Psychological Research in USSR

In August 1966 the world's psychologists came to Moscow. The International Congress of Psychology met in the Soviet capital that summer, and for a discipline long used to thinking of itself as something done in Leipzig, Cambridge, New Haven and Vienna, it was an event with a subtext: the country that had produced Pavlov was inviting the profession onto its own ground and proposing to be judged as a peer.

This anthology is part of that invitation. Assembled by three of the most senior figures in the field - the editors sign themselves "Professor A. Leontyev, Professor A. Luriya, Professor A. Smirnov" - it was designed, in its own words, to help foreign readers "get a sufficiently clear and, what is most important, an objective idea of Soviet psychology".

It is a shop window, and what it puts in the window is genuinely first-rate. Alexander Luria was by then a figure of real international standing; Leontyev's activity theory and Nikolai Bernstein's work on the physiology of movement have both outlasted the state that housed them, and Vygotsky opens the volume as a founding master. These were not people exporting a doctrine to sympathetic Western Communists. They were addressing the profession as such - the American, British, French and German experimentalists who would set the terms of the discipline's reputation - and they were confident enough to let the work speak.

That confidence is the historical fact worth dating. It was earned in a narrow clearing the Thaw had opened, by scientists whose colleagues, and in some cases whose own careers, had been broken in the campaigns of the early 1950s.

Volume One of two. Translated by David A. Myshne. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.