On October 16, Dora Vargha gave a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as a part of the Centre for History in Public Health and the Vaccine Centre lunchtime seminar series. Her talk, ‘ When polio became global: a pre-history of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative,’ addressed the development of international concepts and practices in polio prevention in the post-war decades, and explores how these developments formed part of the foundation of the current polio eradication campaign.
Industrial equipment arrives in Albania from the Soviet Union, 1951.
On Socialist Globalization
By Elidor Mehilli
The “Reluctant Internationalists” project is about the history of international collaboration—experts, policy-makers, doctors, planners, and diplomats—and the intended and unintended consequences of these exchanges in the twentieth century. Reflecting this theme, the project itself is international in conception: fellows come from across the Atlantic, as do occasional visiting scholars. This is a major strength.
One other important contribution of the project, to my mind, is the emphasis on Europe’s place in the story of internationalism. Histories of internationalist movements and the global Cold War have often intentionally looked beyond the European continent to highlight the role of non-European actors. Such efforts can be valuable. But they ignore the fact that there have been historically neglected and abused peripheries within Europe. This is a good opportunity to assess these internal divisions within a supposedly integrating continent and “periphery-periphery” relations in the world more broadly.
A highlight of the project, this past summer, was the conference “Agents of Internationalism,” which brought together scholars working on population transfers, relief workers, child-welfare programs, and transnational approaches to disease—among other topics.
During my residency in London (June—July 2014), I worked on a book on socialist globalization—the state-directed but also informal circulation of practices and planners—through the angle of Albania under Yugoslav, Soviet, Eastern bloc, and Chinese patronage. After the Second World War, tiny Albania came to embody the ethos of socialist internationalism, as Soviet advisers, East German engineers, and Czechoslovak technicians descended on the country to lift it up from poverty and deliver on the promise of a workers’ state (which governed an overwhelmingly rural populace). But by the early 1960s socialist internationalism seemed broken. China and the Soviet Union quarreled, Albania and North Korea sought to go their own way, and Third World countries desperately tried to negotiate space for themselves. My book, then, is a study of local and global socialist commonalities that take shape despite political allegiances.
During my residency, I was fortunate to present a chapter of my manuscript to the project participants and receive a good deal of valuable feedback. Informal chats were as productive. London, needless to say, offers fantastic resources. My only disappointment was the fact that England, my lifelong favorite national soccer team, was kicked out early from the World Cup in Brazil. To share the pain in the pub was, at least, of some consolation.
Elidor Mehilli was the 2014 Visiting Research Fellow of the Reluctant Internationalists project. Applications are currently being accepted for the 2015 Visiting Research Fellowship. Please see the Call for Applications.
Birkbeck College, University of London
February 6-7, 2015
Supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, The Wellcome Trust, The Society for the Social History of Medicine, and The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Call for Papers
In May 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev toured Bulgaria. Under banners declaring “Forward, to Communism!” at a mass meeting in Varna, a Bulgarian health resort, Khrushchev lauded the Bulgarian people for the way in which they had developed the Black Sea coastline. Model health resorts like Varna, which drew visitors from all over the world, were the pride of the Bulgarian people, he claimed. These resorts demonstrated the commitment of the socialist states to the health and welfare of the people. He contrasted the health resorts on the socialist side of the Black Sea to the NATO missile build-up across the sea in Turkey. The health resorts of the Black Sea demonstrated the peace-loving nature of the socialist states to the world. “The Black Sea should be a sea of peace and the friendship of the peoples,” he argued.
While interest in the place of the Black Sea in the history of tourism, public health and architecture has grown rapidly in recent years, leading to ground-breaking studies, these works have treated each topic and national context in isolation. Works on Cold War diplomacy, too, have not taken into full consideration the position of the Black Sea as a site of cultural and political diplomacy in the socialist world. This workshop seeks to bring together historians studying the Black Sea or whose work involves the Black Sea from a variety of perspectives and both historians of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The objective of the workshop is to develop the idea of the Black Sea littoral as an international meeting place of the socialist world.
As Khrushchev’s words suggested, the idea of the socialist Black Sea was closely linked to ideas of health and welfare during times of peace. The Black Sea littoral became a favoured health retreat of the political elite and soon became a setting for high politics and diplomatic negotiations. With the Yalta conference (February 4-11, 1945), the place of the Black Sea as a site of East-West diplomacy was formalized. But the Black Sea also became a place of less formal international exchange. From international children’s camps to delegation visits, at the Black Sea people from the socialist world introduced visitors from all over the world to the socialist way of life, in a Cold War contest fought over standards of living.
