Annotation. This article presents a critical analysis of how the Soviet dental care system took shape between 1918 and 1921, focusing on the work of the Dental Subsection of the People’s Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR and the views of its chief ideologist, Pavel Georgievich Daugė. The profession underwent a radical restructuring, breaking with the traditional model of private practice. The private “craft-based” model gave way to state-run preventive medicine. The article reconstructs the institutional structure of the sector’s administration, analyzes how private practices were nationalized, and describes the educational reform intended to integrate dentistry into the realm of university scholarship.A separate line of analysis focuses on the shortages that accompanied these transformations under the policy of War Communism, based on archival materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF) and regional reports on the Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, and Samara provinces. The gap between the declared “free” nature of care and everyday practice proved to be profound. Actual assistance to the population dwindled to the level of extraction units.The “Daugization” of the sector, which relied on extra-economic coercion and compulsory labor, destroyed the field’s human resources and led to the professional decline of doctors. The system was ultimately destabilized by the mass mobilization of specialists into the Red Army. In the army, 60% of doctors were deployed in roles other than their intended ones. Figures from 1921—1922 document the collapse of the military-communist model, as the transfer of institutions to local budgets led to a 69% reduction in the rural network of outpatient clinics, exposing the utopian nature of the initial plans to centrally allocate resources where market mechanisms were absent.

P. G. Dauge, People’s Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR, nationalization of dentistry, War Communism, dental education, compulsory labor, Dental Subsection, Red Army, extra-economic coercion, history of dentistry..