Nataliya Shok and Nadezhda Beliakova
The history of Soviet family planning policy is а complex subject involving several important agents, including demographers, physicians, women, and the state. The perspective of each has its own scope that pertains to а particular focus in historical research-women’s history, medical history, economic and sociopolitical histories. Navigating around these complexities requires interdisciplinary methodology.
This chapter focuses on the expert communities of Soviet demographers and doctors, drawing lessons not only from demographic discussions but also from debates in the medical community and in healthcare policy. This includes the introduction and analysis of the trends in Soviet family planning policy and practice mirrored in the historiography. It was called “sanitary and demographic statistics,” “social-hygienic aspects of reproduction of the family size regulation,” medical demography and family planning in the late 1980s. This complex approach based on the idea of socialized medicine and the model of centralized state-funded and guaranteed health care allowed Soviets to use the medical data in planning and implementing policies in healthcare, demographic and family planning. The chapter authors offer а novel approach to study them together with this comЬination of concems about the Soviet population, reproductive policies, and demographics because the history of Soviet social medicine is deeply underdeveloped.
