Lechsanupru (Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration)

Founding

When the Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918, the Kremlin became the seat of government and the residence of the top leadership. Amid the First World War, civil war, famine and epidemics, its sanitary condition was desperate. As typhus swept the country from late 1918, a checkpoint was set up in the Kremlin to screen new arrivals, and the doctor Ya. B. Levinson took charge of it in January 1919. On 18 February 1919 People's Commissar of Health N. A. Semashko and Sovnarkom affairs manager V. D. Bonch-Bruevich signed both a statute and a plan organizing the Kremlin's sanitary supervision, and Lenin personally signed the sanitary rules for Kremlin residents. On 22 February an order signed by Lenin and Sverdlov appointed Levinson as the first head of the new administration.

Dual mission and structure

The administration had two tasks: medical care for the highest party and state leadership, and sanitary supervision of the Moscow Kremlin and of the other places where the leadership stayed. Administratively and financially it came under the Sovnarkom affairs management, while its medical and sanitary work fell to the People's Commissariat of Health. Its head was empowered to inspect every premises in the Kremlin and to require that anyone arriving undergo disinfection. In November 1919 its remit was extended to the Houses of Soviets and to all of Moscow's railway stations, and by the first half of 1920 sanitary pass points had been built at the stations.

Renaming and chiefs

In 1928 the administration was renamed the Lechebno-sanitarnoye upravleniye Kremlya (Lechsanupru). Its heads were Levinson (22 February 1919 to 4 July 1934), Khodorovsky (4 July 1934 to 2 December 1937), Busalov (15 July 1938 to 20 May 1947), Yegorov (20 May 1947 to 1 September 1952) and Kuperin (1 September 1952 to 24 April 1953). Leading medical academics and professors of the day, among them Pletnev, Spasokukotsky, Vinogradov, Vovsi, Abrikosov and Yegorov, worked on its staff. It ran a network of sanatoria and rest homes, and the first stage of the Barvikha sanatorium, begun in 1929 to B. M. Iofan's design and opened in 1934, belongs to this period.

The Doctors' Plot and abolition

In the early 1950s the Lechsanupru was subordinated not to the Ministry of Health but to the Ministry of State Security (MGB). In August 1948 Lidiya Timashuk, head of its functional diagnostics department, diagnosed a myocardial infarction from Zhdanov's electrocardiogram, but senior physicians including Yegorov, Vinogradov and Mayorov made her rewrite the conclusion without the word "infarction". Her letter of complaint was forwarded to the very man she was complaining about, the Lechsanupru chief P. I. Yegorov. From 1952 the MGB pursued an investigation aimed at the Kremlin's physicians, and in January 1953 the case against the doctors as a "Zionist conspiracy" was made public. The Doctors' Plot was a criminal case fabricated by the Soviet authorities; it rested on confessions extracted under torture, and most of the physicians charged were on the Lechsanupru staff. After Stalin's death the detainees were released, reinstated and fully rehabilitated on 3 April 1953, and on 24 April 1953 the Lechsanupru was reorganized into the Fourth Administration (later Main Administration) of the USSR Ministry of Health, with fourth administrations created in the health ministries of the union republics as well.

Sources and research

The Lechsanupru's history was long studied only fragmentarily, because in the Soviet years material on the private life and daily routine of the top leadership was closed to researchers. In 2014 Kaikova described the institution as a "special branch of government medicine", noted that it had been studied mainly in a narrow professional aspect, and argued that it should be treated within the problem of "medicine and power".