In August 1966 the world's psychologists came to Moscow. The International Congress of Psychology met in the Soviet capital that summer, and for the discipline's founding powers — long used to thinking of experimental psychology 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. That is the first and most important thing to say about it, and this series says it gladly: the science here is real, much of it is permanent, and a reader who wants to know what Soviet psychology had actually achieved by the mid-1960s could hardly do better than start here.
The venue is worth dwelling on, because it fixes the book's purpose. That an international scientific congress of this weight met in Moscow at all was a mark of how far the discipline had travelled since the early 1950s, when Soviet psychology was a closed and frightened world; the presence of Alexander Luria, by then a figure of genuine international standing, on the editorial masthead is a further sign. Luria and his colleagues were not 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 this introduction is trying to date and explain.
The volume gathers work "written at different times," the editors note, "some of which were written more than ten and even twenty years ago," arranged "according to a thematic rather than a chronological principle." This matters for reading it. The spine says 1966, but the contents span three decades. The book opens with Lev Vygotsky's Development of the Higher Mental Functions, an abridged translation of a work he wrote in 1930–31 and did not live to see printed; it closes, in this first of two volumes, on the psychophysiology of perception and the properties of the nervous system, some of it fresh research prepared for this publication. What the anthology presents as a single confident tableau — "an actual picture of Soviet psychological research" — is in fact a tradition reassembled after two catastrophes, and the confidence of the 1966 face is intelligible only against the wreckage it does not mention. The science is the achievement. The silence about how nearly it was destroyed is the finding.
Take the achievement first, because it deserves to be met on its own terms before anything else is said.
This is Volume One, and its centre of gravity is what the contents page calls "General Problems of Psychology and Psychophysiology" and "Sensations. Perceptions." (The companion material on memory, thinking, speech and personality went into a parallel French collection, which the editors flag on the first page.) So the book leads not with the humane, developmental face of Soviet psychology but with its hard experimental core — the physiology of the conditioned reflex, the properties of the nervous system, the mechanics of movement and perception. And even here, in the most technical quarter of the discipline, the quality is striking.
Vygotsky's opening essay alone would justify the volume. His argument that the specifically human mind is not grown but built — that memory, attention and thought become human only when the child masters an external cultural instrument, a word or a sign, and gradually turns it inward — reoriented developmental psychology across the world, and by 1966 it was on the verge of the Western rediscovery that would make him a canonical figure. He states the thesis with complete clarity: the higher functions rest on "the social determination of behaviour realised by means of signs," a new order of behaviour built over the biological one, historical rather than natural. Nothing in the fifty years since has retired that idea; it is now simply part of how the field thinks.
Alongside Vygotsky, the volume showcases the Soviet physiology of activity at its most ambitious. Pyotr Anokhin's essay on the afferent apparatus of the conditioned reflex lays out the elements of what would become his theory of functional systems — "return afferentation" and the "acceptor of action," the idea that behaviour is guided not by a one-way reflex arc but by a loop in which the organism anticipates a result and checks the incoming signal against it. Nikolai Bernstein's essay on the control of motor acts is, quietly, one of the most important papers in the book: his insistence that movement is governed by "circular sensory correction" rather than by fixed reflex chains, that the reflex arc "is only a rudiment or a very particular case," anticipated the cybernetic understanding of feedback and remains foundational to motor science today. Boris Teplov and Vladimir Nebylitsin's differential work on the properties of the nervous system turned Pavlov's loose talk of nervous "types" into a measurable, individual-differences programme; Yevgeni Sokolov's analysis of the orienting reflex — the "what-is-it?" reaction by which an organism registers novelty — remains a reference point wherever attention and habituation are studied; Sergei Rubinstein's philosophical essay on the relation between the physiological and the psychological is a model of how to keep a science of mind from collapsing into a science of tissue; Leontyev and Gippenreiter treat the eye not as a passive camera but as an organ of activity; Zaporozhets and Zinchenko trace how the sensory image is built up through the child's own perceptual action rather than simply imprinted. This is a serious table of contents by any national standard of the period. A reader told that Soviet science was all Lysenko and dialectical boilerplate is holding the refutation. Much of this work was not propaganda dressed as science; it was science, and good science, and where it survives in the world's textbooks it survives on merit.
