Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia 0198825056, 9780198825050

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Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/2/2020, SPi

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Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia ANDY BYFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Andy Byford 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957896 ISBN 978–0–19–882505–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Fadhila and Ali.

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Contents Preface List of Figures List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction: Sciences of the Child in Transnational Perspective

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2. The Upbringing of Man: Of Nurture and Nature

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3. Pedagogy as Science: Across Professions and Disciplines

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4. The Imperfect Child: Between Diagnostics and Therapeutics

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5. Child Science in Revolution: From Trauma to Transformation

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6. The Making of Pedology: Science and the State

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7. Pedology at Work: Instrument and Occupation

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8. Conclusion: The Afterlife of a ‘Repressed Science’

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Bibliography Index

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Preface Research on which this book is based began in Oxford in the autumn of 2004, when I was appointed postdoctoral assistant on the project ‘Childhood in Russia: A Social and Cultural History’ (2003–6), led by Catriona Kelly (New College, University of Oxford) and funded by the Leverhulme Trust (F/08736/A). I had not previously worked on the history of childhood or the human sciences, nor did I have prior knowledge of the history of child study, in Russia or elsewhere. However, having just completed a doctoral thesis on the institutionalization of literary studies as an academic discipline in late imperial Russia, I had an interest in researching domains of knowledge and professional identities that formed around seemingly self-evident, but in fact far from straightforward, epistemic objects. Thus, the step that I was making from charting the formation of a ‘science of literature’ to exploring the constitution of a ‘science of the child’ was perhaps not as great as might first appear. While I was able, initially at least, to remain on the (for me) familiar territory of the Russian empire during the reigns of the last three tsars, the project required the reconstruction of an entirely different network of actors and institutions—a whole new social field, governed by its own dynamic of expertise-formation. My initial approach was to focus on the history of the discipline that seemed to lie at the core of child study—namely psychology, especially the tentative beginnings in Russia of experimental psychology, which at the turn of the twentieth century thrived in the realm of education. However, what I soon came to realize was that to understand how and why a distinctive domain of knowledge formed around ‘the child’ at this historical juncture, it was not enough to study the institutional and epistemic structures of science itself. Rather, it was essential first to grasp the constitution of those social realms in which this emergent body of knowledge was acquiring meaning and pertinence precisely as ‘science’. These, it turned out, were, first and foremost, specific territories of professional work and responsibility that were crystallizing around questions of child development, socialization, education, and health, which together formed a (to my mind) common field of complex jurisdictional interactions. I decided early on that the politics of inter-professional relations was key to making sense of this field. The conceptual framework of Andrew Abbott’s System of Professions (1988) provided me at the time with a particularly useful lens through which to observe this field’s dynamics with greater clarity and confidence.¹ ¹ Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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My empirical base of choice was the wide range of professional journals in education, psychology, and medicine that were proliferating in the Russian empire in the decades between the 1860s’ Great Reforms of Alexander II and the collapse of tsarism in 1917. These contained a veritable treasure-trove of information on the institutional evolution of all the relevant professional domains. Between 2004 and 2006 I was able to source most of what I needed in libraries in the UK (the Bodleian, the British Library, and the Baykov Library of the University of Birmingham), Finland (the Slavonic Library at the National Library of Finland), and Russia (the Russian National Library in St Petersburg). The outcome of this initial phase of research were three articles that came out between 2006 and 2008, each charting a slightly different zone of interactions around problems of disciplinary identity and professional expertise on the boundaries between psychology, education, and medicine.² This work forms the core of the chapter titled ‘Pedagogy as Science: Across Professions and Disciplines’. From the autumn of 2007 till the end of 2010 I was compelled to take a break from this research as I first took up a postdoctoral position at Oxford to work on an entirely different project, and then spent a year settling into my first permanent job—a Lectureship at Durham University, to which I was appointed in the autumn of 2009. The history of child science was, however, a topic I was eager to return to, and I was finally able to take my original project out of the ‘deep freeze’ at the start of 2011, when I successfully applied first for a Small Research Grant from the British Academy (BA; SG101445) and then a six-month EarlyCareer Research Fellowship awarded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC; AH/J00362X/1). This funding enabled me to carry out successive research trips to Moscow in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, and to expand the remit of my project in a number of ways. In terms of chronology, my research extended into the early Soviet era, which had, of course, been the plan from the very beginning. In terms of source base, I now had more time to explore relevant archives, with materials stored at the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Education proving especially useful. At the same time, I continued to amass published sources from Moscow’s libraries, including not just the Russian State Library, but also the Ushinsky Scientific Pedagogical Library. Throughout this period, I also had the opportunity to engage actively with a team of contemporary educational psychologists based at the Moscow Pedagogical State University (Moskovskii Pedagogicheskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet; MPGU), one of the historic centres of child science from the early Soviet era. The fruitfulness of my annual research trips to Moscow ² Andy Byford, ‘Professional Cross-Dressing: Doctors in Education in Late Imperial Russia (1881– 1917)’, The Russian Review, 2006, 65(4): 586–616. Andy Byford, ‘Psychology at High School in Late Imperial Russia (1881–1917)’, History of Education Quarterly, 2008, 48(2): 265–97. Andy Byford, ‘Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917)’, Osiris, 2008, 23: 50–81.

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owe a huge deal to the friendship and hospitality of this group, especially their leader, Aleksei Obukhov, which included both unfailing practical assistance and highly receptive and perceptive engagement with my ideas and findings. These interactions played no small part in prompting me to start asking some new research questions, which, while not representing a complete departure from my initial angle of approach, added important layers to it. As suggested above, the first phase of my research (2004–7) emphasized above all else transgressions of jurisdictional boundaries that took place in negotiations between different professional groups clustering around ‘the child’ as a common object of interest. The second phase (2012–14) was, by contrast, dominated by efforts to understand the field’s dynamics in terms of a rather different mode of politics—namely the question of how actors mobilized into a common scientific and/or professional endeavour, irrespective of epistemic differences and jurisdictional tensions—a topic for which insights from the sociology of social and intellectual movements proved especially useful.³ I also turned my eye to some of the key instruments of professional and scientific work in the field—notably observational diaries and mental tests—for their use appeared to be crucial in interconnecting the field’s different domains, even as jurisdictional divisions and status hierarchies separating them continued to be maintained.⁴ What also proved significant about this new line of inquiry was that I reached a much greater appreciation of the role that parents played in the field. Work on this topic resulted in a couple of journal articles that feed the chapter titled ‘The Upbringing of Man: Of Nurture and Nature’.⁵ An important consequence of looking at educated parents as a group motivated by merely quasi-professional interests (those associated with their responsibility for children’s ‘upbringing’) was the realization that the lens of professional politics, important as it may be for comprehending interactions along the various internal boundaries of child science, was ultimately insufficient when it came to explaining the politics of this field taken as a whole. The latter evidently depended on a set of much broader issues, not least the problem of class biosocial reproduction, a matter

³ Especially useful in this context has been Scott Frickel and Neil Gross, ‘A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements’, American Sociological Review, 2005, 70: 204–32. ⁴ This research resulted in further articles addressing various cases exemplifying some of the above dynamics. These include: Endi Baiford [Andy Byford], ‘Zagrobnaia zhizn′ “nauki” pedologii: k voprosu o znachenii “nauchnykh dvizhenii” (i ikh istorii) dlia sovremennoi pedagogiki’, Prepodavatel′: XXI vek, 2013, no. 1: 43–55. Andy Byford, ‘The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science’, History of the Human Sciences, 2014, 27(4): 22–58. Andy Byford, ‘V. M. Bekhterev in Russian Child Science, 1900s–1920s: “Objective Psychology” / “Reflexology” as a Scientific Movement’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2016, 52(2): 99–123. This work feeds a number of chapters of the present monograph, including its Introduction and Conclusion. ⁵ Andy Byford, ‘Parent Diaries and the Child Study Movement in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia’, The Russian Review, 2013, 72(2): 212–41. Andy Byford, ‘Roditel′, uchitel′ i vrach: k istorii ikh vzaimootnoshenii v dele vospitaniia i obrazovaniia v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii’, Novye rossiiskie gumanitarnye issledovaniia, 2013, no. 8: http://www.nrgumis.ru/.

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particularly acute in societies undergoing turbulent transformations associated with accelerated modernization, as was the case with late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. The period 2013–14 proved to be an important turning point in the evolution of this project in other ways as well, thanks especially to my discovery of Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1943, 1950, 1966, 1970).⁶ This seminal study in the philosophy of medicine and the life sciences thoroughly reshaped my thinking about the field I was researching. From then on, the ‘science of the child’ became in my understanding an enterprise rooted in some of the core problems of the epistemology of ‘life’ itself—a science caught up in a web of epistemological contradictions that emanated from its ambition to grasp the ‘laws’ of human development. Canguilhem’s elaboration of the epistemic consequences of the fundamentally normative nature of ‘life’ caused a veritable revolution in my approach, prompting me to re-view the field I was exploring as one shaped by interactions not simply between distinct professional self-identities but distinct normative framings of ‘development’, which (I came to realize) lay at the heart of the work that the professions in question were conducting. André Turmel’s A Historical Sociology of Childhood (2008),⁷ which I encountered not long after, confirmed to me that norms of development were what a science of childhood was ultimately about, and that there were, in fact, a number of competing normative regimes framing development within the same field of child science. In consequence, my research at this juncture shifted towards explorations of those areas of child study in Russia and the Soviet Union where different normative frames intersected in particularly interesting ways. Areas that dealt with ‘pathologies’ of development—notably the subfield of child science associated with special education that was in the Soviet era institutionalized as ‘defectology’—became a topic of particular interest around this time. This research resulted in a number of articles, parts of which have made it into the chapter titled ‘The Imperfect Child: Between Diagnostics and Therapeutics’.⁸ Crucial to the final stretch of research that went into completing this book was the twelve-month British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (MD140022), which I was lucky to be awarded for the academic year 2015–16. In addition to providing invaluable writing time, this grant also funded one final research trip to Finland and Russia in the spring of 2016, enabling me to source outstanding materials from libraries and archives. Particularly important at this stage became the ⁶ Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991). ⁷ André Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). ⁸ Andy Byford, ‘Poniatiia subnormy i patologii v istorii rossiiskoi nauki o rebenke’, Voprosy psikhologii, 2015, no. 1: 111–22. Andy Byford, ‘The Imperfect Child in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, History of Education, 2017, 46(5): 595–617. Andy Byford, ‘Lechebnaia pedagogika: The Concept and Practice of Therapy in Russian Defectology, c. 1880–1936’, Medical History, 2018, 62 (1): 67–90.

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realization that the concern with the development of children’s bodies and minds, and the way in which a ‘science of the child’ approached this issue, was never just about the development of specific organisms or even populations but also about the development of society as such. This led me to explore more carefully how Russia’s ‘science of the child’ became embroiled in articulating norms of social development in the wider sense, and this in two major contexts that can be seen to distinguish Russo-Soviet history in the early twentieth-century—the question of what happens to norms of development in the midst of violent, cataclysmic upheavals, such as war and revolution; and the problem of negotiating norms of development in the culturally and biologically highly diverse setting of a multiethnic empire.⁹ From 2016, though, I became preoccupied mostly with trying to make sense of what precisely happened with the field of child science in the early Soviet era. Despite the fact that the rise and fall of ‘pedology’ (as the field came to be known in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1930s) had already been written about at length by historians researching the topic in the 1990s and 2000s, the reigning narrative of this field’s evolution during the first couple of decades of Bolshevik power remained, to my mind, fuzzy. It was clear that the dynamics of the institutionalization of child science in Russia had changed drastically after 1917, if in somewhat predictable ways: its mobilization came to be shaped by revolutionary politics, utopian rhetoric, the expansions of an interventionist state, increasingly stringent ideological demands coming from the new powerholders, and, ultimately, internal struggles within the Bolshevik Party. At the same time, some of the key perspectives that I had developed in my research on tsarist Russia still applied to the Soviet era yet had not been properly accounted for in extant analyses of this period. The intersection of distinct professional jurisdictions and competing normative frames of development remained as relevant as before; as did the fact that the field was shaped by intertwined yet, in principle, distinct mobilizations— scientific and occupational—each needing to be understood both in its own terms and as part of a larger picture. However, my key realization at this point was that the seismic event that had changed the rules of the game in 1917 was above all the sudden shift in the size and character of the ‘population of concern’, which took place in the unprecedented circumstances of the Soviet 1920s. The fact that the total mass of the former empire’s child population was now expected to become subject to a common overarching normative regime of development, caused a truly revolutionary overhaul of the entire normative context in which child science in Russia

⁹ Andy Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2016, 9(3): 450–69. Andy Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s’, Ab Imperio, 2016, no. 2: 71–124.

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was operating. This was what had led to such a remarkable expansion of child science in the Soviet 1920s, but also what embroiled the field in a whole new set of problems—practical, epistemological, ideological. I still needed a further couple of years (2017–18) to try and work out in what ways precisely this governed the institutional evolution of Soviet pedology across the 1920s–1930s, especially when it came to explaining the various political ups and downs that shaped the field’s fate during this period, including pedology’s infamous demise in the mid-1930s. Crucial to this last phase of work on the monograph was the integration of my own conceptual perspective with extant research on Soviet pedology, to which I remain gratefully indebted. The above account, while looking to make intelligible the intellectual path I followed to produce this book, is of course misleading in presenting it as an orderly evolution of thought and logical process of discovery. This is, of course, far from the truth, and the project would never have acquired the present shape without a host of serendipitous encounters and the assistance, advice and prompts of numerous individuals along the way. Since nearly fifteen years have passed between starting my research and writing these words it is nigh impossible to do justice to everyone who has in one way or another helped me. In the acknowledgements that follow I will resist listing every person by name and will, for the sake of economy, refer to some only as parts of institutions or other type of collectives (such as participants at a conference). I apologize in advance to all those who have contributed to my work in so many different ways yet whose name does not appear in these acknowledgements, whether in the interest of efficiency or through purely inadvertent omission. This project would never have even begun without the support of Catriona Kelly who initially suggested child science as a topic for me to pursue. She also, over the years, looked at drafts of a number of my articles, as well as the manuscript of the present book, always offering invaluable feedback and advice. It goes without saying that I am profoundly grateful to all the above-mentioned funding bodies—the Leverhulme Trust, the BA, and the AHRC—for supporting my research. I would, however, also like to thank those who contributed to my grant applications, including both those responsible for managing this process at Durham University and the funders’ own external peer reviewers. In this context, I would especially single out David Moon, whose advice was crucial to the success of my applications to the BA and the AHRC in 2010–11 at a stage when I was quite inexperienced in this matter. I also wish to express my thanks to Durham University more generally, for it has, as an institution, supported me unfailingly in this project since employing me in 2009, enabling its realization through several periods of research leave, and also internal funding for research trips, conference travel, public engagement activities, and conference organization. My gratitude here goes, of course, first and foremost to the people that make

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the institution—especially my immediate colleagues at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and those in Russian Studies in particular. Over the years I have been the beneficiary of funds (from Durham University in 2012–13 and the British Academy in 2015–16) that supported me specifically to promote my project to audiences beyond fellow academic specialists. Thanks to this, I was able to employ two tremendous assistants, Rachel Douglas-Jones, who was especially helpful in developing a web-presence for the project in 2012, and Polina Kliuchnikova, who has over many years been translating and editing my various papers and presentations into Russian, as part of my efforts to do as much as possible to target audiences in Russia. As I quickly learned, the interest in my topic was greater in Russia than elsewhere and tended to be welcomed and appreciated by a much broader range of constituencies. The institution that was crucial in supporting this work of public dissemination in Russia was MPGU, which acted as host for all my research trips during the 2010s. MPGU supported me administratively and generously provided accommodation in Moscow, while also organizing numerous lectures and seminars at which I showcased my research to students and practitioners, as well as to academics. Of crucial help in this were Aleksei Obukhov and Luiza Adamian, whose support over the years I cannot overstate. There are, of course, numerous other individuals in Russia who contributed to my project in various ways, but the two that I would like to cite as people who influenced my work in intellectually more significant ways are Vitaly Bezrogov in Moscow and Aleksandr Lyarsky in St Petersburg. Needless to say, I am also immensely grateful to staff at the libraries and archives that I worked at, not just those in Russia but also in Helsinki and the UK. It is also important to mention that despite my regular travels to Russia there were still times when I sought assistance from others in getting urgently needed material from Russian libraries. I am especially grateful to Inna Konrad and Sheila Pattle for providing this type of help in 2015 and 2019 respectively. In what was a protracted period of research, many of the ideas emerged thanks to my taking part in a wide range of seminars, workshops, and conferences. I presented various aspects of my research at nearly fifty events during this time and many of the questions, comments, and criticisms that I received in these interactions contributed constructively to the final outcome of the project. There were, however, several conferences that I would single out as events that played a more significant role either by forcing me to turn my attention to subtopics that I might previously have missed or by prompting me to re-examine my existing material in a new and ultimately transformative light. An invitation to a panel on the Russian concept of vospitanie (‘upbringing’) at the 44th annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held in New Orleans in November 2012, was crucial to developing my interest in parents as participants in Russian child study. The ‘Imperfect Children’ symposium, held at the Centre for Medical Humanities of the University of Leicester in September

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2013, was decisive in initiating my focus on problems of normativity in conceptualizing the sciences of the child. The workshop ‘Lechenie: Thinking about Therapy in Russian/Soviet Medicine’, held at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, in June 2014, was particularly useful in expanding my thinking about the nature of professional work in the context of child science. The workshop ‘After Shocks: War, Populations in Motion and Medicine in the Troubled 20th Century’, which took place at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, in September 2014, was crucial in prompting me to reflect on how the shifting size and character of ‘populations of concern’ affected the way in which the state, professions, and sciences approached ‘the child’ and intervened in ‘development’ in a larger social context. Invitations to present in a panel at the European Society for the History of Science biennial meeting in London in September 2018 and at the ‘Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc’ conference at the University of Nottingham in May 2019 proved valuable in helping me sharpen my arguments concerning the evolution of Soviet pedology during the final stages of completing this book. I am grateful to the organizers of all these panels and conferences, as well as to fellow participants, for their contributions. As indicated above, much of the research towards this monograph has in the first instance been developed and published in the form of journal articles. Each of these has gone through peer review and editorial processing and has thus benefited from the critical input of a large number of individuals, many of whom will inevitably remain anonymous, while others have already been acknowledged in the relevant articles themselves. I would, however, like to thank especially those who scrutinized the book proposal I submitted to Oxford University Press (OUP) as well as the final manuscript. Aside from Catriona Kelly, my gratitude here goes to Marina Mogilner and Ken Pinnow for providing both useful critical feedback and the kind of support and encouragement that I needed to bring this work to a conclusion. Finally, both the manuscript review and the subsequent editorial work done by OUP proved to be a remarkably smooth and refreshingly relaxed process. For this I thank especially my editor Cathryn Steele and all those at the press involved in this book’s production. I would like to conclude these acknowledgements with unquestionably the most important contributor to my work—my partner, Fadhila Mazanderani, whom I met in Oxford in 2009 and who has seen me at close range for an entire decade of work on this project. Her support throughout this period has been not just personal but also intellectual. As an academic with expertise in Science and Technology Studies she has been the one pointing me to practically all the key readings that at crucial moments inspired me to take important conceptual turns in my thinking about my topic. She has also not just engaged me on all the core ideas but has read through and edited drafts of practically every piece I have written on the topic, including the final manuscript of this book, purging my

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discursive tics and turning my extra-long sentences into more digestible prose wherever this was possible. Around the midpoint of the decade in question, Fadhila and I were, somewhat unexpectedly, blessed with a child. Born in the autumn of 2015, our son Ali had an instant and powerful impact on this project, which was mainly to slow it down. Becoming a parent has been transformative in numerous ways. One of these has been that I started thinking about some of the protagonists of my research in less abstract, more empathetic ways. I confess, though, that I failed to emulate my subjects and was not tempted to produce a diary of Ali’s early development. This, of course, is not to say that his treasured presence has not been inspirational in many other ways in the years that saw me finally bring this rather lengthy chapter of my intellectual life to an end. With this in mind, I dedicate this book to Fadhila and Ali. Edinburgh July 2019

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List of Figures 1. Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii, The Soul of the Child with a Short Description of the Soul of Animals and the Soul of the Adult Human (Kiev, 1911). Frontispiece of I. A. Sikorskii, Dusha rebenka s kratkim opisaniem dushi zhivotnykh i dushi vzroslogo cheloveka (Kiev: S. V. Kul′zhenko, 1911).

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2. Avgusta Aleksandrovna Dernova-Iarmolenko, Diary of a Mother: Booklet for Carrying Out Systematic Observations and Notes on the Bodily and Psychological Development of a Child (Moscow, 1911). Frontispiece of A. A. Dernova-Iarmolenko, Dnevnik materi: Knizhka dlia sistematicheskikh nabliudenii i zapisei nad telesnym i dushevnym razvitiem rebenka (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1911).

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3. Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev in his office at the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg (1913). Reproduced with the permission of the St Petersburg Central State Archive of Cinematic, Photo and Phono Documents (TsGAKFFD SPb, d. 15188).

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4. Konstantin Innokent′evich Povarnin, Privatdocent at the Military Medical Academy, Doctor of Medicine and Director of the Pedology Institute. Reproduced with the permission of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg.

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5. At the Psycho-Pedological Institute. ‘The automatic registration of breathing. Attached to the breathing strap is a special balloon filled with water, which conveys the vibrations of the child’s diaphragm to a needle that charts a “breathing curve” on a rotating cylinder with an endless paper ribbon. Even the lightest disturbance of the child’s breathing for whatever reason immediately raises the regular amplitude of the “curve”.’ From the article ‘The Perfecting of Personality’, published in the newspaper New Time in 1908 (‘Usovershenstvovanie lichnosti’, Novoe vremia, 2 April 1908, 8–10).

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6. Serezha Parinkin. ‘So far the only individual in the world lucky enough to become the object of experimentation in the search for new rational methods of upbringing!’ From the article ‘The Perfecting of Personality’, published in the newspaper New Time in 1908 (‘Usovershenstvovanie lichnosti’, Novoe vremia, 2 April 1908, 8–10).

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7. Aleksandr F. Lazurskii’s ‘star diagram’ (zvezdochka). A. Lazurskii and L. Filosofova, ‘Estestvenno-eksperimental′nye skhemy lichnosti uchashchikhsia’, Vestnik vospitaniia, 1916, no. 6: 1–51 (49).

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8. Participants of the 1909 Conference in Pedagogical Psychology. Photograph published in Iskry, 14 June 1909, 184.

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9. Organizing Committee of the 1909 Conference in Pedagogical Psychology. Sitting: [D. M.] Levshin, N. N. Lange, V. M. Bekhterev, Z. A. Moksheev, A. P. Nechaev, G. I. Chelpanov. Standing: D. A. Dril′, M. I. Konorov, Ia. I. Dushechkin, A. N. Bernshtein, A. F. Lazurskii, Dediulina, N. E. Rumiantsev, N. E. Ignat′ev, [A. S.] Griboedov, Rossovskii, [A. A.] Krogius. Photograph published in Iskry, 14 June 1909, 184.

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10. Grigorii I. Rossolimo’s ‘psychological profile’ (piskhologicheskii profil′). G. I. Rossolimo, Obshchaia kharakteristika psikhologicheskikh profilei 1) psikhicheski nedostatchnykh detei i 2) bol′nykh nervnymi i dushevnymi bolezniami (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1910), 24.

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11. Left to right: Grigorii I. Rossolimo, Aleksandr F. Lazurskii, and Aleksandr P. Nechaev (1911). Reproduced with the permission of the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Education (NA RAO f. 86, d. 46).

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12. Educational reformists at Narkompros. The Scientific Pedagogical Section of the State Academic Council (1929). Reproduced with the permission of the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Education (NA RAO f. 112, d. 337). Sitting: S. T. Shatskii, M. S. Epshtein, N. K. Krupskaia, Katanskaia, A. I. Radchenko, E. Zombe, E. T. Lifshits. Standing: V. V. Simanovskaia, O. A. Malinovskaia, M. M Pistrak, E. T. Rudneva, P. P. Blonskii, S. N. Lunacharskaia, N. M. Shul′man, I. T. Rozanov (?). See V. V. Rubtsov and M. G. Iaroshevskii (eds.), Vydaiushchiesia psikhologi Moskvy (Moscow: PI RAO, 1997), 125.

166

13. Medical check-up of pupils of the secondary general-educational school no. 30, Leningrad, 1932. Reproduced with the permission of the St Petersburg Central State Archive of Cinematic, Photo and Phono Documents (TsGAKFFD SPb, d. 477188).

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14. ‘The pedologist at work’, Pravda, 31 August 1936, 3, by Kukryniksy—the team of Soviet graphic artists consisting of Mikhail Vasil′evich Kuprianov (1903–91), Porfirii Nikitich Krylov (1902–90), and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Sokolov (1903–2000).

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List of Abbreviations AHRC ASEEES BA BNKZ DOBI EEP GARF GIEP GINP GIZ Glavnauka

Glavsotsvos

GNIOMM

GUS IFK IMShR IMVR MONO MPGU MPI MPNI MPS

Arts and Humanities Research Council Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies British Academy Biulleten′ Narodnogo Kommissariata Zdravookhraneniia (Bulletin of the People’s Commissariat of Healthcare) Detskii Obsledovatel′skii Institut (Child Diagnostic Institute) Ezhegodnik eksperimental′noi pedagogiki (Yearbook of Experimental Pedagogy) Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) Gosudarstvennyi Institut Eksperimental′noi Psikhologii (State Institute of Experimental Psychology) Gosudarstvennyi Institut Nauchnoi Pedagogiki (State Institute of Scientific Pedagogy) Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo (State Publishing House) Glavnoe Upravlenie Nauchnymi, Nauchno-khudozhestvennymi i Muzeinymi Uchrezhdeniiami (Chief Administration for Scientific, Scholarly-Artistic and Museum Institutions) Glavnoe Upravlenie Sotsial′nogo Vospitaniia i Politekhnicheskogo Obrazovaniia Detei (Chief Administration for the Social Upbringing and Polytechnic Education of Children) Gosudarstvennyi Nauchni Institut Okhrany Materinstava i Mladenchestva (State Scientific Institute for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy) Gosudarstvennyi uchenyi sovet (State Academic Council) Institut Fizicheskoi Kul′tury (Institute of Physical Culture) Institut Metodov Shkol′noi Raboty (Institute of Methods of School Work) Institut Metodov Vneshkol′noi Raboty (Institute of Methods of Extracurricular Work) Moskovskii otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia (Moscow Department of Public Education) Moskovskii Pedagogicheskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet (Moscow Pedagogical State University) Moskovskii Psikhologicheskii Institut (Moscow Institute of Psychology) Moskovskii Psikho-Nevrologicheskii Institut (Moscow PsychoNeurological Institute) Mediko-Pedagogicheskaia Stantsiia (Medico-Pedagogical Station)

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  

NA RAO Narkompros Narkomput′ Narkomzdrav NPkNSh NPS GUS PA PI PNA PNI PO PS RO RGB RS RSFSR RTsKhIDNI

Sovnarkom TsGAKFFD SPb

TsGAM TsGIA SPb TsNIIP

TsPI Tsutranpros USSR VFP VIVL

Nauchnyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Obrazovaniia (Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Education) Narodnyi Komissariat Prosveshcheniia (The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) Narodnyi Komissariat Putei Soobshchenia (The People’s Commissariat of Transport) Narodnyi Komissariat Zdravookhraneniia (The People’s Commissariat of Healthcare) Na putiakh k novoi shkole (On the Path to the New School) Nauchno Pedagogicheskaia Sektsiia Gosudarstvennogo Uchenogo Soveta (Scientific Pedagogical Section of the State Academic Council) Pedagogicheskaia Akademiia Ligi Obrazovaniia (Pedagogical Academy of the League of Education) Pedologicheskii Institut (Pedology Institute) Psikho-Nevrologicheskaia Akademiia (Psycho-Neurological Academy) Psikho-Nevrologicheskii Institut (Psycho-Neurological Institute) Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie (Pedagogical Education) Pedagogicheskii sbornik (Pedagogical Compendium) Rukopisnyi Otdel Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennoi Biblioteki (Manuscript Department of the Russian State Library) Russkaia shkola (Russian School) Rossiiskaia Sovetskaia Federativnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (Russian Centre for the Archiving and Study of Documents of Recent History) Sovet narodnykh komissarov (Council of the People’s Commissars) Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokumentov SanktPeterburga (St Petersburg Central State Archive of Cinematic, Photo and Phono Documents) Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv g. Moskvy (Central State Archive of the City of Moscow) Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (Central State Historical Archive of St Petersburg) Tsentral′nyi Nauchno-issledovatel′skii institut pedagogiki pri vysshem institute prosveshcheniia (Central Scientific-Research Institute in Pedagogy at the Higher Instititute of Education) Tsentral′nyi Pedologicheskii Institut (Central Pedological Institute) Tsentral′noe upravlenie prosveshcheniia na transporte (Central Administration of Education in Transport) Soiuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (Questions of Philosophy and Psychology) Voprosy izucheniia i vospitaniia lichnosti (Questions of the Research and Education of Personality)

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   VO VP VPKAG VPKAP VSNKh VV ZhMNP ZKV

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Vospitanie i obuchenie (Upbringing and Instruction) Vestnik prosveshcheniia (Herald of Enlightenment) Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i gipnoza (Herald of Psychology, Criminal Anthropology and Hypnosis) Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i pedologii (Herald of Psychology, Criminal Anthropology and Pedology) Vysshii Sovet Narodnogo Khoziaistva (Supreme Soviet of the National Economy) Vestnik vospitaniia (Herald of Education) Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (Journal of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment) Za kommunisticheskoe vospitanie (For Communist Upbringing)

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1 Introduction Sciences of the Child in Transnational Perspective

Modernization and the Biopolitics of Childhood Between the 1880s and the 1930s, in most modernizing societies worldwide, children, from infants to adolescents, became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest.¹ Initially, those who claimed children as distinct objects of investigation and expertise were spread across a range of imperfectly professionalized disciplinary and occupational groups, principally within the fields of medicine, education, and psychology. Out of this heterogeneous network arose a scientific and professional movement, which catalysed the institutionalization of new domains of scientific knowledge and occupational practice that have since become the norm in modern societies. These include developmental and educational psychology, special needs education, child psychiatry, juvenile criminology, and the anthropology of childhood. The turning of children into objects of systematic science was part of more general social transformations associated with accelerated modernization typical of this era. The establishment of new disciplines and occupations around the study and care of children was possible thanks to the rapid expansion and differentiation of a distinctive segment of the middle classes whose social status was built on the values of education, professionalism, and expert knowledge. This was the era that created the foundations of what Harold Perkin has dubbed ‘professional society’.² This growing stratum rooted its legitimacy, first, in the symbolic authority of scientific rationality, and second, in the moral virtues of public service for the

¹ See: André Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893–1935 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Marc Depaepe, Zum Wohl des Kindes? Pädologie, pädagogische Psychologie und experimentelle Pädagogik in Europa und den USA, 1890–1940 (Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1993). Peter Dudek, Jugend als Objekt der Wissenschaften: Geschichte der Jugendforschung in Deutschland und Österreich 1890–1933 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990). Evgenii M. Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii v pervoi tret'i XX veka (St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2012). ² Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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benefit of society as a whole.³ Directly linked with this was the growth of state welfare structures, which entailed the active fostering of science-based professional expertise as one of the most important instruments needed for effective social intervention and population management. In all modernizing societies, the growing professional strata accorded an exceptional role not only to science-based expertise but also to formal schooling and (bourgeois) family upbringing, which they cultivated as the key institutional frameworks on which their own social and cultural reproduction depended. As a result, their members became the ones making the most direct investments in the idea and practice of scientifically-grounded and expert-led study and nurture of children within these very frameworks of socialization—the family and the school—which were posited as the norm.⁴ The members of this social group were both the keenest pursuers of child science and its first clients; its most vocal promoters, as well as its main initial beneficiaries.⁵ This expanding professional middle was, more generally, among the principal drivers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century modernization and a key articulator of modernity’s social imaginaries. Turning its own values into society-wide norms, not least through actively promoting the expansion of professionalized educational, healthcare, and welfare provision to an ever-wider population, it fostered a teleological and hierarchical social ideal of both personal and collective development—physical, intellectual, moral, and civilizational—to be achieved within and through specific normative structures of socialization. It framed such ‘development’ as the path to legitimate citizenship, and applied it to society as a whole, projecting it as an expectation onto the lower, labouring, strata and others situated on society’s margins—minorities, colonial subjects, immigrants. Children, both as individual specimens and as a mass population, were identified as exemplary subjects of development. They were turned into particular biopsychosocial embodiments of development as such, the broader social meanings of which went beyond sheer ontogenesis or childhood as a special period of human life.⁶ The metaphor of ‘development’ was extended as a normative and

³ On ‘professionalism’ more generally see Terence J. Johnson, Professions and Power (London: Macmillan, 1972). See also Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). ⁴ Helga Zieher, ‘Institutionalization as a Secular Trend’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, ed. Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-Sebastian Honig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 127–39. ⁵ This is not, however, a matter of reducing child science to narrowly imagined ‘class’ or ‘status group’ interests per se. See Adrian Woolridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860–c.1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. ⁶ On ‘development’ and childhood see: Martin Woodhead, ‘Child Development and the Development of Childhood’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, 46–61. Janette Friedrich, Rita Hofstetter, and Bernard Schneuwly (eds.), Une science du développement humain estelle possible? Controverses du début du XXe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013). Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood, 248–302.

