Either Socialism Will Defeat the Louse or the Louse Will Defeat Socialism

Abstract

In as much as the banya was associated with the Russian peasantry and urban decadence, Bolsheviks disdained it. But as a tool of modern hygiene, the banya was unassailable. Workers demanded accessible, affordable, and well-maintained bathhouses. After the revolution of 1917, the Soviet state committed to providing them. During the Russian Civil War, the prevalence of epidemics (typhus, relapsing fever) only increased the pressure on the new state to provide people with the means to clean themselves in banyas. During War Communism banyas came under municipal control and were expected to provide access to the lower classes; under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, they re-emerged as commercial enterprises. But as satires by Zoshchenko and the commentary of others made plain, the conditions in Soviet banyas remained abysmal, a far cry from the idealized banyas of popular imagination.