Abstract
This article reconstructs the story of the Soviet Union’s medical internationalism amid the early years of destalinization, when it re-engaged more actively in the global health community. How did the USSR attempt to leverage medicine as a tool of soft power in both multilateral and bilateral relations? Based on records of the USSR Ministry of Health and the Medical Workers Union, as well as newspapers and other published sources, it analyzes what destalinization meant for physicians and public health administrators who sought greater exchange with and connection to their colleagues abroad. A widening web of interconnections in this transitional period paved the way to greater integration in a global medical community. Soviet medical and health professionals nurtured international relationships with a range of strategies, expectations, and aspirations. They used these opportunities to learn, and also to speak back to their superiors and to shape the trajectories of domestic research agendas.
In the first six months of 1959, ten million Soviet children were inoculated against polio. This achievement attests to the winds of change that had begun to sweep the USSR just a few years earlier. Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953 triggered what came to be known as destalinization—a rejection of the regime’s most violent, authoritarian excesses and an opening up to the outside world on a scale not seen since the 1920s. In the realm of science, medicine, and health, this meant a dramatic expansion of engagement with the West, especially with the United States, with consequences for a generation of children. In 1955, the USSR made a request to the government of the United States to send a medical mission on polio that would bring together leading researchers from both nations. Experts travelled between the USSR and the US in the first half of 1956 and, in June of that year, Albert Sabin went to the USSR and “cemented his relationships” with Soviet virologists Mikhail Chumakov, Marina Voroshilova, and Anatoly Smorodintsev.1 Sabin’s work on a live, oral vaccine progressed in close collaboration with his Soviet colleagues, including a large-scale trial on Soviet children to be led by Smorodintsev. Soviet and American researchers stood shoulder to shoulder to conquer a terrible childhood scourge.
Scholars have begun to probe the impact of destalinization on Soviet society, but its consequences in the realm of medicine and health, particularly in the international arena, have to date only just begun to benefit from systematic examination.2 This article analyzes the USSR’s re-engagement in the global health community and expanding bilateral ties, such as that seen in the collaboration on polio, as part of a broader turn toward destalinization. Ties had never been severed with the outside world at the Cold War’s onset, of course. The USSR actively sought to build relations in its Eastern European sphere of influence; its engagement extended beyond its immediate neighbors, as France, Italy and other Western European countries maintained close relations with the USSR throughout the late-Stalinist era. Even if direct US-Soviet contacts were limited, researchers’ paths were crossing in Western Europe, which served as a transit point for the bidirectional flow of ideas.3 But in the mid-1950s, when the opportunity finally arose, those linkages became a foundation for more robust connections. Signals from the upper echelons of the party-state apparatus telegraphed to leaders in the Ministry of Public Health, the Medical Workers Union, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and other relevant institutions that the time was ripe to expand international professional networks. This period saw the Soviet Union’s return to the fold in the World Health Organization (WHO), from which it had withdrawn in 1949. Already strong, exchange and cooperation increased with colleagues in state socialist Eastern Europe. And, as evident in the Sabin-Chumakov collaboration, the USSR’s clinical researchers and public health administrators, for the first time since the Cold War’s onset, engaged deeply with their US counterparts. Based on records of the International Departments of both the USSR Ministry of Health and the Medical Workers Union, as well as newspapers and other published sources, I analyze what destalinization meant for medical workers and public health administrators whose participation in conference and exchanges brought to life a new agenda of global engagement. While their numbers may have been small compared to later years, this widening web of interconnections forged the path for greater integration in a global medical community in the decades to come.
This article asks: what did destalinization mean for medical internationalism? Can one say that medicine in this era served as a tool of soft power? Political scientist Joseph Nye defines soft power as “getting others to want what you want—[it] co-opts people rather than coerces them.” Medicine and health constitute what he describes as an “asset” in public diplomacy, i.e., “an instrument that governments use to mobilize these resources to communicate with and attract the publics of other countries, rather than merely governments. Public diplomacy tries to attract by drawing attention to these potential resources through broadcasting, subsidizing cultural exports, arranging exchanges, and so forth.”4 The universal, humanitarian grounds on which the case can be made for collaboration in medicine are an easy sell to recipient governments and their publics. Contagious diseases, of course, know no national boundaries. Health challenges are often shared, even among nations in ideological conflict, and a clear case can be made for the advantageousness of cooperation and collaboration. Moreover, medicine and health are not as transparently hampered by the commercial and national security concerns that impinge on technological and scientific exchange, or the ideological considerations that plague cultural exchange. The Soviet Union’s experience of global engagement through medicine well illustrates the potency of medical internationalism as a tool of public diplomacy. Unifying what has been in the scholarly literature to date largely separate conversations about multilateral and bilateral relations, this article showcases the range and interlocking nature of strategies available to state actors to serve varied objectives.
A robust body of scholarship probes the history of the Cold War public diplomacy. In her examination of the representation of the American “Other” by the USSR at home and abroad, Rósa Magnúsdottir’s work makes a significant contribution to our understanding about how these efforts operated in the period from the Cold War’s onset through the 1958 signing of the so-called Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, which opened the door to increasingly routinized and extensive bilateral exchanges with the US.5 For the post-1958 period, scholars have analyzed case studies that run the gamut from the history of the US Information Agency, to the sister city program, to the US tour of the Bolshoi ballet company, illuminating a multipronged strategy for winning the public’s hearts and minds.6 In the realm of medicine and science, a handful of studies have examined US-Soviet exchanges. Most recently, work by Anna Geltzer stresses the ways that mutual misunderstanding limited the consequences of bilateral medical research projects in the 1970s.7
Moving away from a tight focus on superpower relations, the transnational turn has complicated our understanding of Cold War public diplomacy, including in the realms of science, culture, and education. Studies by K. R. Teliuk, Rachel Applebaum, and Benjamin Tromly on exchange within the Second World takes us beyond a strictly Soviet-American dyadic view to reveal the pivotal and at times autonomous roles by other states. With respect to medicine and health, Dorá Vargha, Young-see Hong, Ema Hrešanová and myself approach the history of Cold War medicine from a multinational archival perspective, revealing the complex circuits of technological transfer and interpersonal relations.8 Constantin Katsakioris, Julie Hessler, and others have illuminated the ways that Second-Third World relations, particularly in the realm of higher education, demonstrate the imbrication of decolonization in Cold War politics.9
This article is organized around three fields of multilateral and bilateral contact. The first section explores the USSR’s engagement with global health governance on the cusp of its return to active membership in the WHO. I focus on its leading role in a little-known organization called the International Medical Association for the Study of Living Conditions and Health (Association médicale internationale pour l’étude de conditions de vie et de santé, or AMIEV). AMIEV and its limited work is not in and of itself of any great significance, but it speaks to the Soviet strategy for maintaining multilateral relations in the realm of medicine and health despite disengagement from the WHO. Next, I examine the USSR’s medical relations in Eastern Europe. In the wake of the establishment of state socialist governments across the region after World War II, the Soviet Union had already worked actively to draw its Second World allies closer. This discussion explores the growing technological and educational bilateral exchanges that spoke to a deeper enmeshment across the region. The final section addresses the USSR’s growing ties to the US in the mid- and late-1950s. While still limited and tentative, these contacts set the stage for the more regularized educational and scientific exchanges that followed when the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement came into force.
