Vladimir Obukh

Born Mar. 25 (Apr. 6), 1870, in the village of Sviblo, present-day Vitebsk Oblast; died June 14, 1934, in Moscow. One of the founders of Soviet public health care. Public figure; participant in the revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1894.

The son of an agronomist, Obukh entered St. Petersburg University in 1892 and graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Kiev in 1901. In 1898, Obukh became a member of the Kiev committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). He later worked as a physician in Moscow. Obukh became a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP in 1902. He was arrested and exiled in 1904, but in 1905 he returned illegally to Moscow and joined the literature and lecturing group of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP.

Obukh was a physician at the First Municipal Hospital from 1905 to 1917; during this time he continued his illegal party work. He became a member of the Moscow Oblast Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in 1916. In 1917, Obukh was a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik), the commission for the organization of the Red Guard, and the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet. He was one of the organizers of medical aid for the Red Guards.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Obukh became a member of the bureau of the Soviet of District Dumas. From 1919 to 1929, Obukh was the head of the Moscow Municipal Department of Public Health and a member of the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet. He was the personal doctor of V. I. Lenin and his family.

Under Obukh’s direction, new principles and methods of socialist health care were put into practice. Preventive medicine and a dispensary program were introduced for the first time. Outpatient clinics were founded to direct the dispensary program. Tuberculosis, venereal disease, and drug addiction clinics were organized. Maternity clinics, dining halls for those on special diets, overnight and day sanatoriums, and preventive clinics were also founded. On Obukh’s initiative, the Institute for Labor Hygiene and Occupational Diseases, the first in the USSR, was opened in 1923, as was the Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians. From 1929 to 1931, Obukh was a professor at the Second Moscow Medical Institute. He retired with a special pension in 1931.