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teleological structure to ‘life’ in general—biological, social, and historical, including the life of ‘the human race’ or the life of a given ‘nation’. It was in this context that children, taken as a generation of future citizens, became the target population not only for eugenic nurture, but also for mass normative evaluation, categorization, and streaming in ‘developmental’ terms. Systematic assessment and classification of this kind was advocated as the most effective—rational, as well as just—means of managing the rapid social differentiation that came with modernization, whether this differentiation entailed a horizontal, function-based, division of labour or a vertical, merit-based, social mobility (these being the principal structuring principles of Perkin’s ‘professional society’). There were, of course, significant differences in the size, character, position, influence, and politics of the rising professional middle between Progressive-era United States, late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the French Third Republic, the newly unified German Empire, federalist Switzerland, colonialist Belgium, or late tsarist Russia, to name just some of the key states in which the new sciences of the child arose at roughly the same time and in broadly similar ways in the decades building up to the First World War. Nevertheless, the expansion and differentiation of professional groups in all these countries was invariably, if to a different degree and in a different manner, tied to the growing involvement of state structures in regulating society on a mass scale. The social ideals, cultural values, and normative frameworks of the professional classes thus came to shape many of the agendas and priorities of the welfare/warfare states that saw their historic emergence during this period.⁷ The acceleration of industrialization and the succession of mass political, social, and economic upheavals, especially those of the First World War and its ramifications, led to unprecedented levels of state expansionism by the 1930s, in close alliance with the rising professional communities and expert groups, even though the form, degree, and ideology of state interventionism varied from one modernizing state to the next. It was across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, therefore, that childhood became one of the key domains of what Michel Foucault has theorized in more general terms as modern Western biopolitics.⁸ As a subject of ‘development’, the child—complex and multiple, ambiguous and slippery as both concept and reality—was turned into one of the strategic ‘supports’ (points d’appui, to use Foucault’s terminology) for the expansion of modern forms of social and political power over human life. The scientific construction of ‘the child’ thereby became a vital element in the constitution of the twentieth-century human subject and national body politic. Both the politicization of childhood as a matter of intrinsic national interest and investment (and thus also of state protection and control) ⁷ Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, 1–26, 155–70. ⁸ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

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and its scientization as a territory of special (theoretical and applied) knowledge, operated, crucially, through the normativization of childhood as a period of carefully regulated physical, mental, and social ‘development’.⁹ Norms of development were charted as a teleological trajectory of progressive stages, demarcated by standardized physiological, psychological, and socio-cultural milestones. The new sciences of the child were crucial to this: the ‘regulation’ of childhood at both individual and population level was made possible thanks to the creation of new instruments of representation and apparatuses of knowledge-power focused on ‘the child’ as a special category. These ranged from parent diaries and developmental charts to school hygiene procedures and anthropometric or psychometric protocols. They included the new therapeutic, pedagogical, and correctional systems developed in special institutions for the ‘defective’ or the ‘delinquent’; but also a host of ‘progressive’ child-centric educational techniques, based on particular theories of the child’s ‘natural’ path of development, from the anthroposophic to the psychoanalytic. The new sciences of the child, which were to provide a knowledge system that supported and structured these regulatory practices, rooted their legitimacy in the claim that they were establishing objective norms of child development. While ‘development’ remained fundamentally teleological and normative, it was understood as ‘natural’, objectively given, and, crucially, measurable. As a consequence, norms of development came to be represented as probabilistic laws, to be arrived at by positivist experimental and statistical methods.¹⁰ These generated a quantified, and usually also visualized, expression of ‘normal’ development as a mathematical average, against which concrete developmental manifestation could then be both numerically and visually plotted as statistical deviations from it. However, the epistemology underpinning the norms of child development was never exhausted by the articulation of such ‘laws’. As Georges Canguilhem argued in his seminal study The Normal and the Pathological, while the human sciences had undergone a positivist reworking in the latter half of the nineteenth century, their epistemology remained rooted in questions of a fundamentally different order.¹¹ Key to the epistemology of the human sciences, and of the life sciences more generally, was not, Canguilhem argues, the distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, but between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Thus, despite the fact that the human sciences aspired to an epistemology rooted in the ‘lawfulness’ of human life (whether the latter was framed in deterministic or probabilistic terms), their epistemology was ultimately grounded in defining, normatively, the ‘rightness’, or indeed ‘wrongness’, of life’s phenomena. The concept of human ‘development’,

⁹ See especially Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood. ¹⁰ See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ¹¹ Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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which became so central to the sciences of childhood, served as the principal structuring device of life’s normativity. The distinction between ‘laws’ and ‘norms’ that Canguilhem identifies is crucial to understanding the sciences of the child as a domain of the human sciences. The statistically ‘normal’ development, even when grounded in the mathematical laws of probability, is itself an expression not of a ‘law’, but of a ‘norm’. The consequence of this was that the establishment of norms of development by the new sciences of the child depended less on the search for developmental averages—the elusive statistical ‘normality’—and much more on a continuous identification and categorization of imperfections in the child population. It was through the establishment of anomalies, deviations, and errors that norms of development were ultimately enshrined. Imperfections of one kind or another became a major focus of interest, inquiry, and intervention around which the diverse sciences of child development would coalesce. This involved the ambiguous juxtaposition and interplay of three very different modes through which ‘the wrong’ in the child population was identified. The aforementioned experimental-statistical (psychometric or anthropometric) establishment of ‘subnormality’ as a quantitative deviation from a statistically established average was only one of them. The other two included, first, the medically-framed clinical diagnostics of ‘pathologies’ of child development; and second, the much looser, socio-pedagogical or moral-juridical identification of ‘deviant’ or ‘maladjusted’ behaviour, defined against norms of acceptable conduct.¹² The latter applied especially to norms of behaviour created for the most important modern institutions of childhood—namely, the family and the school. It could also refer to wider social norms, such as, typically, those relating to criminal or, indeed, sexual behaviour—two further areas that child science became especially interested in, in the context of juvenile psychiatry and criminology in particular. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, a form of ideological ‘correctness’, determined through the use of survey questionnaires that assessed Soviet children’s awareness and understandings of the new, post-revolutionary socio-political environment, represents another, less familiar, example for the framing of the socially normative by child science. Given the importance accorded to education by the social groups most invested in building the new sciences of childhood at this time, it was the question of intellectual and educational development and its normative standardization that was, arguably, of the greatest concern. This was why debates around both mental testing and mental deficiency reigned over most others. Although there was certainly considerable interest in physical development and physical anomalies, especially among medical professionals, it was primarily through the mass

¹² On the three different types of norms see Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood.

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measurement of intellectual development that the new sciences of the child became enrolled most explicitly in state-wide projects, especially those focused on creating new forms of social unity by combining the widening of educational provision with a carefully managed system of meritocratic streaming—a system that the supposedly value-neutral psychometric technologies were expected to make both fair and efficient.¹³ Efforts at explaining the dynamics of ‘development’ remained, however, by and large rooted in the older deterministic perspective of nature vs. nurture. Thus, one of the most vexed questions within the child sciences continued to be the extent to which ontogenetic development, its path and especially its outcomes, were determined by innate, hereditary, biological programming or historically specific socioeconomic factors, or rather, the correspondingly unequal availability of relevant cultural resources. This question was not (and had never been) merely one of scientific theory or philosophical outlook; it was always, ultimately, a political and ideological issue. The vigorous debates that raged around this binary were in part an expression of disciplinary politics: struggles between the (broadly defined) biological vs. social sciences over whose perspective had greater claims over human life, with psychology positioning itself in mobile and precarious ways in between the two. More importantly, it was always also a matter of wider social politics, especially where the key political categories of class, race, and gender difference were at stake. The matter became particularly acute in the early Soviet Union, where the politics of both individual and collective biosocial development were seen as capable of shaping the very meanings of the Bolshevik revolution.

Towards a Cultural Genealogy of Child Science The scale of the collective mobilization and institutional organization of child science at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries was exceptional. However, the origins of modern practices of systematically observing, theorizing about, and intervening in the physical, mental, and moral development of children date back to the major cultural shifts associated with the Enlightenment. The latter’s intellectual currents included, prominently, the idea that one had to observe and understand the ‘nature of the child’ if one were to ensure the appropriate ‘nurture of the man’. The seminal educational treatises of

¹³ See: Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869– 1939 (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain c.1870–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Gillian Sutherland, Ability, Merit and Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education, 1880–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). John Carson, Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Emile ou de l’éducation (1763), respectively—shaped the naturenurture debate in this vein well into the nineteenth century and beyond. The German philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann’s journal-based observations of the first two years of his son’s development during the 1780s and the contemporaneous psychologically-grounded pedagogy of the Swiss educator Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi are two further examples of Enlightenment precursors that were eagerly claimed by the turn-of-the-twentieth-century international movement promoting the study of the child and the scientization of pedagogy. Even more important to how the latter movement came to understand its object, methods, and purpose, was the mid-nineteenth-century ‘scientist’ reframing of the originally mostly philosophical and pedagogical eighteenth-century conceptualizations of the relationship between nature and nurture. The influence of Auguste Comte’s positivist sociologization and Charles Darwin’s evolutionist biologization of human history was crucial to this. The nineteenth century also witnessed a whole series of innovations in the methodologies of the human and social sciences, from the mass deployment of population statistics and large-scale anthropometric studies of human growth to the pioneering of new experimental techniques in physiology, the neurosciences, and psychology.¹⁴ These new ‘sciences of man’ productively fused the biological with the moral, the laws with the norms of human development. Within this broadly understood, positivist as well as normative, ‘anthropology’, the study of the child acquired a vitally important and distinctive place.¹⁵ The crystallization of scientific interest in the child population towards the end of the nineteenth century involved a modulation of the positivist ‘progressivism’ of the mid-nineteenth century with the rather more ambivalent ‘millenarianism’ of the turn of the twentieth, which interlaced apocalyptic anxieties over the ‘degeneration’ of the human race with utopian hopes in humanity’s unfettered eugenic improvement.¹⁶ ¹⁴ J. M. Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Roger Smith, The Human Sciences (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). ¹⁵ See especially Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood. ¹⁶ See: William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Mark Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). On eugenics related to children and youth see: R. A. Lowe, ‘Eugenicists, Doctors, and the Quest for National Efficiency: An Educational Crusade, 1900–1939’, History of Education, 1979, 8(4): 293–306. Jürgen Bennack, Gesundheit und Schule: Zur Geschichte der Schulhygiene im preußischen Volksschulewesen 1794 bis 1947 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1990). Julia Rodriguez, Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine and the Modern State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda (eds.), Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011). On Russia specifically see also: Nikolai Krementsov, ‘From “Beastly Philosophy” to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union’, Annals of Science, 2011, 68(1): 61–92. Nikolai Krementsov, ‘The Strength of a Loosely Defined Movement: Eugenics and Medicine in Imperial Russia’, Medical History, 2015, 59(1): 6–31. Nikolai Krementsov, With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018).

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It was, however, mostly thanks to the acceleration of industrialization and the accompanying expansion of the state apparatus that the child population became framed as the embodiment of a given society’s future. As a topic of public discourse, ‘the child’ came to be discussed in a way not unlike ‘the environment’ is today—in terms of the values invested in it and the anxieties surrounding it, in the context of what was perceived as the unparalleled upheavals, risks, and uncertainties that came with ‘modern times’. It is in this sense that one might read Ellen Key’s seminal essay The Century of the Child (1900). In response to both hopes and fears, those involved in the new sciences of the child were often driven to make ambitious claims about the importance of their expertise to national prosperity and the progress of civilization, promising new techniques for the rationalization and enhancement of human potential. The rhetoric framing such promises combined the values of efficient rationality with those of high moral and even religious purpose. Much of the child-centrism of the turn of the twentieth century continued, moreover, to be rooted in romantic conceptions of childhood that identified ‘the child’ with ‘nature’, imbuing both these concepts with a dose of mysticism. This did not, however, prevent the embedding of either ‘the child’ or its ‘nature’ into a conceptual framework of structured development that called for systematic scientific understanding and rational control. In the turbulent and often traumatic conditions of the early twentieth century, ‘the child’ became a figure not only of society’s progressive, salutary advancement, but also of this advancement’s fundamental precariousness.¹⁷ ‘The child’ was sometimes associated with the breakdown of norms, becoming a symbol of ‘regression’ (as the ‘moral defective’, for instance). At other times, it became a lost and longed for normative ideal (as in the romantic child-centrism that explicitly or implicitly underpinned most progressive educational movements in this period). And finally, it could also be identified with the construction of an entirely new set of norms (especially in utopian ideas about the rise of the ‘new Man’).¹⁸ What turned ‘the child’ into such a pivotal figure in this context was its normative ambiguity. Indeed, one of the key dichotomies in the history of adult constructions of ‘childhood’ has been that of depravity versus innocence: childhood has historically been cast as a moment of both purity and immorality, both vulnerability and criminality.¹⁹ ¹⁷ See: Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Routledge, 2005). Harry Hendrick, ‘The Evolution of Childhood in Western Europe c. 1400–c. 1750’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, 99–113. John Gillis, ‘Transitions to Modernity’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, 114–26. Suzanne Shanahan, ‘Lost and Found: The Sociological Ambivalence toward Childhood’, Annual Review of Sociology, 2007, 33(1): 407–28. ¹⁸ For examples from Russia see Andy Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2016, 9(3): 450–69. ¹⁹ Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (London: Polity Press, 2001). See also Michel Foucault, ‘The Abnormals’, in his Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 51–7.

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Furthermore, as an object of research, intervention, and care, ‘the child’ has been invariably treated as a function of biosocial reproduction, and hence of the adults’ self-reflection. The sense in which the child was a human being ‘in formation’ was that an idealized—normal, healthy, balanced, civilized—adult (the adult of a certain class, ethnicity, and culture) was posited as the norm that the child was expected to transform into, or rather (re)produce. However, ‘the child’ was in this context scrutinized also as the emblem of the non-given-ness of such development’s desired ‘healthy’ path. This concern echoed pre-romantic views, dating back to at least the seventeenth century, which understood children’s inherent innocence as paradoxically entailing a perilous potential for evil; it meant that the imperative of protecting the vulnerable child required its subjection to the strictures of moral discipline. Thus, the child population, arguably far more than any other group in society, came to continuously yield ‘problem’ subgroups deemed to require special classification and segregation, as well as expert-led study and pedagogical, therapeutic, or correctional intervention.²⁰ Children’s development was moreover always assumed to depend on social mediation, whether in the form of extrinsic ‘moulding’ or ‘steeling’, or through the nurturing of the child’s own intrinsic ‘nature’. Such mediation was considered essential for a population of children to be transformed into a population of authentic, developed human beings, healthy and balanced citizens, productive and efficient labourers, or, in some cases, utopian ‘new people’ (whatever the political ideology or cultural imagination framing the latter). The rationales produced in support of such ambitions were multiple and often contradictory: discourses on the inherent rights and natural freedoms of the child as an autonomous human subject whose authenticity and integrity required support and protection could stand side by side with eugenic proclamations which, using metaphors from engineering or agriculture, described the child population as a valuable national resource of malleable ‘human material’ to be invested in, reworked, or cultivated for the benefits of a higher cause. An important feature of the post-Enlightenment differentiation of ‘childhood’ from ‘adulthood’ was that both ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’, and, crucially, their connection—the ‘developmental’ passage from the former to the latter—served as functions of ‘the civilizing process’ (whether ‘civilization’ was viewed as positive and necessary, or as problematic and precarious, as in the thought of Rousseau or Tolstoi).²¹ With nineteenth-century evolutionism’s reframing of both biological and sociological understandings of humanity’s civilizational development (say, in the writings of Herbert Spencer), children came to be represented as only

²⁰ See Kathleen W. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). ²¹ Reference is here made to Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).

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‘emergently’ human and thus on a par with other groups positioned lower down the evolutionary and civilizational scale, such as the great apes or ‘the primitive man’.²² This was why Ernst Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic law’ of ‘recapitulation’—the idea that ontogenesis, the development of the organism, reproduced phylogenesis, the evolution of the species—enjoyed such popularity among the new sciences of the child at the turn of the twentieth century. The new ‘scientific’ observations of children thus frequently overlapped with studies of animal behaviour, while anthropological representations of the ascent of man came to serve as a convenient repository of analogies for modelling the stages of child development, and vice versa.²³ The modern separation of the category of the developing child from that of the rational and civilized adult was continuously reaffirmed in the ‘disinterestedness’ of objective scrutiny that was expected of the new sciences of childhood (or indeed of any professional observation or verdict concerning child development and socialization). This attitude was identified with ‘science’, and invariably gendered as male. Yet the fascination with children as ‘different’—as a largely unknown, mysterious, and in many ways outlandish category of being, which required special ways of understanding and new means of investigation—went beyond the discourses of the organized sciences and professions, pervading wider cultural representations of childhood typical of this period, at least among the educated middle classes.²⁴ Yet this ‘scientific’ distance or othering of the child was, paradoxically, part and parcel of the assumption that both the study and the shaping of children were essential to the adults’ own self-exploration and self-creation. Importantly, the targets of observation and disciplining in this context became not only the children themselves, but also all those members of the adult population who were identified with the now hugely magnified responsibility of producing, caring for, and raising future citizens. These were first and foremost, parents, and especially middle-class mothers. The parents’ physical and mental health, family lifestyle and nurturing skills became closely intertwined with national survival and prosperity, not least through the hazy notion of ‘heredity’, which, understood broadly and vaguely, was not restricted to biological inheritance. Parents thereby became the subjects of both surveillance and enlightenment, and, as such, the targets of moral and rational critique, orchestrated by the growing body of experts in child development. Professionals entrusted with overseeing child development and socialization did not escape this fate either. This applied especially to teachers who, as a mass occupation, were already experiencing bureaucratic instructions and inspections, ²² Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 245–63. ²³ Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 371. ²⁴ Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child.

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especially in societies where the state assumed the primary responsibility for providing and expanding educational provision. At the turn of the twentieth century, bureaucrats across modernizing societies came to believe that scientific oversight ought to become hardwired to already existing regulation of the educational field. This was initially done through the medical monitoring of schoolchildren’s physical growth and health, mostly as part of the rise of the field of school hygiene and anthropometrics. Added to this was the monitoring of intellectual development through the application of mass mental testing, which, as mentioned, became the most important growth area of child science.²⁵ Significantly, given the high stakes involved in guiding the development of a society’s child population, even the experts and specialists who were carrying out health checks, physical measurements, physiological experiments, psychological assessments, and sociological surveys on children in the name of science, became the subjects of social scrutiny and critique. This no doubt contributed to the instability and eventual fragmentation of child science as a movement. In the 1930s’ Soviet Union, it led to vitriolic denunciation, political repression, and, ultimately, the comprehensive institutional dismantlement of this field of scientific and occupational work.

Mobilizing the Sciences of the Child What was distinctive about the turn of the twentieth century, though, was the work of collective mobilization around what was invariably presented as a new territory of scientific inquiry and expertise. With tentative beginnings in the 1880s, and full-blown activism between the 1890s and the 1910s, circles and societies, conferences and training courses, labs and journals, institutes and academies, devoted in one way or another to the scientific study of child ²⁵ The French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) is commonly credited with initiating mental testing in child science. Between 1905 and 1911, he developed, together with the psychiatrist Théodore Simon (1872–1961), his famous method that claimed to measure the level of intellectual development in terms of ‘mental age’ in distinction to biological age. See Martin S. Staum, Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 126–41. In the years that followed, Binet’s approach became one of the most widely used instruments of child science internationally, especially in the United States. See John Carson, ‘The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental Order and Social Order in Early Twentieth-Century France and America’, in States of Knowledge: The Coproduction of Science and Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 181–205. Americans Henry H. Goddard (1866–1957) and Lewis Terman (1877–1956) ensured that Binet-inspired psychometrics would become one of the most visible, as well as one the most hotly debated, methodologies in post-First World War psychology. See Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Britain was another country where psychometric-based educational selection became strongly entrenched in educational and children’s services in the interwar period, thanks especially to the influence of the (subsequently controversial) psychologist Cyril Burt (1883–1971). See L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt Psychologist (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979) and Woolridge, Measuring the Mind, 73–110.

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development and to problems of upbringing and education mushroomed across countries and cities in Europe and the United States. Their stated purpose was to provide a new, properly ‘scientific’ basis for rationalizing childcare, innovating educational practices, improving the health of the child population, and alleviating physical and mental handicaps. There are three overlapping senses in which the sciences of the child formed a ‘movement’ at this time. Firstly, they emerged through the bottom-up mobilization of participants and resources and depended greatly on the active involvement of non-scientists, especially middle-class parents, as well as teachers and doctors. Those recognized as the movement’s leaders were invariably professional scientists—mostly specialists in psychology and certain areas of medicine, such as hygiene, paediatrics, and neuropsychiatry. However, these new experts did not always find it easy to establish institutional bases for their projects within existing mainstream academic structures and they consequently regularly resorted to drafting support from non-specialist interest groups. Secondly, the new sciences of the child represented a dynamic coalescence of a wide variety of disciplinary programmes and occupational agendas which were not automatically part of a single field of knowledge or domain of practice, but established only a temporary and, in disciplinary terms, unstable platform of common activity. Some key participants did seek to turn this arena of interaction into a more coherent and institutionally secure disciplinary formation, but this proved difficult to achieve in practice, and child science remained a fluid and impermanent phenomenon. Finally, the sciences of the child formed a movement in the sense that its activists mobilized with the express purpose of transforming pre-existing domains of knowledge and occupational practice. Their activity assumed the character of a programmatic campaign to revise the underpinnings of a number of already existing disciplines (especially pedagogy and psychology), as well as to create new disciplines. Indeed, most of its promoters assumed that they were carving out a brand-new domain within the human sciences around the specific question of ontogenetic development. Those involved in the movement regularly presented their project(s) as not simply advancing, but radically renewing the understanding of the child as a biological and social being, and, by the same token, as an object of adult care and intervention. The most important factor in the initial successes of this mobilizing activity was that it coincided with transformations that were already taking place within certain occupations and disciplines. Especially important was the fact that the status of particular key professions started to depend increasingly on the grounding of their work in scientific knowledge. Nowhere was this more important than in the case of teaching, and this especially in the context of the remarkable expansion and diversification of educational provision characteristic of all modernizing societies between the 1880s and the 1930s. It was largely through

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demands to enhance teacher professionalization that pedagogy—to be understood as the disciplinary knowledge base underpinning the professionalism of educators—became a major target of ‘scientization’, with the most active and influential attempts at innovating the discipline coming from groups within psychology and medicine.²⁶ Psychology was only a nascent science at this time. Its representatives were themselves engaged in trying to develop scientific methods, both laboratory techniques adapted from physics and physiology, and cognitive tests, for use in a range of applied domains.²⁷ Psychologists still needed to carve out an autonomous place for their discipline in the existing system of academic knowledge, especially in the space between philosophy and medicine. However, what seemed even more important was the need to gain support for their discipline in the wider public realm. It was in this context that psychologists identified education, and child-rearing more generally, as a territory of strategic interest on which to exert influence. The education profession, from kindergarten staff to high-school teachers, became one of the most important constituencies to which psychology as a science was promoted.²⁸ Psychologists were here building on the already long-established principles articulated by the early nineteenth-century German founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline, Johann Friedrich Herbart, who had argued that teaching expertise must be rooted in the knowledge of the soul. However, the turn-ofthe-twentieth-century promotion of the new experimental psychology, as something essential to the professionalization of educators, resulted in an ambivalent relationship between psychologists and teachers. While educators were initially enthusiastically enrolled into innovative research projects in psychology, such as those of child observation in kindergartens, mental testing in schools, or mass surveys among adolescents, the teachers’ eager, yet amateur, involvement soon became perceived as a threat to psychology’s scientific reputation. A not dissimilar situation occurred in the attempts of some psychologists to enrol educated parents, especially mothers, into systematic child study focused on infancy and preschool development.²⁹ Middle-class mothers were in this context treated as a de facto occupational group—as those with responsibility for care and upbringing in the earliest phases of human life. The values of ‘professional’ or ²⁶ Marc Depaepe, ‘Social and Personal Factors in the Inception of Experimental Research in Education (1890–1914): An Exploratory Study’, History of Education, 1987, 16(4): 275–98. Marc Depaepe, ‘Experimental Research in Education, 1890–1940: Historical Processes behind the Development of a Discipline in Western Europe and the United States’, Aspects of Education, 1992, 47: 67–93. ²⁷ JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). ²⁸ Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 109–39. ²⁹ Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children.

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‘scientific’ motherhood became widespread at this time. Educated middle-class parents were not treated merely as targets of expert advice or training; they were also encouraged to become ‘researchers’, or at least collectors of empirical data (for instance, by recording their observations of early developmental changes in pre-structured diaries that would then be passed on to scientists). Nonetheless, the participation of parent enthusiasts, kindergarten educators, and schoolteachers in science (namely psychology) was ultimately expected to remain subsidiary to their primary function as providers of day-to-day care, early socialization, and formal education. The hierarchical power relations implied here had a gendered dimension as well, given that women were the ones forming the bulk of the subordinate groups confined to child-rearing and education, especially within parent and kindergarten associations, but increasingly also in the wider teaching profession. Science itself was, by contrast, assumed to be a male domain. And yet, the role that female enthusiasts and practitioners played in the mobilization of the child sciences cannot be overstated, even if the most visible leaders of the movement were, for the most part, degree- and academic-post-holding male doctors, psychologists, and educationalists. Over the longer term, this field became a major domain in which women started entering the sciences and professions in ever greater numbers, gradually assuming more prominent positions as authoritative psychologists, paediatricians, psychiatrists, or special needs educators. The explicitly subordinate role of parents and teachers, as well as the relatively insecure professional status of psychologists, contrasted the position that medical professionals held in the emerging child science movement. For this reason, in the initial stages of the mobilization of the sciences of the child, doctors were, as a rule, the most assertive and authoritative experts. Children’s health had started to be formally institutionalized as a distinct area of medical practice in the first half of the nineteenth century, although paediatrics professionalized as a clinical specialism later, towards the end of the century.³⁰ However, the impact of medicine on child science as a movement owed much less to specialization within existing medical structures (i.e. to the differentiation of paediatrics) and far more to the jurisdictional expansion of medical paradigms, discourses, and practices beyond the traditional boundaries of clinical practice and into other domains of social and professional life, where doctors sought to impose their perspective on other occupations, from teachers and psychologists in the realm of education and mental development, to jurists and sociologists in the field of juvenile criminology. Indeed, the role that medicine played on these other territories was contingent on the way it engaged with the concept not of ‘health’ (namely the health of children as human beings in development) but ‘development’. This entailed doctors moving away from a strict focus on ‘childhood illnesses’, as would have ³⁰ Sydney A. Halpern, American Pediatrics: The Social Dynamics of Professionalism, 1880–1980 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988).

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been typical of early paediatrics, and into domains of social and professional life, the core function of which was the fostering of child biopsychosocial development—the domain of nurture, education, and socialization more broadly. While certainly retaining its fundamental interest in both ‘health’ and ‘illness’, what medicine did on this new territory was to effectively turn these into mere functions of ‘development’. Indeed, what was at stake now was ‘healthy development’ or ‘developmental pathology’. This shift of emphasis was crucial; for in this new context, both ‘health’ and ‘pathology’ acquired, of necessity, a much looser, more mobile, and fundamentally metaphorical sense. Representatives of the medical profession seemed persuasive when they either literally or metaphorically pathologized various social and behavioural phenomena. Discourse on ‘degeneration’, which enjoyed wide currency at the turn of the twentieth century, was but one example of this.³¹ Doctors were also highly successful in promoting the idea of public health in a way that stimulated the institutionalization of open-ended medical monitoring and interventionism in a range of social settings, which included key territories associated with child development and socialization, notably the home and the school. The doctors’ involvement in matters of child-rearing built on their professional authority in treating the mother and child in the context of childbirth and infancy. Indeed, the reduction of infant mortality had been one the earliest forms of social intervention that doctors as experts were responsible for, dating back to the eighteenth century.³² This was later systematized and expanded in the development of so-called puériculture—the science of the hygienic care of infant children, including maternal health and behaviour in the prenatal and postnatal phases. It first appeared in France in the late nineteenth century, but soon spread to other countries, mostly as a component of wider public health, social hygiene, and eugenic projects.³³ Efforts to improve infant feeding were another major catalyst through which specifically medical research and thinking was introduced into the everyday practices of raising children. Given that a child’s early development was understood as primarily a period of strengthening the physical organism, doctors were

³¹ See: Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For Russia see Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) and Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 20–4, 123–6. ³² For Russia see Anna Kuxhausen, From the Womb to the Body Politic: Raising the Nation in Enlightenment Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 55–74. ³³ On social hygiene in Russia and the Soviet Union see Elena Ivanovna Lotova, Russkaia intelligentsiia i voprosy obshchestvennoi gigieny: Pervoe gigienicheskoe obshchestvo v Rossii (Moscow: Gos. izd. med. lit., 1962) and Susan Gross Solomon, ‘Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health, 1921– 1930’, in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 175–99.

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able to position themselves as the most trusted gurus of early childcare, authoring influential advice manuals that became staple reading among middle-class parents.³⁴ The authoritative role that physicians assumed in this area remained in place even as early childhood started to be reframed in the late nineteenth century as also a period of significant psychological development and socialization, and hence a territory where the disciplinary perspectives of psychologists and educators, notably female ones, started to become increasingly influential. From the late nineteenth century, the medical profession began targeting the school as a particularly important zone of influence. This was made easier by the fact that some doctors already played a role within the education system as the officially appointed monitors of schoolchildren’s health.³⁵ But what really opened up the educators’ territory to a more systematic incursion from medicine was that teachers were genuinely struggling to legitimize their own professionalism in scientific terms. This contrasted the predicament of doctors, who had undergone the ‘scientization’ of their own profession earlier in the nineteenth century and were keen to keep reinforcing it, rhetorically and otherwise, especially in relatively new medical specializations—those that still needed to prove themselves, including, notably, paediatrics, hygiene, and psychiatry.³⁶ Consequently, doctors interested in child development and questions of upbringing and education claimed, similarly to the psychologists, that they, as the holders of the guiding torch of legitimate biomedical science, ought to be the ones guiding the ‘scientization’ of pedagogy. In addition to taking on a prominent role in innovative teacher-training programmes—programmes, which, they argued, needed to be grounded much more firmly in the knowledge of biology—doctors active in the burgeoning field of child science came to dominate three critical subareas of the educational field: the establishment of norms of bodily development, thanks especially to the growing role of anthropometrics in schoolchildren’s medical check-ups; the expansion of the prophylactic framework of hygiene to the home and school environments, which included the fostering of new systems of nutrition and physical exercises, including systematic programmes of physical education; and the diagnosis and treatment of anything that could be construed as developmental or behavioural pathology, which was how doctors, especially psychiatrists, assumed some of the leading positions in areas such as special needs education and juvenile criminology.

