Cultural Psychologists

Apraushev, Alvin (b. 1930)

Cand. Sc. (Education), director of the Zagorsk Boarding-School for Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children.

Apraushev finished a vocational school in 1943 and volunteered to do economic reconstruction work in the Donbass area. He was severely injured in a mine explosion and was hospitalised until the end of the war in 1945. He then finished a chemical and pharmaceutical specialised secondary school and spent thirteen years working in industry. In 1952 he completed a degree course at the Moscow Institute of Education, by correspondence, majoring in literature and Russian language.

He has worked at the Zagorsk boarding-school since 1965, first as a teacher, then as director of studies starting in 1967, and since 1970 as director of the school.

In 1970, under Meshcheryakov’s guidance, he defended a Candidate’s dissertation on “Technical Aids in the Instruction of the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind.” He is currently working on a Doctoral dissertation on “Labour and Social Rehabilitation of the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind.” He has more than forty scientific and popular scientific papers to his credit.

Blonsky, Pavel (1884-1941)

Soviet psychologist and teacher. After graduating from Kiev University (1907), he taught education and psychology at a secondary school for girls in Moscow. In 1913 he became an Associate Professor at Moscow University where he lectured on psychology and philosophy. He also taught at the Shanyavsky University and at the Non-Credit University Courses for Women.

Between 1915 and 1917 he wrote several articles on education, including “The School and the Working Class” and “The School and the Social System.” In 1919, he published a book entitled Work-and-Study School.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Blonsky gained prominence as a student of behaviour and development in children. He published a book, Child Development, in 1925.

He and Kornilov opposed the idealistic psychology of Chelpanov. He taught at the First and Second Moscow Universities and was one of the founders and leaders of the Krupskaya Academy of Communist Education. He led a team of young psychologists at the Moscow Institute of Psychology.

Blonsky’s main works include The Philosophy of Plotinus (1918), An Outline of Scientific Psychology (1921), Education (1924), Psychological Essays (1927), The Fundamentals of Education (1929), Memory and Thought (1935), Development of Thought in Schoolchildren (1935).

Bozhovich, Lydia (1908-1981)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor, one of the leading Soviet specialists in psychology of personality and education.

Her first experimental investigation, which she carried out as a Moscow University student under Vygotsky’s supervision, was devoted to problems of imitation. After graduating from the University she worked as head of studies at the psychoneurological sanatorium-cum-school, and then at the psychology chair of the Krupskaya Academy of Communist Education, under Vygotsky. In the early 1930s she was part of a team of prominent psychologists (Luria, Leontyev, Zaporozhets and Zinchenko) that worked at the psychology department at the Psychoneurological Academy in Kharkov. During the war, Bozhovich worked as head therapist at a hospital. Between 1945 and 1975 she headed a laboratory at the Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy, investigating the motivations and needs of the child and adolescent and the personality formation in childhood.

An important stage in her scientific career was her work at a boarding-school where she organised a comprehensive experiment to study the personality of the schoolchild in a concrete social environment. The results were summarised in the Psychological Study of Children at a Boarding-School (1960), which formulated several new principles for personality study. Among other things, Bozhovich demonstrated that psychologically, a personality is a combination of a certain type of behaviour learned by the child and a corresponding motive.

In the years that followed, Bozhovich staged some experiments to study the role of self-esteem, ambition and ideals in the child’s motivations and needs.

The results of her in-depth studies of the personality of the child accumulated over three decades of research were summed up in her Doctoral thesis, which provided the basis for the monograph Personality and Its Formation in Childhood (1968).

Lydia Bozhovich worked hard to develop Vygotsky’s scientific ideas.

Chelpanov, Georgy (1862-1936)

Psychologist, philosopher and educator, Professor of Philosophy at Kiev (1892-1906) and Moscow (1907-1923) universities. Until the end of 1923, he was Director of the Moscow Institute of Psychology which, owing to his efforts, had become a well-equipped centre of experimental psychology.

In the field of philosophy he was an idealist and a critic of materialism (Brain and Soul, 1900). His main scientific work was devoted to the perception of space (The Problem of the Perception of Space in Connection with the Teaching of the A Priori and Innateness, 1896-1904).

Among Chelpanov’s other works are Psychology (1909), Introduction to Experimental Psychology (1924), “Psychology or Reflexology?” (Moot Questions in Psychology (1926).

El'konin, Daniil (1904-1984)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy.

He began working early in life. After working for two years as a teacher at a colony for juvenile delinquents, he was sent to study at the Herzen Institute of Education in Leningrad. After graduation, he worked as a lecturer and then as an associate professor at the two educational institutes in Leningrad (the Herzen and the Krupskaya) and simultaneously taught elementary school.

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, El'konin volunteered for the front and was on active duty until the end of the war.

