The politics of human heredity in the USSR, 1920–1940

Genome ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 879-884 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Artificial Insemination ◽  
Human Genetics ◽  
Genetic Research ◽  
Medical Genetics ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Human Heredity ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Socially Relevant

After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Iurii Filipchenko (in Petrograd) and Nikolai Koltsov (in Moscow) created centers of genetic research where eugenics prospered as a socially relevant part of the new "experimental" biology. The Russian Eugenics Society, established in 1920, was dominated by research-oriented professionals. However, Bolshevik activists in the movement tried to translate eugenics into social policies (among them, sterilization) and in 1929, Marxist geneticist Alexander Serebrovsky was stimulated by the forthcoming Five-Year Plan to urge a massive eugenic program of human artificial insemination. With the advent of Stalinism, such attempts to "biologize" social phenomena became ideologically untenable and the society was abolished in 1930. Three years later, however, a number of eugenicists reassembled in the world's first institute of medical genetics, created by Bolshevik physician Solomon Levit after his return from a postdoctoral year in Texas with H. J. Muller. Muller himself moved to the Soviet Union in 1933, where he agitated for eugenics and wrote Stalin in 1936 to urge an artificial insemination program. Shortly thereafter, Muller left Russia, several of his colleagues were shot, and the Institute of Medical Genetics was disbanded. During the next three decades, Lysenkoists regularly invoked the Soviet eugenic legacy to claim that genetics itself was fascist.Key words: Russia, eugenics, human genetics, medical genetics, Lysenkoism, history, politics.

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

The Trials of Arnošt K.

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Gordin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Soviet Authority ◽  
The Soviet Union

The Prague-born philosopher and historian of science Arnošt Kolman (1892–1979)—who often published under his Russian name Ernest Kol’man—has fallen into obscurity, much like dialectical materialism, the philosophy of science he represented. From modest Czech-Jewish origins, Kolman seized opportunities posed by the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution to advance to the highest levels of polemical Stalinist philosophy, returned to Prague as an activist laying the groundwork for the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, was arrested and held for three years by the Soviet secret police, returned to work in Moscow and Prague as a historian of science, played vastly contrasting roles in the Luzin Affair of the 1930s and the rehabilitation of cybernetics in the 1950s, and defected—after 58 years in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—to Sweden in 1976. This article argues that Kolman’s biography represents his gradual separation of dialectical materialism from other aspects of Soviet authority, a disentanglement enabled by the perspective gained from repeated returns to Prague and the diversity of dialectical-materialist thought developed in the Eastern Bloc. This essay is part of a special issue entitled THE BONDS OF HISTORY edited by Anita Guerrini.

Vâlâ Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution: Writing across Turkey and the Soviet Union

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-319
Author(s):  
Nergis Ertürk
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Soviet Republic ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Turkish Literature ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

Abstract Focusing on the life and work of the Turkish novelist and translator Vâlâ Nureddin (1901–67), this article provides a historical overview of Turkish and Soviet literary entanglement in the early twentieth century. A collaborator of the globally acclaimed Turkish communist poet Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ was educated at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from 1922 to 1924. Returning to Turkey in 1925, he launched his career in the daily Akşam (Evening), bringing Soviet and Turkish literature into conversation in his serialized translations and literary adaptations of Soviet erotic fiction. In reading Vâlâ’s neglected 1928 erotic historical comedy Baltacı ile Katerina (Baltacı and Catherine), unique among Vâlâ’s writings in its direct and explicit imagination and specification of an entangled revolution, this article suggests, by way of specific attention to this work’s comedic elements, that Vâlâ imagined the collapse of both Russian and Ottoman imperial sovereignty in terms of sexual revolution. It argues that a study of this unjustifiably neglected erotic comedy not only deepens our knowledge of early republican Turkish literature and culture, but provides a more nuanced understanding of the Moscow-centered transnational literary space produced in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, or what scholars in Slavic studies have called the “Soviet republic of letters.”

Russia

2019 ◽  
pp. 379-384
Author(s):  
Michael J. Bazyler ◽  
Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽  
Kristen L. Nelson ◽  
Rajika L. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communal Property ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Property Confiscation ◽  
Property Restitution

In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, in violation of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The invasion marked the beginning of what Russia would later call the Great Patriotic War during which the Soviet Union suffered tens of millions of civilian and military losses. Private property in the Soviet Union was earlier confiscated through Lenin and Stalin’s nationalization programs. Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union suffered property confiscation by the German forces, with most of the confiscation taking place in the Soviet Republics of Belarussia and Ukraine and western Russia. Russia does not have any private or communal property restitution and/or compensation laws relating to Holocaust-era confiscations, or return of property confiscations dating back to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Russia also does not have any special legislation dealing with heirless property. Russia endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009, but declined to endorse the 2010 Guidelines and Best Practices.

