p In the preceding chapters it was shown that, as a result of the rise in the living standards of the Soviet people and the development of culture and the economy, the general health of the people has greatly improved. General and child mortality have sharply decreased, while the average life expectancy has more than doubled. The changes in the health of the Soviet people have been so great that it would not be wrong to speak of a transformation of the type or profile of pathology, i.e., fundamental changes in mortality indices and disease incidence. Whereas before the Great October Socialist Revolution the type or profile of pathology was characterised by a prevalence of infectious diseases, including acute communicable epidemic diseases, i.e., was essentially epidemic, today it may be called nonepidemic. This is to say that infectious and parasitic diseases have been “superseded” in the structure of disease incidence and especially of mortality by nonepidemic disorders which usually run a chronic course. It was owing to this and other factors that general and child mortality has gone down, the average life expectancy has increased, and the other health indices and demographic phenomena have changed. In particular, the accelerated change of generations that was observed in pre-revolutionary Russia has given place to a reduced change of generations.

Obviously we need to go into the above processes in greater detail because they are of considerable importance not only in analysing the state of the people’s health, but also in evaluating the work of the public health services.