Vegetative-Vascular Dystonia: Medical Legacy of the USSR and the Bodily Archive of the 1990s

Abstract

The article examines vegetative-vascular dystonia (VVD) as a culturally specific syndrome, situating it within the broader context of Soviet medicine, healthcare infrastructure, and the historical era of the late USSR and the 1990s. I analyze the primary reasons for the emergence and prevalence of this distinctly Soviet diagnosis and point to the two key factors in the formation of VVD’s understanding: a mode of medical thinking characteristic of the Soviet medicine, and the structure of the Soviet healthcare system which sustained the diagnosis within the practices of physicians, patients, and the bureaucracy. Furthermore, the zeitgeist significantly influenced the prevalence of VVD. The surge in the diagnosis’s popularity during the second half of the 1980s is linked to the dominant political and social atmosphere. I argue that VVD may be seen as a direct embodiment of the experience of hardships faced by the majority of Soviet people in the 1980s and, subsequently, the 1990s; therefore, I attempt to interpret VVD as the embodied experience of the Soviet Union’s disintegration.