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A Soviet System of Professions: Psychiatry, Professional Jurisdiction, and the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, 1932–1951

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Russian and Soviet Health Care from an International Perspective

Abstract

This chapter examines the way in which the medical profession developed within the Soviet state. It argues that professionals in the USSR secured jurisdiction over specific domains of expert work both by controlling key positions of authority within the increasingly centralized state bureaucracy, and also by demonstrating their discipline’s mastery of a unique domain of knowledge. The chapter focuses on Soviet psychiatrists, who in the 1930s claimed to have unique knowledge of the physiological causes of mental illness. This claim was used against them in the 1940s, when Pavlovian physiologists successfully asserted that psychiatry was simply applied physiology. The USSR Institute of Psychiatry was removed from the prestigious USSR Academy of Medical Sciences in 1949.

Funding for this research was provided by the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program and the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council. My thanks to the staff of the State Archive of Russian Federation (GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) for the use of their materials and their kind advice.

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  1. Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Benjamin Zajicek

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  1. Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Susan Grant

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Zajicek, B. (2017). A Soviet System of Professions: Psychiatry, Professional Jurisdiction, and the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, 1932–1951. In: Grant, S. (eds) Russian and Soviet Health Care from an International Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44171-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44171-9_5

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