The mongoloid and other enlightened Soviet racial categories

We recently moved and I’ve been slowly consolidating all the stuff we had squirreled away in various places — in our storage unit back in New York, at my parents’ house out here in the Richmond District… So I was sifting through our junk, figuring out what to throw away and what to keep, when I came across a Soviet educational poster I bought from a Russian antique store off the internet years ago. The poster was printed in 1972 and was intended to teach kids in 9th grade about the various types of human “races” that exist throughout world.

The reason I got this thing was because it showed the comically regressive view on “race” that got shoved into the minds of Soviet youth. The poster’s also a great example of how the USSR was always a mix of cutting-edge revolutionary leftwing ideas, smashed up against very conservative and retrograde elements.

Some of the early Bolshevik thinking on nationalism and ethnic minorities was way ahead of anything anyone was thinking at the time, and then there’s this…a view of “race” that’s obviously inspired by the crude categorizations of colonial racial theorists that came out of Europe in the 18th an 19th centuries — people like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German naturalist and raciologist, who divided the human race into five categories, with “Caucasian” (aka white) race naturally being the best and purest of them all because the “Caucasian” people were descended down from Noah’s Ark and Adam and Eve while everyone else was tainted with impurities and animal like qualities.

The Soviet educational poster doesn’t push the hierarchy aspect of this kind of early eugenicist theorizing, so it’s not racist in that way — which is inline with the Soviet Union’s official multicultural, multiethnic friendship-of-the-people ideology. Even so, it does bizarrely reproduce the old school categories almost verbatim, and even simplifies them down somewhat to only three main racial types. What are they? If you look at the poster, you’ll see they’re called “negroid-australoid,” “europeoid,” and “mongoloid.”

Yep, apparently these are the races that good Marxist-Leninists had to work with. Which one are you?

Here’s the original.

And here’s my translated version.