5. Rebirth: Eugenics and Marxism
p. 239-292
Texte intégral
“[It] cannot be uniform: every [social] class must create its own eugenics.”
Alexander Serebrovskii, 12 January 1926
1For sixty years since its first publication, Vasilii Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration remained apparently unread and its major ideas dormant. In 1926, however, the book was republished. The main reason for its “resurrection” was the rapid growth during the early twentieth century of a transnational eugenics movement, initiated by, among many others, Francis Galton and advanced by his numerous followers in Britain and elsewhere. The infiltration of eugenics into Russian professional and popular discourse on human variability, heredity, development, and evolution began shortly after Florinskii’s death and culminated in the establishment of a Russian Eugenics Society (RES) in 1920. And it was one of the society’s founding members and its “scientific secretary” Mikhail Volotskoi who discovered, actively popularized, and eventually reissued Florinskii’s book.
2Volotskoi portrayed Florinskii as a “precursor” to Galton and his “marriage hygiene” as a “predecessor” of Galtonian eugenics. But for its new publisher and editor, Florinskii’s treatise was more than a historical curiosity, and its republication was more than an attempt to demonstrate the long “native roots” of eugenics in Russia. Rather, Volotskoi came to see Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration as a model and justification for what, in contrast to Galton’s “bourgeois” eugenics, he named a “proletarian,” “socialist,” “bio-social” eugenics. Volotskoi went beyond a theoretical analysis of what “bio-social” eugenics should be and do. He launched several research projects that would advance its actual development. Indeed, he made explicit the research programme embedded, though not clearly articulated, in Florinskii’s notions of “conditions conducive” to human degeneration and perfection. He started detailed investigations on the “eugenic consequences” of various factors, ranging from occupational hazards to women’s fashions to such “racial poisons” as syphilis, TB, and narcotics.
Galton, Eugenics, and Imperial Russia
3Unlike Florinskii, who after the 1865 publication of his essays never returned to the issues of human reproduction, variability, heredity, and evolution, Galton made the study of these questions his life’s mission and did everything he could to ensure that it would be continued thereafter. For nearly forty years since his first 1865 “eugenic” article, Galton almost single-handedly carried out an extensive programme of quantitative investigations on human variability, heredity, and evolution, ranging from studies of pedigrees, twins, photographic composites, and fingerprints to bio-, psycho-, and anthropo-metry.1 He reported on his results to various scientific societies and institutions and produced numerous publications, from short letters to newspapers pieces, popular magazine essays, extended articles in professional journals, and voluminous monographs.
4Yet unlike the results of his concrete investigations (whether into the principles of biometry, for which the Royal Society awarded him its Darwin Medal, or the classification of fingerprints, which lay a foundation for the personal identification system eventually adopted worldwide), Galton’s notion of eugenics and his theorizing on the “possible improvement of the human breed” by means of selective breeding of “men and women of rare and similar talent” had found little support. As he bitterly remarked in his Huxley Lecture delivered to the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland on 29 October 1901, eugenics “is smiled at as most desirable in itself and possibly worthy of academic discussion, but absolutely out of the question as a practical problem.”2
5At the time of this remark, Galton was nearing his eightieth birthday and beginning to feel his age. His wife had died a few years earlier and, unlike his cousin Charles Darwin’s, his own 43-year-long marriage had borne no children. The approaching milestone seemed to have prodded Galton to contemplate his legacy. He apparently decided to devote his sunset years to putting his “brain-child” on firmer ground. Perhaps the biggest scientific excitement of the previous year — the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s “laws of hybridization,” which led to rapid growth of the new science of heredity, soon to be named “genetics” by his compatriot and critic William Bateson — played a role in Galton’s decision. In the opinion of his close collaborator and first biographer Karl Pearson, “Galton had set before himself in the last years of his life a definite plan of eugenics propagandism.”3
6The plan was indeed far-reaching. And it was not limited merely to propaganda. In fact, Galton set out to make his “brain-child” into a proper scientific discipline by defining its subjects and goals, outlining its particular methodology, training its practitioners, and establishing its research facilities, teaching programmes, regular forums, and publishing outlets. In 1901 Galton supported the establishment of Biometrika, the first journal devoted specifically to the quantitative studies of variability, heredity, and evolution, by both lending his name to the editorial board and underwriting the journal’s financial security with his personal funds.4 Run by his younger disciples and admirers — London mathematician Pearson, Oxford zoologist Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, and Harvard biologist Charles Davenport — Biometrika became, for Galton, a convenient vehicle for the dissemination of both his statistical methods and his eugenic ideas.5 His Huxley Lecture, delivered just a few days after the first issue of Biometrika came out and titled “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment,” was another step in his propaganda campaign. But, although its text appeared almost immediately on both sides of the Atlantic in four different periodicals, including Nature,6 the most widely circulated scientific journal of the time, according to Pearson, its main audience — anthropologists — remained deaf to Galton’s ideas. This probably induced Galton to intensify and expand his efforts.7
7In the spring of 1904, he found a new venue for his proselytizing — the London Sociological Society. Established at the beginning of that year by a diverse group of scientists, economists, social reformers, and writers, the newborn society proved receptive to eugenics.8 At the society’s widely publicized and carefully stage-managed meeting on 16 May 1904, Galton delivered a long lecture on “Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims” to an audience overflowing a large hall of the London School of Economics. It was the first time that Galton put the word “eugenics” in the title of a presentation and attempted to define the meanings, goals, and methods of “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; [and] also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”9 With Pearson in the chair, the lecture was followed by a lively discussion that featured contributions by the leading intellectuals of the day (including political theorist Leonard T. Hobhouse, sociologist Benjamin Kidd, psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, playwright George Bernard Shaw, philosopher Lady Victoria Welby, and writer H. G. Wells). Galton’s lecture was widely covered in the press and published in the society’s journal.10 In Pearson’s words, it “got an excellent advertisement for Eugenics,”11 which Galton quickly proceeded to build upon.
8In October, obviously inspired by the reception of his lecture at the Sociological Society, Galton approached “the authorities of the University of London” with an offer to fund “a small establishment for the furtherance of Eugenics.”12 The university’s officials readily agreed to lend its name and space to a “Eugenics Record Office,” while Galton underwrote its operational costs for the next three years, paying the salaries of a “Research Fellow” and a “Research Scholar in National Eugenics.”13 It was in the course of his negotiations with university officials that Galton redefined eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally,”14 a definition that from this time on replaced his earlier, rather vague pronouncements on eugenics’ scope and aims.15
9A few months later, on 14 February 1905, Galton delivered a second lecture to the Sociological Society on what he apparently considered to be the most important among the “agencies under social control”: marriage. The lecture again sparked a heated discussion on the floor as well as in the press, which prompted Galton to supplement the publication of its text with several follow-up statements that clarified his views on “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion” and on “Studies in National Eugenics” to be carried out under his direction at the just instituted Eugenics Record Office.16 It was in this lecture and its supplements that Galton delineated the two complementary sides of eugenics: the science and the creed of human hereditary improvement, with the former serving as the foundation for the latter and the latter providing the basis for concrete actions aimed at increasing “good” heredity (“positive eugenics”) and decreasing “bad” heredity (“negative eugenics”) in the British nation.
10In 1906, Galton’s failing health prompted him to take further steps to assure the future of his “brain-child.” He asked Pearson to take over the directorship of the Eugenics Record Office, and amended his will to make provisions for its continuation. He also endowed “a professorship in eugenics” at the University of London and initiated the formation of a Eugenics Society. All of his efforts brought plentiful fruits. Over the course of the next year, the Eugenics Record Office was reconstituted as the Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory under Pearson’s directorship and a “Eugenics Education Society” (EES) established with Galton as its “honorary president.”17 In 1909, the EES issued Galton’s Essays on Eugenics, a collection of his key reports and publications on the subject over the prior few years.18 The society also began to publish the Eugenics Review, a widely circulated journal that became an oracle of the new creed. To the end of his days on 17 January 1911, Galton continued his proselytizing campaign, delivering lectures, publishing articles, and even writing a “eugenic” novel, titled Kantsaywhere.19 Upon Galton’s death, Pearson became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics, while Charles Darwin’s son Leonard took over the office of EES president, thus ensuring further development of both the science and the creed of eugenics.
11A year later, in July 1912, furthering its major goal of making “more widely known to the public the aims of Eugenists,”20 the EES hosted in London the First International Eugenics Congress presided over by Leonard Darwin. Although representatives of more than twenty countries took part in the congress’s proceedings, its primary target was the British public. Nearly ninety per cent of its 300-plus attendees were high-profile British politicians, scientists, writers, social activists and reformers, educators, physicians, socialites, and civil servants. In advance of the congress, the EES published in English all the reports by the participants, providing parallel texts of the originals submitted in the French, Italian, and German languages. The British press extensively covered the congress’s week-long proceedings, with The Times carrying daily reports on its sessions.
12The congress vividly demonstrated that while Galton had been waging his proselytizing campaign in Britain, the ideas of the “physical and mental improvement” of humankind had been developed by numerous adherents in many other countries. Indeed, by the time the congress met in London, a variety of research establishments, periodicals, societies, and legislative initiatives — all aimed at the “improvement of humankind” — had emerged in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States.21 Furthermore, several American states had already passed special laws that targeted the procreation of convicted criminals, mentally-ill, and other “undesirables.” As reports delivered at the congress clearly showed, various “national” versions of eugenics had developed in different institutional, intellectual, and social contexts and under different names, such as, for instance, Rassenhygiene and Fortpflanzungshygiene in Germany, humaniculture, euthenics, and stirpiculture in the United States, and pédotechnie and puériculture in Belgium and France. The congress thus became a key instrument of, and a pivotal point in, not only disseminating Galton’s “eugenic gospel” to various countries, but also congealing the variety of “national” approaches to the issues of human betterment into a transnational eugenics movement that in the next few years rapidly spread around the globe.22
13Yet the eugenics gospel was not greeted with the same enthusiasm everywhere. One notable exception was Russia. An announcement that the “First international congress on eugenics (racial hygiene)” will be held in London appeared well in advance in The Physician’s Gazette, the country’s most widely circulated medical periodical.23 Symptomatically, it used Galton’s term “eugenics” as a synonym of Ploetz’s “racial hygiene.” Nevertheless, the announcement failed to induce the formation of a national “consultative committee” similar to those set up in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States in order “to nominate a strictly limited number of readers of papers for each Country, representing the country at the congress.”24 No one officially represented Russia at the congress. Although, just a few months before the congress’s opening, two Russian physicians did attend a conference on “genealogy, heredity, and racial hygiene,” organized in April 1912 by psychiatrist Robert Sommer in Giessen,25 it seemed that the Russian scholarly community was not interested in taking an active part in the advancement of eugenics.26
14The silence that enveloped Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration during his lifetime suggests that in the second half of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire lacked the socio-economic conditions — from industrialization and urbanization to declining fertility, from a developed civil society to an influential hereditary aristocracy, and from immigration to overpopulation — that fueled interest in eugenic ideas elsewhere. The huge, sparsely populated, predominately agrarian, autocratic, poly-confessional, and multiethnic — on the level of both the population and the ruling elites — empire provided neither sufficient data, nor receptive audiences for “eugenic” concerns about racial degeneration and intermixing, falling birth rates, social degradation, or immigration, the very subjects that would constitute the major themes of the London congress.
15Just a few years after Florinskii’s death, however, the advent of industrialization, along with the rapid growth of medical, scientific, pedagogical, and legal professions in Russia, stimulated some interest in ideas of “human betterment.” During the first two decades of the twentieth century, such ideas started to filter into professional and public discourse. Various publishers began to issue translations of works by known British, Dutch, French, German, Swiss, and US proponents of these ideas, including Georg Buschan, Charles Davenport, Emile Duclaux, Alfons Fischer, August Forel, Kurt Goldstein, Max von Gruber, Elie Perrier, Théodule Ribot, Charles Richet, Johannes Rutgers, and Pearson — but, surprisingly, not Galton.27
16Although after the 1874 translation of Hereditary Genius, no other works of Galton’s were published in the country, Russian commentators certainly knew of his role as a “founder” of eugenics. The very word “eugenics” (evgenika) and a brief exposition of Galton’s views on its meanings appeared in Russian for the first time in a 1902 anthropology textbook, written by Ludwik Krzywicki.28 In 1911, Russia’s own “Darwin’s bulldog” Kliment Timiriazev published in a popular encyclopedia a lengthy sketch of Darwin’s cousin’s biography (along with his portrait), emphasizing Galton’s role in developing and promoting eugenics.29 He also wrote for the same encyclopedia an extensive entry on “Eugenics” that praised Galton as the founder of the “new field of knowledge” and outlined its latest developments in Britain.30
17But Russian observers were also well informed of varied approaches to the issues of “human betterment” developed in other countries. They picked selectively from the pool of available ideas, liberally mixing Anglo-American eugenics with French anthropologie sociale, German Sozialpathologie with French puériculture, and German Rassenhygiene with French eugénnetique. They coined a special term, antropotekhnika (anthropotechnique), modeled on the Russian word for animal breeding zootekhnika (zootechnique). The new word served as a synonym for Russian translations/transliterations of such corresponding English, German, and French terms as eugenics (evgenika), Rassenhygiene (rassovaia gigiena), Fortpflanzungshygiene (generativnaia gigiena or gigiena razmnozheniia) and eugénnetique (evgenetika).31
18After 1900, Russia’s budding professional and disciplinary communities of psychiatrists, jurists, pedagogues, anthropologists, social hygienists, and biologists began to take up the ideas and agendas of their western colleagues under consideration, addressing various facets of eugenic research, creed, and policies in professional and popular periodicals. Although Russian observers were quite eclectic in borrowing from their colleagues elsewhere, their approach to eugenics was decidedly critical. Most commentators criticized the “race” and “class” underpinnings of eugenic ideas and policies espoused by German and British eugenicists. Many placed strong emphasis on environment/education/nurture, as did their French colleagues. They largely rejected “negative measures” (be it sterilization or segregation) promoted by US, German, and Scandinavian eugenicists as a means of remedying such “social ills” as alcoholism, venereal diseases, TB, prostitution, and crime. Instead, they advocated for the improvement of social conditions, re-education, and prophylactic medicine.
19These critical attitudes were displayed prominently in Russian responses to the 1912 London congress. Even though the Russian Empire had no official representatives at the congress, at least two imperial subjects did attend its sessions. The eminent naturalist, geographer, and theoretician of anarchism Prince Petr Kropotkin, who at the time was living in exile in Britain, took part in the discussions, while Isaak Shklovskii, a popular journalist (who wrote under the penname Dioneo), covered the congress for Russian “thick” journals.
20Kropotkin delivered a passionate diatribe against the congress’s class bias.32 “Who were unfit?” he exclaimed rhetorically, “the workers or the idlers? The women of the people, who suckled their children themselves, or the ladies who were unfit for maternity because they could not perform all the duties of a mother? Those who produced degenerates in slums, or those who produced degenerates in palaces?” He vehemently opposed proposals repeatedly voiced at the congress to sterilize the “unfit”: “Before recommending the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the unsuccessful, the epileptic (Dostoevsky was an epileptic), was it not their [eugenicists’] duty to study the social roots and causes of these diseases?” Kropotkin insisted that such social measures as the creation of healthy housing and the abolition of slums “would improve the germplasm of the next generation more than any amount of sterilization.”
