Epilogue

The epilogue indulges the conceit that various aspects of the banya’s history remain present in the banya today. For centuries, the basic contours of the steam room have remained fundamentally unchanged, meaning that it is possible to imagine men and women from vastly different times and places sharing a banya at once.

The Onslaught of Civilization

Despite the concerns of doctors about the horrendous conditions in them, banyas remained popular with a broad spectrum of the population. The banya became a battleground on which the process of the modernization and urbanization of the fin-de-siècle empire played out. Literary and artistic figures such as Bely, Chekhov, Kuzmin, Rozanov, and Serebriakova explored anonymity, community, belief, belonging, and sex. Grigory Rasputin, the monk and advisor to the tsar, saw the banya as curative not of physical ailments but of the spiritual void at the center of elite society. He also saw it as a place to take prostitutes.

Here Nobody Is Naked, There Is No Need for Shame

During and after the Second World War, the older idea of the banya as a center of communal identity and a place to restore vitality re-emerged in parallel to the state’s continued emphasis on the utilitarian purpose of banyas. The state still built and maintained banyas to clean people and keep people healthy. And it still fell far short of its goals. But soldiers in battle and citizens in war-torn communities spoke of the banya, especially the rural banya, as a special place, conducive to close personal contact and Russian communal identities. Older notions of the banya as a place of transgressions and defilement re-emerged in the middle of the twentieth century as well, particularly in depictions of the Gulag banya.

Things Are Bad on the Banya Front

Stalin’s “revolution from above” in the Soviet Union directly affected banyas. Forced industrialization suggested that enough banyas could finally be built to meet the demands of the people, and yet they suffered because they were lower priorities than other, more pressing, goals. Collectivization radically transformed the countryside, spreading disease and hunger across the country, increasing the pressure on towns to fight epidemics by using hot banyas to eradicate lice. And campaigns for more cultured living suggested socialist bodies were supposed to be clean bodies. Over the course of the 1930s, however, the Soviet state failed to fulfill its promises of building enough banyas for the population. The problems on the banya front were both laughable (as seen in cartoons in the journal Krokodil) and deadly serious (as the terror suggested.)

The Great Healer

As elites in Russia became more integrated into Western culture, going to the banya became more associated with the unreformed peasantry and lower classes. Most outsiders, like the astronomer Chappe D’Auteroche, who was in Russia to observe the transit of Venus, saw the banya as further indication of Russia’s backwardness and barbarity. Catherine the Great wrote a pamphlet, her famous “antidote,” to rebut his views in general and on the banya specifically. Meanwhile, the prominent medical doctor, Antonio Sanches, used his connections with Catherine and members of her court to systematically defend the banya not as a popular custom, but as a valuable tool of modern medicine. He used his connections with Western European intellectuals to promote the use of the banya there as well.

Older Even Than the Tsar

Banyas have been in the Russian region since before there were Russians. They appear in the first written records of Russian history and continued to remain relevant to belief and behavior though the Muscovite period and into the reign of Peter the Great. As bathing fell out of favor in Western Europe, the persistency of the banya struck outsiders as barbaric, titillating, and licentious. This chapter discusses the origins of the bania in Kievan Rus’, with an emphasis on everyday life, the law, and belief. The bania’s ambiguity as a place of healing and danger, rebirth and illicit behavior was evident from the beginning.

Introduction

For over a thousand years the banya has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. The argument is based on thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays. Inevitably, some aspects of Russia’s past come through stronger than others in these sources. But, taken together, they provide a brand new portrait of the institution of the banya and of the history of Russia.

In the Banya I Changed My World View

The Soviet Union collapsed, but banyas remained. After 1991, various threads of the banya’s history were taken up by different parts of the Russian population. Some saw them as places for contemplation and camaraderie; others went for sex, to conduct business deals, to connect with tradition, or to feed their souls. Still others saw them as primarily about health. But it was also a place of corruption, suspicion, danger, and transgression. In the West, they went from being an odd habit restricted to immigrants from the former Soviet Union to a mainstay of American cities catering to people seeking an authentic spa experience. Banyas showed up in films, novels, and journalistic accounts of Russia as a key to understanding Russian culture.

The Banya . . . Is It Still Necessary?

By the late 1960s, the growth of apartments with indoor plumbing and bathing facilities took the pressure off the state to build banyas. Yet that growth was not universal enough to alleviate the need for banyas altogether. As the utilitarian need for banyas ebbed, the sense of the banya as a crucial meeting place only grew. Stories, films, and memoirs pointed to the banya as a place to escape from the pressures of public life and to reconnect with spiritual and communal identities. By the time the USSR collapsed, the banya was clearly more than just a institution of Soviet hygiene; it was also a symbol of Russian resiliency.

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

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.