ABSTRACT
All Soviet psychologists were voluntarily self-proclaimed Marxists, by definition. This claim can be questioned in relation to few scholars and in the period of the 1920s only. In the 1930s, many Soviet psychologists turned away from Pavlov’s teachings. They contended that the teachings could advance psychology’s understanding of genuine conscious activities in humans. In 1952, Anatolii Smirnov published an essay in which he took up line of argument of the supporters of Pavlov’s reborn teachings in an aggressive critique of those psychologists who showed signs of deviancy from a materialist approach to human behavior. Mental entities, they were convinced, did not belong to the set of possible explananda of animal and/or human behavior. But this rejection was perceived by psychologists as a dangerous challenge to their research aims and institutional recognition. The point is simply that it’s worthwhile to first enter the real life of Soviet psychologists and to grasp events that shaped their career, their successes, and their failures.
