Review

Reviewed Work(s): Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union by Jaan Valsiner

Review by: Colwyn Trevarthen
Source: Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1 (1991), pp. 183-187
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/152490
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 SOVIET STUDIES, Vol. 43, No. 1, 1991, 183-206

Reviews

Jaan Valsiner, Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union. Brighton, UK: The Harvester
Press, 1988, x+ 398 pp., ?35.00 h/b, ?12.95 p/b.

JAAN VALSINER is an Estonian educated at Tartu University, a once renowned centre of

scholarship reduced to provincial status in the Soviet Union by the purge of departments,
personnel and books carried out by orders from Moscow in 1940-41. Valsiner left for the
West in the early 1970s and is now a respected and productive Assistant Professor of
Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Valsiner gives us a fascinating history of psychology in the Soviet Union since 1917-its
triumphs and abuses, its contribution to education and its submission to social and political
forces. An intriguing element of the story is the cultural diversity of the USSR, of which we
are all aware since glasnost' released expression of ancient ethnic tensions.
We learn that while the intellectual roots of Soviet psychology owe much to German
dialectical philosophy, they are Russian as well as European. And, indeed, the legacy of
Russian late 19th century behavioural science is impressive. Darwin's books were quickly
translated and avidly discussed by Russian intellectuals in the context of the social changes
they felt must come. Vladimir Vagner, the comparative psychologist, like Julian Huxley
later, taught that the 'collective psychology' of humans took over the role of natural
selection in generation of adaptive behaviours, and Aleksei Severtsov, an embryologist,
integrated developmental morphology and psychological factors. Both these men influenced
the most famous developmental psychologist in the USSR, Lev Vygotsky. Ivan Sechenov's
'Reflexes of the Brain' of 1863 considered the effect of upbringing on behaviour and
described the internalisation of external experience into 'voluntary' and 'higher' functions
in terms much like those of modern social-cognitive developmental psychology. His work
led to Aleksandr Lur'ya's emphasis on the role of speech in controlling the action of the
child. Bogdanov's interactionist theory was a precursor of General System's Theory, and in
the activity-theory perspective of Vladimir Bekhterev, as later in Piaget's theory, the
organism is seen to act on the environment to determine how it will be stimulated, thus
gaining independence and the capacity to transform its life-conditions. These theories
instructed Soviet psychologists Vygotsky, Leontiev, Zaporozhets, Basov, Ananiev, etc.
The materialistic science of 'reflexology', with its associative processes explaining
development, aims to eliminate mentalistic concepts; but Russian behaviourism kept links
to research on the brain and some Soviet scholars emphasised the role of consciousness and
rejected the reduction that American 'brain-free' behaviourism found so attractive. Valsiner
notes that Ivan Pavlov, a digestion physiologist, was not influential in psychology until after
1950, when he was boosted as genius of Soviet materialistic science. The common sense
ideas of Bekhterev, who established a Brain Research Institute with a laboratory to study
children, were popular much earlier. Bekhterev set up the Petrograd Paedological Institute
where differential personality psychology was developed, as well as 'genetic reflexology'
under Shchelovanov. Ananiev became leader of what became the 'Leningrad School'.