³⁴ On the American childcare guru, L. Emmett Holt, see Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 52–4. ³⁵ Bernard Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995). ³⁶ W. F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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The Inter-Professional Dynamics of Child Science The mobilization of the sciences of the child resulted therefore in the formation of a dynamic and volatile arena of inter-professional and interdisciplinary interactions which involved strategic collaborations as well as jurisdictional conflicts between a host of stakeholders—teachers, psychologists, doctors, parents, jurists, and bureaucrats—around children as objects of scientific inquiry, professional expertise, public concern, state care, and social intervention.³⁷ The flourishing of child science in its apparent marginality, on the one hand, and its pluri-disciplinarity, on the other, was hardly coincidental. This field thrived precisely because it operated as an agonistic arena where different, mostly emergent and hence usually peripheral, professional groups and forms of expertise, with different kinds of legitimacy problems, were able to trade off resources—to exchange forms of legitimacy and to borrow each other’s instruments of professional power or spheres of influence to redefine their own professional identities in situations of occupational crisis, expansion, or transformation.³⁸ In other words, professional interaction within the broad and loose field of child science enabled these different professional and disciplinary groupings to use one another as supports in order to reconstruct their respective identities and legitimacy on new terms, most often by redrawing pre-existing professional and disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies. This arena also created fertile ground for the generation of a host of programmes of scientific innovation, the stated aim of which was to radically transform pre-existing disciplinary agendas or occupational identities, often in ways that put their promoters at odds with the scientific or professional establishment of the day.³⁹ As already mentioned, many of the programmes of innovation within child science were oriented towards reforming already established disciplines or occupations as well as forging entirely new ones. In this context, the multidisciplinary and cross-professional composition of child science was usually highlighted ³⁷ Child science was not the only such field. Inter-professional and interdisciplinary interactions have been shown to be highly relevant in other arenas as well. For examples from Russia see: Laura Englestein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Frances Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Gender, Health, and Enlightenment in Revolutionary Russia, 1918–1931 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). Beer, Renovating Russia. Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and the Courtroom, 1917– 1939 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). Kenneth Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Aleksandr B. Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia kak fenomen sotsializatsii v Rossii na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov (St Petersburg: MIEP, 2010). Elisa M. Becker, Medicine, Law and the State in Imperial Russia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). ³⁸ On interdisciplinary ‘trading zones’ see Michael E. Gorman (ed.), Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). ³⁹ On the role of programmes of innovation as key to scientific movements, see Scott Frickel and Neil Gross, ‘A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements’, American Sociological Review, 2005, 70: 204–32.

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as one of this field’s main assets and itself the key means of achieving innovation. Yet many participants in the movement also worried whether and how such a heterogeneous endeavour could be turned into a coherent and effective project. Indeed, the problem of negotiating divergent professional and disciplinary perspectives was a critical matter for child science from very early on. It appeared as an issue that had to be resolved if this new field of knowledge production, whatever its ultimate shape, was to acquire public acceptance as a base of expertise that would then instruct policymakers, practitioners, and the public in matters of child healthcare and welfare, upbringing and education. The most common strategy for articulating how the different specialists’ work around children cohered into a joint enterprise was the development of an explicit rhetoric of collaboration—namely, a consistent definition of the sciences of the child as, in a fundamental way, an ‘alliance’ of different professions—especially doctors, teachers, and psychologists. This idea of occupational partnership between different parties responsible for children’s health, physical and mental development, education and socialization, was usually accompanied by forms of disciplinary or professional ‘boundary-work’—namely efforts to delimit specific subareas of expertise which thereby turned this ‘collaboration’ into a de facto division of labour.⁴⁰ For instance, while doctors might be entrusted to deal with problems concerning the development of the child’s body, teachers would claim for themselves the development of the child’s soul. In this they might accept (or indeed not) that they would need to be guided by psychologists, whose designated role would be to establish how a child’s mental capacities developed from infancy to adulthood in ‘normal’ circumstances. And while the role of psychologists might be to establish the regularities of psychological development, psychiatrists would claim for themselves the study and diagnostics of anything irregular, pathological, or anomalous in it. Special educators would, in turn, be allocated the task of working with these pathologies both therapeutically and pedagogically on a dayto-day basis. In practice, however, the distribution of disciplinary and occupational territories of action was never so clear and precise. It remained a matter of precariously negotiated power relations between different participant groups, prompting numerous battles on the frontiers of professional jurisdiction, identity, and hierarchy, not least since none of the groups in question felt entirely secure or authoritative across the whole of the territory at stake. What is more, the different kinds of expertise did not all share the same epistemic logic and hence diverged

⁴⁰ See: Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists’, American Sociological Review, 1983, 48: 781–95. Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Anne Holmquest, ‘The Rhetorical Strategy of Boundary-Work’, Argumentation, 1990, 4(3): 235–58.

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in terms of their criteria for evaluating professional status and establishing professional legitimacy.⁴¹ A very different strategy of coordinating work within this agonistic multidisciplinary arena was the effort to establish some kind of disciplinary consensus— namely to create a platform of unified conceptual definitions, shared meanings, common aims, and agreed-upon methods that would turn the study of children into a coherent project. The idea of developing a new science focused on the study of child development and socialization became one of the central issues debated within the child science movement in Europe in the build-up to the First World War. A renewed effort to create such a science was then taken up in the late 1920s in the Soviet Union under the auspices of a highly interventionist socialist state. Despite these concerted drives towards disciplinary integration and synthesis, the achievement of consensus within the child science movement remained elusive as too many divergent programmes and paradigms jostled to be the ones leading the way. In the Soviet Union, a fictional synthesis was produced towards the end of the 1920s mostly in order to serve extrinsic ideological and policy agendas, and only temporarily so, as the new Soviet science of the child was in the mid-1930s eradicated from Soviet academic institutions, educational establishments, and child welfare services in the major political turnarounds under Stalin’s headship of the party-state. The imperfection and ineffectiveness of both consensus-building and interdisciplinary collaboration in child science did not mean, however, that there was no epistemic or practical interconnectedness across this diversity of scientific and professional work. It simply meant that both ‘consensus’ and ‘collaboration’ were underpinned by continued conflicts and misunderstandings between purported partners. One way in which interconnectedness manifested itself across distinct occupational and disciplinary subareas of the heterogeneous domain of child science was through the relatively free travel of epistemic objects and methodologies across the field’s internal boundaries—travel which entailed a degree of flexibility and ambiguity in how these methodologies were being used and interpreted.⁴² This applied, for example, to how psychometrics operated in child science: in different institutional contexts mental tests were framed differently— as psychological experimentation, scholastic assessment, medical diagnostics, or a tool of bureaucratic management. And yet, this was precisely what enabled mental testing to cross multiple distinct domains, ‘joining-up’ different kinds of

⁴¹ E.g. see Harry Collins and Robert Evans, ‘The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience’, Social Studies of Science, 2002, 32(2): 235–96, and Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). ⁴² See especially Susan Lee Star and James R. Griesemer, ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science, 1989, 19(3): 387–420, and Susan Lee Star, ‘This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept’, Science, Technology, and Human Values, 2010, 35(5): 601–17.

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occupational work despite a continued lack of a successful consensus-based integration and only highly ambivalent forms of partnership-like collaboration.⁴³

Child Science as a Transnational Movement Crucial to turning the disparate strands of scientific interest in child development and socialization into a more coherent movement was also the transnational dimension of their mobilization. The crystallization of this movement took place at a time when both nationalism and internationalism in science started to acquire new forms and dynamics.⁴⁴ One could argue that the considerable intensification of transnational interactions in science at the turn of the twentieth century was what transformed the growing interest in the child from relatively narrow occupational and disciplinary initiatives into a highly ambitious programme of innovation in the human sciences, which claimed a position at the cutting edge of modernity itself.⁴⁵ Even when the micro-agendas underpinning the establishment of specific child science organizations and practices varied depending on the disciplinary or occupational context and national or local needs, the ideas, principles, and aspirations that underpinned them were invariably presented as universal in nature and ultimately about the progress of humankind. The way in which child science organized in each individual country depended on the specificities of that country’s academic and professional fields, on its systems of civic activism and philanthropic patronage, and on the variable and evolving degrees of bureaucratic interest in managing the expansion of education, health monitoring, or social welfare.⁴⁶ What is more, given the applied orientation of much of child science, researchers had to recognize that they operated within

⁴³ See also Andy Byford, ‘The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science’, History of the Human Sciences, 2014, 27(4): 22–58. ⁴⁴ On internationalism in science in this era see especially Elisabeth Crawford, Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880–1939: Four Studies of the Nobel Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Aleksandr N. Dmitriev and André Filler, ‘La mobilisation intellectuelle: La communauté académique internationale et la Première Guerre mondiale’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 2002, 43(4): 617–44. Fin-de-siècle internationalism did not, of course, elide the importance of national infrastructures or the promotion of distinctive national approaches and achievements—quite the contrary: since the international arena was expected to be one of competition, as well as exchange, internationalism reinforced nationalism in science, and vice versa. ⁴⁵ American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall (1846–1924) is usually credited as the charismatic initiator of child study as a mass movement, establishing it in the United States during the 1890s, founding the National Association for the Study of Children in 1893, sparking the mushrooming of similar associations across the United States and beyond. The movement assumed a life of its own, resulting in a series of large-scale congresses, attracting several thousand participants and inspiring similar associations to form elsewhere in the world. See Ross, G. Stanley Hall, 31–61. ⁴⁶ For comparisons and contrasts between the United States and France see Carson, Measure of Merit. For comparisons between the United States and Germany see Dirk Schumann (ed.), Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).

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nationally specific, and hence diverse, cultures of childcare and systems of education. In each country, those engaged in child science had to calibrate their tools and regimes for measuring development to reflect the size and social composition of their child populations, taking into account nationally distinctive patterns of class, gender, ethnic, and racial heterogeneity. This was the case especially in the setting of norms, such as anthropometric indexes or intelligence quotients, which proved particularly problematic to compare across national fields. Consequently, child science as an international enterprise was often in tension with national specificity. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that child science would have become a movement on the scale that it did without the high degree of cross-border intellectual exchange and critique, observation and emulation, competition and collaboration, reinterpretation and misinterpretation, which took place across Europe and North America over a relatively short time—especially between the 1880s and the First World War, although the legacies of these interactions continued into the interwar period.⁴⁷ Vital here was not simply the intense international circulation of knowledge, ideas, and practices, but also the concerted enactment of a supra-national arena of knowledge circulation, which, symbolically, gave shape and identity to what was at the time a still very uncertainly defined endeavour—a novel and only looselystructured set of projects arising from marginal positions in relation to established academic and occupational structures within each national field. The internationalism of child science served an important legitimizing and universalizing function, and proved to be a major catalyst for mobilization at the national level, which is why the movement’s institutionalization in each national context appeared like a domino-effect proliferation of organizations and practices across national borders—the creation of a society, lab, journal, or institute in one country commonly inspiring something similar to appear in another. In the process, a veritable ‘child science international’ was constituted in a relatively spontaneous, but also highly self-conscious way, through particular representational and performative practices. These included: debates around the competing and contrasting approaches of key figures, each representing a different country; census-like overviews of the field documenting different national ⁴⁷ A well-publicized early exchange took place in the late 1870s between Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) and Charles Darwin (1809–82). Taine’s 1876 article on children’s acquisition of language (Hippolyte Taine, ‘De l’acquisition du langage chez les enfants et les peuples primitifs’, Revue philosophique, 1876, 1: 5–23) prompted Darwin to publish his ‘Biographical Sketch of an Infant’ (Mind, 1877, 2(7): 285–94). On the influence of Darwin’s article see Marjorie Lorch and Paula Hellal, ‘Darwin’s “Natural Science of Babies” ’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2010, 19: 140–57. This was soon followed by the publication of the Frenchman Bernard Pérez’s (1836–1903), Les trois premières années de l’enfant (1878) and the German Wilhelm Preyer’s (1841–97) influential Die Seele des Kindes (1881–2). On Pérez see Dominique Ottavi, De Darwin à Piaget: Pour une histoire de la psychologie de l’enfant (Paris: CNRS, 2001), 143–51. See also D. B. Wallace, M. B. Franklin, and R. T. Keegan, ‘The Observing Eye: A Century of Baby Diaries’, Human Development, 1994, 37: 1–29, and Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, 222–32.

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contributions; and finally, the staging of major international meetings—not least the First International Pedology Congress in Brussels in 1911, the key function of which was to showcase child science as a worldwide phenomenon.⁴⁸ Prior to the latter event, Europe-wide debates about pedology, experimental pedagogy, child and educational psychology were reserved for subsections of international conventions in psychology, hygiene, or education. Out of one of these, the sixth international psychology congress in Geneva in 1909, came the initiative to organize a congress specifically devoted to pedology. While this event successfully demonstrated that representatives and supporters of the new ‘science of the child’ could be found in most parts of the globe, it also unwittingly revealed that the movement was riven with divergent interests and rivalries pulling in different directions. Representations of the ‘child science international’ usually implied that the precise geographical origins of the movement were difficult to pinpoint given the variety of overlapping and interrelated precursors and roots, approaches and labels arising more or less simultaneously across Europe and North America. Instead, the multiplicity of centres of activity was emphasized, appearing, it would seem, in almost every modernizing country, with each nation contributing something original. Of course, countries with more strongly developed academic fields, more prestigious scientific bases and a greater number of researchers, were unavoidably perceived as forming a dominant core. Germany, as the scientific powerhouse of this era, responsible for the training of many of the leading participants in this international, from Granville Stanley Hall in the United States to Aleksandr Petrovich Nechaev in Russia, served as a centre of sorts. Otherwise, the United States, Great Britain, and France were the most influential contributors of innovative practices in the field. However, representatives of certain smaller European countries, such as Switzerland and Belgium, were highly successful in positioning themselves as the coordinators of internationalism in child science.⁴⁹ In reality, though, the international child science movement remained plural, fluid, and unstable. Its leaders and activists, based in different countries, each had ⁴⁸ Marc Depaepe, ‘Le premier (et dernier) Congrès international de pédologie à Bruxelles en 1911’, Société Alfred Binet et Théodore Simon: Bulletin, 1987, 87: 28–54. ⁴⁹ On Switzerland see Edouard Claparède, Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology of the Child (London: Edward Arnold, 1913), 13–38, and Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly, ‘Ascension, embrasement et disparition d’une science. Le point de vue d’un observateur privilégié: Claparède et la pédologie au début du XXe siècle’, in Une science du développement est-elle possible?, 45–64. Claparède played a key role in the founding of the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva in 1912. In the early 1920s, the Institute was joined and headed by Jean Piaget, whose work shaped much of Western developmental psychology in the years to come. On Belgium see Marc Depaepe, ‘The Heyday of Paedology in Belgium (1899–1914): A Positivistic Dream that did Not Come True’, International Journal of Educational Research, 1997, 27: 687–97, and Marc Depaepe, ‘Science, Technology and Paedology: The Concept of Science at the Faculté Internationale de Pédologie in Brussels (1912– 1914)’, Scientia Paedagogica Experimentalis, 1985, 1: 14–28.

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his or her specific ideas about the remit and mission of the enterprise. Such pluralism was, on the one hand, conducive to conceptual and methodological innovation. On the other hand, it prevented the coalescence of the movement around a single banner or a unified theoretical and methodological framework. What is more, while some in the movement called for the development of radically new research paradigms, others were worried that excessive speed of innovation undermined scientific rigour. Nonetheless, many key players in this transnational network sought to turn this multifaceted and divided endeavour into something resembling an organized discipline. A number of them used for it the neologism ‘pedology’. This term, etymologically derived from the Greek παῖς, παιδός, meaning ‘child’, appeared in slightly different forms and spellings in different countries—paidology, paedology, pédologie, pädologie, paidologia, педология. Both familiar and foreign sounding, Ancient Greek in form, but invented in the 1890s by an American training in Germany, the term, wherever it was introduced, appeared like an exotic importation of uncertain provenance.⁵⁰ In German-speaking countries, the native terms Kinderforschung and Judenkunde or Jugendfürsorge became more popular.⁵¹ In English-speaking countries, there was similarly a preference for the plainer and less scientific ‘child study’, a term that seemed more suitable for drawing mass support from the ranks of mothers, kindergarten educators, and schoolteachers.⁵² Those who promoted pedology as an entirely new scientific discipline usually conceptualized it as a specialization within the human sciences devoted to establishing the biopsychosocial laws and norms of child development in an allencompassing way, primarily with a view to determining the rational principles

⁵⁰ This was Oscar Chrisman (1855–1920) whose doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Jena in 1896 was titled Paidologie: Entwurf zu einer Wissenshaft des Kindes. Chrisman had, in fact, introduced this term already in 1892 in his article ‘The Hearing of Children’, The Pedagogical Seminary, 1892, 2: 397–404. See also Oscar Chrisman, ‘Child Study, A New Department of Education’, Forum, 1894, 16: 728–36. Cited in Guillaume Garreta, ‘Pragmatisme et pédologie: Dewey, Vygotski et la pédagogie soviétique des années 1920’, in Une science du développement humain est-elle possible?, 107–36 (109). See also Oscar Chrisman, The Historical Child (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1920), which is a comparative historical anthropology of childhood. ⁵¹ One of the rallying points for child sciences in Germany was the Kongress für Kinderforschung und Jugendfürsorge, which took place in Berlin in October 1906. German-language child science was at that point further bolstered by the formation of related associations in Austria-Hungary, namely the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Kinderforschung and the Ungarische Gesellschaft für Kinderforschung, both established in 1906, in Vienna and Budapest respectively. ⁵² On Britain see Woolridge, Measuring the Mind, 18–72, and Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, 267–89. The first British child study organization was founded in Edinburgh in 1894. The British Child Study Association formed in 1898 under the leadership of James Sully (1842–1923), Professor of Mind and Logic at University College, London. The Association published the journal The Paidologist from 1899. Britain also had The Childhood Society, led by a doctor, Francis Warner (1847–1926), whose work was inspired by Francis Galton. In 1907, The Childhood Society merged with the London branch of The Child Study Association, forming The Child Study Society which came to dominate the Association. It was around this time, in 1908, that the Association’s periodical changed its name from The Paidologist to Child Study, which continued to come out until 1920.

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of (individual and mass) childcare, upbringing, and education.⁵³ The core innovation of pedology was the idea that the child represented a distinct object of scientific inquiry—an emergent and hence substantively different human form that required relatively autonomous theoretical models and empirical methods of study, especially those that captured its dynamism, framed by the concept of ‘development’. Counterposed to pedagogy, pedology was positioned as the science of child development, and thus distinct from the vocation, art, technique, or practice of education. The term’s exoticism was expected to bring out the (positively interpreted) newness of a properly scientific approach to the study of the child. The neologism was also useful when it was necessary to downplay the evident disparity of pre-existing disciplinary perspectives and professional agendas circulating in this heterogeneous field, helping circumscribe an assumed joint territory of action. Those promoting pedology were usually quite eclectic about its methodological arsenal, which included observational diaries, survey questionnaires, mental tests, psycho-physiological experiments, medical exams, anthropometric measurements, as well as the analysis of children’s artwork or writing. Some of these methods—especially anthropometric and psychometric ones—were used both in empirical research and in routine monitoring and diagnostic assessment for the purposes of educational streaming, for instance. This more applied strand of child science was sometimes referred to as ‘pedotechnics’.⁵⁴ Pedology was not, however, the only framework used within the movement and many prominent actors remained wary of its invented nature, its vaguely and diversely defined object, and its lack of a clear home among the already institutionalized sciences. While pedology was imagined as emphatically multidisciplinary, many were worried about the problems that such disciplinary looseness and methodological eclecticism posed, preferring frameworks with narrower remits and greater focus. The most prominent and successful among these, at least before the First World War, was ‘experimental pedagogy’. Experimental pedagogy was conceptualized as a ‘new pedagogy’ that was based on experimental psychological research applied to problems of education.⁵⁵ It entailed the study of intellectual ⁵³ France sported some of the most vocal and committed promoters of pédologie as an autonomous science. Eugène Blum (1881–1965), teacher at the prestigious Lycée Henri Quatre, and Gabriel Persigout, another lycée teacher, based in the Gironde, campaigned for the institutionalization of pedology as a pure, ‘natural’ science, upon which pedagogy, as an applied, ‘social’ discipline, would then be rebuilt. See Dominique Ottavi, ‘La pédologie, une autre “révolution copernicienne”?’, in Une science du développement est-elle possible?, 27–44 (32–9). ⁵⁴ Edouard Claparède used the term pédologie only for fundamental research into child biopsychosocial development, while for all applied strands he preferred the term pédotechnie. In Claparède’s schema, pédotechnie had three strands: experimental pedagogy, which serviced the education profession, paediatrics, which serviced medicine, and juvenile criminology, which serviced the legal profession. See Hofstetter and Schneuwly, ‘Ascension, embrasement et disparition d’une science’. ⁵⁵ The leaders of experimental pedagogy were Wilhelm August Lay (1862–1926) and Ernst Meumann (1862–1915), who jointly founded the journal Zeitschift für experimentelle Pädagogik in 1905. The two quarrelled not long after and parted ways in 1907. Lay, who taught at a seminary rather than at university, promoted a practice-oriented ‘experimental didactics’, while the more academic

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and educational development using the methods of experimental psychology. Experimental pedagogy did not amount to the development of novel, experimental, teaching systems, such as those of Friedrich Fröbel, Maria Montessori, Margaret McMillan, John Dewey, or the Tolstoyan ‘free education’ (svobodnoe vospitanie) movement in Russia. The latter kind of experimentation with educational models was occasionally referred to (in French) as pédagogie expériencée, which was explicitly distinguished from pédagogie expérimentale.⁵⁶ Whereas the pédagogie expériencée was the territory of educationalists (even in cases where innovation was built on specific theories of children’s psychological development), the pédagogie expérimentale was rather more ambiguous about the relationship between psychology and pedagogy within it. However, in practice, all of the above strands, from ‘child study’ and ‘pedagogical psychology’ to ‘pedology’ and ‘experimental pedagogy’, co-existed and overlapped within the child science movement and were, on the whole, often difficult to disentangle.⁵⁷ Lively transnational exchanges and interactions in this dynamic arena were abruptly halted by the onset of the First World War, which severed academic links within Europe, especially those with German universities, institutes, and labs. This did not, of course, mean a decline in the scientific interest in children—quite the contrary. The war only reinforced the expanding welfare/warfare states’ reliance on scientific expertise in modernizing their children’s and educational services. This became the norm across the modern world and was taken to a whole new level of implementation in all of the above-mentioned countries and beyond, from Spain to Greece to Bulgaria.⁵⁸ International exchange in the field continued too,

Meumann emphasized the methods of experimental psychology. In 1911 the Zeitschift für experimentelle Pädagogik merged with the Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie. Experimental pedagogy declined after Meumann’s premature death in 1915, but he had an active following in Russia, and also in Great Britain, where his emulators included the Scottish educationalist Robert R. Rusk (1879–1972) and John Alfred Green (1867–1922), Professor of Education at Sheffield University and editor of The Journal of Experimental Pedagogy (1911–22). ⁵⁶ Depaepe, ‘Experimental Research in Education’, 79. The making of this distinction is attributed to the Belgian Raymond Buyse. In Russia a similar opposition has been made between opytnaia pedagogika (the key representative of which was S. T. Shatskii) and eksperimental′naia pedagogika (led by A. P. Nechaev). See A. A. Romanov, Opytno-eksperimental′naia pedagogika pervoi treti XX veka (Moscow: Shkola, 1997). ⁵⁷ Depaepe, ‘Experimental Research in Education’. ⁵⁸ See: Till Kössler, ‘Human Sciences, Child Reform, and Politics in Spain, 1890–1936’, in Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–1980, ed. Kerstin Brückweh, Dirk Schumann, Richard Wetzell, and Benjamin Ziemann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 179–97. Annette Mülberger, Mònica Balltondre, and Andrea Graus, ‘Aims of Teachers’ Psychometry: Intelligence Testing in Barcelona (1920)’, History of Psychology, 2014, 17(2): 206–22. Despina Karakatsani, ‘ “Hygiene Imperatives”: Child Welfare, School Hygiene and Puericulture in Greece, 1911–1936’, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, 2011, 3: 17–32. Vassiliki Theodorou and Despina Karakatatsani, ‘Eugenics and Puericulture: Medical Attempts to Improve the Biological Capital in Interwar Greece’, in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics, 299–323. Kristina Popova, ‘Combating Infant Mortality in Bulgaria: Welfare Activities, National Propaganda, and the Establishment of Pediatrics, 1900–1940’, in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics, 143–63.

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with innovations in the United States attracting arguably the keenest attention.⁵⁹ What was no longer as pronounced, though, was the drive to forge a science of the child in its own right. There was, in fact, a marked decline in the use of labels such as ‘pedology’ and ‘experimental pedagogy’ during the 1920s. Experimental pedagogy became mostly a strand within educational psychology, while the term ‘pedology’ was barely used, and in some cases, such as the Netherlands, it eventually came to denote a much narrower specialization—the study of developmental pathologies and the domain of special needs education.⁶⁰ One of the reasons for this was that in most European countries the ambition to develop an integrated programme of systematic research into child development and socialization was by the 1920s no longer perceived as an innovation in and of itself. Many of the principles, paradigms, and practices that had been promoted as new and radical by the child science movement before the First World War had become assimilated into occupational and disciplinary specializations that were now increasingly integrated into routine state or local authority approaches to the management of the child population. Moreover, individual strands of the former child science movement had by this time become much more successful in professionalizing independently from each other within the institutionally more secure broader frameworks provided by medicine, education, and psychology, no longer needing to feed off the interdisciplinary and transnational resources offered by the wider movement.

Russo-Soviet Child Science in Transnational Perspective Russia’s child science movement crystallized during the latter half of the nineteenth century at the intersection of several interrelated domains: the growing interest of parents from the empire’s educated strata in the rational upbringing of their progeny; the expansion of social hygiene, public healthcare, and welfare measures through a combination of state and civic initiatives; the efforts of Russia’s teachers to enhance their status in relation to other, more prestigious professions; and the struggles between rival groups of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds over how best to transform psychology into a modern science.⁶¹ All these areas together provided fertile ground for the development of a Elena Sergeevna Minkova and Mariyana Dimitrova Nyagolova, ‘A Historical-Comparative Analysis of the Theoretical Bases of Pedology in Russia and Bulgaria’, Revista de Historia de la Psicología, 2015, 36(3): 67–86. ⁵⁹ E.g. see Marc Depaepe and Lieven D’hulst (eds.), An Educational Pilgrimage to the United States: Travel Diary of Raymond Buyse, 1922 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011). ⁶⁰ Depaepe, ‘Experimental Research in Education’, 72. ⁶¹ E.g. see Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 182–90, 296–305, 354–60, and Andy Byford, ‘Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917)’, Osiris, 2008, 23: 50–81.

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vibrant network of circles, labs, training courses, institutes, journals, and conferences devoted to child study, especially but by no means only in St Petersburg and Moscow. The 1860s’ Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), which came in the wake of the empire’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), had been crucial to modernizing Russia’s key occupational domains, including those of law, medicine, education, and science. During the last few decades of tsarism, a professional intelligentsia became one of the empire’s major stakeholders, developing structures of mobilization, action, and communication broadly analogous to those found in the West, even though it still felt itself to be much too dependent on the whims of the bureaucratic-autocratic state.⁶² Yet this stratum was in sociocultural terms well integrated with corresponding social groups and knowledge communities in Western societies and closely identified with them, even while remaining embedded in imperial Russia’s distinctive socio-political context. In fact, Russia’s professional intelligentsia positioned itself as the embodiment of the empire’s progressive ‘civil society’, the pioneer of social welfare reform initiatives, and the country’s most responsible articulator of modernization’s ideals and anxieties alike. The rapid expansion of various professional territories during this period meant that these were outgrowing pre-existing, extremely narrow, structures of opportunity, gradually spilling over into previously excluded groups, not least women.⁶³ The new and itself marginal child science movement, being closely associated with the feminine domain of childcare and upbringing, was especially conducive to incorporating women into the empire’s growing professional stratum. Initially this took place through the improvement of girls’ secondary education and the expansion of female teacher training.⁶⁴ Following the creation of the title of ‘woman doctor’ (zhenshchina vrach), there was also an increase in the number of women in medicine, for whom female and child health became a

⁶² See: Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (eds.), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Harley D. Balzer (ed.), Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997). V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Mysl′, 1971), 147–73. James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). ⁶³ See: Christine Johanson, Women’s Struggle for Higher Education in Russia, 1855–1900 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987). Ann Hibner Koblitz, ‘Science, Women, and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Generation of the 1860s’, Isis, 1988, 79(2): 208–26. Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). ⁶⁴ Tat′iana Borisovna Kotlova, ‘ “ . . . Mnogo khoroshikh vospominanii ostalos′ ot gimnazii”: Zhenskoe obrazovanie v Rossii sto let nazad’, in Sotsial′naia istoriia: Ezhegodnik 2004 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 254–77.

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particularly common specialization.⁶⁵ Pedagogy and medicine—the two professional areas that were crucial to the rise of child science—were precisely the ones in which female higher education was being offered in Russia in the last couple of decades of tsarism (though, initially, women sought medical degrees abroad, principally in Switzerland). Such training also gave some women the opportunity to pursue further specialization in psychology and psychiatry, courses in which were from the 1900s provided in a few new privately funded higher-educational establishments, such as the Psycho-Neurological Institute in St Petersburg, which admitted women as well as men. Russian activists in child science were from the outset fully engaged in and directly connected to developments taking place in the rest of Europe and North America. In the post-reform era, Russia’s expanding scientific community closely followed and actively contributed to international developments in the biological, human, and social sciences.⁶⁶ This included developments of relevance to the study of the child, which were being regularly reported on in the growing body of pedagogical and medical journals. Russians reviewed major international contributions and translated key foreign publications, usually very soon after their original appearance. They also participated in international conferences, while inviting recognized figures to attend events organized in Russia. They worked hard to build an analogous scientific and professional infrastructure, seeing themselves as fellow participants and equal partners in the same, collaborative and competitive, project of European modernity. Some of the key players in the Russian movement, such as the already mentioned Aleksandr Nechaev, on one occasion travelled as far as Australia, to a conference organized by the British Society for the Advancement of Science, in order to promote Russian educational research.⁶⁷ The Russian contingent was also one of the more numerous ones at the aforementioned 1911 International Pedology Congress in Brussels. The growth of child science research in Russia involved many emulations and adaptations of the panoply of new methodologies, from diaries of child development and techniques of anthropometric measurement to cognitive tests and

⁶⁵ E.g. see Anna Bek, The Life of a Russian Woman Doctor: A Siberian Memoir, 1869–1954, trans. and ed. Anne D. Rassweiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). ⁶⁶ See: Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1961–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). Daniel P. Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). J.-C. Dupont, ‘The Evolution of Physiological Psychology in Russia at the Time of Sechenov in International Context’, in History of the Neurosciences in France and Russia: From Charcot and Sechenov to IBRO, ed. J. G. Barbara, J.C. Dupont, and Irina Sirotkina (Paris: Hermann, 2011), 23–48. G. Kichigina, The Imperial Laboratory: Experimental Physiology and Clinical Medicine in Post-Crimean Russia (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009). Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ⁶⁷ See Nauchnyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Obrazovaniia (hereafter NA RAO), f. 85, op. 1, d. 63, ll. 1–6 (newspaper cut-out from a report published in Adelaide’s The Register, dated 13 August 1914).

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survey questionnaires. These were invariably taken as inspirations for original research based on Russian material and were for the most part adapted to serve the assumed requirements of Russian society. Those seeking to position themselves as leaders of the movement in the Russian empire were also keen to make original contributions to international science. The inability of the majority of researchers in other countries to read Russian was no doubt an obstacle to the international community’s awareness of the full range of activity conducted in Russia, but studies by Russian scholars, published usually in German, did receive recognition and praise, at least from fellow specialists. The ‘internationalism’ of child science was also something that Russians active in child science constituted for their own sakes. Members of the professional intelligentsia who were engaged in building Russia’s sciences of the child always understood their endeavours to be part of a broader civilizational project that they shared with fellow Europeans. Moreover, they partook of a common modernity not simply by developing cutting-edge child science alongside partners elsewhere in Europe, but also by performing the international and transnational character of the enterprise—in other words, by representing their research programmes as part of scientific innovations taking place across the advanced modern world. In this context, the child as an object of science became a crucial component of the Russian intelligentsia’s imaginary of a common European modernity and of its participation in it. ‘The child’ was here constructed less as an outcome of systematic empirical research into the Russian empire’s own child population, and more as an abstract universal ‘child’, made up of norms and standards which, it was assumed, could, in principle, travel from one nationally-defined society to another. In practice, Russian scholars were alert to the methodological difficulties that this posed (for instance, when they administered mental tests originally developed on French children to Russian ones). However, even when they adapted imported methodologies and calibrated outputs to match the realities of their research contexts, they did not have a strategy for articulating norms that would apply to the empire’s child population as a whole. Being conscious of the huge differences in the conditions of development, upbringing, and education in which the empire’s children were being raised, they tended to study this population as belonging to socially and educationally incommensurate groups. Those who formed the vast majority of the empire’s child population—the peasantry, not to speak of children belonging to the empire’s many different ethnic groups—were at no point considered to be population categories around which overarching normative standards of the empire’s developing child would be constructed, statistically or otherwise. Instead, standards of development and socialization were grounded in normative assumptions governed by the class-specific expectations and aspirations of the educated, Westernized, professional groups engaged in child science—and these invariably referred to ‘European’ norms as their default starting point.

