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Chapter 3 The Soviet Russian Childbirth Ritual (1950-90) Soviet-era childbirth practices were derived from three distinct sources: the folk tradition, established (Western) medical practice, and Soviet ideals. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the medical establishment was already attempting to change village traditions related to birth (Ramer 1992). The Soviet medical system continued this trend of modernizing treatment of pregnant women, and labor and delivery by introducing a Western medical model that would be applied throughout the country. As Ransel (2000) has discussed, by the 1950s, they had essentially achieved this goal. Childbirth itself, of course, is not limited to the actual delivery. The Soviet government was also concerned with eliminating religious practices such as baptism. These changes were based on the Soviet desire to remove Russia from the scientific and cultural "backwardness" that had characterized the pre-revolutionary period. They also were designed to show how the state was providing for its citizens; free, quality medical services were one way to convey that the state cared for its people more than the tsarist government had. They also ensured that future generations of workers, whom the Soviet Union would rely upon, would enter the world properly. Children would not only thrive physically, but would receive socialist messages about the nature of the family and the relationship between the citizen and the state from birth. In this sense, Soviet Russia's medical system correlated to those across Europe from the eighteenth century on. Foucault (1984, 280- 82) argues that, as a result, the family became a unit designed to meet the goals of the state through the creation of healthy children. The family then shifted from "just a system of relations inscribed in a social status, a kinship system, a mechanism for the transmission of property. It is to become a dense, saturated, permanent, continuous physical environment which envelops, maintains, and develops the child's body." Soviet-era literature describing the development and goals of gynecological and obstetric medicine certainly supports his view. The authors of a standard book for gynecological-obstetric professionals, SheningParshina and Shibaeva (1967, 14) assert: "The Party thinks that one of the most important duties of Soviet medical science and public health is the raising, beginning from the earliest age, of a healthy generation with harmonious development of physical and spiritual forces." They continue by 64 VILLAGE VALUES discussing the need for medical personnel to improve the "hygienic culture" of women from all walks of life through their medical practice and education. Given that the doctors were state representatives in the USSR, these attitudes illustrate the importance of the state in family life, particularly in the area of pregnancy and child rearing. None of the women interviewed, who gave birth in the period from 1954 to 2003, gave birth at homel Similarly, they were all treated by medical professionals during their pregnancies and deliveries, which was a major goal of Soviet medical reform. Shening-Parshina and Shibaeva (1967, 143, 148) strongly oppose both home birth and home remedies of any kind; they repeatedly talk of the dangers of delivering a child without proper medical supervision and of the potential harmful effects of non-medical treatment. They also are adamant about the threat posed by relatives in overruling medical advice: "They [mothers] often fall under the influence of older women (mothers, mothers-in-law, aunts, and so on), who do not always give proper advice." As a result, it is surprising that anything at all from nineteenthcentury village traditions survived, given the attacks by Russian medical professionals on the practices of povitukhi 'village midwives' (Ramer 1992). However , as Belousova (1998, 1999) and I (2003) have shown in previous research, doctors and medical personnel were products of the same folk belief system as their patients. When a traditional belief did not directly contradict medical practice, it was often adopted into the birth process, generally with a "rational " medical explanation for its existence. While the state might have espoused a scientific view of birtl1, people also relied on their own experiences and belief systems, as the warnings to medical personnel in the literature (cited above) indicate. It was not a simple task, as doctors and ritual specialists discovered, to eliminate centuries of belief about how to behave while pregnant or while delivering a child, or even what it meant to be part of a family. The patients brought with them, as Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994, 192-193) discuss witl1in the context of the Jain puja ritual, their own interpretations...

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