Medical Propaganda andCultural Revolution in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1928–41[Note 1. Research for this article was supported by grants from ...]

In the spring of 1928 a doctor entered a remote village in southern Kazakhstan. Like hundreds of other physicians sent to the region, he came bearing information about germ theory, disease transmission, and ways to improve the Kazakhs' health and well-being. He found a world very different from his own. Lying south of Siberia and east of the Caspian Sea, these arid steppes bore no resemblance to the dense birch forests his eyes knew well. The Turkic-speaking, Muslim, nomadic Kazakhs neither physically nor culturally reminded him of the Russian villagers that we can imagine he grew up with or visited during the summers of his youth. Shortly after setting up shop in a felt tent, the doctor summoned the villagers to hear a series of lectures on topics ranging from syphilis to prenatal care to sanitation. Somewhat skeptical and at times quite reluctant, Kazakh men and women gathered and listened to these talks that the doctor's assistant haltingly interpreted into their native tongue. In reports back to his superiors, the physician noted the filth and squalor in which his would-be patients lived, their resistance to the notions he brought with him, and the distrust that forged a gulf between him and those he served. I While his medical methods and theories were unfamiliar, his appearance and way of life probably were not entirely unknown to the local population. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, large numbers of Russians and Ukrainians settled in northern Kazakhstan, where they established large farms. Their traditional migratory routes disrupted, Kazakhs