The horrors of Soviet dentistry (photo). Torture dentistry and other delights of Soviet healthcare

Still from the cartoon "Masha and the Bear"

Science and industry of the USSR successfully coped with human space flight, but they were powerless before the creation of a dental drill. The design of this infernal unit was proposed in the 20s of the 21st century and has remained virtually unchanged since then! What for? Belt drive when drilling a tooth is the pinnacle of dental art! Maybe you even remember how you vibrated together with the chair, the drill and the dentist holding it, and it worked with such a sound as if there was an aircraft engine inside it, and you had the feeling that the machine was either going to take off or explode. At the same time, all the steam, so to speak, went into the whistle: this torture device worked at such low speeds that the coefficient useful action tended to almost zero. Treating teeth with this device was not only painful, it also took a very long time.

Still from the film "Adventures of a Dentist"

Drilling work in dental subsoil

Due to the extremely low efficiency, the Soviet dentist drilled your tooth for a long time and persistently, like a driller drilling into especially hard rock. However, the point was also that any advanced diagnostic methods (such as microscopic examination tooth canals) were simply absent. Most often there wasn’t even an X-ray! Take a dental photo today - simplest procedure, and then it was something from the realm of science fiction. Therefore, in order to see what was going on inside, to install a filling or carry out any other procedure, the doctor had to drill out a lot of healthy tooth tissue. Not to mention the fact that the drill itself destroyed dental tissue like an elephant destroys a china shop, and therefore, some time after installing the filling, the tooth could simply fall apart.

Cement kaleidoscope

But the doctor still drilled your tooth to the bitter end, although after an hour in the dental chair you no longer hoped for this, but only dreamed of crawling out of the office alive. Having removed the drill, the doctor began to fill it - or rather, to lay cement into the gaping hole. No light curing - do not eat or drink for 2-3 hours until it hardens on its own. These chemically cured fillings of ill memory were distinguished by truly “fantastic” quality.

Not only that, they could leave the tooth on their own at any (usually the most inopportune) moment! Not only that, all these fillings were of different shades, which did not even closely match the tone of the tooth enamel! Such cement masterpieces were simply useless, because... they could not be polished. Therefore, the rough surface successfully collected all the plaque on itself, as a result of which, over time, caries appeared again around these fillings. In addition, they did not have such a tight bond as their light-cured sisters, and therefore, even under cement fillings, caries lived and flourished until the tooth was completely destroyed.

Still from the cartoon "The Magnificent Gosha"

It doesn't hurt you, Kharlamov!

It was under this motto that dental treatment took place in Soviet dentistry. Tempering an unbending fighting spirit, developing in patients superhuman endurance and complete fearlessness in the face of any danger - apparently, these were the goals that dentists of those years had in mind. Why? But because, firstly, dental needles and syringes were practically not produced in the USSR! This, of course, may shock those who were lucky enough to come to the modern dentistry where is the syringe and big choice painkillers – this has long been a familiar picture. But, secondly, there were almost no drugs for dental analgesia! The maximum that a doctor who was extremely dissatisfied with your mental weakness could offer you was novocaine, to which you were often allergic. And finally, thirdly, as we remember, there were almost no diagnostics. To understand what is happening with your nerve or tooth, the dentist needed the patient’s reaction. So the screams simply replaced the x-ray examination. Cheap and cheerful!

Arsenic is the dentist's friend

And yet, sometimes the strength of the patient’s will and the doctor’s furious screams: “Stop yelling, it doesn’t hurt you!” – was not enough. If a nerve became inflamed, then it was necessary to use arsenic, which the good doctor stuck into a hole drilled with such difficulty that it would kill the nerve in a few days. However, arsenic is the most natural cellular poison with the tendencies of a serial killer: it destroyed not only the nerve, but also mucous tissue, and even jaw tissue. Especially if you were unable to get an appointment with a doctor after 2-3 days. But even if you arrived on time, arsenic still managed to inflict on the tooth irreparable harm, and after such treatment the tooth quickly became completely unusable.

