Promoting Vygotsky: a fragment of Luria's science policy

This episode concerns primarily Luria and another Vygotsky and Luria close associate from the 1920s, Alexei N. Leontiev (1903-1979). Luria’s and Leontiev’s proposal to publish Vygotsky abroad was in no ways a trial balloon. On the contrary, Vygotsky - and now the name may stand for a talented psychologist who died much too young from tuberculosis and/or for the pioneer of the new, true Soviet psychology and/or for the emblem of a school of thought, theoretical approach, or research program — was used especially by Luria for purposes of science policy (in our case: of ‘psychology policy’), and he did it in two ways. On the one hand, he honestly believed that Vygotsky needed to be remembered and honored as a scholar of excellence; on the other hand, he also ‘pushed’ Vygotsky in order to consolidate his own approach (and that of those colleagues who referred to Vygotsky without being among the very close followers) against other, competing approaches of Soviet psychologists. In his memoirs Looking Back. Luria evoked the “intimate meetings” he and Leontiev attended at Vygotsky's flat in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The meetings were held once or twice a week. Their purpose was “to elaborate the general ‘complexes’ of the new psychology.” At these meetings, “the leading spirit of Vygotsky played the decisive role, the other two in the ‘troika’ being mainly his followers and partly his instruments.”^{[1] [2]} The expression “partly his instruments" either means that Luria and Leontiev happened incidentally to be instrumental for Vygotsky’s theoretical thinking, or else that he used his visitors as sources for making progress in his own thinking. The passage seems to be a rare instance where Luria’s attitude towards his genial friend and teacher is tinged with slight ambivalence.

However, as mentioned some lines earlier, Luria also used the ‘posthumous Vygotsky’ as a significant instrument in his own interest. He did so either alone, as in the brief obituary published in March 1935 in the international quarterly Character and Personality. Among other remarkable contributions to psychology-building in the Soviet Union, Luria mentioned that

Vygotsky |. . ,| did not confine himself to the study of theoretical problems, but devoted much of his work to the practical application of psychology. Unlike the psychologists of both the physiological and the idealistic (geisteswissenschaftliche) schools, Vygotsky tried to find a scientific solution of the practical problems of our daily life. [... | The psychiatric and neurological clinics owe to him a number of valuable contributions. He has shown that the disintegration of the complex mental functions plays an important part in the understanding of the mechanisms of nervous and mental diseases.⁴’

A characteristic feature of this obituary is worth a brief comment. While Stalin and his fellow comrades had already decided that Soviet research had to be genuinely Soviet, that it had to rest self-sufficiently on Soviet sources, that it had to avoid foreign (i.e. non-Soviet) inputs, and that it conform to the party line, Luria published this text in the USA, wrote it in Russian, and dealt with a scholar whose work was anything but taken for granted by the majority of Soviet psychologists (also, notably, because it drew from foreign sources). It also turns out in hindsight that Vygotsky’s portrait drawn by Luria could likewise be seen as a sketchy self-portrait, at least as far as the outlook of the research program was concerned.

A similar use of Vygotsky happened in 1958 in the German Democratic Republic. The impact of Soviet psychology on her little sister in the GDR was undoubtedly important at that time. It was probably stronger than the impact of American (or, broadly speaking, Western) psychology' on her academic sister in the Federal Republic of Germany'. But many people doing psychology in the GDR either on the student level or in teaching positions did not closely' follow Soviet output in Russian. Buying academic Soviet-Russian books and journals wasn’t easy either.

Two years after Vygotsky’s first posthumous book had been published in Moscow (it containing a variety' of scholarly contributions⁴'¹), the East German Zeitschrift fur Psychologic carried the translation of the preface Luria and Leontiev had contributed to the Russian book. To put it simply: this amounted to obvious pushing of Vygotsky in the GDR psychology as the most significant and still highly' relevant figure of Soviet psychology or even as the leading Marxist psychologist of the USSR. The presentation of (and introduction to) Vy'gotsky’s works that were not yet available in German translation was structured like previous Lurian reminiscences of the dead friend and teacher: physiology and its psychological offspring on one edge of the academic field, idealist, uerstehende, Diltheyan, humanistically' oriented psychology (and its offspring) on the other edge of the field, and Vygotsky revising both approaches on the basis of Marx’s historical and dialectical materialism, thus clearing the field for good for now and for future research.^{[3] [4]}

A footnote by' the journal’s (unnamed) editor stated:

The publication of some of L. S. Vy'gotsky’s already published writing constitutes a welcome enrichment of the psychological literature worldwide. A. N. Leontiev’s and A. R. Luria’s introductory article (published here in translation) introduced the reader to Vygotsky’s psychological conception; it requires special attention, since it critically assesses Vy'gotsky’s scientific thinking from a historical perspective and thus reveals the development of psychology in the USSR to the present day.^[5]

The persons who did not act as censors in Moscow and/or in Berlin were convinced that this piece of scientific prose was not either ideologically or politically detrimental. It could have been otherwise some y'ears later; it could also have been the same. But another case shows that political and ideological factors were not always predictable, and from time to time quite aleatory. Child psychology was an important field of research both in Eastern and Western Europe. Two French speaking psychologists, Henri Wallon and Jean Piaget, both doing research on the mental development of children, were read and studied outside France: Piaget in the USA (where a considerable number of translations of his works were published) and Wallon in the USSR. And both obtained some attention in the two German states: Piaget in the 'bourgeois’ Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany), because he was accepted by American scholars as a serious theoretician of children’s mental development, and Wallon in the ‘progressive’ GDR, because he was a member of the French Communist Party and still an outstanding specialist of child psychology. In later years. Piaget was also well received in the GDR. And he was known to Soviet psychologists (especially to Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, and others) in the late 1920s and early ’30s long before mainstream psychologists became aware of him in Germany and the USA.^{[6] [7]}

Thus, in retrospect. Luria's and Leontiev’s efforts of promoting Vygotsky in the West might have played an instrumental role for them: first, as a means of advocating for their own research agenda within the Soviet Union and, second, as a major vehicle to overcome the domestic and dogmatic ‘Pavlovians’ and, thus, to defend the status of psychology as an independent and truly Soviet scientific discipline.

• [1] Luria: Looking Back, ms. 1977. p. 43, private archive; my emphasis.
• [2] Luria, 1935, pp. 239-240.
• [3] Vygotsky. 1956.
• [4] See Leontiev & Luria. 1958.
• [5] Anon, 1958, p. 165.
• [6] See Métraux, 1990.
• [7] This is not the place to discuss the issue of auto-, hetero-, or simply biographical genres. Though dealing with early modern life-writing, Stewart’s remarks on this issue are easily transferable to the present time; see Stewart. 2018, pp. 5—7.