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Steppes to Health: How the Climate-Kumys Cure Shaped a New Steppe Imaginary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2022

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Abstract

This paper examines the rise of the “climate-kumys cure” in late imperial Russia and how it shaped perceptions of the steppes as a “curative place.” By positing that kumys (fermented mare's milk), a traditional food produced by steppe nomads, interacted with unique qualities of the steppe climate—including aromatic air, abundant sunshine, cool forest groves, rich feathergrasses, and brilliant wildflowers—to cure tuberculosis patients of their symptoms, the climate-kumys cure produced an imaginary of the steppes that contrasted with traditional Russian views of the steppes as barren, monotonous, and even dangerous. Knowledge about the steppe climate produced by proponents of the climate-kumys cure harmonized with Soviet medical professionals’ ideas about forging workers’ bodies and restoring their minds. An understanding of the steppes as healthy, however, did not stop the spread of disease, nor did it lead to preservation. Even as the climate-kumys cure rose in popularity, the steppes that had given rise to kumys were vanishing.

Type
Cluster: The Soviet Steppe–Transformations and Imaginaries
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 8 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

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13. Carrick, Koumiss, 133–35, 146, 155–56.

14. Ibid., 64, 66n2, 237. In the steppe regions covil (Russian: kovyl΄) was often identified as Stipa pennata, but could refer to a number of species within the Stipa genus.

15. Ibid., 244, 111, 241.

16. Moon, David, The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford, 2013), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Carrick, Koumiss, 268.

18. Articles about Janetovka clearly delineated between the cosmopolitan health resort, an outpost of Europe in the steppes, and its exotic “Asiatic” hinterland. See “Russian Consumption Cure: Fermented Mare’s Milk the Base of the System,” The New York Sun, reprinted in The Washington Post (April 2, 1907); and Victor Pitkethley, “The Koumiss Cure,” Wide World Magazine 3 (April-September 1899): 293–300.

19. Franz Mauelshagen, “Climate as a Scientific Paradigm—Early History of Climatology to 1800,” in Sam White, Christian Pfister, and Franz Mauelshagen, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (London, 2018), 565–88; Matthias Heymann and Dania Achermann, “From Climatology to Climate Science in the Twentieth Century,” in White, Pfister, and Mauelshagen, eds., Palgrave Handbook of Climate History, 605–32: 606; and Bushrod Washington James, American Resorts with Notes Upon Their Climate, trans. S. Kauffmann (Philadelphia, 1889), 10.

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21. James, American Resorts, 17.

22. Nikolai Nikolaevich Mikhailov, Kumys i sovremennoe polozhenie kumysolechebnogo dela v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), 64, 129.

23. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution,” 501.

24. “Rech΄ prof. A.I. Voeikova pri otkrytii otdela klimatologii i klimatoterapii,” Trudy S΄΄ezda po uluchsheniiu otechestvennykh lechebnykh mestnostiakh, vol. 3 (Petrograd, 1915), 41–54: 46.

25. Carrick, Koumiss, 3, 62.

26. “Lechenie kumysom i kefirom D-ra V.A. Shtange,” in Hugo von Ziemseen, ed., Rukovodstvo v obshchei terapii, vol. 1, Appendix to Ch. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1886), 5. Many kumys establishments touted their proximity to lush covil pastures as an advertisement for their kumys.

27. Dr. Victor Jagielski, Koumiss and Its Use in Medicine (Chicago, 1874), 3, 30; “Experiments with Koumiss in the Hospitals of Paris,” trans. Jules Simon, Western Lancet (August 1875), 482; William H. Burt, Therapeutics of Tuberculosis, or Pulmonary Consumption (New York, 1876), 41; and Johannes Brzezinski, Der Kumys. Inaugural-Dissertation (Berlin, 1872), 10–11 (footnotes).

28. S. von Berg, Kumys: Extracts from Therapeutical and Balneological Works and from the Lectures of Prominent Professors (Lancaster, PA., 1877), 1.

