With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia

In 1865, British polymath Francis Galton published his initial thoughts about the scientific field that would become ‘eugenics.’ The same year, Russian physician Vasilii Florinskii addressed similar issues in a sizeable treatise, entitled Human Perfection and Degeneration. Initially unheralded, Florinskii’s book would go on to have a remarkable afterlife in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia.
In this lucid and insightful work, Nikolai Krementsov argues that the concept of eugenics br...