FAYETTEVILLE -- A University of Arkansas historian has been awarded $121,250 in federal grant money from the National Institutes of Health to study smoking in Russia.
Trish Starks, a historian, is working on a book about the culture of smoking in a country where smokers make up about three out of every five men and about one out of every five women, according to a 2013 Word Health Organization report.
"The Soviets were the first government in the world to attempt a national attack on tobacco use in 1920, but they failed," Starks, an associate professor of history, said in a statement released by UA. "The resurrection of anti-tobacco initiatives in the 1970s also collapsed. As a result, Russian smoking is a major public health problem."
Starks' book will be titled Cigarettes and Soviets: The Culture of Tobacco Use in Modern Russia, according to UA.
The grant money mainly will be used to pay for a teaching substitute while Starks writes the book, she said.
"It's an important issue for Russian public health, but also for general discussion of tobacco cessation in other countries," Starks said.
NW News on 04/24/2015