21Shklovskii echoed Kropotkin’s criticism. The subtitle of his correspondence from the congress — “Beastly Philosophy” — speaks for itself. If Kropotkin attacked the “class” underpinnings of eugenic ideas, Shklovskii focused his critique on the “racial” ones: “All those, purportedly scientific, data, upon which the doctrines of higher and lower races are based,” he declared, “cannot withstand criticism, for the very simple reason that anthropology knows of no pure races.”33 Indeed, although some Russian anthropologists, particularly among proponents of “criminal anthropology” à-la Cesare Lombroso, did engage in the propaganda of the superiority of the “Great-Russian race,”34 most of their colleagues rejected the “racialization” of their subjects.35
22The London congress certainly helped intensify interest in eugenics the world over, including Russia. In its aftermath, a number of Russian physicians, biologists, social hygienists, anthropologists, jurists, and educators got involved in discussions about eugenics (in its various “national” versions). Some Russian anthropologists enthusiastically embraced the eugenic vision of “bettering humankind.” Eugenics offered them an opportunity to become not simply the “observateurs de l’homme,” but also to play a prominent social role as experts on human diversity and evolution.36 It was the anthropologist Krzywicki who coined the Russian term antropotekhnika and wrote entries on eugenics for various Russian encyclopaedias.37 Yet, as did other Russian commentators, in the aftermath of the London congress, Krzywicki cautioned against too hasty applications of “negative” eugenic measures, which, in his opinion, at the present time “turn into the instrument of narrow class interests.”38
23Many Russian jurists viewed unfavorably both the ideas of “inborn criminality” and proposals to sterilize prisoners, which were quite popular among many western proponents of eugenics. Indeed, jurists were one of the first professional groups to critically address “eugenic” issues in Russia. Several eminent legal scholars mounted a pointed critique of US sterilization laws, particularly the provisions for coerced sterilization of prisoners.39 This critique was part of a wider debate on justice in the relationship between crime and punishment and, more generally, between the law and the rights of the individual.40 That debate flared up in the aftermath of the first Russian Revolution of 1905-1906, which for the first time in the country’s history granted (at least on paper) its citizens the rule of law and basic civil liberties, is telling. In the atmosphere of political reaction that followed the revolution’s defeat, sterilization laws became the jurists’favorite practice target in their veiled attacks on the tsarist regime’s continuing infringements on individual rights and freedoms. In 1912, Pavel Liublinskii, a wellknown St. Petersburg jurist, published a detailed and highly critical assessment of “eugenic laws” recently enacted in the United States in Russian Thought.41 The London congress reinforced this trend.42
24Similarly, many Russian pedagogues and psychologists critically evaluated the ideas of “hereditary feeble-mindedness,” arguing that so-called “defective” children could be brought up to be normal members of the society.43 At the First Russian Congress on Public Education in January 1914, for instance, Kharkov University’s professor Isaak Orshanskii delivered a lengthy report on “Heredity and Degeneration.” Orshanskii’s speech prompted the congress to issue a special “resolution on the struggle against criminality, suicide, defectiveness, and degeneration among children,” calling for the foundation of specialized schools for the re-education of “defective children.”44
25As were their colleagues elsewhere, many Russian physicians were sympathetic to eugenics. For many doctors dealing with chronic diseases, psychiatrists and neurologists in particular, eugenics offered new research methodologies (medical family histories, twins studies, and statistical analysis) and a new interpretive framework, replacing older, vague ideas of “inborn constitution” with the newly introduced concepts of heredity (be they Galtonian, Weismannian, Mendelian, or Lamarckian).45 Some psychiatrists, including Vladimir Bekhterev in St. Petersburg and Tikhon Iudin in Moscow, investigated the ideas of “hereditary degeneration” in their studies of the mentally ill.46 Others, for example, Orshanskii, focused on “hereditary talents,” continuing Galton’s research programme.47 During this period, several doctoral dissertations on “heredity and disease” were defended in Russia.48 In 1913 Kazan University’s psychiatrist Alexander Sholomovich produced a 300-page clinical study on “Heredity and Physical Signs of Degeneration in Mentally Ill and Healthy Patients.” Sholomovich discussed his findings in light of various theories of heredity, including those of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Galton, August Weismann, and Mendel.49 That same year, Bekhterev invited Iurii Filipchenko (1882-1930), a founder of Russian genetics, to teach Russia’s first course on the subject at the Psycho-Neurological Institute Bekhterev established in St. Petersburg a few years earlier. For many physicians, the use of eugenic language and methods became a means of making their special fields more “objective” and “scientific.” After the London congress their principal periodical The Physician’s Gazette regularly carried articles, reviews, and comments on the subject.50
26Eugenics garnered a warm reception among Russian public health doctors and social hygienists. A programmatic statement opening the first issue of Hygiene and Sanitation (a new journal founded in 1910 by eminent bacteriologist Nikolai Gamaleia) declared that “generative hygiene (eugenics)” must constitute an integral part of Russian public health agendas.51 In the same issue, the journal began publication of a series of articles on eugenics and introduced a special bibliographic section “on eugenics.” As did their western colleagues, many Russian social hygienists focused particularly on questions of alcoholism and heredity.52 Public health specialists strove to keep abreast of the newest developments in the studies of heredity. In November 1912, for example, the Russian Society for the Protection of People’s Health organized a special session and invited Roman Provokhenskii, a well-known animal breeder, to lecture on “modern views on heredity” and their application to humans.53 In the academic year of 1913-1914, Iur’ev (formerly Dorpat) University’s professor Evgenii A. Shepilevskii included “racial hygiene” into his courses and reported on the subject at the meetings of the local society of physicians.54
27Eugenics also found a receptive audience in the nascent community of Russian experimental biologists. As did their western counterparts, Russian biologists exploited eugenic rhetoric in order to legitimize a new field that captivated their interests — genetics. A popular-science magazine, Priroda (Nature), that became this community’s oracle after its establishment in 1912, regularly featured articles on both genetics and eugenics.55 Two founders of Russian genetics, Nikolai Kol’tsov (1872-1940; who in 1914 became co-editor of Priroda) in Moscow and Filipchenko in St. Petersburg, were particularly active in this endeavor.56 In early February 1917, Filipchenko delivered a keynote lecture on eugenics to a large gathering marking the tenth anniversary of Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute.57
28Yet, despite this flurry of reports and publications on eugenics (in its Anglo-American, French, and German variants), each of the aforementioned professional/disciplinary communities focused almost exclusively on the topics and subjects that resonated with their own professional interests. Indeed, eugenic publications appearing in different specialized periodicals often read as if they were devoted to completely different subjects, without any attempt to find a common ground.58 The pronouncements on eugenics by Gamaleia and Iudin, leading spokesmen for public health specialists (social hygienists) and psychiatrists, respectively, provide an illuminating example.
29Established by Gamaleia in 1910, Hygiene and Sanitation became the first Russian periodical to address systematically various eugenic issues and attempt to apply eugenic ideas to the Russian context. The editorial opening the journal’s first issue clearly described its purpose: “all of our attention will be focused on those sanitary measures that are important for the ozdorovlenie (healthification) of Russia.”59 Among the various subjects that the journal planned to cover to make the country healthy, Gamaleia listed infectious diseases, clean water supply and sewage disposal, housing, school, and occupational hygiene, demography and vital statistics, military and naval hygiene, and “generative hygiene (eugenics).”60 Following this programmatic statement, the same issue carried the first of a series of detailed articles — written by Gamaleia’s junior colleague Kazimir Karrafa-Korbut — surveying the goals, methods, and ideas of British eugenics and German racial hygiene.61 A special bibliographic section “on eugenics” regularly reviewed and summarized recent western books and articles appearing in such European periodicals as the British Eugenics Review, the German Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschafts-Biologie and Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexual-Politik, and the French La Presse Médicale and L’Hygiène Populaire.62 Among various items on the subject, Hygiene and Sanitation carried an essay on the history of eugenics, a lengthy report on the proceedings of the First International Eugenics Congress, and a survey of the current views on heredity.63
30Gamaleia personally wrote several editorials discussing various facets of eugenic research and policies and reviewed several eugenic publications.64 Furthermore, in late November 1912 the editor published a long article “On the Conditions Favorable for the Betterment of Humans’ Natural Qualities.”65 The London congress (whose contents he had detailed on the pages of his journal just a few months earlier) appeared to be the major stimulus for Gamaleia to take up his pen. His article presented a concise analysis of the basic eugenic ideas of “racial degeneration” and “regeneration,” their scientific underpinnings in Darwin’s theory of natural selection and in the concepts of heredity advanced by Galton, Weismann, and Mendel, as well as the proposed eugenic actions (both “negative” and “positive”) to counter degeneration and to promote regeneration, all of which had been discussed extensively at the congress.
31Gamaleia questioned the validity of the main eugenic postulate of “racial degeneration.” He saw eugenics simply as an extension of “social hygiene” to the issues of human reproduction: “generative hygiene.” For him, the rise of eugenics in Britain represented the culmination of a long process of social reforms, which had started in the mid-nineteenth century with wide sanitary and public health reforms, moved on to reform the legislation pertaining to the conditions of children’s and women’s labor in factories, and then proceeded to introduce state-mandated education for all children. Now, according to Gamaleia, eugenicists were advocating for expanding these “hygienic” reforms to the pre-school, pre-birth, and even pre-conception stages in human life through extensive “care of the future mother.”
32He concluded that “Russia, which is as yet in her first period of these social reforms [i.e. sanitary and public health reforms], is incapable of generating a strong eugenic movement, but she needs, nevertheless, to understand the problems that trouble her cultured neighbors.”66 Through his journal he pursued exactly that goal: to inform and educate Russian social hygienists about eugenic debates and actions undertaken by their western colleagues.67 At the end of 1913, Gamaleia stopped the publication of Hygiene and Sanitation. But despite his short-lived involvement with eugenics, the journal proved highly influential in awakening Russian public health specialists’ interest in the subject.68
33Just as Gamaleia left the field, eugenics found another champion in Russia: Tikhon Iudin (1879-1949), a young but well-respected Moscow psychiatrist. In early 1914, Iudin became a co-editor of Modern Psychiatry, the discipline’s leading periodical. On the pages of this journal Iudin continued Gamaleia’s mission of educating Russian physicians about eugenics. In April 1914, he published his first lengthy article “On Eugenics and the Eugenics Movement.”69 Iudin picked up the overview of eugenics exactly where Gamaleia had left it off, surveying the development of the field after the First International Eugenics Congress. But his take on the subject differed considerably from that of Gamaleia, for his personal research interests centered on the role of heredity in psychiatric disorders.70 According to Iudin, eugenics was an “applied science” and, as such, it “depends on scientific data gathered by other theoretical disciplines, first of all, by genetics — the science of heredity.” In his opinion, “genetics had directed and still directs the course of eugenics; the successes of the eugenics movement in the last years to a considerable degree are explained by and depend on the successes in the study of heredity.”
34Iudin emphasized that current views ascribed an exclusive role in defining the “quality of progeny” to heredity: environmental influences, from hygiene to education, were capable of only modifying what was already present in the heredity of an individual, which s/he had received from parents. Citing Reginald Punnett, the first professor of genetics at Cambridge University and the editor of the Journal of Genetics,71 and Pearson, he stressed that the proponents of both Mendelian and biometric (Galtonian) schools in the study of heredity supported this view, which thus provided the major scientific foundation for eugenic ideas and practices. Iudin pointed out that “this scientific belief in the negligible influence of environment on heredity” prompted “some eugenicists” to advance certain “questionable ideas,” such as the ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, and to advocate for “decisive policies,” such as the sterilization, segregation, and even euthanasia of individuals with “inferior” heredity.
35Iudin noted a strong negative reaction to such ideas among various observers, including Russians. But, he stressed, it would be wrong to judge the entire eugenics movement by these “fanatical” ideas and policies. He approvingly cited the opinion of William Bateson — a leading British advocate of Mendelism who had coined the term genetics — that scientific understanding of heredity was at that time still too rudimentary to be applied to humans. Iudin also referred to the opinion of Carl Correns, a leading German geneticist who had played a prominent part in the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws, that the majority of “bad” hereditary traits (such as Iudin’s own subject, mental disorders) were recessive and remained “invisible” in the progeny, and thus any selection against these traits promoted by eugenicists “cannot lead to their elimination.”72 Iudin noted that some proponents of eugenics focused on “positive” as opposed to “negative” measures, searching for ways to encourage the propagation of “good” heredity in future generations. Through active propaganda campaigns, he stated, they sought to instill basic eugenic ideas in the population to make these ideas part of “unconscious” social mores, or even “religious dogmas,” that would guide individuals’ decisions regarding marriage partners or the desirable number of children in their family.
36Iudin observed that the “eugenics movement has spread in a great wave through the cultured world.” He provided a detailed overview of eugenic institutions, societies, journals, activities, and legislative initiatives in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and the United States, identifying leading figures in the national eugenic organizations of each country. He underlined a great variety of approaches to the ultimate goal of eugenics — the improvement of humankind — advocated by different individuals, as well as national particularities in the justifications for and the attempts to attain this goal. He noted, for instance, that US eugenicists were much more enthusiastic about “negative” eugenics than their British or French colleagues. He described the continuing efforts to unite national eugenic organizations, which had begun at the London congress and which, he was sure, would further invigorate the eugenics movement at the next international congress, scheduled to meet in New York City in September 1915. He concluded his overview with a cautious endorsement:
Of course, at the present, the theoretical substantiation of, and investigations in, eugenics are at the very beginning, and the time when, on the basis of existing knowledge, we would have a right to intervene in social life on a large scale is still far in the future. But the efforts to advance the very idea of the necessity of greater care regarding the health of future generations, the education of humankind in the spirit of this idea, its propaganda, the creation of common sentiment conducive to eugenics, [and] active support for scientific research in this direction, perhaps will indeed prove very beneficial for all of humankind. In any case, eugenic ideas deserve serious attention and study.
37Undoubtedly, Iudin himself was planning to pay “serious attention” to such study in his own field, psychiatry. In June 1914, he published in Modern Psychiatry a detailed review of the recently (in April) enacted British Mental Deficiency Act, which British eugenicists hailed as a victory for their campaign to educate the public regarding the dangers of “feeble-mindedness” to the nation’s health. The Great War that erupted in August put a stop to Iudin’s plans: he was drafted to the army and went to the front.
38As the materials presented above demonstrate, to a considerable degree Gamaleia’s and Iudin’s overviews of eugenics read as if they were written about two different movements. Indeed, each of them even preferred to use a different name in his descriptions. Gamaleia used “eugenics” interchangeably with “racial hygiene” and “generative hygiene.” Iudin, however, insisted that not “eugenics,” but “eugenetics” (evgenetika) was the most appropriate name for the movement, for it emphasized the close connection between eugenics and genetics. Each of these observers focused largely on those components/elements/tenets of eugenics that resonated most with his personal/professional interests. Each of them sought to demonstrate the relevance of certain components of eugenics to his medical specialty, disciplinary agendas, and scientific interests. And the very possibility of using eugenics for these purposes certainly played a role in drawing other Russian observers’ attention to the early eugenics movement.
39Although they published extensively on eugenics, Russian commentators staunchly maintained their status as observers and critics, not propagandists. None of them called on his/her colleagues either to unify their efforts or to join the fledgling eugenics movement: to take part in an international eugenics conference, to organize a eugenics institution (a society, a journal, or a laboratory), and to lobby for the adoption of eugenic laws and regulations. And none of them ever mentioned Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration.
40All of this changed after the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In the course of just a few years, despite a bloody civil war, famine, epidemics, and economic deprivation engulfing the entire country, eugenics would boast a nationwide society, several research institutions, and specialized periodicals. It would build close links with the transnational eugenics movement, enter teaching curricula in schools and universities, and find a grassroots following in the new, Soviet Russia. Of all the disciplinary and professional groups concerned with eugenics before the revolution, it was Russian biologists, especially Filipchenko in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed after the outbreak of World War I) and Kol’tsov in Moscow, who spearheaded the closely intertwined processes of the institutionalization of eugenics and of its “stepsister” genetics. But it was social hygiene that provided eugenics with its first institutional home. And it was within this torrent of discipline-building and propaganda activities that Florinskii’s book was “resurrected” by Mikhail Volotskoi, a founding member of the Russian Eugenics Society.
Mikhail Volotskoi
41Volotskoi was born on 13 April 1893, in the beautiful ancient town of Rostov, situated some 200 kilometers northeast of Moscow, to an old, but impoverished noble family: his father made a living as a school teacher.73 After graduating from high school, in the fall of 1913, Volotskoi enrolled in Moscow University’s School of Natural Sciences (see fig. 5-1). He chose to study at the Department of Geography and Anthropology, founded and run by the country’s leading expert in these fields Dmitrii Anuchin (1843-1923).74 Volotskoi graduated from university in May 1918 and his mentor Anuchin slated the talented student for “preparation to a professorial position.” It seemed that Volotskoi’s career path to becoming an anthropology professor at his alma mater was set. Keeping to this path, however, proved impossible. Much like Florinskii, Volotskoi had begun his studies in one epoch and finished them in an entirely different one. His student years coincided with the most dramatic and traumatic period in the life of his homeland, encompassing World War I, the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. The beginning of the Great War in August 1914 did not interrupt Volotskoi’s education: as a university student he was exempt from the draft and, unlike some of his classmates, he did not enlist as a volunteer. He spent the war years deeply immersed in his studies. He joined the Society of Enthusiasts for the Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography, most likely on the recommendation of Anuchin, who had served as its president since 1890. In the summer of 1916, with the society’s funding in hand, he embarked on his first field expedition to collect anthropological, ethnographical, and archeological materials in the Tula region, some 250 kilometers south of Moscow.
42Perhaps, as did many university students, in February 1917 Volotskoi celebrated the abdication of Nicholas II and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Prompted by the military failures and economic hardships of the country’s engagement in World War I, the abdication led to the formation of a liberal Provisional Government that was to assure Russia’s transition to democratic rule by convening a Constituent Assembly, elected by the representatives of all social estates to work out the country’s new constitution. The heated debates on — and active propaganda for — various visions of the country’s future put forward by numerous political parties became a major preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia, particularly students of various institutions of higher learning.75 But it seems that Volotskoi had little interest in politics and stayed focused on his research: in the summer the budding anthropologist again went on a field expedition to the Tula region.
43Just as Volotskoi returned from the field, however, in late October the Bolsheviks — a radical faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party led by Vladimir Lenin — effected a coup d’état in Petrograd and declared the establishment of a socialist republic. Over the next few months, a new system of government administration — the Soviets of Worker, Peasant, and Soldier Deputies — began to take control over the country. On 3 March 1918, the Bolshevik government concluded a separate peace treaty with Germany, ending Russia’s participation in World War I. But within a few weeks, the country erupted in a bloody civil war. The former empire disintegrated into a patch-work of semiautonomous regions, with the Bolsheviks holding central industrial provinces, and their various opponents (the “Whites”), aided by British, French, and American troops, encircling the Bolshevik strongholds. In mid-March, threatened by the “White” forces advancing on Petrograd, the new government moved to Moscow, which became the capital of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) formally established by the All-Russia Congress of the Soviets of Worker, Peasant, and Soldier Deputies held in July. The Bolsheviks moved quickly to dismantle the old “capitalist” system and to build a new “socialist” one in all facets of life, including the alphabet, calendar, economy, government apparatus, laws, arts, and sciences. Of course, their overriding priority was the construction of a new, “Red” army to fight off their numerous opponents.
