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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