Participants are sought to present papers which may but will not necessarily fall into the following themes: The divided sea in the Cold War; the political context of Soviet-Turkish, East-West and socialist relations; ideas of Europe; international law; mobility, migration and tourism; commodities; socialist design and urban planning; environmental health; international congresses and festivals, and environmental history. Papers relating to all countries of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR, and which emphasize transnational and international components, are welcome.
Informal enquiries are welcome. Please send paper titles and abstracts (around 300 words) by November 15, 2014 to j.conterio@bbk.ac.uk. Workshop papers will be pre-circulated and are due January 15, 2015.
Contact Details
Dr Johanna Conterio, conference convener
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Birkbeck College, University of London
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
26-28 Russell Square
London, United Kingdom, WC1B 5DQ
j.conterio@bbk.ac.uk
While we were away from our blog, the researchers of the Reluctant Internationalists were busy this summer. A number of us saw publications come out, which may be of interest to some of our readers.
Jessica Reinisch edited, with Matthew Frank, a special issue of Contemporary European History, “Refugees and the Nation-State in Europe, 1919–59,” (v. 49, no. 3, July 2014), which examines how refugees and refugee crises were defined and managed by European nation-states in the forty years after the First World War. Read their introduction for a sketch of the historical context of the refugee problem in Europe and an analysis of the common themes of the papers.
In other publishing news, Dora Vargha was awarded the 2014 Young Scholar Book Award by the International Committee for the History of Technology for her dissertation, Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in Cold War Hungary, completed at Rutgers University in 2013.
Also over the summer, we hosted our first major workshop, “Agents of Internationalism”. Thank you to all the participants who made that workshop a great success. Please keep your eye out for further posts about the workshop and about our work together with our first visiting fellow, Elidor Mehilli, Assistant Professor at Hunter College in New York.
This will be a very eventful year for our research group, so please keep your eye out for more details about upcoming talks, events and publications, and for calls for papers. In the meantime, welcome back, and we wish everyone a good start to the new term.
Patients on their way to the Matsesta baths from the Sanatorium Krasnaia Moskva in 1928 or 1929. From Sochi: Stranitsy proshlogo i nastoiashchego, ed. A.V. Guseva (Sochi: Muzei istorii goroda-kurorta Sochi, 2007).
The Olympic website for Sochi 2014 (http://torchrelay.sochi2014.com/en/city-sochi) and media coverage occasionally detail the history of the development of Sochi, tying it in the main to the growing popularity of sea bathing in Russia in the early twentieth century. The rise of sea bathing certainly did increase the popularity of the resort, in the context of the rise of tourism on the entire Black Sea coast. But that is only part of the story. The resort was also developed, after the discovery of the presence in Sochi of sulpheric mineral waters at the source “Matsesta,” as a resort for mineral water cures. Many of the first tourists to Sochi were actually patients.
While “taking the waters” is unfamiliar to many people, it was at the time of the first and second waves of development in Sochi – in the 1910s and mid-1930s – still mainstream medical therapy throughout Europe, and continues to be in many places to this day. The mid- to late-nineteenth century saw the rise of the baths, tied to the spread of the railways and increasing accessibility of travel to an expanding bourgeoisie. The circulation of visitors to baths in Central Europe increased dramatically in the 1850s, in the wake of railway construction. The leading baths of Central Europe were Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden, which saw about 30,000 visitors a year each in the 1850s. In Imperial Russia, the railway reached from Rostov-na-Donu to the Caucasian Mineral Waters, an established military resort, in 1875, leading to a burst in the construction of hotels, dachas (summer cottages) and restaurants. That decade the railways also reached the baths of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1888, the railway reached the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, opening the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, where Sochi is located, to a new wave of development. As the railways reached out into the flesh of the empires, circulation began to flow domestically and internationally.
As today, the development of the Black Sea coast was spurred by state intervention and investment. The region was in the early twentieth century scarcely populated, and attempts to settle peasants from other places in the empire there as farmers, through various economic and social incentives, were not a success. A particular problem was that malaria was endemic to the region. In the late nineteenth century, Tsar Nicholas II began to ponder targeting the coastline as a site for the development of tourism. But what would draw people to the region?
