Russia and Evolution

Russia produced a number of notable evolutionists who contributed to research and theory in natural history, biology, and anthropology. Russian intellectuals widely accepted Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (published in Russian translation in 1860) and the evolutionary force of natural selection, but reaction to it was shaped by various political leanings and ideological goals. Russian progressives and anarchists were generally less predisposed to the theory as they felt it reflected the bourgeois intellectual tradition in Britain. Some conservatives, however, were proactive Darwinists (for example, K. A. Timiriazev, for whom a present-day State Biological Museum and Agricultural Academy in Moscow are named). Social transformation in Russia intensified with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and many descendants of nobility, military, and urban classes pursued careers in the sciences. There was a small but engaged and prepared audience for evolutionary theory in Russia in the 19th century.

Indeed, many Russian evolutionists took issue with one particular facet of Darwinian evolutionary theory while maintaining their general acceptance of the theory. This issue was Darwin's use of the 18th century Malthusian concept of the “struggle for existence” that was attributed to British competitive individualism and popular acceptance of Malthus. The struggle for existence stood for overpopulation and intraspecific competition as forces driving Darwinian selection. Rather, Russian intellectuals felt that competition was specific to particular ecological conditions. In Russia, wide expanses of the natural world were sparsely populated, especially in Siberia. Naturalists focused on cooperation and variation within species as evidence counter to the struggle-for-existence assumption. Human population pressure was not as great in Russia as Britain, and the communal lifestyle of the Russian peasantry was an important form of social organization for 90% of the population. Russia was a net exporter of agricultural products during the 19th century. Russia had a small middle class and exhibited little social competition; society was markedly hierarchical, but the communitarian values of the Russian majority were an ideal to be envied in some Western academic circles (for example, August von Haxthausen in Studies on the Interior of Russia, 1850).

Karl Kessler, one of Russia's leading 19th-century naturalists and ichthyologists, defended Darwinian selection theory in publications in the 1860s and 1970s, but in 1879, Kessler gave a speech “On the Law of Mutual Aid” to the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists challenging the primary role of the struggle for existence. According to the law of mutual aid, fish and all animals, including humans, were governed primarily by parental feeling and care of progeny as instincts driving nourishment and reproduction. Alliances among former enemies evidenced the increasing material and moral benefits of mutual aid. Kessler died in 1881 before publishing his theory of mutual aid, but a number of Russian scholars picked up Kessler's idea and developed it, including A. F. Brandt in Symbiosis and Mutual Aid (1896) and Prince Petr Kropokin in Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902). The concept of vzaimnopomosh, or mutual aid, was common sense in Russian society, a factor which may have led to the success of the 1904Russian translation of Kropotkin's book from the original English. Mutual aid was the strong force driving natural selection in19th-century Russian evolutionary theory.

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