Physical culture in the discourse of eugenic goal-setting

Abstract

The history of the development of physical culture and sports can be presented quite objectively in the concept of goal setting. During the existence of the USSR, physical culture served external political goal-setting, while the internal logic of development was hardly taken into account. It was only during the 1920s that there was a discussion in physical culture about the desired value goal-setting of Soviet physical culture. Health- improving goal-setting of physical culture was articulated by the then fashionable word “eugenics”. For the first time, the Ukrainian scientist V. Pidhayetsky kept up with the times and in 1921 he started the eugenics section at the Institute of Physical Culture of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv. In the late 1920s, eugenics was declared a “pseudoscience,” and stakeholders in the health vector for the development of Soviet physical culture coined a new term, “euphenics”, in an attempt to defend eugenic value-setting. The concept of “euphenics” as a direction to improve inherited traits, rather than heredity, has not developed and remains an idealistic theoretical discourse.