The history of Eugenics in the USS
The formation of Socialist Eugenics Science
Although the first Russian translation of Francis Galton's “Hereditary Genius“ appeared in 1874 the subsequent quarter century saw little interest in eugenic ideas in Russia, and no other works by the founding father of eugenics were published. Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin who's book "The Origin of Species" changed Galtons life forever. He was fascinated with the work, especially the first chapter on "Variation under Domestication" concerning the breeding of domestic animals. Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted. In doing so, he established a research program which embraced multiple aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height; from facial images to fingerprint patterns. This required inventing novel methods to measure traits, the large-scale collection of data and the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding them. These ideas and techniques were described in his aforementioned "Hereditary Genius" which he published in 1869. Galton also invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in the book, "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development".
Francis Galton
There were several reasons that the concept of eugenics didn't get much attention in the Russian Empire. Russia lacked the socioeconomic conditions, that were fueling the eugenics movement elsewhere. The Empire was huge, sparsely populated, predominately agrarian, autocratic, poly-confessional and multi ethnic. Overpopulation or being overwhelmed by mass immigration weren't concerns, neither was the fear of a degenerated, urban worker and paupers class out-breeding the precious middle and upper class.
Around 1900 the advent of Industrialization along with the rapid growth of medical, scientific, pedagogical and legal professions began to change the situation. During the first decades of the twentieth century, eugenic ideas started to filter into Russia. Russian eugenicists were well informed of the varied approaches to the issues of “human betterment” by selective breeding.
While Russian proponents of eugenics were inspired by Western contemporaries, the majority of them criticized the “race” and “class” components of eugenic ideas and policies, which were most prevalent in the German and Anglo-Saxon discourse. Their work empathized more the education and general nurture side of the debate, as it was the case in France. They rejected “negative measure” like sterilization and segregation and instead advocated the improvement of social conditions, education and the use of eugenics as a form of voluntary prophylactic medicine.
The Russian response to the First International Eugenics Congress held in 1912 in London displayed these features prominently. Although Russia didn't sent official representatives to the congress at least two Russian men attended the sessions anyway. These men were the eminent philosopher and theoretician of anarchism and author of “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]
" [/FONT]Petr Kropotkin and the popular journalist Issak Shklovsky. Kropotkin delivered a passionate speech against the congress class bias “Who are the unfit?” he exclaimed rhetorically “the workers or the idler? The women of the people who suck their children themselves or the ladies who are unfit for maternity because they can't perform their duties of a mother? Those who produce degenerates in slums, or those who produce degenerates in palaces?” Kropotkin vehemently opposed the proposal to sterilize the “unfit” insisting that such social measures as the abolition of slums “will improve the germplasm of the next generation more than any amount of sterilization” .
Shklovsky echoed Kropotkin's criticism. The title of his correspondence from the congress “Beastly Philosophy” speaks for itself. While Kropotkin attacked the “class” components of eugenics ideas, Shklovsky focused his critic on “race”. His criticism can be best summarized in this comment of his: “All those purportedly scientific data upon which the doctrine of higher and lower races are based can not withstand criticism for the very simple reason that anthropology knows no pure races”. The most influential, early enthusiast of eugenics in the Russian Empire was the anthropologist Ludwik Kryzwicki who wrote extensively on eugenics and was the one who coined the term antropotekhnika (antoropotechnique) a term derived form the Russian word for animal breeding zootekhnika (zootechnique).
Kryzwicki was however much more enlightened about the whole concept, than other followers of Galton. While he wrote “eugenics offers us the opportunity to become more than the simple observers of humanity” in the same sentence he also cautioned not to use “hasty application of negative eugenic ” since they might “at the present time turn into the instruments of narrow class interests”.
Many Russian physicians were sympathetic to eugenics. For doctors eugenics offered a new research methodology (medical family histories, twin studies, and statistical analysis) and a new interpretative framework, replacing the old vague idea of “inborn constitution” with the new principle of heredity. During this period several doctoral dissertations on “heredity and disease” were defended in Russia. A programmatic statement opening the first issue of a new journal “Hygiene and Sanitary Science” in 1910 argued that “generative hygiene [eugenics]” ought to constitute an important part of Russian public health agenda. The last but in the end most important group interested in eugenics were Russian biologist, first and foremost Nikolai Koltsov and Yuri Filipchenko two of the founders of Russian Genetic Research.
In the years prior to the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 eugenics failed to spark an organized movement or find an institutional setting. The situation changed dramatically after the revolution. Despite the bloody class war, famines epidemics and economic deprivation eugenics societies, research institutions and specialized periodicals thrived. Eugenics entered teaching curricula and found grass root following nationwide. The Bolshevik revolution liquidated the private endowments that supported Koltsov's Institute of Experimental Biology, which he had established in 1916. This forced Koltsov to search for new patrons among the newly created Bolshevik state agencies. Two circumstances helped him in that quest.
