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«Чтобы нас в грязи, в пыли, съесть болезни не могли»: сцены и модальности раннесоветской санитарной пропаганды
Through an examination of the specific technologies of Soviet propaganda, the paper analyses the places and modalities of sanitation education in the USSR in the 1920s. Drawing on Stefan Plagenborg's approach, the paper places analytical emphasis on the modality of sanitation propaganda. From this perspective, the propaganda technology carried out as part of a campaign to educate Soviet citizens about sanitation is seen as a manifestation of trends contemporary to the 1920s that meet the new norms of the modern era state.
The text analyses four main venues for the implementation of sanitary propaganda: sanitary education houses with their lecture work, agit-trains and their travelling exhibitions, theatre stages with hygienic productions and special sanitary courts, and public reading houses and sanitary work in them. The reasons for the successes and failures of the various modes of sanitation education are examined. Depending on the place and form chosen, the method of health promotion used different linguistic and imaginative techniques: this helped shift the study of health practices from theoretical reflection to understanding them in the processes of implementing everyday human practices.
The study demonstrates how a holistic system of effective sanitation and hygiene education technologies was gradually built up during the early Soviet era, drawing on different practices of medicalisation of the population, performative and creative methods and various prior experiences of socio-political information. The forms of sanitation propaganda used and the various repertoires of sanitation education enabled the Soviet worker to become involved in the processes of medicalization of society and to take an independent interest in the protection of his health.