Revolutionary Rights, Counter-Revolutionary Guarantees": Social Insurance in the East of Russia in the Second Half of 1918 and in 1919

The study is devoted to a key aspect of social policy of anti-Bolshevik governments in the East of Russia-workers' social insurance. The author focused on the most important type of insurance-the health one-because unemployment insurance demands a special study. The problem has been researched fragmentarily so far; and, in Soviet times, historians had a prejudiced attitude to it. This study rests on an extensive source base, which includes laws, publications in periodicals and documents of four archives. The structure of the study comprises a review of the history of health insurance formation in Russia, the influence of the 1917 revolution on health insurance, the state of insurance institutions in the eastern regions of Russia just before the opponents of the Bolsheviks came to power. The attempts to reform the sickness funds of Komuch and the Provisional Regional Government of the Urals are studied. The preparation of normative and instructive materials of the Russian government in the field of workers' and employees' health insurance is examined in detail, and the materials are analyzed in terms of law. The author shows the attitude of different groups of the population to the ongoing reforms, the complexity of the implementation of laws and government orders at the central and provincial/regional levels. Owners of ruined enterprises were not able to pay even reduced fees. Stabilization of social payments contradicted economic logic. As a result, a great deal of entrepreneurs evaded payments of insurance payments. Trade unions and other workers' organizations rejected the authorities' desire to equalize the financial and organizational participation of employers and employees in insurance institutions as a curtailment of revolutionary gains. In the context of acute social confrontation, a full-fledged social partnership, even with the mediation of government representatives, had no chance of success. Nevertheless, in the first half of 1919, there was a relative and short-term stabilization of the situation with sickness funds in the East of Russia, interrupted by the rapid retreat of the White Army to the East, the increased inflation and the falling living standards. The conducted reforms were designed for the post-war settlement of the social situation to a greater extent, but could not lead to the expected results during the Civil War. The author concludes that, before the revolution, the regulatory framework of health insurance in Russia was elaborated in detail. Thus, the successively occurring political regimes in 1917-1920s did not annul the regulatory framework, but supplemented and changed it.

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