Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940

Abstract

Abstract In recent years the history of eugenics has proved a useful way to study the subtle relationships between science and society. However, despite the explosion of literature on eugenics movements in many countries, the history of eugenics in Russia has remained virtually unexplored. In an important article published more than a decade ago comparing the German and Soviet movements in the 1920s, Loren Graham showed in a dozen pages what interesting comparative issues are raised by the Russian case (Graham 1978), but no detailed study of Russian eugenics has yet been published that begins to approach the available literature on the British, American, and other national cases in analytic sophistication or detail.