ABSTRACT
First I got amused, then I got amazed. I was amused by the invitation that I received from the editor of this volume to contribute a new chapter that would be based on my 30-year-old paper that I once published in Russian academic journal Issues of Psychology (Voprosy psikhologii, in original Russian) amid the so-called perestroika (“reconstruction”) period in the latest history of the Soviet Union. On the surface, the editor’s offer appeared very unusual and utterly weird, to say the least. And only then it was that, upon rereading this virtually forgotten text, I got amazed by realizing how contemporary this old paper looks now, 30-something years later, at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. Indeed, virtually nothing has changed since then and it is as if time has stopped for Russian psychology, from the perspective of Marxist thinking in this field of knowledge, at least. That said, one cannot but acknowledge quite a few changes that took place in Russian psychology in a number of other respects over the last 30 years. These I am going to somewhat sketchily overview in the initial, newly written part of this chapter. Then, I will proceed to the considerably revised “prequel” of the story that reflects the state of the art in the field as of the end of the 1980s as it was reflected in my earlier publication (Radzikhovskii, 1988). Yet, before I proceed any further, a personal comment on my place in this story – rather, a history – of Soviet and Russian psychology is in order.
