Racial Psychiatry and the Russian Imperial Dilemma of the “Savage Within”

Abstract

The article tells the story of racial psychiatry in the Russian Empire. The context in which it has developed is analyzed in epistemological as well as political terms, and the discussion of such scholarly categories as “savagery,” “atavism”, or “survivals” and the language of race in ethnography, race science, and psychiatry is complemented with the discussion of rising mass politics. These two threads of analysis are connected within a broader context of the Russian imperial situation of the turn of the century, marked by human, cultural and administrative heterogeneity and the asynchronous social and cultural dynamics of different peoples, classes, and regions. The article explores in details how the Russian psychiatric profession made sense of the Russian imperial situation, and why a group of highly influential psychiatrists turned to the concept of race and the method of inter-imperial comparison as a solution to this situation’s complexities and ambiguities.