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The epilogue indulges the conceit that various aspects of the banya’s history remain present in the banya today. For centuries, the basic contours of the steam room have remained fundamentally unchanged, meaning that it is possible to imagine men and women from vastly different times and places sharing a banya at once.

As elites in Russia became more integrated into Western culture, going to the banya became more associated with the unreformed peasantry and lower classes. Most outsiders, like the astronomer Chappe D’Auteroche, who was in Russia to observe the transit of Venus, saw the banya as further indication of Russia’s backwardness and barbarity. Catherine the Great wrote a pamphlet, her famous “antidote,” to rebut his views in general and on the banya specifically. Meanwhile, the prominent medical doctor, Antonio Sanches, used his connections with Catherine and members of her court to systematically defend the banya not as a popular custom, but as a valuable tool of modern medicine. He used his connections with Western European intellectuals to promote the use of the banya there as well.

In as much as the banya was associated with the Russian peasantry and urban decadence, Bolsheviks disdained it. But as a tool of modern hygiene, the banya was unassailable. Workers demanded accessible, affordable, and well-maintained bathhouses. After the revolution of 1917, the Soviet state committed to providing them. During the Russian Civil War, the prevalence of epidemics (typhus, relapsing fever) only increased the pressure on the new state to provide people with the means to clean themselves in banyas. During War Communism banyas came under municipal control and were expected to provide access to the lower classes; under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, they re-emerged as commercial enterprises. But as satires by Zoshchenko and the commentary of others made plain, the conditions in Soviet banyas remained abysmal, a far cry from the idealized banyas of popular imagination.

For over a thousand years the banya has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. The argument is based on thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays. Inevitably, some aspects of Russia’s past come through stronger than others in these sources. But, taken together, they provide a brand new portrait of the institution of the banya and of the history of Russia.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, the banya remained popular with the people, but was generally ignored by medical professionals in Russia. Ironically, in Western Europe, doctors began to explore the potential of steam bathing for treating ailments and improving health. In the West, public bathhouses were new and could be considered modern. In Russia they had always existed and were considered traditional. In 1812 a popular broadside depicted Napoleon suffering in the Russian banya. In his fiction, the author Fyodor Dostoevsky used the banya as a place of ambiguity: it was clean and dirty, pure and corrupt, a potential gateway to hell and salvation.