Eugenics and Racial Biology in Sweden and the USSR: Contacts across the Baltic Sea

Abstract

The 1920s saw a significant exchange between eugenicists in Sweden and the young Soviet state. Sweden did not take part in World War I, and during the years following immediately upon the Versailles peace treaty, Swedish scholars came to serve as an intermediary link between, on the one hand, Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany, and, on the other hand, Western powers. Swedish eugenicists organized conferences, lecture tours, visits, scholarly exchanges, and transfers and translation of eugenic research. Herman Lundborg, the director of the world's first State Institute of Racial Biology, was an old-fashioned, deeply conservative, and anti-communist "scientific" racist, who somewhat paradoxically came to serve as something of a Western liaison for Soviet eugenicists. Whereas the contacts were disrupted in 1930, Swedish eugenicists had a lasting impact on Soviet physical anthropologists, who cited their works well into the 1970s, long after they had been discredited in Sweden.

Telling a scientific story and governing the population: The Kallikak story and the historical mutations of the eugenic discourse.

“…Soviet physical anthropologists actively referenced Lundborg’s works to validate a version of historical materialism that interpreted race as a “historical category” within the narrative of scientific Marxism–Leninism. Lundborg continued to be an authority for Soviet Marxist scholars well into the 1970s, long after his work had been discarded in Sweden (Rudling, 2014).…”

“…King Gustaf V personally supported the institute as were many prominent members of the Swedish cultural elite, such as painter Anders Zorn, the feminist pioneer Ellen Key, and the Nobel Prize winners in literature, Selma Lagerlöf and Verner Von Heidenstam. And in the 1930s, Social Democratic reformers Alva and Gunnar Myrdal viewed eugenics as a trend of the future (Rudling, 2014). After Lundborg's retirement in 1935, Gunnar Dahlberg became head of the institute and was at the same time installed as professor of race biology at Uppsala University.…”

Multiple racializations in a multiply modern world

“…An example of the former is the interaction of Soviet and Western eugenics. Rudling's (2014) Beaumont and Butler 2011). It also has an interestingly problematical relationship with the representation of the multicultural city as a site of "cosmopolitization" (Beck and Grande, 2010).…”