PROBLEMS OF POST-WAR DEVELOPMENT OF REGIONAL HEALTHCARE (based on materials from the administrative department of Gorky Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks))

The article reveals health problems in the City of Gorky and Gorky Region in the period of 1945 – early 1950s. Topicality of the study is connected, first of all, with the insufficient development of this topic in historiography. On the other hand, the secrecy of a number of archival funds and the gradual work on declassifying socially significant documents require their timely involvement in scientific circulation. The source base is the materials of the State Socio-Political Archive of Nizhny Novgorod Region and the Central Archive of Nizhny Novgorod Region. The City of Gorky and the regional centres of Gorky Region, especially Dzerzhinsk, were important industrial centres in the post-war period. Gorky was also one of the major transport hubs. The article notes that these factors directly influenced the development of regional medicine. With the outbreak of the Cold War, medical documentation became closed. The author focuses on the analysis of medical documents of the administrative department of Gorky Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Data on the state of health care in the region is just at the moment being introduced into scientific circulation. The research is based on the principles of historicism, scientific objectivity, and determinism. Methods of analysis, synthesis, comparative historicism, chronology were used. The novelty of the research lies in obtaining new knowledge about the conditions of the state, functioning and reform of the health care system of Gorky Region, as well as about the organisation of fighting social diseases, such as venereal ones and tuberculosis, in the post-war period. The author highlights the main problems of regional medicine of the period under study and the proposals of Party bodies to resolve socially significant issues.