SUMMARY:

Historic research into Soviet eugenics has focused mostly on eugenic debates in the 1920s, asserting that eugenics was not practiced in the Soviet Union. Contextualizing the 1936 abortion law in Soviet abortion policy from the 1920s to the early 1950s, this article revisits both Soviet eugenics and Stalinist biopolitics, thus shedding new light on Stalinist modernity. The 1936 law documents the presence of a strong eugenic agenda in the Soviet Union at that time, closely resonating with the letter and spirit of the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. The internal reports of abortion commissions show that a majority of legal medical abortions were motivated by eugenic principles. Along with evidence from debates among Soviet public health experts and political leaders, this indicates that a strong eugenic agenda was behind the nominally “medical” abortion policy. The abortion law of 1951 further expanded the Soviet eugenic agenda. The debates taking place within the Soviet Health Ministry further suggest the possibility that eugenic sterilizations were being performed under Stalin. Stalinist biopolitics aimed to purify the Soviet “national body” by purging not only those who were politically undesirable but also those who were genetically unfit.