Introduction: A new history of psychology: Soviet, Russian, Marxist

No news is good news, they say. Then, here it is: yet another “new history”. It is not clear yet if this is good news, but some clarifications and explanations are definitely needed right now.

Indeed, the news of a “new history” emerges from time to time, the “new” stays for a while in order to become an “old” one in due time, then, another “new history” emerges. This seems to be a natural course of events in historiography, and one should not be too excited by a proclamation of a novelty of the kind. This is a normative rule of the game: history keeps rewriting itself. The rhetoric pronouncements of a novelty come and go. Sometimes it even happens so that something proclaimed as “new" turns out to be not so new, or even entirely not new. Yet, the attribution “new” remains. After all, one is once again reminded of the Pont Neuf— allegedly, the New Bridge, according to its French title - which is the oldest standing bridge across the river Seine in Paris, France. The ancient Book of Ecclesiastes seems to be an eternal and ever novel source for inspiration for thinking along these lines.

So, in order to understand the novelty of this proposal and why anyone might be interested in it, we need to get the answers to these two questions: What is this book about? And, then: What is new in this “new history”?

What is this book about?

Time and space have arguably caused most of the problems to humankind so far. Particularly, our interpretation of the time and space juncture — the “chronotope", for the lack a better genuinely English word — is especially painful and troublesome.

This book is about one of those time-space junctures. The geographic land is the territory of the former Russian Empire, at least most parts of it. Yet, it is not as simple as it seems first: the land does not exist by itself and is circumscribed by other lands. Then, the period is, roughly, a couple of decades of the 1920s and 1930s. This is not so simple either: the period is also surrounded by other times that in many ways influenced or were influenced by the events that occurred then. Things get even further complicated when we start thinking about those people who lived there and then (and whose lives spanned well beyond this territory and period), but also got caught into the human networks of their predecessors, contemporaries and successors across other times and spaces. Yet another complication is added with our interest of the intellectual sphere - the “noosphere” if one prefers a smart-looking word of seemingly Greek origin - as the world of abstract ideas in their concrete material manifestations travelling across time, space and the people moving within, along or across them.

The primary focus of the book is the world of ideas, specifically, in the field of the “psychology” in its historical development. Therefore, the book seems to qualify as an “intellectual history”. Our interest in psychology as a scientific discipline makes it also a “disciplinary history”. Yet, as all the book’s contributors certainly realize, no scientific discipline exists by itself, but deeply in the social context of its time and place. Thus, this is also a “social history”. Finally, the abstract human networks at the closest zooming-in fall apart into an array of individual persons’ portraits and idiosyncratic faces of the actors (in the sociological sense of the word) or protagonists (if one tends to think about them as of a narrative or theatric drama characters). Therefore, this book can also be construed as a set of “biographies”. The last point is particularly true, given the number of memoir texts and reminiscences the reader will find inside.

So. the book is about psychology, in most general terms. Then, the word demands an attribute attached to it. We have four immediate options. These are: “Russian”, “Soviet”, “Vygotskian” or “Marxist” psychology'. Let us discuss them one by one.

First. “Russian psychology”. This might refer to some kind of mystical “Russian soul” or “Russian spirit” (like the one that is presumably represented by the characters of Fiodor Dostoyevsky or Anton Chekhov), but this is not about psychology as a scientific discipline and definitely not what this book is about. Alternatively, this might mean a scientific discipline of psychology as it developed from the earlier times of the Russian Empire throughout the Soviet period and until the contemporary Russian Federation. A shorter version of this story (that for obvious reasons did not include the post-Soviet period) can be found in a thick volume Russian Psychology: A Critical History by David Joravsky that covers roughly a century of what can be described as Russian psychological thought (Joravsky, 1989). This kind of story is not ours. Then, a curious blend of the two options is a story about the allegedly “special way” of “Russian science” — particularly, psychology — dramatically distinct from a “non-Russian” one due to its essential “spirituality” and “sacrality”, therefore, superior to the deprived of “spirit” and “eternal values” equally inhuman and godless “Western science” (for a discussion, see Chapter 1, by

Leonid Radzikhovskii). This kind of perspective and worldview can be found in one of the programmatic works of the genre composed by Soviet—Russian author Mikhail Yaroshevskii (Yaroshevskii, 1996) as well as in quite a few contemporary publications of the last couple of decades within the Russian Federation. Yet, this is certainly not “our way” and not what this book has to offer its readers. Finally, “Russian psychology” can be operationalized on purely linguistic grounds as any scholarship that ever existed published in the Russian language. That would also include Russian translations of foreign works. This approach seems to be quite productive for studies of some kind and has recently been explored in a study on a disciplinary history of this field of knowledge in the first half of 20th century (Yasnitsky, 2015). However, this book is of a very different kind and covers a much broader set of topics, problems and perspectives.

