Susan Grant's "Soviet Nightingales"

Susan Grant is a Reader in Modern European History at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society.

Grant applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Soviet Nightingales: Care under Communism, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings us to the Stalinist 1930s and examines the role of nurses in Soviet society. It details the list of duties that Soviet nurses had to perform, a lengthy list indeed that covers more than half a paragraph! Soviet nurses, and other mid-level medical workers such as orderlies, had a great deal of work to get through. Coupled with this is a discussion of changes in middle medical education that were connected to new Stalinist policies and the new ideological standards that nurses were expected to meet. By the late 1930s nurses had to study modern history, the Soviet Constitution, math, Latin, and the Russian language in addition to medical and scientific classes.

The themes that emerge from the discussion of nurses and medical work on page 99, for example gender, values, education, and ideology, inform the book more generally. In discussing these themes here and elsewhere, I show how nurses became crucial symbols of the Soviet state. We see the increasingly paternalistic and conservative state turning to nurses as symbols of care and culture. As such, nurses had the potential to be ideal intermediaries between the state and society. But if they were to represent the state, then these nurses – almost all women – had to be cultured and educated. The idea of nurses as cultured and cultural workers is significant and one that reappears in later years. This page, and this part of the chapter, also sets the scene for debates about how the Soviet state and society interacted with nurses. It captures important questions about specialization and the kinds of skills nurses should acquire. Overall, we see how nursing and healthcare work are bound up with the state.

The book foregrounds how nursing and nurses were indelibly connected to broader social and political developments in the Soviet Union. It examines the nuances and complexities of the wider Soviet project and relates these to the history of nurses and healthcare workers. Although the Soviet state was brutal, violent, and repressive, it nonetheless drew on nurses to help show that socialist society was caring and compassionate. More broadly, I argue that the skills and work of nurses and other healthcare workers need to be properly recognised, and that ‘care’ needs to be taken seriously.

Learn more about Soviet Nightingales at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue