The Endowment in Support of Tarusa Hospital was founded in 2005 by the renowned cardiologist Maxim Osipov, with financial and programmatic support from the American entrepreneur Bernard Sucher. Since then, thanks to philanthropic donations, the small provincial hospital in Tarusa has received a wide range of medical equipment and grants for support of several highly qualified doctors. The hospital in Tarusa has become widely known in the world of Russian medicine.

Now, like so many medical institutions around the world, the Tarusa hospital has to face the coronavirus pandemic. The main goals for the present moment are: 1) to continue to treat the residents of Tarusa and numerous visitors, without compromising the quality of care, 2) to keep the hospital from becoming a source of viral spread, as has happened with many other medical facilities. To ensure this, the hospital staff must themselves not become infected and not infect patients. The costs of personal protective equipment, medicines, and resuscitation equipment have increased many times over. With this in mind, The Endowment in Support of Tarusa Hospital asks you for financial assistance. Our Paypal ID is: https://www.paypal.me/tarusahelp.

Joshua Yaffa, a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine in Russia, has written a letter in support of our activities:

I have spent a fair amount of the last several years in Tarusa, a wonderful and beguiling little town some seventy-five miles from Moscow. In 2019, I had the joy of writing about Tarusa for The New Yorker; in that story, I described first discovering the place on a day trip with my wife some years before: «The houses in the middle of town are squat and wooden, with foundations that have sunk into the dirt and window frames painted in long-faded colors. We could have travelled a hundred miles or a thousand—we had left Moscow and entered, well, Russia. I was charmed.»

As I came to spend more and more time in Tarusa, I fell into the history of the place—the writers and artists and dissidents who found refuge there—but also with the colorful and unique present-day happenings of the town, much of which have been centered around the local hospital. There, in an unassuming late-Soviet edifice made of pale brick, Maxim Osipov, a cardiologist-turned-writer, achieved something remarkable: beginning in 2005, along with the American entrepreneur Bernard Sucher, he gathered private donations from Russia and abroad, turning what had been a dispiriting provincial hospital into a well-equipped, dignified, and professional medical facility. Oftentimes he managed this in spite of the wishes of local authorities, rather than with their support. Osipov, along with his colleague Artemy Okhotin, brought a remarkable standard of care to the hospital, fueled by their own talent and experience, and no small degree of healthy stubbornness. «We didn’t ask if we were allowed,» Okhotin told me of the first time they performed transesophageal echocardiography, an advanced heart-imaging technique. «We decided, and that was that.» These days, thanks to the fund created by Osipov, the Tarusa hospital is one of the leading medical centers of its kind in the region, an example and inspiration for what health-care in provincial Russia can be—if led by a strong cadre of local doctors and supported by the generosity of a wide circle of well-wishers.

Tarusa has not been spared the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic: a number of people in town have been infected with the virus; some have fallen critically ill. For years, thanks to the efforts of Osipov, Okhotin, and now Osipov’s son, Vasily, who works as an internist at the hospital, the residents of Tarusa have been afforded competent, professional, and well-resourced medical care. Ensuring that vital work continues is now more important than ever.