[The evolution of state support for medical tourism in Russia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries].

The article is devoted to the analysis of the evolution of state support for medical tourism in Russia in 1990-2015. The object of the research is the state policy in the field of organization and regulation of cross-border consumption of medical services, the subject is the forms, stages and institutional mechanisms of support for medical tourism. It is shown that the period under review represents an independent stage in the formation of Russian policy in this area: from the almost complete absence of special regulation in the 1990s through indirect incentives in the 2000s to the initial institutionalization of certain elements of the export of medical services in the 2010s. The source base consists of regulatory legal acts, state programs, documents of federal authorities, statistical materials and scientific literature. Methodologically, the work is based on historical-genetic, historical-institutional, comparative-historical and problematic-chronological approaches. It has been established that state support for medical tourism in Russia until 2015 was limited, unsystematic and mostly indirect; with strong clinical schools, the institutional infrastructure for attracting foreign patients remained underdeveloped.