Since today is the anniversary of the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet system, let's remember Soviet medicine, supposedly “good” and supposedly “free”.
In the Western world, a former Soviet man, like a horse, is recognized by his teeth. If you see a person of Eastern European appearance on the streets of London, Paris or New York, they immediately look at the mouth to clarify the diagnosis. There, in the mouths of former Soviets, there is always a mess going on. Stamp of traditional medicine. Even the Poles, Czechs and Bulgarians, that is, comrades who have gone a little further from socialism than us, have neater mouths.
In Latin rima oris. Or "mouth gap".
This is what Soviet dentists called our mouths. “Open your mouth!” - a man in a white coat barked imperiously, seating a man with a face white with fear under the drilling machine...
Yesterday I saw a campaign banner by the roadside from the leader of one of our few parliamentary parties: “Let’s bring back decent free healthcare!” Probably, before we had decent medicine, but today it is no good. Oh, I wish this leader could go to a Soviet clinic for at least an hour. Better dental.
Any exploitation of false longing for non-existent Soviet happiness must be punished with at least a ruble, because playing on Soviet mythology results in infantilization of the population. It ceases to really perceive the world and its responsibility for it, preferring to escape from reality into the languid past.
People who believe that there was good free medicine in the USSR are twice mistaken, because it was not free and it was not good either.
The income level of Soviet citizens lagged behind almost all countries except Africa, India, China and Latin American juntas. For free medicine, free education and free apartments, Soviet people paid at least 2/3 of their real earnings. In the early 1970s, each Soviet person had less than 65 rubles of net income, which even in the Party Central Committee was considered to be living below the poverty line. This is how 3/4 of the country's population lived. And 40% did not even reach the subsistence level.
In Soviet times, people were fleeced by the state brazenly, hypocritically, and cruelly. And for all those modest benefits that the state called free, they paid in full. And then they paid above the norm.
In 1965, ten tablets of chloramphenicol cost 64 kopecks, while their production, according to the State Planning Committee, cost the state only 18 kopecks. The famous Soviet “head remedy” based on analgin, banned in Europe, and even more dangerous pyramidon and caffeine, cost 45 kopecks in pharmacies, and 8 kopecks were spent on its production. It was called “Troychatka”.
Imagine that today a blister of antediluvian citramone would cost more than 100 rubles. What was truly affordable in the Brezhnev pharmacy were iodine and brilliant green - 4 kopecks.
These simple remedies, plus cough lozenges, cough tablets, penicillin and the bronchodilator solutan - these are, perhaps, all the medicines that an ordinary Soviet citizen knew. In the 1970s, they were joined by noshpa and Indian festal, but they were sold through connections or at exorbitant prices. In large cities, a recipe could be used to prepare sulfur powder, calendula tincture or anti-acne lotion. In small cities there were interruptions even with the pyramidon.
Remember the satirical miniature by Kartsev and Ilchenko “Warehouse”.
Pyramidon and analgin were already known then for their severe side effects. Noshpa outside the socialist camp was considered a placebo with long-term side effects, including on the intrauterine development of the child. Festal is today called a pseudo-medicine.
The entire Soviet Union used brilliant green to disinfect scratches, while in the rest of the world it was used to dry the edges of wounds. Soviet drug addicts made “vint” from solutan.
Contrary to the memories of patriots, even these meager medicines were not free in Soviet times. All pharmacies in the USSR were divided into outpatient, that is, self-supporting, and hospital. In the first, medicines were sold for money. Pensioners at the pharmacy were entitled to only one benefit - out-of-turn service. Disabled people and war veterans, disabled people of the first two groups and children under one year old received medicines free of charge. Group III disabled people and children from one to three years old were given a discount. Beneficiaries formed their own queue.
Diabetics bought their own insulin. And seriously ill patients also bought pain relief. Both were chronically unavailable in pharmacies; injections were often obtained only at a doctor’s appointment. The luckiest ones, with connections and money, injected insulin at home from reusable syringes. They were boiled. As a rule, there was one syringe per family, and they took care of it. By the way, life for diabetics in the Soviet country was very bad: insulin was homemade and could not cope with a carbohydrate diet. The country lived on potatoes, pasta and bread. Only two products were produced for diabetics - sorbitol and buckwheat. Both were not given out free of charge, but were sold at market prices. And according to recipes.
Buckwheat - according to the recipe! Did you know?
In the Soviet Union, it was necessary to live young and healthy, because any disease brought a person to the sidelines. The words “cancer”, “stroke”, cerebral palsy in Russia are still synonymous with death or lifelong misfortune, because they were not treated in the USSR, people died quietly, secretly, children with cerebral palsy were hidden.
This is because there were no effective medicines freely available outside of Moscow, and in Moscow they were rare and expensive. Soviet people died not only from strokes, but also from diseases that are ridiculous by today's standards: bronchitis, pancreatitis, asthma, from inflammation of the plenum, from a simple cut on the hand or an abscess.
There were no good antibiotics available for public sale, which is why a huge share of child mortality was due to respiratory diseases. There were no drugs like pancreatin. Asthmatics were injected with hormones in the hospital, during a planned hospitalization, the person could not relieve the asthma attack himself. The chief engineer of the housing office from Mamin’s film “Fountain” used an inhaler for asthmatics - a miracle unprecedented even in the late Soviet Union.
People watched the film and understood that this wonderful romantic was an ordinary thief, because the inhaler, and even with a prescription, was not given to thieves.
Any more or less serious illness resulted in huge expenses, even if the person was admitted to a hospital: medicines in the hospital, like other shortages, were obtained through connections. It happened that tests were done through acquaintances and procedures were carried out for bribes. Clinics often had no reagents, no laboratory equipment, and no dressing material. What was available was distributed corruptly, taken home by staff.
They carried everything: droppers for crafts, bandages for reserve, alcohol for vodka, tweezers, lancets, clamps for the kitchen. A person who ended up in a Soviet hospital without money or acquaintances could simply lie under a glucose drip for 20 days, since there was often nothing in hospitals. Almost everyone had to lie like this, because people with a salary of up to 135 rubles, that is, at least 4/5 of the population, did not have access to the illegal drug market.
However, even the medicines distributed through connections hardly treated anyone, because they were Soviet medicines. Truly effective Western drugs penetrated illegally - mainly through traveling diplomats, athletes, and trade mission workers. And they were a drop in the ocean. We produced almost nothing. In a closed country, science was also closed. The technical, medical, and natural science intelligentsia did not know foreign languages, and the damned bourgeoisie did not translate their publications into Russian. Contrary to proud myths, the Soviet pharmaceutical industry did not make any breakthrough discoveries.
Today, about 5 thousand effective original drugs are known in the world of evidence-based medicine. Of these, less than twenty were discovered by Soviet pharmacology.