After the war, El'konin was appointed senior psychology teacher at the Soviet Army Institute of Education. In 1953, he transferred to the Psychology Institute of the Academy of Pedagogy where he has been working ever since as head of the laboratory. Simultaneously he holds a professorship in the Psychology Department at Moscow University.

El'konin’s major contribution has been in the psychological studies of children, which he started under the guidance of Vygotsky. His work played a major role in developing Vygotsky’s basic ideas, in particular, that of the leading role of the assimilation of social experience in the mental development of children, the mediated structure of psychic processes, and their formation during childhood, etc.

Subsequently, El'konin cooperated closely with Leontyev and his co-workers (Bozhovich, Galperin and Zaporozhets) in the study of the problem of activity and its role in the mental development of the individual, the gradual formation of psychic functions, their evolution, etc.

El'konin’s studies of play and children’s speech, as well as the psychology of pre- and elementary-school children and adolescents are widely known and represent a considerable contribution to the Soviet psychology.

Children’s play, their speech development and the stages of their psychic development form the subject of the special lectures which El'konin delivers at the Psychology Department of Moscow University. These lectures are very popular not only among the department’s students and teachers, but among a broader circle of psychologists and teachers in Moscow.

El'konin considers the problem of children’s speech and its development not in isolation but as a form and means of general psychological development of the child’s personality. The results of his theoretical and experimental studies in that field have been set down in the book Child Psychology (1960) which became widely known not only in the USSR but also abroad (it has been translated into many languages). The author is now preparing a second, thoroughly revised and enlarged edition.

El'konin deals with not only the theoretical but also the concrete questions in elementary education. In 1939 he published a Primer, A Manual of Russian and A Teacher’s Guide to them for the schools of the Far North. He has created a new method of teaching reading, widely known within the Soviet Union and abroad. He used this method to create an experimental Primer which was first published in 1960 and was reprinted in 1969. His Primer is used in the Armenian SSR, in the Yakut ASSR, and is being tried out in Poland, Bulgaria and the GDR. The members of the Institute of Preschool Education of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy have used the psychological and pedagogical principles advanced by El'konin to develop a new method of teaching reading and writing at the kindergarten level.

El'konin has written about ninety works and has edited and contributed to many monograph collections.

Galperin, Pyotr (1902[-1988])

Prominent Soviet psychologist and teacher, a theoretical and experimental scientist, founder of a trend in Soviet psychology which has gone down in history as the “theory of formation of intellectual processes in stages.”

After taking a degree as psychoneurologist at the Kharkov Medical Institute, Galperin practiced medicine at the Kharkov Psychoneurological Institute clinic starting in the 1930 and then became chief of the psychophysiology laboratory at the same institute. Since then, he has engaged in systematic research work. While working at the clinic, he developed an interest in questions related to psychology – the problems of suggestion and hallucinations.

When the psychoneurological academy in Kharkov organised a psychology sector in 1931, Pyotr Galperin joined that sector and devoted his efforts to the study of major psychological problems. Together with Leontyev, Luria, and Zaporozhets who had moved to Kharkov to work there, he developed the theory of activity, specifically the role of operational actions in mental development.

In 1936, Galperin defended a Candidate’s thesis on the subject “The Psychological Development of Tool Usage in Humans and Auxiliary Means in Animals and Their Significance.”

In 1941-1943 during the Second World War Galperin worked at hospitals for wounded soldiers in the rear. He was particularly active at the convalescence hospital in the Urals where he studied the psychological foundations of physical exercise and work therapy with Leontyev, Zaporozhets and others. That period saw the publication of his articles “Psychic Factors of Therapeutic Physical Exercise” and “Effectiveness of Movement in Various Types of Tasks.” These papers made a notable contribution to the understanding of the structure of activity.

In 1943, Galperin moved to Moscow and has worked at Moscow State University ever since, first as an associate and then as a full professor, holding the Psychology Chair of the Philosophy Department. Since 1971 he has been head of the Chair of Peer-Group Psychology in the Psychology Department where he has combined teaching with extensive theoretical and experimental work on the most current problems of psychology.

In 1943-1944 Galperin carried out an important theoretical study of the relation between the physiological mechanisms of higher neural activity developed by the Pavlov school and behaviour in concrete situations.

Since the late forties, Galperin and his associates have developed Vygotsky’s ideas in a series of research projects the results of which enabled him to formulate a hypothesis on the developmental stages of mental functions and concepts involving the idea of the psyche as arising from operational activity and performing an orienting and regulatory function within the activity. The preliminary results of these investigations were reported at the Conference on Psychology in 1953.

Galperin devoted some thirty years to the theoretical and experimental development of his theory of the formation of mental functions in stages, continuously elaborating, expanding, and checking it on the basis of diverse material. Numerous works by his associates were based on material from the formation of concepts and mental functions in various fields of knowledge (mathematics, linguistics, geometry, biology, etc.) and at different ages (preschool, school age, etc.). They explored the opportunities for the formation of mental functions and concepts with predetermined qualities, their generalisation, reduction, and assimilation. All these studies were based on the theoretical concept of mental activity as basically operational by nature.

