Abstract: Tuberculosis is a disease and a social phenomenon; it was the most common cause of death among adults in revolutionary Russia. It is associated with poverty, malnutrition, and crowded living conditions and with those a host of culturally mediated connotations that they elicit wherever the disease is common. In 1909-17, a private group of physicians founded a number of tuberculosis clinics in Russia based on European models and inspired by zemstvo institutions, initiating a popular antituberculosis campaign. Many these experts, working after 1917 with others in the new Soviet Commissariat of Public Health, provided remarkable continuity across the Revolutionary divide and devised a comprehensive tuberculosis control scheme, part of the welfare state apparatus that developed slowly and unevenly in the USSR. The Soviet tuberculosis dispensary, a type of clinic and the centerpiece of the system, was designed for an idealized Soviet state, where housing, diet, and labor were manipulated to benefit worker-citizens, a tool that the modernizing state could use to monitor and manage its population. Core values of the state and party were linked to containment of tuberculosis rhetorically in popular educational materials and physically in the regimens of sanatoria. To the state experts, tuberculosis was a constant source of alarm, suggesting how rampant poverty and poor living conditions remained even decades after the Revolution. This group of elite, committed physicians would shape tuberculosis control for the entire Soviet period. They tirelessly lobbied for more resources to control the deadly bacterium through the difficult period of rapid industrialization in the 1930s when preventative medicine was ignored. Studies showed that tuberculosis was common, affecting ten percent or more of working-age adults in Moscow during the NEP; when socioeconomic turmoil struck there were biological ramifications: the urban tuberculosis death rate rose, reaching a mini-peak in the mid-1930s. In addition to the dispensary, the experts of the Soviet government embraced BCG, a French tuberculosis vaccine, in the late 1920s, and by 1940 over one million infants likely benefited from BCG through a haphazard program that demonstrated the powerful role that individual physicians and Soviet bureaucrats could play in instituting an innovation.