Hi,
Mike mentions some of the events of the 70s and 80s and contact between
Soviet collegues and those of us residing in the USA. My somewhat difficult
road towards citizenship in this country is strangely connected to these
contacts. I was a resident alien when I started to work with Mike, Sylvia
Scribner and Ellen Souberman on the manuscripts which eventually became the
basis of Mind in Society. Luria was still alive and I corresponded with him
in English. He kindly answered some of my questions. while Mike was away on
his field work. The correspondence turned up in the INS office in El Paso,
and I was accused by the officers of the Immigration and Naturalization
service of denying that I knew Russian, they considered me dangerous. They
denied my application. But this being America, there was a transcript of the
interrogation which was suffieciently brutal, particularly about my
experiences during World War II, that it eventually mobilized some
influential citizens. After a few years,(during the Carter administration)
the decision was reversed, and I became a citizen. My story may be relevant
today as non-citizens are experiencing anew the awesome power of the INS.
Another memory:In 1980, The Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago
organized an international meeting of Vygotsky scholars with Jim Wertsch's
help and leadership. Davydov was present, but Zinchenko was unable to
attend. I wondered about the difference in their ability to travel. Mike was
that before or after Davydov was expelled from the party?
I guess it is not surprising that part of Vygotsky's legacy is a
politically complex and difficult one,
Vera
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Saturday, February 02, 2002 6:55 PM
Subject: thanks Anna, Peter and......
>
>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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