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The consequence of all this was that even though Russia’s builders of child science developed an infrastructure on a par with that found in Western countries, and even though they maintained a respectable presence on the European scene, they nonetheless remained ‘peripheral’ in the wider Euro-American context. This ‘peripheralism’ was not simply down to geography, the language barrier, or the cultural biases of the European core; it was also inherent in the Russian movement’s own performative self-construction. Indeed, Russian representatives of child science positioned their contributions in a peripheral position in relation to the international enterprise by virtue of the fact that they themselves performed this enterprise as having a European civilizational ‘centre’, from which the legitimacy of their own scientific theories and practices, instruments and norms was being drawn. After the collapse of tsarism in 1917, the October revolution and the takeover of power by the Communists, the interests and ambitions of the new state became the decisive factor on which the fate of child science in what was once the Russian empire depended. During the 1920s, the Bolsheviks showed considerable interest in this area of scientific work and professional expertise and came to invest significant resources into it, considering it vital to supporting the rapid delivery of their programme of revolutionary social transformation through the radical restructuring of education, healthcare, and social welfare. The name of choice for this expanding field in the early Soviet Union became ‘pedology’ (pedologiia, педология). Bolshevik ideology and practice entailed some significant continuities with modernization projects of Russia’s pre-revolutionary, predominantly liberalbourgeois, professional intelligentsia.⁶⁸ Moreover, despite the more difficult conditions of cross-border interaction after the revolution, early-Soviet researchers in all areas of child science continued to engage and dialogue with key innovations in the relevant fields in Europe and America. They were well informed about developments in mental testing and anthropometrics, behaviourism and psychoanalysis, Gestalt and ethno-psychology, progressive and special education methods. They still enthusiastically and eclectically introduced and domesticated approaches and methods they identified as particularly promising international scientific advances. They also, wherever possible, invited scholars and educationalists from abroad to come and admire the scientific and pedagogical achievements of the new socialist state; and some were able to travel abroad to promote the work carried out in the Soviet Union. However, the way Soviet child sciences were developed during the 1920s, namely as contributing to the erection of a very different, unprecedented, kind of society, expected the field to become rooted in a new imaginary of modernity.

⁶⁸ Cf. Beer, Renovating Russia.

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This was a modernity that was to emerge ‘dialectically’ out of the chaotic realities and seismic upheavals of revolutionary restructuring by following a path framed by a Marxist-Leninist conception of history as a form of class struggle culminating in communism via socialism. It meant that the Soviet sciences of the child, while clearly still drawing liberally from the ‘scientific international’, and while remaining committed to what continued to be understood as a universal project of humanity’s historic advancement, became, by the end of the 1920s, increasingly focused on the very specific needs of the centrally planned ‘construction of socialism’. What was unquestionably new in the 1920s–1930s was the scale and manner in which the social and human sciences were mobilized by an increasingly centralized state for the purpose of rapidly transforming the Soviet population as a means of overhauling the country’s social structure and economic base.⁶⁹ It was in this context of mass population-transformation during the first decades of Soviet statebuilding that children assumed strategic priority, becoming a major focus of organized state intervention. This led the Bolsheviks to institutionalize child science in ways unmatched elsewhere in the world. Crucial at this point was the fact that the revolution had produced a major shift in the size and character of the population that child science was required to account for in normative terms. From this point on, it was the entirety of the former empire’s child population, including the previously marginalized or excluded majority, which was to become the subject of a new regime of development, which the Soviet party-state expected to oversee and manage with the help of science. This shift necessitated a thorough overhaul of overarching norms of development, especially in the context of the Bolsheviks’ efforts to build an entirely new, radically progressive, education system for all. Furthermore, this prompted Soviet child science to confront—in a much more direct and explicit way than was the case in the pre-revolutionary era—the question of physical, social, and cultural difference in the former empire’s multiethnic population.⁷⁰ Soviet child science was faced with the dilemma of needing to scientifically account for these differences, while at the same time being tasked with constructing a universal framework of development in which normative difference (i.e. the fact that different population groups might require different developmental norms) would somehow be elided or at least become invisible and irrelevant. This was not just an epistemological conundrum, but a political one as well, given that the work of Soviet child science on this subject became embroiled in the Bolsheviks’ 1920s’ policy of incorporating so-called ‘backward’ populations

⁶⁹ Pinnow, Lost to the Collective, 1–22. ⁷⁰ For more detail see Andy Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s’, Ab Imperio, 2016, no. 2: 71–124.

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living in the more peripheral parts of the Union into a normatively framed Soviet body politic by enrolling them into the common project of Soviet modernity. By the time of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), pedology was inaugurated in the USSR as a ‘state science’—an official scientific extension of the Soviet stateadministrative apparatus. Its network of institutes and researchers was expected to form a united front, ready to respond to the state’s most urgent needs and directives. What was demanded of pedology at this point was also a comprehensive ‘Sovietization’ of the scientific approach to the child as part of the role that this field had to take in supporting the Soviet project of modernization more generally. This involved directing research down specific paths dictated by the state’s ideological agendas and policy priorities even more explicitly than was the case in the early 1920s. However, what was also implied by the ‘Sovietization’ of child science, and what became increasingly important during the early 1930s, was the construction of the Soviet human sciences as performative of a socialist modernity that was expected to be defined against the negatively connoted rival modernities—above all those of capitalism and fascism, for which the United States and Germany, respectively, stood in the 1930s.⁷¹ Just as the Bolsheviks had in their foreign policy moved towards consolidating ‘socialism in one country’, the position of Soviet child science in relation to what was once the ‘child science international’ was expected to shift as well. Enthusiastic as the ‘Sovietization’ of child science and its enrolment in the First Five-Year Plan seemed to be during 1928–30, it soon showed itself to be contradictory and confusing, ambiguous and exceedingly difficult to realize, both in rhetorical terms and in research and administrative practice.⁷² A key problem for Soviet child science was that the Party demanded it move outside of the transnational context in which it had been embedded throughout its development, and to which it could not help but remain inherently tied in terms of its assumptions and objectives, theories and methodologies, concepts and instruments. So much so that every step that a now ‘Sovietized’ pedology took to extricate itself from ⁷¹ The controversy over ‘multiple modernities’ in the context of Russo-Soviet historiography is a much larger problem, of course. See: David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Markku Kangaspuro and Jeremy Smith (eds.), Modernisation in Russia since 1900 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 2006). David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2015). See also the section ‘Sporia o modernosti’ in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (2016) 140: 16–91. ⁷² This was in line with more general forms of social disorientation during this period of ‘cultural revolution’ which Moshe Lewin has described as resulting in a ‘quicksand’ society. See Moshe Lewin, ‘Society, State and Ideology during the First Five Year Plan’, in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–31, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 41–77 (56). See also, in the same volume, the chapter by Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, ‘Educational Strategies and Cultural Revolution: The Politics of Soviet Development’, 78–104.

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these ties during the early 1930s led to it becoming entangled in them even more contradictorily. The early 1930s were a period of rapid institutional retrenchment in Soviet science as a consequence of the drive towards political centralization following Stalin’s ‘Great Break’. At stake was the strengthening of control by the Stalinized Communist Party over the structures of state administration more generally. At the turn of the 1930s, the scientific bodies embedded in the state apparatus or in other ways serving as the bureaucracy’s instrumental extensions were denounced as a dangerous bastion of bourgeois interests at the heart of the Soviet state. They were consequently turned into a major target for political disciplining or purging, with a view to overhauling their base of cadres, both scientific and bureaucratic. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) was especially under fire, given its role in managing most of Soviet science, education, and culture, as well as the influence that many of Stalin’s key opponents in the Party wielded within it.⁷³ The period from 1931 to 1932 became one of all-out ideological attack on practically every domain of science that had originally been recruited to serve the state.⁷⁴ The aim was the enforcement of partiinost′—loyalty and conformity to the Party line determined by the Central Committee and ultimately Stalin. The campaign demanded of scientists both mutual critique (kritika) and self-criticism (samokritika), expecting them to use the same political arguments that the Party used in its internal debates. De rigueur became the denunciation of any praise or emulation of science emanating from the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist’ West. Narkompros’ political leadership was overhauled, while the scientific leadership of pedology was brought to heel. Nonetheless, pedology as such survived and continued to thrive in two key forms: as a subject in the training of teachers at the various pedagogical institutes and as Narkompros’ so-called school pedology service. The latter served as an instrument of oversight, management, and control over schools in the context of the pressures to enhance performance and meet productivity targets set by the five-year plans.⁷⁵ Indeed, throughout the first half of the 1930s, school pedologists assessed and streamed schoolchildren, referred the underperforming and troublesome to special schools, carried out home visits, and managed school and family records for each child. During this period, one could at times hear isolated criticisms of the work of school pedologists coming from various quarters—parents, teachers, administrators. However, it was only in 1935 that the work of the pedology service came to

⁷³ For more on Narkompros see especially Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). ⁷⁴ Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 31–53. See also V. V. Umrikhin, ‘ “Nachalo kontsa” povedencheskoi psikhologii v SSSR’, in Represirovannaia nauka, vol. 1, ed. M. G. Iaroshevskii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 136–45. ⁷⁵ V. F. Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba v sovetskoi shkole 20-30-kh gg.’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1991, 4: 100–12.

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the attention of the highest levels of the Party in the context of its scrutiny of the ways in which Narkompros kept control over the conduct and performance of the schoolchild population. At this point, Narkompros’ policy of delegating a significant dimension of control to the systematic ‘pedological’ evaluation of schoolchildren was revealed as problematic since pedology, as practised on the ground, crucially, lacked political oversight and was susceptible to committing political blunders. This included especially the way in which the referral of various categories of ‘problem’ children to special schools was being conducted and managed. Soon, Narkompros’ policy came crashing down, with its pedology service, which played such an instrumental role in it, being singled out as the element on which the political errors of both policy and practice could be pinned. This led the Party to swiftly issue the now infamous decree ‘On the Pedological Distortions in the System of the Narkompros’ on 4 July 1936, denouncing pedology more generally as a pernicious ‘pseudoscience’.⁷⁶ The decree resulted in the comprehensive purging of everything associated with it, and included: the transfer of all pedological personnel to other occupational duties; the closure of courses in pedology at the various pedagogical institutes; the restructuring and renaming of pedology’s research hubs; the removal of all textbooks in the subject; and a blanket ban on mental tests, questionnaires, and other trademark instruments of pedological work. Pedology was thereby purged wholesale from the Soviet system of occupational roles as well as scientific disciplines, not to be invoked again, apart from with odious connotations.⁷⁷

Historicizing Russo-Soviet Child Science The damnation of pedology by the Communist Party in 1936 proved decisive in shaping the historiography of Russo-Soviet child science to date. The antipedology Party decree, the campaign of self-criticism that preceded it, and the aggressive vilification that followed, successfully created a taboo around the very term ‘pedology’. The stigma attached to it soon turned into forms of historiographic erasure, not least since no discipline of that name survived elsewhere in the world to serve as a reminder. The circumvention of the topic of pedology by late-Soviet historians of the human sciences tends to be explained by political (self-)censorship, i.e. by the difficulties that Soviet historiography faced in negotiating pedology’s controversial status and problematic credentials, given the Party’s stark condemnation, which had never been formally recalled or revised, even at the height of de-Stalinization. This does not, however, fully account for the ⁷⁶ A. M. Rodin, ‘Iz istorii zapreta pedologii v SSSR’, Pedagogika, 1998, 4: 92–8. ⁷⁷ A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘K istorii vozniknoveniia i pervonachal′nogo razvitiia detskoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1976, 1: 143–55 (144).

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historiographic avoidance of the topic of pedology during the late Soviet period. Crucial to ‘forgetting’ was also the fact that Soviet historiographies of science produced disciplinary histories as supporting pillars of particular disciplines’ institutional existence in the present. By documenting the evolution of scientific institutions and traditions, by creating a pantheon of key figures and by classifying major schools of thought (‘good’ and ‘bad’), late-Soviet historiographies of Soviet sciences by and large served the function of disciplinary legitimation (something that included their dealing with and resolving ideologically controversial moments, as was the case in accounts of the history of Russo-Soviet psychology, for instance). A major difficulty in producing a history of pedology was that it was a failed ‘discipline’. Soviet historians were simply not in the business of writing about the rise and fall of a ‘Soviet science’. Thus, for late-Soviet historiography the problem posed by pedology was not only that the Party had labelled it an ‘anti-Soviet pseudoscience’, but also that, since 1936, pedology (in contrast to psychology, pedagogy, or defectology) was no longer an institutional reality that would have invited (indeed demanded) historiographical support. The most that historians could and, in fact, did do was to affirm pedology’s ultimate failure. Since the Thaw, occasional references to pedology were by no means as harsh as they had been in the 1930s; they certainly no longer vilified pedology as a ‘pernicious pseudoscience’. In some cases, commentary on it might even have sounded like a reprieve (if never quite rehabilitation); yet even then, Soviet historians continued to stress pedology’s (regrettable) ‘mistakes’ that had ultimately led to fiasco.⁷⁸ At the same time, parts of the history of the failed project of pedology have been selectively reincorporated into histories of recognized disciplines, principally psychology, pedagogy, and defectology—histories that ‘made sense’ by virtue of the fact that they referred to existing Soviet sciences and occupations.⁷⁹ Aspects of the history of pedology became thereby components of accounts of the institutional evolution of these other (ultimately successful) disciplines. Furthermore, the documentation of the pre-revolutionary origins of Soviet pedology became a much more acceptable topic for historicization between the 1950s and the 1980s, usually under the guise of charting the history of experimental, developmental, and educational psychology or the evolution of Russian pedagogical thought.⁸⁰ ⁷⁸ A. V. Petrovskii, ‘Neprochitannye stranitsy istorii psikhologii – tridtsatye gody’, Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1988, 4: 125–38. ⁷⁹ N. A. Danilicheva, ‘Metody psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia shkol′nikov v praktike uchitelei 2030-kh godov’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1976, 5: 143–7. Kh. S. Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1980). M. G. Iaroshevskii, Istoriia psikhologii (Moscow: Mysl′, 1985, 3rd edition). ⁸⁰ M. V. Sokolov, ‘Voprosy psikhologicheskoi teorii na russkikh s00 ezdakh po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1956, 2: 8–22. M. V. Sokolov, ‘Kritika metoda testov na russkikh s00 ezdakh po eksperimental′noi pedagogike (1910–1916)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1956, 6: 16–28. E. A. Budilova, ‘Pervye russkie eksperimental′nye psikhologicheskie laboratorii’, in Iz istorii russkoi psikhologii, ed. M. V. Sokolov (Moscow: Izd. APN RSFSR, 1961), 296–357.

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Meantime, in Western historiography produced during this same Cold War period, considerations of Soviet pedology featured prominently in general histories of the Soviet human and behavioural sciences, especially histories of Soviet psychology.⁸¹ In these accounts, pedology is usually discussed as an emblematically ‘Soviet’ phenomenon. Consequently, narratives of its rise and fall serve the function of constructing the ‘otherness’ of the Soviet Union. Soviet pedology is usually made to typify the utopian drives of the post-revolutionary 1920s, incarnating the Bolsheviks’ ambitions of science-based human and social engineering, which was said to have produced some radical (sometimes quirky and dubious, sometimes important and durable) innovations. The ‘Sovietness’ of Soviet pedology in the 1920s, especially its role in constructing what was imagined as the ‘New Soviet Person’, has been emphasized even when some of its innovations were shown to have origins and parallels in scientific and educational projects of Western, especially American, provenance. The story of Soviet pedology also served as a key example of the calamitous nexus of party-state and scientific agendas. It was evidence to the fact that 1930s’ Stalinist totalitarianism had led to the arbitrary elimination of whole branches of science, seemingly at the drop of a hat. Given its emphasis on pedology as a ‘Soviet’ phenomenon, Western historiography has been far less interested in the Russian child science movement of the tsarist era. Its treatment of the latter is usually confined to skimming across essential details, while interpreting it as a somewhat derivative precursor of subsequent, more distinctive, Soviet developments. This neglect of the earlier period of Russian child science in Western historiography is arguably the main reason why overviews of turn-of-the-twentieth-century child study as an international movement have so far failed to do full justice to this movement’s vibrancy in Russia in the build-up to the First World War. Otherwise, it has been the A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Obshchii obzor literatury po detskoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (vo 2-oi polovine XX v.)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1973, 6: 115–23. A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Obshchii obzor literatury po detskoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (nachala XX veka do oktiabr′skoi revoliutsii)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1974, 2: 156–67. Nikol′skaia, ‘K istorii vozniknoveniia’. D. N. Bogoiavlenskii, ‘Voprosy pedagogicheskoi psikhologii na dorevoliutsionnykh s00 ezdakh v Rossii (nachalo XX veka)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1977, 5: 150–7. A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Russkaia detskaia i pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia v 60-e gg. XIX v.’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1978, 1: 137–46. A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Zadachi razrabotki istorii detskoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1984, 4: 134–40. A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Osnovnye etapy razvitiia pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1987, 4: 109–18. E. A. Budilova, ‘Polemika o psikhologicheskom eksperimente na vserossiiskikh s00 ezdakh po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, in Istoriia stanovleniia i razvitiia eksperimental′nopsikhologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii, ed. B. F. Lomov, E. A. Budilova, and V. A. Kol′tsova (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 76–86. ⁸¹ E.g. Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1984). Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). David Joravsky, Russian Psychology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

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remarkable popularity in the West of Vygotskian developmental and educational psychology that has generated more detailed historical accounts of parts of RussoSoviet child science.⁸² Following the collapse of the Communist regime and the dismantlement of the USSR, the historiography of pedology received a major boost in 1990s’ Russia as part of the rediscovery of the many abuses of power by the Soviet party-state. Pedology became a prominent example of a ‘repressed science’ (repressirovannaia nauka) and its story was told principally as one of the eradication, by Stalin, of what appeared to have been a productive and innovative, if at times overly utopian and controversial, field of scientific research.⁸³ This framing of pedology further cemented the historiographic significance of the 1936 anti-pedology Party decree, which became the centrepiece of almost every subsequent account devoted to Soviet child science. The official condemnation of pedology by the Communist Party has since been presented as an outrageous and mysterious affair begging for critical explanation and inviting multiple layers of scrutiny and interpretation, with particular focus on the unhealthily intimate relations between this field and the Bolshevik elite. Studies of pedology’s demise that came slightly later, towards the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, continued in this vein, although they were built on a more solid foundation of archival sources and, as a result, offered less speculative treatments of the issue. At the same time, though, they continued to focus on the build-up to and the consequences of the 1936 decree, reaffirming the event of pedology’s ‘repression’ as the dominant historiographic concern.⁸⁴ This keen interest in pedology’s ‘post-mortem’ was accompanied by a revival of curiosity about the ideas and practices, researchers and institutions, insights and ⁸² Jaan Valsiner, Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991). ⁸³ D. Nikolenko, A. Gubko, and P. Ignatenko, ‘Zlokliucheniia nauki pedologii: Pora vernut′ imia’, Narodnoe obrazovanie, 1990, 10: 117–24. F. A. Fradkin, Pedologiia: mify i deistvitel′nost′ (Moscow: Znanie, 1991). F. Fradkin and M. Plokhova, ‘Istoriia raspravy s pedologiei’, Vospitanie shkol′nikov, 1991, 6: 21–4. A. V. Petrovskii, ‘Zapret na kompleksnoe issledovanie detstva’, in Represirovannaia nauka, vol. 1, 126–35. Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba’. Alexandre Etkind, ‘L’essor et l’échec du movement “paidologique”: De la psychanalyse au “nouvel homme de masse” ’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 1992, 33(4): 387–418. P. Ia. Shvartsman and I. V. Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’, in Repressirovannaia nauka, vol. 2, ed. M. G. Iaroshevskii (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), 121–39. Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St Petersburg: Meduza, 1993), 311–41. See also the English version Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 259–83. I. N. Til′man, ‘Teoriia i metodika izucheniia razvitiia detei i uslovii ikh vospitaniia v otechestvennoi pedologii (20–30 gg.)’, Avtoreferat (Moscow, 1993). ⁸⁴ Rodin, ‘Iz istorii zapreta’. E. Thomas Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers to Their Rights: Soviet Education and the 1936 Denunciation of Pedology’, History of Education Quarterly, 2001, 41(4): 471–93. Nikolai Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2004). A. A. Piskoppel′, ‘Pedologiia i psikhotekhnika: Istoricheskii opyt metodologicheskogo oformleniia i obosnovaniia kompleksnykh nauchno-tekhnicheskikh distsiplin’, Medologiia i istoriia psikhologii, 2006, 1(2): 47– 56. N. Iu. Stoiukhina, ‘Pedologiia v Nizhnem Novgorode: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie’, in Nauchnye idei F. A. Fradkina v kontekste sovremennykh issledovanii istorii i teorii vsemirnogo pedagogicheskogo protsessa (Vladimir: Vladimirskii gos. gum. un., 2008), 210–15.

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methodologies of this ‘forgotten’ science. As a result, pedology has come to be seen by many as a long-neglected endeavour that deserved to be reinstated to its rightful place as a legitimate part of the history of the Soviet human sciences and educational research in particular. And yet, throughout the 1990s–2000s, the most important contributions to the history of Russo-Soviet child science continued to be narratives focused elsewhere—on psychoanalysis, developmental and educational psychology, mental testing, special education, delinquency, pedagogical thought and educational research, Vygotskii and his school, the history of early-Soviet childhood and its institutions.⁸⁵ In some cases (e.g. works on psychoanalysis, mental testing, Vygotskii, or the kindergarten movement), the 1990s’ opening up of the Soviet archives enabled the emergence of genuinely novel accounts. In others (histories of Russian psychology and defectology), what came out in the 1990s was mostly an updated version of histories that had already been in circulation during perestroika or even earlier.⁸⁶ Detailed studies devoted to certain key figures in Russo-Soviet child science have also offered valuable new contributions.⁸⁷ Nonetheless, it was only in the 2010s that more comprehensive accounts of ‘the rise and fall’ of the Russo-Soviet child science movement across both the late-tsarist and the early-Soviet periods, have appeared, although these are, for the most part, overviews documenting the movement’s key institutions, scholars, theories, and events.⁸⁸

⁸⁵ A. V. Brushlinskii (ed.), Psikhologicheskaia nauka v Rossii XX stoletiia: Problemy teorii i istorii (Moscow: Inst. psikh. RAN, 1997). V. M. Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov (Moscow: Narodnoe obrazovanie, 2004). N. P. Senchenkov, ‘Pedologicheskie issledovaniia rebenka v otechestvennom pedagogicheskom nasledii pervoi treti XX veka’, Avtoreferat (Moscow, 2006). T. D. Martsinkovskaia, Istoriia vozrastnoi psikhologii: Uchebnoe posobie dlia vuzov (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2010). E. S. Min′kova, ‘Osobennosti stanovleniia psikhologii razvitiia v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX – pervoi treti XX veka’, Metodologiia i istoriia psikhologii, 2010, 5(2): 40–8. ⁸⁶ A. A. Nikol′skaia, Vozrastnaia i pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Dubna: Feniks, 1995). Kh. S. Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti: Istoriia ikh izucheniia, vospitaniia i obucheniia s drevnikh vremen do serediny XX veka (Moscow: NPO Obrazovanie, 1995). A. V. Petrovskii, Psikhologiia v Rossii: XX vek (Moscow: URAO, 2000). ⁸⁷ The case of A. P. Nechaev and his ‘experimental pedagogy’ would be one example. See: Romanov, Opytno-eksperimental′naia pedagogika. V. V. Anshakova, Problemy detskoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v tvorchestve A. P. Nechaeva: Uchebnoe posobie (Astrakhan: Izd. Astrakhanskogo gos. ped. un-ta, 1999). V. V. Anshakova, Vklad A. P. Nechaeva v razvitie vozrastnoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii: Materialy k spetskursu (Astrakhan: Izd. Astrakhanskogo gos. ped. un-ta, 2002). V. M. Kadnevskii, ‘A. P. Nechaev i stanovlenie eksperimental′noi pedagogiki v Rossii’, Pedagogika, 2005, 1: 71–8. ⁸⁸ Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii. See also several contributions in Friedrich et al. (eds.), Une science du développement humain est-elle possible?, namely: Carlo Trombetta, ‘La pédologie russe et soviétique. Naissance et chute d’un mouvement scientifique’, 65–81; Irina Leopoldoff, ‘La science du développement de l’enfant en URSS. Chroniques de la revue Pedologija 1928–1932’, 83–105; Guillaume Garreta, ‘Pragmatisme et pédologie: Dewey, Vygotski et la pédagogie soviétique des années 1920’, 107–36. See also Irina Leopoldoff, ‘A Psychology for Pedagogy: Intelligence Testing in USSR in the 1920s’, History of Psychology, 2014, 17(1): 187–205, and D. Karoli. [Dorena Caroli], ‘Kontseptsiia S. S. Molozhavogo: Mezhdu istoricheskim monizmom i repressiiami pedologii (1924– 1937)’, in Istoriko-pedagogicheskoe znanie v nachale III tysiacheletiia; istoriia pedagogiki kak pedagogicheskaia i istoricheskaia nauka. Materialy Desiatoi mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Moskva, 13 noiabria 2014 g., ed. Grigorii B. Kornetov (Moscow: ASOU, 2014), 79–103.

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One of the key problems that the above historiography has faced is the difficulty of pinning down what kind of a historical phenomenon the sciences of the child actually were, and what social or institutional form they assumed in the period between the 1880s and the 1930s (whether in Russia/USSR or elsewhere). Charting the evolution of what I have dubbed ‘child science’ cannot be a matter of following the rise and fall of some specific, reified discipline or even of a singularly and straightforwardly defined movement. ‘Child science’ was a highly dynamic multidisciplinary and multi-professional arena of interactions that cut across and interconnected a remarkably wide variety of different, complexly interrelated social concerns, political interests, and professional agendas; scientific programmes, forms of expertise, domains of state intervention, and areas of public engagement. Thus, understanding the history of this field necessitates the simultaneous exploration of a number of different, if interrelated, zones of interprofessional and interdisciplinary interaction. It entails the investigation of a plurality of more narrowly defined programmes of scientific innovation and disciplinary or occupational (trans)formation which intersected in this arena. Understanding ‘child science’ also requires one to see ‘the child’, around which this field appeared to coalesce, as never simply an object of study, but as an object that assumed a much wider range of forms, functions, and meanings, both scientific and social. These forms, functions, and meanings varied from one micro-context to the next and, crucially, kept shifting in direct response to large-scale social and political transformations that marked Russian history across the late imperial and early Soviet eras. The complexity, heterogeneity, and ambiguity of child science as an historical phenomenon does not mean that it cannot or should not be studied in its own right. Quite the contrary, grappling with this complexity and ensuring that all the different strands and facets of child science are understood as interconnected are crucial to making sense of their history. This book aims to do just that. It is organized into six chapters that broadly, but not strictly, follow a chronological order. The next chapter, ‘The Upbringing of Man’, presents the social and scientific background to the appearance of child study in Russia from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Its focus is on how the culturally specific concept of vospitanie (usually translated as ‘upbringing’) was turned into a domain of knowledge and especially how parents, as those responsible for vospitanie, came to be mobilized into scientific projects of studying child development. The chapter that follows, ‘Pedagogy as Science’, traces the institutional growth of the Russian child science movement between the 1890s and 1917. The focus here is on scientific practices that crystallized around school-based education. This included debates about the participation of teachers in research on children, the reform of pedagogy through new approaches in experimental psychology, and an analysis of the ways in which the medical profession sought to influence educational practice in Russia at this time. The last chapter that covers the imperial era, ‘The Imperfect Child’, examines the role that

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the diagnostics and treatment of various kinds of ‘imperfections’ in the child population played in the rise of Russian child science in the pre-revolutionary context. This chapter analyses the emergence of mental testing in Russia before 1917 and the creation of the empire’s first special institutions for the ‘defective’ during this period. The chapter that opens the discussion of the Soviet period, ‘Child Science in Revolution’, charts the initial expansion of institutions devoted to the study of the child in the Soviet Union in the midst and aftermath of the civil war. It highlights as decisive contexts, firstly, the all-out ‘struggle’ with delinquency (besprizornost′) and ‘defectiveness’ in the early 1920s; secondly, the expansion of schooling to entirely new mass constituencies, leading to a radical realignment of educational norms through the adoption of experimental educational models; and thirdly, the revolutionization of the human sciences in the early-Soviet era, which included the interplay of such diverse approaches as Freudian psychoanalysis and the neuroscientific ‘reflexology’ of Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov. The next chapter, ‘The Making of Pedology’, considers the institutionalization of Soviet pedology as a ‘state science’ with a focus on the latter half of the 1920s and the turn of the 1930s. At the centre of this chapter is the analysis of how the forms and meanings of Soviet pedology evolved over the course of the 1920s, shifting from a (pragmatic) ‘bandwagon’ to a (wishful) ‘synthesis’ and then to a (political) ‘programme of takeover’ of an otherwise amorphous field of scientific and professional work. This chapter finishes with a discussion of pedology’s ‘disciplining’ by the Party in 1931–2. The final chapter on the Soviet period, ‘Pedology at Work’, focuses on Soviet pedology as a distinct domain of occupational work within the emergent education system. Of particular interest is the role that pedology played in combating ‘underperformance’ within this system through the practice of streaming and referrals to special schools of those evaluated as below the norm. The chapter traces the origins of this policy across the 1920s, but its focus is on the expansion of the school pedology service under Narkompros in the 1930s. This last empirical chapter concludes with a discussion of what led to the demise of pedology in the mid-1930s, arguing that what was being abolished and dismantled in 1936 was principally pedology as occupational work rather than science as such. The book’s Conclusion, titled ‘The Afterlife of a “Repressed Science” ’, offers a discussion of the ways in which pedology and its legacies have been framed in post-Soviet Russia, while at the same time providing an overview of this book’s core contributions to the historiography of Russo-Soviet child science, with a focus especially on the question of how the latter should be understood as an historical phenomenon.