Second, “Soviet psychology”. This phrase was quite popular and widely used in publications in the previous century, especially after WWII. Many Western scholars would travel “back to the USSR” in order to get familiarized with the great achievements of state-sponsored Soviet science — especially, after the most impressive and even shocking (from the Westerner’s perspective) first launch of an artificial Earth satellite, the Soviet sputnik (in 1957) and, then, first ever journey of a human into outer space: Yury Gagarin, a Soviet citizen, in 1961. These two events alone (not to mention the competition in the Cold War nuclear weapons armament) triggered a space race between the two Superpowers and attracted huge investments in Western science and related social practices, including psychology - such as industrial, organizational, developmental and educational psychologies — and, even more importantly, education. Thus, the primary motivation for the Western intellectuals’ construction and construal of the “Soviet science narrative” was the need in support of their domestic research from their local governments, and this goal was successfully achieved. The victorious image and the success story of the “Soviet psychology” developed mainly under the impression of these exciting (and threatening, for some) achievements of the first socialist state and was shaped in a set of article and book publications that came out mostly in 1960s and 1970s. Some examples of this attitude can be found in the Cold War era classics of the genre (Bauer, 1962; Cole & Maltzman, 1969; McLeish, 1975; O’Connor, 1966; Rahmani, 1973; Simon. 1957). Since then, however, the glory of the Soviet social and scientific project has withered and does not appear now as obvious and fascinating as it used to. It is, perhaps, for this very reason the attribute “Soviet” does not quite fit as the main defining characteristic of psychology as it is treated in this book. Interestingly, the Anglophone narratives about “Soviet psychology” that widely proliferated in mid-20th century typically passed by (i.e., merely ignored) the “legacy of Vygotsky the Genius” (and considerably underplayed the proclaimed Marxist philosophical foundations of the Soviet science). This observation immediately leads to the next option to consider.

Third, “Vygotskian psychology”. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) has long been regarded as the most prominent and the most famous Russian (and Soviet) psychologist, a “genius” (Yasnitsky, 2018) and the “Mozart of psychology” (Toul-min, 1978), apart from Ivan Pavlov (1849—1936) and, to a much lesser extent, Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927): both physiologists rather than psychologists proper, well known for their research on reflexes and the higher nervous system. Another famous Russian scholar is Alexander Luria (1902—1977), nowadays known primarily for his contributions to the study of the human brain and its relation to human behavior and psychological functioning. Yet, outside the specialized field of neuropsychology, Luria’s fame in many ways is closely associated with Vygotsky, with whom he most closely collaborated in the 1920s and early 1930s. Still only the names of Pavlov, Luria and Vygotsky made it to the list of the top 100 most influential psychologists in America, according to a comprehensive study published in early 2000s (Haggbloom et al., 2002).

Yet, from mainstream Western psychology’s vantage point, Vygotsky’s (and “Vygotskian”) legacy is Russian/Soviet psychology’s main claim to fame today, in the 21st century. This conclusion is indirectly corroborated by a relatively recent, albeit somewhat dated study of the “coverage of Russian psychological contributions in American psychology textbooks” (Aleksandrova-Howell et al., 2012). Indeed, out of the six Russian scholars’ names that made it to the top of the most well-known Russian celebrities in the field (i.e., alphabetically, Bekhterev, Luria, Pavlov, Sechenov, Vygotsky and Zeigarnik) it is the name of Lev Vygotsky that most occurs in the very text of the article with its 28 appearances as opposed to mere 7. 13, 12, 6 and 4 instances for Bekhterev, Luria, Pavlov, Sechenov and Zeigarnik. respectively. Notably, three persons on the list, Bekhterev, Pavlov and Sechenov, are 19th-early 20th century practitioners and scholars primarily in the fields of medical studies and physiology. They are considered the classics of biomedical sciences, but hardly qualify as psychologists proper. The other three, Vygotsky, Luria and Zeigarnik, were closest associates and belonged to the same “Vygotsky-Luria Circle” (Yasnitsky, 2016b), which is interpreted as yet another confirmation of Vygotsky’s prominence. There is also an array of other reasons to believe that the image of Vygotsky and “Vygotskian psychology” has largely overclouded and surpassed the entire collective “Russian” or “Soviet psychology'” in popular opinion by now. In contemporary psychological and, especially, educational discourse “Vygotskian psychology” is typically positioned as the main and the most important contribution a Russian-speaking scholar ever made into the international psychology'. At least, it is safe to claim that Russian psychologists and educators other than Vygotsky (apart from those mentioned as the most popular ones in the “coverage of the Russian contributions” overview) are usually' hardly' known at all internationally. Consider the fact that the overwhelming majority of the top (i.e., most read and most cited) publications in contemporary journal Journal of Russian and East European Psychology (also well known as Soviet Psychology, renamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union) are Vygotsky’s own papers, articles authored by' his former direct associates (such as Lidia Bozhovich, Aleksei N. Leontiev or Daniil El’konin) and their colleagues and students (such as Vasilii