None of it, in the ordinary sense of this series, needs correcting. The book does not falsify 1917, does not defend a purge, does not lie about a famine. Its offence, if it has one, is subtler, and it lies not in what the papers say but in the confident frame the volume builds around them — the implication that this body of work is simply what a socialist science of mind naturally produced, in continuous and untroubled growth, under a state that nurtured it. That implication is false, and the scientists in these pages knew it better than anyone alive, because most of them had lived through its refutation twice.
The first was 1936. On 4 July of that year the Central Committee issued its decree "On Pedological Distortions in the System of the People's Commissariats of Education," which abolished pedology — the child-study movement in which Vygotsky's developmental psychology was embedded — as a bogus science, shut its institutions and withdrew its books. Vygotsky had died of tuberculosis in 1934, at thirty-seven; he could not be arrested, but his work could be, and for the better part of two decades it went effectively unpublished. That the man whose essay opens this 1966 anthology as a founding classic had been, within Soviet living memory, an un-person of his own discipline is nowhere on these pages. The book presents him as an ancestor; it does not say that the ancestor was for years forbidden.
The second catastrophe bears even more directly on this particular volume, because this is the psychophysiology volume, and psychophysiology was the scene of the crime. In late June and early July 1950 — the same joint session ran 28 June to 4 July — the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences held what became known as the "Pavlov session": a set-piece meeting, organised under Stalin, at which a faction claiming to defend the orthodox legacy of Ivan Pavlov denounced the leading physiologists of the country for deviating from it. The charge was ideological, the consequences were administrative, and the careers it broke were real. Pyotr Anokhin — whose essay appears in these very pages — was among the principal accused: arraigned for "revising" the foundations of Pavlov's teaching, he was stripped of his directorship and his place in the Academy's presidium and sent to teach at the provincial medical institute in Ryazan. Bernstein's physiology of activity, with its feedback loops and its demotion of the sacred reflex arc, was exactly the sort of "anti-Pavlovian" heresy the campaign existed to suppress, and his work fell out of favour in the same years. The discipline that this book displays in 1966 as a confident, unified science had, sixteen years earlier, been forced at a national tribunal to profess a single compulsory doctrine and to cast out those who would not.
You can watch the scar tissue in the prose. Read Rubinstein's essay — a subtle, genuinely philosophical defence of the reality of the mental against those who would dissolve psychology into physiology — and notice how much of its energy goes into establishing that his position is properly Pavlovian. "I. P. Pavlov's theory may serve as an example of determinism of the new type," he writes; a physiological explanation of perception, he insists, cannot be allowed to abolish the psychological fact it explains — "But must an explanation of a fact serve to liquidate it?" The argument is excellent. It is also, in its constant deferential return to Pavlov as the guarantor of respectability, an argument conducted in the register a scientist had to adopt after 1950 in order to be published at all. Anokhin's essay is similarly wreathed in Pavlov citations, its every extension of the theory framed as fidelity rather than revision — the posture of a man who had been officially convicted of revising Pavlov and had every reason not to be convicted again. The Pavlovian idiom that saturates this volume is not simply the natural language of Russian physiology. It is, in part, the protective coloration the 1950 session made mandatory.
Bernstein, remarkably, lets the shadow surface in a single line. Recalling the years when his principle of circular control was treated as heresy, he writes that "what then involved a bitter struggle is generally recognised now." The sentence is about the history of an idea; but any reader who knows what the "bitter struggle" was — the campaign that drove Anokhin to Ryazan and Bernstein himself out of favour — will hear the second meaning underneath the first. It is the closest the anthology comes to naming its own past, and it names it as an intellectual disagreement now happily resolved, rather than as a state operation that could have ended, and for others did end, in far worse than a provincial professorship.