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2 The Upbringing of Man Of Nurture and Nature

– What are you preparing your son for? – someone asked me. – To be a human being, – I replied. Nikolai Pirogov, ‘Questions of Life’, Marine Almanac (1856, no. 9)¹ Imagine a young woman preparing for motherhood and dreaming of what a little cherub the infant growing under her heart will be. Her husband brings her as a gift the book by Mr Grum [The Manual for the Upbringing, Education and Healthcare of Children]² to help her prepare for the duties that await her. She opens the section ‘The newborn child’ . . . So what do you think, dear reader – Will she continue reading? Unlikely, we think. For, whatever next! Is she really expected to measure and weigh her cherub like a prime cut of beef? F. Toll′, ‘The Pedagogical Review’, The Teacher (1862, no. 19)³

The Upbringing of Man: Vospitanie cheloveka In the era of the Great Reforms, parts of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia believed that the modernization of the empire’s institutions was not sufficient in and of itself. The transformation that they sought had to go deeper. What they called for was no less than the rediscovery of the ‘humanity’ of the empire’s citizens. The disillusioned army surgeon, anatomist, and professor at the Imperial MedicalSurgical Academy, Nikolai Pirogov (1810–81), upon returning from Russia’s debacle in the Crimean War, formulated the task ahead most influentially in his hard-hitting 1856 article ‘Questions of Life’.⁴ The article earned Pirogov the

¹ Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov, ‘Voprosy zhizni’, Morskoi sbornik, 1856, no. 9: 559–97 (559). All translations from Russian in this book are the author’s. ² Kondratii Ivanovich Grum[-Grzhmailo], Rukovodstvo k vospitaniiu, obrazovaniiu i sokhraneniiu zdorov′ia detei, vol. 1, Vozrast mladencheskii (St Petersburg: Min. vnut. del, 1843). ³ F. Toll′, ‘Pedagogicheskoe obozrenie’, Uchitel′, 1862, no. 19: 980–4 (981). ⁴ Available in N. I. Pirogov, Izbrannye pedagogicheskie sochneniia (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1985), 29–51. Originally published in Morskoi sbornik in 1856, it was widely discussed in other outlets. Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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appointment as Superintendent of the Odessa educational district, where he invested himself in improving schooling, becoming one of the leading lights of educational reformism in the late tsarist era.⁵ According to Pirogov, the people of Russia were so fundamentally defined and divided by their social estate, and its educated elites, in particular, so thoroughly subordinated to the narrowly utilitarian needs of an autocratic-bureaucratic state, that simply ‘being human’ was not a given. ‘Being human’ had to be forged in the dialectic of humanity’s givenness in the natural condition of ‘man’ that transcended one’s belonging to a particular estate, and its non-givenness in the moral ideal of ‘Man’ to be raised out of and above this natural foundation.⁶ ‘Being human’ had to be painstakingly nurtured—in oneself, but most especially in one’s progeny.⁷ What was expected was not the realization of some abstract ideal of ‘humanity’, but the ‘development’ (razvitie) of autonomous and authentic ‘personhood’ (lichnost′) in each future citizen. A new model of citizenship, based on one’s development as a ‘person’ and a ‘human being’, would, it was hoped, come to replace the existing one based on one’s arbitrary belonging to an archaic estate and one’s purely functional service to an orderly state. The above was entrusted to the task of ‘upbringing’ (vospitanie), which the Russian elites had turned into a vital social obligation already during the Enlightenment—the patriotic duty to raise physically and psychologically robust, loyal, and moral citizens of the empire and worthy members of their estate.⁸ The Westernized nobility had kept abreast of international pedagogical and philosophical literature on the topic, and during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a number of its most progressively minded members were keen to turn their children into projects of both systematic observation and pedagogical shaping based on Enlightenment ideas and values.⁹ The culturally-specific concept of vospitanie was highly expandable: it blended the notions of care, upbringing, socialization, and education, and it encompassed guiding the development of a ‘person’ in every respect—physical, intellectual, and moral. The meanings of the term could potentially stretch from basic forms of

⁵ On Pirogov’s influence see A. N. Ostrogorskii, N. I. Pirogov i ego pedagogicheskie zavety (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1914). ⁶ See also P. D. Iurkevich, Kurs obshchei pedagogiki s prilozheniiami (Moscow: Grachev, 1869), 41–2. ⁷ N. I. Pirogov, Novosel′e litseia (Odessa: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1857), 7, 9–12. ⁸ See: Anna Kuxhausen, From the Womb to the Body Politic: Raising the Nation in Enlightenment Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 11–26. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–84. Catriona Kelly, ‘Educating Tat′iana: Manners, Motherhood and Moral Education (Vospitanie), 1760–1840’, in Gender in Russian History and Culture, ed. Linda Edmondson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 1–28. See also Max J. Okenfuss and V. O. Kliuchevskii, ‘V. O. Kliuchevskii on Childhood and Education in Early Modern Russia’, History of Education Quarterly, 1977, 17(4): 417–47. ⁹ See Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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nourishment to the noble task of fostering moral qualities in a human being.¹⁰ Vospitanie also had a prominent narrower usage that referred specifically to the domain of early childcare and preschool upbringing—the initial period of childrearing which took place predominantly in the home and was ultimately the responsibility of parents. In this sense, vospitanie contrasted another key term— obrazovanie (lit. ‘formation’)—which referred to education that one obtained through schooling and which was the domain of professional teachers. It was in parental vospitanie therefore that the dialectics of nature and nurture as a model of biosocial reproduction was to be played out in the most explicit and intimate of ways. Pirogov’s reframing of this undertaking as ‘the upbringing of man’ (vospitanie cheloveka) opened the question of what ‘the human’, as both the object and the objective of development and nurture might be. What was it that Russia’s educated elite needed to both realize and reproduce themselves as? In the coming decades, it was children who, as exemplary phenomena of nature, as well as key objects of nurture, became both the models on which the articulation and reproduction of ‘humanity’ through a dialectic of nature and nurture would be played out in theory, and the subjects on whom the vital projects of ‘the upbringing of man’ and the ‘development of personhood’ were to be enacted in practice. Vospitanie was a legal responsibility of every Russian parent and was codified as such in the context of juridical definitions of the powers that parents had over their children.¹¹ In tsarist law, the power (vlast′) of a parent over their child was defined as, in principle, a form of ‘guardianship’ (popechitel′stvo), to be exercised in the best interest of the child.¹² In effect, the state ‘delegated’ power over a child to its parents. At the same time, the tsarist state adhered to the principle of noninterference in parent–child relations, except in cases of extreme criminal abuse, immoral conduct, or utter disregard of the duty of care that resulted in serious physical or psychological harm to the child.¹³ In practice, parents were accorded considerable, rarely challenged, power over their children and this was rationalized by the argument that such power was necessary to enable parents to perform the duties of care devolved to them by the state. These duties were defined through two semantically overlapping terms, both based on roots that refer to ‘feeding’: vskormit′ (to literally feed, but more broadly, to provide for materially) and vospitat′ (to bring up, morally instruct and educate, and, ultimately, prepare for a worthy social role).¹⁴ The state expected parents to contribute to their children’s ¹⁰ K. D. Ushinskii, Pedagogicheskie sochineniia, 6 vols. (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1988–90), vol. 5, 40. ¹¹ See especially the discussion of A. Rabinovich, Roditeli, deti i rodstveniki (Moscow, 1912), 4–70, which focuses on legislation from the late nineteenth century, but also traces its roots to the early eighteenth century. Rabinovich refers principally to the various articles in vol. 10, part 1 of the Russian empire’s legal code (Svod zakonov). For full detail see Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, ed. I. D. Mordukhai-Boltovskii (St Petersburg: Deiatel′, 1912), vol. 10, part 1, book 1, section 2, chapter 2, subsection 1 (‘O vlasti roditel′skoi v lichnykh otnosheniiakh’), articles 164–79. ¹² Rabinovich, Roditeli, 9. ¹³ Ibid., 7. ¹⁴ Ibid., 4.

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upbringing according to their station, means, and abilities, but what exactly this amounted to in practice was unspecified. Indeed, the law had nothing to say about exactly what kinds of concrete powers (in the plural; in Russian polnomochiia) were entailed in the practices of parental care, nurture, and upbringing. The state did not, for instance, either conceptualize or punish parental ‘neglect’ of their child’s education. Silence on this was reinforced by the policy of non-interference in parental approaches to the socialization of their ‘wards’: ‘In the choice of the character and direction of upbringing [vospitanie] the state leaves complete freedom to parents, on the assumption that they should be familiar with the inclinations and abilities of their children, which will determine their future roles.’¹⁵ Parents were assumed to have the necessary knowledge of their children’s capacities as well as a clear understanding of the desired social functions they were ‘preparing’ them for (thus echoing the exchange that opens Pirogov’s article, cited in the epigraph to this chapter). Legal discourse, in this context, articulated what Michel Foucault has described as ‘negative’ or ‘juridical’ power¹⁶—the power of parental, essentially patriarchal, authority, which the law supported; and the power of (extreme) parental abuse, which was the point at which the state’s delegated power might be withdrawn. This was why the figure of the father, symbolically an embodiment of this kind of power, was in legal terms the more important of the two parents.¹⁷ Another significant legislative point was that the parent could further delegate the duties of upbringing to ‘other persons’ (postoronie litsa)—from the wet-nurse, the servant nanny, or the kindergarten caregiver (vospitatel′nitsa) in the early years, to teachers and school authorities once the child was of school age.¹⁸ The reform-era call to renew and enhance the meanings of vospitanie, which turned it into something of a ‘holy duty’ for the educated classes more broadly, entailed a radical expansion of parental responsibilities above and beyond those derived merely from the juridically-defined parental authority. The new responsibilities, as well as the powers that these assumed, were not expected to be elaborated in law, but rather through science (nauka). Indeed, critical to vospitanie acquiring new significance at this juncture was its transformation into a domain of knowledge. The knowledge in question had little to do with what tsarist law presumed was sufficient—namely, the parents’ familiarity with their child and their understanding of the social role that he or she should ideally assume. Vospitanie was now expected to be shaped by objective, ‘scientific’, supra-personal knowledge about ‘the human’, knowledge which would ground the idea(l) of (common) ‘humanity’ in very different kinds of ‘laws’—laws of human

¹⁵ Ibid., 11. ¹⁶ Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1998), 82–91. ¹⁷ Rabinovich, Roditeli, 5–6. ¹⁸ Ibid., 7.

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development, natural as well as moral, biological as well as historical. As Pamfil Danilevich Iurkevich (1826–74), chair of philosophy at Moscow University, wrote in his 1865 Lectures on Upbringing (Chteniia o vospitanii), the principles of upbringing had to be derived ‘from a rigorous and all-round observation of human nature and the fundamental laws of its development and perfecting’.¹⁹ A ‘science of upbringing’ (nauka o vospitanii) was thus both possible and necessary: from now on, ‘[o]nly a rigorous and general science of upbringing [ . . . ] can prevent the educator [vospitatel′] from deviating from the right path’.²⁰ Parents continued to have the primary responsibility for the socialization of their children, but what vospitanie amounted to was no longer left open and unspecified; nor could parents, or any other vospitatel′, be free to decide for themselves what the ‘right path’ guiding the development of a child might be. Encapsulated in vospitanie was no longer the juridical power of parental authority referred to in the letter of the law, but normative power, to be articulated through the discourses and practices of the human sciences (however broadly, heterogeneously, and changeably these might have been understood both at the time and in the decades to follow).²¹ What vospitanie was expected to be rooted in was, from the 1860s, elaborated, framed, and regulated by science (nauka) in ever increasing detail. What the law had defined monolithically as parental power (vlast′) began to diffract into a plurality of much more specific powers. These powers were articulated, firstly, as a form of knowledge-power for which the concept of nauka as such stood, and which came to be represented by a growing body of experts of different kinds, who assumed the position of the bearers and promoters of legitimate knowledge in an array of relevant human sciences. Secondly, they extended into new kinds of knowledge-practices into which parents, as new kinds of educators, were to be enrolled in one way or another.²² Ultimately, this new discourse on vospitanie turned educated parents into subjects of particular forms of knowledge. As such, they became, firstly, objects of training and observation, commentary and criticism by the experts; and secondly, subjects of self-observation, self-evaluation, and self-criticism as performers of vospitanie regulated by science.²³ In the post-reform era, vospitanie was to become a practice shaped through both knowledge-able and knowledge-generating observation and reflection, with parents being helped to ‘learn to observe’, to acquire skills of continuous scientifically-informed and normatively framed analysis of developmental changes and ¹⁹ P. D. Iurkevich, Chteniia o vospitanii (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1865), 5. ²⁰ P. D. Iurkevich, Kurs obshchei pedagogiki s prilozheniiami (Moscow: Grachev, 1869), 39. Iurkevich is best known for his 1860s’ polemics with materialist thinkers such as N. G. Chernyshevskii. His understanding of ‘science’ (nauka) here is anything but materialist. He understood nauka, including psychology and physiology, as revealing God-given laws and truths. ²¹ Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 53–73. ²² Mark Gibson, Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 43–5. ²³ Michel Foucault ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 1982, 8(4): 777–95.

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behaviour in a child.²⁴ This new approach to vospitanie was expected to extend to the earliest stages of infancy, the proverb ‘Uchi ditia poka ono poperek lavki lezhit . . . ’ (lit. ‘Teach a child while it is still small enough to lie across the table . . . ’), becoming a particularly frequent injunction. Some insisted that even before the child was born, its parents had to be clear about how they would go about the task of vospitanie.²⁵ The parental delegation of duties to ‘other persons’ (especially the wet-nurse and the nanny) also required knowledge on the part of the educated parent, essential for both vetting and oversight.²⁶ Furthermore, parental responsibilities extended beyond the practices of upbringing per se and into reproductive biology. Indeed, as caregivers and educators, parents were expected to watch out for problems of ‘heredity’ (nasledstvennost′)—namely, the danger of themselves contributing to the reproduction of ‘degenerative’ pathologies of body, mind, or character in their offspring and, by extension, in the society as a whole.²⁷

The Science of Upbringing Initially, in the 1860s–1870s, the new ‘science of upbringing’ (nauka o vospitanii) was presented by its promoters as a body of seemingly already established knowledge in the emergent human sciences—knowledge that practising educators (not just parents but also teachers) were expected to become acquainted with, and then refer and defer to in their daily tasks of care, upbringing, and educating. Such knowledge was meant to ensure that they performed their duties in the ‘correct’ way, so as not to endanger the child, and to foster, rather than hamper, the child’s all-round development.²⁸ The expectation was that every vospitatel′, and this essentially meant every member of the educated classes, not least in his or her capacity as parent, needed to become familiar with the new ‘sciences of man’ as applied to vospitanie. In the 1860s, the already mentioned professor of philosophy at Moscow University, P. D. Iurkevich, promoted his own domain of expertise as the essential basis of educational practice. This was ‘empirical psychology’ (opytnaia psikhologiia), i.e. psychology rooted in both observation and introspection, in contrast to purely theoretical psychology (umozritel′naia psikhologiia), which, as part of ²⁴ A. A. Dernova-Iarmolenko, Azbuka materi: Pervye uroki po ukhodu za rebenkom (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1912), 3–4. P. F. Kapterev, ‘Trudnosti semeinogo vospitaniia’, Vospitanie i obuchenie (hereafter VO), 1892, no. 1: 1–13 (7, 9). ²⁵ Dernova-Iarmolenko, Azbuka materi, 4. See also D. I. Chernov, ‘Ditia v pervye gody zhizni’, Uchitel′, 1861, no. 3: 91–6 (91). ²⁶ Advice on vetting wet-nurses goes back to the earliest Russian science-based advice to parents. See Grum, Rukovodstvo, 60–99. For the later period see Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 301–2. ²⁷ E.g. see discussion on nasledstvennost′ and vyrozhdenie in I. A. Sikorskii, Vospitanie v vozraste pervogo detstva (St Petersburg: A. E. Riabchenko, 1884), 186–203. ²⁸ Iurkevich, Chteniia o vospitanii, 6.

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philosophy, was of strictly academic interest.²⁹ Iurkevich also recognized the importance of physiology, the fashionable new ‘science of life’, which ‘every educated person today feels the need to learn about [ . . . ], [and which] becomes for him a life’s necessity: he will study it, if not as a specialist, then at least according to his needs as a human being (po nuzhdam cheloveka)’.³⁰ While Iurkevich was extremely wary of the contemporary overuse of physiology to explain almost every domain of human activity, and was especially critical of the new materialist reduction of psychology to it, he still deemed physiology’s role in upbringing and education, and therefore in the science of vospitanie, legitimate and necessary. The expectation to ground the principles of early childcare in physiology and hygiene, and of subsequent educational and moral development in psychology, was not novel in itself. This had been repeatedly argued since the eighteenth century by those who were influenced by Enlightenment philosophies. Moreover, when it came to parental care, both before and during the Great Reforms, medical advice relevant to the upbringing of young children was readily available to educated Russian parents, mostly in the form of translated or adapted manuals of child hygiene. For example, in the late 1830s, on the initiative of the Free Economic Society, Kondratii Ivanovich Grum-Grzhmailo translated a book on early childcare by one of Germany’s most respected physicians, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland.³¹ Grum, who was active in this society in the organization of a programme of smallpox vaccination, also produced, in 1840, his own aid to

²⁹ On Iurkevich’s pedagogical ideas see A. P. Fursov (ed.), P. D. Iurkevich o vospitanii (Moscow: Shkol’naia pressa, 2004). ³⁰ P. D. Iurkevich, ‘Iazyk fiziologov i psikhologov’, Russkii vestnik, 1862, no. 4: 912–34 (912, 915). This is an extensive review of the 1861–2 translation of G. H. Lewes’ Physiology of Common Life (1859) in which Iurkevich polemicizes with M. A. Antonovich who reviewed the same book in Sovremennik and sought to reduce psychology to physiology. Iurkevich’s exposition continues in issues 5, 6, and 8 of Russkii vestnik for 1862. On the practice of experimental physiology in late imperial Russia see G. Kichigina, The Imperial Laboratory: Experimental Physiology and Clinical Medicine in PostCrimean Russia (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009) and J.-C. Dupont, ‘The Evolution of Physiological Psychology in Russia at the Time of Sechenov in International Context’, in J. G. Barbara, J.-C. Dupont, and Irina Sirotkina (eds.), History of the Neurosciences in France and Russia: From Charcot and Sechenov to IBRO (Paris: Hermann, 2011), 23–48. Russia’s most original physiologist of this era was Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov (1829–1905), who extensively discussed the development of the nervous system in infancy—a topic to which he dedicated Chapter Three of his polemical piece Who Should be Developing Psychology and How (1873). See I. M. Sechenov, ‘Komu i kak razrabatyvat′ psikhologiiu’, in Elementy mysli (Moscow: Knigovek, 2011), 126–218 (164–218). However, Sechenov’s purpose here was not to provide an empirically-grounded account of the path of child development as part of a ‘science of upbringing’. Rather, he sought to make a theoretical point—namely to counter assumptions of a priori ‘consciousness’ that reigned among philosophically-minded psychologists based in the humanities faculties (such as Iurkevich). Sechenov argued that ‘thought’ formed physiologically and developmentally out of bundles of elementary reflexes, which he modelled in an entirely abstract infant. ³¹ Khristofor Vil′gel′m Gufeland, Dobryi sovet materiam, kak postupat′ v vazhneishikh chast′iakh fizicheskogo vospitaniia detei, v pervye ikh gody (St Petersburg: Vol′no-ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo, 1838).

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mothers on how to diagnose and treat childhood ailments at home.³² Finally, in 1843–5 he published the most extensive and widely used Russian childcare guide to parents of this period, a rough equivalent of Vladimir Zhuk’s later and much better-known Mother and Child (1881).³³ What was new in the 1860s–1870s, however, was the beginning of the campaign to transform members of the Russian educated classes into committed vospitateli of their own children by getting them to directly engage with and actively embrace specific areas of scientific knowledge about ‘man’—principally ‘physiology’ and ‘psychology’ as understood at the time. A whole range of new pedagogical journals that targeted not only professional teachers but also members of the educated public, in their role as parents and caregivers, arose and flourished in the 1860s– 1870s. They included Journal of Upbringing (Zhurnal dlia vospitaniia, 1857–9), Teacher (Uchitel′, 1861–70), Pedagogical Compendium (Pedagogicheskii sbornik, 1864–1918), Family and School (Sem′ia i shkola, 1871–1917), Pedagogical Bulletin (Pedagogicheskii listok, 1871–1917), and Kindergarten (Detskii sad, 1866–76), which later transformed into Upbringing and Instruction (Vospitanie i obuchenie, 1877–1917). All these publications argued that vospitanie needed to be modernized by embedding it in scientific knowledge about human development. Their editors thought it important to provide a ‘description of the human organism and its expressions [otpravleniia], as well as an account of the process of the natural development of the organism from birth to maturity’.³⁴ Nikolai Khristianovich Vessel′ (1834–1906), editor of first Uchitel′ and later Pedagogicheskii sbornik, was especially vocal in advocating the transformation of the practice of upbringing along these lines.³⁵ In the first year’s run of Uchitel′ he serialized a popular course in ‘empirical psychology’ (opytnaia psikhologiia) as it applied to problems of upbringing and education, targeting mostly parents, whom he addressed in the second person.³⁶ Sections targeting mothers were presented in an even more engaging and accessible way, but one that still made a point of the importance of science in shaping parenthood. For example, in 1861, Uchitel′ ran in serialized form D. I. Chernov’s fictionalized manual of child upbringing titled ‘The Child in the First Years of Its Life’. This was a story of a fictional young mother, Anna Petrovna ³² Kondratii Ivanovich Grum, Drug materei (St Petersburg: A. A. Pliushar, 1846; this is a later, updated edition). ³³ Kondratii Ivanovich Grum, Rukovodstvo k vospitaniiu, obrazovaniiu i sokhraneniiu zdorov′ia detei, 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Min. vnut. del, 1843–5). The first volume deals with early childcare (see note 2), the next with toddlerhood, and the third with older children. On Grum in the context of the history of Russian paediatrics of the first half of the nineteenth century see E. M. Konius, Istoki russkoi pediatrii (Moscow: Medgiz, 1946), 213–22. ³⁴ ‘Ot redaktsii’, Uchitel′, 1861, no. 1: 15–16. ³⁵ See A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Psikhologicheskie osnovy vospitaniia v trudakh N. Kh. Vesselia’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1980, no. 6: 139–47. ³⁶ See also N. Kh. Vessel′, Opytnaia psikhologiia v primenenii k vospitaniiu i obucheniiu detei (St Petersburg: E. Veimar, 1862).

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Krotova, who gives birth to and then cares for her little son, Petriusha.³⁷ The narrative is mostly an opportunity for various instructions on the care of a child to be spelled out to the reader. One of the characters in the tale is Dr Kovalev, who provides lectures on bodily care. Another character, Navzorin, reads to Anna Petrovna from a book written by ‘a pedagogue’ on how not only infant bodies, but also their souls need to be nurtured from birth. Parallels can be drawn between this work and that of the physician Berthold Sigismund’s (1819–1864) Kind und Welt: Vätern, Müttern und Kinderfreunden (Braunschweig, 1856), the internationally-recognized account of a child’s development for parents of this era, narrated in the form of first-hand observations by a knowledgeable and friendly doctor—a work translated into Russian and published in 1866 in a convenient pocket-sized format.³⁸ Doctors were considered to be the only persons qualified to give authoritative advice in child development, especially matters of ‘hygiene’, which were understood broadly to include both the physical care of infants and young children and the rational promotion of health and physical development in older children.³⁹ Nevertheless, medical professionals in Russia still had forcefully to argue that the broader ‘questions of upbringing’ (voprosy vospitaniia)—as these became reframed and loaded with new values from the 1860s—were part of their rightful professional jurisdiction. Educated parents became one of the medics’ most important target audiences in this context—the group to whom doctors made their distinctive, hygiene-based, framings of the meanings of vospitanie, and among whom they sought to establish their authority.⁴⁰ This usually involved criticism of the reigning practices of parental care, which, the doctors argued, could not just lead to lifelong sickliness in the child, but also to the formation of warped personalities and irreparable psychopathologies.⁴¹ At the same time, doctors were always ready to provide expert backing to those parents who had a complaint to make about their child’s school and teachers, and they regularly criticized schools for their harsh disciplinary regimes, work-overload, inappropriate teaching techniques, and traumatizing exam procedures.⁴² Indeed, doctors

³⁷ Chernov’s work was published in book form in 1862 as Ditia v pervye gody zhizni (see note 63). ³⁸ Bertol′d Sigizmund, Ditia i mir: Posviashchaet otsam, materiam i druziam detei (St Petersburg: Kukol′-Iasnopol′skii, 1866). ³⁹ Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogii, 517. ⁴⁰ E.g. see the translated childcare manual Adal′bert Cherni [Adalbert Czerny], Vrach, kak vospitatel′ rebenka, trans. G. Gordon (St Petersburg: Osvobozhdenie, 1909). See E. S. Drentel′n, ‘Lechit′ ili vospityvat′?’, Vestnik vospitaniia (hereafter VV), 1900, no. 3: 161–89, a public lecture (delivered in Moscow in November 1899 and in Khar′kov in January 1900) by a female psychiatrist to an audience of mothers, focusing on the issue of ‘the nervous child’ and on ways of ‘curing’ such children through vospitanie. ⁴¹ A. Virenius, ‘Strakh kak element vospitaniia’, VO, 1886, no. 10: 193–7. P. F. Lesgaft, Semeinoe vospitanie i ego znachenie (St Petersburg: T-vo khudozhestvennoi pechati, 1906). ⁴² E.g. see O. Gintsburg, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s″ezd detskikh vrachei v S.-Peterburge. 27–31 dekabria 1912 goda’, Pediatriia, 1913, no. 1 (‘Korrespondentsiia’): 41–89 (79–83). The meeting on 31 December was a joint venue of the First All-Russian Conference of Paediatricians and the First All-Russian

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often presented themselves as arbiters in the sometimes difficult negotiations between teachers and parents. Finally, they at times depicted themselves as the only true allies of the suffering child—the sole professional who could understand the child better than either the parents or the teachers—its ‘trusted helper and close and useful friend in its hour of need’.⁴³ However, the scientific and professional authority of medicine did not in and of itself guarantee the successful ‘medicalization’ of vospitanie. For example, in the mid-1880s, Ivan Vasil′evich Maliarevskii (1846–1915), the founder of Russia’s first private school for children with special needs, established the journal The Medico-Pedagogical Herald (Mediko-pedagogicheskii vestnik, 1885–7) with the express purpose of rebuilding educational theory and practice on the basis of biomedicine. As someone who started off as a primary school teacher but went on to study medicine, working for a brief spell as both educator and doctor in a juvenile correctional facility, Maliarevskii campaigned vigorously for the ‘coming together of medicine and education’, arguing that medical science should serve as pedagogy’s guiding light. However, practically all the contributors to his journal were medical men, while its readership remained very limited, forcing Maliarevskii to close it down after just a couple of years. A much more articulate and influential Russian promoter of the rooting of vospitanie in the human sciences in the wake of the Great Reforms was Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinskii (1823–70). His multi-volume treatise Man as Object of Upbringing (St Petersburg, 1867–9) went furthest in Russia at this time in presenting a case for an entirely new, much more systematic, ‘science of upbringing’.⁴⁴ Ushinskii dubbed his version of such a science—‘pedagogical anthropology’ (pedagogicheskaia antropologiia). His exposition focused on physiology and psychology as bodies of knowledge about human development, elaborated in a way that made them relevant to the ‘art’ of guiding such development. These two disciplines broadly matched the two traditional parts of pedagogy—one concerned with ‘physical nurture’ (fizicheskoe vospitanie) and the other with the ‘nurture of the soul’ (dushevnoe vospitanie). Ushinskii was explicit that he was neither a scientist nor writing for scientists. His call for the ‘scientization’ of vospitanie had the form of a partly subjective synthesis of the current state of scientific knowledge about ‘man’. He was at the same time clearer than most that the disciplines he was introducing to the reader were still at a relatively early stage of development as sciences. Still, Ushinskii’s

Congress on Matters of Family Upbringing. As a meeting of doctors and parents the debates were mostly attacks on schools and teachers. ⁴³ See B., ‘Voprosy pedagogiki na III s″ezde otechestvennykh psikhiatrov’, Russkaia shkola (hereafter RS), 1910, no. 2: 63–4. ⁴⁴ Ushinskii, Pedagogicheskie sochinenia, vols. 5 and 6. A third volume of Chelovek kak predmet vospitaniia was planned but did not materialize.

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framework for the grounding of vospitanie in nauka was quickly recognized as seminal, and it continues to this day to be cited as the most important native inspiration for subsequent Russian constructions of a new science of child development and upbringing. However, Ushinskii’s synthetic, ‘anthropological’, model proved difficult to realize in practice as over the coming decades expertise in matters of vospitanie continued to be claimed by competing discourses, with experts in different professions offering different framings for what a ‘science of upbringing’ might be. It was psychology that continued to be pitched most directly and successfully to educators, lay and professional alike. Psychology seemed more accessible to educators than physiology or hygiene and more directly relevant to the practical work of vospitanie. At the same time, it was hardly a well-established discipline, let alone a profession, leaving plenty of scope for identifying new, virgin territories of psychological expertise. Indeed, from the latter half of the 1870s a special psychology for educators labelled ‘pedagogical psychology’ (pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia) started to be promoted with some success. This term was introduced in Russia by Petr Fedorovich Kapterev (1849–1922) in 1877, principally through his manual Pedagogical Psychology for Primary Schoolteachers, Educators and Caregivers—a tome of over 600 pages of dense print, which allowed its readers to feel the full weight of the sciences that underpinned their professional practice in this new framework.⁴⁵ ‘Pedagogical psychology’ could, in fact, be seen as Kapterev’s version of what Ushinskii had earlier called ‘pedagogical anthropology’. Kapterev too insisted on the continuity and contiguity of the physiological and the psychological, explaining the importance of brain functions, demonstrating the precedence of physiological processes and analysing the body’s complex psycho-physiological reactivity to environmental stimuli. Its pedagogical dimension was mostly a discussion of the influences that different educational environments, such as the family or the school, might have on a child’s developing psyche. Kapterev was not a holder of an academic post in psychology, but he considered himself perfectly entitled to promote his work as an authoritative outline of a de facto subsection of psychology. The prominent role that he accorded to physiology was designed to reinforce the legitimacy of what needed to become a new, properly scientific psychology for educators. In his other texts too, Kapterev was fond of resorting to medical metaphors to lend the weight of nauka to knowledgepractices that might already be part of the routine duties of vospitanie. He, for instance, argued that before proceeding with particular educational measures, parents needed to perform a ‘thorough physical and psychological diagnosis [diagnoz] of [their child’s] personality [lichnost′]’.⁴⁶ During the last couple of ⁴⁵ P. F. Kapterev, Pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia dlia narodnykh uchitelei, vospitatelei i vospitatel′nits (St Petersburg: A. M. Kotomin, 1877). ⁴⁶ P. F. Kapterev, ‘Trudnosti semeinogo vospitaniia’, VO, 1892, no. 1: 1–13 (7, 9).

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decades of the nineteenth century, ‘pedagogical psychology’ became arguably the most influential framework for the development of a new ‘science of upbringing’ in Russia. However, during this period it also came to be adopted mostly by authors of teacher-training manuals and was, as such, rather less relevant to the scientific reframing of specifically parental upbringing.⁴⁷

Parents and Child Study The ‘scientization’ of upbringing that was to be carried out by parents took a different turn around this same time, and Kapterev played a major role in that development too. Crucial here was the transformation of the daily tasks of parental care and upbringing into a context for carrying out what appeared like a legitimate scientific practice—namely, the systematic observation and meticulous recording of the minutest details of child behaviour.⁴⁸ Data collected in this way was seen as having the potential to result in coherent narratives of the law-like regularities of developmental transformation, especially during the first three years of a child’s life. These could then be framed as veritable natural-historical accounts of early human ontogenesis. It was assumed that these accounts could lead to new evolutionary and anthropological insights, or that they would (at the very least) create a firmer base of scientifically reliable psycho-physiological data on which the practices of upbringing could be rebuilt in a more rational way. The initial impetus for this turn was provided by the 1876–7 exchange between Hippolyte Taine and Charles Darwin on the relationship between child development, language acquisition, and human evolution, which came out in internationally publicized articles based on the two men’s diary-based observations of their daughter and son respectively.⁴⁹ This debate reached Russia almost instantly as translations of and commentaries on these articles were published in 1876–7 in the periodicals Knowledge and The Moscow Medical Newspaper.⁵⁰ These inspired some Russian authors, namely Adelaida Semenovna Simonovich (1840–1933) and

⁴⁷ E.g. N. D. Vinogradov, Pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia v sviazi s obshchei pedagogikoi, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. Obshch. pri Ist.-fil. Fak. Moskovskikh V.Zh.K., 1916). The way in which psychology was conveyed and connected to education varied from textbook to textbook and was by no means the same as in Kapterev’s original elaboration. ⁴⁸ Some portions of the text that follows have appeared in Andy Byford, ‘Parent Diaries and the Child Study Movement in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia’, The Russian Review, 2013, 72(2): 212–41. The present text is an adapted and edited version and some information has been updated. ⁴⁹ Hippolyte Taine, ‘De l’acquisition du langage chez les enfants et les peuples primitifs’, Revue philosophique, 1876, 1: 5–23; Charles Darwin, ‘Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, Mind, 1877, 2(7): 285–94. ⁵⁰ I. Ten, ‘Nabliudeniia nad usvoeniem iazyka rebenka’, Znanie, 1876, no. 10: 44–56. V. Benzengr, ‘K voprosu o razvitii rechi’, Moskovskaia meditsinskaia gazeta, 1876, no. 24: 755–64. ‘Probleski razuma: Biograficheskii ocherk rebenka Charl′za Darvina’, Moskovskaia meditsinskaia gazeta, 1877, no. 32: 969–77.