Dentists' color is red

No, we're not talking about blood spatters, we're talking about resorcinol-formalin, which gave teeth pink-red a color that shocked all foreign dentists to the core when emigrants from the USSR came to see them. Western dentists had never seen this before and could hardly understand how such a technique could be thought of. Its essence was that, in the absence of normal treatment methods, the tooth was impregnated with resorcinol-formalin in order to kill off any pathogenic bacteria that frolicked in the depths of the tooth. But this substance is the same cellular poison as arsenic. The resorcinol tooth became fragile, like glass, and quickly collapsed. It was impossible to treat such teeth - just wash out all the formaldehyde and cover with a crown.

Still in some countries Central Asia gold teeth are a sign of high status and great wealth. But now you can simply put a gold fixation on a tooth, but in the USSR these were crowns - i.e. non-removable structures with which doctors covered teeth that were unable to survive in the mouth on their own as a result of the treatment methods described above. However, gold was still an elite material; often the crowns were simply metal, made of various alloys, so that many patients, after having them installed, resembled James Bond’s unforgettable enemy, the giant nicknamed Jaws. That's just him iron teeth were exotic for spectators, while metal crowns were a sad reality for residents of the Union. The metal oxidized over time and could cause allergies and toxic reactions, and as for “gold teeth,” there were also gold-plated crowns in Soviet practice. As the tooth was used for its intended purpose, the gilding peeled off, exposing the base - for example, light blue. So some of our grandmothers sported blue teeth.

Bridges big and small

As is already clear, the treatment often ended disastrously for the tooth, so much so that there was no longer anything to put a crown on, and the tooth had to be removed. What to do? Well, quite a few people chose not to set foot in dentistry ever again - they continued to live with a gradually decreasing “number” of teeth. But risky citizens - apparently the unaccounted descendants of the mutant Wolverine - could apply for bridges. The doctor drilled two adjacent teeth (without anesthesia, as we remember), killed the nerve (with arsenic) and made a prosthesis that was put on these two teeth, closing the empty gap. However, those who endured all the suffering were faced with food getting stuck under the bridge - hello bad breath and gum problems! In addition, the supporting teeth slowly collapsed under the bridge and over time also abandoned the unlucky owner.

Keeping teeth on a shelf

Yes, yes, in a glass. What's surprising here? Many patients lost almost all their teeth in their old age - partly due to caries and injuries, partly due to the miracles of Soviet dentistry. There were no implants or nylon prostheses at all: if some poor fellow did not want to eat only broths and purees, he had to wear a hard, unpleasant “galosh”, almost not adapted to the oral cavity. Fixing gels for prostheses did not exist in nature, and the galoshes could jump free from any awkward movement. Well, as they say, if you want to eat, know how to move: people even glued their dentures with industrial adhesives! At night, these dentures were supposed to be removed, washed and stored in a cup. Maybe grandma's implanted teeth became a source of inspiration for a lot of children's horror stories, but the convenience of such structures was extremely questionable.

To swallow or not to swallow?

And finally, a little cherry on the cake - there were no saliva ejectors in Soviet dentistries. At all. None. Saliva, blood, tooth dust - all this remained safely in your mouth. There was only one option - to sit and slowly choke, because when you tried to swallow, the attending physician emitted a ferocious cry in your ear: “Don’t swallow!!!” By the way, some doctors put metal tubes on their fingers so that grateful patients could not bite off the healer’s finger or two during treatment.

Yulia Klouda, head of the expert magazine about dentistry Startsmile.ru, recalled with shudder.

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Memories of how teeth were treated in the USSR can please few people - a terribly buzzing drill, almost complete absence anesthesia and arsenic will haunt our dreams for a long time former clients Soviet dental offices.

In 1922, private dental practice in the USSR completely ceased to exist, and all dental institutions were transferred under the control of the People's Commissariat of Health. The following year, the People's Commissariat issued a circular “On measures to improve local dentistry,” according to which clinics were created dental departments 5 or more jobs.

The Soviet government sought to introduce planned accounting in all areas, be it production or sports achievements. Dentistry was also no exception - in 1926, the so-called “work unit” was introduced - the length of time required to treat one carious tooth - 20 minutes. It is the “labor unit” that has become the main criterion for recording and assessing the work efficiency of dentists.

After the war, many dental institutions were destroyed, so priority was their restoration and organization of the work of dental offices throughout the USSR.

