Hygiene propaganda and theatrical Biopolitics in the Soviet Union in the 1920's- 40's. The Moscow Theatre of the Sanitary Culture as a factory of the new man.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Igor Polianski
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391089250

This research project explores the role and impact of the official Soviet hygiene propaganda during the first three decades after the October Revolution, taking as an example the theatrical performances of health and disease. The political goal was to create a 'new man', as it was stated on the banners of the Bolshevik disciplinary power. The 'new man' required a complete physical and mental revival and thus a hygienic 'optimization' of the masses. For that purpose, starting in the 1920's the theatrical performances were demonstrated in open-air theatres and clubhouses for workers and farmers. Even in the kolkhoz fields didactic plays were performed. Many of them addressed the prevailing problems of social health. The People’s Commissariat for Health Care organized most performances. Since 1925, the theatrical hygiene propaganda was centrally managed by the newly founded Moscow Theatre for Sanitary Culture. The political importance of the popularization of healthcare knowledge has often been addressed in the historiography of the Soviet Union. However, the most advanced communicative means of 'sanitary alphabetization' at that time - the theatrical performances - have not been studied yet, although exactly that medium was in focus of the early Soviet hygienization. The project has traced the personal, theatrical-political and socio-medical contexts in which the Moscow Theatre for Sanitary Culture developed, in which forms of presentation and with which claims to interpretation it reacted to the changing hygiene-political challenges. The project has brought to light a wealth of sources, findings, references, and questions that go beyond the institutional, temporal, and geographical framework of the project proposal. First, the origins of theatrical hygiene enlightenment could already be dated to the time of the Russian Civil War. How this was organized within the Red Army, however, remains to be clarified. Secondly, it emerged that the Moscow Theatre for Sanitary Culture was integrated into a widely ramified network of similar institutions, which brought into focus the important question of the tense relationship between centers and inner peripheries and specific forms of theatrical hygiene propaganda in local contexts. Thirdly, new sources were found for the period of World War II, which still need to be examined in more detail. Fourth, indications of the extraordinarily high international appeal of the Soviet theater experiment could be provided. In particular, the references to the U.S. Federal Theater Project will be subjected to a comparative and interaction analysis. For these purposes, a two-year extension of the project funding is requested.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants