ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an analysis of the nursing periodical Meditsinskaya sestra from the 1940s to the 1960s. Before the Second World War, the history of Russian nursing received scant attention. This changed later when the pre-revolutionary past was harnessed and attention drawn to the values and principles espoused by nurses under late Tsarism. The outbreak of the Second World War highlighted the significance of nursing work and the value of well-trained nurses. In 1947 four Leningrad nurses who had worked through the First World War, the Civil War, Finnish War, and Great Patriotic War were singled out for praise. Nurses in the postwar period are undoubtedly presented as professional career women, but there is also no mistaking that they are providers of care. If the Meditsinskaya sestra accounts frame state need within the rhetoric of an idealized nurse, files from the Procuracy show a nurse experience that was more variegated and reflective of the wider Soviet experience.