Subsequently, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the development of dentistry proceeded by increasing the number of clinics and doctors. In the 1980s alone, the number of dental offices increased by more than one and a half times. At the same time, practically no attention was paid to improving the technologies and materials used.

This approach led to the fact that Soviet dentistry was mostly accessible, but of very low quality.

The drills were equipped with a belt drive, which provided a low rotation speed and at the same time significant vibration. The material for fillings was made according to a composition whose recipe was invented back in the late 19th century, so the fillings were short-lived, often breaking after just a few months.

One of the most painful problems in the truest sense of the word was anesthesia, or rather, the lack thereof. Of course, pain relief was provided, but not always and not for everyone who wanted it. Novocaine was most often used, but sometimes a person could be placed under general anesthesia.

When removing the dental nerve, arsenic was used - another “innovation” from the 19th century.

“Travel” Soviet citizens could easily be recognized in Western countries according to characteristic metal prostheses. Moreover, they were often made quite roughly; the crown was massive and stood out against the background of the teeth.

Later, after the collapse of the Union, emigrants were forced to change their metal crowns to white ones, because they did not want to be hired for work if it involved communicating with people. “Iron jaws” seemed sinister to Western citizens spoiled by dentistry.

At the same time, everyone experienced the delights of Soviet dentistry, from tractor drivers to members of the Politburo - only in the 70s did Western medicine begin to seep into the highest echelons of power. However, further politicians and their family members did not develop well.

Undoubtedly, the constitutionally enshrined rights of citizens of the Country of Soviets to free medical care, education and work were great in intention. Another question: how could these rights be realized in real life, has free medical care, in particular dentistry, always been of high quality?

The difficult legacy of tsarism

Young soviet republic didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere. The vast majority of subjects Russian Empire did not have the opportunity to have their teeth treated. They didn’t even suspect that they could be treated, and not just removed. Therefore, both before the revolution and after it, people walked around without teeth or with rotten stumps in their mouths, not realizing that they needed to brush their teeth, eat regularly and nutritiously.

In 1949, a decree was issued to regulate the time of doctor's appointments. This time was limited to 20 minutes, and the doctor had to see at least 30 patients per shift. These 20 minutes of treatment seemed endless to the patient.

And here's why: drills were produced by the Kazan plant (the only one in the USSR) since the 1920s and over the next 60 years did not undergo any improvements, except for increasing engine power (this terrible screech caused horror in the sufferers, evoking associations with a torture chamber).

Instruments (burs, needles, etc.) were produced by another monopolist - the Volgograd Medical Equipment Plant. The quality of the instruments was quite Soviet: burs often broke, flew out of their holders during work, and even a doctor with golden hands found it difficult to perform delicate work with them.

The most frequently heard phrase from the doctor’s mouth was: “Be patient, now it will hurt a little!”, and the patient’s cry confirmed the correctness of the aesculapian’s words.

Going to the dentist is like going to the scaffold

Nerve killing was performed with arsenic paste, but it was an extremely painful procedure. Anesthesia was either not used, or was carried out with novocaine, which was harmful to health, which was abandoned throughout the civilized world even before World War II.

Casts for making prosthetics were taken with plaster, and if the doctor hesitated a little, then the plaster that had hardened tightly had to be hollowed out. Silicone for taking impressions, introduced in 1957 by foreign dentists, was considered too expensive by Soviet health officials for the average citizen.

Bridges and crowns for the mass consumer were made of steel; later, titanium nitride “gold” plating was used; the steel oxidized in the mouth, which did not add to health.

Fillings, which at the very beginning of the century in Russia were made from precious metals and durable porcelain, became cement, they easily flew out not from chewing gum (which did not exist in the USSR), but from toffee candies.

Until the mid-50s, dental personnel in the USSR were trained only in medical institutes in Moscow and Kharkov. Only with Khrushchev coming to power the number of dental faculties increased significantly.

In the 1960s Soviet Union mediocrely missed the world scientific and technological revolution in healthcare, and in dentistry in particular. Since that time, a natural and steady lag in the use of new technologies and materials began.

The prosthesis was “set” on... BF-6 glue

When visiting the dentist, the patient’s nerves burned out so much that they tried to delay visits to the doctor as much as possible, bringing the tooth to a deplorable state. According to Soviet statistics, for a population of 280 million in the USSR, the average citizen visited the dentist once every three years!

