'The health of the individual is the concern of society as a whole' - Defeating Disease

"Comrades, it is impossible to imagine the dreadful situation in the typhus regions, where the population is broken, weakened, without material resources, where all life, all public life ceases. To this we say, “Comrades, we must concentrate everything on this problem. Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice!”"

- V.I. Lenin, "Seventh All-Russia Congress Of Soviets." 5-9 December 1919

These remarks by Lenin were made during a time when the Soviet Republic, in it's very early days, still had a decrepit and severely neglected medical system, and an impoverished population that was overwhelmingly in ill health. All of these things were inherited from the old Tsarist regime. In 1918, months after the Bolsheviks successfully seized power, the Spanish Flu had reached Russian shores, largely due to the fact that WWI Russian prisoners of war had brought the disease home with them after being released by Germany. They saw 150 Spanish Flu cases per week by late 1918. However, on top of that, the typhus epidemic -- which was primarily caused by lice -- was also sweeping the population, with hospitals seeing 1000 cases per week. And thus, the Soviets took swift action to organize the healthcare system so that it would become the socialized public health system where “the health of the individual [was] the concern of society as a whole." It eventually did overtake the imperialist nations' own healthcare systems.

Creating living and working conditions where illness is not a rampant occurrence that threatens human lives is indeed possible. This runs counter to the logic of the capitalist system which is built in such a way that prioritizing the [capitalist] economy and profits is a must and is the only choice -- even if it means that hundreds of thousands of lives are lost to needless, preventable deaths.  

Recommended Reading:

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1919, December 5-9). Seventh All-Russia Congress Of Soviets. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/05.htm 

Sir Arthur Newsholme, & Kingsbury, J.A. (1933). Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia [Marxist Internet Archive version]. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/newsholme/1933/red-medicine/index.htm

Rule, Carlos (2017, January 18). Health in the USSR [Transcript]. The Stalin Society. Retrieved from: https://stalinsocietygb.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/health-in-the-ussr/

*See also my long essay titled, "Neo-Malthusianism: Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, and the Crisis of Capitalism," found here: https://llco.org/neo-malthusianism-anti-humanism-misanthropy-and-the-crisis-of-capitalism/

Featured image: “People’s Health Care in the USSR," 1927. Originally published by the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. It can still be found in the Russian State Library today.