RE: Carpay article in the latest MCA

From: Stetsenko, Anna (AStetsenko@gc.cuny.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 02 2002 - 16:43:58 PST


 Peter, I am so glad you asked about this. Just two days ago I read this MCA
piece and since then have been contemplating the best way to share
information and express my puzzlement about this curious piece. I apologize
that I will have to respond in some detail, perhaps of interest to only few
people on this list...

First of all, this piece is not an article by Jacque Carpay but a record of
an interview with Vassilii Vassiljevich Davydov with a short introduction by
Carpay and in his translation. In this interview, Davydov indeed recalls of
an All-Union Vygotsky Conference of 1981 and his struggle with several party
officials who, the reader is told, shut down the Conference. Davydov's story
ends with his recollection of how the materials of the Conference have been,
supposedly, rescued from the oblivion by being send to the West through
Norris Minnick (to either Mike Cole or Jim Wertsch). Then, there is also a
short Afterword by Carpay in which he alludes to a 1992 Conference on
Vygotsky, creating an overall impression that it is only then, in early
1990s, that the Vygotsky's name became finally rehabilitated in Russia and
his theory was allowed to be discussed and circulated (I left my copy of
this MCA volume at campus too and am here restoring only the major details
from memory).

It is then very logical indeed to ask, as Peter does, about the fate of this
rescued manuscript of the Conference presentations. It is also very logical
to walk away from reading this MCA piece with a reinforced picture of the
dark Soviet times even in the 1980s in which party officials, in a
disgusting ideologically driven tour de force, were banning Vygotsky
Conference and his theory in general and forcing the otherwise powerless
scholars to rescue at least the manuscripts of this Conference through the
private channels to the West. This picture goes well with other portrayals
of these times as the ones in which Vygotsky was a semi-banned name with
only underground copies of his works in circulation among the Moscow
psychological community (see, for example, Kozulin's book 'Vygotsky's
psychology: A biography of ideas', 1990).

Well, yes, that would be a legitimate picture if not just one little glitch
in this whole story. This little glitch is that THIS VYGOTSKY CONFERENCE DID
TAKE PLACE IN MOSCOW IN 1981. And the conference materials have been
published and I here have a copy of the proceedings of this Conference on my
desk, titled "Scientific legacy of L.S. Vygotsky and Contemporary
Psychology: Proceedings of All-Union Conference, Moscow, June 23-25 1981,"
published by The Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR and the
Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the same Academy. This
volume was distributed at the Conference, to all the participants, but
quickly became a rarity due to its limited edition -- only 500 copies.

The Conference was actually an amazing and memorable to many event. It
brought together, from all over the country, numerous scholars working in
the Vygotsky's tradition in diverse sub-disciplines of psychology and some
other social sciences such as linguistics, philosophy, and education. It is
so memorable because so many of the older generation of Soviet
psychologists, many of them immediate followers of Vygotsky, were still
alive and participated in this Conference, including Gal'perin, El'konin,
Zaporozhets, and Zeigarnik. It is so memorable also because of the lively
and often blistering debates that took place during the Conference, such as
the one between Davydov and Shedrovitskij. It is also memorable because it
represented and revealed both the diversity and unity of various research
branches and directions that stemmed from the same foundation of Vygotsky's
theory. And although the proceedings of the Conference only contain
abstracts of the talks, even these abstracts (sometimes quite extended, up
to 5-6 pages) are an amazing testament to the versatility and richness of
the Vygotsky's school in psychology as it developed in the Soviet Union in
the decades after his death. The most amazing abstracts, in my view, are
those by D.B. Elkonin "L.S. Vygotsky today" and P. Ya. Gal'perin "Ideas of
L. S. Vygotsky and the tasks for psychology today". (this Conference is so
memorable to me personally also because it was the first time I had an
opportunity to speak at a professional meeting, and what a meeting this
was).

Now, the question is of course, how is it that Davydov speaks about this
Conference in terms that create an impression that it had been banned. I
have no doubts that Jacque Carpay, a person of highest integrity and also
deep knowledge about Russia, made every effort to convey the meaning of
Davydov's words in his translation. But yet something went somewhat wrong
here. Either Davydov's words are taken out of a larger context in that
perhaps he refers to events that indeed took place and the Conference was
indeed shut down and simply does not mention, in the same piece, that it did
took place, perhaps several months later than initially planned (I might not
know of some deviations in the schedule of how this conference was planned
versus how it then was eventually held; will ask my colleagues in Moscow who
might know more about these details). If this was the case, than it would
strongly speak as to what I see was an almost complete impotence of the
communist party by the 1980s - the impotence that by the way resulted, just
few years later, already by 1987, in Gorbachev's dramatic change of the
party's course and the introduction of freedom of press, abolishing all and
every party controls in the course of his perestrojka - long before
Yeltsin's era.

I see this interview by Davydov as him drawing attention to himself being at
the forefront of promoting and developing the Vygotsky's school against the
alternative schools in psychology such as the ones headed by Boris Lomov and
Alexej Bodalev. And indeed he was at this forefront, no doubt about this. It
is because of his efforts in this direction, in addition to him being the
author of one of the most productive theories that further developed
Vygotsky's insights, that he deserved the deepest admiration of Russian
psychologists and remains one of the most revered scholars of his
generation. So, I believe, he had all the right to draw attention to this
role of his in promoting Vygotsky's approach while speaking to a colleague
from the West. Could he dramatize the events a little bit in this interview
by omitting the details about how the Conference eventually took place? Or
could it be that he just did not have enough time to dwell on other aspects
of this story because this was clearly not an official interview but a
private friendly conversation? - in my impression at least.

Whatever the explanation for this bizarre glitch and the resulting twisted
picture of events (obviously nobody's fault but an unfortunate play of
circumstances), one should also not forget the overall context of the
academic life of these times that differed dramatically from that of the
Western context. The competing schools in psychology, such as the two most
prominent ones - Vygotsky's and Lomov's - had no economic means of promoting
their agenda such as the ones existing in the West - those of providing
grants to certain research directions and not the others. So, the academic
competition in the USSR often took the form of drawing on the power of
influential figures, such as party officials, who could limit the access to
the publishing recourses and international travel, for example, of certain
scholars. Lomov and Bodalev, so the common knowledge goes, often used their
high connections for the benefit of their academic agenda. The assertion
that the communist party itself, in the 70s and 80s, had some stakes in
suppressing the Vygotsky's heritage in some significant ways, and apart from
some not very successful incidents as described in Davydov's interview, is
far from evident. If this were the case, it would be difficult to explain
how was it that Vygotsky's approach (or Vygotsky-Leont'ev-Luria school) was
the one at the core of the whole education at the Moscow State University
(the single most influential college in the whole country) and several
prominent research institutes (such as the one where Vygotsky's conference
was held) throughout many decades, that Vygotsky's works were widely
published in the 70s and 80s and included even in the official textbooks on
psychology, climaxing in the publication of his 6-volumes in 1982 with a
huge circulation of 30 000 copies. Not even to mention that both Davydov and
Zinchenko, as many other representatives of the Vygotsky's school, did held
positions of very high status and power for lengthy periods of time, some
painful episodes of their struggle with the alternative schools in
psychology, and personally Lomov and Bodalev, notwithstanding.

I am clearly speaking out of concern for how the overall context and fate of
Vygotsky's school in the USSR is portrayed. History is important, hence my
modest effort to point to some clear, although not intentional, distortions.

Anna Stetsenko



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