О сельском здравоохранении в СССР, или О качестве истории медицины

Quaestio Rossica. 2022. Т. 10. № 2. С. 646–656.

Zatravkin S., Vishlenkova E. A.

In this text, the authors debate the research carried out by D. Khristenko on early Soviet rural healthcare, questioning the trustworthiness of the sources, their interpretation, and the historical and biographical context of the narrative. The authors provide statistics that recorded a reduction in the Soviet healthcare system’s ability to treat the population. They analyse the reports of people’s commissars and heads of regional health departments, who opened the party’s
eyes to the acute shortage of personnel, the critical condition of hospitals, and the low level of qualifications possessed by Soviet medical graduates. Referring to these testimonies and data, the researchers demonstrate that the Soviet healthcare of the 1920s–1930s was a problematic and acutely undersupplied area of public life. This was especially noticeable in rural Russia, which suffered significant human losses. This is probably a rare case in Russian history when the analysis of officials who headed the healthcare system turned out to be more critical than the accounts of occasional foreigners about their trips to the exotic country of the Soviets. This requires a special approach to the evaluation of the trustworthiness of such opinions and the extent of awareness of the problem.

Keywords: history of medicine, история медицины, История сталинизма, History of Stalinism, советское здравоохранение, soviet public healthcare

Publication based on the results of: Moral Emotions and Ethical Issues in the History of Russian Universities (2022)