[xmca] vygotsky and the revolution

[Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>]

Well, it took me about 6 months, but I finally finished reading Figes' 824-page tour de force, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1991-1924 (ending with Lenin's death and Stalin's ascendance). I am glad I read it, even though I was actively discouraged from doing so by some xmca subscribers, both on and off list. I would say that his general perspective does not favor the Bolsheviks, which may account for the efforts to dissuade my reading. I hope that I do have some powers of discernment that enable me to identify and read through a historian's perspective, however. (n.b. I am also aware that the US has its own history that is amenable to multiple perspectives, many of them unfavorable, so I hope I do not appear chauvinistic in finding the USSR problematic.) (full disclosure: my Jewish grandparents and two of my uncles fled Gomel in 1913 and 1916 to escape pogroms, leaving from Finland and landing in New York.)

Figes does provide, in at times numbing detail, the complexities of the transition from Tsar to USSR, which took place more or less between 1905 and the early 1920s after the two Russian revolutions (1905, 1917) brought down the Tsar; and after the civil war that followed and produced an internecine military battle for control of the Russian territories in the power vacuum. I must say that the whole affair is far more complex than I'd ever imagined, which no doubt speaks to my ignorance about most everything that's happened on this earth, in spite of my ongoing efforts to learn it. I imagine that there are many and contradictory points of view on the period and its winners and losers; and I've read but one, at least in detail. It's a history worth learning about, I'd say.

My purpose here is not to debate the merits of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, or Marx and Engels, or any of the many lesser-known figures from the revolutions (and there were several). I partly undertook this reading to get a better understanding of the context of Vygotsky's life and how his experiences mediated his construction of a theory of human development. I've read a lot of brief summaries of his life, but now must wonder how the incredible period of death and destruction that surrounded his life contributed to his beliefs about cultural difference and mediation (a major issue in his writing about defectology). He was born in 1896 in the Pale of Settlement, the Byelorussian territory to which Tsarist Russia restricted Jews, leaving them subject to death via pogroms. In 1905, with LSV at age 9, Russia lost a war to Japan, bringing about the first revolution, which was quelled. Then in 1914 World War 1 broke out, although hardly in a vacuum; it embodied many extant conflicts. At about this time Vygotsky began the work that resulted in The Psychology of Art, which he wrote mostly from a sickbed during a lengthy bout with tuberculosis over a period of about 6 years, a time that encompassed the whole of WWI and then in 1917 the Russian Revolution that brought down the Tsar-according to Figes, the Tsar's haughty lifestyle in conjunction with the people's dissatisfaction with Russia's involvement with the war (particularly their struggles against Germany) served as the tipping point in their willingness to live as his subjects.

It's quite striking that as the world raged and burned around him, LSV focused intensely on trying to figure out the role of art, particularly drama and literature, in the development of human consciousness; and in the version I read (MIT Press translation), there's no mention of revolution or politics. By the time he was done the Tsar was overthrown but the civil war between Reds and White (an affiliation of various anti-Bolsheviks, often loyal to the Tsar) was in full stride, with the two sides contending to replace him and thousands being killed in the process. Yet LSV biographies have him teaching during this time, and ultimately landing in Moscow as a psychologist, as if there were no disturbances in the environment. His career in Moscow is often described as beginning in about 1924, the year of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise, and according to documents recently unearthed, LSV was a devoted communist, even as Jews continued to be suppressed in the new regime (as testified to by no less a Bolshevik than Trotsky). So, Vygotsky's career as a Moscow psychologist took place in the 10 years between Stalin's ascendance to power and Hitler's rise in Germany-two extraordinary rulerships of modern history, both highly repressive, parochial, nationalistic, violent, and anti-Semitic-that get elided in accounts of his career, at least those I've read.

One thing I learned from Figes is that Stalin's crackdowns included repression of the arts; and Vygotsky never returned to his early considerations of the theater with nearly the focus that produced The Psychology of Art. I imagine that the repressive environment had something to do with that, but I'm only guessing from my historical vantage point. I have to believe that LSV was not doing psychology in a vacuum. So how did the tumult surrounding his career contribute to his thinking? If mediation is central to development, it seems to me that it has to matter.

One thing about the revolutions that I have yet to figure out is how extensive they were. Most of the action seems centered in the east, where Moscow and St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/Stalingrad are located, and thus the locus of power and resources. But Russia spans 13 time zones, stretches to the Pacific and Bering Straits, and includes 17,075,200 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi), giving it more than one-ninth of the world's land area. Luria's Uzbekistan study suggests that the revolutions barely touched remote areas, even in the western region. So I can't figure out how the whole of the nation was affected by the revolutions, except perhaps for Siberia's service as place of exile.

Well, too much perhaps, but those are some thoughts following my reading of this interesting history. Any help with contextualizing LSV's career in light of these events is greatly appreciated. Thx,p
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