ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how unhealthy St. Petersburg as a city and region was from the period 1900–17 and it assesses how the tsarist regime neglected the health of workers and migrant peasants (called the collective) and the consequences of this situation – high death rate, low birth rate, famines, infectious diseases etc and the reasons for this situation – shortage of funding, lack of a Russian ministry of Health, incompetence and a divided medical profession. We explore the Bolshevik response to this by focusing on how they campaigned for health care for workers and peasants (via social insurance changes and an emphasis on factory medicine) and how they forged linked with the more politicised radical elements within the medical establishment, societies and organisations in St. Petersburg or vice versa. The chapter assesses the reasons why a Russian Ministry of health was not possible and even when this became a possibility, how it was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. There was a continuum of crisis from 1914–17 which led to the October Revolution. It is argued that revolution in Tsarist Russia was inevitable, given not just the underlying social and economic problems and the military failures but due to the deteriorating medical situation and the failure to protect the health of workers and peasants.
