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.

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[–] Diuretic_Materialism@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

[–] HexBeara@hexbear.net 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Hell yeah. Why did Stalin roll it back though?

[–] SpookyGenderCommunist@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] HexBeara@hexbear.net 7 points 1 year ago

Ok so that's where it comes from.

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