It is not surprising that by the age of 50, many lost teeth and were forced to use removable dentures (they were placed in a glass of water at night). The industry did not produce fixing creams, so inventive people fixed these “galoshes” with anything, even BF-6 glue.

How much inconvenience such “installations” brought to the owners, because the doctors did not have time to spend many hours carefully adjusting the prostheses, so their jaws flew out at the most inopportune moment. But folklore has acquired the most interesting characters in jokes and tales.

All this “treatment” was provided free of charge. How many teeth have mediocrely disappeared from such treatment and how much today those who lost their teeth in glorious Soviet dental offices have to pay for implants! You have to pay for everything: sooner or later.

I saw a post about Soviet dentistry in the top and tears came to my eyes. A generation has already grown up that has not tasted all the dental “delights” of the Soviet period. And our generation, beaten down by caries and periodontitis, has remained dentally disfigured forever.

I wanted to conduct a small subjective analysis of why the dentistry of “developed socialism” enjoyed such a bad reputation. I wanted to compare, for example, with American dentistry of that time. How did the dental branches of the two opposing systems differ?

1) The most important difference, in my opinion, is the very nature of dentistry. In America, it has long been preventive, but in the USSR, almost until the death of the Union, it was therapeutic. Americans went for preventive examinations in droves, but Soviet people only went when they were sick. Therefore, the nature of the treatment was very different.

2) Lack of diagnostic equipment in the USSR, primarily x-ray units, which in America were an attribute of any dental office. In the Soviet Union, dental x-rays were available only in large clinics. This is one of the reasons for point one, because what kind of prevention can there be without regular x-ray examination of teeth?

3) If in America the first school of dental hygienists opened in 1913, then in the USSR such a specialty, as well as the procedure for brushing teeth, practically did not exist. Hence the rampant gum disease, which often led to the loss of practically healthy teeth.

4) Backlog in medical equipment. Drilling machines operating at high speeds with water cooling began to appear in single copies in ordinary clinics only in the late 1980s. Before this, they drilled with small jackhammers, turning treatment into torture. Until the early 1970s, mechanical pedal-driven units were not uncommon.

5) Backlog in materials. In ordinary clinics, fillings were often performed with zinc-phosphate pastes, which, in fact, are temporary. That’s why they often fell out, or secondary caries developed under them. Amalgam, widely used at that time in America, was inaccessible to the masses Soviet people. To fill the canals, the antediluvian resorcinol-formaldehyde paste was used (and in some places is still used), which turned the tooth into brittle glass and painted the tooth a proletarian red color. The canals were sealed without X-ray control, creating conditions for subsequent infections.

6) Lack of adequate anesthesia. In the USSR, freezing was used only to remove teeth, and they always drilled without anesthesia, even if the tooth hurt. Naturally, this gave the whole of dentistry a tortured character and a bad reputation. When it was impossible to even touch the tooth, a procedure was used to “kill” the nerve with arsenic. In America local anesthesia It became widely used for dental treatment after World War II.

7) In the USSR for the treatment of infections oral cavity for some reason antibiotics were not used. Is it possible when advanced cases in a hospital setting. Almost any case of root canal infection resulted in tooth extraction, whereas in America such teeth were successfully filled and preserved after antibiotic therapy. I still don’t understand why in the USSR all antibiotics were in the form intramuscular injections, why practically did not exist oral medications, i.e. those that are consumed by mouth.

8) The level of training also varied. In America, dentists since the 18th century have undergone training at the doctoral level, and in the USSR, at the paramedic level. Dentists in the Soviet Union were only in large hospitals for serious cases, and not for the treatment of common caries.

9) Inaccessibility of normal prosthetics for the broad masses of Soviet people. IN best case scenario Shitty stamped crowns with gold plating and bridges soldered on them were available, rather than solid dental gold crowns, as in America. I’m generally silent about metal ceramics.

What else have I forgotten?

The collapse of the USSR, among other things, led to positive changes in the field of dentistry. And technologies and materials poured into the post-Soviet space. The current Russian dentistry is practically no different from the American one. Is that the mentality is still slowing down. Not everyone still goes for medical examinations en masse, and not all doctors still use x-rays for diagnosis. The treatment of gum disease, it seems to me, is also lagging behind. But the period of torture dentistry is definitely behind us.

