Nikolai Semashko (medicine)

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko (Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Сема́шко) (September 20 [O.S. September 8] 1874 – May 18, 1949), was a Russian statesman who became People's Commissar of Public Health in 1918 and served in that role until 1930; he was one of the organizers of the health system in the Soviet Union, an academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1944) and of the RSFSR (1945).

Nikolai Semashko was born to a teacher in the village of Livenskoe in Yelets uezd of Oryol guberniya (now Lipetsk Oblast). His mother was a sister of Georgi Plekhanov.

In 1891, after graduating from the Yelets gymnasium (where he studied with Mikhail Prishvin), Semashko entered the medical faculty of Moscow University. In 1893, he became a member of a Marxist group. In 1895, for his participation in the revolutionary movement, he was arrested and exiled to his home in Livenskoe, under strict police surveillance. In 1901 he graduated from the medical faculty of Kazan University, after which he worked as a doctor in Oryol and Samara. In 1904 he was an active member of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP); during the 1905 Russian Revolution he was one of the organizers of the strike at the Sormovo Factory, for which he was again arrested.

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