The KGB had a powerful pharmaceutical intelligence service - security officers from all over the world brought other people's developments to the Union.
Against the backdrop of a total shortage of pharmaceuticals, the Soviet people were treated with whatever was necessary. Nowadays it is common to remember salt rooms in schools, wet salt mats in kindergartens, morning exercises before classes. This is all very good, of course. But apart from salt treatments and massage mats, there was virtually nothing in the country.
Visiting doctors was free, but what kind of doctors did they see in regular hospitals and clinics? They also did not know languages. They were taught by teachers who themselves learned in isolation from world science. Therefore, various obscurantist medical practices flourished in the Union. Especially in the field of physical therapy.
UHF, polarized light, electrophoresis, UV, electrosleep, cups, leeches and mustard plasters were perhaps the only weapons of the Soviet doctor.
They fought against all diseases - from the consequences of perinatal hypoxia and pathologies of placental development to ischemia and osteoporosis.
A sick Soviet worker came under double pressure. On the one hand, helpless medicine awaited him, which took a month and a half to treat ear inflammation or mastitis. On the other hand, sick leave was lying in wait for the poor fellow. The country had standard periods for being on sick leave. After a heart attack and ischemia, 20 days of rest were given. For all illnesses, sick leave had to be extended every three days; it was forbidden to stay on sick leave for more than 10 days without a medical commission.
For colds and acute respiratory viral infections without a fever, sick leave was not required - they went to work snotty. It was impossible to stay at home with a sick child for more than seven calendar days - sick leave was closed, even if the child had whooping cough. For two years, being on sick leave for more than a week was collectively not encouraged; everyone knew this and took time off at their own expense.
Sick leave was paid in full only to people with extensive experience - over eight years. In Soviet times, people got sick with their own money. But dues to the trade union were required to be paid - 1% of the salary, including vacation pay. The teacher paid 12–14 rubles a year to the trade fund. And I was sick 2.5 working days a year. And once every ten years I went on a trip to a sanatorium. That is, the Soviet people paid for their medical care themselves.
Things were a little better in departmental hospitals - valuable workers were taken care of, so bosses went on sick leave several times a year. But another problem was lurking in the special institutions - they received scarce Western equipment and Western medicines. For this reason, good hospitals were extremely corrupt, jobs were grain-based and distributed among their own. And where there is a lot of cronyism, there is no place for qualifications. And they stole more in special hospitals than in district ones.
I personally know the family of a former judge of the Supreme Court and the family of one of the first secretaries of the regional committee of a non-poor region. Both were afraid to be treated in departmental clinics.
What can we say about ordinary outpatient clinics and hospitals? These establishments were scary. Chambers for 12 people and one toilet for two departments are the standard design of the clinic. In maternity hospitals there were ten people in a ward. There were five to ten chairs in the maternity room.
Soviet obstetrics and pediatrics are the main enemies of Soviet citizens. All pediatrics in the first year of a child’s life was aimed at separating the baby from the mother as early as possible so that she could enter production as quickly as possible. Therefore, until the 1960s, a woman did not have the right to babysit for more than three months. Then she was given first six months, then a year, but unpaid leave.
Until 1982, a woman could stay at home with her child in the first year of life only at her own expense.
At the same time, all obstetrics in the USSR was organized so that a woman would go on maternity leave as late as possible. For this purpose, antenatal clinics specifically reduced the duration of pregnancy and issued a certificate stating that it was time to go on maternity leave at 39 weeks. Women gave birth without having time to deliver this certificate to their accounting department.
However, obstetrics and pediatrics were not the most terrible areas of Soviet medicine - otolaryngology and dentistry were more terrible. ENT doctors performed almost all operations without anesthesia: puncture of the nasal sinuses, removal of tonsils, tonsils, adenoids, puncture of the eardrum, cleaning of the middle ear - all at best with novocaine, that is, live.
And in the USSR, teeth were treated using pre-war machines, cement fillings were placed, the nerve was removed with arsenic, and the pain was anesthetized with the same novocaine. People were afraid of this kind of dentistry. Any effective anesthesia, foreign fillings or good prosthetics cost more than a worker’s monthly salary and appeared only in large cities; there was a queue for them for years to come. War veterans and disabled people, and labor veterans received preferential places in the queue. A woman under 60 did not have the opportunity to get teeth inserted without a huge bribe - she could not get through the beneficiaries.
People who yearn for free medicine today simply do not remember the millions of toothless mouths. And in Soviet times they didn’t suffer from anything serious.
Surprisingly, both ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative our citizens today equally criticize modern medicine for the fact that it does not live up to Soviet medicine. And thank God, I’ll tell you that it doesn’t live up to it!
Almost all diseases without exception are now treated in Russia without crazy queues and bribes. Yes, our medicine is not of a Western level. Yes, not everything is free. Yes, not everyone is treated with everything. But the situation is not as bad as some nostalgic alarmists imagine. At least parents today don't have to sell their wedding rings to pay the nurse for injections.
Maybe that’s why hospitals these days are so far from ideal that they are constantly compared not with American or European clinics, but with Soviet institutions, where people were 12 people in a room and where medicines were literally more expensive than gold?
Soviet healthcare cannot stand any comparison with modern healthcare. Moreover, if only because over the course of several decades, medicine and medical practice throughout the world have made a breakthrough. And in our country too. By denying the superiority of post-Soviet healthcare, people, in addition to common sense, are denying progress. Because even if the USSR was a super-open power, its medicine would still seem backward to us. Just because of progress.
Memories of good Soviet medicine are of the same romantic order as longing for Brezhnev's ice cream. Most of those who today still have the strength to discuss the advantages of socialist health care were young in the USSR, for this reason they were happy and, by the way, very healthy. They simply did not have time to encounter the system. And, to be honest, they have nothing to compare Russian medicine with. But for those who really want to compare, I advise you to risk pulling out a tooth without anesthesia. I have never heard of such bold experimenters in the 21st century.
The state of health of the leaders of the USSR has always been a matter of special importance and secrecy: the fate of millions of people in the country and in the world depended on how capable Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev were in the last years of their lives. Therefore, the personal doctors of the Soviet leaders could rise to the top of the Politburo of the Central Committee, and end up in the millstone of political repression. Below are the most dramatic stories of the top doctors of the state...
Vladimir Lenin. “God forbid from Bolshevik doctors”
Vladimir Ilyich and doctors - this is how one could characterize the entire period of time when Ulyanov-Lenin was at the head of the Soviet state. Not initially possessing good health (his father Ilya Nikolaevich died of a stroke as an old man), Lenin also undermined his health with exile in Siberia before the revolution and intense work, 12-16 hours a day, after the revolution.
