Concealing Labor Pain: The Evil Eye and the Psychoprophylactic Method of Painless Childbirth in Soviet Russia

Soviet physicians viewed biomedicine and ethnomedicine as binary opposites. This mutual exclusivity reflected physicians' perception of themselves as harbingers of modernity to a Soviet society steeped in superstition and religiosity. Using sources that privilege the voice of medical experts, historians have often reproduced this binary.¹ Soviet medical professionals were not completely divorced from the rural population, however, and neither were they free of superstitions and folkways. In analyzing Soviet science, the historian should not forget that the majority of the population lived in the countryside until the 1960s. Many medical practitioners came from peasant and working-class backgrounds and had benefited from Soviet affirmative action programs.²

But one did not have to come from the village to be marked by traditional culture. As Irina Aleksandrovna Sedakova argues, traditional culture "is common knowledge, ingested since childhood through bylichki [narratives relating to personal experience]."³ The coexistence of traditional culture and medical science is particularly apparent in practices associated with pregnancy and childbirth. However, direct connections between traditional culture and Soviet natal science are difficult to prove. In fact, since the late 18th century, many Russian doctors had been repulsed by folk practices and invested in a mission to eradicate them.⁴ Yet the ways the Soviet medical model of childbirth paralleled folk beliefs suggest that, though scientists were most likely unconscious of the effect rural culture had on them, their worldviews were nonetheless shaped by it.

This article uncovers the parallels between the highly modern psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth and traditional folk beliefs about childbirth to argue that traditional culture and modernity are not binary opposites. Rather they are best viewed as braided: the traditional is subsumed into the modern, which reconfigures traditional folkways to fit within its logic. Any attempt to transform Soviet birthing practices along scientific and rational principles had to take into account the deep structure of rural culture.

The psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth was based on the idea that "normal" childbirth was not painful, and that women who did not expect pain would not experience it. Since the 1920s, Il´ia Zakharevich Vel´vovskii (1899-1981), his mentor Konstantin Ivanovich Platonov (1877-1969), and others had been developing a psychotherapeutic drugless method for preventing birthing pains primarily by using suggestion and hypnosis on pregnant women. Finally, in 1947, Vel´vovskii put forward a method that combined a completely new perception of childbirth with the mobilization of the parturient. The goal was to prevent labor pain by heightening women's self-awareness and teaching them techniques of bodily control. In a six-session training course conducted at local maternity homes, pregnant women learned the physiology of pregnancy: how their bodies would change and prepare for birth. This information was designed to reassure them that pain was an unnecessary aspect of childbirth. In addition, pregnant women were taught a series of techniques to control their body during labor. These included controlled breathing, massaging the abdomen, rubbing pressure points, adopting correct lying positions, and identifying, recording, and monitoring birth pangs. Women could prevent labor pain by taking control of their bodies, their environment, and the overall birthing experience.⁵

John Bell and Paula Michaels have studied the development and application of the Soviet psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth. In his groundbreaking article, Bell uncovered the evolution of the psychoprophylactic method from the early 1920s until the Soviet Ministry of Public Health endorsed it in February 1951 and decreed that it be used in all Soviet birthing facilities. Paula Michaels expanded on Bell's initial intervention by contextualizing the adoption of the psychoprophylactic method more broadly in Soviet domestic and international politics. For Bell and Michaels the scientific status of the psychoprophylactic method depended on its relationship to the political environment. Thus its rise is attributed to Vel´vovskii grounding the method in the politically sanctioned teachings of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Similarly, they attribute the criticism of the psychoprophylactic method at the Kiev All-Union Conference on Psychoprophylaxis in 1956 to the ideological thaw after Stalin's death.⁶

While the works...