Genetics in the Soviet Union

1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Parisi
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Genetic Research ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Physiological Conditions ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
Inheritance Of Acquired Characters ◽  
Acquired Characters

SummaryGenetics in the Soviet Union has undergone a profound and long crisis, involving the realm of Biological Sciences and Science and Culture as a whole.This was not merely due to the emergence of neo-Lamarckian Michurinism, claiming the inheritance of acquired characters to be possible and necessary, and the genotype to be plastic and shakable, especially under particular environmental and physiological conditions: this could have been the object of scientific discussions, probably of a controversy, too, just as one century ago, but would have hardly involved matters of principle and of method in Scientific Research, nor would the controversy have degenerated, absurdly giving rise to a “ Western ” and a “ Soviet Science ”.Two closely connected factors, equally important and equally witnessing a reject of the principles underlying the scientific method, may be considered as the actual source of this partition of Science, namely:i) The assumption of a primacy of Ideology, thus making Science be submitted to it, and scientific theories be held right or wrong, according to their fitting or not ideological ones;ii) Violent political pressures and administrative coercion on scientific thought, and on scientists themselves.Along with such matters of principle, matters of method in research planning and the formulation of results made it impossible to reach a plain evaluation of Lysenko's theories and results.Now that a normal athmosphere appears to have been re-established for the development of genetic research in the Soviet Union, rejecting, or ignoring the whole of Lysenko's work, could prove just as wrong as Lysenko's reject of Classic Genetics.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1929 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 956-971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Harper
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Political Machine ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Center ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Revolution

A salient feature of the Soviet order set up in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 is the provision for a single, mobilized political center, striving to organize all social processes to conform with its particular ideology and program. The Communist party is this political center of the Soviet Union, enjoying a monopoly of legality in respect of organization. Only an outline of the methods by which this political machine exercises its leadership is possible within the limits of the present note. The emphasis will be on the structure which the Communists have given to their party, in order more effectively to carry the responsibility of leadership assumed by them. The word “party” is used, but one has here an organization which differs sharply from political parties of parliamentary systems. Also in its relations to the formal governmental bodies the Communist party presents several features which differentiate it from the party systems of other countries.The special methods of organization adopted and the peculiar position enjoyed by the Communist party in the Soviet Union permit of several theoretical interpretations. One of these is that the Revolution contemplated by the Communists has three distinct stages, of which only the second has as yet been reached. There was the successful seizure of power, finally consolidated after some three years of civil war. Then came the present period of transition, the length of which will depend upon the success of the party in the exercise of its leadership. Only the successful achievement of the present party leadership will bring the final triumph of the Revolution as the third and last period.

On Certainties and Ambivalencies: Reply to My Critics

Slavic Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric D. Weitz
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Soviet Regime ◽  
Human Heredity ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Population Politics

Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz’s argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of “race,” but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as “racial politics.” Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough die manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by die nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by die genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon’s contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as “race”) with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when die only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.

Without a “Concept”? Race as Discursive Practice

Slavic Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaina Lemon
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Soviet Regime ◽  
Human Heredity ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Population Politics

Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz’s argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of “race,” but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as “racial politics.” Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough die manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by die nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by die genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon’s contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as “race”) with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when die only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.

Khorezm and the Khanate of Khiva

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Wood
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 19Th Century

The Khanate of Khiva, one of the Uzbek khanates of Central Asia, refers to a political entity in the region of Khorezm from the early 16th century until 1920. The term itself, which was not used by locals who instead used the name vilayet Khwārazm (“country of Khwārazm”), dates from 18th-century Russian usage. Khorezm is an ancient center of sedentary civilization with a distinct culture and history that came under Uzbek rule as the latter migrated southward from their pasturelands on the steppe beginning in the early 16th century. In contrast to the related dynasties in Transoxiana, the Khanate of Khiva retained a greater degree of pastoralism, though the state was still fundamentally built on sedentary agriculture. Though no doubt affected by historical variations in the volume and routes of the overland caravan trade, Khiva remained a key center for transregional trade throughout its history, especially with the growing Russia Empire to the north. Political structures in Khiva remained weak and decentralized until the 19th century, when the Qongrat dynasty succeeded in transforming the khanate into the most centralized state in the region. Among the legacies of the khanate is its promotion of a distinctive Turkic literary culture, which interacted fruitfully with the dominant Persian culture of neighboring regions. As with other states in Central Asia, by the second half of the 19th century Khiva became a target of the expanding Russian Empire, which conquered Khorezm in 1873. While the tsarist state initially preserved a portion of the khanate under Qongrat rule as a protectorate, after the Bolshevik Revolution this state was soon dissolved and absorbed into the Soviet Union.

Two and Two Make Five

Red Britain ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 60-111
Author(s):  
Matthew Taunton
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Arthur Koestler ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Relationship

The Bolshevik Revolution induced British writers to rethink the politics of number, and this chapter considers the significance of the marked preponderance of numbers, equations, and arithmetic in discussions of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet State. It explores the obsessive use of statistics by the Soviet Union and its British defenders, as a utilitarian form of socialism came to dominate left-wing discussions of politics. The chapter theorizes a ‘Romantic anti-Communism’ that opposed itself to such calculations, and often to the principle of quantitative equality. The chapter also explores—partly via the equation ‘two and two make five’ (featured Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also in other texts that mediate the relationship between Russian and British socialism)—how the seemingly timeless propositions of mathematics were up for grabs in the debates around Marxist science and dialectical materialism. Writers covered include Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Bertrand Russell.

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