I can answer this partly through the lens of eugenics studies. This will at least give an idea of what the intelligentsia thought of race. While the term is mostly associated with Nazi germany, it also played a role for a while in both Soviet Russia and pre soviet Russia and is a useful way to learn about their ideas of race.

To start with pre Soviet Russia, a sample of Russian ideas can first be seen in the 2 Russian men that took part of the International Eugenics Congress in 1912, the anarchist Petr Kropotkin and the journalist Isaak Shklovskii. Both were vehemently opposed. Kropotkin took the expected class angle, while Isaak shared the same viewpoint as most Russian sciences, that there is no such thing as pure races. (there were a few though who disagreed and were proponents of a Great-Russian race).

That said, Russian eugenics instead of racialization focused on the benefit of humankind’. This continued with the rise of the Soviet Union, eugenics became a popular subject in scientific magazines and popular fiction. Soviet eugenics, was because of the political position of the SU isolated from the rest of the field, although contact did occasionally happen. This, in combination with the Russian political background led it to largely eschew race.

This was reflected in a study done by Russian eugenicists in the early 1920s when they started studying the inheritance of human blood groups and started mapping all different blood groups/ethnicities in the country. However, where western eugenicists were concerned with various racial issues, the Soviets rightfully paid no concern to this, believing that there is no such thing as an inborn criminal’. There was no research done into the results of race mixing, or what in other countries was considered lesser races’ as they simply didn’t believe in this!

Rather than races, the Russian intelligentsia believed in the direct inheritance of skills from father to son, from mother to daughter and so on. Thus they believed the intelligent would have intelligent kids, and the artistic would have artistic kids. This still led to somewhat of an elitist bias, but not a racist one.

Obviously they came a bit at odds with the general Soviet sentiment thanks to this, but they managed to survive into Stalin’s Soviet Union. Here its elitist, bourgeois attitude finally became fatal to the discipline and it died in 1948. This due to several factors, the aforementioned, personal conflicts between eugenicists and Stalinists, and comparison with racist nazi policies. Before that however, the scientists still continued their attacks on the fascist and vicious doctrine of racial purity employed by the nazis in the class war.

The SU was from the start a multinational and multi racial state, wherein everyone (officially) had equal rights. Thus the idea of racial division was anathema to the creation of its classless, multiethnic society that constantly denounced the racism of its rivals.

Source: largely summarized from From Beastly Philosophy’ to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union’ which also serves as a resource and link to various other papers on eugenics and racial ideas in the Soviet Union. Next article: 202005151931 Part 8 - Soviet union


Date
February 22, 2023