The Child

Proctor, Hannah

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_4

Hannah Proctor⁴

Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective ((MHHP))

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Abstract

As an icon of the future, the child was central to Soviet ideology. A new person with no experience of the pre-revolutionary world, yet one still dependent on education from adults, the question of how to create a properly revolutionary childhood was a paradox faced by Soviet psychologists and educators alike. Between 1923 and 1936 Luria engaged in a range of experiments with children, which are the focus of this chapter. These include experiments relating to the development of language and perception, experiments with twins and comparative experiments with children from different social backgrounds conducted at the Academy of Communist Upbringing in Moscow.

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Notes

1.
D.W. Winnicott to Luria, July 7, 1960, London, Wellcome Collection (WC), D.W. Winnicott Papers, PP/DWW/B/B/8, Letters 1938–1968. This is the only letter to Luria in the Winnicott archive suggesting that Luria did not respond to his request.
2.
Winnicott went on to write two essays in which the Berlin wall figured as a metaphor for psychic life: D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Value of Depression’ (1963) and ‘Berlin Walls’ (1969), in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. by Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1986), pp. 71–79 and pp. 221–227.
3.
Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983), pp. 7–8.
4.
Evgenia D. Homskaya, Alexander Romanovich Luria: A Scientific Biography, trans. by Daria Krotova (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 2001), pp. 127–161. An international bibliographical overview on Vygotsky demonstrates this tendency in the secondary literature: Mohamed Elhammouni, Socio-Historicocultural Psychology: Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896–1934), Bibliographical Notes (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997). For an example of the application of Vygotsky’s work aimed at practicing educators, see Robert Lake, Vygotsky on Education: A Primer (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2012). A critical appraisal of the influence of Vygotsky on Western Developmental Psychology is given in Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Hove: Routledge, 2008), pp. 241–260. This chapter does not engage with the large international body of work engaging with and extending Vygotsky’s and Luria’s research in the field of child psychology by practicing psychologists and educators published from the 1950s onwards, nor does it attempt to give an account of the concepts that became most famously associated with their ‘cultural-historical psychology’, for example, the ‘zone of proximal development’.
5.
Although Luria and Vygotsky analysed young people at various stages of development, from birth to adolescence, my focus in this chapter will primarily be on children under seven, typically referred to as ‘preschoolers’ [doshkolniki] in the literature.
6.
Luria also engaged with the discipline of ‘Defectology’ [defektologiia], a discipline dedicated to studying and caring for disabled children. A discussion of his publications and research in this field is beyond the scope of this book. Luria worked at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences between 1953 and 1959. See Umstvenno otsalyi rebenok: Ocherki izucheniya osobennostei vysshei nervnoi deytel’nosti detei-oligofrenov (Moscow: Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR, 1960) translated as A.R. Luria ed., The Mentally Retarded Child: Essays based on a Study of the Higher Nervous Functioning of Child-Oligophrenics, trans. by W.P. Robinson (London: Pergamon Press, 1963). On defectology after the 1936 decree banning pedology, see Andy Byford, ‘The Imperfect Child in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, History of Education, 46, 5 (2017), 595–617. For an insight into Luria’s continued engagement with educational institutions, see the British educationalist Brian Simon’s accounts of a trip to the USSR in 1961. Luria acted as Simon’s host coordinating a trip to psychological and educational institutes in Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi. See London, Institute of Education (IOE), Brian Simon Archive, Book 5 1957–1963, DC/SIM/1/72.
7.
See T.V. Akhutina, ‘A.R. Luriia: zhiznennyi put’ [A.R. Luria: The Way of Life], Kul’turno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia, 2 (2012), 2–10, p. 3 and Anton Yasnitsky, Vygotsky: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 2018), epub, pp. 240.3–244.6.
8.
See K.E. Levitin, ‘A Criminal Investigation’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 36, 5 (1998), 46–75, pp. 74–75.
9.
A.A. Leontiev, ‘The Life and Creative Path of A.N. Leontiev’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 43, 3 (2005), 8–69, p. 31.
10.
Alexei Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1984), p. 22. For accounts of the history of pedology in the Soviet Union, see E. Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii v pervoi tret’i XX veka [Pedology in Russia in the First Third of the 20th Century] (St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2012), Raymond Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 116–127, Making Education Soviet, 1917–1953, ed. by Andy Byford and Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2006), Alexander Etkind, ‘Pedological Perversions’ in Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. by Noah and Maria Rubins (Boulder, CO: West View Press, 1997), pp. 259–285, David Joravsky, Russian Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 345–354, Elena Minkova, ‘Pedology as a Complex Science Devoted to the Study of Children in Russia: The History of its Origin and Elimination’, Psychological Thought, 5, 2 (2012), 83–98 and А.V. Petrovskii and M.G. Iaroshevskii, Psikhologiia (Moscow: Akademia, 2002), pp. 146–147. For a useful anthology of primary texts in translation, see F.A. Fradkin ed., A Search in Pedagogics, trans. by Peter Emerson (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990). An early bibliographical overview is provided in N. Rybnikov, Russkaia Pedologicheskaia Literatura (Orel: Krasnaia Kniga, 1925).
11.
From Speeches at the First Pedological Conference (1928), cited in Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, p. 265.
12.
M. Gel’mont, ‘Pedologo-Pedagogichekoe Izuchenie Kollektivizirovannogo truda i byta’ [Pedological and Pedagogical Research in the Field of Collective Work and Everyday Life], Pedologiia, 1, 13 (1931), 17–23 (citation a modification of the summary on p. 71). Aron Zalkind gives a characteristically forceful programmatic outline of pedology in Pedologiia v SSSR [Pedology in the USSR] (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1929).
13.
On the impact of pedology on Soviet schools, see Larry E. Holmes, Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School no. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), pp. 137–141.
14.
See ‘On Pedological Distortions in the Commissariats of Education. A Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union July 4, 1936’, Joseph Wortis, Soviet Psychiatry (Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins, 1950), 242–245. For the original, see: ‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v sisteme narkomprosov (4 iiulia 1936 goda)’ in KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s”ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, vol. 6 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1985), pp. 364–367. See also: N. Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki [The History of the Liquidation of Pedology and Psychotechnics] (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2004).
15.
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge Falmer, 2001), p. 163.
16.
William Clark Trow, Character Education in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Press, 1934), p. 28.
17.
On the impact of Soviet legislation and Communist Party rhetoric on women, see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) and Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
18.
Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 180. On paternalistic propaganda aimed at mothers, see David Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 88–117.
19.
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 111–112.
20.
Benjamin , Moscow Diary, ed. by Gary Smith and trans. by Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 53.
21.
Benjamin, Moscow Diary, p. 45.
22.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play’ (1928) in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. by Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), pp. 117–121, p. 118. On the paradigm of development and the figure of the ‘normal’ child, see André Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization, and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
23.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’ in Vygotsky and Luria in Studies on the History of Behaviour: Ape, Primitive and Child, ed. and trans. by Victor I. Golod and Jane E. Know (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), pp. 140–231, p. 145. According to the book’s introduction ‘The Child and Its Behavior’ was written solely by Luria. See ‘Translator’s Introduction’, pp. 1–35, p. 24. For the original, see A.R. Luriia, and Lev Vygotskii, Etiudi po Istorii Povedeniia: Obez’iana, Primitiv, Pebionok [Studies in the History of Behaviour: Ape, Primitive and Child] (Moscow: Gosudastvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1930). On Luria’s sole authorship of the chapter and Vygotsky’s later remarks about the contradictions, it revealed in their distinction between biological and social development, see T.V. Akhutina, ‘L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria: Foundations of Neuropsychology’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 41, 3–4 (2003), 159–190, pp. 163–164.
