How the health care system of the USSR was created

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Before the establishment of the Soviet state, the life of Semashko, trained to be a doctor, was the life of a revolutionary: Marxist circles, the organization of strikes, arrests (in Russia and abroad) and exile, police surveillance.

But it was precisely during the years of the revolutionary struggle that the ideological foundations of the future Soviet medicine were laid. Semashko's report "on workers' insurance" at the 6th All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP, edited by Lenin, was adopted by the party and in the future became a guide for the new, socialist state.

During the days of the Great October Revolution, Semashko organized medical care in rebellious Moscow. With the victory of the revolution, Soviet Russia received in the person of Nikolai Semashko, like other revolutionaries, citizens who were ready no longer to tear the old world to its foundations, but to build its own, new world. Unfortunately, their idealistic zeal collided with a reality that did not understand and did not accept the revolution.

By October 1917, Russian health care was a fragmented system with no single management. The main role was played by public associations of doctors, which included more than half of all doctors in Russia.

In the first months, Lenin adopted the decrees of the "work insurance program", significantly expanding the circle of citizens subject to health insurance, and the monetary contributions for it were fully assigned to entrepreneurs. They met with support from citizens who received access to quality medical care, but faced an all-out boycott from the medical community as a whole.

As part of this boycott, there were calls to "dissociate ourselves from the doctors operating in the rapist camp." The "black board" became famous, on which the names of the Bolshevik doctors were entered in order to boycott and desecrate them, into which Semashko's predecessor in the organization of Soviet medicine, the Bolshevik Mitskevich, fell.

In addition to doctors from medical societies, doctors from the old pre-revolutionary Zemsky structures began to boycott the work of doctors from the old pre-revolutionary Zemstvo structures, due to the rejection of the power of the Bolsheviks. There was a general atmosphere not only of hostility to the ideas and decrees of the Bolshevik government, but also of the expectation of its overthrow and return to the previous order of work.

Under these conditions, the People's Commissariat of Health was created, a single coordinating body of Soviet medicine, headed by Nikolai Semashko. As the work of the People's Commissariat expanded, the trust and assistance of the medical community began to come: experts understood that the Bolshevik government and the decrees it adopted were not temporary, but permanent. And most importantly, the decrees of the Bolshevik government in the field of health care are not populist in nature, but are being consistently implemented.

Following the formation at that time of the best medical legislation in the world in October 1917, since July 1918, Nikolai Semashko launched a successful struggle to consolidate the entire medical community into a single state body that united all health care - also the first in the world.

All segments of the population received social security in the field of health care. Public organizations, whose leadership did not agree to contact the People's Commissariat for Health Semashko, were dissolved simply because of the massive transfer of doctors from these organizations to the People's Commissariat for Health. Independent health insurance funds, especially fiercely defending the right to dispose of workers' funds on their own, soon found that workers began to en masse (not without the help of trade unions) to the funds of the People's Commissariat of Health.

Difficulties were great at the beginning of the formation of Soviet statehood in the field of health care, but its achievements were just as great and rapid.

In addition, Nikolai Semashko was the initiator of the Research Institute of Nutrition, with the help of which methodological and research work in the field of nutrition was launched in Soviet Russia throughout the country. He also initiated the creation of the Central Medical Library, was the editor-in-chief of a large medical encyclopedia, was the initiator of many other good initiatives in the field of the formation of Soviet statehood and health care.

The memory of the Russian revolutionary, Bolshevik Nikolai Semashko is now preserved in the city names of streets and hospitals. There are Semashko Street in many cities of Russia - at least among those that have not yet reached the hands of all sorts of foreign funds seeking to destroy the memory of the Bolsheviks through renaming.

There is still Semashko Street in Kiev, which the new Ukrainian authorities want to rename, following their course of decommunization, the erasure of Soviet identity and historical memory in general. There is Semashko Avenue in Donetsk, there are no initiatives to rename it and are not expected.

The example of Nikolai Semashko, his personality shows us that the manifestation of civic virtue is a struggle for practically understandable ideals, a willingness to realize them and create with our own hands.

Semashko is the direct opposite of the merciless rebellion, examples of which we have seen in recent decades. This is an outstanding example of creativity, the life of a simple doctor, thanks to whom hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens improved their health.