© 2013 • 775 pp., illus. (91 B&W ), index
Hardcover • $69 • ISBN  978-1-936113-70-5

In Russia, the initial euphoria of the Bolshevik leaders for a new socialist society ... combined with a commitment to a truly universal health care system, gave a huge boost to the emergence of both the eugenic and medical aspects of human genetics. The obstacles that proved so formidable to the successful launch of the field in the West—the lack of available data on the genealogy of diseases in families, the difficulty in getting a statistically significant number of identical twins to study, and the skepticism of the medical establishment—were all swept aside in the Soviet Union. In the 1920s ... the groundwork was laid for a uniquely Russian approach to medical genetics and (the foundation of) the world’s leading center for the study of the genetic basis of many diseases and human genetics in general. The immense success of the movement, which is little known even to Russians, is brought to life in V.V. Babkov’s The Dawn of Human Genetics, as is its dramatic and violent end, which resulted in the “liquidation” of many of the country’s finest biologists, as well as a major setback to the development of world science. Like many other promising ideas and projects that were born in the Soviet Union, this one was abruptly truncated and then virtually eradicated.

Introduction by James Schwartz

Acknowledgments

A Note from the Publisher

Key to Russian Acronyms and Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

 

Expectations of a New Man

Three Squares by Malevich

Degeneration

Social and Biological Hierarchies

The Eugenics of Francis Galton

National Characteristics of Eugenics in the 1920s

Eugenics as Presented on the Russian Stage

Anthropotechnical Projects of Peter I (Historical Note), M.V. Volotskoy (1923)

Toward a History of the Eugenic Movement, M.V. Volotskoy (1924)

Eugenics in School, Yu.A. Filipchenko (1925)

Human Inheritance, Thomas Hunt Morgan (1924)

Our Eugenic Prospects, S.N. Davidenkov (1930)

 

The Russian Eugenics Society

Improvement of the Human Race, N.K. Koltsov (1922)

Genetic Analysis of the Psychological Features of Man, N.K. Koltsov (1924)

The Impact of Culture on Selection in Humans, N.K. Koltsov (1924)

Genealogies of Our Vydvizhentsy [Self-Made Men], N.K. Koltsov (1926)

Russkiy Evgenicheskiy Zhurnal [Russian Eugenics Journal] (1922–1930)

 

Bureau of Eugenics

Our Outstanding Scholars, Yu.A. Filipchenko (1922)

Full Members of the Former Imperial, Now Russian, Academy of Sciences over
the Last 80 Years, T.K. Lepin, Ya.Ya. Lus, and Yu.A. Filipchenko (1846–1924)

The Intelligentsia and Giftedness, Yu.A. Filipchenko (1925)

Izvestiya Byuro Po Evgenike [Bulletin of the Bureau of Eugenics] (1922–1930)

 

Branches of the Eugenics Society

Criminality of Jews: From the Research Cabinet for the Study of Criminal
Personality and Criminality, S.S. Vermel (1924)

Voprosy Biologii i Patologii Yevreev [Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews]
(1926–1930)

 

Genealogies and Pathographies

Genealogy of Ch. Darwin and F. Galton, N.K. Koltsov (1922)

The Genealogy of the Count Tolstoys, N.P. Chulkov (1924)

On the Descendants of Baron Pyotr Pavlovich Shafirov, Yu.A. Nelidov (1925)

Genealogy of the Decembrist Muravyovs, N.P. Chulkov (1927)

The Bakunins, P.F. Rokitsky (1927)

Genealogies of A.S. Pushkin, Count L.N. Tolstoy, P.Ya. Chaadaev, Yu.F. Samarin,
A.I. Herzen, Prince P.A. Kropotkin, and Prince S.N. Trubetskoy, V. Zolotaryov (1927)

Ancestors and Descendants of the Academician Karl Ernst von Baer, Yu.A. Nelidov and N.K. Essen (1928)

Decembrists (Toward the Analysis of Hereditary Traits), V. Zolotaryov (1928)

The Ancestors of Count S.Yu. Witte, S.V. Lyubimov (1928)

On the Psychopathology of Creativity: V. Khlebnikov in 1919, V.Ya. Anfimov (1935)

The Characterological Analysis of Families, M.V. Volotskoy (1933)

Klinicheskiy Arkhiv Genialnosti i Odarennosti (Evropatologii) [Clinical Archive of
Genius and Talent (of Europathology)] (1925–1930)

 

Society for Study of Racial Pathology

Bolshevist Eugenics

The End of Eugenics

Goals and Methods of Studies of Racial Pathology, N.K. Koltsov (1929)

The Term “Race” in Zoology and Anthropology, V.V. Bunak (1930)

Anthropogenetics and Eugenics in a Socialist Society, A.S. Serebrovsky (1929)

Letter to the Editor, A.S. Serebrovsky (1930)

Eugenics, G. Batkis (1932)

 

What Is Lamarxism?

Biosocial Eugenics

Primacy of the Gene and Legitimacy of Power

Change in Direction on the Philosophical Front

The First Discussion on Genetics

 

Early Medical Genetics

The Medical Genetics Institute

The 1934 Conference

Course on Genetics for Physicians

Genetics and Pathology (in Relation to the Current Crisis in Medicine), S.G. Levit (1929)

Man as a Genetic Object and Twin Studies as a Method of Anthropogenetics, S.G. Levit (1930)

Preface, S.G. Levit (1936)

Anthropogenetics and Medicine, S.G. Levit (1934)

Some Basic Stages of Development of Theoretical Genetics
and Their Significance from the Point of View of Medicine, H.J. Muller (1934)

The Role of Genetics in the Study of Human Biology, N.K. Koltsov (1934)

Genetics and Clinical Practice, S.N. Davidenkov (1934)

Trudy Mediko-Biologicheskogo Instituta [Proceedings of the Medical-Biological Institute] (1929–1936)

 

Conditional Tropism and the Moscow School

The Ideas of the Moscow School

Clinical-Genetic Analysis of Pathological Types

The Hypothesis of Conditioned Tropisms

 

The Rout of Medical Genetics

Letter from Muller to Stalin

7th Congress and 4th Session

S.G. Levit Attacked in Newspapers

Article in the New York Times

Human Genetics at the 4th Session

The Rout of the MGI

Neurogenetics in 1939 and 1948

Letter from H.J. Muller to I.V. Stalin (1936)

Presentation by S.N. Davidenkov (1939)

 

The Fate of Koltsov’s Eugenics

Koltsov and the 1936 Discussions

Academy of Sciences in 1938

Koltsov’s Institute and the Academy of Sciences

Trial by Inquisition

 

After Koltsov

The Origin of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human
Evolutionary Genetics, V.P. Efroimson (1971)

Homo sapiens et humanus—Man with a Capital “M” and the Evolutionary Genetics of
Humaneness (About the Article of V.P. Efroimson on the Evolutionary-Genetic
Basis of Ethics), B.L. Astaurov (1971)

Mysteries of Genetics, Yelena Sakanyan (1979)

The Biosphere and Mankind, N.V. Timofeev-Ressovsky (1968)

Conclusion

Afterword

Index