24.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 145.
25.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 144.
26.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology and Child Development’ in Selected Writings of A.R. Luria, pp. 78–96. First published in Nachnoe Slavoe, 1 (1930), 77–97.
27.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 150.
28.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 155. Although later he notes that his colleagues repeated many of Piaget’s experiments and came to the same conclusions, p. 167. In ‘Paths of Development of Thought in the Child’ (1929) he presents accounts of Piaget’s experiments alongside his own.
29.
Luria, ‘Paths of Development of Thought in the Child’ in Selected Writings of Alexander Luria, ed. by Michael Cole (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), pp. 97–144, p. 99. First Published in Russian in Estestvoznanie i Marksizm, 2 (1929), 97–130.
30.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 124.
31.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 98
32.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology’, p. 83, p. 86.
33.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology’, p. 81.
34.
Lev Vygotsky, ‘K voprosu o pedologii i smezhnykh s neiu naukakh’ [On the Question of Pedology and Adjacent Disciplines], Pedologiia, 4, 3 (1931), 53–58, p. 58.
35.
Vygotsky, ‘K Voprosu…’, p. 58.
36.
Lev Vygotsky, ‘Pedology of the Adolescent’, The Collected Works of Lev Vygotsky, Vol. 5, Child Psychology, trans. by Marie J. Hall (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1998), pp. 3–186, p. 14.
37.
See Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’ (1932–1934) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 5, trans. by Marie J. Hall, ed. by Robert W Riener (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1998), pp. 187–205, p. 196. The Communist Party was also structured into successive age groups: Young Octoberists (8–10), Pioneers (10–14), Komsomol (14–28). After passing through these stages a person could finally become a Communist proper. See Stanislav A. Pedan, Partiia i Komsomol, 1918–1945 [Party and Komsomol] (Leningrad, 1979).
38.
Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’, p. 188.
39.
Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’, p. 188.
40.
Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’, p. 191.
41.
Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 85.
42.
Marx described ancient Greece as the childhood of humanity: ‘Does not in every epoch the child represent the character of the period in its natural veracity? Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that will never recur?’ Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 217. Luria does explicitly link children’s thought processes to earlier stages of civilisation: ‘Parallels taken from the history of thought only confirm that the ability to abstract from a concrete initial point … is a product of a later period. An enormous amount of time was necessary before thinkers could abstract from the concrete empirical postulates of Euclid.’ ‘Paths…’, p. 113.
43.
Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’, p. 191.
44.
Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’, p. 193. On the unevenness of development, see also Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 95. Luria similarly notes that the child’s ‘cultural development is often uneven, and experiments indicate that traces of primitive thinking often show up even in quite developed children’, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 95.
45.
Piaget’s key works from this period are: Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926), The Child’s Conception of the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1928) and The Moral Judgment of the Child (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1932). A discussion of the ways in which Vygotsky’s theories were posthumously mobilised against Piaget’s model by American and British psychologists in the post-war years is beyond the scope of this book. Piaget and Luria corresponded and were on friendly terms and in his works from the 1920s Luria tended to cite Piaget uncritically. In some comments on Vygotsky, Piaget refers to Luria as a friend and outlines some of the divergences between his theories and those of his Soviet contemporaries. See Jean Piaget, Comments on Vygotsky’s Critical Remarks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962).
46.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 212.
47.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 145.
48.
A.R. Luria, ‘The Problem of the Cultural Behaviour of the Child’, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35 (1928), 493–506.
49.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 99.
50.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 99.
51.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 148.
52.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 149.
53.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 149.
54.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behaviour’, p. 151.
55.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. by Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 101.
56.
Rancière, p. 138.
57.
Aron Zalkind, ‘The Pioneer Youth Movement as a form of Cultural Work among the Proletariat’ in Bolshevik Visions: The First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, ed. by William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), pp. 347–354, p. 351. First published in Russian in Vestnik truda, 3, 40 (1924), 107–116.