44The new rulers were set on replacing the old “bourgeois” system with their own “proletarian” one. But they lacked qualified “proletarian” personnel in all the vital spheres of life, from industry and education to medical services and government administration. Thus, although they treated educated professionals as part of the bourgeoisie to be harassed and eventually liquidated, the Bolsheviks had to compromise and convince “bourgeois” specialists to join in the Great Experiment of building socialism in Russia, while, at the same time, putting considerable efforts into the preparation of a new, “proletarian” intelligentsia.76
45For their part, most educated professionals met the Bolshevik Revolution with distrust and open hostility, for they considered the Bolsheviks to be usurpers of the country’s nascent representative government — a long-cherished dream of the Russian intelligentsia. They fled en masse from the regions controlled by the Bolsheviks and many of them left the country altogether. Yet, for those who stayed, their very existence as professionals depended first and foremost on a functional state and functioning economy. Not surprisingly, many Russian agronomists, architects, artists, engineers, jurists, military officers, physicians, scientists, teachers, and so on did join the Bolsheviks in rebuilding their homeland. Furthermore, for some of them, the destruction of the old imperial system presented not only a threat, but also an opportunity. Probably no other group among the Russian intelligentsia seized this opportunity with greater success than scientists.77 The rapid institutionalization of eugenics during the very first years of the Bolshevik regime exemplifies the mutually beneficent, symbiotic relations between Russian scientists and the new rulers. Volotskoi’s involvement in this process illustrates exactly how these relations developed.
46At first, Volotskoi’s life and work seemed remarkably untouched by the dramatic events unfolding in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. After receiving his university diploma in May 1918, the young anthropologist went on yet another research expedition to the Tula region (see fig. 5-2). But in the fall, the growing civil war led to the rapid deterioration of living conditions in Moscow — already severely compromised by the prior four years of all-out war effort. Faced with military opposition, economic chaos, and political turmoil, the Bolsheviks adopted a policy of “War Communism” based on the abolition of private property, banks, the market, and money, the total nationalization of industry, the forced requisition of agricultural produce from the peasantry, and strict administrative control over the distribution of food and goods.78
47Although Anuchin had selected Volotskoi for “preparation to a professorial position,” after the Bolsheviks had seized power it became an empty title. The university’s administration fought a losing battle for preserving its autonomy from the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), the successor to the Imperial Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and the Bolsheviks’top agency in charge of education, science, and culture.79 Anuchin successfully exploited the situation to accomplish his long-relished plan of establishing an independent anthropology department at Moscow University. But he was unable to secure any additional resources and thus to support Volotskoi’s position at the new department. Like many of his contemporaries, the young anthropologist had to find a job, a post, a trade, an affiliation, anything that would give him access to the rations distributed by the country’s new rulers, which, though barely sufficient to sustain one’s life, were the only readily available source of food, goods, and fuel for urban population. Luckily, he was able to secure a teaching position at a secondary school, which enabled him both to avoid being drafted into the Red Army and to survive the first incredibly harsh winter of Bolshevik rule in Moscow.80
48In the spring of 1919, Volotskoi obtained an additional source of support. Apparently on the recommendation of his mentor, together with Anuchin’s right-hand man at the anthropology department Viktor Bunak,81 Volotskoi became a member of a “scientific-consultative group on the biological question” set up at the State Museum of Social Hygiene (see fig. 5-3).82 The museum had been established a few months earlier (in January 1919) by the People’s Commissariat of Health Protection (Narkomzdrav), the new government’s top agency in charge of medical services and public health activities.83 Narkomzdrav immediately began to build a new state system of zdravookhranenie (health protection) that integrated into a unified whole everything related to health: medical services and institutions, health research and development, epidemiological surveillance and prophylactic measures, manufacturing and distribution of vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment, specialized education and training, sanitary infrastructure and propaganda. The agency’s head Nikolai Semashko, a Bolshevik physician, was an active proponent of social hygiene. Indeed, with its focus on the role of social factors in health and disease and its prioritizing of prophylactic over curative approaches to disease, social hygiene became the foundational doctrine of the entire system of health protection created by the Bolsheviks. Furthermore, its proponents defined social hygiene as “a science of the future, which studies and shapes the facts that promote the biological well-being of humanity,” and saw eugenics as “the ultimate goal of all sanitary-medical activities.”84
49The establishment of the State Museum of Social Hygiene was but the first step in the field’s institutionalization in Soviet Russia: four years later, it would be transformed into the State Institute of Social Hygiene.85 The museum’s “scientific-consultative group on the biological question” included specialists who were to advise Narkomzdrav officials — first of all, the commissar himself — on various issues encompassing “general biology, physiology, anthropology, and racial hygiene.”86 A leading member of this group was Kol’tsov, the country’s foremost expert in experimental biology.87 Volotskoi’s participation in the “scientific-consultative group” and his acquaintance with the older scientist proved fateful.
50A scion of a large family of Moscow merchants, Kol’tsov was undoubtedly one of the most entrepreneurial scientists of his generation. In addition to doing first-rate research (for which the Imperial Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member), he organized new laboratories, journals, and teaching courses, recruited and trained numerous students, and built extensive networks of domestic and international contacts. In late 1916, after nearly a decade of continuous efforts, he finally secured funds for the establishment of an Institute of Experimental Biology (IEB) in Moscow (see fig. 5-4).88
51Within just one year, however, the Bolsheviks expropriated the private endowments that had supported the institute, and Kol’tsov had to work hard to find and court patrons in the new state agencies, such as the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), Narkompros, and Narkomzdrav. His participation in the “scientific-consultative group” at the State Museum of Social Hygiene was just one among various activities he undertook during the civil war years to ensure the survival and eventual prosperity of a large group of his students and the institutionalization of various sub-fields of experimental biology, from biochemistry, endocrinology, and cytology to biophysics, zoopsychology, and genetics.89
52Kol’tsov’s association with Narkomzdrav proved particularly fruitful. Although at that point his institute had almost nothing to contribute to medicine or public health,90 in January 1920, the agency took the IEB under its wing. Kol’tsov’s institute became part of a recently founded State Institute of People’s Health Protection, an ever growing complex of research facilities that was to provide scientific grounding for the Bolshevik system of health protection.91 Apparently in an attempt to justify the IEB’s inclusion in Narkomzdrav’s research empire, Kol’tsov created within his institute a “eugenics department” that very summer. At the time, the department existed only on paper — in various reports Kol’tsov presented to his patron. In fact, it had neither personnel, nor a research programme. But its founder certainly had some ideas on how to make the “virtual” department real.92
53In early October 1920, at a meeting of the group on “the biological question,” Kol’tsov aired the idea of creating a eugenics society. The idea found immediate support among the group’s members: psychiatrist Iudin, who, as we saw, had studied the heredity of mental illness and had been keenly interested in eugenics long before the Bolshevik Revolution; Al’fred Mol’kov and Aleksei Sysin, Semashko’s lieutenants in building Soviet social hygiene; and the anthropologists Bunak and Volotskoi.93 In a few days, the group met again to discuss a charter for a “Russian Scientific Eugenic Society” drafted by Kol’tsov. Initially, Kol’tsov hoped to organize two separate societies: one professional (modeled after such existing scholarly associations as the Russian Physiological Society), open to specialists and devoted to research; another popular (modeled after the British Eugenic Education Society), open to anyone interested in eugenics and devoted to propaganda and education. The contingencies of the time forced the group to establish only one — the Russian Eugenics Society (RES).
54On 19 November 1920, the RES held its inaugural meeting. Thirty participants approved the society’s charter and elected its executive council: Kol’tsov became its president, Iudin and Bunak council members, and Volotskoi its “secretary.” As had happened to Florinskii when he rejoined the St. Petersburg Society of Russian Physicians after his European tour, the younger man was entrusted with the organizational and technical support of RES operations — arranging its meetings, conducting its correspondence, filing reports to its state patrons, and keeping the minutes of its proceedings.94 Furthermore, obviously impressed with Volotskoi’s abilities, Kol’tsov invited the young anthropologist to join the IEB eugenics department as a researcher.95 Kol’tsov’s invitation afforded Volotskoi his first paid academic position and, from the late fall of 1920, eugenics became his full-time occupation. He embraced it with all the zeal of a new convert.
55Apparently, Volotskoi’s good command of the English language — still a rarity among Russian scientists at the time — played not the least role in Kol’tsov’s invitation. The IEB director immediately utilized Volotskoi’s language skills in linking eugenics with another project he had undertaken to justify Narkomzdrav’s patronage of his institute: extensive studies of “rejuvenation” in animals and humans purportedly achieved by vasectomy and the transplantation of sex glands.96 As a first step in the realization of this project, Kol’tsov arranged for the publication of a large volume, seductively titled “Rejuvenation,” with translations of major works on the subject by its leading proponents, Austrian physiologist Eugene Steinach and French surgeon (of Russian extraction) Serge Voronoff. Volotskoi, however, translated for Kol’tsov’s volume a piece that seemingly had no connection to rejuvenation at all — a letter written by Harry C. Sharp, a surgeon at the Indiana Reformatory (the state’s major prison), which had appeared in Eugenic Review on the eve of the London congress in 1912.
56Sharp had been one of the instigators of the first “sterilization law” promulgated by the state of Indiana in 1907,97 and its text was amended to his letter.98 In the 1890s and 1900s, the surgeon had performed numerous vasectomies on the reformatory’s inmates, and in the early 1920s his published results were regularly cited in support of the alleged “rejuvenating” effects of the operation. The inclusion of Volotskoi’s translation of Sharp’s letter (and the text of the 1907 Indiana sterilization law it contained) in Kol’tsov’s volume unobtrusively linked the research on “rejuvenation” with eugenics, thus perhaps further strengthening the appeal of the new field to the IEB’s patrons among Narkomzdrav officials. Obviously satisfied with Volotskoi’s work, Kol’tsov suggested that the young anthropologist translate into Russian the “eugenic Bible” — Galton’s 1909 Essays on Eugenics. Kol’tsov’s efforts to promote eugenics as a means of securing government support for his institute and his numerous students soon paid off.
57By the time of the RES inaugural meeting in November 1920, the civil war had largely spent its fury. The Bolshevik Red Army had driven out both the “Whites” and the allied expeditionary forces that supported them.99 But the new rulers paid a steep price for the victory. The entire country lay in ruins: the economy was shattered and cities depopulated, factories stood still and fields empty, epidemics ran rampant, and famine reigned supreme. Faced with these severe crises, in March 1921, the government abolished War Communism and adopted a “New Economic Policy” — NEP. Although under the NEP the Bolsheviks preserved state control over banking and key industries, they reinstated money and the market, permitted private ownership and initiative in trade, services, and the small-scale production of consumer goods, and replaced the forced requisition of produce from the peasantry with a moderate “food tax.” The NEP proved effective in the rapid improvement of living conditions throughout the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that by the end of 1922 had consolidated most territories of the former Russian Empire.100
58With the burden of waging the war lifted, the Bolsheviks turned their attention and the considerable resources at their disposal to the previously neglected areas of state building and administration. One such area became the rebuilding of Russian science.101 The government launched enormous campaigns to combat illiteracy and popularize science,102 began to expand the entire system of education (from primary schools to universities), and strove to promote the rapid growth of all branches of science. The new rulers did not forget about scientists. In December 1921 the highest government agency, the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) presided over by Lenin, issued a special decree “On Improvement of Scientists’[Living] Conditions.” A few months later, in June 1922, the Central Commission to Improve Scientists’ Living Conditions — created to implement the decree — opened a “House of Scientists” in Moscow, which was overseen by Semashko, and became the preferred meeting place for the Russian Eugenics Society. Thanks to Kol’tsov and his fellow members of the RES, including Volotskoi, eugenics quickly became part and parcel of the new policies debated and implemented during the NEP.
59For Volotskoi, as for many others, the adoption of the NEP eased considerably the daily struggle for survival and facilitated his scientific work. In the summer of 1921, he took part in two field expeditions (mounted jointly by the Moscow University anthropology department and the IEB eugenics department) to study the ethnic minorities of the Upper Volga region. But these expeditions were not typical of the bulk of research conducted by Russian eugenicists at the time. Given the shortage of necessary resources, most of them followed Galton’s lead and focused on compiling and analyzing the pedigrees of eminent cultural figures. Volotskoi also got involved in this kind of research on several families of eminent writers, musicians, and artists, including the genealogy of Fedor Dostoevsky that would become his life-long obsession. In the course of the year, he also delivered two lengthy reports to the RES general meetings. One (coauthored with Bunak) dealt with the application of Mendel’s laws to human heredity. Another, titled “The ‘Indiana Idea’ in Light of the Latest Studies by [Eugene] Steinach,” was based on research he had conducted in preparing the translation of Sharp’s letter and addressed the sterilization of the “unfit” as an instrument of eugenics.103
60In October 1921, the RES convened a special meeting to mark its first anniversary. By that time, the society’s membership had nearly tripled to include not only biologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and social hygienists, but also historians, psychologists, sociologists, physicians, educators, and jurists. As we saw, during the two preceding decades, eugenics had meant many different things to distinct professional audiences in Russia, but had inspired no attempts at a unification of their diverging views. With the establishment of the RES, it became necessary to find common ground for the varying approaches to eugenics popular among the representatives of different professions, medical specialties, and scientific disciplines. In his presidential address to the anniversary meeting, titled “The Betterment of the Human Breed,” Kol’tsov attempted to find such common ground and to outline the general contours of “the new biological science of eugenics.”104
61Kol’tsov identified and carefully delineated three key elements amalgamated under the name of eugenics. The first element — “pure science,” which he named anthropogenetics — was to gather knowledge of human heredity and to investigate the principles of inheritance of various human traits. The second — “applied science,” which following his pre-revolutionary predecessors Kol’tsov called anthropotechnique — was to apply the knowledge provided by anthropogenetics to finding appropriate methods (from social policies and legislation to modifying individual behaviors) for improving the genetic quality of future generations. And the third — “eugenic religion,” comparable, in Kol’tsov’s opinion, to nationalism, Christianity, Islam, and socialism105 — was to propagate the “ideal” that would “give meaning to [human] life and motivate people to sacrifice and self-limitation.” The ultimate goal of eugenics was “to create […] a higher type of human, the powerful king of nature and the creator of life.” Echoing Galton, Kol’tsov concluded: “Eugenics is a religion of the future and it awaits its prophets.”106 If there was a dearth of prophets, there was no shortage of apostles. By the time of the RES anniversary meeting, Filipchenko, a zoology professor at Petrograd University, had already established the country’s first department of “genetics and experimental zoology” (see fig. 5-5).107 He had created a “Eugenics Bureau” under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences and launched its own periodical, Herald of the Eugenics Bureau.108 Filipchenko had also initiated the formation of a eugenics society in Petrograd and waged an extensive campaign to promote both genetics and eugenics amongst members of the city’s scholarly community, as well as the general public.109 Over the next few years, Kol’tsov and Filipchenko, together with their students and co-workers, published nearly 100 articles on eugenics in various popular and specialized journals, such as Priroda, Hygiene and Epidemiology, The Proletarian of Communications, and Scientific Word, as well as numerous pamphlets, brochures, and books.110
62The mobilization campaign launched by the champions of eugenics proved very successful. There is little doubt that for many individuals and groups who joined Kol’tsov and Filipchenko in their efforts to develop eugenics in Russia, “the new biological science of eugenics” offered a convenient means to advance their own scholarly interests, disciplinary and professional agendas, expert status, and career ambitions. The Sixth All-Union Congress of Gynecologists and Obstetricians held in June 1924 in Moscow provides an illuminating example. The congress devoted a separate session to “eugenics and biological questions.”111 In his keynote address to the session, titled “Eugennétique and Gynecology,” Saratov University’s professor Nikolai Kakushkin outlined a broad programme of his specialty’s relations to eugenics.112 He insisted that not only “all the questions of woman’s health pertaining to her child-bearing abilities,” but also “all the questions of breast-feeding, child hygiene, preschool and school education, marriage and sex hygiene, struggle against venereal diseases and prostitution,” should come under the purview of the “eugenicist-gynecologist.”113
63Kakushkin’s address vividly demonstrated that eugenics offered gynecologists a suitable tool in the competition with other medical specialists over not just the protection of maternity and infancy, which became a major focus of Narkomzdrav’s activities, but also the entire field of health protection. The congress’s participants also hotly debated the “eugenic” role of contraceptives and abortion (which had been legalized in Soviet Russia in November 1920). Yet a report by Antonina Shorokhova (1881-1958) on successful artificial inseminations in women as a means to fight infertility did not spur much discussion, attesting clearly to the lack of interest in the subject among Russian gynecologists: relative to other European countries that experienced substantial decline in birth rates in the aftermath of World War I, Russian birth rates remained very high.114
64In parallel with conducting an extensive propaganda campaign and building their institutional bases, despite the nearly total international isolation of the newborn Soviet republic, the Russian champions of eugenics began to establish contacts with their foreign colleagues.115 One episode illustrates the aims, scope, and venues of Russian eugenicists’ international activities. In September 1921, the head of the US Eugenics Record Office (ERO) Charles Davenport received a long letter from Nikolai Vavilov, Russia’s leading plant scientist. One-time student of William Bateson, who alongside Kol’tsov and Filipchenko was a major force in building Russian genetics, Vavilov at the time was attending a congress on phytopathology in San Francisco. His letter informed Davenport about the establishment of “the first Russian Eugenic Society” and the work that was being done by Filipchenko and Kol’tsov. Vavilov expressed his regrets that he would not be able to attend the Second International Eugenics Congress being held at that very time in New York City and asked Davenport to collect the congress’s materials and other recent eugenic literature for Russian colleagues.116 Indeed, after the end of the congress, Vavilov came to visit Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office to reiterate the message in person.117
65Around the same time, Davenport received a letter from Russia, from the RES president Kol’tsov.118 Sent through the Narkomzdrav representative in the United States, the letter also notified Davenport of the creation of both the IEB eugenics department and the RES. Kol’tsov noted that he would have liked to attend the International Eugenics Congress, but it seemed impossible at the moment. He also lamented the “intellectual famine” Russian scientists had been and were still experiencing, and asked Davenport for assistance in obtaining recent genetic and eugenic literature.