Davydov, Aleksandr Zaporozhets. Piotr Gal’perin or Piotr Zinchenko), or discuss issues directly related to and stemming from Vygotsky’s writings such as the topics of the “zone of proximal development”, the “social situation of development” or “involuntary remembering”. Thus, “Vygotskian” would until quite recently virtually equate with either “Soviet” or “Russian” as long as psychology is concerned. However, not anymore.

It turns out that “Vygotskian psychology” appears to be in a deep crisis these days. If only Google Scholar citation rate is indicative and trustworthy enough, the crisis manifests itself in the number of references to Vygotsky’s works that kept steadily growing from the end of 1970s throughout 1980s (Valsiner, 1988) and until most recently. However, as documented by Google, Vygotsky citation rate reached its peak in 2017 and started its rapid and steady decline ever since.¹ Should this conclusion prove ultimately correct in the long run, it would be safe to claim that we are currently observing the “Vygotsky bubble” (Yasnitsky, 2019) in its initial phase of shrinking. The reasons are not entirely clear for this truly tectonic shift in the world of ideas — as reflected in the researchers’ and authors’ social practices such as citing their scholarly sources, in this particular case. Yet, there are a couple of possible explanations and interpretations of the currently observed phenomenon.

Historically, the social function of the popular conception of “Vygotskiana” was the restoration of North American teachers in their rights as a leading force in the classroom, which were considerably undermined during the concurrent processes of 1960s—1970s of the “cognitive revolution” (Jerome S. Bruner being the most illustrious representative in educational and developmental psychology), the popular proliferation of the ideas of humanistic psychology (exemplified by such figures as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow). These processes and events triggered the advent of the “constructivist” education and “child-centered curriculum” that was introduced in opposition to the “traditional” instruction based on the methods of teacher-controlled drills (and related ones) and the positivist educational philosophy of behaviorism. The notion of the “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky’s own yet somewhat distorted phrasing of a very vague idea of roughly the last two years of his life, borrowed from the publications in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s made under Vygotsky’s name) was instrumentally used as a forceful argument in the educational field and widely spread among the educationists in support of their claim to getting back the control over learning and instruction. This was promoted under the label of “social constructivism” — as opposed to the older notion of “constructivism” associated with the name of Swiss thinker and researcher Jean Piaget and the child — and the learner-centered movement in education. An explication of this sentiment can be found, for instance, in a recently ^[1]

published book very characteristically titled The Right to Teach: Creating Spaces for Teacher Agency (Ostorga, 2018). Now that American teachers have presumably overcome the problems associated with the de facto loss of their status of the leading force in the classroom and Vygotsky’s writings have already played their historical role, one might assume that invocation of his name and work is not so much in demand as it used to be a few decades ago. An alternative (or an additional) explanation of this phenomenon is that references to Vygotsky have typically occurred in support of the claim that children develop in their social context, as trivial and self-evident as it might appear to some (Valsiner & Van der Veer, 2000). Perhaps, this claim has eventually become so obvious to everyone nowadays, in the time of the global computer-mediated social networks of the 21st century that reference to the works of a long gone Russian scholar is not needed anymore. For a further substantial discussion to this effect see Yasnitsky (2019).

In addition, there is another plausible explanation of the presumably growing disappointment in and dissatisfaction with Vygotsky in yet another of his manifestations. This is his persona of “Vygotsky the Marxist". The name of Lev Vygotsky and the brand of “Vygotskian” science has also been long used (and abused) as an umbrella term for the leftist, post-Marxist political-scientific agenda by the left-leaning intellectuals in their scientific and social activities in order to promote their social and political stance (Laine-Frigren, 2020). This situation can be equally observed in different forms and under diverse disguises in North America, in the countries of the Western Europe and, more recently, in other regions, such as the Spanish-speaking world and perhaps even more notably in Portuguese-speaking Brazil (Aguilar, 2016; Garcia, 2016; IJzendoorn et al., 1981; Mecacci, 2015; Métraux, 2015; Ratner & Silva, 2017; Stetsenko, 2016; Yasnitsky et al., 2016; Zazzo, 1982, 1989). A discussion can be found in Chapter 5 that presents the situation in Brazil as viewed through the eyes of the insiders.

