Editor's Introduction Criticizing Vygotsky

Abstract

To be and remain a professional psychologist in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s required considerable skills, flexibility, and luck. In all the books about the history of Soviet psychology (e.g., Graham, 1987; Joravsky, 1989; McLeish, 1975; Rahmani, 1973), we can read about the orchestrated debates that dominated the scientific agenda (e.g., on reductionism, dialectic, dualism, practice). Individual psychologists had to take the right stance on these issues or risk suffering the consequences. In the 1930s in particular, the ideological pressure turned into genuine state terror, and no scholar could be sure that he or she had expressed the one and only "correct" viewpoint on a particular topic. Unfortunately, the infallible official viewpoints on these topics shifted repeatedly. That is why many intellectuals were prepared for the worst and always had a packed suitcase ready in case the secret police should arrest them (they invariably came during the night).