In the Western world, a former Soviet man, like a horse, is recognized by his teeth. If you see a person of Eastern European appearance on the streets of London, Paris or New York, they immediately look at the mouth to clarify the diagnosis. There, in the mouths of former Soviets, there is always a mess going on. Seal traditional medicine. Even the Poles, Czechs and Bulgarians, that is, comrades who have gone a little further from socialism than us, have neater mouths.

In Latin rima oris. Or "mouth gap". This is what Soviet dentists called our mouths. “Open your mouth!” - a man in a white coat barked imperiously, seating a man with a face white with fear under the drilling machine...

Yesterday I saw a campaign banner by the roadside from the leader of one of our few parliamentary parties: “Let’s bring back decent free healthcare!” Probably, before we had decent medicine, but today it is no good. Oh, I wish this leader could go to a Soviet clinic for at least an hour. Better dental.

Any exploitation of false longing for non-existent Soviet happiness must be punished with at least a ruble, because playing on Soviet mythology results in infantilization of the population. It ceases to really perceive the world and its responsibility for it, preferring to escape from reality into the languid past.

People who believe that there was good free medicine in the USSR are twice mistaken, because it was not free and it was not good either.

The income level of Soviet citizens lagged behind almost all countries except Africa, India, China and Latin American juntas. For free medicine, free education and free apartments, Soviet people paid at least 2/3 of their real earnings. In the early 1970s, each Soviet person had less than 65 rubles of net income, which even in the Party Central Committee was considered to be living below the poverty line. This is how 3/4 of the country's population lived. And 40% did not even reach the subsistence level.

In Soviet times, people were fleeced by the state brazenly, hypocritically, and cruelly. And for all those modest benefits that the state called free, they paid in full. And then they paid above the norm.

In 1965, ten tablets of chloramphenicol cost 64 kopecks, while their production, according to the State Planning Committee, cost the state only 18 kopecks. The famous Soviet “head remedy” based on analgin, banned in Europe, and even more dangerous pyramidon and caffeine, cost 45 kopecks in pharmacies, and 8 kopecks were spent on its production. It was called “Troychatka”.

Imagine that today a blister of antediluvian citramone would cost more than 100 rubles. What was really affordable in the Brezhnev pharmacy was iodine and brilliant green - 4 kopecks.

These simple remedies, plus cough lozenges, cough tablets, penicillin and the bronchodilator solutan - these are, perhaps, all the medicines that an ordinary Soviet citizen knew. In the 1970s, they were joined by noshpa and Indian festal, but they were sold through connections or at exorbitant prices. IN major cities According to the recipe, they could prepare sulfur powder, calendula tincture or anti-acne lotion. In small cities there were interruptions even with the pyramidon.

Remember the satirical miniature by Kartsev and Ilchenko “Warehouse”.

Pyramidon and analgin were already known then for their severe side effects. Noshpa outside the socialist camp was considered a placebo with long-term side effects, including on the intrauterine development of the child. Festal is today called a pseudo-medicine.

The entire Soviet Union used brilliant green to disinfect scratches, while in the rest of the world it was used to dry the edges of wounds. Soviet drug addicts made “vint” from solutan.

Contrary to the memories of patriots, even these meager medicines were not free in Soviet times. All pharmacies in the USSR were divided into outpatient, that is, self-supporting, and hospital. In the first, medicines were sold for money. Pensioners at the pharmacy were entitled to only one benefit - out-of-turn service. Disabled people and war veterans, disabled people of the first two groups and children under one year old received medicines free of charge. For disabled people Group III and children from one to three years old were given a discount. Beneficiaries formed their own queue.

Diabetics bought their own insulin. And seriously ill patients also bought pain relief. Both were chronically unavailable in pharmacies; injections were often obtained only at a doctor’s appointment. The luckiest ones, with connections and money, injected insulin at home from reusable syringes. They were boiled. As a rule, there was one syringe per family, and they took care of it. By the way, life for diabetics in the Soviet country was very bad: insulin was homemade and could not cope with a carbohydrate diet. The country lived on potatoes, pasta and bread. Only two products were produced for diabetics - sorbitol and buckwheat. Both were not given out free of charge, but were sold at market prices. And according to recipes.