66A few weeks later, Davenport received yet another letter from Russia, sent via the Soviet Trade Delegation to Norway, this one from Filipchenko. Filipchenko apprised his US colleague of the establishment of the Eugenics Bureau in Petrograd: enclosed with his letter was the first issue of its Herald dedicated to Galton. He too asked Davenport for help in acquiring eugenic literature.119 Davenport immediately responded to the Russian requests and arranged for a large shipment of books and periodicals to both Moscow and Petrograd. Furthermore, although no Russian scientist had attended the Second International Eugenics Congress, the RES soon became a member of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, with Kol’tsov representing the country on the Federation Council.
67Bolshevik Russia appeared the least likely locale for concerns with “national degeneration,” the increasing fertility of “lower classes,” or “interracial meticization,” which held the attention of the Second International Eugenics Congress. Yet the rapid institutionalization, internationalization, as well as active propaganda, of eugenics in the immediate post-revolutionary years was fully funded and enthusiastically endorsed by various agents and agencies of the country’s new government. Why would a “proletarian state,” which claimed to be building a classless society and vocally denounced racism and nationalism, become a hotbed of eugenic debates, support eugenic research and institutions, and adopt eugenics-inspired policies?
68At least in part, the answer to this question lies in the confluence between the eugenic vision of “the self-direction of human evolution,” as it was expressed in the motto of the Second International Eugenics Congress, and the Bolsheviks “revolutionary dreams” (in US historian Richard Stites’s apt characterization) of creating a “new world,” a “new society,” and a “new man.”120 As Kol’tsov clearly articulated in his 1921 anniversary address, the major goal of eugenics was “to create […] a higher type of human, the powerful king of nature and the creator of life.” The Bolsheviks, in the words of one of their leaders Leon Trotsky, believed that with the victory of the Revolution “humankind, frozen Homo sapiens, will enter into radical reconstruction and will become — under its own fingers — an object of most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. […] Man will put forward a goal […] to raise himself to a new level — to create a higher socio-biological type, an Ubermensch, if you will.”121 Resonance between the eugenic vision of “a higher type of human” and the Bolshevik dreams of “a higher socio-biological type” played an important role in the appeal of eugenics to its state patrons, as well as to the numerous followers the fledgling “biological science of eugenics” attracted in 1920s Soviet Russia.
69The Russian Eugenic Journal (REZh) soon established by Kol’tsov under Narkomzdrav auspices vividly demonstrated that eugenics indeed found an enthusiastic following in Bolshevik Russia. Greeted by a review in Izvestiia, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, the journal’s first issue came out in the fall of 1922 (see fig. 8-2).122 Opening with Kol’tsov’s 1921 presidential address, the issue included Iudin’s overview on “the heredity of mental illness” and Bunak’s plan for establishing “eugenic experimental stations” throughout the country.123 The second issue that came out the following spring carried an article “On the Tasks and Paths of Anthropogenetics” written by Alexander Serebrovskii (1892-1948), Kol’tsov’s most talented student in genetics.124 The article outlined the research methodology and agendas of the new science and was supplemented by Bunak’s lengthy “critical analysis” of the existing “methods of investigating human heredity.”125 The issue also contained a revised text of Volotskoi’s report “on the sexual sterilization of the hereditary defectives” delivered to the RES meeting on 30 December 1921.126
70If Iudin’s, Serebrovskii’s, and Bunak’s contributions addressed the first facet of eugenics identified by Kol’tsov — the “pure science” of human heredity, anthropogenetics — Volotskoi’s assessed the second one: the “applied science” of anthropotechnique. His presentation surveyed an array of concrete policies and actions that should spring forth from the studies of human heredity and advance the principal goal of eugenics, the hereditary betterment of humanity. But he focused predominantly on the most controversial among eugenic policies — sterilization. Based on more than fifty publications in English, French, German, and Russian, he outlined the long history of various surgical operations that produced sterility in both men and women, along with their anatomical details and “physiological and psychological consequences,” especially the widely touted “rejuvenation” that purportedly resulted from such operations.
71Volotskoi described the appropriation of sterilization operations as a tool in eugenicists’ attempts to limit the spread of “bad” heredity. He detailed the propaganda campaigns, legislative initiatives, and actual laws aimed at the implementation of “eugenic sterilization” in different countries, particularly in the United States, as well as the extensive critique and objections these efforts had elicited from various quarters. Volotskoi briefly recounted and dismissed as unsubstantiated the unanimous negative reaction of pre-revolutionary Russian commentators to eugenic sterilization. He argued that “sexual sterilization of hereditary defectives” was an efficient, harmless (indeed, often beneficial due to its alleged “rejuvenation” effects), and legitimate way of advancing eugenics’ goal of improving humankind and as such ought to be adopted and promoted by the RES. The remarks from the floor that followed Volotskoi’s report (and appeared in the REZh alongside its text) show that he failed to persuade his audience. Seven commentators, including Iudin and Kol’tsov, pointed out what they all saw as the major deficiency of sterilization policies: the enormous difficulties in, indeed the sheer impossibility of, defining and identifying “hereditary defectives” given the present state of knowledge on human heredity.
72Volotskoi, however, remained unconvinced by the arguments of his fellow eugenicists. Over the next few months he reworked his report into a book, issued in 3,000 copies under the provocative title Elevating the Vital Forces of the Race: A New Path. As he quipped in the book’s introduction: “one either believed in eugenics or didn’t.”127 He obviously believed what he preached. Volotskoi expanded his analysis to encompass various legislative initiatives and policies advocated by western eugenicists, from marriage regulations to sterilization and segregation, using more than 150 publications in Russian, English, French, and German to substantiate his view of sterilization as the most effective path to the hereditary betterment of humankind.
73Although some social hygienists, for instance, Voronezh University’s professor Tikhon Tkachev, came to support Volotskoi’s position,128 the majority of Soviet eugenicists remained highly skeptical of “negative” eugenics. Despite Volotskoi’s advocacy, they continued to criticize their western colleagues for advocating restrictive “eugenic laws,” particularly the involuntary sterilization of the “unfit.”129 Filipchenko published an extensive denigrating review of Volotskoi’s book, which summarised the criticisms of eugenic sterilization by many geneticists.130 Soviet gynecologists also objected to the sterilization of women on social grounds.131 Yet Volotskoi did not repent: in 1926 he published an expanded, second edition of this book.132
74It was in the course of his work on Elevating the Vital Forces of the Race that Volotskoi discovered Florinskii’s treatise. In an attempt to justify his own views, Volotskoi conducted extensive historical research on marriage regulations in various countries, including Russia. In the course of this research, he found, for instance, a decree issued as early as 1722 by Peter the Great that forbade “fools who are unfit to either education or state service” to marry, because they “will not produce good progeny for the State’s benefit.”133 Volotskoi interpreted the decree as based on “the recognition of the hereditary transmission of certain mental and physical deviations from the norm,”134 and thus prefiguring the ideas of eugenics.
75But it was his discovery of Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration that most profoundly influenced Volotskoi’s views. Volotskoi was clearly unaware that Florinskii’s essays had originally been published in Russian Word, for he referred only to their book version.135 It seems likely that he found a copy of the treatise in the large library of more than 2,000 volumes collected by Anuchin at the Moscow University anthropology department. Perhaps, aware of Volotskoi’s involvement with eugenics, his mentor actually called the young anthropologist’s attention to Florinskii’s treatise.136 Whatever happened, Volotskoi did not discuss in any detail the contents of Florinskii’s work in the text of his own book, but in the appended bibliography he pointed out that “in many of his ideas, [its] author is a predecessor of Galton’s” and “in certain respects, his views on heredity are remarkably close to the modern ones (Mendelism).”137 In fact, the RES secretary was so impressed that he used excerpts from Florinskii’s text — alongside quotations from Plato, Aristotle, and Galton — as epigraphs to several chapters of his own book.
76Volotskoi took it upon himself to reintroduce the “long-forgotten book,” as he obliquely referred to it in one of the epigraphs, to his fellow eugenicists. In the spring of 1923, he delivered a lengthy report on Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration to an RES meeting.138 After a brief biographical sketch of its author, Volotskoi recounted the contents of Florinskii’s book in considerable detail. “It is not difficult to see,” he summarized his presentation, “that Galton’s ‘Eugenics’ and Florinskii’s ‘Marriage Hygiene’ are merely different names for the same thing.” “What we now call ‘eugenics,’ as well as Florinskii’s ‘Marriage Hygiene’,” he elaborated, “is, essentially, the understanding by the species of Homo sapiens of the process of its own evolution and its striving to subordinate this process to its own will through the study of all the factors underpinning or even tangentially influencing the evolutionary development of humankind.”139
77Yet, he asserted, there were substantial differences between Galton’s and Florinskii’s views on how to reach this goal. According to Volotskoi, “prohibitive measures play an essential role in Galton’s eugenics,” whilst in Florinskii’s concept such a role is assigned to “the inculcation in the populace of a healthy, developed taste or fashion that could guide the choice of marital partners.” “The unacceptability of marrying for hereditarily defective individuals, in Galton’s opinion, should become a religious dogma, a sort of taboo in eugenic religion,” he stressed, whilst, “in Florinskii’s opinion, [we] should strive to influence [marital] fashions in such a way as to approximate, if not an absolute perfection, then at least such examples that present, aside from a conditional aesthetic value, a certain biological benefit.”140
78Admitting that “much of the book does not correspond to current knowledge,” Volotskoi insisted that “in the independence and originality of its ideas, Florinskii’s work could rightly claim a place of honor in world literature” on eugenics. “Florinskii’s unrecognized and forgotten treatise deserves the serious attention of eugenicists,” he declared, “and his name as one of the founders of our discipline must be placed alongside with, to be exact, even ahead of, Galton’s.” Furthermore, Volotskoi emphasized, in addition to “its purely historical interest, because it had been published significantly earlier than Galton’s work,”141 Florinskii’s book “had not lost its scientific importance.” At this point, he did not elaborate on what that “scientific importance” might be.
The Champion of “Proletarian” Eugenics
79By the time Volotskoi’s report on Florinskii’s book appeared in print in the spring 1924 issue of Russian Eugenics Journal, his academic affiliations, his attitude to Galtonian eugenics, and, indeed, his entire worldview had undergone a radical transformation. In June 1923, his mentor Anuchin died and the chairmanship of the Moscow University anthropology department went to Bunak. Although he did contribute an article to the special issue of Russian Anthropological Journal commemorating his teacher,142 in the fall, Volotskoi severed all connections to his alma mater.143 Instead, he became a lecturer at the Narkomzdrav Institute of Physical Culture (IFK), the country’s first specialized institution to train instructors in physical culture and education for the “proletarian masses.”144 He began teaching one 24-hour course on eugenics and another 36-hour course on anthropology to the fourth year students.145 The next spring, just as his report on Florinskii’s book came out, Volotskoi also resigned his position at the IEB eugenics department. Instead, he became a researcher at the recently established institution with a cumbersome, but revealing name: the Timiriazev State Scientific-Research Institute for the Study and Propaganda of the Natural-Science Foundations of Dialectical Materialism — the Timiriazev Institute, as it was commonly referred to at the time.146
80Volotskoi’s move from the IEB to the Timiriazev Institute was not a matter of convenience, but a deliberate and meaningful choice: in the course of just a few post-revolutionary years he had become a believer not only in eugenics, but also in Marxism. As its full name makes plain, the new institute was part of the Bolsheviks’ extensive efforts to replace “bourgeois” science with their own “proletarian” one.147 A major tenet of “proletarian science,” most fully elaborated by its principal theoretician Alexander Bogdanov and widely popularized by his numerous followers during the early 1920s, was a conviction that, as part of society’s superstructure, science reflected the interests of the ruling class.148 Hence, in a capitalist society, science served only the needs of the oppressor class and itself became an instrument of oppression, while in a proletarian state science was to serve the needs of the previously oppressed proletariat. Accordingly, while bourgeois science was based on “idealistic” bourgeois philosophy, proletarian science should adopt as its guiding philosophy the ideology of the proletariat, Marxism — dialectical and historical materialism. From the very beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks spared no effort to “infuse” Marxism into science and to build an institutional base for “Marxist” science. As early as 1918, a group of high-ranking Bolsheviks established a Socialist Academy (renamed Communist Academy a few years later) as a counterweight to the “bourgeois” Academy of Sciences they inherited from their imperial past. They also created a number of “Communist Universities” and “Institutes of Red Professors” to prepare cadres for proletarian science.149
81In their initial labors to remake the “bourgeois” and “idealistic” science into a “proletarian” and “materialist” one, the Bolsheviks targeted mainly the social sciences and the humanities. However, a few naturalists, especially from among the younger generation born circa 1890, appeared receptive to Marxism, embracing both its dialectical-materialist method of studying nature and its class approach to the understanding of human history.150 Paraphrasing Lenin’s famous 1922 call for “militant materialism,” the rules of appointment to the Timiriazev Institute stated categorically that its researchers “must follow a strictly materialistic view in the field of natural sciences” and “possess a dialectical-materialist worldview.”151 Named after Kliment Timiriazev, one of the first Russian commentators on Darwin’s theory who had attempted to link Darwinism and Marxism, the institute became home to a sizeable cohort of “materialist-biologists,” as they called themselves.
82Volotskoi’s application and subsequent appointment to the Timiriazev Institute signaled unambiguously that by the spring of 1924 he had become a convinced Marxist. He was among the first to apply Marxism to eugenics, not as a rhetorical exercise, but as a genuine attempt to grapple with the Marxist philosophy of nature and history in his own work. And it was his “class” analysis of Galtonian eugenics, much more than his support for eugenic sterilization, that led him to parting ways with Kol’tsov and the IEB eugenics department and to joining the “Department of the Biological Foundations of Social Phenomena” at the Timiriazev Institute.
83Available materials are completely silent on exactly when, why, and how Volotskoi “converted” to Marxism. It seems likely that his acquaintance with the RES member Evgenii Radin (1872-1939) played a decisive role in arousing the young anthropologist’s interest in Marxism.152 Radin had developed close ties to the Bolsheviks long before they seized power: his older brother had been an active member of the early Russian labor movement and even authored its most popular “anthem.”153 Trained as a psychiatrist at Berlin University, Radin worked as a school physician before the Bolshevik Revolution.154 After the revolution, he came to work for Narkomzdrav as an expert on children’s health, a subject that became a major focus of the agency’s policies from its very birth in July 1918.155 Indeed, Narkomzdrav created two special large departments: one for “the protection of maternity and infancy” (OMM — okhrana materinstva i mladenchestva) and another for “the protection of children’s and adolescents’ health” (OZDP — okhrana zdorov’ia detei i podrostkov). Radin became the head of the OZDP department and a leading force in the development of this field,156 particularly in the creation of the Bolshevik system of physical culture and physical education, becoming a deputy-head of its flagship institution, the IFK.157 He also became one of the founders of Soviet pedology (the science of childhood).158 Radin elaborated a system of “bio-social upbringing” (biosotsial’noe vospitanie) that was to combine the biological (such as physical culture) and the social (from general education to specialized psychological testing and training) sides in the upbringing of Soviet children.159
84Most likely it was Radin who, in the fall of 1923, invited Volotskoi to join the IFK faculty. And it was Radin who the same year published the first, though very brief, Marxist assessment of eugenics that clearly influenced Volotskoi’s attitude to his newfound faith and his own programme of “bio-social” eugenics.160 Whatever were the initial stimuli to Volotskoi’s “conversion,” he diligently studied Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, along with many other foundational works of what became the official state ideology of Soviet Russia. He soon attempted to put these studies to good use in his own research and writing on eugenics.
85Volotskoi’s various reports and publications of 1924-1925 indicate that he came to see Galton’s eugenics as a prime example of “bourgeois” science and Florinskii’s “marriage hygiene” as a model for “proletarian” eugenics. In 1924, under Radin’s editorship, the IFK issued the first volume of its proceedings, titled Physical Culture in Light of Science. Prefaced by Commissar Semashko’s unequivocal declaration that “physical culture is a powerful means of the healthification of human beings and a foundation of eugenics,”161 the volume contained two lengthy contributions by Volotskoi. One examined “physical culture in light of eugenics,” another analyzed “certain currents in modern eugenics.”162 A few months later, under the auspices of the Timiriazev Institute, Volotskoi also published a fifty-page pamphlet, tellingly titled Class Interests and Modern Eugenics.163 In these three publications, Volotskoi advanced a Marxist critique of “bourgeois” eugenics, taking as his starting point the Communist Manifesto’s famous statement that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” And in all three he invoked Florinskii’s treatise in support of both his criticism of “bourgeois” eugenics and his vision of what “proletarian” eugenics should be and do.
86Volotskoi’s critique centered on what he saw as the main programme of “bourgeois” eugenics: the “cultivation of talents” by selective breeding among individuals of privileged classes and “higher” races. He identified three main fallacies that, in his opinion, underpinned this programme and clearly betrayed the “bourgeois nature” of contemporary eugenics: class and race biases, privileging the biological over the social (nature over nurture, heredity over environment) in the understanding of human individual and social development, and rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In advancing his position, Volotskoi repeatedly juxtaposed Florinskii’s views on these issues with those of the well-known proponents of eugenics, taking his examples from Britons Galton and Pearson, Germans Hermann W. Siemens and Fritz Lenz,164 and Russians Kol’tsov and Filipchenko. He attacked the eugenicists’ conviction that the “upper classes” and, especially, the intelligentsia, were the bearers of hereditary talents, while the “proletarianization” of the population constituted the major threat to “national” and “racial” heredity. He was particularly incensed by the eugenicists’ attempts to put different monetary values on the children of “higher” and “lower” classes, and thus estimate their respective “hereditary worth,” while completely ignoring the role of the environment in the realization of hereditary potentials.