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184 REVIEWS

The story of how utopian plans for education became progressively soured and d
by a xenophobic dogmatism a few decades after the revolution makes sad reading.
of the new Soviet state confronted widespread illiteracy and seven million children
homeless in the civil war. Teachers and administrators welcomed the reforms of the new
regime. Ambitious programmes of re-education and compulsory education with indoctrina-
tion in social studies were introduced in 1927. At first the Bolsheviks trusted the
intellectuals and sought their help, but the seeds of a dogmatic standardisation of education
and human science were sown by Lenin's 1922 essay 'On the Meaning of Militant
Materialism', which encouraged progressive ideologisation and devaluation of philosophy
and the social sciences.
Valsiner describes the young cadres from the working class who pushed Lenin's ideas in
the 1930s as slavophilic, anticosmopolitan, ideological and quasi-philosophical. In Stalin's
state the 'Science of the Fatherland' had to be sovietophilic and nationalistic in opposition
to foreign 'bourgeois' science. Partiinost' (partisan loyalty), defined after 1930, is a Russian
concept that inherits the notion of 'good citizenship' of Catherine II and the traditional
absolute dogmatism of the Orthodox Church. In its name appeals to extrascientific
authority and personal attacks on opponents were made and huge meetings with factional
battles and public self-criticism by the individuals under attack were organised, in order to
defend a Soviet approach to the 'truth' about human consciousness and behaviour and how
they were to be shaped in a classless society. In the process the varied intellectual and
cultural heritage of the USSR was pruned, centralised and bureaucratised. A fortress
mentality, enhanced by terrible losses during the war and continued through the Cold War,
did not relax until the 1970s.
In the 1920s Pavel Blonsky had advocated a developmental and comparative approach,
sought practical improvements in education, and helped develop scientific studies of
education called paedology. He worked on curriculum development and made studies of
children's cognition similar to, and contemporary with, those of Piaget. But, about 1932,
paedology was attacked as 'perverse', too empirical and pseudoscientific and was soon
terminated. Testing and placement of children was considered a device to preserve a ruling
class and standardised tests were eliminated from Soviet education in 1936 on the argument
that they do not inform about the process of learning, which must be studied in the course of
instruction, i.e. as the interaction of teaching and learning. In 1923 Kornilov took over the
Moscow Psychological Institute. In his 'reactology' Marxist ideas were taken into a non-
developmental behaviouristic framework-'conditions of social life' are both the stimuli for
physical reflexes and active by their 'qualitative ideological content'. But Vygotsky, Lur'ya
and others working under Kornilov did not emphasise Marx, and their theories followed
Blonsky.
In the ensuing 'fight for dialectics' Bekhterev and Kornilov were criticised for their
'mechanistic materialism'. Kornilov was deposed in 1931, and among the leaders in
psychology, Blonsky, Vygotsky, Basov and Zalkind were targeted for 'theoretical mistakes'.
Simultaneously, in an attack on 'idealism' in philosophy, Deborin was deposed by Mitin.
Vygotsky and Pavlov were suppressed and then later resurrected, but Basov and Bekhterev,
estimated by Valsiner to be of equal stature, never recovered.
Valsiner's book makes an important contribution to a richer assessment of Lev Vygotsky,
the origins of whose ideas are generally not realised in the West. In 1924 Vygotsky was
invited to Lur'ya's department in Kornilov's Institute in Moscow, to help built the new
Marxist psychology. He quickly emerged as a leader, circumstances being propitious for the
rapid and voluminous development of his thinking and experimentation, much of which
remained incomplete at his death as a young man only 10 years later. He was a brilliant
scholar, knew European and American work thoroughly, and rooted his constructivist ideas

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 REVIEWS 185

in Gestalt psychology. He knew the works of Binet, Baldwin, Groos and Claparede, as w
as Piaget's Language and Thought of the Child, published in 1926. Vygotsky's fam
'double stimulation' method of testing children's thought was derived from K6hle
problem-solving tasks and is close to Piaget's 'clinical method' and the techniques
Mikhail Basov's group in Leningrad. His theories owe much to the German philosop
Dilthey, as well as to the developmental perspective of Blonsky and the evolutio
background from Vagner. Vygotsky, like Baldwin before him in the US, put developmen
the centre of psychological explanation and criticised over-emphasis on the experim
method and Baconian quantitative measurement. His major contribution concerns h
thinking becomes internalised from communication and he defined the psycholog
factors of instruction in mental development. His concept of the 'zone of proxima
development' clarifies the 'teacher-learner union' called obuchenie in Russian.
While recognising fully the stature of Vygotsky, Valsiner seeks to promote the w
largely unknown in the West, of Mikhail Basov, who linked analysis of behaviour a
holistic approach to personality. In 1920 Basov was in Bekhterev's Brain Research Instit
in Leningrad. He, like Vygotsky, saw the need to integrate behavioural and cognitive/af
tive aspects of psychology. He studied children in natural settings, made meticulo
observations and a thorough theoretical analysis, and described perception and free-pla
pre-school children and behaviour in kindergarten groups. He stressed the importan
such research to educational practice. In 1924 he was one of the founders of the Sta
Institute of Scientific Paedogogics. He made a study of children's 'world views' and he wrot
a General Foundations of Paedology. He, too, was criticised in 1931 as a 'menshevist
'formalist' who would not look at psychology from the 'class position'.
Like Vygotsky, Basov incorporated ideas of K6hler, Claparede and Piaget in a search for a
social utopian ideology and attempted to elucidate the relation of units in psychology to the
whole, trying to identify the 'real' elements of personality-within-the environment in what is
now called a 'transactional' theory. Hence he, again like Vygotsky, pointed out the
limitations of an observational methodology which cannot know the conditions of the past.
For Basov, consciousness is the regulator of the integration of internal and external
stimulations, making possible goal-directed and abstract-idea-based action. His 'dynamic
structuralism' is close to Piaget's 'equilibration'. Basov's diagrams of various associative
networks, chains and constellations are reproduced by Valsiner. Among Basov's important
colleagues are Zeileger and Levina.
Rubinshtein, a philosophically sophisticated and erudite psychologist who survived into
the late 1930s and the 1940s, explored the interaction of social and personal ideology and
psychology, in the development of consciousness, continuing the line developed by
Vygotsky and Lur'ya. His theory resembles that of Heinz Werner and he tried to build a
General Psychology. The close of the war brought contacts with foreigners, but isolation of
Soviet culture started again with the Cold War. Rubinshtein, a Jew and an internationalist,
lost out in this change about 1948. In the process of 'social purification' Leontiev was also
attacked for being 'too close to the West'. The 1950s were dominated by Pavlov, in
physiology and psychology, Lysenko in genetics, and the self-proclaimed linguist, Stalin.
Valsiner gives a sketchy overview of research on the development of perception, but
reports some interesting recent work. Aleksandr Fonarev has examined infants' visual
orienting reactions, and A. A. Mit'kin has measured infants' oculographic responses to
stationary and moving stimuli and their visual-vestibular interactions. Action and percep-
tion are linked in Soviet research, which closely parallels the work of Piaget, investigating
the conditions for the development of action on objects and the emergence through action
of the child's reflection (metacognition). However, the Soviet work, taking Vygotsky's
cultural-historical perspective, places great emphasis on communication and the act of

