Scholars generally agree on the relationship between the physical stature, or height, of children and adults, and their quality of life, or their biological status, including diet, illnesses, intensity and conditions of work, availability of medical care, living conditions, psychological well-being, climate, water, air, and other environmental factors that have impinged on their lives prior to the point at which their height is measured. Genetic factors have an important effect on individual height, but genetic distinctions lose their significance when masses of individuals are measured and average heights are compared. The same effect holds at the level of entire populations: differences in height are determined, not by ethnic or racial attributes, but by living conditions.

Assessing the change in the level of Soviet welfare in the first half of the twentieth century presents many problems. There are the problems associated with the reliability and accessibility of Soviet statistics, and there are those associated with the problem of understanding the peculiar nature of the Soviet situation in which a trend toward rapid secular improvements in welfare and life expectancy were accompanied by massive shortterm welfare and mortality crises. These problems are made even more complicated by the intense politicization of this question. In this paper I address all of these problems.

“From the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, Paul Bunyan split the atmosphere exacdy 12 feet 11 inches. His weight, he told me—and I don't doubt his word for a moment—was 888 pounds.” Together with precise measures of Paul Bunyan's hips, waist, shoulders, thighs, calves, and reach, subsequently detailed, we would, it seems, have a rather comprehensive anthropometric description of this legendary logger. But his companion, Babe the Blue Ox, “was seven axe handles wide between the eyes,” quite a different anthropometric measure indeed. Moreover, “some persons give the measurement as forty-two axe handles and a plug of Star tobacco.” And, we are told, “both figures are correct,” all of which quickly brings us to the heart of the problem, species aside.

The systematic study of the physical characteristics of human beings reaches well back into the eighteenth century. By the 1830s, scientists began to recognize that human biological outcomes were influenced, not only by inherited characteristics, but by both the natural and the socioeconomic environment. Genetic variation, by itself, did not account for the spatial, social, or temporal variation in physical stature. Only in the 1970s, however, did historians begin in earnest to explore the welfare implications of anthropometric measures. With the birth of “anthropometric history,” biological indicators, including physical stature, were used to assess the welfare of human beings as complements to such conventional indicators as income or real wages.

In my view, the skeptical comments of Steven L. Hoch, whether intentionally or not, undeservedly discredit human height data as an indicator of the physiological status and well-being of populations, and possibly represent the historiographical appearance of a postmodern intellectual ideology, whose representatives look with distrust on historical sources. Hoch repeats some traditional objections connected with data on height: 1) terminal height—that is, the height a person attains by the age of 20 to 25–is not a true indicator of the physiological status and well-being of a population; 2) the precision of height data falls below the standard scientific requirements for reliable indicators; 3) periodization of the dynamics of physiological status of the population and of basic data on height is impossible in principle; 4) the reasons for changes in physiological status cannot be subjected to rigorous analysis.

John Komlos is one of the leading specialists on international comparative anthropometric history, and Steven L. Hoch is a leading specialist on the Russian peasantry. Their responses to my paper are a little disappointing, for they seem to have failed to grasp the main points of my argument and, despite my warnings, they have continued to view this problem from the standpoint of political interest. They both appear to be more concerned with condemning the Soviet system than with attempting to understand that system. My paper concluded by stating: “It is unfortunate that our academic debates are not used to confronting a complex situation in which secular improvements in welfare and mortality are accompanied by massive short-term crises in welfare and mortality. Instead of concentrating on the question, Who is to blame, we need to know more clearly What really happened? How large was the crisis? What factors were causing or moderating the secular trend?”

The Bolshevik revolution represented a remarkable opportunity for many academics and professionals. The demands of governing a region as vast as the new Soviet state necessitated official patronage of the sciences, and the party and government provided sources of support for disciplines that had been underfunded, underdeveloped, or completely nonexistent before 1917. After the revolution, cartographers, linguists, geographers, ethnographers, social hygienists, and others found themselves the beneficiaries of a regime eager to learn about the lands that it had suddenly inherited and to spread the news of revolution to the backward peoples of the former empire. As much recent scholarship has shown, far from being the mere conduits for policies devised at the center, these specialists were professionals of variable talent and training with interests, projects, and agendas of their own. Government policy toward the nationalities, and perhaps toward scientific research in general, emerged not simply as a result of Moscow's diktat, but as a complex interplay among the center's patronage and attendant demands, the professional interests and programs of the specialists dispatched by the center, and the local interests of their colleagues and subjects in the outlying reaches of the Soviet state.

In his celebrated "secret speech" to the delegates to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev singled out Soviet filmmakers for their part in establishing and maintaining Stalin's personality cult. Although not specifically mentioned by Khrushchev, one film has been generally identified as a prime example of the way in which those filmmakers "varnished the reality," particularly of the Soviet countryside during the Stalin period: Ivan Pyr'ev's Kubanskie kazaki (The Kuban cossacks) made in the film-famine year of 1949 and released in February 1950. But let us look at what Khrushchev actually said.

Rudolf Slánský's arrest in November 1951 by Statni bezpecnost (StB), the Czechoslovak secret police, his Kafkaesque trial a year later, and his execution caused a sensation during the early years of the Cold War. For a full week, the trial could be followed live on the radio in Prague. The transcript of the proceedings was published and widely distributed. Yet the affair remained a mystery. Slánský, until recently the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), and thirteen of his colleagues, all of them lifelong party members, confessed to crimes of high treason against the Prague government, espionage on behalf of the west, and sabotage of the socialist economy. In tired, monotonous voices, they described their lives as being motivated by their hatred of the CPC and loyalty to such sponsors as the Gestapo, Zionism, western intelligence services, and international capital. In their final speeches, all the defendants demanded that the court impose upon them the death penalty. The judge disappointed only three—they received life sentences. Slánský and ten others were executed in December 1952.