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Chapter 2 FIGHTING PLAGUE IN SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN RUSSIA, 1917–25 A Case Study in Early Soviet Medicine D M I T R Y M I K H E L On October 29, 1897, the department of medicine of the Kiev St. Vladimir Imperial University took the decision to publish Professor Grigorii Nikolaevich Minkh’s book on the history of the Vetlianka plague epidemic.1 Plague broke out in the village of Vetlianka, halfway between Astrakhan’ and Tsaritsyn on the Volga’s right bank, in September 1878, and in the course of a year killed 434 people. The Vetlianka epidemic cost the state budget dearly and also harmed the Russian Empire’s international reputation, especially in relation to Germany.2 Like a specter from the distant and dreadful past, 20 years later this plague continued to disturb the memory of Russia’s educated society. Yet in 1897, new threats tormented the scholars who had decided to publish Professor Minkh’s book posthumously. The southern and eastern frontiers of Russia were again threatened by plague, which had arisen first in Hong Kong (1894) and then in Bombay (1896). The year 1897 saw the formation of prerevolutionary Russia’s first antiplague organization.3 On January 11 the tsar published a decree establishing a “Commission for Measures to Prevent and Eradicate Plague Infection.” In the same month, to curtail contacts with Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, the southern borders and ports on the Black and Caspian seas were closed. Vladimir Konstantinovich Vysokovich and a small team set off for Bombay in February to study the plague epidemic there. During the same year experts at the St. Petersburg Institute for Experimental Medicine embarked upon D M I T R Y M I K H E L 5 0 the preparation of an antiplague serum for cattle. The tsarist government, preparing for the arrival of plague, sent Vladimir Ivanovich Likhachev, a high-ranking bureaucrat, to the cities of the lower Volga on an inspection tour. He rapidly produced a major report on the sanitary conditions of the region, noting, “There is every basis for contending that … the city of Astrakhan ’ with its fisheries is an open door, and the Volga itself with its riverside towns and villages, constitutes a broad way for any kind of epidemic to come from Asia to Russia and through Russia to Western Europe.”4 Such words illustrate how educated Russian society clearly defined its geopolitical identity, considering itself and the Russian state as a part of Western civilization, the borders of which it was prepared to defend. In this enterprise, members of Russia’s emerging professional medical community began to play a significant role, using their expertise as a genuine “weapon of empire” in the colonization of its borderlands.5 When the tsarist empire fell, a new, Soviet empire took its place on the same territory. Regardless of what was said about breaking with the “dark” and “diseased” past, its founders eagerly made use of the tsarist legacy, including instruments of domination such as medicine. Confronting the dilemma of plague on the very same borders of European Russia, the new rulers turned to the same specialists who had studied plague earlier. In the space of just a few years, from 1917 to 1925, the threat of plague epidemics was completely eradicated across this massive region. In Soviet historiography this era has been portrayed as a heroic time when the young Soviet state implemented that which the preceding regime was incapable of handling.6 Relying upon the latest scientific achievements, Soviet power answered the challenges of plague and other infectious diseases and opened the door to a “bright” and “healthy” future. However, the history of the response of early Soviet medicine to the challenge of plague in the vast southeastern region of Russia remains relatively unstudied. New approaches permit this history of the response to plague in the region to be reconstructed not only as the liquidation of a dangerous natural phenomenon , but also as the establishment of new forms of social control—and the reinforcement of political order. This chapter examines several episodes in this process as it took place in southeastern European Russia. PLAGUE AS SOCIAL DISORDER AND THREAT TO CIvILIzATION Until the mid-1970s, the historiography of epidemics considered plague as a natural phenomenon that posed an extremely dangerous threat to human welfare. Historians emphasized the progress in knowledge that successfully enabled humans to eradicate infectious diseases, which had [18.223.0.53] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 23:36...

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