29. Surveys of health resorts at the time, including guides to the kumys cure, overwhelmingly focus on European Russia. The Resettlement Administration’s overview of the empire’s Asiatic domains suggests that in 1910 there were as many as 267 kumys establishments in the Kazakh Steppe, Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East. See Ivan L. Iamzin, “Vrachebnoe delo v Aziatskoi Rossii,” in Aziatskaia Rossiia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1914), 270–84: 274–75 (table).

30. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Komissiia po napravleniiu zakonodatel΄nykh predlozhenii, “Doklad po proektu polozheniia o kurortakh,” No. 196, Prilozheniia k Stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, chetvertyi sozyv, sessiia vtoraia, vyp. II (1913/14), 1; Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Komissiia po napravleniiu zakonodatel΄nykh predlozhenii, “Po proektu Polozheniia o Kurortakh,” Obzor deiatel΄nosti komissii i otdelov, tretyii sozyv, sessiia IV, 1910–11 g. (St. Petersburg, 1911), 288–89.

31. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, “Doklad po proektu polozheniia o kurortakh,” 2–3, 9–10, 34.

32. Ibid., 10.

33. For a schoolteacher’s account of the kumys cure, “Poezdki na kumys (iz rasskazov i ukazanii bol΄nogo uchitelia),” in Evgenii Alekseevich Zviagintsev, ed., Voprosy i nuzhdy uchitel΄stva: Tretii sbornik statei i spravok, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1909), 32–44.

34. Mikhailov, Kumys i sovremennoe polozhenie kumysolechebnogo dela v Rossii, 136.

35. Charles R. Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 (Bloomington, Ind., 2016), 127–28, 161–62. Steinwedel notes that this process, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century, was compounded by the agrarian policies of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin (211).

36. Tatars, Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians, Mennonites, and Old Believers participated in the kumys cure industry as well.

37. Vladimir Zolotnitskii, “O sovremennoi postanovke kumysolecheniia na iugo-vostoke Rossii,” Tuberkulez 1, no. 5 (May 1912): 235–51; “S ocherednogo Soveta Vserossiiskoi Ligi dlia Bor΄by s Tuberkulezom (15–17 dek. 1912 v Moskve),” Tuberkulez 2, no. 3 (March 1913): 172–73; and Nikolai N. Plaksin, “O kumysolechenii,” Tuberkulez 2, no. 3 (March 1913): 173–74.

38. The total number undergoing the kumys cure, including in Siberia, was possibly closer to 25,000. Dr. I.D. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie: Kurortnyi spravochnik s predisloviem Prof A.N. Rubelia (Moscow, 1927), 13–14; and Shtange, “O lechebnykh mestnostiakh v Rossii,” 15.

39. Mikhailov, Kumys i sovremennoe polozhenie, 141–42.

40. Sputnik kumysnika po Ufimskoi gubernii (Ufa, 1910); Grigorii I. Dembo, Kumys i lechenie kumysom (St. Petersburg, 1903), 21; and Mikhailov, Kumys i sovremennoe polozhenie, 145.

41. Ilya Mechnikov reached similar conclusions in the Kalmyk steppe in 1911. Metchnikoff, Life of Elie Metchnikoff, Chapter XXXI.

42. Zolotnitskii, “O sovremennoi postanovke kumysolecheniia,” 249–51; Emilii I. Gikkel΄, Kratkii spravochnik dlia edushchikh na kumys v Ufimskoi Guberniiu, 2nd ed. (Ufa, 1917), 39–40; and Ufimskoe Gubernskoe Zemskoe Sobranie, XXXVIII Ocherednoi Sessii 1912 goda (Ufa, 1913), 824. The Samara zemstvo, in comparison, did little, while Orenburg was granted a zemstvo only in 1913. See Valerii V. Karrik, “O sovremennom polozhenii kumysolechebnogo dela,” Trudy S΄΄ezda po uluchsheniiu otechestvennykh lechebnykh mestnostiakh, vol. 5 (Petrograd, 1915), 159–65: 165.