It is noteworthy that, having destroyed the entire tsarist system of governing the country and promising to put a cook in charge of the state, Lenin himself and other leaders of the Soviet Republic did not trust class-reliable doctors with party cards for their health, but turned to pre-revolutionary trained specialists for help, or even simply to foreign doctors.
« The news that you are being treated in a new way by a “Bolshevik”, albeit a former one, really bothered me, Lenin wrote to Maxim Gorky. — God forbid from comrade doctors in general, Bolshevik doctors in particular! Really, in 99 cases out of 100, fellow doctors are “donkeys,” as a good doctor once told me. I assure you that treatment (except for minor cases) should only be done by first-class celebrities. Trying a Bolshevik’s invention on yourself is terrible!”
Lenin himself was treated by a whole staff of doctors - stars of European medicine Förster and Klemperer, Strumpel and Genshen, Minkovsky, Bumke and Nonna, domestic luminaries - Kozhevnikov and Kramer, Elistratov and Bekhterev, specialists in brain diseases and spastic paralysis, neurologists and diabetes therapists . But, despite the creation of Lechsanupra under the Central Committee and a host of foreign specialists invited for hard currency, the leader of the world revolution slowly but surely faded away.
What did Lenin’s doctors treat for? According to the recollections of the People's Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko, a specially assembled council of doctors alternately gave Vladimir Ilyich three incorrect diagnoses: neurasthenia (overwork), chronic lead poisoning and cerebral syphilis. Accordingly, the treatment method was chosen incorrectly. First, in 1921, that is, three years before his death, doctors diagnosed Lenin with severe overwork with a whole “bouquet” of accompanying ailments.
« They say I suffer from progressive paralysis. There will probably be some irritation. A guy predicted this to me a long time ago. He says your neck is short».
« He developed three such things: a headache, and sometimes a headache in the morning, which he had never had before. Then insomnia, but he had insomnia before. Then the reluctance to work. It wasn't like him at all“,” noted Lenin’s brother Dmitry Ulyanov in his memoirs. — He had always had insomnia, but such a thing as an unwillingness to work was new.
Since March 1922, phenomena began that attracted the attention of others - frequent seizures, consisting of a short-term loss of consciousness with numbness on the right side of the body. These seizures were repeated frequently, up to twice a week, but were not too long - from 20 minutes to two hours».
The patient was prescribed rest and rest, living in Gorki, but the doctors could no longer save him. It is noteworthy that at that time all members of the Central Committee of the party and the government suffered from overwork; doctors recognized only the head of the USSR government, Nikolai Rykov, as more or less healthy, prescribing everyone for chronic fatigue either enhanced nutrition and a strict daily routine, or opium, or even an experimental drug "gravidan" - purified urine of pregnant women.
As a supporter of this method, experimental doctor Alexey Zamkov (husband of sculptor Vera Mukhina), noted, “ lasting treatment results were recorded in dozens of drug addicts and alcoholics" But the gravidan did not help the leaders of the revolution.
The next diagnosis made to Lenin in 1922 was “chronic lead poisoning from two bullets” remaining in the soft tissues after the assassination attempt on Fanny Kaplan in 1918. One of the bullets was removed after a complex operation, but this did not bring relief to the patient.
The head of state felt worse and worse and worked less and less. And then a third diagnosis was proposed, which, for obvious reasons, was not widely advertised throughout the country - syphilitic inflammation of the inner lining of the arteries. Lenin was prescribed the necessary injections of arsenic and iodine compounds in this case, but years later one of the council members, Georg Klemperer, suddenly changed his mind. " The possibility of a sexually transmitted disease has been ruled out", he noted in his memoirs.
One way or another, the leader of the world proletariat was let down by his brain; during a post-mortem autopsy it was discovered “ severe damage to cerebral vessels, especially the left carotid artery system" The patient himself guessed why he was dying:
« They say that I suffer from progressive paralysis, but if this is not so, then, in any case, paralysis that is steadily progressing, Lenin once told his attending physician Otfried Förster. — There will probably be some irritation. A guy predicted this to me a long time ago. He says your neck is short. And my father died around the same years from a stroke».
It is noteworthy that for the doctors who were unable to save the leader, no sad consequences occurred. The persecution of pest doctors began under the next Soviet leader.
Joseph Stalin and the “pests in white coats”
The medical record of Stalin’s “friend of athletes” is one of the most interesting among all Soviet leaders and still the most secret. Suspicious Joseph Vissarionovich could not complain about his ill health to either doctors or relatives. Much about the state of health of the leader of the peoples was learned only from a post-mortem autopsy at the Department of Biochemistry of MOLMI.
« No heart attack was detected, but the entire mucous membrane of the stomach and intestines was also dotted with small hemorrhages“, - Alexander Myasnikov, academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Soviet Union, later wrote based on the results of the autopsy in his book “I Treated Stalin.” — The focus of hemorrhage in the area of the subcortical nodes of the left hemisphere was the size of a plum. These processes were a consequence of hypertension. The arteries of the brain were severely affected by atherosclerosis; their lumen was very sharply narrowed».
Academician Vinogradov was arrested, and Stalin trusted no one else and did not let anyone get close to him.
The detected atherosclerosis of the cerebral arteries, according to doctors, could “exaggerate the loss of adequacy in assessing people and events, extreme stubbornness, suspicion and fear of enemies.” “The state was essentially ruled by a sick person,” Myasnikov stated. “He hid his illness, avoided medicine, and was afraid of its revelations.”
« On December 21, 1952, I saw my father for the last time. He looked bad. Apparently felt signs of illness,” Alliluyeva later wrote. — Obviously, he felt high blood pressure, but there were no doctors. Vinogradov was arrested, but he didn’t trust anyone else and didn’t let anyone get close to him».
In part, historians explain the famous “Doctors’ Case” with this suspicion, in which in 1952, nine of the largest doctors of the USSR were convicted - professors Vovsi, Egorov, Feldman, Etinger, Grinshtein, Mayorov, M. Kogan, B. Kogan and Vinogradov.
It is noteworthy that the last two were considered Stalin’s personal doctors, but here, as they say, “nothing personal.” The “killers in white coats” were accused of “organizing a Zionist conspiracy” and the desire to “shorten the lives of the leaders of the Party and Government during treatment.”
In order to extract testimony from the detainees, according to the head of the MGB, Semyon Ignatiev, “measures of physical coercion were applied to Egorov, Vinogradov and Vasilenko, for which... two employees were selected who could carry out special tasks in relation to particularly important and dangerous criminals.” Only Stalin's death in March 1953 saved doctors from the inevitable death sentences in such cases.
Who knows, if Stalin had trusted doctors, how long he would have lived and what the USSR and the world in general would have been like.
