“Face to the Countryside!”: A Thorny Path for Soviet Public Healthcare in an Interwar Belarusian Province

Abstract

This article demonstrates the complications of rural healthcare modernization in the context of the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic. While reforming public healthcare, the Bolsheviks managed to revive pre-revolutionary networks and provide the rural population with basic medical assistance. Various propaganda campaigns by the medical administration also aimed to improve sanitary condition and the state of healthcare in the countryside. However, due to political transformations in the interwar Soviet state, many of these plans ultimately proved unsuccessful at the local level.