1 Soviet Medical Internationalism and Global Health Governance, 1953–1957
The Soviet Union and its socialist allies had joined the WHO upon its 1948 establishment but withdrew cooperation and financial investment in 1949 over grievances about financial mismanagement and the domination of the United States and its Western allies. As historians Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Nikolai Krementsov argue, the Soviet Union “distrusted the intentions” of the WHO and feared that it “did not serve the USSR’s national interests.”10
Self-imposed exile from the WHO, however, did not mean that the USSR could not engage countries outside the socialist camp in the field of medicine and health. However marginal, AMIEV provided a haven for the USSR to meet and exchange information with progressive-minded physicians and public health professionals. It grew out of a preparatory conference held in Rome in 1951 and a world congress in Vienna in May 1953.11 The organization sponsored a short-lived quarterly journal Living Conditions and Health. AMIEV’s journal subcommittee set its intention to emphasize material and ideas generated by the organization, as well as “the publication of other works in this sphere, i.e. medical scientific articles and articles on living conditions and their effects on health; the repercussions of war; the stimulation of scientific work and of international collaboration in the spirit of the Congress; the preparation of further congresses and conferences; and the promotion of international exchange of scientific information.”12 Despite these ambitions, the journal appeared only irregularly following its launch in 1956, and then was superseded in 1960 by the annual Acta Medica et sociologia, published in Sofia, Bulgaria through 1972. AMIEV itself persisted at least on paper into the early twenty-first century, though there is no evidence of it engaging in any significant activity after the 1980s.13
The health consequences of nuclear weapons were among AMIEV’s primary concerns during its relatively robust early years. For the USSR, participation in a two-week study mission to Japan in May 1955, afforded an opportunity both to profess publicly the state’s concern for peace and to engage with colleagues from Japan, Western Europe, and North America. The timing was significant, as the US had temporarily pulled ahead of the USSR in the arms race, successfully testing its first hydrogen bomb in 1951; the USSR caught up only in November 1955. The eleven-member medical mission included representatives from Austria, Belgium, Berlin, Canada, France, India, Italy, Switzerland, USA, and the USSR who bore responsibility for studying material that Japanese researchers had gathered. Hosted by the Japanese Union of Doctors against Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb and the Atomic Energy Medical Society, the delegation travelled to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki to talk to physicians and survivors.14 Their report was concerned not only with the consequences of the past, but also with ongoing worries about “the contamination of the land, water, and atmosphere as a result the explosions on Bikini [Atoll]” by the Americans.15 The mission reported that the Nagasaki attack, which killed 70 of the city’s 170 doctors, overwhelmed public health institutions, and that rates of miscarriage and birth defects attested to the bomb’s lingering impact. The 1954 exposure of crew members from the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru to nuclear fallout from American hydrogen bomb testing raised new worries for a nation already devastated by nuclear weapons.16 Issued in June 1955, the mission’s press release stressed that the serious health consequences should give the world pause about the dangers, not only of nuclear weapons, but also of nuclear power. Breaching their national affiliations and Cold War fissures, mission members invoked their position as physicians, who were “obligated to defend the health of the people against all dangers that can be defeated.” It was in this professional capacity that they called for “mutual agreement among people and sound human reason, so that measures are taken for the prevention” of future weapons testing and that “atomic energy be used only for peaceful and constructive goals for all humanity.”17
The mission was part of an effort by the USSR to strengthen its bilateral relations with Japan through the issue of antinuclearism. For example, in 1955, the same year as the AMIEV mission, physician B. D. Petrov attended an antinuclear conference in Japan. On hearing his report on the conference upon his return, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) lamented that scholarly cooperation, the exchange of publications, and personal contacts with Japan were all “inadequate.”18 Concern with the health consequences of nuclear weapons thus provided a pretext for expanding Soviet-Japanese relations. The Presidium invited leading Japanese oncologists to the upcoming meeting of the AMS, and instructed the Academy’s library to engage Japanese libraries, academic institutions, and presses in the exchange of scientific literature. It approached a Soviet publishing house with a proposal to translate and publish the works of Japanese scholars and requested that the Medical Council of the USSR Ministry of Public Health “take measures so that Soviet doctors going to Japan … present papers and presentations on the state of Japanese medical science and public health for a wide circle of Soviet scientists to be informed.”19 Soviet officials no doubt saw antinuclearism as a wedge issue between the US and Japan but, whatever the political motives, Soviet medical researchers surely welcomed the opportunity to connect with foreign colleagues with enthusiasm.
Work with and beyond AMIEV on medicine and antinuclearism was part of a broader Soviet expansion of global engagement that took off in 1955, when the USSR formally expressed to the WHO its renewed interest in active membership. In seeking reconciliation, it offered a 2 million-ruble (US$500,000) contribution to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).20 In response, the WHO’s Executive Board expressed its “pleasure at the USSR’s readiness to participate actively again,” but also emphasized that this participation came with an ongoing financial commitment that the WHO expected to be honored.21 The Executive Board referred the matter to the Ninth World Health Assembly (WHA), held in Geneva in May 1956. The USSR’s last-minute decision not to send a representative to the WHA created some confusion, but the question was delegated to the Committee on Administration, Finance, and Legal Matters for resolution.22 The particular sticking point concerned contributions owed by the USSR to the WHO for its period of inactivity. The USSR offered to pay its dues for its last active year (1948) and to pay for the WHO publications it had received during its years of inactivity.23 After some to-and-fro over the details, the Soviet Union once again took its seat at the table of global health governance as a full participant in 1957’s WHA, along with its socialist allies, who had stood with the USSR during its protest period.
