Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Vera worked in collaboration with the great, unsung psychoanalytic pioneer Sabina Spielrein, an idealistic intellectual who had been Jung’s client, then his lover, then Freud’s protégée and Piaget’s analyst, before returning to Moscow at the age of thirty-eight, armed with years of experience and learning and new ideas about child development. Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria both worked at the nursery, and it is clear enough from their writings that they were hugely influenced by Spielrein’s research on how children acquire language, though neither man gave her any published credit.27

  The school’s nickname was the children’s idea: to its founders, the White Nursery was known as the Solidarity International Experimental Home, and it was meant to develop a form of early education that could address the needs of the country’s millions of homeless orphans.28 The school, which shared with the Psychoanalytic Institute a magnificent art nouveau mansion on Malaya Nikitskaya Street, was typical of progressive projects at that time: it adopted much of Jean Piaget’s thinking, and was not so different in spirit to A. S. Neill’s experimental school at Summerhill, which opened in England in the same year. But there was an important difference: unlike Piaget, workers at the White Nursery believed that a child relied on the company of others to develop its language and social skills. People were not ‘hard-wired’, but responded to the society in which they grew up. It was up to socialist psychologists and teachers to discover what environment brought forth the healthiest, happiest personalities.

  Spielrein conducted experiments at the school to find alternatives to regimentation and discipline in the teaching of children. Activities included drawing, collage, modelling and educational games. Teachers prepared reports, diagrams and graphs detailing each child’s development. There were no punishments and no excessive displays of affection. Acts earned neither praise nor blame: children were left with their dignity intact. A little girl who enjoyed smearing herself with excrement was calmly washed and changed, again and again, and was eventually given paints to play with. The girl happily switched her interest to paints and brushes. The approach impressed the nursery’s many and distinguished foreign visitors, including the radical Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.

  The nursery was the most celebrated of a whole slew of Bolshevik social experiments, designed to overturn centuries of incarceration, regimentation and punishment, and put in their place rational, scientific and humane forms of social engineering. The principle of ‘no punishment’ was not unique to the nursery. The Education Commissariat recommended that schools do away with all punishments, examinations and homework. The terms ‘guilt’, ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ were removed from the first Soviet criminal code of 1919 because they obscured the social causes of crime.

  These ideas were all very idealistic, very rational, but they proved impossible to implement in a society reeling from revolution, civil war and famine. Two years after opening, the nursery ran out of funds and had to close, the mascot of a social revolution that never happened. As projects of progressive education were abandoned, one by one, even the movement’s patron, Lenin’s wife Nadya Krupskaya, was forced to admit her ‘leftist mistakes’.

  Vera Shmidt put the best face she could on the nursery’s eventual closure in 1925, telling Reich that she herself had shut up shop because ‘the requisite conditions for that type of work were not yet available’. And it is true to say she couldn’t get the properly trained analysts on whom the nursery’s work depended.

  By many measures, the White Nursery was a failure. It never got around to caring for any actual orphans. Instead, it looked after the children of Communist Party bigwigs – including Joseph Stalin’s son Vasily. Intellectually, however, the White Nursery had been a resounding success. It gave researchers such as Luria and Vygotsky vital data in their quest to refashion psychology.

  The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology was written between 1926 and 1927, while Vygotsky was bedridden with an attack of tuberculosis. ‘I have been here a week already,’ he wrote to a colleague from hospital, ‘in large rooms for six severely ill patients. Noise, shouting, no table, and so on. The beds are set next to each other without any space between them, as in a barracks. On top of this I feel physically in agony, morally crushed, and depressed.’29

  Vygotsky, who had spent the Civil War nursing his mother during two separate episodes of tuberculosis, as well as his two brothers (one with tuberculosis and the other with typhoid fever – both died before the end of 1918), suffered constant recurrent bouts of TB throughout his life, requiring operations, painful treatments, and regular periods in overcrowded hospitals and sanatoriums. Even as he and his colleagues compiled their book, doctors were measuring his remaining life in months.

  The Crisis was yet another brave attempt to arrive at a single definition for psychology.

  Psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, the Würzburg school: every school of psychology was battling every other, and to listen to them you would think that each had discovered some universal principle explaining all the phenomena of the mind. It was time to accept that the field was fractured, and would be for some time to come.

  Rather than attempt to break down all these fiercely defended positions, Luria, Vygotsky and their co-author Leontiev went back to basics, wrote up the experimental data they had gathered from Spielrein and Shmidt’s nursery, and then from Vygotsky’s own educational laboratory, and attempted to recast psychology as a set of questions about human development. They turned psychology into a practical programme, bringing what they knew to bear on medicine, education and industry.

  Vygotsky’s own view of the project was modest: ‘What has the new psychology succeeded in yielding? Not much so far … some methodological premises, the outline of a science, its plan … but what is most important: Marxist psychology has an objectively and historically justified will toward the future.’30

  Vygotsky had by now grown rather dismissive of Pavlov. ‘A human being is not a satchel stuffed with reflexes,’ he had written in 1925; ‘neither is it a hotel for reflexes that happen to drop in.’ But he had not reckoned on how appealing this vision was.