87Volotskoi appended his 1925 brochure with a long excerpt from Florinskii’s treatise to illustrate the latter’s attitude toward the “biological, hereditary worth of the representatives of different classes,”165 clearly expressed in the professor’s musings regarding the “natural mind” of the peasantry and the “artificial mind” of the aristocracy. Volotskoi even attempted to explain the diverging fates of Galton’s and Florinskii’s concepts of the betterment of humankind by claiming that, unlike the former, the latter had been neglected by contemporary society exactly because it did not correspond to the interests of nineteenth-century Russia’s ruling classes.
88It was not only his newfound Marxist beliefs that influenced Volotskoi’s attitude to Galtonian eugenics and its plans of “breeding talents.” His own and his fellow eugenicists’ actual research on “hereditary talents” also played an important role. In the early 1920s, this line of research comprised nearly one half of all the studies conducted by Russian eugenicists (including Volotskoi) who analyzed the “inheritance” of literary, musical, mathematical, and artistic talents, along with “hereditary inclinations” to scientific research.166 To give just one example, the REZh’s very first issue carried a joint genealogy of Darwin and Galton constructed by Kol’tsov and a similar genealogy of the Aksakovs family (that included a number of eminent Russian writers) presented by Serebrovskii.167 Many of these studies considered “talent” to be a simple recessive trait that could be identified by tracing “eugenic pedigrees” of famous scientists, musicians, artists, and writers.168 Justifying this line of research in his 1921 anniversary address, Kol’tsov stressed: “We cannot experiment. We cannot force [Russia’s most famous soprano Antonina] Nezhdanova to marry [Russia’s most famous bass Fedor] Chaliapin in order to see what kinds of children they would have.”169 Answering Kol’tsov’s challenge, Volotskoi found a “historical” experiment of exactly this kind.
89According to Volotskoi’s research, in 1838 Osip Petrov (1806-1878), a famous bass of the Imperial Mariinskii Theater, married Anna Vorob’eva (1817-1901), a leading contralto at the same theater.170 Judging by the testimonies of their contemporaries, including prominent composers Modest Musorgskii and Mikhail Glinka, both were “musical geniuses.” Their marriage bore seven children (only one of whom died in infancy), thus, as Volotskoi put it, “realizing those conditions that the talent breeders dream of.” Yet, although from their infancy these children grew up surrounded by music and musicians and therefore had a very supportive environment, they did not exhibit even a modicum of their parents’ talents. Three of them did attempt to embark on a professional career in music and/or theater, but all ended in failure, while the other three showed no inclination of following in their parents’ footsteps. Furthermore, Petrov and Vorob’eva’s six children produced only one grandchild between them, who died in infancy, and therefore the entire family line went extinct and the great talents of its founders had been lost.
90Volotskoi observed that Petrov himself had come from a very humble background (as a child he was a shepherd): he was raised in the home of his uncle, a cattle dealer who had tried to suppress the boy’s attraction to music in every possible way, up to breaking a guitar on his head. Yet, this did not stop the young shepherd from learning music and becoming a star singer. As Volotskoi put it, “Petrov has made a great journey from a shepherd to a creator of the Russian opera. His children went in the opposite direction.” According to Volotskoi, his analysis of Petrov and Vorob’eva’s marriage demonstrated that the notion of talent as a simple hereditary trait was not supported. Any talent, he argued, was a complex combination of numerous hereditary traits that could be expressed or suppressed under the influence of environment. Hence, he insisted, “we should not breed talents, but [help] realize them.” He approvingly cited Florinskii’s lament: “We can only regret that not all societal groups have the same opportunity for the development of their natural mind, [and] that many excellent, talented individuals remain hidden in the mass of the people as wasted, unproductive capital that has neither purpose, nor use.”171
91Volotskoi did not limit himself merely to criticizing Galtonian eugenics. He actually attempted to create an alternative, “bio-social” eugenics. On 19 November 1925, he delivered a lengthy report to the Timiriazev Institute, titled “A System of Eugenics as a Bio-Social Discipline.”172 His talk was an extensive commentary on an elaborate chart that presented his vision of the “methods, contents, and scientific foundations” of eugenics (see fig. 5-6). According to this vision, “eugenics strives to study the process of the evolutionary development of humankind in order to learn [how] to guide this process in the desired direction, namely from degeneration to renaissance” with the “ultimate goal of the betterment of the human breed.”
92Volotskoi modeled his chart in part after the famous “eugenics tree” diagram exhibited by the US Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at the Second International Eugenics Congress in New York City in 1921 (see fig. 5-7). But in contrast to the ERO’s “eugenics tree” that identified only its separate “roots” in various scientific disciplines and medical specialties, Volotskoi’s scheme categorized not just the “roots,” but also the “trunk” and the “upper branches” of his bio-social eugenics. Indeed, Volotskoi began his exposition with the analysis of its “upper branches” — methods and policies to advance the ultimate goal of biosocial eugenics. He clearly followed Florinskii’s two-pronged approach and suggested that, instead of the customary division of eugenics into “positive” and “negative,” all eugenic activities should be split into two categories: “preventive or prophylactic” and “creative.” The first should “protect the population (race) from everything that could cause its degeneration,” while the second should include “the entire system of measures [that could] actually better the human breed.”
93Both preventive and creative eugenics, in his view, could be advanced by two complementary methods: positive or negative “selection” (selektsiia) and “social eugenic measures,” such as “physical culture, protection of mothers’, children’s, and adolescents’ health, and so on.” “Supplementing each other,” he asserted, “these two methods form that synthetic applied discipline we call bio-social eugenics.” Volotskoi described in detail how each of these methods could be used in preventive and creative eugenics. Preventive eugenics employs negative selection, “removing from the production of the offspring” all individuals who are afflicted with such ailments as “hereditary deafness and blindness, feeblemindedness, idiotism, and certain forms of mental and neurological disorders.” Since we do not know what produces “such hereditary diseases as hemophilia, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, feeblemindedness, various physical abnormalities and constitutional anomalies,” he explained, we cannot eliminate their actual causes, and hence, “various forms of prophylactic selection (sexual sterilization, marriage prohibition, segregation, and so on) remain so far the only method of protecting the interests of the progeny.”
94“The social-prophylactic branch of eugenics,” according to Volotskoi, should focus on “the healthification and rationalization of all the conditions of life and on the systematic removal of all the factors that could in one way or another [adversely] affect the quality of the race,” including “occupational hazards” and “such ‘racial poisons’ as syphilis and various narcotics (alcohol, cocaine, etc.).” He proclaimed that the existing social institutions devoted to the protection of maternity and infancy (OMM) and the protection of child and adolescent health (OZDP) play an important role in this branch of eugenics. But he suggested that they should be supplemented with a “special department or an institute for the protection of the progeny in the widest sense of the word, that is the protection of future generations.”
95In contrast to preventive eugenics, creative one, according to Volotskoi, employs not “negative” but “positive” selection (selektsiia) through the choosing (vybor) and matching (podbor) of progenitors. It is in this branch of “selecto-creative eugenics,” in Volotskoi’s opinion, that the class, race, and other social biases of “bourgeois” eugenics manifest themselves most clearly, especially in its various programmes of “breeding talents.” Yet he did not dismiss the method as such. Rather, he urged his audience to follow Florinskii’s ideas of “conscious healthification” of the personal tastes and societal mores that guide people’s marital choices and to replace the “breeding of talents” with the “professional orientation of the laboring population,” “based on the consideration of all of the organic particularities and abilities of each individual.” The last branch of “social-creative eugenics” in Volotskoi’s schema covered all social actions, measures, reforms, and revolutions, such as the emancipation of women, the development of physical culture, and the rationalization of marriage, which could produce “positively-eugenic results.” He emphasized that his “classification of various eugenic methods has to a considerable degree a conditional character, since there are no strict boundaries among the various branches of eugenics,” but it presents a useful tool to demonstrate conveniently how all of them are related to each other.
96After the extended discussion of its “upper branches,” Volotskoi turned to the “trunk” — the actual contents — of bio-social eugenics. In his opinion, “eugenics is an applied discipline aimed at the betterment, ‘ennoblement’ of the human breed” and its very name, deriving from the root “good” — “eu- (εὐ-)” — gives it a “certain conditional, normative content.” But what is “good” from the viewpoint of the representatives of one class, he elaborated, is evaluated in a completely different way by the representatives of another class, while what is “useful and valuable” under one set of life conditions could become “harmful and excessive” under another one. He proceeded to illustrate this conditionality and normativity of eugenics with examples, taken from Galton and Siemens, of “social evaluations” of certain human qualities in a capitalist society, contrasting them with the possible evaluation of the same qualities in a future communist society. Since “the transition to a communist society naturally involves the re-evaluation of all [previous] social values and the replacement of one set of ideals with another,” Volotskoi asserted, “the evolution of socio-economic formations should become the foundation of bio-social eugenics, for it gives the entire eugenics movement its concrete contents and direction.”
97Clearly following Florinskii’s views on health as a universal human ideal, Volotskoi suggested that the social value (whether positive or negative) of certain features does not change, irrespective of the socioeconomic conditions of human life. Such human traits as “deafness, blindness, feeblemindedness, and most mental and neurological disorders remain ‘bad’,” he claimed, “while health [remains] ‘good’ under all social circumstances.” The very existence of such “objective criteria” of good and bad, according to Volotskoi, warrants close attention to “certain advances and methods of bourgeois eugenics.” “A complete rejection of the entire modern eugenics as a doctrine totally alien and unsuitable to our conditions” represents “a very narrow and one-sided approach to the issue,” he affirmed, and “certain innovations and methods of bourgeois eugenics could be included in our system of bio-social eugenics.” Of course, he qualified his statement, any such “borrowings” from bourgeois eugenics require “great caution and criticality.”
98Volotskoi defined the “roots of eugenics” as “an array of scientific disciplines upon which it is based, using for its own practical goals the achievements of various fields of knowledge.” “The main root that should feed our eugenics” and provide “a necessary link between biosocial eugenics and its scientific foundation,” according to Volotskoi, “is dialectical materialism,” because “thinking dialectically is the first and absolutely essential condition of a truly scientific approach to the problems of eugenics.” In his view, the “two main pillars” of this scientific foundation are the theory of biological evolution, Darwinism, and the theory of social evolution, Marxism. The first unifies and synthesizes all biological/anthropological/medical knowledge and the second all sociological/economic/political knowledge pertinent to biosocial eugenics. Volotskoi provided lengthy descriptions of separate disciplines, fields of inquiry, and specialties that contribute to each biological and sociological understanding of humankind, ranging from anthropogenetics, statistics, experimental psychology, and “the theory of constitution (Konstitutionslehre)” to social hygiene, “bio-social upbringing,” and the history of class struggle, law, and economics. He admitted that in this particular section his scheme had much in common with the ERO’s “eugenics tree,” but he emphasized such essential differences as the exclusion of religion from and the inclusion of the studies of occupational hazards into bio-social eugenics. Despite its dependence on and close relations to numerous biological and sociological fields of knowledge, Volotskoi insisted, “eugenics does not lose its autonomy.” Its main subjects — the process of human evolution, as well as its practical goals of controlling and directing this process — in his opinion are specific enough to insure eugenics’ self-sufficiency, self-determination, and independence.
99Volotskoi soon went beyond a theoretical analysis of what bio-social eugenics should be and do. He launched several research projects that would advance its actual development. In fact, Volotskoi made explicit the research programme embedded, though not clearly articulated, in Florinskii’s notions of “conditions conducive” to either degeneration or perfection. He began a focused study on the influence of such “racial poisons” as alcohol and syphilis on the progeny173 and initiated a broad research on “eugenics and occupational hazards.”174 He also attempted to expand on Florinskii’s idea that “marital tastes and fashions” influence the evolution of certain physical types by investigating “the evolution of the Russian women type in relation to issues in eugenics.”175
100There could be little doubt that Florinskii’s book played a key role in both amplifying Volotskoi’s critical attitude towards Galtonian eugenics and shaping his own plans for bio-social eugenics. He certainly felt that Florinskii’s work deserved much wider circulation beyond the still narrow circle of Russian eugenicists and did everything he could to popularize the writings of his newfound hero. His efforts culminated in a new edition of Human Perfection and Degeneration.176
101This “second edition,” as it was described on the title page, appeared in early 1926 in 3,000 copies as the first issue of the Timiriazev Institute’s signature series, “The Library of a Materialist” (see fig. 5-8). The 165-page volume contained a shortened text of Florinskii’s 1866 book, typeset anew to correspond to the new alphabet and spelling rules introduced by the Bolsheviks. Volotskoi restored the correct initials of its author and placed his portrait on the front page.
102Volotskoi took his editorial work very seriously. He divided the text into an “introduction” and four chapters, thus changing considerably the original structure of Florinskii’s book. The first chapter was titled “The Changeability of the Human Type,” and the second, “The Role of Heredity in the Changeability of the Human Type.” Together with the “introduction” the first two chapters corresponded to the text of Florinskii’s first essay published in the August 1865 issue of Russian Word. The third chapter, titled “Conditions Conducive to the Change of the Human Breed,” reproduced the text of the second essay that had appeared in the October issue. It was subdivided into three sections: “Taste and demand for certain qualities,” “The influence of external life conditions,” and “Rational marriage.” The last chapter bore the unwieldy title “The Degeneration of Human Stocks and Conditions that Produce It (Slavery, Poverty, Exploitation, Lack of Stock Renewal, Consanguinity, and so on),” and contained the text of the third essay that had originally been split between the November and December 1865 issues of Russian Word.
103Although he did not indicate in any way his edits in the published text, Volotskoi substantially edited Florinskii’s treatise. Some of the changes were purely stylistic. He divided the long paragraphs of the original into several shorter ones, changed punctuation, and added or removed emphasis indicated by italics. The editor also shortened the original text by nearly ten per cent, excising certain words, phrases, paragraphs, and occasionally whole pages. Some of the cuts look as if they were made to improve the flow and to lighten the prose by removing what the editor clearly saw as redundant. Others, however, were less innocent. In several instances, Volotskoi substituted “peasants” for Florinskii’s expression “lower class.” He effectively “ungendered” Florinskii’s aside to his “female readers” by rewriting it in a gender neutral voice. He removed quotations from the Bible that Florinskii had used to drive his points home. Volotskoi also excised Florinskii’s “politically incorrect” ideas, such as his suggestion that “intermixing” of the nobility and the peasantry could “perfect the human type,” or his musings on the possible extinction of the “Negroes” in the United States.
104It is possible that some of the edits were made not by the editor, but by the censor. The Bolsheviks exercised strict control over all publications, and Florinskii’s volume was no exception.177 The Soviet censorship system was no less vigilant than its imperial predecessor in removing all and any ideas, sentiments, and pronouncements deemed politically and/or ideologically unacceptable.
105Volotskoi also appended the book with ten pages of “editor’s commentaries.” Tellingly, in his commentaries Volotskoi did not use Florinskii’s own term usovershenstvovanie (perfection) replacing it with uluchshenie (betterment) that in the 1920s became Russian eugenicists’ preferred word to convey to their audiences the meaning of eugenics’ major goal of human hereditary improvement. By translating the “outdated” contents of Florinskii’s treatise into the modern languages of both eugenics and genetics, Volotskoi’s commentaries “updated” the professor’s various statements on human heredity and variability with recent advancements in genetics and anthropology and provided some references to the latest literature on these subjects. For instance, Volotskoi equated Florinskii’s expression “hereditary potentials” (nasledstvennye zadatki) with “genes” and applied the notion of dominant and recessive genes to the explanation of hereditary diseases offered by Florinskii.178 In a similar way, he updated Florinskii’s characterization of the upper classes’ “perverted tastes” in the ideals of women’s beauty with an illustration of “bourgeois tastes” in current women’s fashion. He actually reproduced a picture of a female fashion model (from a 1922 issue of the popular magazine Herald of Fashion), pointing out her narrow pelvis and shoulders, underdeveloped breasts, and hands “unfit for physical labor” (see fig. 5-9). “It is clear,” he asserted, “that such a woman is incapable either of labor processes or of childbirth and breastfeeding… Her entire figure symbolizes the rejection of labor and childbearing.”179
106Volotskoi also wrote an extensive foreword, titled “On the History and Contemporary State of the Eugenics Movement in Relation to V. M. Florinskii’s Book.”180 Developing further his claim that Florinskii’s work had remained forgotten for so long because it did not suit the interests of Russia’s ruling classes, Volotskoi opened his foreword with an illuminating metaphor:
The principle of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest operates not only in the process of plant and animal evolution, but also in the whole series of processes that occur in the artificial environment created by civilized humanity. In part, we can see it [operating] in those factors that affect the book market. Here, too, only those books “survive” — that is gain social recognition — which have proven strong and viable in their own struggle for existence, in other words, those which have corresponded to the interests of the ruling class, or at least, of that class which had understood its social role.
107According to the editor, Florinskii’s book “was too far ahead of its time and thus found no support.” “It is sufficient to read the author’s merciless assessment of the privileged classes,” he continued, “to understand why his treatise did not suit the tastes of the contemporary reading public.” “Considering the ‘higher’ strata of the population as suffering from degeneration and decline,” Volotskoi stressed, “he places all his hopes on the country’s laboring elements. And it is on this foundation that he builds his system of human perfection.” This assessment, of course, implied that Volotskoi’s own time — the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution that turned the “laboring elements” into the ruling class in Russia — was ripe for appreciating the full import of Florinskii’s treatise.