Buckwheat - according to the recipe! Did you know?

In the Soviet Union, it was necessary to live young and healthy, because any disease brought a person to the sidelines. The words “cancer”, “stroke”, cerebral palsy in Russia are still synonymous with death or lifelong misfortune, because they were not treated in the USSR, people died quietly, secretly, children with cerebral palsy were hidden.

All because for some reason effective medicines V free access there were none outside Moscow at all, and in Moscow they were rare and expensive. Soviet people died not only from strokes, but also from diseases that are ridiculous by today's standards: bronchitis, pancreatitis, asthma, from inflammation of the plenum, from a simple cut on the hand or an abscess.

Good antibiotics open sale was not reported, which is why a huge share of child mortality occurred in respiratory diseases. There were no drugs like pancreatin. Asthmatics were injected with hormones in the hospital, during a planned hospitalization, the person could not relieve the asthma attack himself. Chief Engineer The housing office from Mamin's film "The Fountain" used an inhaler for asthmatics - a miracle unprecedented even in the late Soviet Union.

People watched the film and understood that this wonderful romantic was an ordinary thief, because the inhaler, and even with a prescription, was not given to thieves.

Any more or less serious illness resulted in huge expenses, even if the person was admitted to a hospital: medicines in the hospital, like other shortages, were obtained through connections. It happened that tests were done through acquaintances and procedures were carried out for bribes. Clinics often had no reagents, no laboratory equipment, no dressing material. What was available was distributed corruptly, taken home by staff.

They carried everything: droppers for crafts, bandages for reserve, alcohol for vodka, tweezers, lancets, clamps for the kitchen. A person who ended up in a Soviet hospital without money or acquaintances could simply lie under a glucose drip for 20 days, since there was often nothing in hospitals. Almost everyone had to lie like this, because people with a salary of up to 135 rubles, that is, at least 4/5 of the population, did not have access to the illegal drug market.

However, even the medicines distributed through connections hardly treated anyone, because they were Soviet medicines. Truly effective Western drugs penetrated illegally - mainly through traveling diplomats, athletes, and trade mission workers. And they were a drop in the ocean. We produced almost nothing. In a closed country, science was also closed. The technical, medical, natural science intelligentsia did not know foreign languages, and the damned bourgeoisie did not translate their publications into Russian. Contrary to proud myths, the Soviet pharmaceutical industry did not make any breakthrough discoveries.

Today in the world evidence-based medicine about 5 thousand effective ones are known original drugs. Of these, less than twenty were discovered by Soviet pharmacology.

The KGB had a powerful pharmaceutical intelligence service - security officers from all over the world brought other people’s developments to the Union.

Against the backdrop of a total shortage of pharmaceuticals, the Soviet people were treated with whatever was necessary. Nowadays it’s common to remember salt rooms in schools, wet salt mats in kindergartens, morning exercises before classes. This is all very good, of course. But apart from salt treatments and massage mats, there was virtually nothing in the country.

Visiting doctors was free, but what kind of doctors did they see in regular hospitals and clinics? They also did not know languages. They were taught by teachers who themselves learned in isolation from world science. Therefore, various obscurantist ideas flourished in the Union medical practices. Especially in the field of physical therapy.

UHF, polarized light, electrophoresis, UV, electrosleep, cups, leeches and mustard plasters were perhaps the only weapons of the Soviet doctor.

They fought against all diseases - from the consequences of perinatal hypoxia and pathologies of placental development to ischemia and osteoporosis.

A sick Soviet worker came under double pressure. On the one hand, helpless medicine awaited him, which took a month and a half to treat ear inflammation or mastitis. On the other hand, the poor guy was lying in wait sick leave. The country had standard periods for being on sick leave. After a heart attack and ischemia, 20 days of rest were given. For all illnesses, sick leave had to be extended every three days; it was forbidden to stay on sick leave for more than 10 days without a medical commission.

For colds and acute respiratory viral infections without a fever, sick leave was not required - they went to work snotty. Longer than seven calendar days It was impossible to sit at home with a sick child - sick leave was closed, even if the child had whooping cough. For two years, being on sick leave for more than a week was collectively not encouraged; everyone knew this and took time off at their own expense.

