The Sovietization of transport medicine of the Far East (1917–1924). Report II. The metropolis directives and regional practices

The article highlights contradictions between early Soviet ideology promoted by the Center and regional medical practices. While health care leaders (N. A. Semashko and Z. P. Solovyov in particular) affirmed radical rupture with traditional medical approaches and denounced “curative deviation” as bourgeois survival, M. V. Michurin, head of Health Department of the Ussuri Railway, adhered to established therapeutic guidelines. The historical analysis of perspective of particular physician reveals structural problems of the Soviet system that in macro-historical studies are not fixed. The obtained observations substantiate hypothesis of newest studies about uneven Sovietization of peripheral regions, by virtue of which unexpected adaptations and resistance to capital directives were possible.