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her husband, the physician Iakov Mironovich Simonovich (1840–83), who ran one of Russia’s first kindergartens and edited Russia’s first journal on preschool education, Kindergarten (Detskii sad), to present and then publish related observations based on their own material, which they had collected as both parents and kindergarten educators.⁵¹ Influential in Russia was also the 1878 work of the Frenchman Bernard Pérez (1836–1903), Les trois premières années de l’enfant, which was translated into Russian only a year later, and published alongside an article by the Scot Alexander Bain (founder of the British journal Mind), which in Russian appeared under the title ‘Upbringing as Science’ (‘Vospitanie kak nauka’).⁵² Also in 1879, the journal School and Family called upon parents to send in detailed observations of their children’s development; this material was then synthesized and discussed by the initiator of the project, B. P. Lenskii.⁵³ Even more important was the appearance on the international scene of Wilhelm Thierry Preyer’s (1840–97) Die Seele des Kindes (Leipzig, 1881)—an account of infant development based on the author’s systematic observations of his son from birth to the age of three. This work is often recognized as laying down the foundations of modern child study by establishing a specific methodology for the study of early child development, namely that of the structured recording of developmental changes in infants and toddlers, based on a pre-prepared and repeatable schedule and plan of topics. Particularly significant was that Die Seele des Kindes turned the diary of child development into a practice that, while making serious scientific claims, mobilized a wider network of stakeholders, promoters, and emulators ready to engage in it in a variety of ways. Indeed, what became so influential in the decades to follow, in Russia as elsewhere, was less Preyer’s specific model of diary-keeping or his particular account of child development, and more the deployment of diaries of development written by caregivers and educators (especially parents and primarily mothers) as a means of fostering child study networks. In these networks, a very particular relationship was established between an emergent body of experts in child development, related professionals who claimed ‘questions of upbringing’ as their jurisdiction without being experts as such (e.g. ordinary doctors and teachers), and finally, a wider group of laypeople, namely engaged and interested parents.

⁵¹ See Ia. M. and A. S. Simonovich, Sravnenie individual′nogo razvitiia rebenka s epokhami chelovechestva (St Petersburg: A. M. Kotomin, 1884), which includes papers originally delivered in 1880. ⁵² Bernard Pérez, Les trois premières années de l’enfant (Paris: Germer Baillière et Cie, 1878). Bernar Pere, Pervye tri goda zhizni rebenka: Etiud opytnoi piskhologii (St Petersburg: F. S. Sushchinskii, 1879). See also the longer work by Alexander Bain, Education as a Science (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1884). ⁵³ B. P. Lenskii, ‘Russkie dannye dlia psikhologii rebenka’, Sem′ia i shkola, 1881, no. 4–5: 185–225; no. 10: 217–42; 1882, no. 2–3: 65–85. See also B. P. Lenskii, ‘Novye opyty i nabliudeniia nad rebenkom’, Sem′ia i shkola, 1882, no. 10: 310–20.

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          

Preyer’s book was not translated into Russian until the 1890s, but its appearance in German in the early 1880s provided a model for those in Russia who sought to position themselves as authorities in early child development. Their expertise contrasted the more traditional hygiene advice for parents provided by medically-trained childcare gurus by shifting the emphasis onto the problem of the child’s early psychological development.⁵⁴ The Kiev-based psychiatrist Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii (1842–1919), the Odessa-based psychologist Nikolai Nikolaevich Lange (1858–1921), and the St Petersburg-based promoter of ‘pedagogical psychology’ P. F. Kapterev were those who, over the course of the 1880s and early 1890s, mediated the reception of Preyer in Russia, initially penning their own summary accounts of early infant development ‘after Preyer’ and eventually publishing the first, mostly abridged, translations of Die Seele des Kindes.⁵⁵ Sikorskii in due course expanded this into a textbook on the ontogenetic development of the psyche targeting preschool educators (Figure 1).⁵⁶ The experts in question still tended to construct their target audience of parentvospitateli as non-specialists to whom they had to provide a properly scientific understanding of the specificities of child development in the first years of life and thereby equip them with the knowledge necessary to avoid poor child-rearing practices, which they thought were rooted in ignorance and the perpetuation of dangerous folk misconceptions. As Sikorskii put it in his 1884 Upbringing in Early Childhood: the gap in contemporary systems of care [vospitanie] lies in the absence of firmly established conceptions of the nature of children and the development of a child in the first years of its life. As a consequence, both educated parents and those who have no education whatsoever are equally helpless in carrying out the routine, but nonetheless difficult, task of early upbringing [pervonachal′noe vospitanie].⁵⁷ ⁵⁴ A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Znachenie rabot V. Preiera dlia razvitiia detskoi psikhologii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1983, no. 3: 143–7. ⁵⁵ See I. A. Sikorskii, Vospitanie v vozraste pervogo detstva (St Petersburg: A. E. Riabchenko, 1884). N. N. Lange, Dusha rebenka v pervye gody zhizni (St Petersburg: I. N. Skorokhodov, 1892), which contains two public lectures that Lange delivered at Novorossiiskii University in 1891, and P. F. Kapterev, ‘Otlichitel′nye cherty psikhicheskogo razvitiia ditiati vo vtoroi god zhizni’, VO, 1893, no. 7: 217–27. Sikorskii published the first part of Preyer’s Die Seele des Kindes as Dusha rebenka. Nabliudeniia nad dukhovnym razvitiem cheloveka v pervye gody zhizni (St Petersburg: A. E. Riabchenko, 1891). P. F. Kapterev translated a more popular abbreviated version, addressed explicitly to parents, as V. Preier, Dukhovnoe razvitie v pervom detstve s ukazaniiami dlia roditelei o ego nabliudenii (St Petersburg: Aleksei Al′medingen, 1894). ⁵⁶ I. A. Sikorskii, Dusha rebenka s kratkim opisaniem dushi zhivotnykh i dushi vzroslogo cheloveka (Kiev: S. V. Kul′zhenko, 1911; 3rd edition). Sikorskii here places the development of the psyche in a child in the context of the evolutionary development of the psyche in animals, with particular reference to Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel. Not long after, Sikorskii, whose politics leaned to the right, gained notoriety as a controversial expert witness in the infamous anti-Semitic Beilis court case (1911–13), where he claimed that there had been cases of ritualistic murder committed by Jews. ⁵⁷ Sikorskii, Vospitanie v vozraste pervogo detstva, 2–3.

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Figure 1 Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii, The Soul of the Child with a Short Description of the Soul of Animals and the Soul of the Adult Human (Kiev, 1911). Frontispiece of I. A. Sikorskii, Dusha rebenka s kratkim opisaniem dushi zhivotnykh i dushi vzroslogo cheloveka (Kiev: S. V. Kul′zhenko, 1911).

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Sikorskii recognized that many educated parents wished ‘to align themselves with scientific experience [soobrazovat′sia s nauchnym opytom]’ and he affirmed that they did, indeed, need to take up this ‘scientific’ approach if they were to acquit themselves of the practical tasks of vospitanie in a satisfactory way.⁵⁸ Thus, even though the hierarchical relationship between parents and experts was consistently and categorically maintained, from the 1880s–1890s parents started to be called upon to engage much more actively in practices associated with the systematic observation of child development. What is more, the (educated) ‘parent’ came to be imagined as a de facto professional role. As such, ‘the parent’ was placed alongside other professionals, namely family doctors and schoolteachers. The newly emergent specialist expertise in child development targeted all three groups (parents, teachers, doctors) as those needing more specialist training if they were to perform the occupational tasks expected of them.⁵⁹ From the perspective of the experts’ scientific programmes of rational childcare, all three were occupational intermediaries who needed to be specially prepared to implement ‘on the ground’ scientifically-devised programmes of rational upbringing.⁶⁰ This meant that literature on early child development targeting parents increasingly modelled parental involvement in vospitanie on that of physicians, psychologists, and educators, albeit with its own distinct, carefully delimited, set of remits and responsibilities.⁶¹ ‘The parent’ became simply one of those responsible for the upbringing and education of the child. His or (usually) her designated ‘occupational territory’ was considered to be care, upbringing, and early socialization in the preschool period, from infancy to the point where the teacher and the school would take over. Although experts regularly stressed the importance of the preschool age in the formation of a person’s character and highlighted the role that parents had in ensuring adequate preparation for school and preventing physical and psychological pathologies later in life, ‘the parent’ was invariably and inevitably placed lowest in the professional hierarchy. This was partly because ‘the parent’ was usually a woman and partly because parents were hardly professionalized in real terms, representing instead an amorphous group, with varied interests in and ideas about their children’s education.

⁵⁸ Ibid. ⁵⁹ Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogii, 516–32. ⁶⁰ In pre-zemstvo times, the Free Economic Society promoted Hufeland’s book in Grum’s translation as a manual that provincial landowning women (pomeshchitsy) could use to assist their serf populations in child healthcare and to promote hygiene practices in the local area. See Gufeland, Dobryi sovet materiam, ix–xi. ⁶¹ See P. F. Kapterev, ‘Trudnosti semeinogo vospitaniia’, VO, no. 1 (1892): 1–13. P. F. Kapterev, ‘Nedostatok sovremennogo semeinogo vospitaniia’, VO, 1892, no. 11: 393–401. P. F. Kapterev, ‘Psikhologicheskaia detskaia statistika’, VO, 1892, no. 9: 329–39.

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The Mother-Educator Given the association of parental vospitanie with the earliest phases of childrearing (infancy, toddlerhood, and preschool education), it was women—especially mothers, but also an emerging group of trained nannies and kindergarten vospitatel′nitsy—who became the primary targets of the above discourse. Contrary to the legal framework, in which the father was the carrier of the juridical power of parental authority, the new ‘science of upbringing’ targeted the mother as the more important of the two parental subjects. The experts’ largely patronizing relationship towards parents was in part down to the fact that ‘the parent’, as someone in need of guidance from ‘science’, was, in practice, usually female, and, as such, by and large not deemed to be the equal of the mostly male ‘expert’ (if only on account of women’s restricted access to higher education and science at this time). Nonetheless, enlightening ‘educated mothers’ (intelligentnye materi) about childcare still took the form of quasi-professionalization, closely overlapping with the experts’ efforts to organize occupational training for nannies, midwives, and female teachers.⁶² Childcare modernization campaigns were never just a question of informing mothers about the correct practice, but also about transforming women (of this particular class) into a new kind of role—that of ‘mother-educators’ (materivospitatel′nitsy).⁶³ At stake was not just the improvement of the health and survival of the child population, but also the restructuring of the social role, identity, and practices of women from Russia’s expanding and diversifying educated classes, as part of the wider efforts of this stratum to ensure its social reproduction through class-specific (if always universalizing) models of nurture and socialization. Childcare modernization could be seen as contributing to the constitution—in discourse as well as practice—of a new, broadly middle-class, female social norm, which needed to be legitimated and promoted in relation to the pre-existing paradigms of female identity and behaviour of imperial Russia’s social elite, namely those of the declining gentry estate (dvorianstvo). In the post-reform era, the expanding educated middle tended to position itself as the inheritor of the cultural values of the dvorianstvo (to which many from the professional strata still legally belonged, of course). This included the values and norms of vospitanie itself. Into the early twentieth century, women from the educated middle emulated the traditions of the Russian upper class, delegating much of the day-to-day hands-on care of very young children to wet-nurses, nannies, and servants, generally recruited from the peasantry. And it was this

⁶² P. F. Kapterev, ‘Pedagogicheskie kursy dlia materei i nian′’, VO, 1893, no. 1: 2–18. ⁶³ [D. I. Chernov], Ditia v pervye gody zhizni: Ocherki pervonachal′nogo telesnogo i dukhovnogo vospitaniia (St Petersburg: E. Veimar, 1862). E. K. Krichevskaia, Moia Marusia: Zapiski materi (Petrograd: R. Shvarts, 1916). E. K. Krichevskaia, Pis′ma o materinstve (Petrograd: R. Shvarts, 1916).

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model of delegated responsibility that was being revised in the discourse of childcare modernization campaigns.⁶⁴ It was articulated as a shift from the earlier ‘noble-mother/peasant-nanny’ model to the new one of ‘mother-educator/childcare expert’. Of course, both models should be understood as ideal-types—constructs of the discourse of these campaigns, which served a dual function: that of legitimating a new social role for the educated mother, and that of legitimating the functions and status of the expert in child development, care, and upbringing—an equally new social phenomenon. Even though the legitimation of the ‘mother-educator’ (the model of quasiprofessional motherhood), was being developed in contrast to previous models of elite motherhood, in practice this involved a critique of peasant childcare, i.e. customs associated with the ‘backward’ traditions of the simple people (narod)— the social inferiors of the experts’ actual target audience. In this critique, ‘backwardness’ was usually figured by the ‘uncultured’ (nekul′turnaia) peasant nanny, as the repository of superstitious and pernicious practices of pre-modern childcare.⁶⁵ Thus, even though the experts addressed themselves to educated (intelligentnye) mothers who generally had at least female high-school education, often with further pedagogical training, and who were ‘cultured’ in other respects, they frequently resorted to the long-established mission civilisatrice rhetoric, exposing and condemning the horrors and dangers of traditional childcare associated with the illiterate rural population. Such rhetoric, deployed to initiate women from the educated stratum into modern, rational upbringing, was part of the discursive articulation and legitimation of a socio-cultural shift in the role of the mother that was to some degree already under way.⁶⁶ The reason why experts were so persistent in this rhetoric was that the above models were expressions of an ideal that needed to be performatively reiterated as a framework for interpreting existing practice. Actual parental practice was inevitably more diverse and ambivalent than the modernizers might have wished: the educated classes did not adhere in a disciplined way to any particular childcare regime, but tried different ones and eclectically mixed modern and traditional practices.⁶⁷ They did not automatically trust every new fad recommended by the experts, but would defer, inconsistently and partially, to a whole variety of authorities, from the most widely read Russian childcare guru of the time, Vladimir Nikolaevich Zhuk

⁶⁴ On the fusion and negotiation between traditional and modern practices in the culture of childbirth in late tsarist Russia see N. A. Mitsiuk and N. L. Pushkareva, ‘Domashnie rody v rossiiskikh dvorianskikh semiakh (konets XIX – nachalo XX v.)’, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2015, no. 5: 167–83. ⁶⁵ A. A. Dernova-Iarmolenko, Dnevnik materi: Knizhka dlia sistematicheskikh nabliudenii i zapisei nad telesnym i dushevnym razvitiem rebenka (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1911), 3. Krichevskaia, Moia Marusia, 11. ⁶⁶ Kelly, Children’s World, 296–7, 304. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 361.

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(1847–1915), to those they trusted in their own social circle, including those passing on folk wisdom.⁶⁸ From as early as the 1860s, women themselves became active in the development of vospitanie as a domain of knowledge, reflection, and expertise.⁶⁹ A number of them authored instructive accounts of child-rearing, with particular focus on the preschool period, usually targeting other women as fellow mothers and educators. Some pioneers, such as Maria Manasseina (1843–1903), author of On the Upbringing of Children in the First Years of Life (1870), came from the ranks of Russia’s first female doctors.⁷⁰ However, arguably better read at this time were those who came from the newly emerging networks in preschool education, such as the already mentioned Adelaida Simonovich.⁷¹ Another such figure was Elizaveta Nikolaevna Vodovozova (1844–1923), author of The Mental Development of Children from the First Appearance of Consciousness to School Age (1871) and wife of the well-known educator, Vasilii Ivanovich Vodovozov (1825–86).⁷² Vodovozova and Simonovich were not only embedded in Russia’s reformist pedagogical discourse of the 1860s, but also travelled to Germany and Switzerland where they studied the influential kindergarten system of Friedrich Fröbel. They were keen to import elements of the latter into Russia, but also to revise it in line with the ideals of native vospitanie.⁷³ Over the coming decades, preschool pedagogy, as a body of theory and practice in education, was developed in Russia both as part of the discourse on family or home education and within Russia’s relatively modest, but in terms of pedagogical innovation by no means insignificant, kindergarten movement, which was dominated by women.⁷⁴

⁶⁸ E.g. ‘Pedagogicheskie mytarstva: (Iz dnevnika i nabliudenii odnogo iz roditelei)’, VV, 1892, no. 7: 110–30 and V. N. Zhuk, Mat′ i ditia: Gigiena v obshchedostupnom izlozhenii (St Petersburg: V. F. Demakov, 1881). See Kelly, Children’s World, 301–4. ⁶⁹ Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Family Patterns and the Female Intelligentsia’, in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David Ransell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 44–59 (58–9), argues that the number of articles devoted to motherhood and childcare increased hugely during the 1860s–1870s and that progressive women read and responded to them eagerly. She cites ‘Ukazatel′ literatury zhenskogo voprosa na russkom iazyke’, Severnyi vestnik, 1887, July–Aug, entries 1641–1755. On female pedagogical professionalization see Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), 62–86 and Andy Byford, ‘Psychology at High School in Late Imperial Russia (1881–1917)’, History of Education Quarterly, 2008, 48(2): 265–97 (268–77). On the Russian kindergarten movement see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 8–32. ⁷⁰ Maria Manasseina, O vospitanii detei v pervye gody zhizni (St Petersburg: Ia. Trei, 1870). See also Vladimir M. Kovalzon, ‘Some Notes on the Biography of Maria Manasseina’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2009, 18: 312–19. ⁷¹ On A. S. Simonovich see V. I. Iadeshko and F. A. Sokhina (eds.), Doshkol′naia pedagogika (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1978). ⁷² E. N. Vodovozova, Umstvennoe razvitie detei ot pervogo proiavlenia soznaniia do shkol′nogo vozrasta (St Petersburg: A. M. Kotomin, 1871). ⁷³ See P. F. Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogii (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2004; originally published in 1915), 521–2. ⁷⁴ Ibid., 524–5. See also Kelly, Children’s World, 367–71, and Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 8–32.

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Women’s development of vospitanie as a domain of knowledge was predominantly, and self-consciously, practical in its orientation and grounded more in subjective, ‘experiential’, rather than objective, ‘scientific’, forms of knowledge. It was knowledge to be shared, rather than imparted. This was also how male teachers of pedagogy in girls’ high schools tended to construe ‘female’ forms of pedagogical knowledge. They liked to emphasize that their female students’ ‘innate’ motherly instincts made them especially good, naturally endowed, child psychologists.⁷⁵ Some even argued that not taking this gender specificity into account when training women to become educators was tantamount to turning them into ‘sexless professionals’ (bezpolye professionalki).⁷⁶ From the 1870s, girls were trained for work in primary schools (where women became allowed to teach only in 1871), but this training was simultaneously framed as useful preparation for motherhood.⁷⁷ Thus, in women, the roles of ‘educator’ and ‘mother’ were expected to closely overlap, and this was embedded not just in framings of vospitanie as a ‘female’ practice, but also in the articulations of particular kinds of knowledge of the child that such vospitanie entailed. By the turn of the century, though, there emerged on the scene a handful of female experts who started to be recognized as authoritative developers of the objective ‘science of upbringing’ properly speaking. This was principally on account of the fact that they had medical training (mostly obtained abroad), although the targets of their discourse were still predominantly other women. For example, Avgusta Aleksandrovna Dernova-Iarmolenko (1869–1930), editor of the journal Family Upbringing (Semeinoe vospitanie), was especially active in mobilizing mothers to take part in the systematic monitoring of child development, creating and publishing a pre-structured diary for this purpose (Figure 2).⁷⁸ Dernova-Iarmolenko was keen for women not to absorb hygiene advice dogmatically and she encouraged mothers to systematically record their own observations of their children’s development. Her aim was ‘to train [the mother] to keep notes and then use these to [ . . . ] formulate conclusions, [ . . . ] to seriously interest parents in the task of upbringing, to make them [ . . . ] read, observe, contemplate and apply this [knowledge] to the task at hand’.⁷⁹ Dernova-Iarmolenko also believed that those mothers who ‘[found] in themselves the strength, the time and the desire’ to do this, could potentially even make a contribution to the new sciences of child development.⁸⁰ ⁷⁵ K. V. El′nitskii, ‘Prepodavanie obshchei pedagogiki v zhenskoi gimnazii’, RS, 1905, no. 3: 85–108 (86). El′nitskii, based in Omsk in Siberia, was an experienced teacher of pedagogy in girls’ schools and the author of a number of popular textbooks used in the girls’ high school pedagogy class from the late 1870s. ⁷⁶ P. Golovachev, ‘K voprosu o prepodavanii pedagogiki v zhenskikh gimnaziiakh’, VV, 1893, no. 8: 68–76 (69). See also Ruane, Gender, Class, 31–2. ⁷⁷ S. Brailovskii, ‘Zametka ob organizatsii zaniatii v pedagogicheskom (VIII-m) klasse zhenskikh gimnazii’, RS, 1892, no. 2: 91–102. ⁷⁸ Dernova-Iarmolenko, Dnevnik materi. ⁷⁹ Ibid., 5. ⁸⁰ Ibid., 6.

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Figure 2 Avgusta Aleksandrovna Dernova-Iarmolenko, Diary of a Mother: Booklet for Carrying Out Systematic Observations and Notes on the Bodily and Psychological Development of a Child (Moscow, 1911). Frontispiece of A. A. Dernova-Iarmolenko, Dnevnik materi: Knizhka dlia sistematicheskikh nabliudenii i zapisei nad telesnym i dushevnym razvitiem rebenka (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1911).

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The Parents’ Circle The articulation and legitimation of expertise that targeted those involved in early upbringing, not least mothers, also required the constitution of particular institutional platforms—a ‘stage’, as it were, for enacting the interaction between experts and parents around child development and the questions of vospitanie. Such a performative platform was from the 1880s provided by the St Petersburg Parents’ Circle (Sankt-Peterburgskii Roditel′skii kruzhok).⁸¹ The Circle emerged as a small assembly of enthusiasts in problems of vospitanie (especially early childcare and preschool pedagogy), including doctors (such as Zhuk), and professional educators (such as Kapterev), as well as mothers from the same social milieu. The group initially met in their own homes, but from 1888 they organized themselves more formally as a subsection of the Pedagogical Museum in Solianoi gorodok in St Petersburg—an institution established by the Army Ministry’s Department of Education with the aim of supporting the modernization of educational practices.⁸² The early meetings of the St Petersburg Parents’ Circle did not follow a particularly rigorous programme and consisted mostly of mothers reporting on their children, based on observations written down in diary notes of varying degrees of detail and systematicity. These readings would usually be followed by a general discussion, during which an expert, such as a doctor, provided more technical commentary. Although the proceedings were kept relatively informal, with those cast as experts sometimes discussing their own children, the meetings were also framed as ‘courses for parents’, with professionals taking on a lead role, often lecturing to those assembled.⁸³ The Circle’s activities could therefore be seen as part of the more general promotion of childcare advice, above all to educated mothers.⁸⁴ However, while expertise was here constructed differentially across the boundary between those who claimed it and those to whom it was being conveyed, ‘parents’ were cast as a participant audience whose role was incorporated into the

⁸¹ See: ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok. (Zasedaniia v Pedagogicheskom muzee)’, VO, 1893, no. 7: 236–7. ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok. (Zasedaniia v Pedagogicheskom muzee)’, VO, 1893, no. 9: 306–11. N. Arep′ev, ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok v Peterburge’, VV, 1897, no. 1: 181–97; no. 3: 158–69; no. 5: 188–97. A. O. Selivanov, ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok pri Pedagogicheskom muzee voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii v S.-Peterburge’, Pedagogicheskii listok, 1901, no. 6: 741–5. ⁸² On the St Petersburg Pedagogical Museum see: Kratkii obzor deiatel′nosti Pedagogicheskogo muzeia voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii za 1894–95 g. (Dvadtsat piatyi obzor) (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasulevich, 1895). N. Flerov, ‘O pedagogicheskom muzee’, Pedagogicheskii vestnik Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga, 1913, no. 4–5: 88–111. N. G. Tarasov (ed.), Pedagogicheskii muzei byvshii Pedagogicheskogo obshchestva v 1909 godu (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1910). ⁸³ E. Ia. Korsakova and N. S. Kartsev, ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok’, Pedagogicheskii sbornik (hereafter PS), 1895, no. 12: 131–7. ⁸⁴ On the efforts of the St Petersburg Parent Circle in this domain see Kapterev, ‘Pedagogicheskie kursy’.

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very constitution of this expertise. The active enrolment of parents in what was envisaged as an emergent science was crucial to the workings of the Circle, even if parents remained hierarchically inferior and were expected to follow the specialists’ lead. For instance, the childcare guru Vladimir Zhuk used the meetings of the Circle to develop and promote special tables and charts, eventually publishing them in the form of a diary-like album. Its purpose was to make mothers’ daily registrations of their babies’ development more disciplined in following the principles laid out in his exhaustive manual.⁸⁵ Kapterev, who was one of the Circle’s founders, was similarly keen to make parental observations and registrations of children’s psychological development more methodical and ‘scientific’.⁸⁶ He took it upon himself to work out a structured questionnaire that would assist parents in charting the development of memory in their young children.⁸⁷ The Circle’s meetings also featured reports on significant academic publications, such as Sikorskii’s 1891 translation of Preyer, as well as Lange’s exposition of Die Seele des Kindes in the pedagogical journal The Russian School (Russkaia shkola, 1891, nos. 9–12), in which he called upon parents to emulate Preyer, as well as to compile mini-dictionaries of their children’s first linguistic constructions.⁸⁸ Over the course of the 1890s, the St Petersburg Circle became increasingly more formal, emulating to some degree a learned society. Extracts from the minutes of its meetings were published in the journals Herald of Education (Vestnik vospitaniia, 1890–1917) and Upbringing and Instruction (Vospitanie i obuchenie), the latter serving as the Circle’s de facto organ. The Circle also looked for ways to expand its domain of activities, seeking to model itself on equivalent associations in the United States and Great Britain.⁸⁹ From 1897 it started publishing a series of brochures for parents, The Encyclopaedia of Family Upbringing and Education, under Kapterev’s editorship.⁹⁰ This was a particularly ambitious project in the domain of parental childcare advice literature in Russia, with fifty-nine issues coming out between 1898 and 1910.⁹¹ After 1905 the Parents’ Circle became an autonomous organization, no longer affiliated to the Pedagogical Museum.⁹² Moreover, its charter now stated that it ⁸⁵ ‘Khronika’, VV, 1891, no. 2: 190–1. V. N. Zhuk, Ditia: dnevnik materi. Al′bom dlia zapisi nabliudenii materi nad fizicheskim razvitiem rebenka: Pervye tri goda (St Petersburg: M. Stasiulevich, 1892). According to Kelly, Children’s World, 304, the album did not enjoy the popularity of the manual itself, suggesting that parents were not as interested in taking up this practice as Zhuk had hoped. ⁸⁶ P. F. Kapterev, ‘O nabliudeniiakh nad det′mi’, VO, 1892, no. 2: 65–73; no. 3: 97–104. ⁸⁷ For Kapterev’s programme see ‘Khronika’, VV, 1891, no. 2: 189. ⁸⁸ ‘Khronika’, VV, 1892, no. 4: 190–5. ⁸⁹ Selivanov, ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok’. ⁹⁰ See Kapterev’s preface to the first volume of Entsiklopediia semeinogo vospitaniia: P. F. Kapterev, ‘Kharakter i zadachi Entsiklopedii semeinogo vospitaniia i obucheniia’, Zadachi i osnovy semeinogo vospitaniia (St Petersburg: E. Evdokimov, 1898), vii–xii. ⁹¹ This publication was not that effective in reaching the provinces. See M. A. Samoilenko, ‘O sem′e i shkole’, VO, 1906, no. 10: 321–40 (337–8). ⁹² N. S. Kartsev, ‘Preobrazovanie Roditel′skogo kruzhka v Peterburge’, Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i gipnoza, 1906, no. 3: 63–5. N. F. A., ‘S.-Peterburgskii roditel′skii kruzhok’, VO, 1906, no. 6: 218–24. ‘Ot S.-Peterburgskogo roditel′skogo kruzhka’, Pedagogicheskii listok, 1907, no. 7: 500.

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dealt with the education of children of all ages, and not only the preschool period. A major new issue on its agenda became the critique, on behalf of the educated public, of Russia’s secondary education.⁹³ Indeed, members of the educated classes were, as parents, often unhappy with secondary schools and regularly criticized teachers for their bureaucratic and disciplinarian approach, citing expert, especially medical, opinion, to back their claims.⁹⁴ However, the balance of power between ‘home’ and ‘school’ was weighted relatively equally, with teachers feeling just as entitled to complain about parents for failing in their duties of home upbringing, as well as for unduly interfering in the education process. During the late 1900s–early 1910s the St Petersburg Parents’ Circle’s most visible role was, in fact, in mediating the conflict between ‘family’ and ‘school’. Despite its name, the Circle positioned itself not as a parent activist association, but as an ‘expert arbiter’.⁹⁵ It formed two commissions—one whose task was to study the influence of the school on children’s health and development, and another which examined the influence of family upbringing on the child of school age.⁹⁶ Both commissions were led by doctors and both produced highly critical reports, calling for the radical reform of schooling practices, while admonishing parents for meddling in the teachers’ rightful jurisdiction. The St Petersburg Circle was not the only organization of this sort in Russia and a number of similar groupings and related societies, focusing mostly on preschool education, were established in several other major Russian urban centres. Kazan′ had a Family-Pedagogical Circle (Semeino-pedagogicheskii kruzhok), which formed in 1899, assembling as many as 300 members.⁹⁷ In 1900, the Moscow Pedagogical Society created a separate section on ‘family education’, headed by Ts. P. Baltalon.⁹⁸ There were also analogous parent circles in Kiev, Ekaterinburg, Tiflis, and other cities. Some of them even published their own journals—for example, Family Upbringing (Semeinoe vospitanie) in Astrakhan or Preschool Upbringing (Doshkol′noe vospitanie) in Kiev.

⁹³ For more detail see Andy Byford, ‘Roditel′, uchitel′ i vrach: k istorii ikh vzaimootnoshenii v dele vospitaniia i obrazovaniia v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii’, Novye rossiiskie gumanitarnye issledovaniia, 2013, no. 8: http://www.nrgumis.ru/. ⁹⁴ A. V. ‘Tshchetnost′ roditel′skikh sobranii’, VO, 1905, no. 8: 257–71 (269); I. Paktovskii, ‘Neskol′ko slov po voprosu o sblizhenii sem′i i shkoly’, RS, 1903, no. 10–11: 179–81. ⁹⁵ Arep′ev, ‘Roditel′skii kruzhok′’, 188. ⁹⁶ Roditel′skii kruzhok did, however, provide advice to parents, such as how to prepare children for entrance exams. See N. A-v, ‘Ob otnoshenii sem′i i shkoly’, RS, 1900, no. 4: 106–13. See also vol. 22 of Entsiklopediia semeinogo vospitaniia: A. N. Ostrogorskii, Ob otnoshenii sem′i i shkoly (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1900). ⁹⁷ F. Mishchenko, ‘O rabotakh i nachinaniiakh semeino-pedagogicheskogo kruzhka v Kazani’, VV, 1901, no. 3 (Referaty i melkie soobshcheniia): 85–91. ⁹⁸ A. N. Ostrogorskii, ‘Pedagogicheskoe obshchestvo, sostoiashchee pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom universitete. Otdelenie po voprosam semeinogo vospitaniia. Obrashchenie k roditeliam, vospitateliam i vospitatel′nits[am] po voprosu ob izuchenii dushevnoi zhizni detei’, PS, 1901, no. 8 (Chast′ neofitsial′naia): 159–61.

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The culmination of the activities of these groups was the First All-Russian Congress on Matters of Family Upbringing (Pervyi Vserossiiskii s″ezd po voprosam semeinogo vospitaniia), which took place in St Petersburg between the end of December 1912 and the beginning of January 1913. The event was initiated by the editors of Upbringing and Instruction but involved parent associations from across Russia.⁹⁹ A large number of experts participated, with a particularly strong presence of doctors. A broad array of topics was addressed and not just those concerning ‘family upbringing’ strictly speaking: papers ranged from child superstitions to juvenile delinquency, from the hygiene of breastfeeding to reforms of Russian orthography. The first resolution of the congress was on the vital importance of developing further scientific research on the child, while promoting this science among ‘mother-educators’ as the linchpins of vospitanie in the home.