43. Ufimskoe Gubernskoe Zemskoe Sobranie, XXXVIII Ocherednoi Sessii, 27–28, 825.

44. Trudy S΄΄ezda po uluchsheniiu otechestvennykh lechebnykh mestnostiakh, vols. 3, 5 (Petrograd, 1915).

45. I.P. Akhmatova, “O prichinakh plokhogo razvitiia russkikh kurortov i kumysolechebnykh zavedenii i o merakh k ikh vozrozhdeniiu, Trudy S΄΄ezda po uluchsheniiu otechestvennykh lechebnykh mestnostiakh, vol. 6 (Petrograd, 1915), 123–27; vol 3, XIII, XVII.

46. Dekret Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov “O lechebnykh mestnostiakh obshchegosudarstvennogo znacheniia” (March 20, 1919), Istoricheskie materialy, at http://istmat.info/node/37912 (Accessed February 14, 2022). While the decree used lechebnye mesta in the title, the text indicated that kurorty was synonymous.

47. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 6.

48. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter: GARF), fond (f.) A-482, opis΄ (op.) 13, delo (d.) 54, (list) ll. 3–50b: 3 (Dekret o kumysolechebnykh mestnostiakh obshchegosudarstvennogo znacheniia).

49. Diane Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 12.

50. Dr. Nikolai M. Kishkin, “Gosudarstvennye kurorty SSSR v 1925 godu,” Kurortnoe delo 4, no. 8 (August 1926): 29. This represented 93% of all registered tuberculosis patients in the country.

51. Dr. Nikolai I. Teziakov, “Kurortnoe delo v sezon 1923 g. i ego dal΄neishaia postanovka,” Kurortnoe delo 1, no. 11–12 (November–December 1923): 16–47: 42.

52. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 18.

53. “Organizatsiia i perspektivy raboty Kursovkhozov v 1923 godu v sviazi s NEP i vzaimootnosheniia s Gossel΄sindikatom,” Kurortnaia khronika 1–2 (October 1922), 6–7; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (hereafter: RGAE), f. 478, op. 4, d. 826, ll. 46, 49, 58, 61, 66, 79–790b; and N.I. Teziakov, K itogam letnego kurortnogo sezona 1922 (Kratkii mediko-statisticheskii ocherk) (Moscow, 1922), 6, found in GARF, f. 4085, op. 12, d. 762, between ll. 113–14.

54. RGAE, f. 478, op. 4, d. 826, ll. 44–45.

55. GARF, f. A-482, op. 13, d. 119, ll. 1–40b, 6, 440b, 52–53; and ibid. d. 130, l. 1.

56. GARF, f. A-482, op. 13, d. 435, ll. 7–9, 69–700b.

57. GARF, f. A-482, op. 13, d. 119, l. 440b; and RGAE, f. 3107, op. 4, d. 5, l. 9.

58. GARF, f. A-482 op. 13 d. 435, l. 7; and RGAE, f. 478, op. 4, d. 826, ll. 4–40b.

59. GARF, f. A-482, op. 13, d. 435, 1. 6.

60. RGAE, f. 3107, op. 4, d. 5, ll. 2–7, 35–350b; and GARF, f. A-482, op. 13, d. 435, l. 7.

61. GARF, f. 5528, op. 6, d. 146, ll. 18–20, 220b, 32, 42–420b, 50–51.

62. Nikolai N. Darkshevich, “Znachenie klimata v dele kumysolecheniia,” Kurortnoe delo 2, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1924): 14.

63. An. Begak, “Kumyso-lechebnye kurorty Bashkirskoi respubliki,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia (May 13,1928); Dr. Nikolai E. Khrisanfov, “VI-oi Vsesoiuznyi Nauchno-organizatsionnyi S΄΄ezd po Kurortnomu Delu,” Kurortnoe delo 6, no. 2 (Feb. 1928): 97–98; and Aleksei K. Shenk, “Klimatoterapiia, kak osnova kurortnogo dela,” Kurortnoe delo 4, no. 4 (April 1926): 58. For an argument against a singular “steppe climate,” see Darkshevich, “Znachenie klimata,” 16. For kumys outside of the steppe, M.P. Mikhailov, Kumys i kumysolechenie (v usloviiakh Sibiri i Burrespubliki) (Verkhneudinsk, 1929), 16, 36; “O kumysolechenii v Krymu,” Kurortnoe delo 3, nos. 9–10 (September–October 1925): 79–86; and Eduard A. Zhebrovskii, “O kumysolechenii na iugozapadnoi Rossii,” Tuberkulez 2, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1913): 295–96.

