30 April 2021 — 12:00 noon — online

Peter Worger (UT History Department)

“Eugenics, Organizational Psychology, and Industrialization in the Soviet Initiatives of V. M.  Bekhterev”

Peter will start by presenting a general overview of the development of eugenics in Russia, starting with the publication of Vasillii Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration in 1865. Then, he will present his research on proposals to implement selection and removal of children exhibiting signs of moral or physical defects and degeneration in the development of boarding schools under the Bolsheviks, and the proposed rehabilitation of these children in agricultural collectives on the basis of the supposedly regenerative effects of manual labor and fresh air, later to become known as “physical culture.” He will then discuss the influence of physical anthropology and eugenics on the development of aptitude tests to assess the hereditary talents of workers for a conference on the Scientific Organization of Labor in 1921.

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Peter Worger is a fifth-year doctoral student in the UT History Department. His research on the history of eugenics and sexual education in the early Soviet Union has received support from the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
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