In its early stages, his theory was seen by many as merely a theory of the formation of mental functions and concepts geared to the problems of instruction. However, after 1958, and especially in recent years, he has presided over an increasing range of studies going beyond the examination of intellectual processes and covering a wide range of psychic processes and aptitudes: perception and its chief properties, attention, motor habits, linguistic consciousness, etc. The first in this series was the hypothesis on the psychological nature of attention, confirmed experimentally in 1969.

Then followed a series of works by Galperin himself, and his pupils and associates on the guided formation of various psychic processes (1977).

This idea contained a new approach to the very object of psychology and is set forth in detail in the book Introduction to Psychology (1976).

Galperin has more than one hundred printed works to his credit, many of which have been translated and published abroad (in Poland, the GDR, Bulgaria, the USA, Britain, Japan and other countries). He has participated in psychology congresses, conferences and symposiums in the Soviet Union and several international conferences.

Galperin devotes much of his time to teaching and to advanced training of psychologists. For many years he has lectured on the fundamentals of psychology at the Philosophy and Psychology departments at Moscow University.

He devotes much time and effort to educating young psychologists.

Ilyenkov, Evald (1924-1979)

Well-known Soviet philosopher and theoretical psychologist, Dr. Sc. (Philosophy), Ilyenkov was a well-educated versatile scientist with a deep grasp of the basic problems of social science. He tried to raise and solve these problems on a philosophic level, skilfully applying the dialectical materialist epistemology with a profound awareness of its historical concreteness. The work of Ilyenkov and his pupils led to breakthroughs in several areas of social science, and he was a brilliant stylist as well.

Ilyenkov was born in Smolensk in 1924. After finishing secondary school in Moscow, he entered the Philosophy Department in 1941. Then he served in the army and, after finishing artillery school, went to the front. After being demobilised, Ilyenkov was first an undergraduate and then a graduate student at the Philosophy Department of Moscow University (1946-1953). From 1953 and until his death he was a senior research worker at the Institute of Philosophy under the USSR Academy of Sciences.

From the outset of his career, Ilyenkov studied the principles of dialectics taken as logic and epistemology, both its history and contemporary problems connected with it. He was rightly reputed to be one of the finest connoisseurs of the philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel. In 1965, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences awarded Ilyenkov the Chernyshevsky Prize, the highest honour in the humanities.

He devoted many years to studying the history of logic and psychology, the relationship between these sciences, prospects for the application of their achievements, and ways of devising scientific theories to provide a psychological and educational basis for the development of the harmonious individual. In the sixties, he teamed up with Meshcheryakov who created an original system for educating deaf, dumb, and blind children. Ilyenkov made a considerable contribution to that study which revealed many secrets in the development of human psychology.

Some of Ilyenkov’s books are available in translation. His works The Dialectic of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s “Capital” (1960), On Idols and Ideals (1968), Dialectical Logic. Essays on Its History and Theory (1974) and numerous articles provided the basis for a new trend in psychology with elements of philosophy and logic in the study of the functioning of consciousness and personality, an area now being developed by his pupils.

Khomskaya, Yevgenia (b. 1929)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor.

In 1952, she graduated from the psychology sector of the Philosophy Department at Moscow University, and for the next twenty-five years worked under Luria. In 1952-1957 she studied mentally retarded children at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped and a children’s neurological sanatorium. In 1957 she defended a Candidate’s thesis, suggesting a conditional-reflex (verbal and motor) method for differentiating such children. She was the first to demonstrate and assess the possibilities of compensating for disturbances of the conditional motor reactions with the assistance of speech. This problem is part of a larger one – voluntary control over movement and speech organisation in involuntary movement and actions.

Since 1958 Khomskaya has worked in neuropsychology. Since 1972 she has been head of the neuropsychology laboratory at the Institute of Psychology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Between 1958 and 1968 she investigated the functions of the frontal lobes of the brain.

Khomskaya has written more than 150 scientific papers.

Kornilov, Konstantin (1879-1957)

Dr. Sc. (Education), Full Member of the RSFSR Academy of Pedagogy (since 1944).

After finishing a teacher’s college in Omsk (1898), he taught in Siberia until 1905. In 1910 he graduated from Moscow University and became a research worker at the Institute of Psychology. In 1916 he was made an Associate Professor at Moscow University.

In 1921, Kornilov founded the Department of Education at the Second Moscow University. He was appointed Dean and Professor of the Psychology Chair. In 1923, he led a group of psychologists who set themselves in opposition to the then director of the Institute of Psychology, Chelpanov, demanding a restructuring of psychology on a Marxist basis. In 1923-1930 and again in 1938-1941 Kornilov was director of the Psychology Research Institute. In 1944-1950 he was Vice-President of the RSFSR Academy of Pedagogy.

