Shingarev, Andrei Ivanovich

SHINGAREV, Andrei Ivanovich (1869–1918), a public physician and political figure of pre-revolutionary Russia, a minister of the Provisional Government in 1917, and a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party. After graduating from the university, Shingarev worked for several years as a physician in a village, where he attempted to establish public work as a "free" physician; later, he was for some time a zemstvo district physician and a sanitary physician in Voronezh Governorate. During this time, he wrote the well-known book "The Dying Village," in which, based on a study of the economic and sanitary condition of one of the villages in his medical district, he provided a vivid picture of the complete economic and cultural degeneration of the village under the conditions of autocracy and landlord exploitation. This book, which went through several editions, played its role in criticizing the dying regime of old Russia, although it did not reveal the entire class essence of the village's situation at that time. During the years of Soviet power (1927), the same village of Novo-Zhivotinnoye, under different socio-economic conditions of its life, was again subjected to an examination by Soviet investigators, who showed, in contrast to the former state, the rise and cultural flourishing of the same village under Soviet power. Subsequently, Shingarev distinguished himself as a public figure, first in the field of healthcare organization as a zemstvo physician (participation and a leading role in the Pirogov Congresses), and then as a political figure, joining the Constitutional Democratic Party and playing a prominent role in it. As a member of this bourgeois party, Shingarev entered the State Duma and occupied a prominent position there both as a constant orator and as an energetic worker on issues of agrarian and financial policy, speaking in opposition to the government and defending liberal forms on the basis of preserving the economic structure of the capitalist system intact. In the period 1908–1914, Shingarev also acted as a figure in higher education; he compiled one of the first curricula for a course in social hygiene, which he taught under a different name at the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg. Shingarev also wrote a number of journal articles on issues of public medicine. After the February Revolution of 1917, Shingarev was a member of the Provisional Government for several months (until July), occupying the post of Minister of Agriculture, conducting a sharp struggle against the growing forces of the proletariat, and thus became one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary movement during the October coup and after the October Revolution.