Nikita Khrushchev. Undisciplined patient
It is interesting that Nikita Sergeevich, who was dismissed with the wording “due to advanced age and deteriorating health,” practically did not complain about his health. Having become a “pensioner of union importance” at the age of 70, he, who did not tolerate inactivity, tinkered in the garden and, with the permission of the curators, went to agricultural exhibitions. He fell into the hands of doctors only a few times, the first time with a myocardial infarction.
« At first I was surprised why he was admitted to the neurological department and not to the therapeutic department.? - Praskovya Moshentseva, a former surgeon at the Kremlin hospital in Sokolniki, later recalled. — After all, the diagnosis was obvious: myocardial infarction. Apparently, they wanted to isolate Khrushchev from the outside world. Moreover, the department was previously cleared of all patients and was guarded in the strictest manner, both at the entrance and at the exit.».
The former Secretary General, who threatened to show the whole world “Kuzka’s mother,” turned out to be an absolutely adequate patient, although not entirely disciplined.
They wanted to isolate Khrushchev from the outside world: the department was previously cleared of all patients and was guarded in the strictest possible manner.
« Opening the door to the room, I cheerfully walked towards the patient’s bed. Khrushchev was reading the Pravda newspaper and smiling at something. I decided not to interfere. She apologized, promising to come back later. But Nikita Sergeevich put the newspaper aside.
“No, no, Praskovya Nikolaevna, don’t go,” he said. - I am waiting for you.
“I don’t want to disturb you,” I said. - You read Pravda.
- Who reads it? - Khrushchev smiled. “I personally am just looking through it.” Here we only write about socialism. In general, it’s just water.”
Having lost influence and suffering from the human vacuum that had formed around him, the so-called “friends, associates and like-minded people” - the former first secretary found an attentive and friendly audience among doctors and nurses.
« In the middle of the room, Nikita Sergeevich sits in an armchair, covered with pillows. There are nurses around him, the older nurse stands guard at the door. When they saw me, everyone froze with guilty faces. They understood that they had seriously violated hospital rules by allowing a bedridden patient to leave the ward. Khrushchev laughed.
“Ah, dear Praskovya Nikolaevna,” he said. “I beg you not to punish anyone: I ordered them.” Please note: this is my last order. Now I'm nobody. You know, I always loved talking with ordinary people. Academicians, members of the CPSU Central Committee and generally responsible workers - what are they like? They are cautious in their statements and like to complicate things. Before you say anything sensible, everything will be turned upside down...
Nikita Sergeevich spoke about five-story buildings, about the development of virgin lands, about our black soil: how during the war the Germans took it out of the country in whole trainloads, about much more. After finishing the speech, I asked the nurses to take the headstrong patient back to the room».
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Evgeniy Chazov, who treated Brezhnev, remembered the retired first secretary in the same way.
« Khrushchev was in the hospital on Granovsky Street due to myocardial infarction, Chazov wrote in his book “Health and Power. Memoirs of a “Kremlin doctor.” — One late evening I was in the department and needed a nurse. Looking into the medical staff’s room, I saw a strange picture: the nurses on duty and orderlies were sitting around an old patient, wrapped in a hospital gown, who was loudly proving something to them and asking with passion: “Well, is your life better under Brezhnev?”
“Dear Leonid Brezhnev” and hearse racing
The two decades following Khrushchev’s resignation brought politics and medicine, the country’s leaders and doctors, who supported the leaders’ strength and health, closer than ever before in the USSR. Three heads of state in a row - Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko - were not in good health and led the country, as people joked then, “on a drip.”
It must be remembered that at that time the confrontation with the West was gradually growing, and in this somewhere obvious, somewhere hidden struggle, the leader of such a superpower as the USSR was obliged, if not to be, then at least to look strong, healthy and capable of adequately perceiving the situation in world. And every year it became more and more difficult.
Already in the early 1970s, the state of health of “dear Leonid Ilyich” inspired fair fears. Once, according to Chazov’s recollections, Brezhnev lost control of himself during important negotiations in the GDR.
« Kosygin sat next to Brezhnev and saw how he gradually began to lose the thread of the conversation. “His tongue began to tangle,” said Kosygin, “and suddenly the hand with which he was supporting his head began to fall. He should be taken to the hospital. Nothing terrible would have happened.” We tried to reassure Kosygin, saying that there was nothing wrong, it was just a matter of overwork, and that Brezhnev would soon be able to continue negotiations. After sleeping for three hours, Brezhnev came out as if nothing had happened and continued to participate in the meeting».
According to Academician Chazov, who observed the health of the Secretary General for many years, “ Losing the ability of analytical thinking and speed of reaction, Brezhnev more and more often could not withstand workloads and difficult situations. Disruptions occurred that were no longer possible to hide. They tried to explain them in different ways: impaired cerebral circulation, heart attacks, and often gave them a political connotation».
But even the rapidly weakening and aging leader was not allowed to retire for a well-deserved rest by “friends and associates” from the Politburo. Only equally sick candidates could replace him at the helm of the state - Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, who ultimately ruled the country for a total of about three years. Therefore, we could only hope that Leonid Ilyich would hold out for another year, two more...
The ill health of the elderly Secretary General became the topic of hundreds of jokes and gossip among the people, but life itself was more anecdotal than any invented story. Here’s an incident Chazov recalls about this:
« Due to the decline in critical perception, Brezhnev also had incidents. One of them is connected with the television series “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” which Brezhnev watched in the hospital. The nurse on duty with him, when discussing the picture, conveyed as obvious the rumors circulating among a certain circle of people that the prototype of the main character of Stirlitz is Colonel Isaev, who lives forgotten by everyone, and his feat is not worthily noted.
An excited Brezhnev immediately called Andropov and seriously began to reprimand that we still do not appreciate the merits of the people who saved the country from fascism. He asked to find Isaev, “whose work behind German lines is worthy of the highest award.”
When Andropov began to reasonably say that he knew for sure that this was the author’s fiction, that there was no real person hiding behind Stirlitz, Brezhnev did not believe this and asked to find out everything again and report. Isaev, of course, was not found, but the awards were still presented. They were awarded to the actors in this film, which the Secretary General liked so much».
The slightest change in the health of the Soviet leader was closely monitored not only by doctors and relatives, but also by the closest political circle and the intelligence services of many countries around the world.
« The secret services of various countries, who were interested in the stability of the new leadership, paid attention to this issue - Chazov recalled. — Andropov told me that for this purpose they are trying to use any information - from official photographs and filming to stories from people who meet him about his speech, gait, appearance».
Therefore, in public, Brezhnev, like Andropov and Chernenko who later replaced him, tried their best to look healthy and full of strength.
“The opinion that a leader needs to show himself periodically, regardless of how he feels, which later concerned not only Brezhnev, but also many other leaders of the party and state, became almost official and, in my opinion, was not only hypocritical, but also a sadistic character, Chazov said.