108Volotskoi focused on comparing the two “systems of the betterment of humankind”: Florinskii’s and Galton’s. Since he thought that Florinskii’s treatise had appeared in 1866, while, as he discovered in the course of his research, Galton’s first “eugenic” article had been published a year earlier, Volotskoi revised his earlier claim that Florinskii was “a predecessor” of Galton. Instead, he argued that the general idea of human betterment could be traced as far back as Greek antiquity (to ancient Sparta, Plato, and Aristotle) and had since been supported by various thinkers, “for instance, in the famous utopia The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella.” Galton’s 1865 article, Volotskoi maintained, had turned this general idea into a “caste cultivation of talented people, who… must marry only within their [own] caste and must not mix with the remaining mass of mediocrity.” Florinskii, therefore, did have predecessors, Volotskoi conceded, but “his system of the betterment of the human type shows no sign of borrowing [from] or imitating [these predecessors] and has nothing in common with Galton’s.” In a footnote, he admitted that both Galton’s and Florinskii’s systems had sprouted from the same root — Darwin’s evolutionary theory. But, he insisted, in contrast to Florinskii, Galton and his followers “completely ignore that part of Darwin’s doctrine where he speaks of the evolutionary significance of the use [and disuse] of organs and the immediate influence of environment on the organism.”
109To illustrate further the differences between Florinskii’s and Galton’s systems, Volotskoi divided several pages of his foreword into two columns. On the left he placed excerpts from Florinskii’s text and on the right quotes from Galton and his followers: Pearson, Siemens, and Alfredo Niceforo, a criminologist and statistician who had played a prominent role in founding Italian “national” eugenics.181 The citations, he stressed, show indubitably that “modern eugenics is imbued with reactionary attitudes towards the proletariat,” while Florinskii’s treatise is very sympathetic to the “lower” classes.
110The editor also critically assessed the works of Kol’tsov and Filipchenko to demonstrate that Soviet eugenics “is almost indistinguishable” from its counterparts abroad. To some, Volotskoi mused, this would seem a good cause to banish eugenics altogether from the land of the victorious proletariat. Yet, he insisted, these “reactionary tendencies [of modern eugenics]… should not repel us from the extremely valuable idea of bettering humankind by means of conscious actions upon the process of human evolution.” This idea of “a conscious, planned betterment of the human breed,” he continued, “corresponds completely to the general goals of building a socialist Soviet society.” All that is necessary, Volotskoi affirmed, is to create a new, bio-social eugenics that would “correspond to the socio-economic conditions of our great country.” His talk on “the system of eugenics as a bio-social discipline” delivered just a few months prior to the book’s release clearly shows that he had found a prototype of such new biosocial eugenics in Florinskii’s treatise.
111Certainly, Volotskoi admitted, any attempt to illuminate the problems of modern eugenics from the viewpoint of a book published sixty years ago would seem unsatisfactory to a modern scientist. Yet, he claimed, the value of Florinskii’s work lay not in the “freshness” of its scientific contents, but in its “distinct ideological particularities that give it its own physiognomy.” The editor argued that, thanks to his origins in the low-level clergy, Florinskii’s “worldview had acquired many features common with the ideology of all the exploited and the oppressed.” “Professor Florinskii created the first eugenic system founded not on the caste segregation of the higher, privileged layers of society, as in modern eugenics,” he specified, “but, to the contrary, on the abolition of all caste barriers.” And this is exactly what, in Volotskoi’s opinion, gave Florinskii’s book not just historical, but “undoubtable practical importance,” for his system could be useful in “finding scientific pathways towards the creation of a new eugenic system.” The replacement of Galton’s “bourgeois” eugenics with a new system became Volotskoi’s avowed goal, as his research projects undertaken during the 1920s clearly demonstrate. “We’ll hope,” he concluded, “that Florinskii’s unrecognized book will finally find its place in the libraries of sociologists, hygienists, anthropologists, and, generally, everyone who is interested in the issue of the conscious betterment of the human breed.”
112Volotskoi’s hope did come true, but not exactly in the way he envisioned it.
Notes de bas de page
1 For details, see Michael Bulmer, “The Development of Francis Galton’s Ideas on the Mechanism of Heredity,” JHB, 1999, 32: 263-92; and idem, Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
2 Francis Galton, “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment,” Nature, 1901, 64 (31 October): 659-65 (p. 659).
3 Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), vol. 3, part 1, p. 412. Hereafter references to this publication will be given as Pearson, 3(1): 412.
4 For a brief history of the journal during its first years, see John Aldrich, “Karl Pearson’s Biometrika: 1901–36,” Biometrika, 2013, 100(1): 3-15.
5 In its early years, Biometrika carried a variety of items on eugenics, ranging from short reviews to lengthy research reports, see W. P. E., “Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics, by Francis Galton,” Biometrika, 1907, 5(4): 477; idem, “The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics: The Fourteenth Boyle Lecture by Karl Pearson,” ibid., 1908, 6(1): 124; Edgar Schuster, “Hereditary Deafness: A Discussion of the Data Collected by Dr. E. A. Fay in America,” ibid., 1906, 4(4): 465-82; Edgar Schuster and E. M. Elderton, “The Inheritance of Psychical Characters,” ibid., 1907, 5(4): 460-69; K. P [earson], “Note on Inheritance in Man,” ibid., 1908, 6(2/3): 327-28; Ethel M. Elderton, “On the Association of Drawing with Other Capacities in School Children,” ibid., 1909, 7(1/2): 222-26; and David Heron, “Note on Reproductive Selection,” ibid., 1914, 10(2/3): 419-20.
6 Galton, “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed”; the same article also appeared in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1901: 523-38; Man, 1901, 1(132): 161-64; and Popular Science Monthly, 1901-02, 60 (January 1902): 218-33.
7 See, for instance, F. Galton, “Our National Physique — Prospects of the British Race — Are We Degenerating?” Daily Chronicle, 29 July 1903.
8 For further details on the society and its role in Galton’s campaign, see Chris Renwich, British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
9 F. Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” Sociological Papers, 1905, 1: 45-51 (p. 45). The same article in an abridged form appeared in Nature, 1904, 70 (26 May): 82; while its full text, along with its discussion, was also published by The American Journal of Sociology, 1904, 10(1): 1-25.
10 See Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims.” The paper was supplemented by the texts of Pearson’s opening remarks, the subsequent discussion, and written comments, as well as excerpts from the press coverage, see Sociological Papers, 1905, 1: 52-84.
11 Pearson, 3(1): 261.
12 Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908), p. 320.
13 Pearson, 3(1): 222.
14 This definition was publicly introduced for the first time in Galton’s Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University on 5 June 1907, see F. Galton, “Probability, The Foundation of Eugenics,” in idem, Essays on Eugenics, pp. 73-99.
15 See Pearson, 3(1): 222 and passim.
16 See Sociological Papers, 1905, 2: 1-53. (“Restrictions in Marriage,” pp. 3–13; “Studies in National Eugenics,” pp. 14-17; “Reply to the Speakers,” pp. 49-51; “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion,” pp. 52-53).
17 For a detailed history of the society, see Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its Sources and Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992).
18 Francis Galton, Essays on Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909).
19 A clear allusion to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, an 1872 novel about the future evolution of humanity, whose sequel, Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, appeared in 1901.
20 Sybil Gotto, “Preface,” in Problems in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1912), vol. 1, p. i.
21 The literature on the early history of eugenics in these countries is vast. Useful introductions could be found in Bashford and Levine, eds., Oxford Handbook.
22 For detailed analyses of the formation of the “transnational eugenics movement” in the early decades of the twentieth century, see Deborah Barrettand Charles Kurzman, “Globalizing Social Movement Theory: The Case of Eugenics,” Theory and Society, 2004, 33: 487-527; Alison Bashford, “Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Eugenics,” in Bashford and Levine, eds., Oxford Handbook, pp. 254-86; Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Nikolai Krementsov, “The Strength of a Loosely Defined Movement: Eugenics and Medicine in Imperial Russia,” Medical History, 2015, 59(1): 6-31.
23 See “1-i Mezhdunarodnyi s” ezd po evgenike (rasovoi gigiene),” Vrachebnaia gazeta, 1911, 40: 1260.
24 Gotto, “Preface,” p. i.
25 See A. S. Sholomovich, “Novoe techenie v uchenii o nasledstvennoti (po povodu Gissenskogo kongressa o nasledstvennosti),” Sovremennaia psikhiatriia (hereafter SP), 1912, 6: 392-401; and idem, “Pervyi kongress po genealogii,” Nevrologicheskii vestnik, 1912, 19(3): 582-602. On Somner’s involvement with eugenics, see Volker Roelcke, “‘Prävention’ in Hygiene und Psychiatrie zu Beginn des 20 Jahrhunderts. Krankheit, Gesellschaft, Vererbung und Eugenik bei Robert Sommer und Emil Gotschlich,” in Ulrike Enke and Volker Roelcke, eds., Die Medizinische Fakultät der Universität Giesen. Institutionen, Akteure und Ereignisse von der Gründung 1607 bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), pp. 395-416.
26 For the history of Russian eugenics during this period, see Adams, “Eugenics in Russia”; Krementsov, “From ‘Beastly Philosophy’ to Medical Genetics”; Felder, “Rasovaia gigiena v Rossii”; and Krementsov, “The Strength of a Loosely Defined Movement.”
27 See, for example, Iogannes Rutgers [Johannes Rutgers], Uluchshenie chelovecheskoi porody (SPb.: A. S. Suvorin, 1909); for the Dutch original, see J. Rutgers, Rasverbetering en bewuste aantalsbeperking: kritiek van het Malthusianisme en van het Nieuw-Malthusianisme (Rotterdam: W. J. van Hengel, 1905); however, the Russian translation was probably made from a Germanlanguage edition, see J. Rutgers, Rassenverbesserung: Malthusianismus und Neumalthusianismus (Dresden; Leipzig: Minden, 1908); see also an excerpt from Davenport’s book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: H. Holt, 1911) published as Charl’z Davenport, Evgenika kak nauka ob uluchshenii prirody cheloveka (M.: V. Kariakin, 1913); and many others.
28 See Liudvik Krzhivitskii [Ludwik Krzywicki], Psikhicheskie rasy (SPb.: XX vek, 1902), pp. 54-73, 212-23. Tellingly, when six years earlier, Krzhivitskii published a lengthy (350-page long) overview of contemporary anthropology (see L. Krzhivitskii, Antropologiia (SPb.: F. Pavlenkov, 1896), he mentioned Galton only in passing and did not use the term “eugenics” at all. But he did discuss various ideas and projects of “human betterment” propounded by other authors. It was in the latter volume that Krzhivitskii first used the term “anthropotechnique” to describe such ideas and projects. Nowadays Krzywicki is remembered mostly as a foremost Polish Marxist, sociologist, and economist. See Ludwik Krzywicki, Wspomnienia, 3 vols. (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957-59); Tadeusz Kowalik and Henryka Hołda-Róziewicz, Ludwik Krzywicki (Interpress, 1976); Henryk Holland, Ludwik Krzywicki–nieznany (Warsaw: Książka i Prasa, 2007); and Wojciech Olszewski, “Ludwik Krzywicki: An Inconveniently Labelled Marxist,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 2006, 6(3): 359-80. His role in the development of eugenics either in Russia or in Poland, however, remains almost completely forgotten. See, for instance, Grzegorz Radomski, “Eugenika i przejawy jej recepcji w polskiej mysli politycznej do 1939 roku,” Historia i Polityka, 2010, 4(11): 85-100; and Magdalena Gawin, “Early Twentieth-Century Eugenics in Europe’s Peripheries: The Polish Perspective,” East Central Europe, 2011, 38(1): 1-15.
29 See K. Timiriazev, “Galton,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Br. A. i I. Granat i Ko. (M.: “Granat,” 1911), vol. 12, pp. 469-73. It is worth noting that in 1901, the same encyclopedia carried only a very brief note on Galton, which did not mention eugenics at all. See “Galton, Francis,” Nastol’nyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (M.: “Granat” i Ko., 1901), vol. 2, p. 1090.
30 K. A. Timiriazev, “Evgenika,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Br. A. i I. Granat i Ko. (M.: “Granat,” 1913), vol. 19, pp. 391-95.
31 See Liudvik Krzhivitskii [Krzywicki], “Antropotekhnika,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Br. A. i I. Granat i Ko. (M.: “Granat,” 1911), vol. 3, pp. 249-50; K. A. Timiriazev, “Evgenika,” ibid. (M.: “Granat,” 1913), vol. 19, pp. 391-95; L. Krzhivitskii, “Antropotekhnika,” in Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (SPb.: Brokgauz-Efron: 1911), vol. 3, pp. 99-101; Anon., “Evgenika,” ibid. (SPb.: Brokgauz i Efron: 1914), vol. 17, p. 173.
32 Kropotkin’s speech was published in the congress’s proceedings, see Problems in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1913), vol. 2, pp. 50-51. All the subsequent quotations are from this source.
33 Dioneo [I. Shklovskii], “Iz Anglii. Zverinaia filosofiia,” Russkoe bogatstvo, 1912, 10: 296-323 (p. 302). The essay was also reprinted in the two-volume collection of Shklovskii’s writings issued two years later under the general title Changing England. See Dioneo [I. Shklovskii], “Glava Piatnadtsataia. Zverinaia filosofiia,” in idem, Meniaiushchaiasia Angliia (M.: Tovarishchestvo pisatelei v Moskve, 1914-1915), vol. 2, pp. 217-50.
34 See, for instance, V. Chizh, Kriminal’naia antropologiia (Odessa: G. Beilenson i I. Iurovskii, 1895); P. I. Kovalevskii, Vyrozhdenie i vozrozhdenie. Prestupnik i bor’ba s prestupnost’iu (SPb.: M. I. Akinfeev i I. V. Leont’ev, 1903); and I. A. Sikorskii, Chto takoe natsiia i drugie formy etnicheskoi zhizni (Kiev: S. V. Kul’zhenko, 1915).
35 For a general history of physical anthropology and the concept of race in Imperial Russia, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia. See also Nathaniel Knight, “Vocabularies of Difference: Ethnicity and Race in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2012, 13(3): 667-83.
36 See, for instance, E. Chepurkovskii, “Biologicheskii i statisticheskii metody v izuchenii nasledstvennosti u cheloveka,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal (hereafter RAZh), 1916, 1-2: 15-32; 3-4: 17-43.
37 See Krzhivitskii, “Antropotekhnika,” 1911, vol. 3, pp. 249-50; idem, “Antropotekhnika,” 1914, vol. 3, pp. 99-101.
38 Krzhivitskii, “Antropotekhnika,” 1914, p. 100.
39 See Vlad. Nabokov, “‘Poslednee slovo’ kriminalistiki,” Pravo, 1908, 14: 808-12.
40 See, for instance, A. A. Zhizhilenko, “Mery sotsial’noi bor’by s opasnymi prestupnikami,” Pravo, 1910, 35: 2078-91; 36: 2136-43; 37: 2167-77; N. N. Lebedev, “Bor’ba s prestupnost’iu v Amerike: operativnyi sposob uluchsheniia roda chelovecheskogo (sterilizatsiia),” Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny, 1911, 1: 1-11; and many others.
41 P. I. Liublinskii, “Novaia mera bor’by s vyrozhdeniem i prestupnost’iu,” Russkaia mysl’, 1912, 3: 31-56.
42 See, for instance, S. Ukshe, “Vyrozhdenie, ego rol’ v prestupnosti i mery bor’by s nim,” Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny, 1915, 6: 798-816.
43 See P. I. Kovalevskii, Otstalye deti (idioty, otstalye i prestupnye deti), ikh lechenie i vospitanie (SPb.: Vestnik dushevnykh boleznei, 1906).
44 See “Khronika,” Gigiena i sanitarnoe delo, 1914, 1: 118.
45 See I. G. Orshanskii, “Rol’ nasledstvennosti v peredache boleznei,” Prakticheskaia meditsina, 1897, 8-9: 1-120; and T. Iudin, “Psikhozy u bliznetsov,” Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii, 1907, 7: 68-83.
46 V. M. Bekhterev, “Vorporsy vyrozhdenia i bor’ba s nim,” Obozrenie psikhiatrii i nevrologii, 1908, 9: 518-21; and T. Iudin, “O kharaktere nasledstvennykh vzaimootnoshenii pri dushevnykh bolezniakh,” SP, 1913, 8: 568-78.
47 I. G. Orshanskii, “Izuchenie nasledstvennosti talanta,” Vestnik vospitaniia, 1911, 1: 1-41, 2: 95-127. See also, Vl. Chizh, “Nasldstvennost’ talanta u nashikh izvestnykh deiatelei,” Nauka i zhizn, 1906, 2-3: 267-90.
48 See, for instance, N. Kabanov, Rol’ nasledstvennosti v etiologii boleznei vnutrennikh organov (M.: G. I. Prostakov, 1899); and P. P. Tutyshkin, Rol’ otritsiatel’nogo otbora v protsesse semeinogo vyrozhdeniia (Khar’kov: M. Zil’berberg, 1902);
49 A. Sholomovich, Nasledstvennost’ i fizicheskie priznaki vyrozhdeniia u dushevnobol’nykh i zdorovykh (Kazan: Tip. Imp. Un-ta, 1913); and idem, Nasledstvennost’i fizicheskoe vyrozhdenie (Kazan: Tip. Imp. Un-ta, 1915).
50 See, for example, S. A. Preobrazhenskii, “Mendelizm i eigenika,” Vrachebnaia gazeta, 1913, 11: 409; M. G. Zaidner, “Braki mezhdu krovnymi rodstvennikami s tochki zreniia rasovoi gigieny,” ibid., 1914, 16: 656; and L. G. Lichkus, “Nalsedstvennost’ i eigenika,” ibid., 1914, 22: 893.