The point of naming all this is not to catch the editors in a lie. They tell none; they simply exercise the editor's oldest privilege, which is selection, and select a discipline without its wounds. The point is that the wounds are the truth about how this science was made. The cultural-historical and activity traditions on display here were not the serene product of a state that cherished its scientists. They were the achievement of scientists who did world-class work and outlived the apparatus that periodically forbade it — and the volume's poise in 1966 is not the poise of a science that was always free, but of one enjoying the reprieve that came with the Thaw. Vygotsky's Selected Psychological Studies had reappeared only in 1956, twenty-two years after his death and the year Khrushchev denounced Stalin; that date, not 1930, is the real birth-year of the confidence this book radiates.
There is a further edge, sharper because it cuts along the grain of the science rather than against it. The unifying idea of this whole school — the idea that gives the sibling volume in this series, Karl Levitin's One Is Not Born a Personality, its title — is that the human mind is formed: built up in the individual out of the tools, signs and social relations a culture supplies. As psychology this is true and fertile, and the papers here are its proof. But the same proposition, turned a half-turn, is the founding charter of a state that claimed the right to form the new Soviet man — to treat the human being as material to be worked. A psychology of formation is a magnificent science and a convenient one, and it is worth asking, of a discipline operating under that state, what it was allowed to examine and what it was not.
The tell is a matter of scope. This tradition studies, with great power, how a mind is assembled — the sign, the tool, the reflex loop, the sensory image built through activity. What it does not, and under the conditions could not, put on the table is the political question that the science itself raises: assembled by whom, and into what. The social relations that form the person are treated, throughout, as a neutral given, the way a physicist treats a field — never as themselves an object of scrutiny, never as something that might be unjust, coercive, or arranged in the interests of one stratum against another. The "collective" whose activity shapes the personality is always simply there, benign and unnamed. That is the boundary of the permitted. A Soviet psychology could investigate the child at Zagorsk being led into the human world through a spoon; it could not investigate the society doing the leading, or ask what happens when the collective that forms people is not a free association but a bureaucratic state — the one that, in 1936 and 1950, had formed the careers of these very authors by decree. The science stops exactly where the state's self-examination would have to begin.
None of this is a quarrel with the school's Marxism, which is the genuine article and not decoration. When this tradition grounds the personality in the ensemble of social relations, it is drawing directly on Marx — on the sixth of the Theses on Feuerbach, that the human essence is no abstraction inherent in the single individual but "in its reality" the ensemble of social relations. On that, the school and the tradition this series writes from agree without reservation: the human being is social all the way down, made and not given. The activity approach is one of the most productive things twentieth-century Marxism produced, and it produced it here.
The disagreement is over the other half of Marx — the half about ends. If the person is formed through the collective, the emancipatory tradition always insisted on what the collective is for: a society, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." The individual is the aim of the association, not its raw material. A psychology of formation is humane precisely to the degree that the society doing the forming is one its members freely make and freely govern; it becomes something colder when "the collective" is the name given to a state that forms people for its own purposes and calls the result the new man. The science in this book cannot resolve that tension, and should not be asked to. But a reader can hold the question open where the book keeps it shut — and for the political half of the answer this series has a standing reference. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, in the very months the pedology decree was issued, is the argument that by that decade the "collective" in whose name the Soviet person was to be formed had passed under the administration of a privileged bureaucracy with interests of its own. That is the fact that explains the boundary described above: why a great psychology of how minds are made had to keep silent about who was making them, and why it could re-emerge in 1966 only on the state's own terms, with its founders' persecution edited out of the picture.
So: read this book, and read the science in it with respect. It is one of the best single doors into a tradition — Vygotsky on the making of mind, Anokhin and Bernstein on the loops that govern action, Rubinstein on the stubborn reality of the mental — that ranks among the twentieth century's real contributions to the understanding of human beings. This is not a Soviet fabrication to be exposed. It is, in large part, a Soviet achievement, and this series is glad to help carry it forward.
Read it, too, against what it will not say. When Anokhin defers so carefully to Pavlov, remember Ryazan. When Bernstein mentions a "bitter struggle" now happily "recognised," remember that the struggle was a state campaign and that its victims were his colleagues and himself. When Vygotsky opens the volume as a founding master, remember that his collected works waited until 1956 to be printed, and ask why. The confidence of 1966 was earned — but it was earned by scientists working in the narrow clearing the Thaw had opened, and the clearing was surrounded, on every side and in living memory, by the woods this bright anthology declines to describe.