Russia in the time of cholera: disease under Romanovs and Soviets

As the nineteenth century drew to a close and epidemics in western Europe were waning, the deadly cholera vibrio continued to wreak havoc in Russia, outlasting the Romanovs.

Scholars have since argued that cholera eventually fell prey to better sanitation and strict quarantine under the Soviets, citing as evidence imperial mismanagement, a 'backward' tsarist medical system and physicians' anachronistic environmental interpretations of the disease.

Drawing on extensive archival research and the so-called 'material turn' in historiography, however, John P.

Davis here demonstrates that Romanov-era physicians' environmental approach to disease was not ill-grounded, nor a consequence of neo-liberal or populist political leanings, but born of pragmatic scientific considerations.