— Sadistic towards these unfortunate people, overwhelmed by political ambitions and thirst for power and trying to overcome their weakness, their illnesses in order to appear healthy and efficient in the eyes of the people. And now a system of television coverage of meetings and meetings with the participation of Brezhnev, and then Andropov, is being developed, where the director and cameraman know exactly the angle and points from which they should broadcast.
In the new room for plenums of the CPSU Central Committee in the Kremlin, special railings are being installed for leaders to enter the podium. Special ramps are being developed for getting onto the plane and to the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. By the way, if my memory serves me right, the creators of the gangway were awarded the State Prize».
The deaths of Brezhnev and the two general secretaries who followed him, aptly called by the people the “carriage race,” put an end to the long epic of “USSR leaders and their doctors.” The era of leaders is over, and their relationship with medicine has ceased to be the subject of the most important state secret.
Academician Evgeniy Chazov, who headed the 4th Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Health for 20 years, told AiF readers about how the political elite was treated in Soviet times, and in 1987-1990. - Minister of Health of the USSR.
Is a heart attack good for you?
“AiF”: - Evgeniy Ivanovich, in the USSR the rulers promoted domestic medicine, therefore, when Brezhnev had a heart attack, he ordered the construction of a Cardiac Center. This is true?
Evgeny Chazov:- Not really. Brezhnev had a heart attack in his youth, when he worked in Moldova as secretary of the Republican Central Committee. In the mid-1970s, my colleagues and I often visited him at his dacha in Zarechye - he then had health problems. The visits took place in the morning and ended with a tea party, which was organized by Brezhnev’s wife. One day he remembered that he had suffered a heart attack. They began to discuss modern methods of treatment, and the conversation turned to health problems in general. I told him about our proposal to create a special cardiology service - already at that time, mortality from cardiovascular diseases occupied one of the first places. After listening carefully, he was surprised that the Ministry of Health could not resolve this issue. And within a week, these proposals with Brezhnev’s visa were discussed at all levels of government. And the fact that none of the Soviet leaders ever went abroad for treatment is indeed true. On the one hand, they probably didn’t want foreigners to find out about their state of health. On the other hand, they believed that we already had everything: a high level of medicine, outstanding specialists recognized throughout the world. Moreover, there was even a certain ban on inviting foreign specialists to the country. Of the 19 leaders of various countries whom I treated, only three - Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko (I’m not counting Khrushchev) - were Soviet. And the rest are leaders of foreign states.
What the press didn’t write about me then... For example, that I supposedly killed Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko so that Gorbachev would come to power. But in medicine, decisions on the most complex cases are made collectively. So, many academicians took part in the treatment of those whom I “killed”. And at a meeting of the Academy of Medical Sciences, I showed that very article and said: “Dear colleagues, 12 academicians sitting here, it turns out, are criminals, murderers. That's what Pravda said. Everyone started talking. The president of the academy wrote a letter to the newspaper: “Are you creating a new “doctors’ business”?” And Pravda, I note, published this letter along with an apology.
Are overseas doctors in fashion?
“AiF”: - But starting with Boris Yeltsin, our leaders prefer to be treated by foreign specialists. It was you who invited the American heart surgeon Michael DeBakey to see him?
E.Ch.:- Andropov was the first. When, at the end of his life, he had serious health problems, he asked for a consultation with the participation of foreign specialists. We invited Professor Rubin from New York General Hospital, a world-renowned kidney specialist. And he confirmed all our diagnoses and the correctness of treatment. And Yeltsin had surgery with us. By the way, Chernomyrdin also performed operations in Russia. I actually asked my friend DeBakey to come to Yeltsin. Yeltsin liked him. But Yeltsin’s entourage was not satisfied with his verdict and decided to invite German specialists for consultation. When they saw Michael and me, they became nervous. In Germany, I am an honorary member of two universities, everyone knows me there, and suddenly they were sent to supervise me and our outstanding cardiac surgeon and academician Renat Akchurin, with whom we were supposed to operate. The Germans sat silently throughout the entire operation, literally pressed against the wall. As soon as we left the operating room, Michael immediately began applauding himself. He really performed the operation brilliantly. The heart didn’t even have to be artificially restarted - it repaired itself and “started up.” And the first of our people whom DeBakey operated on was the great mathematician Mstislav Keldysh. Then I turned to DeBakey as the author of the treatment method that was required for such a diagnosis as Keldysh’s. But that is another story.
P.S. How is medicine today different from what it was half a century ago? How was Marshal Zhukov saved? Read about this and much more in the continuation of the interview with Academician E. Chazov in the following issues.
Material prepared by: Yulia Borta, Savely Kashnitsky, Dmitry Skurzhansky, Vitaly Tseplyaev, Lydia Yudina
Prepared by: Sergey Koval
The series of stories about great doctors continues Hematologist Nikita Shklovsky-Kordi:
Why were global programs to harvest bone marrow in case of nuclear war closed?
— So, Nikita Efimovich, 1972, a protocol for the treatment of Donald Pinkel’s childhood leukemia appeared. How was this implemented in the USSR?
— The leading Soviet hematologist Andrei Ivanovich Vorobyov at that time, as they said, “played the box” - he had to work in the clinic of the Third Directorate. It was a very closed clinic (hence “box”) - such offers were difficult to refuse in Soviet times. Although he said that his parents were imprisoned and he could not be a party member, he did not wriggle out. (In 1936, A.I. Vorobyov’s father was shot, and his mother was sentenced to ten years in the camps. The “Institute of Biophysics” with a departmental closed hospital with 200 beds was under the jurisdiction of the Third Main Directorate of the Ministry of Health - the Atomic Ministry - "Sredmash" - and was specially engaged in rehabilitation of workers “suffered from the radiation factor” - Note auto).
But, on the other hand, there were much more opportunities to conduct serious therapy there.
Before Vorobyov, it was believed at the Institute of Biophysics that acute radiation sickness was, first of all, a disease of the nervous system.
Andrei Ivanovich fundamentally changed these ideas and created a system of biological dosimetry: an algorithm that allows one to retrospectively reconstruct the radiation dose based on the clinical signs of the disease. It was practically impossible to measure this dose using physical methods. An accident is always a mess: people go where they shouldn’t and don’t take a dosimeter with them. And the dosimeters were designed for small doses; during accidents they went off scale.
At A.I. Vorobyova had a brilliant colleague - Dr. Marina Davydovna Brilliant. She looked after the patients very carefully and, every day, when she did a blood test for them, she recorded the results on a temperature sheet. All doctors in the world are taught to keep such a list, but few do it.
M.D. Diamond and A.I. Vorobyov discovered that in acute radiation sickness, the leukocyte curve—the change in the number of peripheral blood leukocytes over time—reflects the dose of total radiation that the patient received on the bone marrow. Observing victims of many radiation accidents of that time allowed them to learn to determine the emergency radiation dose with an accuracy of several tens of rads and formulate this in the form of instructions.
