‘Socialising’ primary care? The Soviet Union, WHO and the 1978 Alma-Ata Conference

Abstract

In September 1978, the WHO convened a momentous International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma-Ata, capital of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. This unprecedented gathering signalled a break with WHO’s long-standing technically oriented disease eradication campaigns. Instead, Alma-Ata emphasised a community-based, social justice-oriented approach to health. Existing historical accounts of the conference, largely based on WHO sources, have characterised it as a Soviet triumph. Such reasoning, embedded in Cold War logic, contradicts both the decision-making processes in Geneva and Moscow that led the conference to be held in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the reality that the highest Soviet authorities did not consider it a significant ideological or political opportunity. To redress the omissions and assumptions of prior accounts, this article examines the Alma-Ata conference in the context of Soviet political and health developments, drawing from Soviet archival and published sources as well as WHO materials and interviews with several key Soviet protagonists. We begin by outlining the USSR’s complicated relationship to WHO and the international health sphere. Next, we trace the genesis of the proposal for—and realisation and repercussions of—the primary healthcare (PHC) meeting, framed by Soviet, Kazakh, WHO and Cold War politics. Finally, we explore misjudgements and competing meanings of PHC from both Soviet and WHO perspectives, in particular focusing on the role of physicians, community participation and socialist approaches to PHC.