Themselves anxious to reengage with the WHO, the USSR’s comrades in Eastern Europe had had their interest piqued by Soviet stirrings about its intent to reactivate its membership. Their walk-out from WHO had not necessarily been explicitly ordered, but Moscow had expected solidarity. When rumors began to circulate that the USSR was changing course on its relationship to the WHO, members of the socialist camp sought to make clear their support for this new direction and their own desire to resume active membership. Hungary’s Minister of Public Health József Román wrote to his Soviet counterpart, M. A. Kovrigina, in January 1956 that Czechoslovakia’s Minister of Public Health had mentioned that the Soviet Union was seeking to renew its active membership in WHO. He sought from Kovrigina an update on how this process was proceeding. In August, Poland’s Deputy Minister of Public Health Boguslaw Kozusnik similarly requested clarification, after receiving conflicting reports from the USSR’s Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the advance of negotiations with the WHO following the May assembly. Kozusnik felt the need to justify at length Poland’s desire to resume active participation in the WHO, offering a range of reasons, including the value of having a voice in determining the international rules and regulations that govern public health, and Poland’s need to bring its health statistics in line with global norms. Kozusnik placed particular emphasis on the political value of participating in the WHO, noting that by contributing personnel to WHO’s technical assistance programs to the decolonizing world, Poland could provide a socialist alternative to what medical and health workers from capitalist countries offered.24
The way that its East European allies weighed in on the USSR’s move to reengage with the WHO points to the artificiality of scholarly investigation into bilateral and multilateral relations. Bilateral relations clearly encompassed concern with global health governance. Soviet-Polish medical internationalism, for example, did not revolve narrowly and exclusively around their bilateral exchange, but also concerned how both individually and in concert these states engaged with the WHO. Similarly, AMIEV offered the USSR a forum for developing bilateral relations with Japan. Thus, an examination of medical internationalism demands attention the intricate plaiting of multilateral and bilateral relations.
2 Medical Internationalism in the Second World
For the USSR, its bilateral relations with its socialist allies in Eastern Europe were of profound importance in their own right. Consultation and coordination in the mid-1950s between the Soviet Union and at the socialist bloc reflect ties built in the decade after World War II, the USSR’s desire for deeper integration across the region, and an aspiration to showcase these relations to the decolonizing world. As a 1956 report from the USSR Ministry of Public Health’s Department of External Ties notes, such linkages have “enormous significance for the countries of people’s democracies. It helps them to more quickly attain success in the noble work of building socialism.”25 The value of these efforts extended beyond relations within the Second World, to “inspire the workers of the capitalist, colonial, and semi-colonial countries in their struggle to improve the conditions of work and everyday life, for union rights, and for democratic freedoms.”26 For the Soviet Union, these contacts had the immediate, practical benefit of entrenching the socialist structures it promoted in Eastern European public health and medical institutions, while simultaneously binding medical research networks and the pharmaceutical and medical supplies industries to the USSR. In time, this scientific and economic integration led to a division of responsibilities, as Hungary and Poland “became centres of pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, GDR and Czechoslovakia focused on medical devices, and the USSR produced the bulk of vaccines and sera.”27 The success of these endeavors in turn fed the more long-term ambition of offering an alternative developmental model to decolonizing countries of Asia and Africa.
The Soviet archives chronicle a steady stream of people and correspondence during the mid-1950s. Workers in clinical facilities and medical enterprises in Eastern Europe sought to connect and correspond with their Soviet counterparts. For example, the director of Okula, a spectacle lens factory in Nýrsko, Czechoslovakia, wrote in 1955 to the Leningrad Optical-Medical Factory with questions about its experience with “developing socialist competition and the life of the workers.”28 Secretary of the Medical Workers Union Central Committee, E. Rodionova, commanded the Leningrad factory to establish a “regular correspondence. Considering the clear importance of ties with foreign comrades, the answer to this letter in duplicate and the original sent to you should be forwarded to the union [Central Committee]” promptly.29 Czechoslovakian labor activists in medicine and health greeted with gratitude this support. As Rodionova’s Czechoslovakian counterpart, Rudolf Poledník, expressed it in a letter to her, “we won’t forget the tremendous help of USSR with introducing socialism in our country and especially in the establishment of socialist public health.”30 Beyond trading such words of encouragement and facilitating connections, Rodionova oversaw the exchange of publications of broad mutual interest—on medical topics, and also on labor organizing. The USSR Medical Workers Union sent Meditsinskii rabotnik [Medical Worker], Meditsinskaia sestra [Nurse], Fel’dsher i akusherka [Feldsher and Midwife], Trud [Labor], and Sovetskaia zhenshchina [Soviet Woman] to its Czechoslovak comrades, and received Zdravotnitske novinki [Medical News] and Zdravotnická pracovnice [Medical Working Woman] return. In all of this activity, the Medical Workers Union did not act autonomously, of course. Rodionova and others answered to higher-ups, including those in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who urged the cultivation of these ties with comrades in Eastern Europe.31
Contacts were reinforced when high-level delegations travelled to the USSR to meet with top officials, tour facilities, and build connections that could lead to research collaborations. They ventured beyond Moscow and Leningrad, frequently travelling to Ukraine—long a center for medical education and research, especially in the city of Kharkov (today, Kharkiv)—and Georgia. Some rank-and-file medical professionals went to the USSR on tourist visas, but availed themselves of the opportunity to meet with physicians, public health officials, and leaders in the medical workers union. Soviet medical professionals greeted these official and quasi-official delegations with what appears to be genuine enthusiasm. In addition to taking care to put their best foot forward, carefully choosing the institutions and individuals that visitors from Eastern Europe encountered, they enhanced these visits with cultural excursions and mementos to take home with them. In anticipation of a 1955 delegation from Czechoslovakia, the Medical Workers Union allocated nearly 3,000 rubles for gifts for the visitors. They purchased leather portfolios, lacquer items, and coffee table books on the Bolshoi Theatre, Ilya Repin, the Kremlin, and the 1905 Revolution. They also bought stamps, postcards, and over 400 badges for more informal giving and exchanging.32
However authentic the warmth behind such exchanges may have been, one suspects that lavish praise for the USSR’s support for socialist medicine in Eastern Europe was at least to some degree prompted by expectations for genuflections. Whether Moscow implicitly or explicitly demanded kowtowing is not clear, but it is obvious that Soviet authorities reveled in it. There were, of course, relatively measured expressions of gratitude for the Soviet people as leaving “the greatest impression” on visitors for their “warmth and love.”33 But, as a 1956 report on medical cooperation with Eastern Europe suggests, Soviet officials dwelt a great deal on their allies’ appreciation of their benevolence. During a December 1955 visit to the USSR, for example, Czechoslovakia’s Deputy Minister of Public Health Zdenek Štik “spoke about the preparedness of the Soviet people to share their experience and render all sorts of assistance, noted the warm, friendly relationship toward the [Czechoslovakian] delegation shown by all the Soviet comrades.”34 In thanking her Soviet counterpart for the visit, President of the Czechoslovak Central Committee of the Medical Workers Union, Comrade Bzhozovskaia [sic?] wrote that “your achievements and your experience in union work helps us now to resolve much more easily the serious questions that stand before us.”35 The report’s author stresses that, upon their return home, delegation members wrote newspaper articles lauding Soviet generosity. One doctor wrote in Služba zdraví (Health Service), organ of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Public Health and the Medical Workers Union, that “in Moscow we made real friends, ready at any moment to offer aid and support.”36 One cannot know how sincere these remarks are, but nor can they be dismissed out of hand. While the words often read as formulaic, one suspects that on an interpersonal level genuine bonds were forged.