51 [N. Gamaleia], “[Programma zhurnala],” Gigiena i sanitariia (hereafter GIS), 1910, 1: 1-5 (p. 5).
52 See, for instance, I. V. Sazhin, Nasledstvennost’ i spirtnye napitki (SPb.: Soikin, 1908).
53 See K. Kuchuk, “Kratkii ocherk sovremennykh vzgliadov na nasledstvennost’,” GIS, 1912, 21-22: 437-41.
54 See E. A. Shepilevskii, “Osnovy i sredstva rasovoi gigieny (gigiena razmnozheniia),” Trudy i protokoly zasedanii Meditsinskogo obshchestva im. N. I. Pirogova pri Imperatorskom Iur’evskom Universitete, 1913-14, 6: 61-137. On Shepilevskii and his involvement with “racial hygiene,” see Felder, “Rasovaia gigiena v Rossii.”
55 See L. P. Kravets, “Nasledstvennost’u cheloveka,” Priroda, 1914, 6: 722-43; and Kr. L., “Evgenetika,” ibid., 10: 1229.
56 See N. Kol’tsov, “Alkogolizm i nasledstvennost’,” Priroda, 1916, 4: 502-05; idem, “K voprosu o nasledovanii posledstvii alkogolizma,” ibid., 1916, 10: 1189; and Iu. Filipchenko, “O vidovykh gibridakh,” in V. A. Vagner, ed., Novye idei v biologii. Nasledstvennost’ (SPb.: Obrazovanie, 1914), pp. 124-49.
57 Iu. Filipchenko, “Evgenika,” Russkaia mysl’, 1918, 3-6: 69-96.
58 For a detailed analysis of this situation, see Krementsov, “The Strength of a Loosely Defined Movement.”
59 For a discussion of the concept of ozdorovlenie (healthification) and its role in the ideology and activities of Russian physicians, see John Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890-1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. xv-xx.
60 See [N. Gamaleia], “[Programma zhurnala],” GIS, 1910, 1: 5.
61 See K. V. Karaffa-Korbutt, “Ocherki po evgenike,” GIS, 1910, 1: 41-48; 2: 138-45; 3: 276-81. Judging from the contents of these three articles, Karaffa-Korbutthad originally planned a much longer series, with separate articles on biometrics, Galton, and German Rassenhygiene. But although the last published article promised “to be continued,” no further articles appeared. I was unable to discover any reasons for this abrupt end of the series.
62 See, for instance, Kazimir Karaffa-Korbut, “I. Rutgers. Uluchshenie chelovecheskoi porody. Agnessa Blium. Etika i evgenika. SPb 1909,” GIS, 1910, 1: 75-76; N. G [amaleia], “Bertillion,” ibid., 1910, 4: 292-93; and N. Avgustovskii, “N. Norre, O zachatii v sostoianii op’ianeniia,” ibid., 1910, 9: 670-71.
63 See “Istoriia evgeniki. I. A. Fields, The progress of eugenics,” GIS, 1913, 17-20: 286-90; [N. Gamaleia], “Pervyi mezhdunarodnyi evgenicheskii kongress v Londone 24-30 iiulia 1912,” ibid., 1912, 15-16: 175-82; and Kuchuk, “Kratkii ocherk sovremennykh vzgliadov na nasledstvennost’.”
64 See, for instance, N. G [amaleia], “Bertillion,” GIS, 1910, 4: 292-93; and idem, “1 iiulia 1910 goda,” ibid., 1910, 13: 1-5.
65 N. F. Gamaleia, “Ob usloviiakh, blagopriiatstvuiushchikh uluchsheniiu prirodnykh svoistv liudei,” GIS, 1912, 19-20: 340-61.
66 Ibid., p. 361.
67 Gamaleia did not limit this activity to his journal. For instance, while teaching bacteriology and hygiene in Iur’ev (now Tartu, Estonia), he delivered a series of public lectures on eugenics, which were reported in the city’s major Estonian-language daily, see N. F. Gamaleja [Gamaleia], “Toutervendluseopetuse, eugeenika pohjus, motteist ja ulesannetest,” Postimees, 5–9 November 1912, http//:dea.nlib.ee/fullview.php?frameset=3&showset=1&wholepage=keskmine&pid=s474228&nid=7093,I am grateful to Julia Laius for her assistance in finding this source.
68 For instance, contrary to the opinion of Bjorn M. Felder, it was Gamaleia who incited Evgenii A. Shepilevskii, a professor at Iur’ev University (where Gamaleia was teaching in 1911-13), to take up the discussion of, and research in, racial hygiene. See Felder, “Rasovaia gigiena v Rossii.”
69 T. I. Iudin, “Ob evgenike i evgenicheskom dvizhenii,” SP, 1914, 4: 319-36. All the subsequent quotations are from this source.
70 Iudin had conducted extensive research and published a series of articles on the subject, see T. Iudin, “Psikhozy u bliznetsov,” Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii, 1907, 7(1): 68-83; idem, “O skhodstve psikhozov u brat’ev i sester,” SP, 1907, 10: 337-42; 11: 401-9; 12: 451-59; idem, “O forme dushevnykh zabolevanii, vstrechaiushchikhsia v sem’e progressivnykh paralitikov,” ibid., 1911, 1-2: 126-43; and idem, “O kharaktere nasledstvennykh vzaimootnoshenii pri dushevnykh bolezniakh,” ibid., 1913 (August): 568-79.
71 Just a few months earlier, a Moscow publisher had issued a Russian translation of the third, revised and expanded, edition of Punnett’s classic textbook, Mendelism (London: Macmillan, 1911), which Iudin used in his survey, see R. Pennet, Mendelizm (M.: Bios, 1913).
72 Iudin used a Russian translation of Correns’s book, Die neuen Vererbungsgesetze (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1912), which had appeared just a few months earlier, see K. Korrens, Novye zakony nasledstvennosti (M.: Bios, 1913).
73 My reconstructions of Volotskoi’s life and career are largely based on his personnel files, especially CVs, preserved at various institutions where he had studied and worked. See the Central State Archive of the City of Moscow (hereafter TsGAM), f. 418, op. 325, d. 310, ll. 1-12; the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (hereafter ARAN), f. 356, op. 3, d. 60, ll. 298-303; ARAN, f. 669, op. 2, d. 30, ll. 1-43; and RGALI, f. 117, op. 1, d. 77, ll. 5-5 rev.
74 On Anuchin and his role in Russian anthropology, see G. V. Karpov, Put’uchenogo: Ocherki zhizni, nauchnoi i obshchestvennoi deiatel’nosti D. N. Anuchina (M.: Geografgiz, 1958); and S. S. Alymov, “Dmitrii Nikolaevich Anuchin: ‘estestvennaia istoriia cheloveka v obshirnom smysle etogo slova’,” in V. A. Tishkov and D. D. Tumarkin, eds., Vydaiushchiesia otechestvennye etnologi i antropologi XX veka (M.: Nauka, 2004), pp. 7-48.
75 For illuminating memoirs (in English) of the February Revolution, see Semion Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917 Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
76 See Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
77 For details, see Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and idem, “Big Revolution, Little Revolution: Science and Politics in Bolshevik Russia,” Social Research, 2006, 73(4): 1173-204.
78 For a general discussion of the Bolsheviks’social, economic, and cultural policies during this period, see D. P. Koenker, W. G. Rosenberg, and R. G. Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).
79 For details of the conflict, see the memoirs of the university rector, zoologist Mikhail M. Novikov, Ot Moskvy do N’iu Iorka. Moia zhizn’v politike i nauke (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1952). For a general, though dated, assessment of Narkompros’s activities in the first years of the Bolshevik regime, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
80 Numerous dairies vividly depict the difficulties of survival in Moscow during the civil war years. See, for example, N. P. Okunev, Dnevnik moskvicha, 1914-1924, 2 vols. (SPb.: Voenizdat, 1998). For a thorough historical analysis of urban life during this period, see A. A. Il’iukhov, Zhizn’ v epokhu peremen (M.: ROSSPEN, 2007).
81 On Bunak, see M. F. Nesturkh, “Viktor Valerianovich Bunak,” in idem, ed., Sovremennaia antropologiia (M.: MGU, 1964), pp. 9-18; and S. V. Vasil’ev and M. I. Urynson, “Viktor Valerianovich Bunak: patriarch antropologii,” in Tishkov and Tumarkin, eds., Vydaiushchiesia otechestvennye etnologi i antropologi, pp. 233-60. The former article appeared in a jubilee volume celebrating Bunak’s seventieth birthday and did not mention his involvement with eugenics at all. The list of Bunak’s publications appended to the article did not include a single reference to his numerous works on the subject. This omission is particularly telling, since Bunak was the only Soviet eugenicist whose paper appeared in the proceedings of an international eugenics congress, see V. Bunak, “Sex-Ratio of New-Born Infants, as an Index of Vitality,” in A Decade of Progress in Eugenics. Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1934), pp. 431-35.
82 On the establishment of the State Museum of Social Hygiene and its first director, see M. P. Kuzybaeva, “Gigienicheskii muzei professora A. V. Mol’kova,” Gigiena i sanitariia, 2013, 4: 94-97. On the museum’s consultants, see GARF, f. A1571, op. 1, dd. 1-2.
83 On the creation of Narkomzdrav and its activities during the first decade of operation, see Neil B. Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health Administration, Narkomzdrav, 1918-28,” in S. G. Solomon and J. F. Hutchinson, eds., Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 97-120.
84 T. Ia. Tkachev, Sotsial’naia gigiena (Voronezh: Gubzdravotdel, 1924), pp. 11, 153.
85 On the history of Soviet social hygiene, see Susan G. Solomon, “Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health, 1921-1930,” in Solomon and Hutchinson, eds., Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 175-99; and idem, “The Limits of Government Patronage of Sciences: Social Hygiene and the Soviet State, 1920–1930,” Social History of Medicine, 1990, 3(3): 405-35.
86 V. Mol’kov, “Piat’let raboty Gosudarstvennogo Instituta Sotsial’noi Gigieny,” Sanitarnoe prosveshchenie, 1924, 2: 31.
87 On Kol’tsov’s life and activities, see B. L. Astaurov and P. F. Rokitskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich Kol’tsov (M.: Nauka, 1975).
88 On the history of the institute, see Mark B. Adams, “Science, Ideology, and Structure: The Kol’tsov Institute, 1900-1970,” in Linda L. Lubrano and Susan G. Solomon, eds., The Social Context of Soviet Science (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980), pp. 173-204.
89 For a focused analysis of Kol’tsov’s early efforts to build working relations with the Bolshevik regime, see Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 183-85.
90 One of the first projects Kol’tsov offered to Semashko in 1919 was breeding rabbits, mice, guinea-pigs, and chickens for Narkomzdrav’s research institutions, which, given the total absence of a system of supply of laboratory animals in the country, was a very timely and appealing offer. See GARF, f. A-482, op. 1, d. 34, ll. 346-47.
91 For the early history of this institution, see L. A. Tarasevich and V. A. Liubarskii, eds., Gosudarstvennyi Institut Narodnogo zdravookhraneniia imeni Pastera (“GINZ”), 1919-1924 (M.: GINZ, 1924).
92 See ARAN, f. 450, op. 4, d. 7, ll. 1-4; d. 8, ll. 22-23.
93 See the descriptions of the meeting in V. Bunak, “O deiatel’nosti Russkogo evgenicheskogo obshchestva za 1921 god,” Russkii evgenicheskii zhurnal (hereafter REZh), 1922, 1(1): 99-101; and “Khronika,” RAZh, 1922, 12(1-2): 215-16.
94 See, for instance, Volotskoi’s reports to Narkompros on the RES activities in 1922 and 1923, in GARF, f. A2307, op. 8, d. 278, ll. 81-83; 85-92.
95 Kol’tsov invited Bunak to head the department and reserved for himself its “general scientific direction,” see ARAN, f. 570, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 27, 58.
96 On the “rejuvenation craze” in early 1920s Russia, see Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments, pp. 127-58.
97 For detailed analyses of the US “eugenic” sterilization, see Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
98 See Dr. Sharp, “Sterilizatsiia v shtate Indiana,” in N. K. Kol’tsov, ed., Omolozhenie (M.-Pg.: GIZ, 1923), pp. 121-23. For the original, see “Discussion,” Eugenics Review, 1912, 4(2): 204-05.
99 For a highly readable account of the civil war, see W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of Russian Civil War, 1918-1921 (New York: Da Capo, 1989).
100 For a general discussion of the social, economic, cultural, and political aspects of NEP, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For more recent assessments based on the newly available archival documents, see materials of a series of conferences held at the Institute of Russian History in Moscow, A. K. Sokolov, ed., NEP v kontekste istoricheskogo razvitiia Rossii XX veka (M.: IRI, 2001); A. S. Siniavskii, ed., NEP: ekonomicheskie, politicheskie i sotsiokul’turnye aspekty (M.: ROSSPEN, 2006); and many others.
101 For details, see Krementsov, Stalinist Science, and idem, “Big Revolution, Little Revolution.”
102 For details on the post-revolutionary literacy and science-popularization campaigns, see James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917-1934 (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2003).
103 For instance, in order to get more information on the Indiana sterilization law, Volotskoi initiated correspondence with one of its instigators, Indiana State Health Officer John N. Hurty. See Sharp, “Sterilizatsiia v shtate Indiana,” pp. 121-23.
104 N. K. Kol’tsov, “Uluchshenie chelovecheskoi porody,” REZh, 1922, 1: 3-27. All the following citations are from this source. This and several other articles that had been published by Soviet eugenicists were reprinted in V. V. Babkov, Zaria genetiki cheloveka (M.: Progress-Traditsiia, 2008). These publications are also available in an English translation; see V. V. Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, transl. by Victor Fet, ed. by James Schwarz (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2013). Although in my own work I have always used the original Russian texts, for the convenience of my English-reading audience, I include references to their English translations available in the latter volume. Hereafter such references will be given as [Babkov, pp. 66-86].
105 Kol’tsov used the word “religion” in the same sense as we use the word “ideology” today.
106 A year later, when Kol’tsov published this speech as a brochure, he excised its last two paragraphs that had advanced the view of eugenics as religion, see N. K. Kol’tsov, Uluchshenie chelovecheskoi porody (Pg.: Vremia, 1923).
107 For a short biography of Filipchenko in English, see Mark B. Adams, “Filipchenko, Iurii Aleksandrovich,” in Frederic Holmes, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner, 1990), vol. 17, suppl. 2, pp. 297-303; for a much more detailed Russian-language biography, see N. N. Medvedev, Iurii Aleksandrovich Filipchenko (M.: Nauka, 2006). From the very beginning of his organizational efforts, Kol’tsov sought Filipchenko’s support. He even invited Filipchenko to head the IEB eugenics department and managed to approve his candidacy by Narkomzdrav (see ARAN, f. 570, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 29, 34, 58). But, busy with building his own institutional base in Petrograd, Filipchenko declined to move to Moscow. In September 1920, Kol’tsov also invited Filipchenko to join him in founding the Russian Eugenics Society. On the latter’s visit to Moscow in November, Filipchenko and Kol’tsov discussed the strategy and agreed that Filipchenko would act in Petrograd independently of whatever Kol’tsov would do in Moscow. For a description of the meeting, see Filipchenko’s diaries held in the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg (hereafter RO RNB), f. 813, op. 1, d. 1283, l. 3.
108 See the St. Petersburg branch of the ARAN, f. 132, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 2-6; and Iu. Filipchenko, “Biuro po evgenike,” Izvestiia Biuro po Evgenike, 1922, 1: 1-4; for a brief history of the bureau, see M. B. Konashev, “Biuro po evgenike, 1922-1930,” Issledovaniia po genetike, 1994, 11: 22-28.
109 In 1924, this society became a branch of the RES and Filipchenko joined Kol’tsov as a co-editor of its oracle, the Russian Eugenics Journal.
110 For a voluminous, though far from complete bibliography of eugenics publications up to 1928, see K. Gurvich, “Ukazatel’literatury po voprosam evgeniki, nasledstvennosti i selektsii i sopredel’nykh oblastei, opublikovannoi na russkom iazyke do 01.01.1928 g.,” REZh, 1928, 6(2-3): 121-43.
111 See “Evgenika i biologicheskie voprosy,” Ginekologiia i akusherstvo, 1924, 4: 409-13.
112 Many Russian gynecologists preferred the term evgenetika (eugénnetique) introduced by their prominent French colleague, obstetrician Adolphe Pinard. See, V. Wallich, “L’eugénnetique,” in E. Brissaud, A. Pinard, P. Reclus, eds., Nouvelle pratique médico-chirurgicale illustrée. Premier supplément (Paris: Masson, 1911-1912), pp. 547-50, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54465064. On Pinard’s involvement with eugenics, see Alain Drouard, “Eugenics in France and in Scandinavia: Two Case Studies,” in Robert A. Peel, ed., Essays in the History of Eugenics (London: The Galton Institute, 1998), pp. 173-207; and idem, L’eugénisme en questions: L’exemple de l’eugénisme “français” (Paris: Elilipses, 1999).
113 N. M. Kakushkin, “Evgenetika i ginekologiia,” in Trudy VI s” ezda vsesoiuznogo obshchestva ginekologov i akusherov (M.: T. Dortman, 1925), p. 415.
114 See Trudy VI s”ezda vsesoiuznogo obshchestva ginekologov i akusherov, pp. 448-55.
115 For more details on Russian geneticists’ and eugenicists’ international activities, see Nikolai Krementsov, International Science between the World Wars: The Case of Genetics (London: Routledge, 2005).