58.
Luria, ‘The Development of Mental Functions in Twins’, Character and Personality, 5, 1 (1936), 35–47, p. 36. See also, Luria, ‘The Variability of Mental Functions as the Child Develops (Based on a Comparative Study of Twins), Soviet Developmental Psychology, p. 65. First published as: ‘Ob izmenchivosti psikhicheskikh funkstii v protsesse razvitiia rebenka’, Voprosy psikhologii, 3 (1962), 15–22. This piece discusses research N.G. Morozova conducted with twins in the 1930s. In a letter to Michael Cole Luria indicated her findings remained unpublished: ‘As to your question concerning my early work on twins I asked N.G. Morozova (who is now 70!!) and she assured me that nothing of her work of these years was published. She will try to find the original ms., and if she will succeed, I shall send it to you.’ A.R. Luria to Michal Cole, October 16, 1976, Michael Cole Personal Archives.
59.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Tool and Symbol in Child Development’ in The Vygotsky Reader, René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner eds. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 99–174, p. 116. Although Vygotsky lists this essay in the bibliography of Myslenie i rech (Thinking and Speech) in 1934, this text was not published in Russian until 1984. On the text’s history see Vygotsky Reader, p. 170. An exhaustive comparison of the English and Russian versions is provided in D. Kellogg and A. Yasnitsky, ‘The Differences between the Russian and English Texts of Tool and Symbol in Child Development—Supplementary and Analytic Materials’, PsyAnima, Dubna Psychological Journal, 4, 4 (2011), 98–158.
60.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Tool…’, p. 113. Critiques of Vygotsky published in the 1930s emphasised that he did not think adult guidance was a pedagogical prerequisite, claimed he was too quick to dispenses with rules, reprimands and examinations, and drew attention to passages that argued for an ‘anti-Leninist’ abolition of the school as an institution.
61.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Tool…’, p. 122.
62.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Tool…’, p. 125.
63.
Vygotsky and Luria, ‘Tool…’, p. 112. Here they are comparing the child to the aphasic person who, they argue, is similarly incapable of coherently uniting their perceptions.
64.
Vygotsky, ‘Play’, pp. 95–96.
65.
Vygotsky, ‘Play’, p. 98.
66.
Vygotsky, ‘Infancy’, The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 5, pp. 207–241, p. 215.
67.
Vygotsky, ‘Infancy’, p. 216.
68.
René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 53
69.
Akhutina, ‘L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria: Foundations of Neuropsychology’, pp. 163–164.
70.
Vygotsky and Luria, Ape, Primitive and Child, p. 40. In the English translation this is included as an epigraph to the opening chapter, whereas in the Russian it is given a separate page at the beginning of the whole book. See L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, Etiudi po Istorii Povedeniia: Obez’iana, Primitiv, Pebionok (Moscow: Gosudastvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1930), p. 7.
71.
Luria, ‘Voobrazhenie’ [Imagination], Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, tom 13, ed. by Otto Schmidt (Moscow: Aktsioneroe Obshchestvo Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1929), pp. 120–121.
72.
Luria, ‘Voobrazhenie’ [Imagination], p. 121.
73.
Luria, ‘Voobrazhenie’ [Imagination], p. 121.
74.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 127.
75.
Benjamin , ‘Russian Toys’, p. 123. Benjamin also discusses the industrialisation of toy manufacture in ‘The Cultural History of Toys’ (1928), Selected Writings, Vol. 2, pp. 113–116.
76.
See Ella Winter, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace and Co, 1933), p. 244. A history of Russian peasant toys published in 1933 ends with a chapter on contemporary toys made in the ‘proletarian style’, which include a crane and a pair of Red Army soldiers: N. Tseretelli, Russkaya Krest’ianskaia Igrushka [Russian Peasant Toys] (Moscow: Akademia, 1933). For an illustrated overview of the collection of the Zagorsk Museum of Toys, USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, see G.L. Dain, Russkaia Igrushka [Russian Toys] (Moscow: Sovietskaia Rossiia, 1987).