His major works are: Contemporary Psychology and Marxism (1925), Outline of the Psychology of Preschool Children (1927), Human Reactions: Reactology (1927), Textbook of Psychology from the Dialectical Materialist Viewpoint (1931), Textbook for Teacher’s Colleges (1946).

Lange, Nikolai (1858-1921)

Began working as a psychologist in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt. His first serious scientific work was devoted to involuntary fluctuation of attention in visual and audio perception. Then, with the addition of historical and critical material, the expanded form became part of his Doctoral dissertation. Subsequently Lange devoted most of his energies to teaching at Novorossiisky University in Odessa. He wrote several more scientific papers including The Child’s Soul in the Early Years of Life (1892), a major article on Wundt’s theory of the origin of the myth, an outline of the history of psychology, and a handbook on logic. His major work is Psychological Studies (1893) consisting of two works: The Law of Perception and A Theory of Voluntary Attention.

Levina, Rosa (b. 1908)

An outstanding child psychologist, Dr. Sc. (Education), Professor.

Levina was also one of Vygotsky’s disciples.

In 1936 she completed her article “Psychology of Children’s Speech in Pathological Cases” (Autonomous Children’s Speech, Moscow, 1936), a theme suggested by Vygotsky.

Vygotsky’s ideas determined the whole of Levina’s career. Her main publications include Handicaps in Reading and Writing (1941); Writing Impairment in Children With Delayed Speech Development (1961); and Fundamentals of the Theory and Practice of Speech Therapy (1958), written jointly with her pupils.

For a long time, Levina headed the speech therapy sector at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped under the USSR Academy of Pedagogy where she studied the psychological and educational aspects of delayed speech development.

Levina discovered the nature of these handicaps, tracing them to abnormalities in phonematic perception. The rehabilitation methods developed as a result make it possible to completely cure speech and writing disorders.

Studies of speech development in mentally retarded children conducted at Levina’s laboratory made important contributions to the psychology of thought and speech.

Levina’s investigations generally combine theoretical depth and practical applications which gives them particular social significance. She initiated the establishment of speech therapy centres for school and preschool children in this country.

Mareyeva, Raisa (b. 1928)

Head of the Sokolyansky Laboratory for the Study and Education of Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy.

After graduating from the handicapped studies department of the Lenin Institute of Education in Moscow, she worked at a school for children with impaired hearing and later at a kindergarten for deaf children. She completed a graduate course at the Institute for the Studies of the Handicapped under the guidance of Sokolyansky. She has been on the staff of the laboratory since 1960 and became its head after Meshcheryakov’s death in 1974.

Her major work is Education and Instruction of Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children at Home (1979). Many of her articles have appeared in scientific journals.

Morozova, Natalya (b. 1906)

Dr. Sc. (Education), Professor. In 1925 after graduating from a teacher’s college, Morozova entered the Education Department of the Second Moscow State University (now the Lenin State Institute of Education) and began research into the psychological development of handicapped children under Vygotsky’s supervision.

Morozova devoted more than fifty years of her life to the study of the handicapped. After graduating from the Institute in 1930, she worked as head of the children’s group at the psychoneurological sanatorium-cum-school at the Gorky Medico-Biological Institute. She dealt with problems connected with special fields of psychology, revealing considerable talent as a theoretician and experimenter.

In 1939, Morozova became a graduate student at the Experimental Institute for the Study of the Handicapped. During the war Morozova, worked as a teacher and head of studies at the regional school for the deaf-mute children in the city of Ufa and then as senior researcher at the Bashkir Institute of Refresher Training for Teachers. In 1944 she defended a Candidate’s thesis in psychology. In that same year she returned to Moscow to work as a senior researcher at the Institute of Psychology.

In 1953, Morozova resumed her work at the Experimental Institute for the Study of the Handicapped.

In 1968, she defended her Doctoral thesis and became a Professor in 1970.

She has published more than a hundred works, including five monographs on the development of speech and thought in normal and handicapped children. She made a considerable contribution to the study of the cognitive interests of children and their formation in development, normal and handicapped. While she was head of the department for the education of preschool handicapped children, she and her co-workers carried out a series of interesting studies in the development of auditory perception in deaf preschool children and the training and education of mentally retarded children, and developed a network of special preschool institutions and methods of selecting children for various institutions.

Petrovsky, Artur (b. 1924)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor, Full Member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy (since 1971).

He graduated from the Potyomkin Educational Institute in Moscow in 1947 and defended a Candidate’s dissertation in psychology in 1950.

From 1952 to 1968 he was first an associate and then a full professor and head of the Psychology Chair at the same institute. He defended his Doctoral dissertation in 1965. Since 1971 he has been chief of the laboratory at the General and Educational Psychology Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy.

