Pavel Vasilyev

• Associate Professor at National Research University Higher School of Economics

This paper focuses on the interrelation between the process of militarisation of everyday life and individual subjectivities. More specifically, it explores one of the less obvious manifestations of this process – the issue of ‘military' miracle drugs. By this term, I understand the various pharmaceuticals that (1) are perceived to treat a very bro...

Emerging literature in Critical Menstrual Studies seeks to contextualize and decentralize the modern Western experience of the menstrual cycle, by paying closer attention to its various historical and cultural specificities (especially in the Global South). This paper extends the discussion by focusing on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The post-Sov...

Drugs and their illicit use have long fascinated writers and the reading public. Informed by new interdisciplinary perspectives, a growing number of academically trained historians are now approaching drugs as a fresh topic for serious research. This OUP Handbook of Global Drug History is the first major attempt by historians of drugs to take stock...

This chapter familiarizes Western readers with recent developments in the history of drugs in modern Russia and the Soviet Union. The field is just beginning in terms of its achievements, problems, new archives, and interpretations, and its uncharted territory for future research. The chapter starts by describing the main trends in the historiograp...

This paper discusses several ethical issues related to clinical trials within the Soviet system of drug development and testing, which reflected larger ideological principles of healthcare organization in the ussr , with its focus on eradicating market elements from drug development. The centralized state-controlled system was thought to combat suc...

This article focuses on the rave subculture of St. Petersburg in the 1990s and demonstrates how new forms of psychoactive control and resistance emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. By staying sensitive to the material and corporeal aspects of these phenomena, it contributes to the socio-material studies of drug control and emphasizes that t...

Background/aims Current research largely tends to ignore the drug-testing model that was developed in the “Second World” as an explicit alternative to the randomized controlled trial. This system can be described as “socialist pharmapolitics,” accounting for the specific features of state socialism that influenced the development and testing of exp...

Rhodiola rosea is a Siberian medicinal plant possessing qualities of a central nervous system stimulant that has been traditionally used in the folk medicine of the indigenous peoples in Siberia. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the plant had been intensively studied in the scientific laboratories of Tomsk. The study of physicochemical properties o...

This article explores the intellectual history of the concept of “feeling of justice” and related concepts and the attempts to make them central to legal practice in the context of early 20th century Russia. It starts by tracing the emergence of new modes of thinking about judicial emotion in fin-de-siècle Russian Empire and accounts for both inter...

The relatively short period from 1914 to 1932 witnessed a radical change in the attitudes of both governmental authorities and professional communities towards drugs and addiction. Before the First World War, Russians could easily buy cocaine or heroin at a pharmacy, medical science did not view addiction as a serious social problem. There was prac...

This chapter travels to the early Soviet era and investigates private provision of health care in the 1920s. After the Revolution of 1917, health-care provision was reorganised to reflect aspirations to excluding market forces, establishing efficient central planning, and making medicine universally available and free. It was under these circumstan...

This article builds on previous research on early Soviet female criminality, in particular the studies by Sharon A. Kowalsky and Dan Healey, that have demonstrated how Soviet courts and criminologists explained and handled crimes committed by females, revealing, in the process, profound ambiguities and contradictions in their attitudes towards wome...

This article is an ‘emotional’ intervention in the field of early Soviet legal history: it provides a theoretical background on the role of emotions in early Soviet legal thought and practice. After sketching the wider context necessary for an understanding of emotions in the specific setting of the courtroom, it charts three possible directions fo...

The conventional image of a judge as a dispassionate person continues to prevail in both popular culture and academic scholarship, despite influential recent research that has clearly demonstrated the inevitable impact of emotions on judicial decision-making. This article provides a historical perspective on what Terry Maroney has called »the persi...

Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and 'immoral' sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the bod...