Though framed primarily as benevolence, Soviet medical internationalism in Eastern Europe quite frequently looked like what Austin Jersild calls “imperial scavenging.”37 In 1954, for example, the USSR sent a delegation to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in order to see a demonstration of the prototypes for an artificial heart and an iron lung.38 A. P. Vorobeva travelled to Berlin, Leipzig, and Greiz for two months to gain familiarity with these apparatuses and report back to authorities in Moscow. She was instructed to bring back blueprints of the artificial heart and iron lung, with detailed instructions for their construction. Vorobeva also posed a number of questions to her East German colleagues: can the iron lung be used for a person of any age? If it is a universal apparatus, then how is a hermetic seal achieved in a machine that can theoretically accommodate a three-year-old child and a full-grown adult? Does the pressure fluctuate if the breathing rhythm increases?39 In total, Vorobeva came to the GDR with more than 20 specific questions about each apparatus, suggesting a keen interest in efficient, effective technological transfer eastward. Cooperation with the socialist bloc was not merely about abstract notions of fraternity, but about advancing knowledge through exchange. The USSR promoted itself as a generous sponsor, but it was also a clear beneficiary.
3 Soviet-US Medical Engagement
The USSR in the mid-1950s began to set its sights for such transfer and engagement beyond the boundaries of its sphere of influence. Alongside its ongoing relations with the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and its reengagement with the WHO, the Soviet Union sought deeper bilateral relations with the countries of the capitalist West. A 1954 interview in Izvestiia with USSR AMS Vice President A. I. Nesterov highlights the intensity of this interest. He boasted about how “ties between the USSR AMS, its institutes, and scientists with foreign scholarly entities, scientists and doctors have quickly grown and strengthened in recent years.”40 Among the countries with which the USSR has deepening contacts, he lists its Eastern European allies, as well as the People’s Republic of China and decolonizing states such as India and Burma. However, he offers far more detail about burgeoning ties with Great Britain, France, Italy, Norway, and the United States. These connections were, of course, relatively novel, but the outsized attention they received from Nesterov in this public platform reflects the state’s enthusiasm for nurturing relationships that had been significantly hindered by Stalin’s more isolationist approach.
Given its position in the world of medical research and in the struggle of the Cold War, no potential partner for bilateral exchange was more important to the USSR than the United States. Like the contemporaneous efforts at collaboration by Sabin, the 1955 visit to the USSR by Major Paul W. Schafer helped to pave the way for developing ties. The New York Times reported that this “chief of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington … toured Soviet medical facilities for three and a half weeks … [it was] the most extensive [trip] by an American doctor here since 1945.”41 The mid-1950s saw perhaps a few dozen Americans and Soviets meeting with health officials and researchers through participation in exchanges, missions, and international medical congresses. The numbers remained small until the conclusion of the 1958 Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, but this early activity set the stage for later expansion.42
The years 1956 and 1957 saw a marked uptick in the scale of Soviet-American medical contact.43 Of this bidirectional traffic, Howard A. Rusk of NYU-Bellevue Medical Center in New York City, wrote that all the Americans involved “share my own personal great belief in the values of international exchange in health and medical affairs.”44 In February 1956, a group of five physicians travelled to the USSR following a visit by a group of Soviets earlier that year. The mission focused primarily on microbiology, epidemiology, infectious disease, and cancer research.45 In July, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare proposed to Soviet authorities a visit by James A. Shannon, recently appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Charles V. Kidd, head of the NIH Office of Research Planning. The purpose of the trip was “to discuss … questions of organization, planning, and development of medical research in the Soviet Union.” In a spirit of “reciprocity the United States would be prepared to accept two official representatives from Soviet organs of public health to visit” research institutions and scholars.46 Possible destinations that the Americans proposed were of interest to them included the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Ministry of Public Health, the Institute for the Study of Polio, and the Leningrad Medicine Institute of Sanitation and Hygiene. In turn, they invited their counterparts to the US National Academy of Science, the American Cancer Society, the National Cardiology Association, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as arranging meetings with a medical school dean and a tour of a New York medical research lab.47
In addition to the high-level exchanges, Soviet and American medical researchers increasingly encountered one another at international conferences, including those held in the US and to which Soviet delegates began to travel. Four Soviet hematologists attended the Sixth International Congress of the International Society of Hematology and the Sixth Congress of the International Society of Blood Transfusion, held consecutively in the late summer of 1956 in Boston. The participation of a Soviet delegation met with great enthusiasm. Upon arrival at the airport, they were greeted personally by the President of the International Society of Hematology, William Dameshek, along with members of the organizing committee and the press. To be singled out in this way was no small honor given that the congress welcomed over 700 participants from 33 countries. Delegation members N. A. Fedorova, A. N. Filatova, G. A. Alekseeva, and Iu. M. Ordenko availed themselves of the opportunity to tour medical and health institutions not only in Boston, but also in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington; they visited, for example, Ortho Pharmaceutical in Philadelphia and Lederle Laboratories in New York City.48 This kind of itinerary, which combined conference participation with tours of educational, research, and manufacturing facilities was repeated again and again, as is evident from reports by venereologists, otolaryngologists, cardiologists, oncologists, and others.49 Enthusiasm for these new opportunities for contact is also evident in the American Medical Women’s Association’s (AMWA) invitation to a Soviet delegation in 1957. The preponderance of women among Soviet medical professionals, a fact repeatedly commented on by American visitors, perhaps made their Soviet colleagues of particular interest to the AMWA.50 The delegation ventured beyond the East Coast, making stops in Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and Madison, Wisconsin, accompanied along the way by two representatives from the US State Department, one of whom served as translator. Their mission focused heavily on discussions about medical education, but they were also attentive to questions of gender and racial disparities in public health.51
The proliferating linkages between Soviet and American medical and health professionals forged mutual respect, fed curiosity, and served ambitions. The novelty of Soviet medical missions prompted hosts to open their homes and journalists to seek out interviews.52 In the context of Cold War competition, American medical professionals who travelled to the USSR returned to a great number of questions about what they had seen. Many praised their Soviet colleagues for the advances they had made.53 Western visitors to the USSR recognized Soviet researchers as in the vanguard in a number of fields, including cancer, hemorrhagic fevers, heart disease, and artificial blood substitutes, as well as the organization and provision of emergency services.54 For their part, Soviet medical professionals used reports to their superiors about what they had seen abroad not only to inform them, but also to press for greater funding. Hematologists expressed concern that the USSR was falling behind the US in advances in chemotherapeutic treatments for leukemia, though other visitors saw in the US a great deal of work in the field of chemotherapy with little to show for it in terms of clinical results.55 This competition with and comparison to the US offered Soviet hematologists an opening to push for more investment in specialized laboratories and experimental departments. Estimating that blood transfusions were used 5–6 times more often in the US than in the USSR, they similarly advocated for expansion at home. The hematology delegation saw that Americans had introduced plastic bags for blood collection and recommended the establishment in the USSR of a factory to produce analogous ones. Their report stressed that growth in the blood bank network and in the use of transfusions would prove useful in wartime, driving home its significance and urgency by leaning on a military justification.56
For the Soviet state, the newfound openness offered access to Western advances and an opportunity to tout its own successes, but these benefits came with liabilities. Allowing American and other Western medical professionals to tour Soviet facilities risked making a negative impression about the quality of care and the level of advancement in research. When Schafer returned from his 1955 Moscow tour, The New York Times ticked off a list of all the areas in which he asserted that the USSR lagged behind: medical education; organization and distribution of physicians; sanitary conditions in surgical theatres. When the article offers praise, it is almost always countered by some reservation or criticism. “Highly developed and reasonably effective” care for injured workers contrasts with “rehabilitation of the handicapped [that] does not approach American standards.” “Clean and efficient” maternity homes offer what Schafer describes as “‘assembly line methods [that] would probably never be accepted’” in the US.57 Similarly, when New York pediatrician Harry Bakwin returned from a 1957 visit to the USSR, he reported at a conference on maternal care that treatments there were “outmoded” and pediatricians “inadequately trained.”58 Dr. Helen Taussig lauded elite researchers, but noted that “this is a very thin layer.”59 Taken together, praise of the USSR comes across as circumscribed and only grudgingly offered.