During Chernobyl, Andrei Ivanovich’s student discharged fifteen thousand people from hospitals in Ukraine in one day - because he could estimate the upper limit of the radiation dose they received, from which it directly followed that they would not need medical care.
On the other hand, it became clear who could not be cured - with a total dose of more than six hundred rads, the bone marrow was not restored, and the success of bone marrow transplantation in case of emergency radiation was excluded.
This was also proven by A.I. Vorobyov and his colleagues and closed the Soviet and world programs for the procurement of bone marrow in case of nuclear war.
— As I understand it, when Chernobyl happened, all of Academician Vorobyov’s research was very useful?
- And how! Andrei Ivanovich gave a lecture on acute radiation sickness to all hematology cadets at his department at the Institute for Advanced Medical Studies. I first heard it at medical school, and while already working for him, I sat at this lecture in April 1986 - just before the accident. And someone chuckled:
- Why do we say we need this?
Vorobyov answered very decisively:
“Tomorrow some station will collapse, you will all be on the front line and will treat these patients.”
And so it happened.
Chernobyl nuclear power plant, after the explosion and before conservation. Photo: ria.ru
And then Vorobiev became the main person responsible for the clinical part of Chernobyl. Two hundred people were treated in the sixth hospital, and no serious mistakes were made there, except that they were not given a blood test on the May holidays. And international experts R. Gale and Tarasaki were allowed there due to the fact that Vorobyov was not afraid of openness.
Andrei Ivanovich Vorobyov is a hero not only of saving the lives of victims, but also a champion of understanding the Chernobyl experience.
— And in peacetime, these studies were continued - as a treatment for leukemia, and not for acute radiation sickness?
— Yes, Academician Vorobiev very soon created a program for the treatment of lymphogranulomatosis with chemotherapy and radiation at the same time. It was an absolutely innovative program, ahead of its time, but as a complication, ten percent of patients developed acute myeloid leukemia. Then this program was stopped and then came to us from abroad with a modification - chemistry and radiation were postponed by a month. This gave brilliant results.
The first thing Vorobyov did when he became director of the Central Institute of Blood Transfusion was resuscitation for oncological and, in particular, hematological patients. There, chemotherapy began with artificial ventilation and hemodialysis.
This is how the “medicine of the future” was formed, capable of taking on a number of important functions of the human body and helping to endure the toxic load of chemotherapy. The institute began to be called the “Center for Hematology and Intensive Care” - during perestroika, it was sometimes possible to change the names in accordance with the meaning.
As a result, Vorobiev achieved that lymphogranulomatosis began to be cured in 90% of cases, and some types of lymphosarcoma - in 80%.
This happened due to the fact that he took full responsibility for clinical trials, without waiting for endless approval procedures.
“All because Vorobyov managed to explain to his superiors”
— I understand that this later came in handy during Chernobyl. But what does this have to do with children?
— Vorobiev remained the most experienced specialist in radiation sickness - then there were fewer accidents, and he came to Sredmash just at the moment when our nuclear industry was transferred from the hands of the scientific creators to the hands of operating engineers.
There were many accidents then and, accordingly, many sick people. We learned from them.
But still, these were random patients. And here Andrei Ivanovich managed to explain to his superiors that the model of radiation sickness is acute leukemia and get permission to admit children with acute leukemia to his closed clinic.
When the Total Therapy program appeared, Vorobiev, in the same year, slightly changing the protocol to suit his real capabilities, treated several dozen children. The protocol included the need to destroy leukemia cells that had “settled” in the membranes of the brain and spinal cord. Pinkel had radiation for this.
But, since Vorobyov did not have a suitable irradiator for the head and spine, he prevented neuroleukemia not with x-rays, but with chemotherapy - he injected three cytostatics into the cerebrospinal fluid at once. By the way, a few years later the Americans modified the protocol in the same way.
And a miracle happened that pediatric hematologists could not believe in - 50% of cases of complete cure for acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children - just as it was said in Pinkel’s publication.
Despite the fact that Vorobyov was publicly accused of being subject to the “corrupt influence of the West,” at least ten of these first cured people live in Russia today.
We are friends with one of them, a film director and restaurateur, and she invites us to celebrate the holiday of her life, it is known who gave it to her. And the holiday has been going on for more than forty years.
Great doctors may have different methods
— Pinkel was a democratic doctor who insisted on the patient’s duty to know his diagnosis. And Vorobiev? What's even better?
— Yes, and in his clinic, for example, there was a special documentation regime, when the patient’s card was placed in a folder on the door of the room and was available to him and his family. This was a great step, and very few in world medicine have reached this point today.
Our last conversation about Pinkel was illustrated by the website Miloserdie.ru with a photograph of the pompous entrance to St. Jude with a huge statue. This is a picture of today's regression: the first St. Jude building was surprisingly modest and proportionate to small patients.
But the laboratories there were spacious - in contrast to what I saw in the USA when I got there in 1989 - luxurious hospital lobbies and closets of research departments.
In St. Jude Original, Pinkel took an epochal step comparable to Pinel, who removed the chains from psychiatric patients. Pinkel put the medical history in the hands of the patient and his parents - so that there would be no conflict between the doctor and his patient. secret.
Andrei Ivanovich Vorobyov is a completely different person - he is a paternalistic doctor. He told his patients this: “We know what is wrong with you, and we will do everything that is necessary.” And the patient, when he hears this, does not argue, because
Every sick person - both small and large - wants to have parents. If you have such happiness - a doctor who is your father and mother - it is a rare patient who will refuse this.
- Nikita Efimovich, but in the current conditions, when an oncology patient must receive a quota, wait for a place in the federal center and get there when he is transferred from region to region, he should know his diagnosis and the list of procedures that he needs.
- Undoubtedly. And Andrei Ivanovich is one of those people who understands this well. Of the people I know, the one best prepared for remote treatment was eighty-seven-year-old Doctor Vorobiev. He is ready to consult patients by phone, Skype - whatever you like. He has one goal - to help the patient, and if new means can be used for this, he uses it.
Today A.I. Vorobiev says that the patient must become much more active and take many things into his own hands - first of all - collecting and storing medical records, ensuring continuity treatment.
Without this, everything is in vain, just like thinking without memory falls apart. The literacy of patients has increased and at the same time the organizational capabilities of the doctor have decreased. That is, today the patient must be responsible for collecting and storing medical information.
Another thing is that Vorobyov always says: “You cannot take away a person’s last hope.” Not because he ever took it away, but there are people who do it, and not without pleasure. In Harrison's textbook, the Bible of American medicine, there is, for example, the following statement:
“A misanthrope may be a good diagnostician, but he will never be a good doctor.”
