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

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.