The intellectual history of eugenics in the Soviet Union developed quite differently than in other European states. Compared to many of its neighbouring states, its history was short, limited mostly to the 1920s.

In the first decade after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, eugenics was supported by the People’s Commissariat of Health and Education, and perceived as a part of the project of a rational, hypermodern vision for the re-organization of society. Soviet state planners agreed that scientific categorization was necessary to transform the relatively backward lands of the Soviet Union, and worked together with biologists, physicians, and physical anthropologists to charter and survey the characterizations of various ethnic groups on their lands. Soviet racial science was largely led by men who were educated in, and the product of the late imperial era. They were strongly influenced by German racial anthropology and followed similar modules to charter blood groups and “racial” and physical characteristics to define and categorize the populations.

Motivations: Who & Why
In the Soviet case, one would have to make a rather clear distinction between racial anthropology and eugenics. In many European countries the concept of eugenics and racial hygiene came to merge, whereas in the USSR they were largely kept separate. Racial science (razovedenie) was regarded a legitimate field of inquiry. It was treated as unrelated to racism, which was sharply condemned by the Soviet authorities. The existence of human races was not only taken for granted, it was integrated into official ideology, which treated race as a stage, or phase, in historical materialism. Under primitive communism, according to official ideology, there were no human races. Rather, these developed under later stages in history, as the result of socio-economic conditions. Under communism, racial differences would disappear along with nations and classes, and the Soviet man would be a “racial” hybrid.

Applied eugenics, on the other hand, as a concept had a short history in the USSR, limited to a half a dozen years in the 1920s. Soviet eugenicists sought to distance themselves from their colleagues in the west, and to develop a Soviet, socialist eugenics. The eugenic research was, primarily, carried out at institutions for genetic research in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv. In Soviet eugenics, two men, in particular, stood out: Iurii Filipchenko (1882-1930), a pioneer of Russian and Soviet genetics and Valerii Bunak (1891-1979), the leading Soviet racial anthropologist, who worked in the field of craniology, blood groups, and racial classifications.

The biologist Aleksandr Serebrovskii (1892-1948) suggested a “truly socialist” way of eugenic engineering, by producing a superior Soviet man through separating love and reproduction. Others, such as the biochemist E. O. Manoilov believed that the study of various blood types could determine racial and national identities. Soviet eugenicists had to work within the shrinking confines of official ideology. While they rejected race as a basis for eugenic measures against individuals, some argued in applying them to the mentally ill and habitual criminals, whose reproduction they deemed dangerous to society. Eugenics, as a field, essentially ceased to exist following the rise of Stalin around 1928-30. In 1930 the Russian Eugenics Society was disbanded, and eugenics was denounced as a “bourgeois” and “fascist” doctrine. Soviet scholars who had done research on miscegenation were repressed after 1931, by which time their contacts with international colleagues had been almost totally severed. Yet, also under Stalin, Soviet racial science remained respected as a legitimate field of inquiry, and questioning the existence of human races was condemned as “subversive-idealistic” position. During the Stalinist era, but also after 1956 and well into the 1970s, Soviet racial anthropologists continued to charter the “racial characteristics” of various peoples in the Soviet union, operating within increasingly dated paradigm of pigmentation, shape of eyelids, noses, lip thickness to racially classify human populations.

Repeal/Apology – Contemporary/Post-Eugenic Era
As eugenics was prohibited in the Soviet Union at the same time as various programs of sterilization were introduced in several European and North American states, the situation in the Soviet Union was quite different. As state eugenics was abandoned in its infancy, it is hard to talk about a post-Eugenics era in Russia and other Soviet successor states. Yet, the legacy of Soviet raciology remains strong in many post-Soviet countries; primordial notions of the existence of objective racial categories and nationalities remain firmly rooted, are often taken for granted, and seldom questioned.

-Per Anders Rudling

• Adams, M., Allen, G. E., & Weiss, S.F. (2005). Human Heredity and Politics: A Comparative Institutional Study of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor (United States), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (Germany), and the Maxim Gorky Medical Genetics Institute (USSR). Osiris 20(1), 232-62.

• Graham, L.R. (1977). Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s. American Historical Review, 82(5), 1133-1164.

• Krementsov, N. (2010). Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union. In A. Bashford & P. Levine (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Eugenics (413-419). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Rudling, P. A. (2014). Eugenics and Racial Biology in Sweden and the USSR: Contacts across the Baltic Sea. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine, 31(1), 41-75.

• Schmuhl, H.W. (2000). Rassenhygiene in Deutschland—Eugenik in der Sowjetunion: Ein Vergleich. In D. Beyrau (Ed.), Im Dschungel der Macht: Intellektuelle Professionen unter Hitler und Stalin (360-71). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.