Petrovsky’s research centres on the history of psychology and social psychology. His major works are: History of Soviet Psychology. The Formation of the Foundations of Psychology, The Social Psychology of the Collective and The Psychological Theory of the Collective. Petrovsky has authored and edited several textbooks on psychology including Psychology, General Psychology, and Peer-Group and Educational Psychology which have been translated into many languages.

Rubinstein, Sergei (1889-1960)

Major Soviet psychologist and philosopher. He began as a teacher of psychology and logic at a gymnasium in Odessa in 1915. He received training in philosophy at Marburg University (Germany). In 1919, he became an associate professor at the chair of philosophy and psychology of the Novorossiisky University in Odessa and, following the death of Lange, in 1922 succeeded him as head of the Psychology Chair at the Institute of People’s Education formed through the merger of the humanities departments of that university. In 1932-1942 he created and became head of the Chair of Psychology at the Herzen Institute of Education in Leningrad and in 1942 he founded the Chair of Psychology at Moscow University and was its head until 1950. He was director of the Institute of Psychology from 1942 to 1945, in 1945 he became head of the Psychology Sector at the Institute of Philosophy under the USSR Academy of Sciences. Rubinstein was the first psychologist in the USSR Academy of Sciences, having been elected a Corresponding Member in 1943 and Full Member of the RSFSR Academy of Pedagogy in 1945.

An important work in his scientific career was his 1934 article “Psychological Problems in the Work of Karl Marx.” It formulated the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity which provided the basis for subsequent concrete psychological research (including experimental programmes for the study of perception, speech, memory and thought) which he supervised. He used that principle to develop his view of psychology in his two major works, The Fundamentals of Psychology (1935) and Fundamentals of General Psychology (1940).

The last years of Rubinstein’s life were particularly productive in spite of the debilitating illness that afflicted him. In 1957, his book Being and Consciousness was published. It concentrates on the nature of the psyche and its place in the system of phenomena of the material world. The key to the solution of this problem is offered by the dialectical materialist interpretation of determinism. According to this interpretation, external causes act through inner conditions. As applied to psychology, it means that the psyche is included in the overall pattern of phenomena, and always in a dual role – as something conditioned by our life and activity and as something conditioning human behaviour in turn.

Rubinstein’s book On Thought and Ways of Studying It (1958) sums up his many years of experimental work on the thought processes. These experiments were concerned not with the learning of ready modes of action but with revealing the mechanisms of man’s creative activity. The deterministic principle in this theory of thought implies the recognition of the inseparable link between the inner laws and conditions of cognitive activity and the external objective conditions as well.

His 1959 book Principles and Paths in the Development of Psychology extends Rubinstein’s basic propositions on thought to other important areas of psychology, such as the nature of sensation, the personality and its education, consciousness, etc. In his essays on the history of psychology in the Soviet Union and abroad, which are included in the above-mentioned book, Rubinstein sets forth his views on the pattern of the development of psychology.

His last paper, entitled “Man and the World” (in Problems of General Psychology), published posthumously in 1973, systematises the methodological principles and philosophical problems of psychology in terms of which the principle of the individual and the social, the problem of personality and its links to the world, become central to psychology.

Many of Rubinstein’s works are available in translation.

Schedrovitsky, Georgy (b. 1929)

Cand. Sc. (Philosophy) specialising in scientific methodology, in particular, psychology.

He received training in physics, mathematics and philosophy at Moscow University, from which he graduated in 1953. He defended a Candidate’s dissertation in 1964 on “Thought in Speech and Methods of Study.” He began his scientific career by studying the mechanisms of the formation of concepts in the natural sciences. Then he took up the problem of the intellectual development of preschool and school-age children, attempting to combine an analysis of the history of culture, the development of philosophy and scientific notions on the one hand, and the analysis of the way children assimilate human culture and develop intellectually on the other.

His major works are: On the Structure of Attributive Knowledge (1958-1960), Study of Thought in Children with Reference to the Solution of Arithmetic Problems (1965), Methodological Problems in Systems Analysis (1964), On the System of Educational Research (Methodological Analysis) (1971), Primary Notions and Categorical Means in the Theory of Activity (1975).

Skorokhodova, Olga (1914-1982)

Cand. Sc. ( Education), senior research worker at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy. As a result of meningitis, she became completely blind and deaf in early childhood.

This chapter contains a compilation of materials about her life and work.

Olga Skorokhodova wrote numerous scientific articles and three books, among them, How I Perceive, Imagine and Understand the Surrounding World, which is available in translation.

Slavina, Liya (b. 1906)

Cand. Sc. (Education), prominent Soviet psychologist, specialist in secondary education.

While in her second year at the University, she began working with Vygotsky and was a member of his team until his death.