77.
E. Molozhavaia, Siuzhetnaia Igrushka—Tematika i Oformlenie [Toys—Theme and Design] (Moscow and Leningrad: Vsesoyuznoe Kooperativnoe Ob’edlenennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1935). An earlier collection of psychological investigations into children’s relationships with toys overwhelmingly relied on traditional toys: N.A. Rybinkov ed., Rebionok i igrushka [Children and Toys] (Moscow: 192–).
78.
Homskaya, p. 28.
79.
Luria, ‘The Development of Mental Functions in Twins’, Character and Personality, 5, 1 (1936), 35–47, p. 35.
80.
A.R. Luria and A.N. Mirenova, Eksperimentalnoie rasvitiye konstrukivnoi deiatelnosti [The Experimental Development of Constructive Activity] (Moscow: Mediko-Geneticheskogo Institut, 1936), pp. 487–505.
81.
Luria, ‘The Development of Constructive Activity in the Preschool Child’ (first published in 1948 but based on the experiments with twins undertaken with Mirenova in the 1930s) in The Selected Writings of Alexander Luria, pp. 201–202. First published in Voprosy psikhologii renenka doshkol’novo vozrata [Problems in the Psychology of the Preschool Child] (Moscow and Leningrad: APN RSFSR, 1948), pp. 34–64.
82.
Luria, ‘Development of Constructive Activity…’, p. 199.
83.
Luria, ‘Development of Constructive Activity…’, p. 201.
84.
Luria, ‘Development of Constructive Activity…’, pp. 207–208.
85.
Luria, ‘Development of Constructive Activity…’, p. 222.
86.
Luria and F.Ia. Yudovich, Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child, ed. and trans. by Joan Simon (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 90. The first English edition was published in 1959 based on the Russian publication from 1956: Rech’ i razvitie psikhicheskikh protsessov u rebenka (Moscow: APN RSFSR, 1956). The book’s translator Joan Simon noted in a letter to the scientist Oliver Zangwill in 1975 that interest in the book had grown over time: ‘In fact it has an interesting history—how it was ignored at first but demand has gradually spread’. Joan Simon to Oliver Zangwill, May 8, 1975, Brian Simon Archive, Institute of Education (IOE), DC/SIM/2/5.
87.
Luria and Yudovich, Speech…, p. 91.
88.
The Moscow Metro was one of the major emblems of Stalinist modernity. It opened in 1935. Illustrated children’s books celebrating the new construction indicate the extent to which knowledge of such projects were addressed to children. See Elizabeta Tarakhovskaia, Metropoliten (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1933) and Gotov! Rasskaz i stikhi o Metro [Ready! Stories and Poems about the Metro] (Moscow: Detizdat, 1935).
89.
For a typical example, see Luria, Speech…, p. 87.
90.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
91.
Luria, Speech…, pp. 96–97.
92.
Luria, Speech…, p. 40.
93.
Luria, Speech…, p. 100.
94.
Cited in Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 74.
95.
Dorothy Thompson, The New Russia (New York, NY: H. Holt and Co., 1928), p. 233.
96.
For a discussion of the Soviet avant-garde’s work for children, see Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of early Soviet Children’s Books (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1999) and Alla Rosenfeld, ‘Does the Proletarian Child Need a Fairytale?’ Cabinet, 9 (2002–2003). For examples of Soviet children’s book illustrations, see Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920–1935, ed. by Julian Rothenstein et al. (London: Redstone Press, 2013).
97.
Chukovsky’s story ‘Crocodile’ was denounced by Nadezhda Krupskaya in Pravda as a ‘bourgeois muddle’ on 1 February 1928. On 17 January 1928, Chukovsky wrote in his diary that ‘anthropomorphism’ was considered the greatest crime of Soviet children’s literature and that he hoped to write a defence of the fairy tale. See, Kornei Chukovsky, Diary, 1901–1969, trans. by Michael Henry Heim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 217.