64. Darkshevich, “Znachenie klimata,” 14.

65. Quoted in Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 41–42.

66. Tricia Starks, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (Madison, Wis., 2008), 25.

67. Johanna Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture in Sochi, 1917–1991” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 81–82.

68. Starks, The Body Soviet, 38–39, 72–73; and Dr. N. Podd΄iakov, “Kumysolechenie—kak im pol΄zovat΄sia,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 110 (May 13, 1928).

69. Vrach V. Kochurov, “Na solntse v derevniu! Provedem kul′turno letnyi otdykh,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 112 (May 22, 1929).

70. Alison Frank, “The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain Air in Alpine Central Europe,” Central European History 45, 2 (June 2012): 185–207; and Sputnik kumysnika po Ufimskoi gubernii (Ufa, 1910), 9.

71. Z. Nikiforova, “Kumysolechebnitsa im. Aksakova,” Sovetskoe Bashkiriia (July 2, 1953); Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium,” 143–144; and Kumys v Bashkirskikh stepiakh Ufimskoi gubernii. G. Belebei, (St. Petersburg, 1899), 11.

72. Pavel Iu. Berlin, “Kumysolechenie pri legochnom tuberkuleze,” Voprosy kurortologii 3–4 (1938), 53.

73. Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium,” Figure 2, 133–34.

74. Nikolai A. Bush, Botaniko-Geograficheskii ocherk Evropeiskoi chasti SSSR i Kavkaza (Moscow, 1936), 139–40.

75. Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium,” 107–108.

76. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 44; and Darkshevich, “Znachenie klimata,” 17.

77. “Kumys plius. . .kosnost΄,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 144 (June 26, 1928).

78. Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium,” 201–2.

79. Podd΄iakov, “Kumysolechenie.”

80. Vrach Binshtok, “Solntse, vozdukh, voda,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 110 (May 19, 1929).

81. “Kak ispol′zovat′ svoi letnyi otdykh,” Smychka 111 (May 1926).

82. Podd′iakov, “Kumysolechenie.”

83. Mikhail Mul΄tanovskii, “Darshkevich N.N., Meditsinskii otchet,” Kurortnoe delo 2, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1924): 142.

84. Darkshevich, “Znachenie klimata,” 21. This argument was not new—see, for instance, “Lechenie kumysom i kefirom D-ra V.A. Shtange,” 5.

85. Darkshevich, “Kumysolechenie (ocherk),” Spravochnik po Kumysolechebnym raionam (Moscow, 1924), 24–26.

86. Darkshevich, “Kumysolechenie (ocherk),” 24; and Podd΄iakov, “Kumysolechenie—kak im pol΄zovat΄sia.”

87. “Amerikanskii prerii i bashkirskii step΄,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 181 (August 13, 1929); and Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes, 7, 70–72.

88. Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium,” 84.

89. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Dublin, 1728), 3.

90. Sebastian Kneipp, Meine Wasser-kur (Kempten, 1897); and Ivan Tarkhanov, Zakalivanie chelovecheskogo organizma (St. Petersburg, 1899).

91. On health care and the New Soviet Person: Bernstein, Burton, and Healey, Soviet Medicine, 11. For associations of zakalivanie with masculinity: Catriona Kelly, “The Education of the Will: Advice Literature, Zakal, and Manliness in Early Twentieth-Century Russia,” in Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healy, eds., Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (New York, 2001).

92. Tarkhanov, Zakalivanie chelovecheskogo organizma, 38.

93. Richard Stites, “Man the Machine,” in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989).

94. Tristan Landry, “Socialist Realism as a Survival Strategy: Readers’ Letters about Nikolaj Ostrovskij’s How the Steel was Tempered,” Revue des études slaves 79, no. 4 (2008): 573–74.

