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Peter:
I think you are absolutely right to emphasize that the Russian Revolution wasn't a single nationwide event; it was concentrated in only two large cities. However, the Civil War which followed immediatly upon the insurrection was indeed nationwide, and of course the great economic transformation which changed Russia from "The Sick Man of Europe" to a global power that not only laid the foundations for space exploration but also created the rudiments of the world's first truly scientific psychology was the work of a whole nation.
I think that the way that this minor splash was able to create such large ripples is actually related to those rudiments, because one of Vygotsky's key contributions (so it seems to me) is directly related to the concept of uneven and combined development, which was the theoretical justification put forward by Trotsky for Lenin's seizure of power ahead of the rise of a capitalist class to be overthrown.
Lenin himself planned on a period of capitalist rule by the working class and peasant parties. The idea he put forward right up to April 1917 was the "bourgeois democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". The workers parties and the social-revolutionaries (representing the peasants) would give land to the peasants, make peace with the Germans, and carry out simple democratic reforms until the working class was numerically the most powerful force in the country and would rule in its own name and according to its own interests.
Trotsky pointed out that this assumed a national, rather than a global, economy. In important ways, Russia not only had a capitalist class, it had concentrations of capital that were not possible even in Germany precisely because development (often foreign investment) was so heavily concentrated in a few centres. (Paradoxically, the Germans built bigger factories in Russia than they did at home; you can see the same sort of thing in China if you just look out the window of the train that connects Hongkong and Guangzhou).
For Trotsky, uneven and combined development, that is, the juxtaposition of the most backward and the most advanced, was the rule and not just the exception. Combined development occurs precisely because of uneven development; the reason WHY Russia absorbs the most advanced forms of capital is that it is only these advanced forms of capital that get exported. That was why Russia and China had far more compact, organizable, and militant working classes than other countries, and why, politically, capitalism snapped at what was, economically, at once the weakest and the strongest link of the chain.
Vygotsky believes this too. Uneven and combined development is the rule and not the exception for psychological functions. Cognitive development happens precisely because development occurs unequally in a society (factory workers more than farmers or forest dwellers, parents more than children). And combined development happens precisely because of uneven development; the reason why children learn signs before they even learn the use of tools is that it is precisely these advanced forms of mediating activity that get exported. The reason why my mother in law read Gorky and Gogol to her illiterate mother is much the same reason why my neice has to teach me how to use a cell phone.
Here's an example that will interest you as a literacy person (I still remember reading your early work as a graduate student in 1991--my professor Keith Johnson was much influenced by it). It might also greatly shock Andy (but not surprise Martin). Vygotsky is talking about the child's very first drawings, and he notes that they are not depictions of objects but rather attempts at rendering speech.
"When the child, drawing, displays the new treasures of his memory, this is done by way of speech, as if by way of narration. The main trait of this method: a certain degree of abstraction which all verbal description necessarily and naturally must compel. We see, therefore, that drawing is a graphic speech arising on the basis of verbal speech. Schemata which characterize the first drawings of the child resemble verbal concepts, which convey only the essential and constant features of objects." (p. 138 of Vol. 4 of the Collected Works, bottom of the page, but this is my translation).
Weirdly, Vygotsky then goes on to describe how this form of "written speech" is really, from a psychological point of view, the depiction of objects and not the depiction of meanings at all. So we have an almost pure case of uneven and combined development, an abstract verbal concept in the way in which the symbols are arranged on paper (as a cartoon, sometimes even with speech bubbles and marks for motion) and a mere array of things in the child's mind. It's not too hard to see how Vygotsky and Sakharov could have developed from this their idea of a pseudoconcept; something conceptually developed on the outside but complexive and underdeveloped within.
What was true in space was doubly true of time: the revolution was by no means a single sharp shock that totally transformed a whole country. It would surprise me only a little if Vygotsky wrote anti-Bolshevik articles in 1917. On the one hand, it would be deeply ungrateful and uncharacteristically ungenerous, given that the Bolsheviks at a stroke wiped away discrimination against Jews in public life, something that Vygotsky had, up to that time, largely avoided only by incredible luck (such as winning the lottery for admission to Moscow University). On the other, it would be evidence that he was deeply influenced by people like Shpet at Shanyavsky University, where he was studyiing part time.
But what really DID surprise me was THIS picture, which was taken about the time that Leontiev and Luria were setting up a separate school in Kharkov.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GolodomorKharkiv.jpg
(A couple of years ago there was a CNN clip widely shown here in South Korea showing similar scenes allegedly shot in North Korea, but on closer inspection the "bodies" on the street proved to be quite well fed and were probably drunks, and I noticed street signs that were in Chinese!)
But there are too many pictures like this from Kharkov to discount. This was in a town of 417,000, about the size of the Minneapolis where I grew up; the Pyatorka must have seen this sort of thing on the street on their way to work fairly often. (We know that Vygotsky, in replicating the "chicken" experiments would use acorns that he gathered in the woods as prizes for the starving children, and they must have found these more than usually motivating.)
Of course, as in North Korea (and in China) there is a simple explanation that the regime could offer the people for the failure of the country to develop evently more than a decade and a half AFTER ther revolution--others are developing, and the developers are strangling us. The explanation had the advantage of being true--no aid was offered to North Korea, or to China in 1959, or to the Soviet Ukraine. So this too is uneven and combined development, seen on a world scale.
Many people have remarked how Vygotsky's conception of development is tragic without being Rousseauian and romantic. Yes, and no wonder.
David Kellogg Hankuk University of Foreign Studies --------- 원본 메일 ---------
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