98.
For an overview of the early debates in Soviet children’s literature, see Marina Balina, ‘Creativity Through Restraint: The Beginnings of Soviet Children’s Literature’ in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), pp. 3–17.
99.
Kornei Chukovsky, From Two to Five, trans. and ed. by Miriam Morton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 4. This English translation is a heavily edited version of a later edition. The discussions of pedology are not included in the Russian first edition when Chukovsky himself was under attack. See Malen’kie Deti [Little Children] (Leningrad: Krashaia Gazeta, 1928).
100.
Chukovsky, From Two to Five, pp. 89–90.
101.
Chukovsky, From Two to Five, pp. 17–18.
102.
Chukovsky, From Two to Five, p. 95, p. 96.
103.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 85.
104.
Chukovsky’s assumption is further challenged by R.G. Vilenkina’s pedological experiments. She asked adolescent workers and apprentices to deposit anonymous notes in a designated box. One asks—‘Do people live on Mars?’ suggesting that Soviet fantasies were indeed mistaken for reality by some contemporary citizens. See R.G. Vilenkina, ‘K kharakteristike nasroenii rabochego podrostka’ [On the Characteristic Mental Features of the Adolescent Worker], Pedologiia, 1 (1930), 81–97, p. 88.
105.
Chukovsky, p. 112.
106.
Chukovsky, p. 125.
107.
Chukovsky, pp. 124–125.
108.
A similar observation about the similarities between Chukovsky’s approach and the approach of pedologists he aims to distinguish himself from is made in Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 2–3.
109.
Sections from Luria’s notebooks describing his daughter’s development are included in Elena Luria, Moi Otets, pp. 92–99.
110.
Elena Luria, Moi Otets, p. 96.
111.
Esther Leslie, ‘Opinions et Penseés: His Son’s Words and Turns of Phrase’ in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 109–112. For sections of the notebook, see pp. 116–150.
112.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 133.
113.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 124.
114.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 137.
115.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 142.
116.
Luria, ‘Paths…’, p. 98.
117.
Luria ‘The Problem of the Cultural Behaviour of the Child’, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35 (1928), 493–506, p. 504.
118.
Benjamin, ‘Old Forgotten Children’s Books’, pp. 406–413, p. 407.
119.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), p. 4.
120.
Rose, Peter Pan, p. 138.
121.
Rose, Peter Pan, p. 8.
122.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile or on Education, trans. by Allan Bloom (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1979), p. 47.
123.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology…’, p. 95.
124.
Luria, ‘The Development of Writing in the Child’, Selected Writings, pp. 145–194. First published in Voprosy marksistkoi pedagogikii [Problems of Marxist Pedagogy] (Moscow: Academy of Communist Upbringing, 1929), pp. 143–176.
125.
Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Middlesex: Penguin, 1970), p. 1.
126.
See Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 149–150.
127.
Maxim Gorky, My Childhood, trans. by Ronald Wilks (Penguin: London, 1966), p. 25.
128.
See Baruch Wachtel, pp. 131–152.
129.
Riley, p. 27, p. 33.
130.
Riley, p. 26.
131.
See, for example, Semunova and Bolunova, ‘Rech’ sovremennogo russkogo prolearskogo i krest’ianskogo rebionka doshkol’nogo vozrata’ [Speech of the Contemporary Russian Proletarian and Peasant Child at Preschool Age], Pedologiia, 2 (1928), 47–60, Syrkin, ‘Materialy k voprosu o fizicheskom razvitii proletarskogo i krest’ianskogo rebenka’ [Materials on the Question of the Physical Differences between Proletarian and Peasant Children], Pedologiia, 1–2 (1929), 133–138, Vilenkina, ‘Sravnitel’nyi analiz social’no bytovyh uslovii moskovskih detei raznyh social’nykh grupp’ [‘A Comparative Analysis of the Social and Living Conditions of Moscow Children of Different Social Groups], Pedologiia, 1–2 (1929), 157–166, E. Netchaeva, ‘Vilyanie sredy na trudovuyu napravlyennost’ podrostkov’ [The Influence of the Surroundings upon the Industrial Capacity of Adolescents], Pedologiia, 1 (1930), 43–53.