First Nikolai Koltsov had a long history of being politically active and supportive of the socialist cause. In the the days of the Revolution of 1905 Koltsov joined the newly formed socialist “Circle of Eleven Hot-Heads” lead by the astronomer Paul Karlovic Sternberg. Sternberg worked at the Observatory of the Moscow University where the circle held their first meeting but for security reasons they shifted their base of operation from the observatory to Koltsov's office. Here the revolutionary collective organized protests, petitions and printed on mimeographed underground propaganda leaflets.
Genetic Counseling
Koltsov's state of mind during this period is best characterized by his short book “In Memoriam. Victims from among the students of Moscow in October and December days.”
Income from the publications supplied the committee to assist prisoners and pardoned. It was sold for a price of 50 kopeks in 1906. The book not only gave out the names of the victims but in detail described the circumstances of their death, and included various excerpts from newspapers as well as comments from Koltsov himself. One example for a newspaper article was Czars Nikolai's speech in which he thanked the student's killer for their heroic deeds, as he said "The sedition in Moscow has been broken."
The book was released at the same day, that the new state Duma held its first meeting. The book was almost immediately confiscated, but more than half of the circulation had already managed to disperse. Shortly after the suppression of the revolution Koltsov had scheduled his Doctor Thesis defense, but refused to defend his work “behind the doors”. This comment was not as one might think a figure of speech but a sad reality. The University was at the time patrolled by soldiers to ensure "law and order" and the professors were literally working behind closed doors, since no public lectures were allowed yet. In 1909 Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov was finally banned from teaching for his political views and quit from the university in 1911 joining other famous teachers who did the same.
The second advantage he had was his good relationship with The People's Commissar for Public Health Protection Nikolai Semashko, a Bolshevik physician who was himself an active proponent of social hygiene and the leading force of its institutionalization. Eugenics found its first institutional home in the State Museum of Social Hygiene, created by the Commissariat for Health Protection in January 1919.
Under Koltsov's imitative the "USS Eugenics Society" was founded in November 1920. One of the other founding members the anthropologist Viktor Valerianovich Bunak became the director of the eugenics department at the Institute for Experimental Biology which Koltsov had created already in 1917.
As the head of the whole Ineksbio Koltsov was responsible for the general scientific direction of the institute, but he also found the time to be the editor in chief of the Eugenics Society's publication the “USS Eugenic Journal”. Parallel to Koltsov, Yuri Filipchenko had organized the USS first genetic department at the Petrograd University and a genetic laboratory within the University's Institute of Natural Science. He also advocated the establishment of a Department of Eugenics inside the People's Commissariat of Health Protection to study the “questions of heredity specifically in application to humans” and “to implement the results in form of a general socialist eugenics policy”. Shortly after the first issue of the “USS Eugenic Journal” was published he joined Koltsov on the editorial board.
Having built the institutional bases the champions of Russian eugenics began to revive their international contacts, reviewing current Western works on eugenics and arranging for their Russian/Interlingvo translation. However soveta eugenics did not simply, slavishly follow the path of its Western counterparts. It was profoundly shaped by the local traditions, as well as the institutional and ideological landscape.
In his inauguration address as the new and first president of the “USS Eugenic Society” Koltsov identified three key components of eugenics. The first was “pure science” or “anthropogenetics” gathering knowledge of human heredity.
The second “applied science” which echoing his pre-revolutionary predecessors termed “anthropotechnique”. The task of anthropotechnique was to find appropriate methods of improving the genetic quality of future generations. The third and last was “eugenic religion” a concept inspired by the new and highly active movement of Cosmism. Koltsov sought to integrate the concept of eugenics into the new secular church's doctrine in order to espouse an “ideal” that would “give meaning to (human) life and motivate people to sacrifices and self-limitations”. The “USS Eugenic Journal's” second issue carried an article “On the tasks and paths of anthropogenetics” written by Koltsov's student and future head of the “Department of Anthropotechinque” Aleksander Serebrovsky which outlined the research methodology and agendas of the new science.
Between 1920 and 1925 the USS Eugenics Society published and lectured to professional and lay audiences, organized exhibits and public discussions, and advocated the inclusion of courses on general biology in the syllable of secondary schools and universities. This propaganda bore plentiful fruits, by the mid-decade, the USS Eugenics Society membership included psychiatrists and anthropologist but also gynecologist, pedagogues, public health and education officials, jurist neurologists and criminologist. During the early 1920 local chapter of the USS Eugenics Society appeared all over the Union, as well as independent eugenics groups which appeared in many provincial centers. Furthermore eugenics found a grassroots following; in 1926 Koltsov received a request for advice and support from the “Eugenic Society of Perfectionists” a small commune organized by several enthusiasts in southern Russia to put ideas of “eugenic marriage” into practice.
