Exporting Socialist Health Care: Soviet Humanitarianism in the Global South

This article focuses on three Soviet Red Cross overseas hospitals to examine the contradictions and challenges of socialist humanitarianism in the context of the Cold War. The development of socialist humanitarianism in the Soviet context was part of the broader foreign policy reorientation away from isolationism and towards robust internationalist engagement after the death of Iosif Stalin. Healthcare assistance was an integral component of this engagement and one in which the Soviet Red Cross played an active role through training local medical personnel, delivering healthcare assistance, and the management and maintenance of overseas hospitals. This article focuses on Soviet Red Cross hospitals in the cities of Tehran, Addis Ababa, and Phnom Penh. From the Soviet side, these hospitals were flagship projects of socialist humanitarianism and ‘gifts’ of high-quality, modern healthcare that symbolized the USSR's friendship with formerly colonized peoples and commitment to aiding the development of various states in the Global South. However, in practice, the hospitals’ functioning was shaped by the volatile political context, issues of budgeting and capitalization, and the clash between ideas about anticolonial solidarity and Soviet civilisational superiority.