132.
M.P. Feofanov, ‘The Theory of Cultural Development in Pedology as an Eclectic Conception with Basically Idealistic Roots’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 38, 6 (2000), 12–30, pp. 15–16. Originally published as ‘Teoriia kul’turnogo razviita v pedologii kak elektricheskaia konseptsiia, imeiushchaia vosnovnom idealisticheskie korni’, Pedologiia, 1–2 (1932), 221–234.
133.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech Responses and the Social Environment’ in Soviet Developmental Psychology, ed. by Michael Cole (New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1977), pp. 32–64, p. 35, p. 60. Excerpted from the edited collection Speech and Intellect among Rural, Urban and Homeless Children [Rech’ i intellekt derevenskogo, gorodskogo i besprizornogo rebenka] (Moscow: Gosizdat RSFSR, 1930).
134.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 32.
135.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 64.
136.
Dominick LaCapra, ‘History and Psychoanalysis’, Critical Inquiry, 13, 2 (1987), 222–251, p. 242.
137.
LaCapra, p. 222.
138.
Nadezhda Krupskaya gave this figure in 1923 and the same figure was repeated in the 1927 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. See Margaret K. Stolee, ‘Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917–1957’, Soviet Studies, 40, 1 (1988), 64–83, p. 69.
139.
A. Zalkind and M. Epshtein, ‘Besprizornost’, Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, tom 5 (Moscow: Aktsioneroe Obshchestvo Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1929), p. 786.
140.
On shifting attitudes to abandoned children in the Soviet Union, see Alan Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), Juliane Fürst, ‘Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society’, Slavonic and East European Review, 86, 2 (2008), 231–258 and Marina Goloviznina, ‘Politika sotsial’nogo kontrolia prestupnosti nesovershennoletnikh v SSSR (1917-konets 1980-khgg.)’, Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki, 3, 2 (2005), 223–240.
141.
Ball, And Now…, pp. 193–195.
142.
Vladimir Zenzinov, Deserted: The Story of the Children Abandoned in Soviet Russia (London: H Joseph, 1931), p. 129.
143.
Zalkind, ‘Psikhopaty li besprizonye?’ Vestnik prosveshcheniia, 9 (1924), p. 136 cited in Gorsuch, p. 160.
144.
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986), pp. 153–154.
145.
Pravda, 1925, no. 255 (November 7), p. 2 cited in Ball, And Now…, p. 193.
146.
Ball, And Now…, p. 45.
147.
Konstantin Paustovsky, The Restless Years (London: Harvill, 1974), p. 46.
148.
For a discussion of how metaphors of moulding, forging and building were applied to the besprizorniki , see Marina Balina, ‘It’s Grand to be an Orphan!’: Crafting Happy Citizens in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920’ in Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, ed. by Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (London: Anthem Press, 2009), pp. 99–114.
149.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 35.
150.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 33.
151.
Luria extended his ‘combined motor method’ in experiments with children conducted in the 1950s with S.V. Yakoleva and O.K. Tikhomirov, which asked a child of 2.5 years to squeeze a bulb or cry out in response to a signal. See A.R. Luria, ‘A.R. Luria’ in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 6, ed. by Gardner Lindzey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 253–292, pp. 272–273.
152.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 36.
153.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 49.
154.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 44.
155.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 51.
156.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 54. Urban children’s responses included ‘Workers’, ‘Councils’, ‘USSR’ and ‘Trade unions’, p. 55.
157.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 55.
158.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 54.
