Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies

The State of the Art

Anton Yasnitsky, René Van der Veer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138929692
• eBook ISBN: 9781317500414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies brings together recent critical investigations which examine historical and textual inaccuracies associated with received understandings of Vygotsky's work. By deconstructing the Vygotskian narrative, the authors debunk the 'cult of Vygotsky', allowing for a new, exciting interpretation of the logic and direction of his theory. The chapters cover a number of important themes, including:

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• The chronology of Vygotsky's ideas and theory development, and the main core of his theoretical writings

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• Relationships between Vygotskians and their Western colleagues

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• The international reception of Vygotskian psychology and problems of translation

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• The future development of Vygotskian science

Using Vygotsky's published and unpublished writings the authors present a detailed historical understanding of Vygotsky's thought, and the circumstances in which he worked. It includes coverage of the organization of academic psychology in the Soviet Union, the network of scholars associated with Vygotsky in the interwar period, and the assumed publication ban on Vygotsky's writings.

This volume is the first to provide an overview of revisionist studies of Vygotsky's work, and is the product of close international collaboration between revisionist scholars. It will be an essential contribution to Vygotskian scholarship, and of great interest to researchers in the history of psychology, history of science, Soviet/Russian history, philosophical psychology and philosophy of science.

Part I

Contexts and people

1
The archetype of Soviet psychology

From the Stalinism of the 1930s to the “Stalinist science” of our time

Anton Yasnitsky

Russian psychology emerged against the rich philosophical, artistic, and scientific background of Russian culture of the fin de siècle and was institutionalized as a scientific discipline virtually at the same time as academic psychology took root in the West. Yet, in the first decades of its development psychology in Russia can be best described as a more or less successful adaptation of Western tradition. Perhaps the only original contribution of Russian scholars to international psychological scholarship was their teaching on the “conditional reflexes” that was developed by two major research groups associated with Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. The state of the art in psychology in Imperial Russia (i.e. before 1917) is, perhaps, best understood within a continuum between two extremes that do not belong to the domain of scientific research proper, yet largely determine its existence in the concrete historical, social, and cultural context. The two extremes are, on the one hand, philosophy, and, on the other hand, human industry, broadly understood as a range of social activities geared towards the attainment of material gains. Given that psychology as a scientific discipline is the inseparable unity of theory and empirical studies – laboratory-experimental (in vitro) and applied (in vivo) – the continuum can be structured into several strata that may be represented as “philosophy – general psychological theory – empirical research – social practice” (see Table 1.1).

Psychology in late Imperial Russia manifested itself as three fairly distinct disciplines and related kinds of social agency.

First: Speculative academic psychology, typically based in university departments of philosophy and extremely critical towards any empirical psychology whatsoever. In fact, despite proclaimed interest in “psychology” the advocates of this approach were professional philosophers or philosophizing intellectuals in a wide range of other intellectual/practical spheres from social and human sciences to non-scientific enterprises such as the arts, theology, or psychiatric practice.

Table 1.1 Structural components of a scientific discipline in social context

1. Philosophy
2. General (psychological) theory
3. Empirical research:
laboratory-experimental			applied
4. Human industry and social practice:
medicine and health care	education and child-rearing	industry proper and labor	military affairs and defense	propaganda and public relations

Second: Empirical psychology that widely used the methods of laboratory experiment of a natural-scientific type for the investigation of the so-called “lower” psychological processes and at the same time frequently allowed for theoretical speculations on explanations of the “higher” psychological processes and phenomena – the “spiritual,” superindividual, cultural, or naturally organismic ones – that the advocates of this approach did not believe are accessible by the methods of “purely scientific,” positivist quantitative research. Therefore, the two typical frameworks for these speculations were vitalism or spiritualism that postulated the primacy of “life” and “spirit” as fundamental explanatory principles of these theories.

Third: Applied psychology that primarily aimed at solving practical tasks outside the academic domain proper and was directly related to social practices, predominantly in the spheres of education and health care. Occasionally, the representatives of this strand could occupy university chairs and be involved in traditional academia, but regardless of their possible participation in theoretical discussions and laboratory studies, their definite priority was transformative agency in some segment or another of social practice.

Therefore, although Russian psychology on the threshold of 1917 seems to have been well represented by a few intellectuals in a wide range of national institutions and organizations, in fact there were very fragmented and often rival psychologies of three types, not to mention competitive groupings, cliques, and clans within each of these types. The gap between the three “psychologies” was enormous and required a truly revolutionary shift in the professional consciousness, self-identity, and social practice of psychologists. Russian psychology as a unified scientific discipline with original conceptions and innovative methods for their implementation owes virtually all its achievements to the Soviet era and, primarily, to the turbulent period of the 1920s–1930s, when the foundations of “Soviet psychology” as we know it today were laid.

