Research Seminar: The Reddest Gift: Blood Donation and the Red Cross in the Post-Stalin USSR

This paper explores the pivotal role of voluntary organisations in the coordination of Soviet blood donation services in the 1950s-1980s. The Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the USSR (known as the Soviet Red Cross) was the largest voluntary organisation in this period. The Soviet Red Cross blurred the lines between civil society and the state: it was staffed mainly by volunteers, but it was closely linked to the state bureaucracy and dependent on state approval and resources to function. Despite this, the Soviet Red Cross was not just a transmission belt for the Communist Party, and instead, the organisation worked with various state ministries to shape policy, deliver healthcare, and advocate for the vulnerable citizens that they endeavoured to support. 

In the mid-1950s, the USSR’s Ministry of Health noted significant shortfalls in the volume of blood required to adequately supply the national healthcare services and began a mass collaborative campaign with the Soviet Red Cross. In the decades that followed, the Soviet Red Cross organised thousands of blood drives, launched a mass propaganda campaign, and took various steps to incentivise blood donation. In the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, the meaning of blood donation was inflected by a complex mix of psychological forces and social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances. Soviet donors framed their donation as a ‘gift’ to the sick and a powerful act of solidarity, employing the altruistic terminology that underscored the ideal of voluntary non-renumerated blood donation that was promoted as best practice by the international Red Cross movement. However, the gift did not go uncompensated. In a socio-economic system characterised by shortages, Soviet donors were able to access a series of fringe benefits and state-controlled goods that were difficult to come by, which likely further incentivised donation.  

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of the Soviet Union and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her current project, ‘Red Humanitarianism: The Soviet Red Cross and Public Health, 1953-1991’ explores the meaning and scope of medical volunteerism in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021), and her work has appeared in the journals Past & Present, Russian Review, English Historical Review, Gender & History, Europe-Asia Studies, and the Journal of Social History, amongst others.