After graduating from the Second Moscow State University in 1930, she taught at a school that trained nurses for créches in Yaroslavl and a year later joined the psychology laboratory at the Institute of Physical Education. She worked at a school, then as junior research worker under Leontyev at the psychology laboratory of the Krupskaya Academy of Communist Education. Later she taught adult illiterates until 1938, when she entered a graduate course at the Institute for Mother and Child Care, specialising in early childhood psychology. Slavina completed her graduate course in 1941 but was unable to defend her thesis because the war broke out. During the war she worked as an instructor at créches and as a researcher at the Institute for Mother and Child Care in Alma-Ata.

In 1944 Slavina returned to Moscow and joined the Institute of Psychology’s child psychology sector headed by Leontyev.

In 1945, she defended a Candidate’s thesis on “Understanding of Oral Stories by Young Children.”

When a laboratory of schoolchild psychology was set up as part of the Child Psychology Sector and Bozhovich became head of that laboratory, Slavina joined her in doing research on the motives for learning, the role of the family in shaping the attitudes of schoolchildren toward learning, and psychological analysis of marks as motivation for learning.

Her major works are The Handling of Low Achieving and Undisciplined Pupils (1958, translated into Spanish), Children with Affected Behaviour (1966, written jointly with Bozhovich), Know the Child to Educate It (1976), and Mental Development and Education of the Schoolchild (1979).

Smirnov, Anatoli (1894-1980)

Dr. Sc. (Education), Professor, Member of USSR Academy of Pedagogy since 1947.

After taking a degree in history and philology at Moscow University (1916), he worked at the Institute of Psychology, then at the Academy of Social Education, at the Institute for Extra-Mural Education, and at the Moscow Institute of Education. From 1941 to 1951 he was Professor at Moscow University, and from 1957 to 1963, he was President of the Psychological Society of the USSR. He was head of the Institute of Psychology for thirty years and chief editor of the journal Voprosy Psikhologii for a quarter of a century.

Smirnov’s experimental work was devoted to visual perception and problems of memory. He wrote papers and books on general and child psychology, psychology of education, and the history of psychology; he co-edited the two-volume work, Psychology in the USSR.

His major works are: Psychology of the Child and Adolescent (1926), Occupational Psychology (1927), The Psychology of Remembering (1948), Problems in the Psychology of Memory (1966) and The Development and Present State of Psychology in the USSR (1975).

Sokolov, Alexander (b. 1911)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor.

After graduating from the Biological Department of the Institute of Education (1934), he completed a graduate course at the Institute of Psychology (1937) where he remains until the present time. He is now head of the Institute’s Thought and Speech Laboratory.

In 1938 he defended a Candidate’s thesis on “Consciousness and Habit,” and in 1967 a Doctoral thesis on “Inner Speech and Thought.”

He also taught at Moscow University, first in the psychological sector of the Philosophy Department and later in the Psychology Department.

His major work, Inner Speech and. Thought (1968), was published in the USA in 1972 and reprinted in 1974.

At present, Sokolov is engaged in research on the psychophysiology of thought and the encephalographic aspects of the speech mechanisms of thought.

Sokolyansky, Ivan (1889-1960)

Sokolyansky was born into a Cossack peasant’s family in the Kuban. He received an elementary education in his village and graduated from the Kuban Teacher’s College. In 1908, after receiving a matriculation certificate, he entered the Education Department of the School of Natural History at the St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, from which he graduated in 1913.

Sokolyansky received further training in the field of studies of the handicapped at the Mariinsky Educational Courses in the department for the education and instruction of deaf mutes. He took a course in experimental psychology under Professor Lazursky and Professor Bogdanov-Beresovsky. Lagovsky was also among his teachers. Sokolyansky studied education of the blind under Professor Krogius. He attended lectures by outstanding Russian physiologists Vvedensky, Bekhterev and Pavlov.

He began his career as a teacher while still an undergraduate. Between 1910 and 1919, he taught at a school for deaf mutes. He wrote his first works on special education and public education during that period.

His involvement in revolutionary activities resulted in his being blacklisted and exiled to the Vologda Region.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Sokolyansky worked with tremendous energy to set up new Soviet schools. At that time there was no educational journal or newspaper of any significance in the Ukraine to which he did not contribute.

The articles he published – “On Education” (1917), “Misfortune or Social Crime” (1920), “Handicapped Children in the System of Social Education” (1923), “On the Behaviour of the Personality” (1925), “The School and the Children’s Movement” (1925), “Dire Legacy” (1925), “The Children’s Movement, the School and the Teacher” (1925), “The Problem of Organising Behaviour” (1926) – evoked great public response.

In 1919, Sokolyansky organised a school for deaf-mute children in the town of Uman. In 1920, the Ukrainian Minister of Education appointed him Associate Professor of Education of the Deaf and Psychology at the Special Education Department of the Public Education Institute in Kiev. In 1923, he joined the Kharkov Public Education Institute, and in 1926 was appointed Professor of the Handicapped Studies Department at that Institute and Dean of the Special Education Department.

