By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the USSR had the best blood service system in the world, which was operated by seven institutes, 170 stations and 1,778 transfusion rooms.
By Order No. 302 of the USSR People's Commissariat of Health dated 3 July 1941, “operational management of blood transfusion in the Union” was entrusted to the Central Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion (CIBT, now the NMRC for Hematology) under the leadership of A.A. Bagdasarov.
The donated blood not only had to be received, but it had to be saved (preserved) and delivered to where it was needed. In the Soviet Union, the topic of blood transfusion in the war and the problem of its preservation was taken care of long before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. Back in 1932, at the XII All-Union Congress of Surgeons, the Director of the Central Institute of Blood Transfusion A.A. Bagdasarov said that the blood service would be considered ready to work in military conditions if: 1) all personnel of the army, navy and the population were tested for group affiliation (the Rh factor had not yet been discovered), 2) military and civilian doctors were trained, 3) the problem of blood donation and preservation was solved.
The technique of successful blood preservation became a turning point in the history of medicine, and not only front-line medicine. The world supremacy in this matter belongs to Soviet doctors. In the 1930s, the first solutions for blood preservation were developed at the Central Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion. The best preservative that could preserve blood for up to 20 days was the glucose nitrate preservative CIBT No.1. The director of the Institute, A.A. Bagdasarov, presented this new technique in 1935 at the International Congress in Rome and then in 1937, in Paris.
The problem of transportation was also solved: “We have designed insulated boxes that make it possible to store and transport blood under any temperature conditions and built a special parachute and stowage that makes it possible to drop canned blood from airplanes at any height. Thus, the issue of supplying blood to points deprived of landing sites for airplanes has been resolved,” A.A. Bagdasarov wrote back in 1936. Large ampules were used instead of glass jars for storing and transporting blood.
Despite the fact that blood flowed freely at the front, donated blood was a valuable and difficult-to-obtain resource. Just imagine: to get 100 liters, you needed 250-300 donors. Where could you get these needed liters in the conditions of war? Even more so, near the front line? To conserve donated blood, “waste” blood was used (obtained from bloodletting, for example, in hypertensive patients, as well as cadaveric and placental blood) – this, of course, helped, but it did not solve the problem. One of the solutions was the method of drying plasma and blood serum in a vacuum proposed by Central Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion back in 1939: it could be transported and stored even at room temperature, and when diluted with glucose solution it was not inferior to native plasma.
Blood-replacement solutions were also used. One of the most effective blood substitutes was invented in 1941 by the head of the experimental laboratory of the Leningrad Institute of Blood Transfusion (LIBT in the structure of the CIBT) I.R. Petrov. The composition of the “Petrov tablets” included three chlorides: sodium, potassium and calcium. The tablet had to be dissolved in 100 ml of distilled water, filtered through a paper filter, poured into ampules or flasks, sterilized, and heated to 38 degrees before use. 10% compatible preserved blood was added to the resulting liquid before transfusion. Only ten percent! This invention made it possible to significantly save precious donated blood.
In July 1941, Anatoly Yefimovich Kiselyov, the future director of the Central Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion, created the world's first mobile blood transfusion station near Smolensk. During the first two months of the war, the station harvested 750 liters of blood. Later, about 10 similar stations began operating at the front.
Nevertheless, the main objective was to provide the front with donated blood, and the Central Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion completed this mission! If at the very beginning of the war, in June 1941, the institute sent 211 liters of canned blood to the front, then in October, it was already at 3,050 liters, and in the first year of the war – 55 tons! “The experience of harvesting canned blood for the army during the 1941-1945 war was unprecedented in the history of past wars. During this period, the institutes and stations of the Soviet Union harvested 1,652 tons of canned blood and its components (plasma, serum),” wrote A.E. Kiselyov. In 1944, for this work (although it is more correct to say for this feat), the institute was awarded the Order of Lenin. Its name was changed to the Central Order of Lenin Institute of Blood Transfusion.
The Blood Service, based on scientific and organizational methods developed at the Institute of Blood Transfusion, provided more than 7 million transfusions and about 3 million liters of blood during the war years, which saved millions of lives and brought most of the Red Army soldiers back into service.