In 1912, the Tsar sent a large delegation of scientists, including the leading balneologists of the empire, to the region to search for mineral water sources. If mineral waters could be found, perhaps they could serve as a nucleus to draw tourists to the region (and away from rival baths in Central Europe). The delegation reported back that their greatest hopes had been answered. The region was laden with rich deposits of mineral waters, largely untapped. The scientists compared the baths of Matsesta to the baths of Aachen in Western Germany, due to their sulpheric content, a mineral water source called the Kaiserquelle.
The news of the riches of the region, and imperial approval for their development, spread quickly. The first development of the Matsesta waters rested on private capital. A joint stock company was formed to fund the development of the Matsesta mineral waters and in 1912, the first bath house there was opened. Sochi-Matsesta was an ingénue among resorts – aristocrats largely remained loyal to the more established Crimean resort of Yalta or the Caucasian Mineral Waters resort. The Black Sea Coast was particularly attractive to a middle class health resort patient, or kurortnik, as well as patients of the Jewish faith (whose presence was banned at established Imperial Russian resorts). Dachas and villas as well as modest pensions and inns began to be built and there was even some land speculation. Sochi-Matsesta boomed, very briefly, and the development of spa medicine improved when imperial resorts served the front during World War I. The resorts on the Black Sea coast grew from almost nothing at the beginning of the twentieht century through the help of speculators and developers to receive 75,000 visitors in 1912.
A Patient at the Matsesta bath house in the 1920s. From L.G. Gol’dfail’ and I.D. Iakhnin, Kurorty, Sanatorii i doma otdykha SSSR 1928 (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928).
With the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the fate of the resorts of the empire seemed unclear. In the nearby Weimar Republic in Germany, for example, despite revolution, the celebrated baths remained largely in the hands of the elite segments of society, beyond the reach of the state. But the Communist party and state was determined to develop health resorts “for the workers.” In 1919, Lenin signed a decree nationalizing all health resorts, which reserved them for the use of the workers, peasants and Red Army soldiers in first order, for medical treatment. Filling the old Tsarist palaces with workers and peasants had obvious propaganda value. In Sochi, sanatoria were established in pre-revolutionary villas, hotels and private clinics (see Figure 1). But the level of state investment in the network of health resorts, and of medical services there, make it clear that this was not a mere “Potemkin village.” The state, and particularly the committed physicians at the head of the new, state public health ministry, the Commissariat of Public Health, took health resort medicine seriously, not least mineral water treatments, as a way to improve the health of the entire population.
The use of the Matsesta waters increased dramatically, largely due to patients sent for a “cure” by the Commissariat of Public Health (See Figure 2). In the 1920s, a cure usually lasted from four to six weeks, and included from 15 to 30 baths with Matsesta waters. Physicians sent patients to Matsesta to cure chronic eczema and other skin conditions, gout, various nervous ailments, syphilis, chronic rheumatism, gynecological ailments and ailments of the heart, circulation and digestion, but patients also took the waters of their own accord, “off label,” for whatever ailed them. The number of patients using the Matsesta waters increased from 67 in 1920, to 3,921 patients in 1925. The most rapid expansion, however, came during the years of industrialization of the late 1920s and 1930s: from 1927 to 1932 the number of patients taking the Matsesta cure increased from 7,980 patients to 48,574 patients. The number of baths taken increased from 1921 to 1932 from 1,345 baths to 731,218 baths. A second bath house was built. But demand outpaced supply. By 1937, the Matsesta bath houses were working from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m.
The Soviet leaders were justifiably proud of their accomplishment, but rather overstated their role in developing the resort. Frequently not included in Soviet statistics were numbers from the pre-Revolutionary period: 18,604 baths were administered in 1913, 17,395 baths in 1914, 16,982 baths in 1915 and 21,586 baths in 1916. Indeed, the pre-revolutionary peak in 1916 was not reached in the Soviet Union until 1923. In the 1920s and 1930s, as now, the idea that the resort was “new” served the symbolic project of treating their development as a display of state power. Patients continue to take the cure at the Matsesta waters to this day (See Figure 3).
The bath house “Staraia Matsesta” in 2009. Photograph taken by the author
For Further Reading:
Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Mirjam Zadoff, Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Douglas Peter Mackaman, Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine and the Spa in Modern France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).
John K. Walton, ed., Mineral Springs Resorts in Global Perspective: Spa Histories (London: Routledge, 2013).
Eric Thomas Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
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