Immediately after the October Revolution, Sokolyansky became involved in work with homeless children and was appointed officer of the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and later inspector of institutions for handicapped children.

He founded a network of educational institutes for handicapped children in the Ukraine shortly after the establishment of Soviet government. On his initiative, joint medical and educational centres were set up to coordinate all the research in studies of the handicapped.

Sokolyansky was among the organisers of the Educational Research Institute in the Ukraine. In 1926 he became the director of that institute and head of the department for the study of the handicapped. In 1930, Sokolyansky became the first director of the newly organised Research Institute for the Study of the Handicapped in Kharkov.

During these years, he held other leading posts in the system of education of handicapped children and wrote articles on special education that are still relevant today: “On So-Called Lip Reading in Deaf Mutes” (1925), “Articulation Schemes in the Receptive and Effective Speech of Deaf Mutes” (1926), “On the Method of Teaching Oral Speech to Deaf Mutes” (1930), to mention but a few.

Sokolyansky’s research and educational activity in studies of the handicapped was wide-ranging. He was a major specialist in the education of deaf children. His works on the teaching deaf mutes their native language, lip-reading, and the speech regime of the deaf were very important for the general development of the social education of deaf mutes. In these studies, he did not confine himself to specific questions of the education of deaf mutes. His work was aimed at improving the whole system of education for handicapped children. His works in education of the blind are known to those who work with the handicapped. Sokolyansky constantly took on the most difficult cases in special education. He developed individual methods of education for persons not covered by the existing system of public education. For example, he developed a manual for individual instruction of adult deaf mutes living in rural areas and a special primer for schools for adult deaf mutes. On his initiative, a school-and-clinic for deaf, dumb, and blind children was set up in Kharkov.

That institution was visited by delegates to an international congress of physiologists. According to their comments in the visitors’ book, the clinic for the deaf, dumb, and blind was an outstanding research institution in Soviet and international science... “An institution like the one in Kharkov could hardly be found anywhere else in the world,” they wrote.

Sokolyansky’s work with deaf, dumb, and blind children attracted Gorky’s attention. In his letters to Sokolyansky and Skorokhodova, the great writer stressed the significance of that work.

In 1939, at the invitation of the RSFSR Ministry of Education, Sokolyansky came to work at the Moscow Special Schools Research Institute (now the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy), where he resumed his work on the problems of teaching the dead, dumb, and blind.

It was characteristic of Sokolyansky’s activities as a scholar and educator that he constantly used the latest technical achievements in the instruction of deaf, dumb, and blind, deaf-mute, and blind children. He had himself invented some valuable technical equipment for use in these fields: the Braille screen for deaf mutes (1941), the mechanical primer and others. He developed an ordinary-script reading machine for blind, and deaf, dumb, and blind persons. See his articles: “The Blind Can Read Any Book” (1936), “A New Method of Reading for the Blind,” “On the Reading of Flat Script by the Blind and Deaf, Dumb and Blind” (1956). Various teletactors designed and suggested by him are now indispensable instruments in the instruction of the deaf, dumb, and blind. Sokolyansky worked fruitfully in that field until his last days.

Tsvetkova, Lyubov (b. 1929)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor. She began work in neuropsychology under Luria in 1958 and defended her Candidate’s thesis (1962) and Doctoral thesis (1970) on this problem. After defending her Candidate’s thesis she became head of a research team studying speech disorders and rehabilitation techniques at the neuropsychology chair headed by Luria. After defending her Doctoral thesis she became head of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Rehabilitation of Higher Psychic Functions set up at the Nervous Diseases Clinic of the Sechenov First Medical Institute in Moscow and continues to work in this capacity.

Tsvetkova has worked under Luria’s guidance for many years, starting in 1958. The main task of her laboratory is to develop her teacher’s ideas in neuropsychology. She supervises research in the development of the theory and scientific methods for restoring not only speech in aphasics but also other mental processes, such as memory, thought and perception.

Tsvetkova has written more than 130 scientific works, including five monographs, and has edited two collections put out by the laboratory. One of her monographs, Neuropsychological Analysis of Problem Solving was co-authored with Luria. Her book Rehabilitation and Training of Patients with Localised Brain Damage won her the Lomonosov Prize.

Yaroshevsky, Mikhail (b. 1915)

Dr. Sc. ( Psychology), Professor.