Eugenic ideas also became the subject of popular plays and fiction which generated lively debates in literary and theatrical circles and among the general public. Soveta futurist Sergei Tretyakov's popular pro-eugenics discussion play “I want a Child (1927)” is certainly the most famous example. The play's main character is Milda, a cultural education worker who decides that she wants to have a baby, without a father or a family, bred from best proletarian stock of her choice.
The child is to be raised by the communal child-rearing organizations that Milda herself is helping to establish as part of the Bolshevik’s effort to construct the ideal socialist state. Doing her best to ignore the meddling and scorn of the unruly co-tenants in her crowded Moscow apartment block, Milda sets out to complete her mission. Eventually she fulfills her dream after a laborious, comic, melodramatic, and tragic journey.
The geneticists Koltsov and Filipchenko initiated the institutionalization of soveta eugenics but practicing physicians interested in hereditary disease also became engaged. In 1922 Kiev University professor Alexei Krontovsky established a “bureau for studies in human heredity” to study the “human pathological heredity and constitution”. Many more similar efforts followed. The particularities of the newly created soveta public health system, with its focus on prevention, the social contexts of health and the protection of maternity and infancy expressed in organizations like Propainfan provided a fertile ground for these new ideas.
According to the founder of the “Circle of Materialist-Physicians” Solomon Levit the “reconstruction of the soveta medicine on a prophylactic basis” would be the theoretically unthinkable without the “reconvention of the inheritance of acquired characteristics”. Nevertheless there still was a notable amount of criticism which supporters of eugenics spent considerable effort answering. Commissar Semashko published an article tellingly entitled “Eugenics, Theirs and Ours” which called for clear distinction between “Western, Bourgeois” and “Soveta Proletarian” eugenics. Koltsov and Filipchenko together with Chetverikov waged a coordinated campaign against Lamarckism in popular and professional periodicals.
Serebrovsky went even further, he joined the Socialist Academy to oppose the critics, which were mostly socialist philosopher rather than actual scientist, form within their main base, claiming that modern genetics represented the “truly Marxist and Tectological” view while Lamarckism was “anti-Marxist” and reactionary. Moreover to assuage the accusation of elitism Serebrovsky introduced the notion of a “gene fund” describing it as the “nation's genetic capital”. Since a nation's population possessed “a gigantic gene fund” which contained countless genes of creativity, talent and genius, a true socialist would seek the utilization and redistribution of this genetic wealth. This Serebrovsky argued was “the primary task of soveta eugenics”. Following this reasoning Serebrovsky identified a “truly socialist” way of achieving eugenic goals; the “separation of love and reproduction” and the artificial insemination of soveta women with “recommended sperm” from “talented producer”. Of course to implement this vision Serebrovsky noted, the country needed to expand research on anthropogenetics considerably. Most soveta eugenicists came to advocate positive eugenics, “the direct introduction of desirable heritable changes whether by the control of mutation or by encouraging people with the desirable traits to have more children, rather than negative eugenics, namely sterilizing the “unfit”
Alexander Serebrovsky
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Interestingly both Bogdanov as well as Lunacharsky were initially Lamarckists, at least to a certain degree. But they were swayed by the overwhelming evidence in favor of Mendelian genetics. It also helped that that Bogdanov accepted Darwin's theory in general and had only held the fairly common idea that acquired characteristics could be somehow additional inherited as well. Lunacharsky however was a Lamarckist because genetics would make people “slaves of the past” while Lamarckism made them “captains of the future”. The idea was that evolution only due to random spontaneous mutation stood counter to any systematic planing effort. A rather dogmatic approach which could have become problematic.
Luckily Serebrovsky had a good personal connection to these most important Bolshevik leaders Bogdanov as well as Lunacharsky. At the end of 1883 Sergei Mitrofanovich Serebrovsky, Alexanders father and a reasonably successful architect had moved with his family to Tver, and four months later settled in Tula. Searching for a suitable place of service, Sergei Mitrofanovich Serebrovsky went in February 1894 to St. Petersburg. There he attended a meeting of Marxists and got acquainted with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. The Serebrovskys invited the Social Democrats exiles to visit their home any time and in particular Lunacharsky and Bogdanov made good use of that offer. Sometimes they even held their illegal party meetings there. While the general historical consensus in the USS stresses the (almost inhuman) rationality of the Bolshevik leadership “irrational” factor such as personal connections should not be underestimated. One might go so far as to say that the early and crushing victory of the Mendelian faction in the field of biological science wasn't only the inevitable outcome of the internal rationality of the scientific system, but that the support of the Sovetunio's two most important men played an important role as well. Even if nothing else they definitely influenced the decision of which projects got founding and what would be taught in the USS education system.
Notes and Sources
The connection between Bogdanov, Lunarchasky and Serebrovsky and his father is OTL.
Rosenthal (2002): New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche To Stalinism.
D) or is this only the prelude to more posts on scientifical developments in the Fascist countries, up till now quite neglected? After all, if we're going to have an Axis-Interkom war the Fascists had better start living up to the TL subtitle A world where the Avant-garde is triumphant.