On at least some occasions, American newspapers misquoted the US physicians they interviewed or overemphasized the negatives, leading to awkward encounters in the face of possible Soviet consternation. In February 1956, Dameshek wrote to Soviet Ambassador Georgy Zarubin a letter of thanks for the hospitality he had received on his recent visit to the USSR, but felt compelled to offers a rather awkward apology.
Since my return I have spoken and written with considerable enthusiasm about our experience. I must say that some of my remarks since my return have been garbled in several newspaper reports including particularly such ridiculous things as cutting our trip short because of an alleged difficulty with food. Although one can say that the food in the Soviet Union does not compare too favorably with our America food, nevertheless we were able to get along at the Intourist hotels without too much difficulty.60
From the Soviet perspective, surely these criticisms stung, especially given the great care taken to host foreign visitors. We see this in a slightly later period, when, in 1964, a representative from the Medical Workers Union travelled to and reports on the suitability of the city of Vladimir as a destination for foreign visitors. Iu. L. Greiding recommends the oncology outpatient clinic (dispanser) and the psychiatric hospital as appropriate destinations. Though the psychiatric hospital was housed in an older building, it was in good condition and the dedicated, animated staff compensated for the facility’s physical decline. By contrast, all other medical facilities in Vladimir were deemed to be in such a poor state, primarily due to overcrowding, that it was undesirable to bring foreign guests there.61
4 Conclusion
Soviet-American medical engagement entered a new era with the October 1957 signing of the “Agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields,” commonly known as the Lacey-Zarubin Agreement. On January 8, 1958, just three weeks before that agreement came into force, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before the US Congress and gave his annual State of the Union address. He called for deeper scientific cooperation between the US and its allies, noting that “we cannot afford to cut ourselves off from the brilliant talents and minds of scientists in friendly countries. The task ahead is hard enough without handcuffs of our own making.” For less friendly countries, such cooperation was a more complicated question, raising concerns about national security. But Eisenhower believed that exchange and cooperation in science and medicine was a path forward to peace. To this end, he spoke near the close of his address not to Congress, but “from the people of the United States to all other peoples, especially those of the Soviet Union.” Soviet and American citizens needed “to know each other better” through greater “communication and exchange of people.” It would be a “work of peace” for them to cooperate
on projects of human welfare. For example, we now have it within our power to eradicate from the face of the earth that age-old scourge of mankind: malaria. We are embarking with other nations in an all-out five-year campaign to blot out this curse forever. We invite the Soviets to join with us in this great work of humanity. Indeed, we would be willing to pool our efforts with the Soviets in other campaigns against the diseases that are the common enemy of all mortals—such as cancer and heart disease. If people can get together on such projects, is it not possible that we could then go on to a full-scale cooperative program of Science for Peace?62
Of course, malaria was not eradicated in five years, but there would be successful cooperation in the fights against polio and smallpox. Through both their bilateral relationship and the WHO, the US and USSR worked together, precisely because the dangers of the Cold War demanded it.63 In 1972, amid détente, in the realm of medicine and health the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement was superseded by a new agreement that created the US-USSR Joint Committee for Health Cooperation, which oversaw research in a number of areas, including cancer and heart disease, just as Eisenhower had hoped.64
Soviet authorities had their reservations, but they also recognized the potential of these points of contact, not just with the US or Western Europe, but with their allies in Eastern Europe, as well as with countries emerging from the yoke of colonialism, such as Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea. As a 1956 report to the Ministry of Public Health observes, “we must use every tiny opportunity with foreign delegates. Upon arrival of foreign delegates to medical facilities, crèches, [and] medical manufacturing enterprises, members of local and factory committees and union activists should not shy away from conversing with delegates, but should take active part in showing off the institution, familiarizing the delegation with the tasks and work of the [medical workers’] union.”65 This understanding of the propaganda value of medicine, alongside its practical application, guided the USSR’s engagement around the globe down to its 1991 collapse.
What the case study of Soviet medical internationalism amid destalinization demonstrates is the varied ends to which this form of soft power was deployed. International venues such as AMIEV and the WHO offered not only opportunities to perform on the world stage, but to foster and mobilize bilateral relationships. In concert with allies, such as the USSR had in the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, medical internationalism facilitated technological transfer, scientific and economic enmeshment, and the cultivation of interpersonal relationships. For more fraught bilateral connections, as exemplified by Soviet-American contacts, opportunities to gain access to information and to display advances came with risks of exposing what were or could be represented as national weaknesses. Depending on their targets, Soviet medical and health professionals nurtured international relationships with different strategies, expectations, and aspirations. They used these opportunities not only to learn, but to speak back to the superiors who had authorized these contacts. Thus, medical internationalism was in dialogue with the trajectories of domestic research agendas and funding. Far from an uncomplicated or benign story of science triumphing over politics, Soviet medical internationalism in this transitional era attests to the complexities, promise and vulnerabilities that accompany the use of soft power.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges that the research for and writing of this article was funded, respectively, by the Monash University Outside Study Program and a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at Aarhus University. I thank Rósa Magnúsdottir and her colleagues at AU for the supportive and stimulating environment in which I presented an early draft. Thanks also go to this article’s anonymous reviewers, who engaged so deeply and constructively with this article, and to Ema Hrešanová for her help navigating Czech names and titles transliterated into Russian.
