Issue 2026, 1: PROFESSIONAL as POLITICAL Physicians – challengers of the Russian health care system
This paper aims to analyze how health professionals in Russia perceive their profession as a political issue and how the war has shaped this perception. The study focuses on healthcare providers whose narratives express explicit dissatisfaction with the Russian healthcare system, sustained criticism of it, and efforts to bring about change. Drawing on the strategic action field approach, we define these actors as challengers – that is, professionals who seek to alter the organizational field of healthcare and broader societal power relations. Medical professionals are generally considered as a politically neutral group and typically do not identify them selves as challengers of the social system. However, we reveal that at critical moments of war and migration, they explicitly connect their professional positions with issues of political power and political engagement. The paper draws on in-depth interviews with healthcare providers who left Russia shortly after February 2022. The analysis suggests that in the context of an authoritarian state, healthcare professionals challenge not only the organizational field but also the political order itself, thereby relinquishing claims to political neutrality in pursuit of systemic change.