Psychoneurological disciplines In the Soviet Union In the 1920s

The revolutions in February and October of 1917 dramatically changed the entire structure of Russian society and gave access to power, administration, and social advancement to large sections of the population of the country, such as the Jewish minority in the Russian Empire, who had fairly limited opportunities for education or state-funded positions before the October uprising and the Bolsheviks’ ascent to power. Quite characteristic in this respect are the careers of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, for whom access to university education before the revolution would mean the need to overcome the 3 percent Jewish quota and, furthermore, the random ballot during the candidate selection process, in contrast to the open and freely available governmental positions of various kinds possible after the Bolshevik revolution. Bolsheviks had a high regard for science and technology as the vehicles of social modernization and progressive transformation of national industry and the economy (Kojevnikov, 2004; Krementsov, 1997). Besides, the issue of official recognition of the USSR was one of the national priorities of the new state, and the impact of “cultural diplomacy” – including international scientific exchange – on the reputation of the country and propaganda for the Soviet project of radical social transformation can hardly be overestimated (David-Fox, 2012). The example of the only Russian Nobel Prize winner as of 1917, Ivan Pavlov, is quite telling: not only did the Bolsheviks persuade him not to leave the country after the revolution, they also provided him with favorable conditions for living and working that eventually turned him from profound criticism of the new regime to moderately enthusiastic support for Bolshevik rule (Todes, 1995, 2014).

The decade of the 1920s can without any exaggeration be described as a period of intensive growth – even flourishing – for Russian psychology. It was then that the new generation of young intellectuals and activists emerged, inspired by Nietzschean ideas of radical revaluation of the entire social structure including the promise of a new science of man and its decisive role in revolutionary transformation of the world. Thus, one of the key tasks of the post-revolutionary era was utopian “remolding of man,” the creation of a new type of people, who will master their nature and uncover the yet unknown potential of human beings.¹ These ideas were grounded in the pervasive post-revolutionary belief in the possibility of virtually unlimited personal growth and an active, creative attitude to the world. This is why the public discourse of Soviet science, fiction, and media often returns to the topics of the specifically human characteristics that distinguish homo sapiens from other species, the nature of humans and the ways to overcome it, and the specific non-natural, i.e. cultural, laws of human development that are not inherited and genetically predetermined, but are formed by means of society, art, and culture.

By the mid-1920s a four-level structure of the social organization of Soviet psychology and allied sciences formed. This structure tied together philosophy and practice and comprised: (1) Marxist philosophy and dialectical materialism as the philosophical foundation of general psychology; (2) general psychology as a high-level scientific theory; (3) applied psychological disciplines (for instance, pedology or psychotechnics, roughly equivalent to child studies and industrial and vocational psychology, respectively); and (4) social institutes and practices (medicine, education, industry, etc.) (see Table 1.2; for convenience experimental psychology of the laboratory type is not represented). Some of these theoretical and applied disciplines originated in the West and were imported by Russian scholars and practitioners from abroad before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, primarily from Western Europe and North America. These include pedology (alternatively, referred to as “pedagogical psychology” or “experimental pedagogy”), psychotechnics, psychotherapy, and psychohygiene (in North America known as mental hygiene).² On the other hand, a few original Soviet disciplinary “brands” were created such as the reflexology of V. M. Bekhterev (originally, Bekhterev’s “objective psychology” of the pre-revolutionary period that, at its creator’s insistence, radically departed from the original and quickly changed its “brand-name” after the Bolshevik revolution) (Bekhterev, 1925, 1933). Other examples are K. N. Kornilov’s reactology and defectology, understood as a complex scientific-practical agency towards overcoming children’s “defectiveness”: physical, mental and psychological, and social alike.

Table 1.2 Disciplines of Soviet psychology in the 1920s

Philosophy
General (psychological) theory: psychology, reflexology, reactology
Applied empirical studies: psychotherapy, defectology, pedology, psychohygiene, psychotechnics
Human industry and social practice:
medicine and health care	education and child-rearing	industry proper and labor	military affairs and defense	propaganda and public relations

According to the Bolsheviks’ requirement of the practicality of science, it was practice that would become the criterion of truth and usefulness – quite in agreement with the postulates of Marxism, which, in fact, was the second of the Bolsheviks’ requirements of science. Indeed, the requirement of practicality could be interpreted as a direct challenge to philosophy’s ambition to provide a theoretical viewpoint, yet it was certainly an extension of Marx’s ideas on the role of philosophy in the radical and revolutionary transformation of the world as opposed to its traditional understanding as a purely theoretical and speculative enterprise. The role psychology was to play in this social transformation was very special and highly important. Psychology was to find the means for the normative remolding of the “old man” of the capitalist past and educating the “new man” of Communism. These methods would be subsequently implemented in large-scale social projects and would lead to the creation of the improved and advanced people of the future. These utopian and idealistic plans were also supported by most immediate and utterly practical goals of concrete social reality. The country was recovering after the Civil War (1918–22) and the actual tasks of the day were to modernize the national – predominantly agricultural – economy, overcome child homelessness and illiteracy, reanimate the system of schools and higher education, reform health care, and provide professional reorientation and training to thousands of new workers.³ Therefore, it was not abstract, theoretical interest, but the urgent demands of social practice that determined the rapid development of applied psychoneurological disciplines grounded in the actual concrete tasks of the establishment of a new society.