Saul Benison, “International Medical Cooperation: Dr. Albert Sabin, Live Poliovirus Vaccine and the Soviets,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56, no. 4 (1982): 469. See also Edward A. Raymond, “US-USSR Cooperation in Medicine and Health,” The Russian Review 32, no. 3 (1973): 232–33. On the Soviet delegation’s trip to the US, Chumakov’s initial pursuit of a large-scale trial of the Salk vaccine, and simultaneous interest in Sabin’s work, see Vypiska iz protokola no. 22, zasedaniia Prezidiuma uchenogo soveta Ministerstva zdravookhraneniia SSSR, April 20, 1956, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter, GARF), fond (hereafter f.) R-8009, opis (hereafter, op.) 34, delo (hereafter, d.) 226, listy (hereafter, ll.) 106–08. For the richest treatment on the battle against polio amid the Cold War, see also Dóra Vargha, Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
On the social history of destalinization see, for example, Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Claire E. McCallum, “‘A Beautiful Dream, Facing Both the Future and the Past’: Destalinization, Visual Culture and the Fortieth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” Revolutionary Russia 33, no. 1 (2020): 106–40; Margaret Peacock, “The Perils of Building Cold War Consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students,” Cold War History 12, no. 3 (2012): 515–35.
See, for example, Paula A. Michaels, Lamaze: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Joseph S. Nye, “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): 95. On the origins and history of the term “public diplomacy”, see Nicholas Cull, “‘Public Diplomacy’ Before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase,” USC Center on Public Diplomacy, April 18, 2006, https://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/public-diplomacy-gullion-evolution-phrase.
Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One the United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). The agreement takes its informal name from the chief negotiators: American William S.B. Lacey, Special Assistant on East-West Exchange, and Soviet Ambassador Georgy Zarubin. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 15.
E.g., Robert Francis Byrnes, Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958–1975 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Brian C. Etheridge, “The Sister-City Network in the 1970s: American Municipal Internationalism and Public Diplomacy in a Decade of Change,” in Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad, ed. Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith, and David J. Snyder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Christopher D. Hollings, Scientific Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Cham, Germany: Springer International Publishing, 2016); Cadra Peterson McDaniel, American- Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere (London: Lexington Books, 2015); Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). On the interwar era, see, Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). In the realm of medicine during this period, see On Soviet medical internationalism in the 1920s, see Susan Gross Solomon, “The Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition to Buriat Mongolia, 1928: Scientific Research on National Minorities,” Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (1993): 204–34; Susan Gross Solomon, “Building Bridges: Alan Gregg and Soviet Russia, 1925–1928,” Minerva 41, no. 2 (2003): 167–76; Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Susan Gross Solomon, “Thinking Internationally, Acting Locally: Soviet Public Health as Cultural Diplomacy in the 1920s,” in Russian and Soviet Health Care from an International Perspective: Comparing Professions, Practice and Gender, 1880–1960, ed. Susan Grant (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 193–216.
Anna Geltzer, “In a Distorted Mirror: The Cold War and U.S.-Soviet Biomedical Cooperation and (Mis)Understanding, 1956–1977,” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 3 (2012): 39–63; Anna Geltzer, “Surrogate Epistemology: The Transition from Soviet to Russian Biomedicine” (PhD diss., Ithaca, NY, Cornell University, 2012).
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Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Nikolai Krementsov, “‘Socialising’ Primary Care? The Soviet Union, WHO and the 1978 Alma-Ata Conference,” BMJ Global Health 3, no. Suppl 3 (2018): 4.
“Editorial,” Living Conditions and Health 1, no. 1 (1956): 4.
Minutes of the Journal Subcommittee of the Secretariat of the World Congress of Doctors for the Study of Present-Day Living conditions, n.d., GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 152, l. 51.
The paper trail on AMIEV is thin. In 1982, AMIEV jointly organized with the WHO a conference on nutrition in Varna, Bulgaria. “Infant and Child Feeding Progress Report by the Director-General. Thirty-Fifth World Health Assembly Provisional Agenda Item 24” (World Health Organization, March 20, 1982), 28. To date it apparently maintains “special consultative status” to the UN Food and Health Organization (FAO) but appears to have been ostensibly dormant since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. “Organizations in Specialized Consultative Status with FAO, Admission to the Session of Representatives and Observers of International Organizations, Thirty-Eighth Session, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” June 15, 2013, http://www.fao.org/3/mg411e/mg411e.pdf. On AMIEV’s history, see T. Tashev, “Mezhdurarodnaia meditsinskaia associatsiia po izucheniiu uslovii zhizni i zdorov’ia,” in Bol’shaia meditsinskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), https://tinyurl.com/y2qvx3m5.
Letter from Dr. Hideo Kumabe and Dr. H. Shiga to A. V. Kozlova, April 23, 1955, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 152, l. 165.
Press-kommiunike Mezhdunarodnogo kongressa vrachei po izuchenii uslovii zhizni naseleniia, Vienna, June 21, 1955, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 152, l. 53.
Press-kommiunike Mezhdunarodnogo kongressa vrachei po izuchenii uslovii zhizni naseleniia, l. 54.
Press-kommiunike Mezhdunarodnogo kongressa vrachei po izuchenii uslovii zhizni naseleniia, l. 55.
Otchet o komandirovke v Iaponiiu na mezhduranodnuiu konferentsiiu po bor’be protiv atomnogo oruzhiia, October 4, 1955, GARF, f. R-8009 op. 34, d. 152, l. 84. On Petrov’s career, see “K 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia prof. B. D. Petrova,” Gigiena i sanitariia 39, no. 8 (1974): 112–13.
Otchet o komandirovke v iaponiiu na mezhduranodnuiu konferentsiiu po bor’be protiv atomnogo oruzhiia, l. 85.
“Russians Bearing Gifts,” New York Times, July 10, 1955, E8. The official exchange rate was four Soviet rubles to one US dollar throughout the 1950s. Marcin R. Wyczalkowski, “The Soviet Price System and the Ruble Exchange Rate.” IMF Staff Papers 1, no. 2 (1950): 219.
