After the October Revolution of November 1917, Semashko served as head of the Health Department of the Moscow City Council, and from July 1918 to 1930 he held the post of Commissar of Health of the RSFSR. Under Semashko’s leadership, work was carried out to combat epidemics, the foundations of Soviet public health were laid, and a system of protection of motherhood and childhood and the health of children and adolescents and a network of medical research institutes were created.
In the Semashko model, medical services are provided by a hierarchy of state institutions under the supervision of Ministry of Healthcare and are financed from the national budget.[1] For the country’s citizens, medical services are free and equal, with an emphasis on social hygiene and prevention of infectious diseases.[1] The model features publicly owned medical facilities, salaried health workers, large providers of primary healthcare and an exceptionally high degree of governmental administration, providing a universal healthcare.
Also he was apparently a big proponent of gay right in the USSR.
I just skimmed around (sorry not reading it all right now looking for funny hahas) but it’s very cool to see an og commie not have the knee jerk reaction to associate homosexuality with bourgeoisie decadence. If ever I speak to a fellow member of the alphabet mafia and talk about socialism/communism and they say yada yada homophobia, I can now properly counter without having to just use modern day Cuba as an example. Very cool.
If you skim the Wikipedia page for “homosexuality in Russia”, even they admit many of the early Bolsheviks had pretty progressive views on gay rights for the time. Issue was they only really ever had luck enacting anything in major city centers like Moscow and St Petersburg. Turns out you can just magically make an undeveloped, mostly rural agrarian society become socially progressive by just willing it to be.
Hell yeah. Why did Stalin roll it back though?
I made a post about this awhile back, that I’ll just quote here:
While queerness has always existed, and cultures throughout history have had queer subcultures, such as the Kathoey in Thailand or Molly Houses in England, the development of Capitalism brought with it a trend towards a more systematized, wider reaching regimentation of reproductive labor, then what had been seen under previous forms of class society.
On the one hand, this brought about the categorization and subsequent oppression of queer people. But on the other hand, industrialization brought people into urban areas, socialized labor, and allowed those, now more intensely oppressed, queer people to form larger communities, and start organizing politically at scale.
Since the Soviet Union had not industrialized, that pressure on queer people in the Soviet Union, to organize at a large scale, didn’t exist. And the prevalence of queer organizing in the more industrialized west, brought Stalin’s administration to make the idealist error that queerness was an outgrowth of “bourgeois decadence”, rather than material conditions.
Ok so that’s where it comes from.
I’m very interested in learning more about this. What resources helped you come to this understanding?
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and The State by Engles - Incredibly foundational for any discussion of queerness and Marxism. Doesn’t really need much introduction.
Make Way for Winged Eros by Alexandra Kollontai - There’s a section in here which Is a historical materialist account of the history of Love. It doesn’t address queerness outright, but it doesn’t take a huge leap to see how Kollontai is outlining the ways that homosexual subcultures were prevalent in early forms of class society.
Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici - Though principally about the oppression of Women, this book is a Marxist account of the early modern witch hunts, their relationship to enclosures of the Commons, and Colonialism in the Americas. Federici is principally concerned with how this process impacted cis women, but it applies just as much to queer people, as both groups were violently forced into more regimented roles in the process of reproductive labor. This brought with it a renewed conception of “women’s” work as being tied to the home, and a systematized valorization of hetronormativity.
Capitalism and Gay Identity by John D’emilio - basically what it says on the tin. D’emillio is building off of Engles, and lookhe political economy of the family, and how it relates to that labor socialization process that I talked about. As queer people are forced into environments of socialized labor, they started forming independent cultures and conceptions of self, under industrial capitalism, which would set the stage for modern queer organizing.
Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg - my favorite book on this list, and one that ties all the others on this list together. Feinberg is doing an historical materialist analysis of transness, which can be broadly applied to queerness generally. I would probably read this first, as it’s pretty accessible. It patches some holes in Federici’s book, by looking at how that witch hunt process also punished gender nonconformity, fleshes out stuff that Kollontai only hints at, and is just a really fantastic work of historical materialism.
This is why I love our little community here. The receipts are a stack of books. You’re not going to get this from lib circles.
Not super sure but probably partially because there was social pressure to do so as the Communist Party became more engrained into broader Russian society, and partially because Stalin was himself more socially conservative than many of his early Bolshevik peers.
I think it was the Stalin Proles of the Round Table episode of RevLeft where they posited a possibility I found interesting in that it may have been a form of infighting or personal attacks within Stalin’s administration. So and So’s Son is homosexual and I can’t attack So and So directly, but I can make his life more difficult and his existence more precarious kind of thing.
Who the fuck is stanning Lysenko?
There was like, two or three people here I recall, but they may all be gone or banned now
I wonder if it’s the same sort of people who unironically stan Pol Pot
Well, there was this guy, @Vertraumir@lemmygrad.ml…
