Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Arkansas

Expert Bio

Tricia Starks completed her B.A. in Russian Area Studies at the University of Missouri and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the Ohio State University. She joined the history department at the University of Arkansas in 2000 and has taught courses in the history of medicine, world history, Russian and Soviet history, and gender history. Starks’s primary area of expertise is the history of medicine in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is author of The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) and the forthcoming Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia. (Cornell University Press, 2018). She is completing a manuscript on tobacco use in the Soviet period and has begun work on popular and official responses to demographic problems in the late Soviet period.

Wilson Center Project

'Save the Men!’ Public Response to the Soviet Demographic Crisis

Project Summary

In 1968, the Soviet economist and demographer Boris Urlanis precipitated a national furor with the essay “Save the Men!” in which he revealed that the average age of death for men at sixty-six and at seventy-four for women revealed that the weaker sex was the stronger. Major contributors to this issue were alcohol and tobacco. Urlanis’s plea hit a nerve. A flood of essays, commentaries, cartoons, and even a movie called to society to “Save the Men,” as letters poured into the offices of Literaturnaia gazeta. A cache of the records of the journal for this period are held at the Library of Congress and will further illuminate the social, cultural, and popular response to this groundbreaking essay.

Major Publications

The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia. (Cornell University Press, 2018).

“A Revolutionary Attack on Tobacco: Bolshevik Anti-Smoking Campaigns in the 1920s,” American Journal of Public Health 107:11 (2017): 1711-1717.

Previous Terms

Kennan Short Term Grant, Aug. 2004: Cigarettes and Soviets: A History of Tobacco Use in 20th Century Russia/ Kennan Short Term Grant, Aug. 1998: Learning to Be Soviet: Hygiene Education in the 1920s