95. Podd΄iakov, “Kumysolechenie”; and Berlin, “Kumysolechenie pri legochnom tuberkuleze,” 53.

96. Arkadii N. Rubel΄, “4-i S΄΄ezd Rossiiskisk Terapevtov v Kieve,” Tuberkulez 2, no. 3 (March 1913): 294–95.

97. Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002).

98. Anton Chekhov, The Steppe: The Story of a Journey (1888), trans. Constance Garnett (Adelaide, 2014) at ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chekhov/anton/steppe/complete.html (accessed February 4, 2022; no longer available). The oppressive steppe nature was also remarked upon by other visitors. Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes, 43.

99. Begak, “Kumyso-lechebnye kurorty.”

100. By the Soviet period, the term lesostep΄ was preferred to predstep΄. Bush, Botaniko-Geograficheskii ocherk, 123; and Jonathan D. Oldfield and Denis J.B. Shaw, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment (New York, 2016), Table 3.3, 71–72.

101. Conterio, “The Soviet Sanatorium,” 7.

102. Begak, “Kumyso-lechebnye kurorty.”

103. Ivan M. Levashov, “Borovoe, kak gelio i kumysolechebnyi kurort,” Kurortnoe delo 5, no. 11 (November 1927): 16; and Mikhailov, Kumys i kumysolechenie, 15.

104. “Kumysolechebnitsy Bashkirii,” Pravda 154 (June 3, 1951).

105. Begak, “Kumyso-lechebnye kurorty”; and Nikiforova, “Kumysolechebnitsa im. Aksakova.”

106. “Pravila ne ispolniaiutsia,” Pravda (July 27, 1926).

107. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 53.

108. Darkshevich, “Kumysolechenie (ocherk),” 30.

109. Levashov, “Borovoe, kak gelio i kumysolechebnyi kurort,” 16, 18.

110. Dr. S. Lisunov, “K voprosu o reorganizatsii kumysolechebnogo dela v Nizhne-Zavolzhskom krae,” Kurortnoe delo 5, no. 11 (Nov. 1927): 23.

111. Levashov, “Borovoe, kak gelio i kumysolechebnyi kurort,” 18–19. Herculin possibly refers to a drug designed to restore virility to men suffering from neurasthenia. North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, Special Bulletin—Food Department 5, no. 1 (January 1918), 19–20.

112. Bush, Botaniko-Geograficheskii ocherk, 129–30.

113. “Kurorty na Vsesoiuznoi Sel΄sko-Khoziaistvennoi Vystavke,” Kurortnoe Delo 1, no. 8–9 (August–September 1923): 85; and “Glavnoe Kurortnoe Upravlenie na Vserossiiskoi Sel΄sko-Khoziaistvennoi Vystavke v Moskve (20/VIII-20/X 1923 g.),” Kurortnoe delo 2, no. 1 (Jan. 1924): 77–78.

114. An. Begak, “Kurorty Bashkirii,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 110 (May 19, 1929); and MP Mul΄tanovskii, “Vliianie kumysolecheniia na izmenenie vesovogo pokazatelia u bol΄nykh legochnym tuberkulezom,” Kurortnoe delo 3, nos. 1–2 (January–February 1925): 103.

115. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 80–85.

116. Ibid., 18.

117. Ibid., 81.

118. “Postanovleniia VI Vsesoiuznogo kurortnogo s΄΄ezda, Kurortnoe delo 6, no. 2 (February 1928): 97–98.

119. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 34, 48.

120. Liubov΄ Moiseevna Gorovits-Vlasova, “Dal΄neishie nabliudeniia i zamechaniia otnositel΄no primeneniia laboratornogo (na chistykh kul΄turakh) metoda kumysodeliia v Orenburgskom Kumysolechebnom Okruge,” Kurortnoe delo 2, no. 11–12 (November–December 1924), 8.

121. On adding water, Mikhailov, Kumys i sovremennoe polozhenie, 42, 148.

122. Begak, “Kurorty Bashkirii”; and Begak, “Nastoiashchee i budushchee kumyso-kooperativnykh artelei,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 21 (May 26, 1928).

123. Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 19.

124. Teziakov, “Kurortnoe delo v sezon 1923 g. i ego dal΄neishaia postanovka,” Kurortnoe delo 1, nos. 11–12 (November–December 1923): 34, 36. This was the case again in 1924–25. Kishkin, “Gosudarstvennye kurorty SSSR v 1925 godu,” 52.

125. Darkshevich, “Meditsinskii otchet po kumysolechebnitsam Orenburgskogo Kumysolechebnogo Okruga za sezon 1923 g. Vestnik Zdravookhraneniia. Organ Orenburgskogo Gub. Otd. Zdravookhr. 1923 g. No. 10–12, str. 31,” Kurortnoe Delo 2, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1924), 142.

126. GARF, f. 5528, op. 6, d. 146, ll. 27, 290b.

127. “Na bor΄bu s vragom,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia (July 13, 1928).

128. “Neradostnye itogi”; and “O poriadke otkrytiia i soderzhaniia kumysnykh zavedenii, kvartir dlia kumysnikov, stolovykh i o zaniatii kumysnym promyslov na territorii BASSR,” Krasnaia Bashkiriia 111, 112 (May 21–22, 1929).

129. Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes, 118–38; David Moon, “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” The Russian Review 69 (April 2010): 251–75; and Paul Josephson, Nicolai Dronin, Aleh Cherp, Ruben Mnatsakanian, Dmitry Efremenko, and Vladislav Larin, An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2013), 39–42.

130. Begak, “Kumyso-lechebnye kurorty”; Iakhnin, Kumysolechenie, 14, 43–44; and Mikhailov, Kumys i kumysolechenie, 14.

131. “Vypiska iz zhurnala No. 13 zasedaniia Komiteta po Okhrane Pamiatnikov Prirody, 10 sentiabria 1924,” Kurortnoe delo 2, nos. 11–12 (November–December 1924): 36. For prerevolutionary concerns and protection efforts, see O. Smirnova, “Zapovednik,” Trudy Orenburgskogo Obshchestva izucheniia Kirgizskogo Kraia 1 (1921), 84–91. On Soviet health resorts and zapovedniks, see Johanna Conterio, “Curative Nature: Medical Foundations of Soviet Nature Protection, 1917–1941,” Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 23–49.

132. A.A. Chibilev, D.A. Safonov, and S.N. Mil΄kov, Na granitse Evropy i Azii (Orenburg, 2003), 97–101.

133. Mikhailov, Kumys i kumysolechenie, 1.

134. See for instance: “A kumys vse zhe lechit,” Pravda (July 17, 1975); and “Issledovaniia budut rasshireny,” Pravda (August 19, 1975).

135. Ramil΄ Khakimov, “Tselebnyi napitok iz sel΄skogo dnevnika pisatelia,” Pravda (August 13, 1968).

136. Examples are Aksakovo and Yumatovo (established in the 1930s) in the Dëma Valley. Borovoe (Burabai) is still celebrated for its climate and kumys. Others have shut their doors in recent years, while new “kumys cure” establishments have opened, such as the Baitur Resort in Kyrgyzstan’s Suusamyr Valley.

137. “Kumys v poroshke,” Pravda (June 3, 1969); “A kumys vse zhe lechit”; and Khakimov, “Tselebnyi napitok.”

138. N. Sviatokha and I. Filimonova, “Koumiss Therapy as an Upcoming Trend for Development of Tourism in Russia,” 4 th International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts SGEM 2017, Conference Proceedings 1, vol. 4 (2017): 457–64; and Baris Erdem and Ibrahim Gundogdu, “Kumiss Treatment in the Context of Health Tourism: A Research in Kyrgyzstan,” International Journal of Medical Research & Health Sciences 7, no. 11 (2018): 135–55. For contemporary interest in kumys as a tuberculosis remedy, see Gabriel McGuire, “Cultural Histories of Kumiss: Tuberculosis, Heritage and National Health in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan,” Central Asian Survey 36, no. 4 (2017): 493–510. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis remains a significant concern across much of Eurasia.