Races and Peoples

Over most of its length this is a good book, and an honest account of it has to begin there.

It collects essays by working scholars of the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnography - physical anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, a philosopher, a sociologist and a legal specialist - drawn from the Institute's yearbook Rasy i narody, which had begun to appear in 1971, with several pieces written specially for this English edition.

The scientific core is sound, and for its date it was valuable. The opening section on theory contains real physical anthropology by N. N. Cheboksarov and V. P. Alexeyev, and it dismantles biological racism at the root. Alexeyev treats human races not as fixed types on a ladder but as populations - clines of gene frequencies shaped by migration, adaptation and interbreeding, dividing humanity along axes that cut clean across the old colour hierarchy. The book keeps its logic honest against its own side too, noting that racism arises from the idea of the inequality of races and not from the recognition that populations differ.

It argues against a live and named opponent: the American attempt to give racism a scientific mask, in the person of the Berkeley psychologist whose 1969 article on race and IQ was then the most fiercely contested claim in the field. And its anti-apartheid chapter is detailed and accurate, walking through the Group Areas Act and quoting Malan on what it was for.

Edited by I. R. Grigulevich and S. Y. Kozlov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the terrain the book refuses to enter.