Resolution EB17.R27, Notification by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Concerning Participation in the World Health Organization, 17th Session of Executive Board, World Health Organization, January 26, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 256, l. 100.
“Ninth World Health Assembly, Geneva, 8–25 May 1956: Resolutions and Decisions, Plenary Meetings, Committees, Annexes,” Official Records of the World Health Organization (Geneva: World Health Organization, December 1956), 144, 153.
Letter from M. Kovrigina to Dr. József Román, February 11, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 257, ll. 10–11.
Letter from Dr. József Román to M. D. Kovrigina, January 20, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 257, l. 1; Letter from B. Kozusnik to M. D. Kovrigina, August 25, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 257, ll. 5–8. On intra-Second World relations that speak to similarly complex navigations, see Elidor Mehilli, From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Johanna Conterio, “‘Our Black Sea Coast’: The Sovietization of the Black Sea Littoral under Khrushchev and the Problem of Overdevelopment,” Kritika 19, no. 2 (2018): 327–61.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], [1956], GARF, f. R5464, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 2.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe].
Birn and Krementsov, “‘Socialising’ Primary Care?,” 4. On the USSR’s policy of economic extraction and enmeshment in this era, see Austin Jersild, “The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: ‘Catch Up and Surpass’ in the Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950–1960,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011): 109–32.
Letter from the Okula Factory Committee to Leningrad Optical-Medical Factory, October 10, 1955, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 7. For a similar request from a factory in Jičín, Czechoslovakia, see letter from Rudolf Polednik to the USSR Medical Workers Union Central Committee, [1955], GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 2224, ll. 50–51.
Letter from E. Rodionova to V. K. Permikov, November 22, 1955, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 9. Emphasis in original.
Letter from Rudolf Polednik to the USSR Medical Workers Union Central Committee, [1955], l. 51. Applebaum argues for the sincerity of such statements, which draw on a deep well of gratitude toward the USSR for its role in liberating Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation. Applebaum, Empire of Friends.
Letter from Rudolf Poledník to Comrade Rodionova, November 9, 1955, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 31; Letter from M. Zimianin to E. I. Rodionova, December 3, 1955, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 21.
Letter from Rudolf Poledník to Comrade Rodionova, November 9, 1955; [Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], [1956], GARF, f. R5464, op. 26, d. 2224, ll. 2–3; Akt, chleny Prezidiuma TsK profsoiuza meditsinskikh rabotnikov, December 19, 1955, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 39.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], [1956], GARF, f. R5464, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 3.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], l. 2.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], l. 2.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], l. 2.
Jersild, “The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger.”
The first recorded transplant of artificial heart was in 1938, when as a fourth-year honours student V. P. Demikhov operated on a dog, who survived for 16 minutes. Demikhov spent the rest of his career at the frontier of transplant surgery. See R. M. Langer, “Vladimir P. Demikhov, a Pioneer of Organ Transplantation,” Transplantation Proceedings 43, no. 4 (2011): 1221–22; Simon Matskeplishvili, “Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov (1916–1998),” European Heart Journal 38, no. 46 (2017): 3406–10. Demikhov is most infamous for allegedly transplanting the head of one dog onto another. Sinead O’Carroll, “The History of the Two-Headed Dog Experiment,” The Journal, February 16, 2013, http://www.thejournal.ie/two-headed-dogs-794157-Feb2013/.
Memo from N. Bivikov to I. G. Kochergin, November 2, 1954, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 125, l. 49; Zadanie po oznakomlenie s proizvodstvom i rabotoi apparatov ‘isskustvennoe serdtse’ i ‘zheleznye legkie’, April 11, 1955, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 125, ll. 50, 52, 53.
“Krepnut mezhdunarodnye sviazi uchenykh-medikov,” Izvestiia, October 23, 1954, 3. On Nesterov’s career in rheumatology, see “Tvorcheskii put’ A. I. Nesterova,” Voprosy revmatizma 2 (June 1979): 74–77; V. N. Anokhin, “A. I. Nesterov—vydaiushchiisia deiatel’ otechestvennoi meditsiny i zdravookhraneniia,” Terapevticheskii arkhiv 67, no. 11 (1995): 62–65.
“Soviet Held Open to Doctors of U.S.: Army Surgeon Who Toured Country Says Specialists Would Be Welcome,” New York Times, August 28, 1955, 31.
John R. Paul, “Medical Mission to the Soviet Union.” The Scientific Monthly 85, no. 3 (1957), 150. For a bibliography of reports by doctors and health officials to the USSR in these years, see Elizabeth Koenig, Medical Research in the Soviet Union: Recent Reports from Western Sources, a Selected and Annotated List of References (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health Division of Research Services, 1957. For details on an early tour of Soviet doctors to Great Britain, see “Visit of the Russian Doctors,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 4949 (1955): 1202–4.
I have yet to locate cumulative statistics, but in 1956, 2,000 Americans visited the USSR through Intourist. Perhaps a few dozen were medical and health professionals. Norman E. Saul, “The Program That Shattered the Iron Curtain: The Lacy-Zarubin (Eisenhower- Khrushchev) Agreement of January 1958,” in New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations, ed. William Benton Whisenhunt and Norman E. Saul (London: Routledge, 2015), 230.
Letter from Howard A. Rusk to Maria Kovrigina, November 20, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 374, l. 48.
“Doctors off to Russia: 5 U.S. Research Physicians Paying Reciprocal Visit,” New York Times, February 26, 1956, 3; John R. Paul, “Medical Mission to the Soviet Union.” The Scientific Monthly 85, no. 3 (1957), 150.
Pamiatnaia zapiska vruchena posol’stvu SSSR v SShA, July 23, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 373, l. 173[b]. This document is mislabelled in the folder as l. 173, which the preceding page is also marked as; the subsequent page appears as l. 174. For the sake of clarity, I have taken the liberty here of identifying it as l. 173[b]. On earlier stages of these negotiations, see Memo from Merill to A. M. Ledovskii, June 12, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009 op. 34, d. 373, ll. 170–71; Predlagaemyi marshrut poezdki po Soedinennym Shtatam srokom priblizitel’no na chetyre nedeli,” June 12, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009 op. 34, d. 373, ll. 172–73. On Shannon’s tenure as director of the NIH (1955–1968), see “Shannon Recalls Years as NIH Director: Cites ‘Greatest Personal Satisfactions,’” NIH Record, August 20, 1968, 1, 3; “Medical-Health Advances in Shannon Era Bear Imprint of NIH Research, Support,” NIH Record, August 20, 1968, 4–5; Mike O’Neill, “Former Medical Writer Assesses Impact of Shannon Era on Biomedical Research,” NIH Record, August 20, 1968, 3, 5.
Predlagaemyi marshrut poezdki v SSSR, SShA, n.d., GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 373, ll. 174–75.
