Sanitizing Moscow

2026 Winner, Lynn Hollen Lees Book Prize for Best Book in European Urban History, Urban History AssociationSanitizing Moscow presents an environmental history of public health reforms in late imperial Moscow between 1870 and 1917. It explores the relationship between Russia’s urban modernization and the more-than-human environment in the context of the major social and political changes, triggered by the liberal reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, and the transnational rise of scientific medicine and sanitary technologies. Mazanik is the first to combine environmental history and the history of urban public health in the context of imperial Russia.