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Among the cities of the Russian Empire, Moscow, Europe’s sixth largest city in 1900, introduced the most extensive program of sanitary reforms. Those reforms created a new sanitary regime—the Russian version of the “sanitary city”—based on the medicalization of urban politics and the municipalization of public health. How and why did Moscow elites understand and engage with sanitary problems? Why did it happen at that particular moment? Who benefited from sanitizing Moscow, and who was excluded? How can one reconcile the sanitary reforms with Moscow’s stunning mortality rates? Why was Russia’s sanitary city so deadly?
In her talk, Anna Mazanik will present her recently published book Sanitizing Moscow: Waste, Animals and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025). She will specifically focus on a major paradox of the sanitary project —the problem of children’s health in the city— and show that Moscow’s public health policy towards children reveals a peculiar combination of consideration and neglect, with innovative and successful efforts to create a healthier childhood and to support socially disadvantaged school children, on the one hand, and the failure to tackle the most dramatic health problems among younger children, on the other.
Anna Mazanik is an environmental and medical historian of Russia and a research fellow at the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe in Germany. Born in Moscow, she has studied in Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the United States and holds a PhD in history from Central European University.
