"Curing and Crippling": Biomedical and Alternative Healing in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

From its inception after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the centrally controlled Soviet medical system attempted to monopolize medical practice-stigmatizing and punishing alternative practitioners who worked outside the state system. Nonetheless, alternative medical practitioners survived the seven decades of Soviet power. Ordinary people never stopped seeking them out, and since the late 1980s, the number of alternative healers in the Russian Federation has increased astronomically. The aim of this article is to analyze the forms of alternative medicine that exist in contemporary Russia and to offer an explanation for their continuing popularity in terms of popular conceptions of health and healing, the functioning of the state medical care system, and the attitudes of Russian physicians toward alternative healing.