The agency of the Soviet psychologists in the 1920s, therefore, was not confined within the borders of psychology as an isolated discipline. Lavishly supported by the Bolshevik leadership, work was done on creating a pragmatic interdisciplinary synthesis of scientific-practical interventions and a higher-level theoretical paradigm that would encompass all human sciences and bring about a universal framework in which disciplines at different levels and from various spheres of application would work together as a complex, based on a shared methodological and philosophical foundation. The development of all these disciplines and social movements was rooted in a wide range of scientific societies and civil organizations. Hundreds of new research institutes were founded in the 1920s. In 1928 a few new scientific journals were launched such as Psychotechnics and Psychophysiology of Labor (in 1932 renamed Soviet Psychotechnics), Psychology, Pedology, and Problems of Defectology.

As a result of all these social transformations, a range of new scientific schools and research groups in human sciences emerged in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1920s. Soviet psychology triumphantly entered international psychological science at the IX International Congress of Psychology held at Yale University in early September, 1929, where Soviet scholars were represented by a record-breaking third largest non-American delegation (after those of Great Britain and Germany). This scientific event was followed by major international congresses held in the Soviet Union – the VII International Congress of Applied Psychology, or Psychotechnics, (Moscow, 1931) and the XV International Physiological Congress (Leningrad and Moscow, 1935) – that solidified the success of Soviet human and biomedical sciences. Characteristically, Carl Murchison’s Psychologies of 1930 for the first time contained a whole new section titled “Russian Psychologies,” which included three chapters that featured Ivan Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity (Pavlov, 1930),⁴ Vladimir Bekhterev’s reflexology (Schniermann, 1930), and the “dialectical-materialist psychology” of Konstantin Kornilov (Kornilov, 1930). These were accompanied by a number of translated publications of Soviet scholars that came out in the West mostly in the second half of the1920s and first half of 1930s.⁵

Subsequently, a number of Western scholars visited the Soviet Union in order to familiarize themselves with the state of the art in contemporary Soviet psychology. These trips were reflected in a series of Western publications that present a relatively mixed, but generally quite favorable image of the success of the Soviet project in the field of the human sciences, including psychology.⁶

Soviet psychology as a “Stalinist science” from the 1930s to our time

The end of the 1920s in the Soviet Union saw the start of major social, economic, and cultural transformations that the leader of the country, Joseph Stalin, characterized as the “Great Break” (Velikii Perelom). The literature on Stalin’s Great Break and its impact on virtually all spheres of social life in the USSR is enormous,⁷ but in the context of this discussion we are primarily interested in its effect on science and particularly on the psychological and allied sciences. For our current purposes it suffices to point out that as a consequence of the “Great Break” and the accompanying social processes a new model of science and, furthermore, the model of the interrelations between science, the state, and the ruling Communist Party was established in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1930s. The reader is thus directed to the classic book by Nikolai Krementsov that provides an excellent and seemingly exhaustive discussion of the topic that the author referred to as “Stalinist science” (Krementsov, 1997). The phrase does not appear unquestionable and is used here interchangeably with another phrase with essentially the same meaning: the “Stalinist model” of science. While Krementsov’s book will provide a rich source of thought-provoking input to the interested reader, several points need to be clarified and explicated here in order to shed some light on the nature of the tectonic shift of this period and those specific changes that Soviet science had to undergo in its transformation in agreement with the “Stalinist model.”

First: The rationale of the Great Break as it is related to scientific research and national science is perhaps best understood as the Party and state demand for the accountability of all subordinate structures of society, which primarily required establishing control over these structures and social institutes. Indeed, as far as the social and human sciences are concerned, the preceding decade of the 1920s is characterized by the state-sponsored but relatively free establishment and proliferation of numerous revolutionary and experimental projects in science and social practice. In contrast, the decade of the 1930s was characterized by the introduction of planning in virtually all spheres of social life, primarily the economy of the Soviet Union, now to develop according to a series of Five-Year Plans. Therefore, the whole rhythm of social life changed during this decade, and even scholars were now to create their annual plans of research and submit them for inspection to the supervisory agencies. Another consequence of the major transformation as it is directly related to the psychological and allied sciences was the beginning of the process of inter-disciplinary struggle for survival under the scrutiny of the organs of state and Party control. Indeed, as it turned out by the beginning of the 1930s, quite a few of the new scientific disciplines of the post-revolutionary era of the 1920s considerably overlapped in their topics, theories, and methods of research and were more often than not represented by pretty much the same set of spokesmen and activists. A characteristic example of such overlap would be the interplay between such disciplines as psychology, pedology, psychotechnics, and defectology that appeared to represent just different faces of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Foreword: how to reconstruct deconstructions
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Contexts and people
• PART II Texts and legacy
• PART III Holism and transnationalism
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Abbreviations and archival and documentary sources
• Notes
• References
• Index