The interest of the international community in “Vygotsky the Marxist” is not incidental (Ratner & Silva, 2017). It is based on quite a number of Vygotsky’s texts in which he on various occasions quotes from Marx and Engels. Moreover, there is a lengthy discussion of the topic of Marxism in its potential application in psychology, education and related scientific disciplines and social practices. This fragment can be found in one of his earlier unfinished manuscripts of his mechanistic “instrumental’’ period of 1920s titled variably “The (historical) meaning of crisis in psychology'" (Zavershneva & Osipov, 2012a, 2012b). It was not published until after Vygotsky’s death and is well known (Vygotsky, 1997). Yet, the actual manuscript was abandoned by its author, and there is no evidence he was ever going to publish it or develop it any further. But this is far from the only obstacle to “Vygotsky’s Marxism”.

In any single Vygotsky work, there is no trace of any sufficiently well-developed distinctly Marxist research methodology deeply grounded in systematic analysis of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. What we have instead are only bits and pieces and occasional quotes unsystematically scattered throughout a range of texts. Furthermore, there are even instances when Vygotsky either contradicted his own "Marxist” proclamations and promises (like his call for application of Marx’s method of “reverse analysis” from most developed forms to the less developed ones that he actually never followed in any of his works) or rejected them altogether (like his mechanicist “instrumental method" of the 1920s that he explicitly renounced as erroneous and “reactological” in early 1930s) (Yasnitsky, 2018). Finally, the last argument, Vygotsky’s declaration of his personal “Nicene Creed” (or a “symbol of faith”): a major theoretical work on “psychological materialism” that, by analogy with "historical materialism” for Marxist history and sociology, contemporary psychology' direly needs as its methodological foundation. This remained only a slogan, mere proclamation and a statement of intent at best: Vygotsky failed to ever write such a book or create a comparable Marxist methodological legacy of this magnitude and importance. And even that is not all. A surprising discovery has been made in a study of Vygotsky’s and Luria’s experimental research conducted in 1931—1932 in Central Asia. The analysis of correspondence, documents and publications revealed the superficial, reductionist and “vulgar Marxist” essence of Vygotsky’s (and his allies’) understanding of the foundations of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s philosophical and social teaching even in the most advanced and mature stages of Vygotsky’s thinking development in 1930s, until virtually right before his death in 1934 (Lamdan & Yasnitsky, 2016; Yasnitsky, 2018). Thus, Vygotsky’s status of a leading Marxist thinker and psychologist has been recently questioned and considerably undermined.

It is hardly possible to tell which of these factors or whether any combination of them (and if any of these) is in play in this situation. In any case, the “Vygotsky crisis” and the related “Vygotsky bubble” are likely to become an intriguing phenomenon in the history of science, to be further explored in the years to come. Yet, in sum, the cumulative scholarship on “Russian psychology”, “Soviet science” and “Vygotskian legacy” has left a considerable gap in our knowledge about the real content and social meaning of the intellectual project as it was developed for a number of decades in the Soviet Union, its political satellite countries and their supporters all around the world. This conclusion virtually inevitably suggests the fourth option.

Fourth and the last: “Marxist psychology”. After all, this is the real gap in our understanding the Soviet psychological project in its historical development. Indeed, we are still unfortunately lacking the knowledge about (a) distinctly Marxist (but decidedly non-Vygotskian), (b) Soviet and Russian (c) psycholog}' (and the range of closely related disciplines) as (d) inseparable unity of philosophy, theory, scientific research methodology and, finally, social practice. This is the answer. As the reader of this book, who had a chance to have a look at its cover, already knows this is the choice we made. This is perhaps the main reason why this book had to be designed, materialized and released to the public. This is the book, and this is what it is about.

• [1] To this effect see, for instance, the link to Vygotsky's Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google. com/citations?user=L4S0dT0AAAAJ and compare it with those of, for instance, Albert Bandura: https://scholar.google.coni/citations?hl=en&user=muejNLSAAAAJ or Sigmund Freud: https:// scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&:user=N80kIiYAAAAJ.