Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Balkan Transitional Justice | March 24, 2021

There are memorials across Serbia and Kosovo to commemorate hundreds of people who died during NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which began on March 24, 1999 and is being marked with an official commemoration in Belgrade on Wednesday evening.

Some of them are huge monuments, like the ‘Eternal Flame’ column in the Serbian capital; others are much more modest, like the engraved stone slab in the Kosovo village of Bishtazhin commemorating 41 ethnic Albanians who were mistakenly killed by a NATO air strike.

The Western military alliance launched its air strikes in an attempt to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement to end his military campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which involved widespread ethnic cleansing. But as the bombing continued, Milosevic’s army and police force intensified their war and committed a series of massacres of ethnic Albanian civilians.

Healthcare Under Socialism: The History of the Soviet Healthcare System

There are a lot of discussions on the healthcare systems today. Capitalist ideologists try their best to prove that the state healthcare system is too expensive and can not be implemented. But history proved them wrong. How did socialism change the approach to the management of healthcare?

As a result of the October Revolution of 1917, an entirely new state was created in place of the Russian Empire, establishing a proletarian dictatorship. For the first time in history, the country’s resources and means of production were in the hands of the majority of the population, rather than a narrow stratum of the nobility and bourgeoisie. It was a state with different principles of development and a unique communist ideology.

As far back as 1903, Vladimir Lenin outlined the objectives of the state in the sphere of health protection in the 1^st Program of the RSDLP. It stressed the necessity of establishing an 8-hour working day, banning child labor, arrangement of crèches in factories, state insurance for workers, sanitary supervision in factories, etc. But like any new country, Soviet Russia was faced with many problems in all spheres which had to be solved as effectively and promptly as possible. And one of the most serious problems was the lack of a healthcare system.