  Pavlov’s reflex theory of higher nervous activity had one huge advantage over Vygotsky’s richer, more nuanced psychology: it was a science of prediction. It said that people’s behaviour was controllable. In this, it resembled the Bolshevik grail of one simple self-consistent science much more closely than Vygotsky’s frank admission of muddle.

  As the Pavlovian juggernaut gathered pace in scientific journals and administrative meetings, competing disciplines found their funding cut, their theories attacked, and their institutions either abandoned or simply banned. Psychoanalysis was the first to go. Freudianism, like Marxism, claimed to unify both scientific and literary ideas of self. Freud, however, nursed an essentially tragic idea of human destiny: humans weren’t just the pawns of history; they were the pawns of their own animal natures. Socialist programmes of improvement were pointless. Civilisation as it advanced only increased repression to ever more pathological levels.

  By the mid-1920s, then, Freudianism’s philosophy was being derided, while Freudian practitioners were tolerated as ‘specialists’, using Freudian techniques like spanners to treat the mentally ill. They were not considered important – and in a country with very few psychiatrists or mental hospitals, they probably weren’t. Freudian therapy isn’t much good against extreme pathology.

  In January 1927 Trotsky published his article ‘Culture and Socialism’, in which he made his most enthusiastic appeal for a sympathetic understanding of Freud’s work. To receive such support from the man who at that very moment was being defeated by Stalin in the struggle for control of the leadership of the Communist Party was the kiss of death for Soviet psychoanalysis.31

  In April, opposition in both Party and literature forced Luria to resign as secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society. In 1928, soon after Trotsky’s arrest and expulsion from the country, the society president, Moshe Wulff,
resigned and emigrated. Sabina Spielrein retreated to Rostov-on-Don. In January 1930 Freud’s theories were bitterly attacked by A. B. Zalkind, a psychologist who had once been the Freudians’ most vocal apologist, and the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was disbanded. The last work by Freud to be published in Russian translation appeared in 1930. Pedology itself was banned six years later; industrial psychology and applied psychology fell to the same sweep of the administrative scythe.

  Something horrible was happening to the field, and it was happening so quickly, to so many disciplines, that Alexander Luria, for one, couldn’t quite take it seriously. In 1932 he published a summary of his early Freudian monographs in a book titled The Nature of Human Conflicts, and blithely sent a copy of his summary off to Ivan Pavlov.

  The next day Pavlov blazed into Luria’s office, pulled out the monograph, tore it in half, and tossed it on the floor. Luria was officially prohibited from teaching, researching, or publishing anything to do with psychoanalysis ever again.

  *

  Konstantin Kornilov, in his battle with Chelpanov over control of the Moscow Institute of Psychology, had first mooted the idea of ‘Marxist psychology’. Now the idea came back to bite him. In 1930, at a special meeting, ambitious juniors accused Kornilov of not being loyal to Marxism, and threw him out.

  By then, most of the institute’s significant figures (including Bernstein and Vygotsky) had already left. The three authors of the Crisis headed for the city of Kharkov, looking for work in whatever disciplines still seemed open to them: in child development, medicine … On 26 June 1933 Alexander Luria wrote to Lana Linchina, his wife-to-be:

  I am completing my studies of aphasia patients and trying to convince them that the brother of the father is not the same as the father of the brother … Currently we’re coming across lots of very interesting material: cases of agnosia, agraphia, postnatal psychoses with aphasia … we are drowning in an abundance of the rarest cases. I am thoroughly enjoying medicine: I am spending time with Vygotsky to study pathophysiology, and, of course, thinking about you.32

  In his final years, Vygotsky’s interest in human development broadened to encompass the way society influences and shapes the individual. After all, human beings transmit huge bodies of knowledge across generations not biologically, but culturally. It follows, then, that people’s potential is constrained by the level of sophistication of their culture. This prompted him to look for parallels between a child’s thinking and the reasoning power of so-called primitive societies.

  Luria and Vygotsky planned a study of the ‘intellectual functions’ of adults from ‘a non-technological, non-literate, traditional society’. In some respects the 1930s were a good time to conduct such studies because the state’s impressive literacy campaigns were being extended into the remotest corners of the Soviet Union, where people up till then had had no exposure to formal schooling. Together Luria and Vygotsky settled on Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in Central Asia for their most ambitious studies. Ill-health kept Vygotsky at home, so Luria became his corresponding researcher.

  Changes were coming thick and fast to the tenant cotton farmers of Uzbekistan. Schooling was being introduced, agriculture was being collectivised, and efforts were being made to emancipate women. Luria studied five groups of people: illiterate women unaffected by these changes, illiterate peasants in remote villages not yet gathered into collectives, women who had had some training in teaching nursery-age children, experienced collective farm workers, and literate women who had had a few years’ teacher-training.