There is also a psychological defense: a person does not hear what he does not want to hear. All current “informed consent” does not take into account what exactly the person heard and accepted. Formally, you informed him, but you don’t know what he learned from it. It seems to me that the highest success of “informed consent” - mutual understanding between doctor and patients, were the words of the parents of Pinkel’s young patients: “We know that our children will die. But do your best to understand how to treat other children.” This is where the healing took place. These are not random words in the Universe!
The point is not to tell a person that he is dying. Personally, I tell patients who ask me about death directly:
“You know, today you are sick, but I seem to be healthy. But tomorrow is tomorrow for both of us.”
So we discuss what we know about the diagnosis and what we will do.
In the West, a person is also not informed about a diagnosis in such a way that he has nowhere to run. Because a catastrophe for a person is a lack of meaning.
And a constructive path is a search for the meaning of today’s life, with any diagnosis, and people who are looking for this meaning with you.
The main advantage and main disadvantage of a doctor
Doctor Fedor Petrovich Gaaz. Image from lecourrierderussie.com
In world practice, medical research has begun to slow itself down. They are overgrown with a huge bureaucracy, commissions and committees, which believe that good can only be compared with very good, and risky cannot be compared. This dulls the role of the doctor-researcher - after all, Dr. Haass said: “ Hurry up to do good".
Vorobiev openly believes that he is doing an “experiment” with each patient: he treats each one as if it were the first time, because all patients are complex. But patients become complex only when the doctor works with them only after the requirements for making a diagnosis have been met. Then, when treatment is prescribed, the doctor follows the protocol, but with each patient, within the framework of the protocol, he looks for what can be done better.
Vorobyov is the genius of the council. He takes his own opinion into account last, and even treats the “breaths” of someone else’s thoughts with great attention and is ready to hear it, even if this requires a change in the entire concept of treatment.
Vorobiev considers the main quality necessary for a doctor to be focus on the patient. And the most dangerous flaw a doctor can have is stubbornness.
So try to please him!
Medicine “for the nose” - a relapse of the Middle Ages
"Hippocrates: Medicine Becomes Science" by Tom Robert, ser. 20th century. Image from casosgalenos.com
— You said that ideally a medical history is written as an essay, and the patient participates in its creation. But this results in a huge amount of information that is impossible to analyze in the current flow conditions.
— The history of the disease, as it was formed at the end of the 19th century, is an example of a successful approach to describing a complex object. As they say in mathematics, “decision making with insufficient and unreliable information.” And here you cannot follow the symptom.
Our pharmacies are experiencing a relapse of the Middle Ages: medicines “for the nose”, “for the eyes” and “for the back” are the complete opposite of science.
The scientific approach is different: you listen to the patient’s complaints, ask about how he lived and was ill, and then examine him according to a plan that is the same throughout the world: the respiratory system, the digestive system, the endocrine system, etc., and only after that you put forward a hypothesis about the diagnosis and see how to check it: order additional tests.
A good doctor always follows a systemic examination algorithm, the problem is that now they have become worse at recording their findings and conclusions, and this is the main creative result of a doctor’s work!
Alas, medical history is being replaced by reporting forms.
The amount of information that laboratory and instrumental tests provide in modern medical history is enormous. But they are scattered and can only be integrated by a person - a doctor. The task of information systems is to help find connections and present information to the doctor in a convenient form. The temperature sheets kept by M.D. Brilliant are the simplest example of such a system - and how it worked!
As A.I. says Vorobyov: “the most terrible condition in medicine is the lack of diagnosis.”
The Communists immediately saw what their party was becoming. For example, already in 1921, at the plenum of the Central Committee, the prominent communist L. Krasin expressed this in numbers: “The source of all the troubles and troubles that we are experiencing at the present time is that the Communist Party consists of 10 percent convinced idealists who are ready to die for the idea, and 90 percent of the unscrupulous opportunists who joined it to get a position.”
And V.I. Lenin, in his well-known work at that time, “The Infantile Disease of Leftism in Communism,” wrote: “We are afraid of excessive expansion of the party, because careerists and scoundrels who deserve only to be shot inevitably try to attach themselves to the government party.”
Lenin was a pure fanatic of Marxism, who did not need anything other than the victory of the proletariat (the victory of his Leninist ideas). Lenin was absolutely indifferent to food, clothing and entertainment, and in fact he is well characterized by this note:
"May 23, 1918
Administrator of the Council of People's Commissars
Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich
Due to your failure to comply with my urgent demand to indicate to me the reasons for increasing my salary from March 1, 1918 from 500 to 800 rubles. per month and in view of the obvious illegality of this increase, which you made arbitrarily by agreement with the Secretary of the Council Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunov in direct violation of the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of November 23, 1917, I severely reprimand you.
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V. Ulyanov (Lenin).”
Stalin was similar to Lenin, but his fanaticism extended not to Marx, but to the specific Soviet people - Stalin fanatically served him. He was not an ascetic, but he simply did not need anything extra. For a very long time, he and his family lived extremely modestly, and his wife did not always have enough money even for such a life. They had no cooks; When, after the death of his wife, the housekeeper prepared dinner for Stalin, the dinner consisted of cabbage soup for the first course, porridge with boiled cabbage soup for the second course, and compote for dessert. Or they brought him lunch from the canteen of the regiment guarding the Kremlin. From the surviving correspondence of that time, it is clear with what joy Stalin’s children received the parcels of fruit that their father sent them when he was resting and receiving treatment in the Caucasus.
Henri Barbusse describes Stalin's housing and life in the early 30s.
“Here in the Kremlin, which resembles an exhibition of churches and palaces, at the foot of one of these palaces stands a small three-story house.
This house (you wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t been shown to you) was previously an office building at the palace; Some royal servant lived in it.
We go up the stairs. There are white linen curtains on the windows. These are three windows of Stalin's apartment. In the tiny entrance hall, a long soldier's overcoat catches the eye, with a cap hanging above it. The three rooms and dining room are simply furnished, as in a decent but modest hotel. (By Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of December 1, 1917, Lenin determined that for people's commissars "no more than 1 room per family member is allowed in apartments.")
The dining room is oval in shape; Lunch is served here - from the Kremlin kitchen or homemade, prepared by the cook. In a capitalist country, the average employee would not be satisfied with such an apartment or such a menu. A little boy is playing right there. Yasha's eldest son sleeps in the dining room - they make a bed for him on the sofa; the youngest is in a tiny room, like a niche. After finishing his meal, the man smokes a pipe in a chair by the window.
