Socio-economic and scientific premises for forming the strategies against malaria in Russia under Soviet power.

The rapid spread of malaria in the 1920s-early '30s in the USSR was a result of Stalin's social and demographic policy. The Soviet government needed to elaborate the special complex of organisational and applied scientific measures concerning the eradication of malaria. The Central Malaria Commission and a network of antimalaria stations were created. In the 1930s and '40s malaria studies were institutionalised. A system of Medical Research Institutes was set up in the Soviet Union. Antimalaria congresses and periodical special issues helped coordinate their activities. Russian parasitologists worked out new approaches and methods of the comprehensive control of malaria foci. During World War II (1941-1945), the epidemiological situation was aggravated and antimalaria measures reduced. In the years 1945-1960 Beklemishev with his scientific school worked out the concept of landscape malariology and of "vital scheme of the species". This concept formed the basis for realising the malaria eradication strategy. In 1961 the WHO Malaria Eradication Department ascertained the liquidation of all types of malaria in Russia as epidemics.