  Luria and Vygotsky’s aim was to see how different levels of culture affected the way individuals perceived the world. One of the first experiments the research team carried out involved showing people at different stages of social development some classic visual illusions. Could very basic-seeming perceptual assumptions be affected by one’s upbringing? Indeed they could: Luria was so excited by the preliminary results that he telegraphed Vygotsky to say, ‘The Uzbeks have no illusions!’33

  The assumption behind this project – that cultures can be ranked in a line from ‘primitive’ to ‘sophisticated’ – would never pass today. But Luria’s findings are fascinating and foundational. When ‘non-modern’ subjects were presented with a set of objects, they tended to group them according to practical considerations (‘all these objects are needed for chopping’). Other, to us very obvious, characteristics were completely ignored. Nobody bothered to gather together all the yellow objects. Indeed, for this group, grouping by abstract characteristics like colour seemed ‘stupid’.

  These people made ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them’ and exhibited ‘much worldly intelligence’, but in theoretical thinking they were limited. Told that in the far North, where there is snow, all bears are white, and that Novaya Zemlya is in the far north, they answered the question, ‘What colour are the bears in Novaya Zemlya?’ with comments like ‘I’ve never been in the North and never seen bears,’ or ‘There are different kinds of bears. If one is born red, he will stay that way.’34

  Groups who had had even the slightest training, however, responded very differently. They handled simple logical problems with ease, and they used abstract categories far more frequently than practical ones.

  Luria concluded that ‘basic changes in the organisation of thinking can occur in a relatively short time when there are sufficiently sharp changes in social–historical circumstances, such as those that occurred following the 1917 Revolution’.35

  So far, so politically correct: Luria and Vygotsky had demonstrated the efficacy of Soviet education, and the improvement potential of even the least educated Soviet citizen. On top of that, they had garnered clear evidence of the malleability of mind, and the power social improvements wielded over an individual’s lifechances. Karl Marx had promised that human natures would change for the better under socialism: here was the evidence.

  When Luria’s train pulled into Moscow station, agents of the NKVD were waiting for him. They had intercepted his telegram to Vygotsky, and read it to mean that the Uzbeks had no illusions about Soviet authority in the area. This farcical misunderstanding seems to have been cleared up fairly quickly. But it set the mood for what was to come. As news of their expedition spread, critics accused Luria of insulting the national minorities of Soviet Asia, whom he had, apparently, depicted as an inferior race unable to behave reasonably. A 1934 review of the Uzbek expedition in the journal Literature and the Proletarian Revolution claimed that:

  Instead of showing the process of development and the cultural growth of the workers in Uzbekistan, they search for justifications for their ‘cultural psychological theory’ and ‘find’ identical forms of thought in the adult Uzbek woman and a five-year-old child, dangling before us under the banner of science ideas which are harmful to the cause of the national cultural construction of Uzbekistan.

  Such malicious misreadings were all too common. Every kind of non-Pavlovian psychology was becoming politically unacceptable. In her memoir, Luria’s daughter Elena Alexandrovna recalled her father saying, ‘I was accused of all mortal sins right down to racism, and I was forced to leave the Institute of Psychology.’36

  Vygotsky’s confidence was utterly undermined. In a letter to Luria he wrote:

  I am still beset with thousands of petty chores. The fruitlessness of what I do greatly distresses me. My scientific thinking is going off into the realm of fantasy, and I cannot think things through in a realistic way to the end. Nothing is going right: I am doing the wrong things, writing the wrong things, saying the wrong things.37

  Vygotsky took it very hard that he and Luria were unable to continue their Uzbek research, and witnesses said it was this that broke his spirit at last, so that he gave in to his illness. In May 1934 he fell ill and was brought home from work suffering a throat haemorrhage. He died a few weeks later, on 10 June.

  Luria retrained as a physician. He spent the late 1930s working in the Institute of Neurosurgery under Nikolai
Burdenko.

  The Crisis in Psychology had peaked and passed, and Pavlov – or rather, a narrow, Bolshevik idea of Pavlov – now towered over its wreckage.

  Notes

  1. Lev Vygotsky, ‘Soznanie kak problema psikhologii povedeniia’ [‘Consciousness as a Problem of Behavioural Psychology’; 1925], Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Pedagogika, 1982), pp. 78–98.

  2. Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, p. 57.

  3. David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History, p. 80.

  4. S. V. Anichkov, ‘How I Became a Pharmacologist’, Annual Review of Pharmacology 15 (1975), pp. 1–10.

  5. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (Holt, 1890), p. 192.

  6. William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (Courier Corporation, 2012), p. 335.

  7. Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933–1935, Writings on Lenin, Dialectics and Evolutionism, trans. and intro. Philip Pomper, p. 49.

  8. Leon Trotsky, ‘Culture and Socialism’ [1927], Problems of Everyday Life: And Other Writings on Culture and Science, p. 298.

  9. Galina Kichigina, The Imperial Laboratory: Experimental Physiology and Clinical Medicine in Post-Crimean Russia.

  10. Bekhterev’s energetic, scattergun approach to his subject is neatly caught in M. A. Akimenko, ‘Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 16 (2007). Bekhterev’s incredible capacity for work was quite the equal of Pavlov’s. Between his lectures he ran hypnosis sessions in the auditorium next door. His evening consultations ran into the small hours of the night, and could involve seeing forty-odd patients.