I Theory

Reminiscence about future Marxist psychology: one hundred years of solitude

First I got amused, then I got amazed. I was amused by the invitation that I received from the editor of this volume to contribute a new chapter that would be based on my 30-year-old paper that I once published in Russian academic journal issues of Psychology (Voprosy psikhologii, in original Russian) amid the so-called perestroika (“reconstruction”) period in the latest history of the Soviet Union. On the surface, the editor’s offer appeared very unusual and utterly weird, to say the least. And only then it was that, upon rereading this virtually forgotten text, I got amazed by realizing how contemporary this old paper looks now. 30-something years later, at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. Indeed, virtually nothing has changed since then and it is as if time has stopped for Russian psychology, from the perspective of Marxist thinking in this field of knowledge, at least. That said, one cannot but acknowledge quite a few changes that took place in Russian psychology' in a number of other respects over the last 30 years. These I am going to somewhat sketchily overview in the initial, newly written part of this chapter. Then. I will proceed to the considerably revised “prequel” of the story' that reflects the state of the art in the field as of the end of the 1980s as it was reflected in my earlier publication (Radzikhovskii, 1988). Yet, before I proceed any further, a personal comment on my place in this story - rather, a history - of Soviet and Russian psychology' is in order.

s-1980s: the portrait of the author in social context

The author of these lines graduated in 1975 from the Department of Psychology of Moscow State University and soon thereafter, at the age of 26, officially defended his doctoral (more precisely, “Candidate of Sciences”) dissertation in the field of the history of psychology' in 1979, specifically, on the scientific legacy of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Given that his 226 pages long doctoral research topic was dedicated to the pioneering exploration of the topic of “main stages of scientific creativity of Lev Vygotsky” (Radzikhovskii, 1979b), he seems to qualify as one of the pioneers in the field of the “Vygotsky Studies", a new and emerging subfield of scientific inquiry back then, and a burgeoning field of knowledge now. the field of research that is currently undergoing a "Revisionist Revolution” of the 21st century (Yasnitsky, 2012, 2019a; Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2016b; Yasnitsky et al., 2016). Besides, not only was he an established authority in Vygotsky’s legacy, its history and historiography (Radzikhovskii, 1979a) and one of the key organizers of the first conference on Vygotsky’s legacy in the Soviet Union in June, 1981 (Davydov et al., 1981), but also a scientific researcher at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow (more precisely, the Scientific Research Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR, as it was officially titled at the time) well-known by the names of a few of its former employees, including a few academic celebrities: Lev Vygotsky and his collaborators and members of the “Vygotsky-Luria Circle” such as Leonid Sakharov (the author of the famous “Vygotsky-Sakharov test”), Alexander Luria, Mark Lebedin-skii, Viktor Kolbanovskii, Aleksei N. Leontiev and many others. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the author of this chapter was appointed as a secretary of editorial board of the forthcoming six-volume project of Lev Vygotsky's “Selected Works” that were published in Russian in 1982—1984. It was this very edition that was subsequently translated and published in English in 1987 (first volume that included “Thinking and speech”) and then, after a pause, in 1993 and 1997-1999 (cumulatively, other five volumes).