[Public health statistics in the Soviet Union in the 1920s: international cooperation and national tradition in a post-revolutionary framework].

In October 1929, a two-man delegation (a social hygienist and a sanitary statistician) went to Paris to participate in the meeting of the International Institute of Statistics called to consider revisions of the Bertillon classification of the causes of illness and death. The Soviet delegates were demonstrably eager to be considered part of the international scene in public health statistics. But they came to Paris with a radical proposal to replace the locationist system of classification with one that gave clear primacy to the principle of social etiology. This paper examines the assumptions about public health statistics, about the international area, and about their own indigenous tradition in public health, that underlay the Soviet proposal. On the basis of this particular case, the paper raises questions about the factors that favor the adoption of one system of statistical classification as opposed to others and about the general problem of studying "internationalism" in public health.