Continuity of biopolitics in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia: What policy documents can tell us

Abstract

From a critical public health perspective, public health serves as an instrument of biopolitics in modern societies. Through public health measures, citizens’ bodies are regularised to exhibit desirable characteristics. However, what is considered desirable differs between epochs and political configurations. In this article we aimed to discern what kinds of subjects were envisioned as ideal and what configurations of public health were consequently produced in the late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. Through the analysis of legislative documents that have regulated Russian public health since their first codification in 1971 until now, we traced transformations of the state’s biopolitical agenda. We demonstrate how the Soviet paternalistic state aimed to provide health(care) for all while coercing those who did not share its ideals of health. We show how the liberalisation and marketisation of the 1990s attempted to transform citizens into responsible patient-consumers, and how, nowadays, public health regulation balances neoliberal ideas of health and Soviet notions of control. ‘Reading off’ legislative documents highlights how public health is transformed in line with biopolitical agendas, which exist in continuity and are deeply rooted both in the agendas of the past and imaginaries of the future.