Join Professor Tricia Starks, the author of Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR, shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2023, for a lecture breaking down the assumed links in the West between tobacco use and ubiquitous advertising, nefarious product manipulation, and hi-tech industrial design. By showing how Soviet smoking habits continued without sophisticated or sustained use of any of these techniques, Starks challenges current assumptions about how best to pursue cessation and fight an addiction that still ensnares nearly one in four adults worldwide to a product that results in the death of half its users.
Enriched by colour reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packaging and anti-smoking propaganda, Cigarettes and Soviets provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit, and the lecture will also draw on Starks’ previous book, Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia. She will describe how the Soviets maintained the first mass smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting this deadly addiction. It is at once a study of Soviet tobacco, deeply enmeshed in the social, political and cultural context, and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic.
About the speaker
Tricia Starks is Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of three monographs and coeditor of several collections – most recently the Diagram Prize finalist “The Lifecycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Fabergé” (Bloomsbury 2021).