Otchet sovetskoi delegatsii o VI mezhdunarodnom gematologicheskom kongresse i o VI kongresse mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva po perelivaniiu krovi v gorode Boston, Massachuzet’, SShA, August 24–5 September 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 219, ll. 1, 35, 36. Dameshek pushed for inclusion of the Soviet delegates as part of his vision of creating “a world community of hematologists.” “Obituary: William Dameshek,” The Lancet 294, no. 7626 (October 25, 1969): 914.
E.g., Otchet delegatsii Professorov P. V. Kozhevnikova, B. M. Pashkova (rukovoditel’ delegatsii), I. S. Smelova na mezhdunarodnuiu konferentsiiu po venericheskim bolezniam v Vashintone, June 28, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 226, ll. 2–29; Otchet o komandirovke Prof. I. I. Sherbatova i Prof. K. L. Zhilova na VI mezhdunarodnyi kongress otolaringologov v SShA v Vashingtone, May 18, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 323, ll. 1–28; Otchet o poezdke v SShA starshego nauchnogo sotrudnika Instituta terapii AMN SSSR Dorofeevoi Z. Z. i assistenta arfedry pervoi terapii TsIU Zhdanavoi, N. S., n.d., GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 374, ll. 1–20; Otchet sovetskoi delegatsii—P. I. Androsova, B. A. Dolgo-Saburova, D. A. Zhdanova, V. V. Kovanova (glava Ddelegatsii) ob uchastii v III mezhdunarkodnom kongresse po angiologii v g. Atlantik-Siti (SShA) i zankomstve s nekotorymi nauchnymi i lechebnymi uchrezhdeniiami gg. Vashingtona i N’iu-Iorka, October 19, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 324, ll. 1–19.
E.g., “Soviet Held Open to Doctors of U.S.,” 31; “U.S. Doctor Reports on Soviet Blood Use,” New York Times, June 26, 1958, 54; “Hematology Advances Found by Dameshek on World Tour,” Scope Weekly, February 8, 1956, 16; W. Dameshek, “A Hematologic World Tour,” Blood 11, no. 5 (1956): 491.
E. Vasiukova, Otchet o poezdke delegatsii sovetskikh zhenshchin v SShA, October 11–November 10, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 373, ll. 137–67.
For example, the Soviet delegation attending the Third International Congress on Angiology—the study of the circulatory and lymphatic systems—in Atlantic City in 1957 was interviewed by Medical News. Otchet sovetskoi delegatsii—P. I. Androsova, B. A. Dolgo-Saburova, D. A. Zhdanova, V. V. Kovanova (glava delegatsii)—ob uchastii v III mezhdunarkodnom kongresse po angiologii v g. Atlantik-Siti (SShA) i zankomstve s nekotorymi nauchnymi i lechebnymi uchrezhdeniiami gg. Vashingtona i N’iu-Iorka, l. 16. See also Letter from Paul Dudley White to Maria Kovrigina, November 25, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 374, ll. 46–47; “Krepnut mezhdunarodnye sviazi uchenykh-medikov,” 3.
E.g., “Six U.S. Doctors See Soviet Dog Revived,” New York Times, May 21, 1958, 14.
Raymond, “US-USSR Cooperation in Medicine and Health,” 230; “Khirurg V. P. Demikhov peresazhivaet serdtse,” Pravda, June 1, 1958.
Otchet sovetskoi delegatsii o VI mezhdunarodnom gematologicheskom kongresse i o VI kongresse mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva po perelivaniiu krovi v gorode Boston, Massachuzet’, SShA, August 24–September 5, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 219, l. 57; E. Vasiukova, Otchet o poezdke delegatsii sovetskikh zhenshchin v SShA, October 11–November 10, 1957, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 373, l. 150.
Otchet sovetskoi delegatsii o VI mezhdunarodnom gematologicheskom kongresse i o VI kongresse mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva po perelivaniiu krovi v gorode Boston, Massachuzet’, SShA, 24 August–5 September 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 219, ll. 58–60. Plastic bags for blood collection were introduced in the US in 1950. Kristen Stankus, “A Brief History of Blood Transfusion through The Years,” Stanford Blood Center (blog), March 10, 2016, https://stanfordbloodcenter.org/a-brief-history-of-blood-transfusion-through-the-years/.
“Soviet Held Open to Doctors of U.S.,” 31.
“Soviet Child Care Hit: U.S. Doctor Calls Program Inadequate and Outmoded,” New York Times, July 13, 1957, 2.
“U.S. Doctors Tell of Tour of Soviet,” New York Times, June 15, 1958, 19.
Letter from William Dameshek to the Soviet Ambassador to the USA [Georgy Zarubin], February 20, 1956, GARF, f. R-8009, op. 34, d. 219, l. 170. For an example of Dameshek’s positive portrayal of Soviet advances, see “Hematology Advances Found by Dameshek on World Tour,” 1; Dameshek, “A Hematologic World Tour,” 488–91. A 1972 letter from the President of the American Medical Association to the head of the USSR Medical Workers Union expresses similar concerns about any offence that might inadvertently be caused by press reports. Carl Hoffman writes: “During my press conferences and on radio, I have complimented the work you are doing on many occasions, and I shall continue to do so. Although at times there will probably be some statement in the press taken out of context which not be clear [sic], I can assure you that I do not intend ever to say anything damaging about the tremendous job that you and your health care workers are trying to do.” Letter from C. A. Hoffman to Nadezda Gregoreva [sic], August 15, 1972, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 4324, l. 5.
Otchet o okmandirovke po Vladimir referenta TsK Profsoiuza medrabotnikov Greidinga, Iu. L., 1964, GARF, f. 5465, op. 26, d. 3586, ll. 7–8. The Soviet government returned again and again to a handful of medical institutions that were relied upon to impress foreign visitors. An American deeply involved with US-Soviet exchanges observes that “our Public Health Service administers have noted that the groups of American doctors traveling to the Soviet Union have generally visited the same institutions in just a few cities. By 1964 twenty-eight delegations had visited the Institute of Experimental Pathology at Sukhumi.” Byrnes, Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958–1975, 173.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 8, 1958,” The American Presidency Project, accessed December 13, 2021, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-the-congress-the-state-the-union-10.
On overtures to collaborate in the WHO, see Austin C. Wehrwein, “Dr. Milton Eisenhower Outlines a World Medical Science Plan,” New York Times, May 27, 1958, 15.
Geltzer, “In a Distorted Mirror”; Erez Manela, “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (2010): 299–323; Raymond, “US-USSR Cooperation in Medicine and Health,” 239.
[Report on medical cooperation in Eastern Europe], [1956], GARF, f. R5464, op. 26, d. 2224, l. 2.
