Soviet medical attestation and the problem of professionalisation under late Stalinism, 1945–1953

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Notes

I would like to thank Hugh Hudson for his comments on the earliest incarnation of this article presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. I would also like to thank the participants of the Mid-West Slavic Workshop, the University of Chicago Russian History Workshop and the University of Toronto Stalin Archive workshop series for their thoughts and comments on elements of this study.

1 Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine. A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. xvi, 5.

2 See Dorothy Porter (ed.), The History of Public Health and the Modern State (London, The Wellcome Institute, 1994).

3 R.A. Mel'nikova, Meditsinskie kadry Voronezhskoi oblasti v IV Stalinskoi pyatiletke (Organizatsionnye voprosy) (Voronezh, 1946), p. 11.

4 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossisskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 8009, op.14, d. 813, l. 34. The documents used in this article are drawn mainly from the Collegium and the Cadres Department of the Soviet All-Union Ministry of Health, correspondence between the All-Union Ministry of Health, the Orgburo of the Communist Party, and the secret department of the Russian Republican Ministry of Health.

5 Harley Balzer (ed.), Russia's Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, M.E. Sharpe, 1996). In his edited volume on professions in late Imperial and revolutionary Russia, Balzer found two characteristics that distinguished Russian professions from those elsewhere: first, they had a profound sense of obligation to society inherited from the intelligentsia, but second, there was professional subservience to the state, including professional acceptance of this idea.

6 For a detailed analysis of the ambitions and complications of Soviet pharmaceutical production during the late Stalinist period see Mary Schaeffer Conroy, ‘The Soviet Pharmaceutical Industry and Dispensing, 1945–1953’, Europe-Asia Studies, 56, 7, 2004, pp. 963–991.

7 The nomenclature of Soviet central government institutions changed from commissariats to ministries in 1946. I therefore refer to them and their leading personnel as commissariats and commissars before the change and ministries and ministers after it occurred.

8 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 566, 11. 92–96.

9 Nikolai Krementsov, The Cure. A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 70–71.

10 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 566, 1. 92.

11 Iosif Ya. Bychkov & I.S. Ermolaev, Spravochnik administrativno-khozyaistvennogo rabotnika mediko-sanitarnykh uchrezhdenii (Moscow, 1950), pp. 310–311.

12 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 566, 1. 93.

13 Ibid., 1. 95.

14 Ibid., 1. 94.

15 V. Kuleshov, ‘“O vvedenii zvanii vrachei-spetsialistov”. Kto dolzhen attestovat’?’, Meditsinskii rabotnik, 5 July 1945, p. 2.

16 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 566, 1. 96.

17 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 935, 1. 106.

18 Ibid., l. 106.

19 Ibid.

20 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 3–9.

21 Early Western accounts of Soviet medicine emphasised the post-revolutionary disbanding of the Pirogovtsy and the resulting loss of recently-gained corporate autonomy, leading to a permanent deprofessionalisation. Most famously, Field's classic study includes a chapter titled ‘The Medical Profession: From Corporation to Employee Group’; see Mark Field, Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 45–61. Other scholars have argued for a more gradual process of deprofessionalisation, or gradual transformation of Soviet doctors into a non-professional or semi-professional occupation; see Kate Schecter, ‘Professionals in Post-Revolutionary Regimes: A Case Study of Soviet Doctors', Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1992 and Michael Ryan, Doctors and State in the Soviet Union (London, Macmillan, 1989).

22 Abbott, The System of Professions, pp. 52–57.

23 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 566, 1. 93.

24 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 663, 1. 11.

25 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 935, 1. 108.

26 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 929, 11. 23–24.

27 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 935, 1. 107.

28 Ibid. l. 106.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., l. 122.

31 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1073, 1. 18.

32 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 935, 1. 115.

33 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1125, 1. 212.

34 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 935, 1. 114.

35 Ibid., l. 115.

36 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1073, 1. 23.

37 Efim I. Smirnov, Voina i voennaya meditsina, 1939–1945 (Moscow, Meditsina, 1979), pp. 128–129.

38 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 935, 11. 9 i ob.

39 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1073, 1. 18.

40 Ibid., l. 23.

41 Smirnov, Voina i voennaya meditsina, pp. 128–129.

42 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1041, 11. 43–44.

43 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 515, 1. 165.

44 GARF (filial), f. 482, op. 47, d. 5874, 1. 125.

45 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 911, 11. 18–19.

46 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1073, 1. 11.

47 Ibid., 11. 13, 27.

48 Ibid., 1. 34.

49 Ibid., 1. 39.

50 Ibid., 1. 20.

51 Ibid., 1. 21.

52 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 1041, 1. 64.

53 GARF (filial), f. 482, op. 52s, d. 369s, 11. 15–7.

54 The KR Affair was the Cold War re-casting of the previous scientific contacts between two Soviet scientists with American oncologists and diplomats as the irresponsible and possibly traitorous passing of the highest state secrets to the enemy. See V.D. Esakov & E.S. Levina, Delo KR. Sudy chesti v ideologii i praktike poslevoennogo stalinizma (Moscow, 2001) and Krementsov, The Cure.

55 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 663, 1. 11.

56 Ibid., 1. 12.

57 Ibid., 1. 13.

58 Ibid., 1. 13.

59 Ibid., 1. 13.

60 Kuleshov, ‘Kto dolzhen attestovat’? p. 2.

61 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 663, 11. 14–31.

62 Mariya Dmitrievna Kovrigina, V neoplatnom dolgu (Moscow, Politizdat, 1985), p. 95.

63 Abbott, The System of Professions, pp. 52–57.

64 Interview Abelev.

65 GARF, f. 8009, op. 14, d. 305, l. 77; d. 776, 1. 51.

66 Rossisskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI), f. 17, op. 118, d. 530, 1. 181.

67 GARF, f. 8009, op. 14, d. 795, 1. 11.

68 Interview, With Garii Izraelovich Abelev, Moscow 11 June 1996.

69 Simon E. Shnol’, Geroi, zlodei, konformisty rossiiskoi nauki (Moscow, 2001), pp. 597–598.

70 Yakov Rapoport, The Doctors' Plot of 1953 (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 69.

71 GARF, f. 8009, op. 1, d. 937, 11. 2–7.

72 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 168, 1. 140.

73 My thanks to Steven Harris of the University of Chicago for this insight. For the classic account of this policy in the early Soviet period see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001). On the figures for the ethnic composition of Soviet medicine overall see GARF, f. 8009, op. 14, d. 305, l. 77; d. 776, l. 51. On the figures for the ethnic composition of medical research specifically see GARF, f. 8009, op. 14, d. 756a, l. 49. We do not have precise figures for the number of Jews in the Soviet Union after the war. The first post-war census was not held until 1959, at which time 2,267,814 Jews were enumerated, or 1.1% of the population. See also Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry Since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure (New York, Greenwood, 1987), p. 21.

74 GARF (filial), f. 482s, op. 52s, d. 352s, 11. 16–18.

75 Ibid.

76 Thomas Ewing, ‘Stalinism at Work: Teacher Certification (1936–1939) and Soviet Power’, Russian Review, 57, 2 Spring 1998, p. 222.

77 GARF (filial), f. 482s, op. 52s, d. 352s, 1. 16.

78 Ibid., 1. 17.

79 Ibid., 1. 27.

80 Shnol’, Geroi, zlodei, konformisty, pp. 597–598.

81 Ewing, ‘Stalinism at Work’, pp. 218–235.

82 For contemporary guidelines on the use of medical attestation see M.M. Parshin, Attestatsiya kadrov v sisteme zdravookhraneniya Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow, MTsFER, 1999).