17 March 2026, 4pm
CHSTM Seminar Room: Simon 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online Access tbc.

Dr Siobhán Hearne, Department of History, University of Manchester

Soviet Healthcare Diplomacy in the Global South

Abstract

After the death of Stalin, the Soviet government began to meaningfully engage with leaders of the newly independent states of the decolonising world, driven by a mixture of anticolonial sentiments and a desire to showcase the apparent success of socialist development models. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the Soviet government signed bilateral agreements on development aid – understood as a mix of cultural exchange, military support, and economic and technical assistance – with the governments and national liberation movements of numerous countries in the Global South. Healthcare assistance was an integral component of these interactions and one that was primarily channeled through the Soviet Red Cross on behalf of the Soviet government. This paper focuses on four important sites of Soviet healthcare diplomacy in the Cold War: Addis Ababa, Tehran, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh. In each of these cities, the Soviet Red Cross constructed medical facilities, delivered medications, and trained local medical personnel with the goal of exporting Soviet healthcare overseas and strengthening relations between the USSR and national elites/liberation movements. Within Soviet-run hospitals, the rigidity of the USSR’s political and economic system clashed with the practical realities of delivering medical care in often volatile political contexts, and rhetoric about anticolonial solidarity sat uneasily alongside dominant assumptions about the civilisational superiority of Soviet medical professionals in relation to peoples of the Global South.

Siobhán Hearne is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses broadly on histories of humanitarianism, health, gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She is writing a book about her current project entitled Red Humanitarians: The Red Cross Movement in the Soviet Union, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

All welcome!

CHSTM Research Seminar Programme

Related