Denis Leonidovich Ostrovkin,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Ural State Forest Engineering University, Yekaterinburg, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mikhail Valerievich Popov,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Ural State Pedagogical University, Yekaterinburg, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Health Care and Sanitary-Epidemic State of the Ural Village in the 1920–1930s
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2023-1-17
On the basis of federal and regional archives the article describes one of the understudied aspects of country life in the 1920s and 1930s connected with the establishment of a network of healthcare facilities, medical treatment and sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures in villages. The article argues that those measures established a state healthcare and medical treatment system in that period based on the principles of centralization, uniformity and free-of-charge basis of medical care. At the first stage (1920s), the government, alongside state financial support, took money from the agricultural sector to finance healthcare. But in the 1930s, the village was in decline because of collectivization and hunger, and no money could be taken from the village people. As a result of modernization of the 1930s aimed at industrial development, money was channeled to the needs of industry, and agriculture was severely underfinanced. Consequently, healthcare in the village faced serious problems as it was funded residually by the Bolsheviks. At the same time in the mid-1930s due to stabilization and improvement of life in the village and rise of the living standards of the population, the state regulates and develops the healthcare network with the help of financial support from collective farms (known as kolkhoz) and state farms (sovkhoz). This allowed to increase the number of hospitals and ambulance stations, as well as the number of doctors in the Urals villages in late 1930s early 1940s; sanitation of villages was improved. There were no epidemics of smallpox in the Urals anymore; outbreaks of typhus were very rare. However these results should not be overestimated. Before the Great Patriotic War the health situation and sanitation in the Urals were on the same level as in the Russian SFSR in general, but they were much worse than those in the Western Europe and in the USA.
Publishing: 28/02/2023
The article has been received by the editor on 17.11.2022
How to cite: Ostrovkin D.L., Popov M.V. Health Care and Sanitary-Epidemic State of the Ural Village in the 1920–1930s // Historical Courier, 2023, No. 1 (27), pp. 208–219. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2023/ISTKURIER-2023-1-17.pdf]
Links: Issue 1 2023
Keywords: health care; Urals; medicine; village; collectivization; sanitation; epidemics; mode of life; peasantry