The Parent Diarist The most direct way parents were enrolled in actual scientific practices was through the promotion of parent diaries of child development. Experts encouraged Russian parents to keep such diaries since at least the 1880s, but they rarely put much scientific weight on the output. This meant that no such diaries were published until the 1910s, although fragments from them were occasionally reproduced in pedagogical journals. Preyer, as the ‘founder’ of the ‘method’, remained a prominent influence into the new century, with the fullest Russian translation of Die Seele des Kindes coming out in 1912.¹⁰⁰ But Russians also kept abreast of other diary-based studies of early child development and in the 1910s even more influential than Preyer became the diaries of Clara (1878–1945) and Wilhelm Stern (1871–1938), which the couple had kept on their three children born during the 1900s.¹⁰¹ A number of the Sterns’ publications based on these diaries were translated into Russian at this time.¹⁰² The Sterns’ inspired the publication of Russia’s first full parent’s diary— Anatolii Feliksovich Levonevskii’s My Child (1914).¹⁰³ Levonevskii was not, however, ‘just’ a ‘parent’. He was also an enthusiast of scientific child study and of ⁹⁹ Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo s″ezda po semeinomu vospitaniiu, 2 vols. (Petrograd: N. L. Nyrkin, 1914). ¹⁰⁰ V. Preier, Dusha rebenka, ed. V. F. Dinze (St Petersburg: O. Bogdanova, 1912). ¹⁰¹ Werner Deutsch and Christliebe El Mogharbel, ‘Clara and William Stern’s Conception of a Developmental Science’, European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2011, 8(2): 135–56. ¹⁰² William Stern’s Psychologie der frühen Kindheit (1914) was published as Vil′iam Shtern, Psikhologiia rannego detstva, do shetiletnego vozrasta. S ispol′zovaniem v kachestve materiala nenapechatannykh dnevnikov Klary Stern (Petrograd: Shkola i zhizn′, 1915). ¹⁰³ A. F. Levonevskii, Moi rebenok: Nabliudeniia nad psikhicheskim razvitiem mal′chika v techenie pervykh chetyrekh let ego zhizni (St Petersburg: O. Bogdanova, 1914). Parts of the book were published in Russkaia shkola (1909, 1911, and 1912) under the title ‘Materialy k voprosu o psikhicheskom razvitii rebenka v techenie pervogo, vtorogo i tret′ego goda ego zhizni’.

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psychology more generally. He had attended extracurricular courses in the subject, had translated Robert Eugen Gaupp’s Psychologie des Kindes (Leipzig, 1909) and was at the time translating Stern’s Die Kindersprache.¹⁰⁴ He was an active reviewer, publishing commentaries on translations of Preyer and Stern in Russia’s pedagogical press.¹⁰⁵ At the same time, Levonevskii saw himself as a spokesman for ‘parents’ and was keen to ensure that parental observations were incorporated legitimately into child study as a scientific enterprise, even if ‘the parent’ remained only a lowly ‘disciple’ of established authorities. Levonevskii was explicit that he modelled his practice on the work of the Stern couple. He imagined their partnership in terms of a gendered division of labour—a combination of maternal empathetic intuition and paternal theoretical prowess.¹⁰⁶ This division of labour between mother and father was a transposition of the already established division of labour between the lay parent as diary-keeper (usually female) and the expert psychologist, the master of scientific theory, interpretation, and experimentation (usually male). Levonevskii’s book was not a chronological diary in ‘raw’ format, but a heavily edited narrative, a ‘monograph’, summarizing and commenting on his son Dima’s development, fitting it into an account of the development of babies more generally.¹⁰⁷ Levonevskii emphasized that he, rather than his wife, was the one responsible for the ultimate output—‘the scientific processing of the observations’ and ‘the actual writing up of the present book’.¹⁰⁸ Nonetheless, Levonevskii accepted that parents’ contributions, even when as well informed as his was, were still ultimately a function of their core responsibility, namely that of vospitanie.¹⁰⁹ A rather different example is Elena Konstantinovna Krichevskaia’s My Marusia (1916). Like Levonevskii’s book, this is a chronological narrative of the development of Krichevskaia’s daughter, based on the diary she had kept for a period of five years.¹¹⁰ Krichevskaia addressed herself almost exclusively to mothers, whom she constructed both as her peers and as the audience she sought to guide. In her book, Krichevskaia assumed, simultaneously, two distinct roles. On the one hand, she was the protagonist of the narrative as little Marusia’s parent and vospitatel′nitsa—the ‘ordinary, average educated mother’. On the other, her role was that of the author-narrator introducing and framing the account—an already published ‘educator of mothers’¹¹¹ who articulated a particular form of ‘lay expertise’ derived ¹⁰⁴ Robert Gaupp, Psikhologiia rebenka (St Petersburg: O. Bogdanova, 1909). ¹⁰⁵ A. F. Levonevskii, ‘Retsenziia na knigu V. Preiera, Dusha rebenka’, PS, 1913, no. 4: 518–22. ¹⁰⁶ Levonevskii, Moi rebenok, 9. ¹⁰⁷ N. A. Rybnikov argued that Levonevskii’s was the best Russian diary of this type, dubbed dnevnik svodnogo tipa. See Rybnikov, ‘Detskie dnevniki’, NA RAO f. 47, op. 1, d. 27, l. 17ob. ¹⁰⁸ Levonevskii, Moi rebenok, 10. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 216. ¹¹⁰ Krichevskaia, Moia Marusia. As Krichevskaia explains, the book was made primarily out of materials from her diary, but also included information recorded in letters, and in part relied on her recollections. ¹¹¹ Krichevskaia, Pis′ma o materinstve. In the Soviet era Krichevskaia continued to publish advice literature for early child upbringing, as a ‘pedagogue’ attached to early childcare consultancies run by

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both from her own experiences as a mother and from her engagement with and assimilation of established, authoritative expert advice. Krichevskaia made no claims to scientific expertise as such, though. Even as an ‘educator of mothers’, she was different to the expert in, say, hygiene (whether male, like Zhuk, or female, like Dernova-Iarmolenko). Nonetheless, Krichevskaia promoted maternal diary-keeping as a key practice of ‘professional motherhood’. Her narrative was shaped around the role of the mother as caregiver-educator (vospitatel′nitsa), and the mother’s observations and recordings of her child’s development were presented as part of this role. According to Krichevskaia, a mother simply could not do her ‘job’ properly without knowing her child’s psyche, and the mode through which she acquired this knowledge was through observation and diary-keeping.¹¹² Krichevskaia framed her book as a ‘document of real human experience’ (chelovecheskii dokument) that contained all that had been ‘lived and thought by an average educated woman in the first five years of motherhood’.¹¹³ And yet, this was never just a narrative of a mother’s experience, but also, crucially, an account of the gradual acquisition of a mother’s expertise—a kind of Bildungsroman of a mat′-vospitatel′nitsa, the story of a mother’s selfdiscovery in this quasi-professional role, not least through the exercise of persistent diary-keeping.¹¹⁴ Parent diaries that appeared in print in the late 1910s, after those of Levonevskii and Krichevskaia, were, by contrast, published through the intervention of professional psychologists interested in turning parental diary-keeping into a component of larger-scale psychological research. Particularly active in enrolling parents into diary-keeping, specifically in the context of building a legitimate methodology of psychological study, was Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rybnikov (1880–1961).¹¹⁵ Rybnikov was based at the Moscow Institute of Psychology from 1912, first as an assistant, then later, in the Soviet era, as professor. However, the institution that served as the base for his diary-collecting enterprise was, initially, in the tsarist era, the Pedagogical Museum of the House of Teachers in Moscow and from 1921 the Central Pedological Institute.¹¹⁶

the Commissariat of Healthcare. See E. K. Krichevskaia, Sovety materiam po vospitaniiu detei: Opyt pedagogicheskoi konsul′tatsii (Moscow: GAKhN Glavnauki NKP, 1927). ¹¹² Krichevskaia, Moia Marusia, 3. ¹¹³ Ibid., 5. ¹¹⁴ Ibid., 4. ¹¹⁵ On Rybnikov see F. N. Gonobolin, ‘75-letie Professora N. A. Rybnikova’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1956, no. 1: 116–17, and M. E. Botsmanova and E. P. Guseva, ‘Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rybnikov (obzor arkhivnykh materialov)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1997, no. 6: 96–108. ¹¹⁶ Uchitel′skii Dom in Moscow was set up in 1912 by the Obshchestvo vzaimnoi pomoshchi pri Moskovskom Uchitel′skom Institute. It was envisaged as a centre devoted to reforming education based on scientific principles and to promoting the findings of child science and educational research, primarily to the wider teaching masses, but also to preschool vospitateli and parents. Uchitel′skii Dom had a Pedagogical Museum, the task of which was to collect and study materials on child development, to curate exhibitions, and to publish manuals (the series Biblioteka Pedagogicheskogo muzeia Uchitel′-skogo doma v Moskve). See NA RAO f. 47, op. 1, d. 45. On the Central Pedological

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The first full diaries of this kind to be published were those by N. I. Gavrilova and M. P. Stakhorskaia, which came out in a single volume in 1916, edited by Rybnikov and Konstantin Nikolaevich Kornilov (1879–1957), his friend and colleague at the Moscow Institute of Psychology (later this Institute’s director).¹¹⁷ The diaries follow the development of two boys, Lev Gavrilov (Levik) and Lev Stakhorskii (Masik) respectively. They mutually complemented each other, with Gavrilova’s diary charting her son’s life from birth to the age of three and Stakhorskaia’s between the ages of four and seven. Contrary to both Levonevskii’s and Krichevskaia’s volumes, diaries published under Rybnikov’s editorship came out as ‘raw’ day-by-day notations. Parental discourse was thus marked off in both format and style from the expert’s introduction to them. The psychologist’s commentary stressed the distinct register of the diary discourse, making sure to highlight its non-scientific (subjective, emotive, feminine) character, transforming the diarist-mother from an observer of her child’s development into an object of expert evaluation. What Rybnikov sought to negotiate in the framing of these diaries was their scientific value—namely, the extent to which they could and should be used as sources of ‘factual material’ in the scientific study of childhood and as part of psychology’s methodological arsenal. Rybnikov believed that psychologists could, and in many ways had to, delegate the systematic observation of infants and toddlers to engaged educated parents, but that they also needed to ensure the legitimacy of such observations, given that these were being carried out by unqualified and unreliable persons.¹¹⁸ The problem was usually framed as that of eliminating the unscientific interference of parental subjectivity, which was as a rule associated with femininity. It was assumed that mothers, even educated ones, could never be entirely objective, while fathers were viewed as more detached parent-observers, closer to the experts in their stance and attitude.¹¹⁹ The descriptors ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ here referred primarily to the degree of the parent’s emotional attitude towards the child. Although fathers’ diaries were an exception rather than the rule, the next diary that Rybnikov published, N. Sokolov’s Life of a Child (1918), was indeed penned by a father.¹²⁰ Sokolov was a teacher and kept the diary himself, describing the life of his son Boris up to the age of five and a half, and, more episodically, during the boy’s first years at school.¹²¹ Evidence of

Institute see N. A. Rybnikov, Dva goda raboty Tsentral′nogo pedologicheskogo instituta, 1921–23 (Moscow: Pedologicheskaia biblioteka, 1923). ¹¹⁷ N. I. Gavrilova and M. P. Stakhorskaia, Dnevnik materi (Moscow: Prakticheskie znaniia, 1916). ¹¹⁸ See Rybnikov, ‘Detskie dnevniki’, NA RAO f. 47, op. 1, d. 27, ll. 17ob–21ob. ¹¹⁹ Ibid, l. 15ob. ¹²⁰ N. Sokolov, Zhizn′ rebenka: Po dnevniku ottsa. Zapiski o dushevnom razvitii rebenka ot rozhdeniia do 5½ let (Moscow: N. Zheludkova, 1918). ¹²¹ Rybnikov, ‘Detskie dnevniki’, NA RAO f. 47, op. 1, d. 27, l. 16ob.

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Sokolov’s supposedly ‘objective’ (male) gaze was identified, for instance, in his first impressions of the new-born as ‘just a little piece of meat’.¹²² Turning parent diaries into a suitable methodology was a more complex affair. As a methodology, the diary of child development was conceptualized as a variant of psychological ‘observation’ (as opposed to the technically more demanding ‘experimentation’, which was considered a no-go zone for parents).¹²³ The diary was accepted as the primary method of research into early development, dominating this subfield of child study thanks to authorities such as Darwin, Preyer, Stern, and others. However, while ‘classical’ diaries carried out by established scholars were paradigmatic of the required scientific standards, diaries written by ‘ordinary’ parents were invariably presented as suffering from intrinsic methodological flaws. And yet, the stress placed on the ‘natural’ conditions that this type of observation required, and the fact that the child had to be observed over a long period of time by a person familiar to them, made parents the most suitably positioned observers. In order to resolve this contradiction, psychologists such as Rybnikov endeavoured to standardize parental diary-keeping. On the one hand, such standardization promised to equip parents with supposedly already established scientific instruments, which they could then use for their own purposes. On the other, parents were invited to contribute (with their observations) to the building of child study as an enterprise in the making.¹²⁴ Rybnikov’s instructions on how to keep diaries of early development came out in his manual How to Study a Child (1916), which he published simultaneously with Gavrilova’s and Stakhorskaia’s diaries.¹²⁵ In this publication Rybnikov brought together a host of different programmes for gathering observational data on children, providing expert direction to non-specialists that he was thereby mobilizing into child study; and one of his key aims here was to help mothers detach subjective speculation from objective fact.¹²⁶ Despite these efforts, the diary of child development, as kept by parents, remained teetering precariously on the outer edges of scientific legitimacy. Parent diaries were maintained strategically on the boundary between ‘parenthood’ (a culturally specific type of educated parenthood associated with the wider self-identity of late tsarist Russia’s professional middle stratum) and ‘science’ (the emergent field of expert knowledge in child development, care, and socialization). Indeed, what was at stake in the psychologists’ project was ¹²² See discussion in V. A. Rybnikova-Shilova, Moi dnevnik: Zapiski o razvitii rebenka ot rozhdeniia do 3-kh let (Orlov: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, Orlovskoe otdelenie, 1923), 142–66 (158). ¹²³ K. N. Kornilov, Metodika issledovaniia rebenka rannego vozrasta: Rukovodstvo dlia pedagogov i vrachei (Moscow: Gosudarstvenno izdatel′stvo, 1921), 7. ¹²⁴ G. I. Rossolimo, Plan issledovaniia detskoi dushi: Posobie dlia roditelei i pedagogov (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1906), 3. ¹²⁵ N. A. Rybnikov, Kak izuchat′ rebenka (Moscow: Prakticheskie znaniia, 1916). ¹²⁶ Ibid., 3, 9–10.

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less the instrumentalization of actual parental observations (which never seemed to be properly allowed into the domain of scientific objectivity), and more the deployment of the (inherently subjective) ‘parent’ as a foil against which the proper ‘objectivity’ of the psychological method of prolonged observations of a developing child would be articulated and legitimized—in competition with, as well as in emulation of, other methods, especially the experimental one, which dominated psychology’s self-definition as a science at this time. Parent diaries were recognized as scientifically legitimate only in cases where the parent-diarist was a qualified, practising psychologist engaging in diary-writing first as a researcher, and only secondarily as a parent. Otherwise, parent diaries continued to be side-lined as a minor, dilettante genre.¹²⁷

Upbringing in the Laboratory Some psychologists who were adamant to establish their discipline as a science properly speaking were inclined to believe that full objectivity could only be achieved if the study of early child development were taken out of the home and family environment and transported into a controlled laboratory setting, where one would no longer need to rely on observations made by subjective and imperfectly trained parents. Something of this sort was attempted during the 1900s–1910s by the neuropsychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (1857–1927; Figure 3) as part of his efforts to create what he called ‘objective psychology’.¹²⁸ In this context, very young children were construed as a paradigmatic case for constituting an entirely new psychology—a psychology, the epistemology of which would no longer be dependent on the research subject’s (fundamentally subjective) ‘introspection’ (in Russian samonabliudenie, lit. ‘selfobservation’). Bekhterev’s more direct involvement in child study started in his guise as a parent. Emulating the European classics, he began by observing his own children, especially his youngest daughter Mariia, born in 1904, relying greatly on the

¹²⁷ Methodological principles of parental diary-keeping remained largely unchanged through the 1920s–1940s. See Rybnikov, ‘Detskie dnevniki’, NA RAO f. 47, op. 1, d. 27, especially the appendix ‘Instruktsii k provedeniiu dlitel′nykh nabliudenii za razvitiem rebenka (dnevnikovykh zapisei)’ (ll. 20– 21ob). A degree of professionalization of standardized diary-keeping was achieved in the regulation of the work of staff employed in institutions for early childcare and education in the Soviet 1920s, but this was not framed as the practice of science either. See Kornilov, Metodika issledovaniia rebenka rannego vozrasta. E. G. Bibanova and N. A. Rybnikov, Kak izuchat′ rebenka: Rukovodstvo k izucheniiu rebenka ot rozhdeniia do trekh let (Orlov: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, Orlovskoe otdelenie, 1923). See also Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades. ¹²⁸ For more detail on what follows see Andy Byford, ‘V. M. Bekhterev in Russian Child Science, 1900s–1920s: “Objective Psychology” / “Reflexology” as a Scientific Movement’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2016, 52(2): 99–123. Portions of text in this section are reproduced from this article in edited form.

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Figure 3 Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev in his office at the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg (1913). Reproduced with the permission of the St Petersburg Central State Archive of Cinematic, Photo and Phono Documents (TsGAKFFD SPb, d. 15188).

assistance of his wife, Natal′ia Petrovna.¹²⁹ From 1907, though, his contributions to Russia’s growing field of child science research became tied principally to the work done at the so-called Pedology Institute (Pedologicheskii Institut; hereafter PI), which Bekhterev established as part of his grand project at that time—the PsychoNeurological Institute (Psikho-Nevrologicheskii Institut; hereafter PNI).¹³⁰ PI was, to begin with, a rather modest enterprise built on limited private donations. It was initially housed in a flat, although it eventually, thanks to a

¹²⁹ A. S. Nikiforov, N. Kh. Amirov, and R. Z. Mukhamedzianov, V. M. Bekhterev: Zhiznennyi put′ i nauchnaia deiatel′nost′ (Moscow: GEOTAR-Mediia, 2007). V. M. Bekhterev, ‘Ob individual′nom razvitii nervno-psikhicheskoi sfery po dannym ob″ektivnoi psikhologii’, Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i gipnoza (hereafter VPKAG), 1910, no. 2: 105–20. ¹³⁰ On PNI, see M. A. Akimenko and A. M. Shereshevskii, Istoriia instituta imeni V. M. Bekhtereva na dokumental′nykh materialakh, 3 vols. (St Petersburg: PNI, 1999–2002). PNI was expected to have a crèche and nursery. See M. Dobrotvorskii, ‘Psikho-Nevrologicheskii Institut’, VPKAG, 1908, no. 6: 306–20.

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grant from the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, acquired more elaborate premises on the site of PNI itself.¹³¹ The Institute functioned, in fact, as a lab-nursery: a handful of children (initially rather unwell ones in need of care) were brought there from the age of just a few months and were looked after full-time by PI staff for several years, six or seven in some cases.¹³² The children’s development and behaviour were observed, recorded, and experimented on, mostly by a resident female psychologist (ordinator), who usually had medical training, while a female educator (vospitatel′nitsa), who had pedagogical training, was responsible for their daily care.¹³³ A resident paediatrician monitored the children’s health.¹³⁴ Bekhterev and others formed a committee that oversaw the work of the Institute and the research carried out there. From 1910, PI came under the headship of Bekhterev’s former student, Konstantin Innokent′evich Povarnin (1877–1963; Figure 4), who organized the research carried out at the Institute in a more systematic way.¹³⁵ Bekhterev himself assumed at this point the role of higher authority, preferring to delegate research on children to PI’s regular staff. Diaries, three separate kinds—physiological, psychological, and pedagogical— were kept for each child, following standardized rubrics. The physiological diary contained anthropometric measurements and recorded bodily temperature, pulse rate, respiration and sleep patterns, appetite, mood, and illnesses. The psychological diary was based on registrations of reactions to external stimuli, mostly grimaces, gestures, and movements. Photography was also used.¹³⁶ The focus of research was on the development of sensory reactions and motor skills, on shifts from instinctive and reflexive reactions to cognitive (spontaneously exploratory, as well as conditioned or learned) behaviour, and on the evolution of what was

¹³¹ The initial sum of 52,000 roubles was donated by V. T. Zimin, a philanthropist from Siberia with interest in education. See ‘Uchrezhdenie psikhopedologicheskogo instituta, sostoiashchego pri psikhonevrologicheskom institute v S-Peterburge’, RS, 1907, no. 12: 95–6. Zimin was actively involved in the setting up of the PI early on. See G. Arkatov, ‘Chelovek kak predmet vospitaniia’, Niva, 1908, no. 3: 54– 6; ‘Usovershenstvovanie lichnosti’, Novoe vremia, 2 April 1908, 8–10; Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (hereafter TsGIA SPb) f. 2265 op. 1 d. 933 ll. 1–76. TsGIA SPb f. 2265 op. 1 d. 931 ll. 1–2; TsGIA SPb f. 2265 op. 1 d. 926 ll. 1–7; TsGIA SPb f. 2265 op. 1 d.927 ll. 1–5. ¹³² On the early difficulties faced by PI see TsGIA SPb f. 2265 op. 1 d. 933 ll. 1–76, esp. ll. 55–76. ¹³³ ‘Psikho-Pedologicheskii Institut, stoiashchii pri Psikho-Nevrologicheskom Institute’, VPKAG, 1908, no. 6: 321–4; M. K. Kostin, Spravochnaia knizhka o Psikho-Nevrologicheskom Institute s kratkimi svedeniiami o ego deiatel′nosti za 1909–10 uchebnyi god (St Petersburg: Gramotnost′, 1910). ¹³⁴ TsGIA SPb f. 2265 op. 1 d. 933, ll. 55–76. ¹³⁵ K. I. Povarnin, ‘Zadachi, organizatsiia i deiatel′nost′ Petrogradskogo Pedologicheskogo Instituta pri Psikho-Nevrologicheskom Institute’, Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i pedologii (hereafter VPKAP), 1919, no. 1: 90–109; K. I. Povarnin, Pedlogicheskie instituty i ikh rol′ v nauke i praktike (Petrograd: Tip. ‘Nash vek’, 1916); T. E. Skhor, ‘Konstantin Innokent′evich Povarnin – uchenyi, vrach, pedagog’, in Ia. (A. Slinin) i my: k 70-letiiu professora Iaroslava Anatol′evicha Slinina (St Petersburg: Sanktpeterburgskoe filosofskoe obchshestvo, 2002), 633–41. ¹³⁶ Initially, Bekhterev thought that film, rather than photography, would be the preferred technology and he was even somewhat dismissive of the latter. See V. M. Bekhterev, ‘Ob ob″ektivnom issledovanii detskoi psikhiki’, VPKAG, 1908, no. 1: 4–17. The use of the phonograph for the recording of sounds and speech was also envisaged.

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Figure 4 Konstantin Innokent′evich Povarnin, Privatdocent at the Military Medical Academy, Doctor of Medicine and Director of the Pedology Institute. Reproduced with the permission of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg.

conceptualized as ‘symbolic’ behaviours, including speech, drawing, craft, and play. Observations were combined with experiments, and these were often carried out by visiting researchers, mostly doctors working towards a higher degree. There was particular interest, for instance, in measuring changes in respiration under specific stimuli, e.g. auditory ones. This methodology was deployed in studying the ‘reaction of concentration’ (the moment of ‘attention’) by means of recording interruptions in the child’s breathing pattern upon, say, hearing a sound. Such research was performed with the help of apparatuses designed by Bekhterev himself. These measured and graphically displayed fluctuations in breathing, producing pneumograms, understood as objective visualizations of the ‘reaction’ in question (Figure 5). Bekhterev’s own interest in the earliest stages of child development was governed by more fundamental research concerns. He construed children principally as convenient models for studying the genesis of what he called ‘neuro-psychic activity’. The question of how higher mental functioning and complex behaviours emerge out of, and in contiguity with, physiological processes, he presented as the

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Figure 5 At the Psycho-Pedological Institute. ‘The automatic registration of breathing. Attached to the breathing strap is a special balloon filled with water, which conveys the vibrations of the child’s diaphragm to a needle that charts a “breathing curve” on a rotating cylinder with an endless paper ribbon. Even the lightest disturbance of the child’s breathing for whatever reason immediately raises the regular amplitude of the “curve”.’ From the article ‘The Perfecting of Personality’, published in the newspaper New Time in 1908 (‘Usovershenstvovanie lichnosti’, Novoe vremia, 2 April 1908, 8–10).

root problem of psychology.¹³⁷ The ultimate goal of Bekhterev’s lab was not to study ‘the child’ per se but to model translations on the boundary between the biophysiological and the psychosocial.¹³⁸ Particularly important here was the supposed psycho-neurological simplicity that a young organism presented to the

¹³⁷ V. M. Bekhterev, ‘O razvitii nevno-psikhicheskoi deiatel′nosti v techenie pervogo polugodiia zhizni rebenka’, VPKAP, 1912, no. 2: 1–48. ¹³⁸ V. M. Bekhterev, Problemy razivitiia i vospitaniia cheloveka: Izbrannye psikhologicheskie trudy, ed. A. V. Brushlinskii and V. A. Kol′tsova (Moscow: APSN, 1997), 72–82, 88–92.

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researcher—the seemingly elementary character of behavioural and physiological changes that one could observe and measure in infants. From a slightly different perspective, ‘the child’ (whose movements and reactions, gestures and grimaces, pulse rates and breathing patterns were meticulously registered by researchers and measured by apparatuses) served as a de facto registration device in its own right—the lab’s centrepiece instrument, in fact. In this context, ‘the child’ both encapsulated and screened transmutations between and across the physiological and the psychological. Decisive to how this transmutation worked was Bekhterev’s concept of ‘associational reflex’ (sochetatel′nyi refleks).¹³⁹ Bekhterev used Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov’s description of the reflexes of the developing child as a basis for articulating the continuity between physiological phenomena and higher mental functions.¹⁴⁰ However, Bekhterev’s ‘associational reflex’ was not so much a phenomenon of the nervous system, but, as he himself put it—a ‘schema’, a transferrable model that could shift between and across descriptions of sensorimotor physiology, (conscious and unconscious) psychology, and, finally, observable individual or social behaviour.¹⁴¹ The idea behind Bekhterev’s ‘associational reflex’, as a schema, was that simple, inherited reflexes (or reflexes proper, with which an organism was born) served as kernels for the gradual building of secondary reflexes created developmentally in the central nervous system through the organism’s continuous exposure to stimuli in the environment. The sum of associational reflexes ultimately accounted for fully developed human behaviour, including psychic life, which ought, therefore, at least in principle, to be describable in terms of elaborate complexes of associational reflexes. While it was vital to Bekhterev that ‘the reflex’ should remain a neurological reality (thus linking psychic life to nervous activity), his theory was not a description of a physiological mechanism, but a means of accounting for the full complexity of an organism’s relationship to external and internal environments. Bekhterev’s theory of associational reflexes can also be seen as an attempt to reimagine the dialectic of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in terms of a neuroscientific model of development. Indeed, PI was never intended to be a laboratory in which only the neuroscientific ‘nature’ of humanity would be explored. The Institute was also envisaged as a site of ‘nurture’ contributing to the development of a ‘science of

¹³⁹ Sechenov had already established the reflex as the elementary mechanism of the central nervous system. This was expanded upon by Ivan Pavlov in his theory of ‘conditional reflexes’ (uslovnye refleksy). Contemporaneously with Pavlov, Bekhterev developed his own, related but not identical, theory of secondary reflexes, branding them ‘associational’. On the Pavlov–Bekhterev clash see Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 319–36. On the differentiation between the two reflexologies see J.-C. Lecas, ‘Towards a Conceptual History of the Conditional Reflex: Brief Overview’, in History of the Neurosciences, 103–33. ¹⁴⁰ Sechenov, ‘Komu i kak razrabatyvat′ psikhologiiu’, 164. See also footnote 30 in this chapter. ¹⁴¹ Dupont, ‘The Evolution of Physiological Psychology’.

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upbringing’.¹⁴² This was why the PI research programme also included as one of its key dimensions the systematic keeping of a ‘pedagogical diary’ in which staff registered how particular forms of social and educative stimulation affected child behaviour. PI depended greatly on private sponsorship from the wider educated public and Bekhterev could not afford to be too aloof and specialist when defining the purpose of his enterprise. He remained highly eclectic in his promotional strategy, pursuing every angle that was likely to gain attention and yield donations. Most important here was his reliance on the interest and investment of Russia’s educated classes in problems of vospitanie.¹⁴³ Like all those who claimed expertise in this new field, Bekhterev emphasized the innovations that the sciences of child development brought to this task.¹⁴⁴ He piggy-backed on the widespread circulation in the Russian media of eugenic concerns with ‘degeneration’ and utopian promises of scientifically-engineered human ‘perfecting’ (Figure 6).¹⁴⁵ He even promoted himself as something of a childcare guru.¹⁴⁶ Bekhterev also emphasized the patriotic duty of Russians to develop their own scientifically-grounded ways of rearing their young, especially in competition with the Germans.¹⁴⁷ He invoked the popular Fröbel kindergartens as a supposed competitor, which his approach, grounded in ‘objective psychology’, was expected to outdo.¹⁴⁸ In practice, though, the supposedly innovative childcare that took place at PI was mostly an adaptation of middle-class home rearing, combined with eclectic elements of progressive education that was becoming popular in a number of private kindergartens in Russia. The science that went on at PI did, however, have the ambition of informing Russia’s budding system of preschool education.¹⁴⁹ Research carried out at PI was promoted especially to the Society for Preschool Education and at the aforementioned First All-Russian Congress on Matters of Family Upbringing, although the reception of PI research at this event was rather sceptical.¹⁵⁰ Bekhterev’s research focus on infants and toddlers was distinctive among the higher echelons of Russian child science at this same time. Most other leading specialists in this growing field in Russia, who during the 1900s–1910s similarly

¹⁴² V. M. Bekhterev, ‘Voprosy vospitaniia v vozraste pervogo detstva (v sviazy s postanovkoi ego v Pedologicheskom institute)’, Obrazovanie, 1909, no. 2: 24–69. This was, indeed, how PI’s initial sponsor and co-founder, Zimin, had imagined the Institute. ¹⁴³ V. M. Bekhterev, ‘Zadachi Psikho-Nevrologicheskogo Instituta’, Vestnik znaniia, 1908, no. 3: 3–19. ¹⁴⁴ Arkatov, ‘Chelovek kak predmet vospitaniia’. ¹⁴⁵ ‘Usovershenstvovanie lichnosti’. ¹⁴⁶ V. M. Bekhterev, Ob″ektivnoe issledovanie nervno-psikhicheskoi sfery v mladencheskom vozraste (St Petersburg: P. P. Soikin, 1909); V. M. Bekhterev, Okhrana detskogo zdorov′ia (St Petersburg: Bibliotechka kopeika, 1911); V. M. Bekhterev, O vospitanii v mladencheskom vozraste (St Petersburg: PNI, 1913). ¹⁴⁷ Bekhterev, ‘Voprosy vospitaniia’. ¹⁴⁸ Bekhterev, Ob″ektivnoe issledovanie. ¹⁴⁹ TsGIA SPb f. 2265 op. 1 d. 929 ll. 4–6ob. ¹⁵⁰ A. V. Gerver, ‘Otchet o deiatel′nosti uchebno-vospomogatel′nykh uchrezhdenii PsikhoNevrologicheskogo Instituta’, VPKAP, 1914, no. 1: 162–3. Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo s″ezda po semeinomu vospitaniiu, 266–349.

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Figure 6 Serezha Parinkin. ‘So far the only individual in the world lucky enough to become the object of experimentation in the search for new rational methods of upbringing!’ From the article ‘The Perfecting of Personality’, published in the newspaper New Time in 1908 (‘Usovershenstvovanie lichnosti’, Novoe vremia, 2 April 1908, 8–10).

made a point of developing more rigorous scientific methods in psychology, tended to work on children of school age or late pre-schoolers at the youngest. Otherwise, they—as we have seen above in the case of Rybnikov—delegated the observation of the earlier stages of child development to amateur parent-vospitateli. Because of Bekhterev’s focus on early childhood, the primary mass audience that his research attracted were educated parents. Yet parents, even when actively engaged and organized into parent associations, remained a diffuse amateur group. Bekhterev’s other more receptive audience, the young female staff working in tsarist Russia’s relatively few preschool institutions, was still small and poorly professionalized. This lack of a strong professional constituency for a broader mobilization of support meant that during the 1900s–1910s, Bekhterev’s ‘objective psychology’ was not as prominent in the wider Russian child science movement as Bekhterev might have wished; and this irrespective of his considerable scientific authority, public visibility, and entrepreneurial activities. Far more successful were programmes that strategically targeted the professionally much better organized and highly interested teachers. This will be examined in greater detail in the next chapter.

