ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — The intention to turn a St. Petersburg clinic treating pediatric cancer patients into one that would exclusively serve judges and staff of Russia’s highest courts spread widespread public dismay.

More than 100,000 people signed a petition to President Vladimir Putin, a city native, urging him to scrap the plan to change City Hospital No. 31. Among those who signed were prominent figures from the worlds of art and sciences, including physicist Zhores Alfyorov, a Nobel Prize winner who is a member of Russia’s parliament.

In a rare occasion of what appears to be the government bowing to public pressure, the plan was shelved Wednesday.

The St. Petersburg governor’s office said the hospital would continue to treat patients and insisted there was no plan to change its location or profile when the Supreme Court and other top courts are relocated to Russia’s second largest city from Moscow.

The Kremlin’s property department also issued assurances that the hospital, located on prestigious Krestovsky Island, would not be given over to judges of the top courts.

Even so, about 1,500 people took part in a planned evening protest, with some saying they did not trust officials not to go back on their word. Braving a bitter winter wind, they held up signs that said: “Children are more important than bureaucrats” and “You want to kill the hospital, but you will kill children instead.”

“Even a one-day break in the work of the hospital is a potential murder,” said protester Anna Ivanova, a 29-year-old pediatrician who trained with the hospital’s doctors. “I’m sure that it is only the fact that people have come out to defend the hospital that it might be saved,” said Nadezhda Dankova, a 32-year-old pediatric nurse.

 

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