
Cracking the Genetic Code: Stalin’s New Soviet Man
by Darian Diachok
April 2019
Editor’s Note - The intellectual pedigree of the Left includes the most outlandish crackpot theories imaginable. The Utopian Socialists believed socialism would turn the oceans into lemonade. What the Soviets believed about transmitting communism down through the generations in the blood ranks right up there with the most outlandish of all the theories on offer from the Left.
After defeating the counterrevolutionary armies to win the Russian Civil War, the Reds at once replaced religion in the schools with Marxist indoctrination. If Communism was to succeed, the State needed not only a highly educated workforce but politically loyal one as well. But revolutionary proclamations were one thing, and reality quite another. The Reds found they had inherited a devastated education system. Before the Revolution, over ninety percent of children had been attending school, but after years of neglect and war devastation, the figure had fallen to just a quarter.
Confronted with rampant illiteracy throughout the new Communist realm, the governing elite found it had to temper its wild-eyed revolutionary zeal with practicality. To raise literacy levels quickly, the new government encouraged basic instruction in all the local languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Belarusian. Total Russification could come later. The Ukrainian language, long suppressed under the Russian czars, enjoyed a rebirth, and an outpouring of first-rate literature – a literary movement that would take an unexpected turn.
When Joseph Stalin wrested total power after Lenin’s death, he added a portentous new emphasis to mere literacy. A doctrinaire Marxist in love with the notion of “struggle,” Stalin pushed his own pet scientific ideas in education – and foremost among these, a theory of evolution long discredited in the West. Stalin believed in Lamarck’s Theory of Acquired Characteristics: Simply put, organisms evolved by struggling against adversity – these struggles supposedly altering the organism’s actual genetic code. The next generation, Stalin believed, would inherit the improved genes, and evolution would progress. This quack theory would profoundly impact Soviet education policy. Stalin in fact came to believe that Communist schools could produce an entirely new biological species, the New Soviet Man. As Soviet youth studied and struggled toward the ideal of selfless service to the Revolution, why, they would pass on their newly improved genes to the next generation, and the next generation ... until the desired new life form emerged.
According to Marxist theorists, this New Soviet Man, once fully evolved, would be completely “self-regulating,” no longer in need of any antiquated bourgeois or religious moral code for guidance. Instead, the Communist vision, genetically inbred through the Socialist struggle, would animate the new creature. As a side benefit, this New Soviet Man would also turn out sexually liberated, but presumably in a “self-regulating” way. Depictions of these futuristic hominoids began appearing all over the Soviet Union – in posters, statues and even on postage stamps – their faces pulsing with Marxist fervor – both genders in their youthful prime and muscular as Olympic athletes.
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Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. This piece appears as a chapter in his book, Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.
by Darian Diachok
April 2019
Editor’s Note - The intellectual pedigree of the Left includes the most outlandish crackpot theories imaginable. The Utopian Socialists believed socialism would turn the oceans into lemonade. What the Soviets believed about transmitting communism down through the generations in the blood ranks right up there with the most outlandish of all the theories on offer from the Left.
After defeating the counterrevolutionary armies to win the Russian Civil War, the Reds at once replaced religion in the schools with Marxist indoctrination. If Communism was to succeed, the State needed not only a highly educated workforce but politically loyal one as well. But revolutionary proclamations were one thing, and reality quite another. The Reds found they had inherited a devastated education system. Before the Revolution, over ninety percent of children had been attending school, but after years of neglect and war devastation, the figure had fallen to just a quarter.
Confronted with rampant illiteracy throughout the new Communist realm, the governing elite found it had to temper its wild-eyed revolutionary zeal with practicality. To raise literacy levels quickly, the new government encouraged basic instruction in all the local languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Belarusian. Total Russification could come later. The Ukrainian language, long suppressed under the Russian czars, enjoyed a rebirth, and an outpouring of first-rate literature – a literary movement that would take an unexpected turn.
When Joseph Stalin wrested total power after Lenin’s death, he added a portentous new emphasis to mere literacy. A doctrinaire Marxist in love with the notion of “struggle,” Stalin pushed his own pet scientific ideas in education – and foremost among these, a theory of evolution long discredited in the West. Stalin believed in Lamarck’s Theory of Acquired Characteristics: Simply put, organisms evolved by struggling against adversity – these struggles supposedly altering the organism’s actual genetic code. The next generation, Stalin believed, would inherit the improved genes, and evolution would progress. This quack theory would profoundly impact Soviet education policy. Stalin in fact came to believe that Communist schools could produce an entirely new biological species, the New Soviet Man. As Soviet youth studied and struggled toward the ideal of selfless service to the Revolution, why, they would pass on their newly improved genes to the next generation, and the next generation ... until the desired new life form emerged.
According to Marxist theorists, this New Soviet Man, once fully evolved, would be completely “self-regulating,” no longer in need of any antiquated bourgeois or religious moral code for guidance. Instead, the Communist vision, genetically inbred through the Socialist struggle, would animate the new creature. As a side benefit, this New Soviet Man would also turn out sexually liberated, but presumably in a “self-regulating” way. Depictions of these futuristic hominoids began appearing all over the Soviet Union – in posters, statues and even on postage stamps – their faces pulsing with Marxist fervor – both genders in their youthful prime and muscular as Olympic athletes.
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Darian Diachok has been working in international development for several decades, with major postings in the Former Soviet Union. This piece appears as a chapter in his book, Escapes: A True Story, available on Amazon.