Sick leave was paid in full only to people with extensive experience - over eight years. In Soviet times, people got sick with their own money. But dues to the trade union were required to be paid - 1% of the salary, including vacation pay. The teacher paid 12-14 rubles a year to the trade fund. And I was sick 2.5 working days a year. And once every ten years I went on a trip to a sanatorium. That is, the Soviet people paid for their medical care themselves.

Things were a little better in departmental hospitals - valuable workers were taken care of, so bosses went on sick leave several times a year. But another problem was lurking in the special institutions - they received scarce Western equipment and Western medicines. For this reason, good hospitals were extremely corrupt, jobs were grain-based and distributed among their own. And where there is a lot of cronyism, there is no place for qualifications. And they stole more in special hospitals than in district ones.

I personally know the family of the former judge Supreme Court and the family of one of the first secretaries of the regional committee of a non-poor region. Both were afraid to be treated in departmental clinics.

What can we say about ordinary outpatient clinics and hospitals? These establishments were scary. Wards for 12 people and one toilet for two departments are the standard design of the clinic. In maternity hospitals there were ten people in a ward. There were five to ten chairs in the maternity room.

Soviet obstetrics and pediatrics are the main enemies of Soviet citizens. All pediatrics in the first year of a child’s life was aimed at separating the baby from the mother as early as possible so that she could enter production as quickly as possible. Therefore, until the 1960s, a woman did not have the right to babysit for more than three months. Then she was given first six months, then a year, but unpaid leave.

Until 1982, a woman could stay at home with her child in the first year of life only at her own expense.

At the same time, all obstetrics in the USSR was organized so that a woman would go on maternity leave as late as possible. For this purpose, antenatal clinics specifically reduced the duration of pregnancy and issued a certificate stating that it was time to go on maternity leave at 39 weeks. Women gave birth without having time to convey this certificate to their accounting department.

However, obstetrics and pediatrics were not the most terrible areas of Soviet medicine - otolaryngology and dentistry were more terrible. ENT doctors performed almost all operations without anesthesia: puncture of the nasal sinuses, removal of tonsils, tonsils, adenoids, puncture eardrum, cleaning the middle ear - all at best with novocaine, that is, for real.

And in the USSR, teeth were treated using pre-war machines, cement fillings were placed, the nerve was removed with arsenic, and the pain was anesthetized with the same novocaine. People were afraid of this kind of dentistry. Any effective anesthesia, foreign fillings or good dentures cost more than a worker's monthly salary and appeared only in large cities; there was a queue for them for years to come. Advantageous place War veterans and disabled people, labor veterans were in line. A woman under 60 could not get her teeth inserted without a huge bribe; she could not get through beneficiaries.

People who yearn for free medicine today simply do not remember the millions of toothless mouths. And in Soviet times they didn’t suffer from anything serious.

Surprisingly, both ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative citizens today equally criticize modern medicine for the fact that it does not live up to the Soviet one. And thank God, I’ll tell you that it doesn’t live up to it!

Almost all diseases without exception are now treated in Russia without crazy queues and bribes. Yes, our medicine is not of a Western level. Yes, not everything is free. Yes, not everyone is treated with everything. But the situation is not as bad as some nostalgic alarmists imagine. By at least parents don't have to sell today wedding rings to pay the nurse for the injections.

Maybe that’s why hospitals these days are so far from ideal that they are constantly compared not with American or European clinics, but with Soviet institutions, where people were 12 people in a room and where medicines were literally more expensive than gold?

Soviet healthcare cannot stand any comparison with modern healthcare. Moreover, if only because over the course of several decades, medicine and medical practice throughout the world have made a breakthrough. And in our country too. Denying the superiority of post-Soviet healthcare, people, in addition to common sense, deny progress. Because even if the USSR was a super-open power, its medicine would still seem backward to us. Just because of progress.

Memories of good Soviet medicine are of the same romantic order as longing for Brezhnev’s ice cream. Most of those who today still have the strength to discuss the advantages of socialist health care were young in the USSR, for this reason they were happy and, by the way, very healthy. They simply did not have time to encounter the system. And, to be honest, they have nothing to compare Russian medicine with. But for those who really want to compare, I advise you to risk pulling out a tooth without anesthesia. I have never heard of such bold experimenters in the 21st century.