| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| How mental patients were saved in Samara during the famine of 1922 |
| 2023-10-08 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. Text taken from the V Kontakte page of Grigory Tsidenkov [ColonelCassad] Save the mentally ill. The Samara psychiatric hospital was located 8 miles from the city, near the village of Tomashev Kolok (now within the city limits). In December 1921, with the onset of frost, local peasants tore off the locks from the hospital sheds, stole all the firewood supplies, and there was nothing to heat the hospital with. For the New Year, there are only 3 days left of firewood supplies. There were 400 patients in the hospital. The medical staff moved their own supplies of firewood there and everyone began to live in the hospital - surviving together. The regional health department stepped up to the plate and allocated money for the purchase of fuel. However, local peasants, seeing such a thing and the apocalypse happening around, set a price tag: 6 pounds of meat, 1.5 pounds of millet and 50,000 rubles per cubic meter of firewood. The price is absolutely unaffordable for a hospital where rations were already severely cut. The peasants of the Semeykino dachas, which are 18 miles from the hospital, agreed to sell the firewood for a reasonable price. But the hospital did not have its own transport. We again turned to the gubernia health department with a request to help with transport. The provincial health department, having absolutely no funds at its disposal, proposed a simple solution: to cut down the hospital park for firewood. The mental hospital medical staff flatly refused, but then the fuel completely ran out. In order not to waste time, being on the verge of cold death, we turned to Epidcheck. Epidcheka also immediately proposed cutting down the park. The doctors again flatly refused, arguing that the park is therapy for the mentally ill, the same as hospital equipment. The epidemic check went into detail, but there was no money, funds or free horses at hand, and the decision had to be made right here and now - otherwise tomorrow they would start dying from hypothermia in the mental hospital. HEARD: The petition of a psychiatric hospital to release funds for the purchase of 3 horses to strengthen transport. DECIDED: To release three horses to a psychiatric hospital. To take away the horses from the district health doctors. To allocate funds to the health doctors for the purchase of tram tickets." They began to transport firewood from the Semeykino dachas. But there is also hunger there - the locals began to demand payment in food. Sharing cut rations means starving ourselves. And in January-February there is a typhus hurricane, hundreds of corpses are buried in mass graves every day. Epidchek and Gubzdrav have no time for a mental hospital. But doctors still go to Epidchek, to its chairman Antonov-Ovseyenko. Antonov-Ovseenko, not as the Pre-Provincial Executive Committee, but as the chairman of the Epidchek, appeals to our Russian Red Cross Society and the Swedish Red Cross with a request to provide food to children's hospitals in Samara as quickly as possible. Abroad, they initially intended to help only children - the Swedes are suspending the opening of kitchens in the Krasnoyarsk volost and throwing funds at children's hospitals. ROKK breaks out of railway traffic jams with its train. On February 3, 1922, the ROKK and the Swedish Red Cross covered the food supply of all children's hospitals in the city of Samara with their funds. Soldiers from the Communist Epidemiological Squad have already been deployed to the hospitals, sealing them and preventing the staff from stealing products already allocated by the gubernia health department. These products are confiscated from city hospitals, which are now transferred to the Red Cross, and are sent to feed patients and staff of a psychiatric hospital. Survived. Photos from the site "Historical Samara". The data is from the funds of the Samara EpiCheck. (c) Grigory Tsidenkov Photos can be seen here. |
| Posted by:badanov |