History of the family. Special issue: mothers, infants, and the state: histories of maternity in Central and Eastern Europe

Central Asia, conquered and exploited as a colonial entity by Tsarist Russia, became the target of Soviet ‘affirmative action’ after the October revolution in 1917: The Bolsheviks considered nation building a precondition for socialist internationalism and sought to promote national consciousness among the local population. They established new institutions and employed science to modernize the region. This article examines the knowledge production and policy implemented by the State Scientific Institute for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy in Tashkent founded in late 1928 as part of those modernization efforts. The institute had the task of examining the ‘racial physiology and pathology of the local nationalities populating Central Asia’ in order to lower infant mortality as well as to improve female reproductive health. This research agenda was informed by and engaged with scientific racism and the transnational debate on human difference in a specific way: By combining German constitutional medicine [Konstitutionslehre] and neo-Lamarckian ideas about the heredity of acquired traits, the Soviet scientists tied women’s fertility to regional geography and climate, but also to the mode of production. Drawing on historiographical research on gendered environmentality, this article argues that Central Asian women were implicitly de-subjectivized as the harmful environment of their children. This framework paved the way for social and biopolitical engineering in order to normalize what was conceived as pathological maternity to conform to ‘European’ standards. By analyzing the intersection of ‘race’, gender and eugenics in a de-facto colonial setting, this paper contributes to a transnational history of scientific motherhood as well as to current scholarship on Soviet race-thinking. It examines a crucial period marked by Stalinist rapid industrialization and a shift in reproductive policy from permissive to pronatalist, culminating in the ban of abortions in 1936.