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186 REVIEWS

speaking. A group that Vygotsky had led in Moscow, including Leontiev, Lur'ya, Zap
zhets and Bozhovich, moved to Khar'kov in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. Studies,
on A. N. Leontiev's 'activity theory', of the formation of a child's cognitive processes
the help adults give to bring the child from a visual-figurative to a verbal-logical think
continued in the hands of Ukrainian psychologists Asnin, Lukov, Zinchenko and Gal'pe
Contemporary workers in the tradition of Leontiev and Vygotsky include Davydo
El'konin, Poddyakov and Tulviste.
In the laboratory of Maiya Lisina, at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psycho
in Moscow, remarkable studies have been carried out on social interactions with infant
toddlers and pre-school children. This group has observed interaction with institut
reared infants, which Valsiner compares to the work of John Bowlby. Lisina distingui
communication from other activity and her work attempts to explain the infant's 'ne
interaction', which develops into the infant/toddler's 'need for cooperation' in hand
objects. Lisina's students have made empirical studies of the infant's discriminatio
persons and objects in interaction, using analysis in terms of a construct called 'compl
animation'.
The work of Soviet developmental psychologists also includes fluent writing and
empirical studies on moral development. They draw attention to the purposeful formation
of children's moral reasoning and motivations. A personality theory based on Vygotsky and
the Khar'kov school has been developed by Lidiya Bozhovich. A massive body of research
into children's social consciousness, religious ideas, effects of family, collectives and
institutional practices, and social group organisation was carried out in the 1920s and
1930s, mainly led by Basov and a Ukrainian, A. S. Zaluzhnyi. Contemporary studies
continue this tradition.
The new Soviet state, uniting widely different racial and cultural groups, created the
problem of natsmen-non-Russian national minorities. Paedological expeditions were
organised to observe child upbringing in remote regions, two initiated by Vygotsky to the
nomadic Tungus of Northern Baikal and to the Oirots and Telengits of the Altai mountains
in Southern Siberia. Zaporozhets' research showed the limitations of Western psychometric
methods in such comparative studies and the findings were interpreted in line with the ideas
of Vygotsky and Lur'ya on the cultural-historical factors in formation of children's thinking
and their 'life world'. Other expeditions organised by Lur'ya went to Central Asia to
measure cultural change, but he did not published the results until decades later.
Valsiner's book is a remarkable work of scholarship and the bibiliographic research is
truly monumental-nearly 1000 references, most to papers and books in Russian, are
presented with English translations of their titles. He defends the thesis that psychological
theory is necessarily part of social and political history, embedded in the place it developed.
For him scientific ideas are always a development, and developmental psychology has a
crucial role in every political revolution, because it provides the theory for educational
policy, available for use or abuse in support of any practice. The flowering of Soviet child
psychology in the 1920s and 1930s still has a vital influence in the literate world. Indeed the
ideas of Vygotsky are having a renewed impact, and doubtless this will only increase with
glasnost' and the democratisation of Eastern Europe, as scholars and professionals trained
in his ideas gain more contact with their Western counterparts.
There is, Valsiner emphasises, a crucial difference in philosophy between Russia and the
West, with effects on research in psychology and development. Classical Aristotelian,
causal, two-valent logic (in which everything is either 'true' or 'false') imposes logical
constraints on the understanding of developmental processes. In contrast, a dialectical logic
of tensions and relationships gives a natural understanding of the essentially one-way
unfolding recognised by James Mark Baldwin, who emphasises that we have to study

