Thanks for filling us in on some of the complexities of the history of
events surrounding Carpay's interview, Anna.
As a foreigner, I experienced some of the difficulties of find some solid
ground of reality in the hot house atmosphere of Moscovian academic
conflicts in the 1980's. Let me add a few events of which I had personal
experience, the 1981 events not being one of them.
1. From about 1978 to the demise of the USSR I was the official representative
of the American Psychological Association, through the American Councile of
Learned Societies, to the USSR Academy of Sciences. In that capacity I sought
to open up as much exchange as I could. (The Brushlinsky article published
in the LCHC Newsletter came from the visit of a Soviet delegation here).
During all of this time, because the exchange was with the Soviet academy,
no Vygotskian was put on a delegation coming to the US. No American sent
on the exchange could, without special permission TALK to a psychologist
outside of the Institute of Psychology headed by Lomov. Some special
arrangements were made. Laura Martin was allowed to conducat research
with Vitalii Rubstov (subsequently published in Russian and English).
2. During this period, the only official contacts of American psychologists
with Soviet psychologists through the exchange had to occur in one room
of the Institute of Psychology. That room was next door to the room of the
KGB officer at the Institute. The wall between his room and the official
room was made of a false front "file case" designed for recording all
conversations that occurred there.
3. In 1983, by a set of very unusual circumstances, my wife and I went to
Moscow as part of a delegationg led by Urie Bronfenbrenner. The meeting
was held at the Lomov Institute. It was, as usual, difficult to have
Vygotskians included in the discussions, but Davydov was allowed to talk
(Zinchenko was not).
My wife, a journalist by profession, decided to study the Russian
human potential movement of the period (an article subsequently published
in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology-- articles not totally critical
off all aspects of Soviet life were not saleable at the time-- remember the
evil empire?). As part of her research, she spent a lot of time with
people concerned about the blind-deaf. In this connection, she was invited
to a clandestine meeting by Felix Mikhailov, at which a young Englishman
named David Bakhurst was giving lectures on Wittgenstein and Ilyenkov. The
then-head of the Inst of Pedagogical Sciences-- who replaced Davydov who
had been removed from his post as director of the institute and kicked out
of the Party-- was livid that the meeting took place. The impotence that
Anna spoke of was evidenced by the fact that Mikhailov, Bibler, and other
scholars who dared to attend did not, so far as I know, suffer from their
attendance.
No bottom line to this, just a footnote about the very different realities
that Russians and Americans, even those very few Americans who could
understand Russian and knew something about Soviet life, experienced even
when in the same meetings, staying at the same hotels.
The Communist party was not so impotent at the time that it failed to send
provacteurs in the form of prostitutes to hotel rooms or to arrange for
convenient rides, just when they were needed, by Soviet colleagues who
just happened to be passing by when the rides were needed.
My own view, as an outsider, was that if you weren't paranoid under those
circumstances, you simply didn't know what was going on. That went for
both Amerericans and our Soviet colleagues.
mike
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