After graduating from the Institute of Education in Leningrad in 1937 he worked as a secondary-school teacher and later as a lecturer at an Institute of Education. He completed a graduate course at Moscow University and in 1945 defended a Candidate’s dissertation on the theme “Potebnya’s Teaching on Language and Consciousness.” Between 1945 and 1951 he was a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and between 1951 and 1964, head of the Chair of Psychology at the Institute of Education in Dushanbe (Tajikistan). Since 1964 he has headed a sector at the Institute of the History of the Natural Sciences and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

His Doctoral dissertation, defended in 1961, was published as a monograph entitled Problems of Determinism in the Nineteenth-Century Psychophysiology.

Yaroshevsky’s other works include: History of Psychology (1966; revised edition, 1976), Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1968), Psychology in the Twentieth Century (1971; revised edition, 1974), The Development and Present State of Western Psychology (1974).

Zaporozhets, Alexander (1905-1981)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Full Member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy, Director of the Preschool Education Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy, he made major contributions to the development of the main problems of Soviet psychology, to asserting the principle of activity in the approach to the study of the nature of the psychic processes, the problems of mental development in children, and the building of the Soviet system of preschool education.

He graduated from the Education Department of the Second Moscow State University (now the Lenin State Institute of Education) in 1930. Zaporozhets was initiated into scientific research while still an undergraduate when he joined a small research group. Between 1929 and 1931 he worked as a laboratory assistant and then as a junior researcher for the Chair of Psychology at the Krupskaya Academy of Communist Education. During that period he studied the problem of the origin of signs and their role in the psychic processes. In 1931, he, Leontyev and Luria, moved to Kharkov to join the newly organised psychology sector at the Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy as a senior researcher and soon as head of the developmental psychology laboratory. There he conducted some basic experimental studies to find out the role of concrete actions in the child’s mental development. In 1936 he presented this investigation as a Candidate’s dissertation entitled “The Role of Activity and Speech in the Mental Development of the Child.”

Simultaneously, Zaporozhets began to work for the Psychology Chair of the Kharkov State Institute of Education. In 1938, he became head of that chair. Under his guidance, the members of the chair studied the development of perception and thought in children. The most important feature of this research was that it pioneered the understanding of perception as a distinct kind of activity determined by the objective properties of the thing under consideration.

During the Second World War, he worked at a convalescence hospital on the scientific and practical aspects of restoring disrupted motor functions after injuries. This work confirmed his ideas on the structure of activity, the relationship between the motives and goals of actions, and between actions and operations. Zaporozhets invented some new devices for work therapy. His activities during this period were summed up in the monograph Restoration of Movements which he co-authored with Leontyev.

In late 1943, he moved to Moscow to work at the Institute of Psychology of the RSFSR Academy of Pedagogy and simultaneously at Moscow State University. Since 1944, he was head of the laboratory of the Psychology of Preschool Children at the Psychology Institute of the RSFSR AP. The main problem which engaged him, experimentally and theoretically, was the dependence of various psychic processes on the motives and tasks of activity. Data obtained in the course of his studies in this area provided the material for his Doctoral dissertation, defended in 1958 and published as a monograph, The Development of Voluntary Movements.

Zaporozhets devoted much energy to training young scientists. He lectured on child psychology at the Psychology Department of Moscow University and was adviser for many Candidates’ dissertations. Following the trend in Soviet psychology initiated by Vygotsky, he created an independent branch of psychology for preschool children.

In 1958 Zaporozhets was elected a Corresponding Member of the RSFSR Academy of Pedagogy and in 1960 was appointed Director of the Preschool Education Research Institute. As the director of that institute, he effected successful links between research into the psychology of infants and preschool children and theoretical and practical studies into the key questions of education and the elaboration of a system of preschool education.

Zaporozhets published more than one hundred experimental and theoretical works including monographs and scientific articles. Among them was a textbook on psychology for institutes training preschool teachers published in 1953 and reprinted twice since then. This textbook earned him the Ushinsky Prize. Many of his works were translated.

In 1968 Zaporozhets was elected Full Member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy and a Member of its Presidium. He took part in many international psychology conferences, symposiums, and seminars on child psychology and preschool education.

Zinchenko, Vladimir (b. 1931)

Dr. Sc. (Psychology), Professor, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Pedagogy of the USSR (since 1974).

After graduating from the Philosophy Department of Moscow University (1953), where he majored in psychology, he taught logic and psychology at secondary schools for five years. Simultaneously, he did a graduate work at the Institute of Psychology and in 1957 defended a Candidate’s dissertation entitled “The Formation of Motor Habits.” Since 1956 he has worked part-time at the Institute of Psychology, and since 1960 at Moscow State University. He has been working in industry at the same time. In 1966, Zinchenko defended his Doctoral dissertation on “Perception and Action.” Zinchenko is Vice-President of the USSR Society of Psychologists.

He has written ten books and some 250 articles. His major works are Perception and Action (1967), also available in Japanese, The Forming of Visual Image (1969), also available in Czech, English, and Hungarian, The Psychology of Perception (1973), The Fundamentals of Ergonomics (1979), and The Functional Structure of Visual Memory (1980).