Research seminar: Soviet Malariologists Meet the World: Socialist experts and world health, 1920s-1960s

From the 1920s to the 1960s, an enduring cohort of Soviet experts forged a distinct project of malariology at the intersection of socialist, capitalist, and (post-) colonial worlds. Over these tumultuous decades, they engaged deeply with the evolving project of world health while articulating self-consciously socialist models of expertise. My paper uses the foreign travels and transnational contacts of this group to interrogate both the unique discipline of malariology that emerged in the USSR and the perspective it provided on the domain of world health. Soviet experts identified the tensions, limits, and hierarchies of world health with particular clarity. Yet, at the same time, the political significance of their own project was transformed by translation across geographical and ideological boundaries.

Dr Marek Eby is a Research Fellow in Global Health History at the University of Leeds, working on the Wellcome-funded project The Soviet Union, The WHO, and Global Health, 1957-1991. He received a PhD in History from New York University in 2025. His research interests focus on the intersections of public health, revolutionary politics, and social transformation in the twentieth century. His doctoral dissertation examined the history of Soviet malaria control campaigns in the region of Central Asia during the interwar period. His current research builds on this work to consider the international role of Soviet malariology in the postwar period.