"Cigarettes and Soviets: Communism, Capitalism, and Addiction" (Dr. Tricia Starks).

The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Kansas welcomed Dr. Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas) on 2/13/2024. Dr. Starks gave a talk titled "Cigarettes and Soviets: Communism, Capitalism, and Addiction."

Analysts blame the rise of tobacco use in the west on capitalist agendas like advertising, product manipulation, and industrial design, but how then do we understand the Soviet tobacco problem where such methods were ill developed if at all yet smoking was rampant? Dr. Starks challenges public health assumptions about capitalism’s role in tobacco uptake and argues that to fight a product that still ensnares nearly one in four adults in the world and brings death to half its users, it is important to look at nicotine dependency in different contexts.

Tricia Starks is distinguished professor of history at the University of Arkansas, where she has taught since 2000 after graduating with a PhD in history from the Ohio State University. She is the author of three monographs – The Body Soviet (Wisconsin, 2008), Smoking under the Tsars (Cornell, 2018) and Cigarettes and Soviets (Northern Illinois, 2022) – and coeditor of several collections – most recently From Fish Guts to Fabergé: The Lifecycle of Russian Things (Bloomsbury 2021). She has earned grants from the National Institutes of Health as well as the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. In addition to research and teaching at the University of Arkansas, Starks serves as Director of the University of Arkansas Humanities Center.