He is always dressed the same. Military uniform? - this is not entirely true. Rather, a hint of uniform - something that is even simpler than the clothes of an ordinary soldier: a tightly buttoned jacket and khaki-colored trousers, boots. You think, you remember... No, you have never seen him dressed differently - only in the summer he wears a white linen suit. He earns several hundred rubles a month - the modest maximum for a party worker (one and a half to two thousand francs in French money).
According to the recollections of the head of his security in 1927, Stalin’s dacha had neither amenities nor servants (Stalin passed a decree that the dachas of party workers could not be larger than 3-4 rooms. Nevertheless, the “victims of Stalinism” Rudzutak, Rosengoltz, Mezhlauk, Karakhan, Yagoda and others had managed to build palaces with 15-20 rooms by the time of their arrest16), and he and his family came there on weekends with sandwiches prepared at home.
Over time, his life was improved, which was caused rather by the need to receive foreign guests, but his indifference to everyday life remained: he had practically no personal belongings, not even an extra pair of shoes or some clothes. (Colonel N. Zakharov in 1953 was the head of the government security department and described Stalin’s property after his death. Almost 50 years later, Zakharov recalled with surprise: “When I opened Stalin’s wardrobe, I thought that I was richer than him. Two jackets, an overcoat , boots, 2 pairs of felt boots - new and hemmed, new ones have never been put on. That's it!").
With such a leader, his comrades were selected accordingly, especially when he did not yet have an overwhelming advantage in the ideological struggle with Trotsky.
Trotsky was the direct opposite of Stalin on this issue. This required the results of victory in material form. If you travel, then on the Tsar’s train, if you live, then in the palace, if you eat, then only the food of your personal chef, if you are a prostitute, then only the high society. You took power - have fun! True, Trotsky himself modestly called this “concern for comrades.” It goes without saying that thanks to this “care” there were never any scoundrels among Trotsky’s comrades and his ideological allies.
Genrikh Yagoda photo
These are the comparisons. There is not a single hint that Stalin or Molotov, or Kaganovich ever spent an evening in a restaurant in their lives. But, let’s say, Trotsky’s supporter G. Yagoda, who actually headed the country’s state security agencies (OGPU), in honor of the tenth anniversary of his organization, rented all the most expensive restaurants in Moscow. By the way, during a search of this baboon, in addition to an abundance of velvet, a huge collection17 of pornography, which was then extremely scarce throughout the world, was found. (According to Article 1821 of the then Criminal Code, the court could give up to 5 years in prison for importing pornography into the country.) This is the question of where he directed the money allocated for exploration.
Neither Stalin nor his comrades were ever treated or vacationed abroad. But future “victims of Stalinism” preferred to be treated only at foreign resorts. For example, N. Krestinsky, whom we will remember later, having gone abroad in 1922 to widen the air passages in his nose, spent several months in German resorts and on the Riga seaside, bringing suitcases of junk and at once spending the entire amount planned for dozens really sick revolutionaries. In the same year, I. Smilga, also a future “victim of Stalinism,” went abroad. When he returned, he couldn’t account for the 2,000 rubles in gold, so he simply wrote: “I didn’t skimp on food.”
In this regard, the transcript of the court hearing in the case of the so-called “right-Trotskyist bloc”, which took place on March 2-12, 1938, is interesting, about which more details below. From the interrogations of the defendants (and no attention is paid to this) it follows that almost all of them, Trotsky’s supporters, including personal doctors, spent their vacations abroad, naturally, at state expense. This, by the way, is an interesting point that shows how and with what help Stalin’s opponents recruited supporters.
A I Rykov photo
One of the defendants M.A. Chernov worked in the People's Commissariat of Trade of Ukraine. In the summer of 1928, he was called on official business by the People's Commissar of Foreign Trade of the USSR, who was on vacation in the Crimea, Stalin's comrade-in-arms A.I. in those years. Mikoyan. Please note: the People's Commissar of the USSR is only vacationing in Crimea. Here Chernov was lucky enough to meet with the then head of the USSR - A.I. Rykov. A.I. Rykov, who was also a defendant in the mentioned trial, testified in cross-examination with Chernov about this meeting:
“I saw Chernov and tried to convince him of the correctness of my then counter-revolutionary activities, I was going to make him my supporter, but I found a ready supporter in Chernov.” The material result of the recruitment for Chernov personally was almost immediate: he was immediately transferred to work in Moscow and almost immediately sent “for treatment” to Germany at state expense and foreign currency. Note that this is immediately after 1927, when there was a famine in the USSR, and the only source of foreign currency was grain exports.
And yet, currency was immediately found for Chernov. But that’s not enough for him, and he reports: “I called Rykov’s secretary Nesterov that I’m going abroad and I need to talk to Rykov on foreign exchange matters, on the issue of increasing the currency...” The head of the USSR was impudent, but of his own supporter, naturally. accepts, gives currency and anti-Stalinist assignments.19. That is, being an anti-Stalinist was financially very profitable even when Trotsky was exiled abroad.
But in those years, under Stalin, they tried to fight the greedy opportunists. Purges regularly took place in the party, that is, at open party meetings in the presence of non-party members, the business and moral character of the communists was regularly discussed, and if it turned out that he was an opportunist who had crept into the party for a position or other benefits, then he was expelled from both the party and his position . However, it was more difficult with high-ranking employees, whose activities ordinary people are not able to evaluate, and scoundrels strived for these positions with terrible force.
This is obvious, and I think there is no need to prove it: where else did all these Gorbachevs, Shevardnadzes, Yeltsins, Yakovlevs, Kravchuks and other Shushkeviches come from in the Communist Party in the 90s? During the Great Patriotic War, almost every second communist died on the fronts and in partisan detachments, but the communists defended the cause of building Communism, and the Soviet Union, and saved the whole world from Nazism.
And in 1991, the 18 million herd of CPSU members not only allowed the USSR to be destroyed, but did not even defend the property that was created with their own membership fees. Why? There is no other answer: because by 1991, the CPSU no longer had not only 10, but even 1 percent of communists, and all more or less leadership positions in the party and the country were occupied either by weak-willed opportunists or inveterate scoundrels. This is what being in power means for a party.
But this situation was also the death of Communism, since it was a dead end for it. Under Communism, power belongs to all citizens equally, and Communism is fundamentally impossible if power belongs to the party, that is, to a part of these citizens, even if this part is communist. And this must be clearly understood: the communist Stalin could in no way recognize as satisfactory the situation in which power in the country belonged to the party, he could only tolerate this situation for the time being. And such a time came in the mid-30s, about 20 years after the communists came to power in Russia.
Economic feat
During these 20 years, the communists accomplished a managerial feat in Russia that has never happened in the history of the world. They rebuilt impoverished, agrarian Russia, in which 85% of the population barely fed themselves in the countryside, destroyed during the First World War and the Civil War that lasted until the end of 1920, and brought it to second place in the world in terms of economic well-being, after the United States.