159.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 57.
160.
Luria, Speech and Intellect…’, p. 58.
161.
Luria, Speech and Intellect…, p. 60.
162.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 38.
163.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 58.
164.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, pp. 38–39.
165.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 39.
166.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 39.
167.
Luria, ‘A Child’s Speech…’, p. 39.
168.
Luria, ‘Speech and Intellect…’, p. 41. Luria also criticises psychometric tests in ‘Variability in Mental Development’, pp. 73–74. On the issue of testing more broadly, see Andy Byford, ‘The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science’, History of the Human Sciences, 27, 4 (2014), 22–58.
169.
Luria, ‘Speech and Intellect…’, p. 40.
170.
Luria, ‘Speech and Intellect…’, p. 44.
171.
Luria, ‘Speech and Intellect…’, p. 50.
172.
On these internal rules, see Zenzinov, p. 127.
173.
Ball lists some of the terms specific to the dialect of besprizornye, p. 38.
174.
Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, p. 27.
175.
Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, p. 27.
176.
Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, p. 28.
177.
‘O Pedologicheskikh Izvrashcheniiakh v Sisteme Narkomprosov’ [On the Pedological Perversions of the Narkompros System], Pravda, July 5, 1936, p. 1.
178.
A.V. Kozyrev and P.A. Turko, ‘Professor L.S. Vygotsky’s “Pedagogical School”’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 38, 6 (2000), 59–74, p. 69. Originally published as ‘“Pedologicheskaia shokla” Prof L.S. Vygotskogo’, Vysshaia Shkola, 2 (1936), 44–57.
179.
E.I. Rudneva, ‘Vygotsky’s Pedological Distortions’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 38, 6 (2000), 75–94, p. 91. Originally published in Pedologicheskie izvrashcheniia Vygotskogo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1937), pp. 3–32.
180.
A.S. Zaluzhnyi, Lzhenauka pedologiia v ‘trudakh’ Zalkinda (Moscow, 1937), pp. 20–21, cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 229–230. This echoes denunciations of Vygotsky: ‘Vygotsky does not understand the Marxist-Leninist theory of the environment; he disregards the role of man in transforming the environment’, Rudneva, p. 93.
181.
Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, p. 277.
182.
The precise implications of the decree and the status of Vygotsky’s work during the Stalin period are examined in Jennifer Fraser and Anton Yasnitsky, ‘Deconstructing Vygotsky’s Victimization Narrative: A Re-examination of the “Stalinist Suppression” of Vygotskian Theory’, History of the Human Sciences, 28 (2015), 128–153.
183.
In the Preface to the first English edition of Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child in 1958, Luria wrote he had ‘long lost sight of the two twins, Yura and Liosha’, p. 16.
184.
In her wide-ranging discussion of Russian childhood, Catriona Kelly considers 1935 as a watershed year in the history of Soviet childhood. She considers the period from the revolution until 1935 as a discrete epoch characterised by competing but often radical ideas about the child. In addition to the decree on pedology, 1935 and 1936 saw major policy reforms that effected children. Legislative changes included lowering the age of criminal responsibility, cracking down on waifdom [besprizornost’], an upsurge in propaganda aimed at families and policy shifts in schools that placed an increased emphasis on authority and discipline. See Kelly, Children’s World, pp. 61–92.
185.
Anton S. Makarenko, The Road to Life: An Epic in Education (New York, NY: Oriole Editions, 1951), p. 414.
186.
Anna Louise Strong, Children of Revolution: Story of the John Reed Children’s Colony (Seattle, WA: Piggott Press, 1925), p. 98.
187.
Luria, ‘The Child…’, p. 145.
188.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Tool…’, p. 117.
189.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘Tool…’, p. 125.
190.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘The Child…’, p. 164.
191.
Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 389–400, p. 393.
192.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Norr, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 89.

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Proctor, H. (2020). The Child. In: Psychologies in Revolution. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_4

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