116 Vavilov to Davenport, 21 September 1921. This letter is preserved among Davenport’s papers held in the Manuscript Division of the American Philosophical Society (hereafter APS), Mss. B. D27; hereafter references to this collection will be given as “Davenport Papers.”
117 See “Foreign Notes,” Eugenical News, 1921, 6: 72-73.
118 See Koltzoff [Kol’tsov] to Davenport, 25 June 1921, Davenport Papers.
119 See Philiptschenko [Filipchenko] to Davenport, 28 October 1921, Davenport Papers. Davenport also printed Filipchenko’s plea in the ERO newsletter, see “Russian Eugenics Bureau,” Eugenical News, 1922, 7:13.
120 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
121 L. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (M.: Krasnaia nov’, 1923), pp. 195-97.
122 See “Russkii evgenicheskii zhurnal,” Izvestiia, 7 October 1922, p. 8.
123 See T. I. Iudin, “Nasledstvennost’ dushevnykh boleznei,” REZh, 1922, 1(1): 28-39; and V. V. Bunak, “Evgenicheskie opytnye stantsii, ikh zadachi i plan ikh rabot,” ibid., 83-99.
124 See A. S. Serebrovskii, “O zadachakh i putiakh antropogenetiki,” REZh, 1923, 1(2): 107-16. For a brief biography of Serebrovskii in English, see Mark B. Adams, “Serebrovskii, Aleksandr Sergeevich,” in Holmes, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 18, Suppl. II, pp. 803-11; for a much more detailed description of Serebrovskii’s life and works in Russian, see N. N. Vorontsov, ed., Aleksandr Sergeevich Serebrovskii (M.: Nauka, 1993).
125 V. V. Bunak, “Metody izucheniia nasledstvennosti u cheloveka,” REZh, 1923, 1(2): 137-200.
126 M. V. Volotskoi, “O polovoi sterilizatsii nasledstvenno-defektivnykh,” REZh, 1923, 1(2): 201-22.
127 M. V. Volotskoi, Podniatie zhiznennykh sil rasy. Novyi put’ (M.: Zhizn’i znanie, 1923), p. 5.
128 See, for instance, T. Ia. Tkachev, “Polovaia sterilizatsiia, kak problema sotsial’noi gigieny,” Voronezhskoe zdravookhranenie, 1923, 2: 51-55; and idem, Sotsial’naia gigiena.
129 See, for instance, Russian discussions of the Norwegian and Swedish eugenic legislation, Anon., “Sovremennoe sostoianie voprosa o sterilizatsii v Shvetsii,” REZh, 1925, 3(1): 78-81; and Iu. Filipchenko, “Obsuzhdenie norvezhskoi evgenicheskoi programmy na zasedaniiakh Leningradskogo Otdeleniia R. E. O.,” ibid., 1925, 3(2): 139-43; the latter article was reprinted in Eugenics Review, see Ju. A. Philiptschenko, “The Norwegian Eugenic Programme: Discussed at Meetings of the Eugenic Society of Leningrad,” Eugenics Review, 1928, 19(4): 294-98.
130 See Iu. A. Filipchenko, “M. V. Volotskoi, Podniatie zhiznennykh sil rasy. Novyi put’. Iz-vo ‘Zhizn’ i znanie’. M. 1923 g. Str. 96,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1924, 6: 248-50.
131 See, for instance, N. Lialin, “Khirurgicheskaia sterilizatsiia zhenshchin i ee sotsial’noe znachenie,” Zdravookhranenie, 1929, 11-12: 162-68.
132 V. M. Volotskoi, Podniatie zhiznennykh sil rasy. Novyi put’ (M.: Zhizn’i znanie, 1926).
133 Ibid., p. 24.
134 Volotskoi published a “historical inquiry” on Peter the Great’s “anthropotechnical projects” in Russian Eugenics Journal, see M. V. Volotskoi, “Antropotekhnicheskie porekty Petra I-go (istoricheskaia spravka),” REZh, 1923, 1(2): 235-36 (p. 336), [Babkov, pp. 20-22].
135 He did notice in the treatise’s text several references to it being “a journal article” and tried to find where it had originally been published. He took as his guide a reference to the journal Deed as the publisher of Florinskii’s book that appeared in an article on Florinskii in a popular encyclopedia (see A. [M. T. Alekseev], “Florinskii, Vasilii Markovich,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’Brokgauza i Efrona (SPb.: Brokgauz i Efron, 1902), vol. 36, p. 169). But, of course, he did not find any of Florinskii’s publications in Deed. See the first “editor’s commentary” in Florinskii, 1926, p. 157.
136 Anuchin knew and corresponded with Florinskii during the 1890s regarding the latter’s archeological research in Siberia (see a sample of this correspondence in Iastrebov, Sto neizvestnykh pisem, pp. 21-25), and it seems likely that he owned a copy of Florinskii’s treatise. However, Anuchin’s book collection currently held at the Rare Book Section of the Scientific Library of Moscow University does not have a copy of Florinskii’s 1866 book (though it does have a copy of the 1926 edition issued by Volotskoi). According to the head of the Rare Book Section, Alexander Livshits (personal communication, 10 November 2016), it is possible that the 1866 copy has been lost, as a result of either the numerous “purges” the library had suffered during the Soviet era, or its evacuation from Moscow during World War II. It is also possible that Volotskoi had “borrowed” the copy to prepare and typeset his 1926 edition of the book and never returned it to the library. However, none of these possibilities could be verified by the available materials.
137 Volotskoi, Podniatie zhiznennykh sil rasy, p. 91.
138 V. M. Volotskoi, “K istorii evgenicheskogo dvizheniia,” REZh, 1924, 2(1): 50-55, [Babkov, pp. 23-28]; all the subsequent quotations are from this source.
139 Ibid., pp. 53-54.
140 Ibid., p. 54.
141 At the time of writing his book, Volotskoi was clearly unaware of Galton’s 1865 article and apparently thought that Galton’s first “eugenic” work was Hereditary Genius published four years later.
142 See M. V. Volotskoi, “O dvukh formakh chelovecheskoi kisti preimushchestvenno v sviazi s polovymi i rasovymi otlichiiami,” RAZh, 1924, 13(3-4): 70-82.
143 Only two years older than Volotskoi, Bunak apparently saw the younger man as a formidable threat to his own administrative ambitions at both the anthropology department and the IEB eugenics department. Judging by available materials, the relations between the two men were less than cordial and might well have also contributed to Volotskoi’s decision to leave the university. Tellingly, in 1930 when Bunak was fired, Volotskoi returned to his alma mater.
144 On the establishment of this institute and its work during the first five years, see Piatiletie Gosudarstvennogo tsentral’nogo instituta fizicheskoi kul’tury, 1918-1923 (M.: TsIT, 1923); for a Soviet-era history of the institute, which of course does not even mention eugenics, see I. G. Chudinov, Gosudarstvennyi Tsentral’nyi ordena Lenina institut fizicheskoi kul’tury: Istoricheskii ocherk (M.: Fizkul’tura i sport, 1966).
145 Podgotovka rabotnikov po fizicheskoi kul’ture (M.: Izd-vo Vysshego i Moskovskogo soveta fiz.kul’tury, 1924), p. 8.
146 ARAN, f. 669, op. 2, d. 30, l. 1.
147 For details on the Bolsheviks’ efforts to create “Communist” and “proletarian” science, see Krementsov, Stalinist Science; and idem, “Big Revolution, Little Revolution.”
148 For details on Bogdanov’s concept of “proletarian science,” see Nikolai Krementsov, A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
149 For details, see David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind; and Krementsov, Stalinist Science.
150 For detailed analyses of the role of Marxism in 1920s Russian, especially biomedical, science, as well as an overview of voluminous historical literature on the subject, see Nikolai Krementsov, “Marxism, Darwinism, and Genetics in the Soviet Union,” in Denis Alexander and Ron Numbers, eds., Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 215-46; and Daniel P. Todes and Nikolai Krementsov, “Dialectical Materialism and Soviet Science in the 1920s and 1930s,” in William Leatherbarrow and Derek Oxford, eds., A History of Russian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 340-67.
151 In his 1922 article, titled “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” Lenin proclaimed that every “scientist must be an up-to-date materialist, a deliberate follower of the materialism presented by Marx, that is, he must be a dialectical materialist.” See V. I. Lenin, “O znachenii voinstvuiushchego materializma,” Pod znamenem marksizma (hereafter PZM), 1922, 3: 29. The rules of appointment are preserved among the Timiriazev Institute’s materials, see ARAN, f. 669, op. 2, d. 30, l. 8.
152 Aside from an occasional mention of his name in various publications on the history of Soviet pediatrics and physical culture, I was able to find only very brief biographies of Radin. See “Radin Evgenii Petrovich,” Bol’shaia meditsinskaia entsiklopediia (M.: Gosmedizdat, 1962), vol. 27, p. 739; the same entry was reprinted in B. D. Petrov, ed., Vrachi-soratniki V. I. Lenina, uchastniki revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia. Biobliograficheskii spravochnik (M.: n. p., 1970), 95-96. The following reconstruction is based on Radin’s personnel file preserved in the Narkomzdrav archive, GARF, f. А482, op. 41, d. 2820, ll. 1-10. Alas, the file covers only the 1923-29 period.
153 The anthem was “Smelo, tovarishchi, v nogu” (Bravely, Comrades, in Step). See “Radin, Leonid Petrovich,” in P. A. Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli. Biobibliograficheskii slovar’(M.: Prosveshchenie, 1990), vol. 2, “M-Ia,” pp. 185-86.
154 See E. Radin, Okhranenie nervnogo i dushevnogo zdorov’ia uchashikhsia (SPb.: B. M. Vol’f, 1910). He also published several interesting studies on what at the time was termed “social psychiatry,” investigating manifestations of mental illness in contemporary literature and social attitudes. See, for example, E. P. Radin, “Vyrozhdaiushchiesia vysshego poriadka,” SP, 1908, October: 433-44; November: 483-93; idem, Problema pola v sovremennoi literature i bol’nye nervy (SPb.: Montvida, 1910); idem, Dushevnoe nastroenie sovremennoi uchasheisia molodezhi po dannym Peterburgskoi obshchestudencheskoi ankety 1912 goda (SPb.: N. P, Karbasnikov, 1913); and idem, “Futurizm i bezumie”. Paralleli tvorchestva i analogii novogo iazyka kubo-futuristov (SPb.: N. P. Karbasnikov, 1914).
155 For a general examination of the Bolsheviks’ concern with children, see Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); and Loraine de la Fe, “Empire’s Children: Soviet Childhood in the Age of Revolution,” doctoral dissertation, Florida International University, 2013.
156 See, for instance, E. P. Radin, Chto delaet sovetskaia vlast’ dlia okhrany zdorov’ia detei (M.: Komissiia pamiati V. M. Bonch-Bruevich [Velichkinoi], 1919). He fought fiercely to wrestle control over school physicians from Narkompros and instigated several decrees by the SNK to subordinate all the issues of children’s health to Narkomzdrav’s authority. See E. P. Radin, Okhrana zdorov’ia detei i podrostkov i sotsial’naia evgenika (Orel: GIZ, 1923), pp. 23-58. For a brief contemporary English-language description of the OZDP department, see Anon., “Children’s Health Protection in the Soviet Union,” Russian Review, 1925, 3(22): 461-62. In 1927 Radin became the director of the first research institute for the protection of children’s and adolescents’health, see E. P. Radin, Gosudarstvennyi nauchnyi institut okhrany zdorov’ia detei i podrostokov Narkomzdrava (Orel: Orlovskoe pedologicheskoe obscshestvo, 1929).
157 For general histories of early Soviet physical culture, which, alas, do not mention Radin, see Susan Grant, “The Politics and Organization of Physical Culture in the USSR during the 1920s,” Slavonic and East European Review, 2011, 89(3): 494-515; and idem, Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society: Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s (New York: Routledge, 2013).
158 For accounts of the history of Soviet pedology, see N. Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki (SPb.: Aleteia, 2004); and E. M. Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii v pervoi treti XX veka (SPb.: Nestor-Istoriia, 2012); on the history of Russian pedology in English, see a series of publications by Andy Byford, “Professional Cross-Dressing: Doctors in Education in Late Imperial Russia (1881-1917),” Russian Review, 2006, 65(4): 586-616; idem, “The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science,” History of the Human Sciences, 2014, 27(4): 22-58; and idem, “Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s-1930s,” Ab Imperio, 2016, 2: 71-124. Alas, none of the above publications mention Radin’s contributions to the field.
159 See, for instance, his book (co-written with his wife) on “New games for new children” that went through five editions during the 1920s, M. A. Kornil’eva-Radina and E. P. Radin, Novym detiam — novye igry. Podvizhnye igry shkol’nogo i vneshkol’nogo vozrastov (ot 7 do 18 let) v refleksologicheskom i pedologicheskom osveshchenii, 5th edn. (M.: Medgiz, 1929).
160 Radin, Okhrana zdorov’ia detei i podrostkov.
161 N. Semashko, “Predislovie,” in E. P. Radin et al., eds., Fizicheskaia kul’tura v nauchnom osveshchenii (M.: Izdanie Vysshego i Moskovskogo sovetov fizicheskoi kul’tury, 1924), pp. 3-4 (p. 3).
162 M. V. Volotskoi, “Fizicheskaia kul’tura s tochki zreniia evgeniki,” in Radin, Fizicheskia kul’tura v nauchnom osveshchenii, pp. 62-75; idem, “O nekotorykh techeniiakh v sovremennoi evgenike,” in ibid., pp. 76-85. The first article was actually the text of a report he had delivered in November 1923 to an all-Russia conference on the protection of children’s and adolescents’ health. He also published an updated version of this article three years later in a new journal, Theory and Practice of Physical Culture, established by Narkomzdrav, see V. M. Volotskoi, “Fizicheskaia kul’tura i evgenika,” Teoriia i praktika fizicheskoi kul’tury, 1927, 1: 19-26.
163 V. M. Volotskoi, Klassovye interesy i sovremennaia evgenika (M.: Zhizn’i znanie, 1925).
164 Volotskoi used Siemens’s article, “Die Proletarisierung unseres Nachwuchses, eine Gefahr unrassenhygienischer Bevölkerungspolitik,” Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschafts-Biologie (hereafter ARGB), 1916-17, 12(1): 43-55; and his two-volume treatise on Grundzüge der Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1923); along with the second volume of the infamous collection by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and FritzLenz, Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1921), written and published by Lenz under the title, Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene.
165 Volotskoi, Klassovye interesy, p. 45.
166 See the tables of contents of the two oracles of Russian eugenics, Russian Eugenics Journal and Herald of the Eugenics Bureau, in Babkov, pp. 196-203; and pp. 287-89.
167 See N. K. Kol’tsov, “Genealogiia Ch. Darvina i F. Gal’tona,” REZh, 1922, 1(1): 64-73; and A. S. Serebrovskii, “Genealogiia roda Aksakovykh,” ibid., 82-97.
168 See, for instance, D. M. D’iakonov and Ia. Ia. Lus, “Raspredelenie i nasledonvanie spetsial’nykh sposobnostei,” Izvestiia biuro po evgenike, 1922, 1: 72-112; and G. G. Shefter, Vyrozhdenie i evgenika (M.-L.: GIZ, 1927).
169 Kol’tsov, “Uluchshenie chelovecheskoi porody,” p. 10.
170 He described this “experiment” in detail in his article, Volotskoi, “O nekotorykh techeniiakh v sovremennoi evgenike.” All the following quotations are from this source.
171 Volotskoi took this citation from Florinskii, 1866, p. 73.
172 He repeated the same talk in April 1926 at the Institute of Physical Culture. Its text, however, appeared in print only two years later, see M. V. Volotskoi, Sistema evgeniki kak biosotsial’noi distsipliny (M.: Izd. Timiriazevskogo instituta, 1928). All the subsequent quotations are from this source.
173 See V. M. Volotskoi, “Alkogolizm i sifilis kak factory, vliiaiushchie na potomstvo,” Fizicheskaia kul’tura v nauchno-prakticheskom osveshchenii, 1928, 1-2: 134-47.
174 See V. M. Volotskoi, Professional’nye vrednosti i potomstvo (Vologda: Severnyi pechatnik, 1929). This 250-page book had actually been finished in 1926, but appeared in print only three years later.
175 He gave a talk on the subject at the Timiriazev Institute, but never published its text. See ARAN, f. 356, op. 1, d. 38, ll. 72-73 rev. Unfortunately, the archive does not contain a stenographic record of the talk.
176 Florinskii, 1926.
177 As did all other Soviet publications, on the back of its front page, Florinskii’s volume bore a specific inscription — “Gublit № 1114 (Vologda)” — that “identified” the concrete censor who had reviewed the book and approved it for publishing. The inscription indicates that the volume was submitted to the censor in the city of Vologda where it was printed. Alas, I was unable to find any archival records illuminating the censorship process.
178 Florinskii, 1926, pp. 163-64.
179 Ibid., pp. 159-60. He took his picture from Vestnik mody, 1922, 5.
180 M. V. Volotskoi, “K istorii i sovremennomu sostoianiiu evgenicheskogo dvizheniia, v sviazi s knigoi V. M. Florinskogo,” in Florinskii, 1926, pp. VII-XIX. All the subsequent citations are from this source.
181 Volotskoi cited an English translation of Niceforo’s report to the 1912 London congress, see A. Niceforo, “The Causes of the Inferiority of Physical and Moral Characters in the Lower Classes,” Problems in Eugenics, vol. 1, pp. 189-94. On Niceforo and his place in Italian eugenics, see Cassata, Building a New Man.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.