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 REVIEWS 187

development
development in in
time.
time.
Dialectics,
Dialectics,
imported
imported
into Soviet
intopsychology
Soviet psychology
from Hegel,from
EngelsHegel,
and En
Marx,
Marx,made
made thethe
study
study
of psychological
of psychological
development
development
easier. Buteasier.
it also But
provided
it also
a way,
provided
by a w
over-use
over-useofofdialectical
dialectical
principles,
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to justify
to justify
the termination
the termination
of the scientific
of the
and
scientific
educationaland edu
efforts
effortsofofpsychologists
psychologistsin the
in1930s.
the 1930s.
Attraction
Attraction
to abstract
to concepts,
abstractso concepts,
characteristic
so characteri
of
Soviet
Sovietscholars,
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risk.risk.
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is a powerful
is a powerful
urge to theorise
urge tointheorise
Russian scholarship,
in Russian schola
especially
especially inin
thethe
human
humanand social
and social
sciences,
sciences,
whereaswhereas
the American
the American
influence has
influence
been has
heavily
heavilyinin favour
favourof improved
of improved
methodsmethods
and greater
and greater
accuracy ofaccuracy
measurement,
of measurement,
at the
expense
expenseofof theoretical
theoreticalbreadth
breadth
and cohesion.
and cohesion.
The bestThe
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bestwork
Russian
is admirably
work isdescrip-
admirably
tive
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pursuitof of
evidence
evidence
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onvalidity
the validity
of largeof
theoretical
large theoretical
schemes. schemes.
Though
Thoughhehe writes
writes
well,
well,
withwith
admirable
admirable
conviction
conviction
and clarity,
andValsiner's
clarity,insistent
Valsiner's insis
generalisations
generalisations about
about
sociological
sociological
factors,
factors,
historical
historical
processes processes
and the philosophical
and the philosophic
con-
straints
straintsonon scientific
scientific
thinking
thinking
becomebecome
somewhatsomewhat
tedious with
tedious
repetition,
with repetition,
and the parade and
of the pa
unfamiliar,
unfamiliar, difficult
difficult
names
names
does not
doeshelp.
notHe help.
cautions
He cautions
that the West
thatshould
the West
guardshould
against guard
smugness
smugness when
when reading
reading
the grim
the grim
historyhistory
of Stalinist
of Stalinist
repressions,
repressions,
and recogniseandthat
recognise
politics, that
even
evenwhen
when it it
appears
appears
democratic
democratic
and 'free',
and always
'free', guides
alwaysandguides
limits and
thought
limits
on how
thought
youngon how
human
humanbeings
beings develop
develop
their
their
consciousness
consciousness
in society.
in society.
Thus, theThus,
most creative
the mosttheorizing
creative or theor
experimental
experimental research
research
can hide
can hide
an ideological
an ideological
motive, motive,
with its blind
withspots
its blind
for some
spots
aspects
for some
of
of the
thecontext
context andand
process
process
of children's
of children's
mental mental
growth. growth.
Valsiner leaves some areas of child psychology as a catalogue of names that lead a curious
reader only to obscure bibliographical references. This neglect clearly reflects the author's
specialisation in social psychology. He is little interested in psychophysics and experimental
psychology in general. Sparse reference is made to original Russian work on development of
perception and motor coordination. The voluminous work of the physiologist and engineer-
ing genius Nicholas Bernstein, of supreme importance in the current work on perception
and action at all stages of child development, has five words and two references. There is
nothing on the developmental neuropsychology of Aleksandr Lur'ya and others. The index
is inadequate; it does not list any names or places, but merely tabulates topics and concepts.
The cover, in red, shows a bizarre and inscrutable image of a tadpole-like woman/fish
chimera floating in apparent horror over a stormy cityscape with classical and gothic
buildings. However, these are only disappointing blemishes in a book of great merit and
potential usefulness.

University of Edinburgh COLWYN TREVARTHEN

Archie Brown, ed., Political Leadership in the Soviet Union, London: Macmillan, 1989,
xi+245 pp., ?35.00 h/b, ?14.99 p/b.

ANY BOOK with this title is bound to be of interest to a wide range of readers. A book that also
includes heavily documented chapters by T. H. Rigby, John Miller, Robert Daniels, Marie
Mendras and Archie Brown is bound to be useful to students, teachers and researchers of
Soviet politics alike. Such is the case with this volume. However, with such a collection of
expertise and brain-power, one would also have expected a volume that is more than the
sum of its parts and adds significantly to our store of knowledge and understanding.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. The volume is a collection of research essays on
complementary topics. It is not an integrated research project that tells us more than we
largely knew as a result of previous published work by these outstanding specialists. Had it
been conceived as such a project, the volume would also have taken a more ambitious
approach to discussion of the concept of 'leadership', and to relating Soviet practice to some
of the vast literature on varied dimensions of leadership in comparative perspective

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