The confrontation between Soviet and Tibetan medicine in the late 1920s - early 1930s

The article provides an insight to an understudied aspect of the history of Mongolia’s Sovietization - the confrontation between Soviet and Tibetan medicine in the process of shaping socialist healthcare in the Mongolian People’s Republic. The struggle against Tibetan medicine was the inevitable consequence of the export of ideologized Soviet healthcare model based on the Eurocentric science to Mongolia. In the course of stiff opposition to Soviet medicine, Mongolian healer lamas used a whole arsenal of counter-propaganda and defamation methods but finally were defeated. This article explains a number of reasons why Tibetan medicine lost this confrontation with socialist healthcare.