Scientific business trips abroad of the Riga Medical Institute employees in the last decade of the USSR

To examine the qualitative and quantitative tendencies of scientific foreign business trips of the teaching staff and employees of research institutes and laboratories of the Riga Medical Institute (RMI) in the period from 1979 to 1991. The National Archives of Latvia: the State Archive of Latvia  - Fund 507, instructions "for restricted circulation only" of the Ministry of Health of Latvian SSR, interviews with eyewitnesses. Comparative historical research. The policy and practice of building international scientific and cultural relations at the level of state institutions in the USSR began to develop in the mid-1950s. The last decade of the existence of the USSR is a model of all ideological contradictions in the bureaucratic and repressive regulation of international cultural, scientific and technical relations between USSR and foreign countries. This is a period of political and ideological “cold war" confrontation between the USSR and the leading Western powers since the late 1970s and significant liberalization of foreign contacts during Gorbachev's "perestroika" from 1986 to 1991. The RMI qualified among the best of the higher medical education institutions in the Soviet Union. As a leading state establishment in its field, the RMI was a suitable institution for a strictly controlled system of international educational and scientific relations between the USSR and foreign countries. This process was carried out in a “dosed” manner and under the strict control of the subordinated structures and the departments of external relations (Upravleniye vneshnikh snosheniy) of the ministries of health of the USSR (Moscow) and the Latvian SSR (Riga). The study reveals the spheres and geography of medical international cooperation of the RMI until 1992, the leading influence and regulation by communist party and bureaucratic structures, as well as the role of personal contacts in international cooperation and scientific partnership with leading medical specialists in Soviet Union.