ABSTRACT
The cultural-historical tradition in psychology experienced a seismic transformation when, following the death of L.S. Vygotsky in 1934, Vygotsky’s student and collaborator A.R. Leont’ev shifted the unit of analysis from individual, volitional, goal-directed, tool-mediated, and socially and culturally conditioned action to the mediated action of the collective. Bakhurst (2007: 63) observes that ‘Despite his emphasis on the sociocultural foundations of psychological development, Vygotsky’s thought remains centred on the individual subject conceived as a discrete, autonomous self.’ Leont’ev turned his focus instead to the sources of the social and cultural patterns of action through which individuals internalize their understanding of the world. These recurring, routine actions contribute to collective conceptions of the trajectory of whole societies and therefore of individuals within them, and to the construction and maintenance of the cultural practices through which people and groups learn to help their presumed teleological destinations come about. Vygotsky (1987) recognized and accounted for social and cultural mediation in his account of individual concept development. He nonetheless focused on individual internalization and externalization of patterns of thinking and the patterns of speech. These patterns reflect prior cultural practices and ultimately help individuals to construct them anew as they take on and reproduce their societies’ ways of knowing. In his departure from Vygotsky, Leont’ev (1981) – the architect of what has generally been called ‘activity theory’ – took a more orthodox Marxist perspective on human labour and cognition by foregrounding the social group rather than the individual. This shift was not necessarily based on purely scientific differences. The ascent of Vygotsky in the world of Russian psychology coincided with the founding of the Soviet Union and its basis in a highly centralized philosophy based on Marxist assumptions regarding social-class homogenization
following from the demise of capitalism’s class-based conflicts. The setting provided by the Soviet Union proved critical for the direction that science, including psychology, took between the early 1920s and early 1990s. First, as an explicitly Marxist state, the Soviet Union established a central and abiding ideology that suppressed the role of individuals, especially as they exercise capital-based control over one another. Vygotsky’s interest in individual cognition did not fit within this perspective in spite of his emphasis on higher mental functions as developed through social transactions that are situated in cultural and historical practices for solving the problems presented by specific environments (Tulviste 1991). Vygotsky’s foregrounding of the individual became increasingly at odds with official state ideology, a conflict that undoubtedly would have escalated had he lived to develop his research programme. Second, the Soviet Union’s Marxist emphasis took a totalitarian turn soon after its leaders came into power, and they reinforced its ideology with a stunning brutality during Stalin’s reign from 1924-1953 (see Cole et al. 2006), a period that encompassed Vygotsky’s career. Those who survived this era had few illusions about the perils of defying Soviet dogma. Zinchenko (2007: 213), for instance, observes that ‘Vygotsky’s commitment to Marxist beliefs did not save him from criticism. His works were banned, denounced, and declared to be vicious and even evil. He was lucky to have managed to die in his own bed in 1934.’ Vygotsky, many commentators believe, would undoubtedly have met the same fate as Gustav Gustavovich Shpet, one of his mentors, who was dismissed from his academic positions on multiple occasions and subjected to ‘brutal interrogation and execution in 1937’ by Soviet authorities (Wertsch 2007: 184) due to his ‘freedom and dignity and the independence of his thought from Marxist-Leninist ideology, which at the time was growing stronger and stronger’ (Zinchenko 2007: 212). Vygotsky’s death in 1934 coincided with a ban on pedology – Vygotsky’s field of the study of child development – by the Pedology Decree of 1936, the execution of Schpet and others during Stalin’s Great Purge, the decline of intellectuals and rise of the proletariat in stature, the elevation of Soviet paranoia following the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the increase in violent repression as a systemic aspect of Soviet life. Even Stalin’s successor and close associate Georgi M. Malenkov was disposed of within two years, eventually expelled from the party and sent to Kazakhstan to manage a hydroelectric plant for 30 years; life was lonely and perilous even at the top of the system. Reading Vygotsky and his colleagues was forbidden almost immediately following his death. Kozulin and Gindis note that ‘discussion of Vygotsky’s ideas was practically impossible from 1936 to the late 1950s’ (2007: 334), and Daniels reports that Vygotsky’s book Pedagogical Psychology
was considered to be so politically unacceptable to the rulers of the Soviet state that one had to have a special pass from the KGB that would admit one to the restricted reading room in the Lenin Library where the book could be read.
