"Curing and Crippling": Biomedical and Alternative Healing in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

From its inception after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the centrally controlled Soviet medical system attempted to monopolize medical practice-stigmatizing and punishing alternative practitioners who worked outside the state system. Nonetheless, alternative medical practitioners survived the seven decades of Soviet power. Ordinary people never stopped seeking them out, and since the late 1980s, the number of alternative healers in the Russian Federation has increased astronomically. The aim of this article is to analyze the forms of alternative medicine that exist in contemporary Russia and to offer an explanation for their continuing popularity in terms of popular conceptions of health and healing, the functioning of the state medical care system, and the attitudes of Russian physicians toward alternative healing. Article: In the years following the Revolution of 1917, the new Bolshevik government created the world"s first national health care system, a highly centralized structure designed to provide Soviet citizens universal access to medical services at no direct cost. From its inception, the system reflected the commitment of its organizers to "modern" biomedicine. They excluded other kinds of healers and implemented a variety of measures designed to wean the masses from their "dangerous reliance" on more traditional forms of treatment. The seriousness with which this endeavor was regarded is suggested by the warning of a prominent late nineteenth-century physician about peasant medical practices: "Many healthy people die in Russia because of [them], and even more are crippled and remain broken, weak, or feebleminded for an entire lifetime" (Frieden 1981, 91). Imperial Russia did, in fact, have the highest mortality rates of any European nation, and the physicians who ventured into the countryside in that era quickly discovered that they faced powerful local opposition (Ramer 1991; Ransel 2000). While some peasants welcomed the medically trained outsiders, many others regarded the doctors" interventions as at best irrelevant-perhaps even dangerous or sacrilegious. During cholera epidemics in the 1890s, medical personnel were violently attacked by angry peasants suspicious of both their methods and their motives (Frieden 1981). Like their predecessors, Soviet era medical leaders regarded stamping out health-related "superstitions" and suppressing the activities of nonphysician healers as vital to the nation"s health. Over the course of the twentieth century, substantial resources were devoted to those tasks. Nonetheless, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, neither biomedical nor alternative practitioners have total hegemony over the minds and bodies of Russian patients. Despite repeated efforts by Soviet authorities to marginalize or punish alternative healers, ordinary people never stopped seeking them out. In the post-Soviet era, these practitioners are more visible than ever. Our aim in this article is to examine some aspects of alternative medical practice in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia and t...

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