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3 Pedagogy as Science Across Professions and Disciplines

If teachers, jurists and doctors were properly acquainted with psychology, they could become excellent experimenters in the domain of psychological life, since even without this they are, by virtue of their occupations, required constantly to experiment psychologically on others in order to learn about or act upon their psychic life. In a particularly favourable situation to carry out psychological experiments are teachers, and it is without question that their work would be much enhanced if they studied experimentally the psychic life of their pupils and charges. Nikolai Grot, ‘The Foundations of Experimental Psychology’, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology (1895)¹ Both doctor and teacher labour on one and the same field – that of the child’s organism. It is impossible to separate with any precision what in this organism belongs to the teacher and what to the doctor, because their activities have too many points of contact. As a result, both teacher and doctor must, for the benefit of the child’s organism, act in unison and collaboration, checking between them the observations that the other has collected, without pretension automatically to issue instructions, but with a sincere desire to learn from one another. Only under such conditions can pedagogy be developed with the success that it strives for and deserves. ‘From the Editors’, Herald of Education (1890)²

¹ Nikolai Ia. Grot, ‘Osnovaniia eksperimental′noi psikhologii’, Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (hereafter VFP), 1895 (vol. 30), no. 5, 568–618 (612). Published also as introduction to Vil′gel′m Vundt, Ocherk psikhologii (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1897), iii–lxvi. ² [Egor Arsen′evich Pokrovskii], ‘Ot redaktsii’, Vestnik vospitaniia (hereafter VV), 1890, no. 1: 1–14 (3–4). Pokrovskii, a paediatrician by profession, was the founder and, until his death in 1895, the editor of Vestnik vospitaniia (Moscow, 1890–1917), the most influential pedagogical journal of this era.

Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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A Profession without a Science Despite the enthusiasm expressed in the era of the Great Reforms to turn teaching into a socially valued task, fundamental to the empire’s modernization, the two government ministers who dominated Russia’s education system for the remainder of the nineteenth century—Count Dmitrii A. Tolstoi (Minister of Public Enlightenment between 1866 and 1880) and Count Ivan D. Delianov (who occupied the same post between 1882 and 1897)—saw the domain that they were assigned to manage in a very different light.³ For them, education was a highly sensitive area of state administration that required close bureaucratic oversight and tight governmental control lest schools and universities become a hotbed of autocracy’s irreversible destabilization. Over the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Russian state schools, and especially those established to provide access to higher education, acquired the reputation of institutions ridden with bureaucratic formalism and authoritarian discipline, in which educators had little scope to develop a sense of professional autonomy.⁴ By the 1890s, teachers regularly complained about the poor public image of their profession and said they felt more like lowly state officials than a social vanguard entrusted with the responsibility of enlightening the people or, indeed, forging the empire’s educated citizenry. One of the issues they identified as critical to schools being pervaded by bureaucratic rather than properly professional power-relations was the low status of their profession-specific expertise—namely, the fact that, in Russia, pedagogy was not accorded suitable academic recognition and consequently enjoyed little respect in wider society. This was considered to be one of the main reasons why ‘everyone’ seemed to think himself qualified to judge a teacher’s methods and quibble with his or her pedagogical decisions.⁵ It was this, they argued, that allowed educational practice to be governed by extrinsic ministerial instructions, enforced by the bureaucratic authority of school directors and inspectors.⁶

³ Significant portions of this chapter are reproduced from Andy Byford, ‘Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917)’, Osiris, 2008, 23: 50–81, in edited and updated form. ⁴ See Patrick L. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), 87–104, 115–29, 140–53, 228–42. Christine Ruane and Ben Eklof, ‘Cultural Pioneers and Professionals: The Teacher in Society’, in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 199–211. Christine Ruane, Gender, Class and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860–1914 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1994). V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Mysl′, 1971), 147–73. ⁵ V. Vagner, ‘Universitet i sredneobrazovatel′naia shkola’, Russkaia mysl′, 1898, no. 2: 136–46. ⁶ Alston, Education and the State, 144–53. Ruane, Gender, Class, 42–61. See also A. Divil′kovskii, ‘Avtoritet i svoboda – vospitatelei’, VV, 1915, no. 5: 56–95. G. R[okov], ‘Eshche o polozhenii uchitelei srednei shkoly’, VV, 1900, no. 5: 66–97.

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Russia’s pedagogical reformists of the 1860s had presented the ideal of teaching as the harnessing of the emergent anthropological sciences to the noble practice of human betterment and social progress. These lofty ambitions were not, however, realized in institutional practice and the reputation of pedagogy continued to lag over the course of the 1870s–1890s.⁷ Indeed, during this period, very few specialist establishments providing higher-level teacher training for those intending to work in secondary education were established.⁸ Dmitrii Tolstoi founded the HistoricalPhilological Institutes in St Petersburg (in 1867) and Nezhin (in 1874) in order to train staff to deliver the new Classics-dominated curriculum that he imposed on the elite high schools (gimnazii) in the 1870s.⁹ These institutes did offer pedagogy as a subject, but their programmes emphasized, first and foremost, the in-depth study of specialist humanities subjects that their graduates were expected to teach. Otherwise, the staffing of secondary schools relied on university graduates, recruited on account of their degrees, without either requiring or providing special training in educational theory or practice.¹⁰ There was no faculty designated for future educators of the kind that existed for the legal and the medical professions. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment refused to establish a university chair in pedagogy, deeming the subject unworthy of the status of an independent ‘science’ (nauka).¹¹ Pedagogy’s aspirations to the status of a scientific discipline were regularly mocked by university academics, who dismissed it as little more than a second-hand compendium of titbits from physiology, hygiene, psychology, and ethics—a hotchpotch suitable only for the training of future primary-school

⁷ On the role of academic knowledge in professional formation see Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 52–8. ⁸ For more detail see Byford, ‘Turning Pedagogy into a Science’, 56–62. On efforts to enhance the expertise of teachers in the context of their professionalization see Ruane, Gender, Class, 21–41 and Alston, Education and the State, 228–42. ⁹ V. A. Zmeev, ‘Vysshaia shkola Rossii: ot reform 60-kh k reforme 80-kh godov XIX v.’, Sotsial′nopoliticheskii zhurnal, 1998, no. 5: 164–79 (166–9). ¹⁰ On qualifications required to occupy a teaching post in secondary education see S. Stepanov, ‘K voprosu o pedagogicheskoi podgotovke prepodavatelei srednei shkoly v Rossii. Istoricheskii ocherk’, Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (hereafter ZhMNP), 1909, no. 3 (‘Sovremennaia letopis′’): 1–35 (12–15). ¹¹ A university chair in pedagogy existed in the 1850s when it replaced the chair in philosophy (which had been temporarily abolished following the 1848 revolutions in Europe). However, it disappeared again in the 1863 university charter. Some theoretical aspects of pedagogy were occasionally taught in philosophy lectures. See V. Ivanovskii, ‘O prepodavanii pedagogiki v universitetakh’, VV, 1906, no. 7: 109–35 (118–21). Chairs in pedagogy existed at Ecclesiastical Academies, and, for this reason, graduates from these establishments were sometimes given preference for posts of school inspectors. See E. A. Bobrov, ‘O zhelatel′nosti uchrezhdeniia kafedr pedagogiki v russkikh universitetakh’, Voprosy pedagogiki, 1912, no. 1: 16–20 (17). However, pedagogy taught in ecclesiastical institutions was deemed inadequate for the purposes of modern ‘rational’ education. See N. Ticher, ‘Diletantizm i prizvanie v pedagogicheskom dele’ (‘Iz inostrannoi pedagogicheskoi literatury’), Narodnoe obrazovanie, 1905, no. 12 (‘Knizhnoe i zhurnal′noe obozrenie’): 555–76 (556). On the abolition of the university ‘pedagogical courses’ by Dmitrii Tolstoi in 1867–8 (on the grounds that they were unsuitable for an institution of nauka) see Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (II, XLII, 44767).

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educators (narodnye uchitelia) and female teachers; in other words, those who had not benefited from university study.¹² The fact that those who taught in secondary schools all had higher education, which was emphatically academic rather than practical-professional, meant they were inclined to perceive themselves as subject-specialists who were not to be reduced to the level of ‘mere’ schoolteachers. And yet, the task and defining value of secondary education was said to be the provision of all-round ‘general education’ (obshchee obrazovanie), not initiation into ‘science’ itself. The latter was the prerogative of the next educational level—the universities as ‘temples of science (or learning)’ (khramy nauki). Thus, despite the importance that specialist academic knowledge played in their professional self-understanding, those teaching in secondary schools could hardly emulate the status of university-based scholars. To counter this vacuum of profession-specific legitimacy, a new and more concerted campaign to transform pedagogy into an academically valid form of corporate expertise began in earnest during the 1890s–1900s. A major role in this was played by a new generation of educational journals, especially The Russian School (Russkaia shkola) and The Herald of Education (Vestnik vospitaniia), both founded in 1890. However, what seemed even more important was the wish to create new institutions of pedagogical training where education would be developed and taught as a ‘science’. In 1898–9, a row on the matter flared up on the pages of the pedagogical press and beyond: while some argued that Russian universities ought to introduce departments in pedagogy on the American model, others believed it would be better to create entirely separate institutes, where pedagogy would be shaped more directly by occupation-specific needs and priorities.¹³ This debate gained momentum thanks to a series of reviews of teacher training, conducted by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment between 1900 and 1905.¹⁴ The government set up several commissions and sub-commissions to consider the matter of improving the qualifications of the empire’s teachers. Consultations were wide and resulted in contradictory conclusions about the desired way forward.¹⁵ Some participants were critical of the universities and proposed to dissociate teacher training from them. The majority, however, favoured at least some input from university-based academics, given that these ¹² R. Iu. Vipper, ‘Spetsial′naia podgotovka prepodavatelia srednei shkoly ili podniatie ego polozheniia?’, VV, 1898, no. 6: 52–74. On the final year ‘pedagogical class’ which crowned the programme of the female gymnasia, see Andy Byford, ‘Psychology at High School in Late Imperial Russia (1881– 1917)’, History of Education Quarterly, 2008, 48(2): 265–97 (268–77). ¹³ Vagner, ‘Universitet i sredneobrazovatel′naia shkola’, 138–41. The United States had twenty-six universities with education departments. There was little unity in their organization, but American practice indicated some of the main content requirements (psychology, physiology, history of education, school management, school hygiene, subject-specific teaching methods) and forms of training (seminar presentations and discussions, observations of lessons, trial lessons). ¹⁴ Alston, Education and the State, 153–65. ¹⁵ E. A. Kniazev, Genezis vysshego pedagogicheskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii XVIII—nachala XX veka: Smena paradigm (Moscow: Sentiabr′, 2001), 191–8.

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were considered the only legitimate representatives of nauka. In the absence of clear solutions, the Ministry adopted half-hearted temporary measures, such as the introduction of cheaply run, and merely facultative, university-affiliated ‘pedagogical courses’ for students who wished to go into teaching.¹⁶ Nonetheless, during this same period, thanks to increased scope for civic enterprise, philanthropic investment and professional self-organization, as well as the growing eagerness of Russia’s educated public to expand, improve, and liberalize education as a critical area of social development, the Russian empire saw a remarkable burst of independent initiatives devoted to innovating educational practice.¹⁷ Among such initiatives were also those that focused specifically on raising the qualifications and expertise of Russia’s educators. Most of these new projects were funded privately, though many also involved a form of private– public partnership, with a portion of support, especially for infrastructure, coming from various government ministries—not just the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, but also (and initially more prominently) the Ministries of the Army and of Finance, both of which ran their own educational networks, the cadet and commercial schools respectively. Among the various new teacher-training initiatives that appeared during the 1900s, particularly prominent became those with the explicit ambition to make pedagogy ‘scientific’. However, this programme was pitched as an innovation that came from outside of the education profession itself, namely as an intervention of psychologists and doctors. This new group of experts claimed that the mostly experience-based normative frameworks on which teachers traditionally relied when guiding children’s educational development were (by default) ‘unscientific’ and had to be replaced by the objective laws of children’s mental, physical, and social development as the only legitimate and reliable basis for transforming educational practice.¹⁸ More controversially, these innovators also proposed that teachers had to transform themselves as professionals: that they had to go beyond the role of sheer educators and effectively become researchers in and diagnosticians of child development; in other words, that scientific child study had to be hardwired to teaching practice and thereby become an inherent component of every teacher’s professional identity. This model offered an alternative mode of turning pedagogy into a science to simply admitting the discipline to the official ‘temples of learning’. Rather than creating legitimacy by granting pedagogy a university chair, department, or ¹⁶ M. M. Rubinshtein, ‘Pedagogi bez pedagogiki. (O polozhenii pedagogiki v nashikh universitetakh)’, VV, 1913, no. 6: 114–27. I. K., ‘Zametka po povodu stat′i M. M. Rubinshteina “Pedagogi bez pedagogiki” ’, VV, 1913, no. 9: 195–9. ¹⁷ Kniazev, Genezis vysshego pedagogicheskogo obrazovaniia, 119–220 (187–238). James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 29–55. ¹⁸ I. A. Sikorskii, ‘O postanovke prepodavania i vospitaniia soobrazno estestvennomu khodu umstvennogo razvitiia’, Russkaia shkola (hereafter RS), 1900, no. 2: 32–46.

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faculty, what was being promised was a much more direct empowerment of the education profession with science through the creation of an entirely new kind of ‘scientific pedagogy’. This new form of pedagogy was expected to incorporate the teachers’ own expertise into research questions, methods, and instruments that psychologists and doctors were at that same time developing as innovations within their own disciplinary realms. This idea was welcomed by many Russian teachers, who agreed that they had to adopt an entirely new professional mindset. Enthusiasm for it led to a boom in new types of training courses, professional conferences and societies, research labs and institutes, which all emphasized the grounding of pedagogy in the scientific study of children.¹⁹

Towards a ‘Scientific Pedagogy’ The earliest initiatives that sparked this movement came from the Army Ministry’s Department of Military Education and its Pedagogical Museum in St Petersburg.²⁰ In 1891 General Apollon Makarov was appointed as the Museum’s head and he, in particular, began pushing for a more systematic reform of pedagogy, inviting progressive educational theorists, doctors, and psychologists to take part in regular meetings and to introduce Russian parents and teachers to new research and ideas, especially innovations that were making headlines in West European and North American pedagogical, psychological, and medical press. Among Makarov’s initiatives was the setting up, in 1899, of courses for officers who were being trained to teach in Russia’s cadet schools. As part of this project, Makarov supported the creation, in 1901, of a fully equipped psychological laboratory that would focus on problems of education. This was the first lab of this kind in Russia, and it was organized on the initiative of the young psychology tutor, Aleksandr Petrovich Nechaev (1870–1948).²¹ Nechaev had started off as an untenured lecturer (privat-dotsent) at the philosophy department of St Petersburg University in the late 1890s. Having spent a portion of his postgraduate training in Germany in 1898–1900, he became

¹⁹ Alston, Education and the State, 228–42. Kniazev, Genezis vysshego pedagogicheskogo, 187–238. ²⁰ This institution has already been cited in the previous chapter as the institutional home of the St Petersburg Parents’ Circle. See also N. Flerov, ‘O pedagogicheskom muzee’, Pedagogicheskii vestnik Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga, 1913, no. 4–5: 88–111. Kratkii obzor deiatel′nosti Pedagogicheskogo muzeia voenno-uchebnykh zavedenii za 1894–95 g. (Dvadtsat′ piatyi obzor) (St Petersburg, 1895; supplement to Pedagogicheskii sbornik (hereafter PS), 1895, no. 11). ²¹ A. A. Romanov, Opytno-eksperimental′naia pedagogika pervoi treti XX veka (Moscow: Shkola, 1997), 40–119. V. V. Anshakova, Vklad A. P. Nechaeva v stanovlenie i razvitie vozrastnoi i pedagogicheskoi psikhologii (Astrakhan: Izd. Astrakhanskogo gos. ped. un-ta., 2002). V. V. Bol′shakova, ‘Eksperimental′noe izuchenie psikhologii shkol′nikov v trudakh A. P. Nechaeva’, in Istoriia stanovleniia i razvitiia eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii, ed. B. F. Lomov, E. A. Budilova, and V. A. Kol′tsova (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 189–99. A. P. Nechaev, ‘Zapiski psikhologa’, in ibid., 201–13.

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enthusiastic about experimental psychology and wrote his master’s dissertation on its role in education, based largely on experiments he conducted on schoolchildren in several St Petersburg schools during 1899.²² His thesis was, however, failed by his own mentor, the Neo-Kantian philosopher, Professor Aleksandr Vvedenskii, on account of it being based on methodologies—namely cognitive tests framed as psychological experiments—the validity of which Vvedenskii rejected. This setback barred Nechaev from a university career and he instead decided to take up Makarov’s offer to teach psychology at the Pedagogical Museum, where he also proposed to set up and direct a psychology lab devoted to problems of education. Nechaev was able to market his laboratory as a unique research hub that did pioneering work in experimental educational psychology. He positioned it as Russia’s one and only centre dedicated to the forging of a new, truly scientific basis for pedagogy, in line with similar initiatives taking place in the West. His successful promotion of the laboratory led, in 1904, to the launching of the socalled Pedology Section of the Pedagogical Museum. The Section was conceived as the kernel of a future institute, which was expected to be devoted to all-round child study or pedology, emulating the establishment set up by Granville Stanley Hall at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Such an institute was framed also as a belated realization of Konstantin Ushinskii’s dream of a pedagogical faculty devoted to the comprehensive study of ‘man as an object of education’.²³ The Pedology Section organized annual training courses that were open to all educators, regardless of the ministry that employed them.²⁴ In a speech at their launch, Makarov insisted that these courses were not practical-professional but devoted to the development of a ‘science of upbringing’ (nauka vospitaniia). He stressed that teachers would acquire the kind of professional status that they desired and deserved only once ‘the foundations of education [were] developed scientifically and not by the arbitrary views of practitioners’.²⁵ He urged ‘practising pedagogues’ to look up to the new category of experts that he dubbed ‘representatives of the science of upbringing’—namely, the psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, and criminologists who were giving keynote speeches at the inaugural

²² A. P. Nechaev, Sovremennaia eksperimental′naia psikhologiia v ee otnosheniiakh k voprosam shkol′nogo obucheniia (St Petersburg, 1901). ²³ K. Dobropistsev, ‘Otkrytie Pedologicheskogo otdela pri Pedagogicheskom muzee voenno uchebnykh zavedenii’, Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i gipnotizma (hereafter VPKAG), 1904, no. 4: 268–71. ²⁴ See Mikhail Ivanovich Konorov, ‘Otkrytie pedologicheskikh kursov’, PS, 1904, no. 12: 548–53. I. M., ‘Pervoe publichnoe zasedanie Pedologicheskogo otdela imeni K. D. Ushinskogo’, VV, 1904, no. 4 (‘Khronika’): 109–15. Nikolai Efimovich Rumiantsev, ‘Letnie Pedologicheskie kursy dlia uchitelei v S.-Peterburge s 20 iulia po 18 avgusta 1907 g. Otchet.’, VPKAG, 1907, no. 4: 153–86. ²⁵ K[onor]-ov, ‘Otkrytie lektsii i prakticheskikh zaniatii’, 94–5.

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ceremony and who were also acting as lecturers on these courses.²⁶ Speaking after Makarov, Nechaev explained that the Pedology Section’s courses were still intended specifically for ‘representatives of living school practice’, but that they were designed to actively engage educational professionals in ‘free scientific work’. Science was to be incorporated into all parts of training, with practical classes designed to focus not on developing teaching skills but on enabling trainees to pursue research projects relevant to their occupational practice, with the achievement of a published research paper replacing an exam or diploma. Aiming to promote this new paradigm of ‘scientific pedagogy’ to a wider audience of educational practitioners nationwide, in the summer of 1906, Nechaev and his colleagues organized Russia’s first major conference in ‘pedagogical psychology’, attaching to it one-month courses for teachers on the above ‘scientific’ model.²⁷ The courses, which ran in both 1906 and 1907, offered something genuinely different from most standard teacher-training programmes of that time. There were ninety hours of lectures and a considerable number of practical classes; there were excursions to local museums, laboratories, crèches, schools, and sanatoria; each day ended in long evening discussions on topical issues in education and psychology. Lectures and practical classes were offered in anatomy, physiology, educational psychology, experimental psychology, the psychophysiology of sensory organs, psychopathology, school hygiene, speech therapy, children’s games, and school management. They were accompanied by demonstrations using magic lantern displays, psychological instruments, diagrams and charts, anatomical displays, and physiological experiments on frogs and pigeons. The programme was intensive—twenty-five days filled with nonstop activities, from 9 a.m. to 10–11 p.m. During 1907–8, these summer courses, and the Pedology Section itself, were transformed into a more permanent establishment—the Pedagogical Academy (hereafter PA).²⁸ The Academy was devised as a postgraduate institution that awarded diplomas after a two-year course, and only to those who already had a first degree from some other institution (a university or Higher Women’s Courses, for instance). It was marketed in the pedagogical press as Russia’s response to related initiatives emerging at roughly the same time in the United States, Britain, France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany. PA was established under the

²⁶ They included, for example, the psychologist A. P. Nechaev, the paediatrician N. P. Gundobin, the psychiatrist L. N. Blumenau, and the criminologist D. A. Dril′. ²⁷ Rumiantsev, ‘Letnie Pedologicheskie’. ²⁸ On what follows see ‘Ustav Pedagogicheskoi akademii Ligi obrazovaniia’, VPKAG, 1907, no. 4: 187–90. M. K[onorov?], ‘Pedagogicheskaia Akademiia’, RS, 1907, no. 12: 83–5. A. Nechaev, ‘Pervye shagi Pedagogicheskoi Akademii’, Ezhegodnik eksperimental′noi pedagogiki (hereafter EEP), 1910, 3: 10–21. Trudy s.-peterburgskoi Pedagogicheskoi akademii, Vyp. I. Nachalo dela. Vozniknovenie Pedagogicheskoi akademii, obshchye osnovy ee organizatsii i pervye raboty slushatelei (St Petersburg: PA, 1910). Trudy s.-peterburgskoi Pedagogicheskoi akademii, Vyp. II. 1910–11/1911–12 (St Petersburg: PA, 1913).

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auspices of the League of Education (a relatively loose, philanthropically run cluster of educational societies), but was officially subordinate to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment.²⁹ The Ministry did not, however, provide financial assistance, and, more importantly, it denied the Academy the right to award doctorates in pedagogy. This was a major blow to the ambition of its organizers to turn it into the Russian establishment creating future professors of pedagogy who would go on to head pedagogy departments or institutes elsewhere, should these be established in the future. In the end, the Pedagogical Academy had to formulate its role vaguely and unambitiously as providing ‘specialist education to persons who wished to devote themselves to pedagogical work’.³⁰ It was unclear, though, what the phrase ‘pedagogical work’ referred to exactly: whether the Academy provided top-up training for already established teachers, whether it prepared educational managers, or if it trained future researchers and lecturers in educational psychology or school hygiene. Most of the tutoring at the Academy was done through lab demonstrations and seminars, with emphasis placed on group research projects and trial lessons. The student-teachers were not novices but experienced ‘practising pedagogues’ who were given plenty of freedom to organize their studies. The Academy was never going to provide them with additional teaching qualifications. The objective was, rather, for them to become a new form of scientifically-minded ‘teacherresearchers’—an ideal that was difficult to fit in the existing educators’ job market and professional hierarchy.³¹ In 1911, thanks to a generous private donation by a philanthropist from Samara, PA was able to set up an experimental school as part of its structure. Nechaev acted as the school’s principal, while the Academy’s trainees filled the teaching posts and jointly acted as a school-manager collective.³² The school had its own psychology lab and school hygiene room. There were entrance assessments for children, which included a medical check-up, an anthropometric examination, psychometric testing, and an interview with the parents. Psychological experimentation and observation were carried out continuously, both during and outside lessons. This was framed both as general psychopedagogical research and as a form of systematically monitoring individual ²⁹ ‘Ustav Ligi obrazovaniia’, VPKAG, 1907, no. 4: 190–4. ³⁰ ‘Ustav Pedagogicheskoi akademii’, 187. ³¹ Some believed that the graduates of PA ought to be particularly well-suited for posts of school directors. See the review of Trudy s.-peterburgskoi Pedagogicheskoi akademii, Vyp. II. 1910–11/1911–12 (St Petersburg: PA, 1913) by R. G. in VV, 1914, no. 5 (‘Kritika i bibliografiia’): 41–5. Other options included recommendations for the creation of a rank similar to the German Gymnasialprofessor, which would be awarded to teachers who made special scholarly contributions to pedagogy. See V. Polovtsov, ‘O pedagogicheskoi podgotovke uchitel′skogo personala srednei shkoly’, ZhMNP, 1916, no. 1 (‘Otdel po narodnomu obrazovaniiu’): 97–9. ³² A. P. Nechaev, ‘Ob eksperimental′noi shkole pri pedagogicheskoi akademii’, VV, 1911, no. 3: 1–20; NA RAO f. 47, op. 1, d. 95.

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schoolchildren, all in the context of training higher-level professionals in education who would then be able to emulate these practices elsewhere. A similar approach to teacher training and the same desire to become a groundbreaker in ‘scientific pedagogy’, was characteristic of the Pedagogical Faculty at V. M. Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute (hereafter PNI), which he established in St Petersburg around this same time. PNI’s Pedagogical Faculty existed alongside its Faculties of Law and Medicine, thereby ensuring that, formally at least, future teachers enjoyed institutional rights on a par with those of other, more prestigious, professions. Since PNI offered a first degree, it catered for a much larger number of students than PA and had a broader educational programme.³³ The latter was based on an initial grounding in the human sciences, to be followed up by student research projects, which involved work in PNI’s psychology lab as well as visits to schools, sanatoria for children deemed abnormal, and PNI’s own Pedology Institute.³⁴ The Pedagogical Faculty had relatively little new to offer in terms of transforming teaching technique. The practical dimension of the course was instead conceived as a form of ‘applied science’. Exemplary of the fusion of education and science in this programme were the projects supervised by the psychology lecturer Aleksandr Fedorovich Lazurskii (1874–1917), who had studied under Bekhterev at the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg and then taught there as privatdotsent. At PNI Lazurskii devised the method he called ‘the natural experiment’, which involved designing ‘experimental lessons’ in different subjects, and even an entire ‘experimental school day’, as carefully crafted frameworks for performing personality and mental ability tests on individual pupils in a classroom setting.³⁵ A student-teacher on Lazurskii’s course would sit at the back of a class and observe the behaviour and responses of a particular child in a series of lessons. These lessons would involve ordinary school activities but would be specially designed to enable the systematic assessment, and even quantification, of cognitive abilities and personality traits, without the children ever noticing they were being psychologically assessed. The researcher would take notes on the child’s performance and reactions during the lesson, based on a pre-prepared programme that specified

³³ M. A. Akimenko and A. M. Shereshevskii, Istoriia instituta imeni V. M. Bekhtereva na dokumental′nykh materialakh, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: PNI, 2002). Kniazev, Genezis vysshego pedagogicheskogo obrazovaniia, 158–66. ³⁴ See the discussion of PNI’s Pedology Institute in the previous chapter. ³⁵ A. F. Lazurskii, Shkol′nye kharakteristiki (St Petersburg: Senatskia tip., 1908). A. F. Lazurskii, ‘O estestvennom eksperimente’, EEP, 1911, no. 4: 90–100. E. A. Kenigsberg-Kovarskaia, ‘Eksperimental′nye uroki, kak odin iz priemov estestvennogo eksperimenta’, EEP, 1913, no. 6: 66–90. L. N. Val′vat′eva [Filosofova], ‘Eksperimental′nye uroki po prirodovedeniiu’, VV, 1913, no. 5: 44–82. M. Korenblit and M. Nadol′skaia, ‘Uroki risovaniia, kak metod issledovaniia lichnosti’, EEP, 1914, no. 7: 63–80. E. A. Kovarskaia, ‘K voprosu o psikhologo-pedagogicheskom znachenii raznykh uchebnykh predmetov’, RS, 1916, no. 5–6: ‘Eksperimental′naia pedagogika’, 1–21. A. F. Lazurskii and L. N. Filosofova, ‘Estestvenoeksperimental′nye skhemi lichnosti uchashchikhsia’, VV, 1916, no. 6: 1–51. A. F. Lazurskii (ed.), Estestvennyi eksperiment i ego shkol′noe primenenie (Petrograd: K. L. Rikker, 1918).

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which psychological characteristic was being measured in which school activity. In the end, a detailed verbal profile (kharakteristika) of the child’s personality was produced and the results of the observations were transposed onto a diagram of cognitive abilities, which one could use for both scientific and educational purposes.³⁶ Just like Nechaev, Lazurskii promoted this work simultaneously and ambiguously as experimental research in differential or individual psychology, as a methodology for improving teaching and learning by creating psychologically more meaningful lesson designs, and as a practical means of profiling schoolchildren in an educational context. The visual immediacy of the graphic representation of a child’s mental profile seemed especially important in the promotion of this new technology to the wider clientele of teachers.³⁷ Even before developing the ‘natural experiment’, Lazurskii had devised a map-like representation of a child’s personality, which he called ‘schema’ (skhema) and which was understood as the output of his systematic programme of objective observation of a child’s behaviour in an educational context.³⁸ However, this ‘schema’ was criticized in the pedagogical press for being unnecessarily complex and impractical.³⁹ This prompted Lazurskii to come up with a much simpler ‘star diagram’ (zvezdochka) as the graphic output of his ‘natural experiment’ (Figure 7). This diagram was designed in such a way that the size of each vertex corresponded to the degree of development of a particular set of mental faculties, based on the data obtained in the experiment. The zvezdochka had the virtue of representing the result of the ‘experiment’ carried out by a ‘pedagogue-researcher’ as a harmonious whole that could be grasped at a glance. Both the PA and PNI’s Pedagogical Faculty presented their innovations in teacher training as rooted in an objective, scientific, and therefore neutral, form of authority. However, the novelty of their institutional positioning and their programmes, the relative lack of financial and moral support from the tsarist state, and the fact that they often attracted as students and lecturers those who were not admitted to the academic mainstream (Jews, women, and those expelled from university on political grounds), meant that, ultimately, their image was that of radicals—partisans of untested and potentially suspect approaches. Indeed, their ambitions provoked scepticism and opposition among teachers, bureaucrats, and academics who were of a more conservative or simply cautious bent. Even while being praised as institutions created through independent initiative and ³⁶ Similar sorts of observations were being carried out in the experimental school affiliated to PA. See Nechaev, ‘Ob eksperimental′noi shkole’. ³⁷ On the significance of graphic visualization in child science see A. Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2008), 115–81. ³⁸ Lazurskii, Shkol′nye kharakteristiki. ³⁹ See V. Iakovenko’s review of A. F. Lazurskii, Shkol′nye kharakteristiki (St Petersburg, 1908) in VV, 1909, no. 4: 37–44.

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Figure 7 Aleksandr F. Lazurskii’s ‘star diagram’ (zvezdochka). A. Lazurskii and L. Filosofova, ‘Estestvenno-eksperimental′nye skhemy lichnosti uchashchikhsia’, Vestnik vospitaniia, 1916, no. 6: 1–51 (49).

civic enterprise that demonstrated genuine leadership in furthering the scientific credentials of pedagogy, they could also be lambasted for pursuing this goal too hastily, for uncritically promoting controversial fads in psychology, and for leaning too far towards extreme forms of natural-scientific materialism.⁴⁰ A further problem that plagued the PA and PNI’s Pedagogical Faculty was that, contrary to the universities, these new institutions had, for strategic reasons, positioned themselves in between the hierarchically split levels of ‘science’ and ‘education’; and what is more, they defined as their ideal an unprecedented, as well as ambiguous, fusion of the two. The leaders of these institutions courted

⁴⁰ S. Liubomudrov, ‘Psikhologiia i pedagogika’, ZhMNP, 1910, no. 8 (‘Sovremennaia letopis′’): 65–84 (83–4).

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practising teachers as a key following, but at the same time sought to forge and embody a hierarchically superior form of scientific authority that would reign over and above educational practitioners. Such positioning was contradictory since it left open the question of whether the teachers could become the ‘owners’ of what was being created, institutionalized, and ‘sold’ to them as their science, or whether, in order to be empowered by science, they had to become a different kind of professional altogether.

The Teacher as Psychologist The movement for ‘scientific pedagogy’ did indeed entail a re-imagining of teaching as an ‘applied’ form of developmental psychology.⁴¹ Teaching seemed so inferior to the work of other professions that those campaigning to improve the teachers’ image thought it essential to transform the very nature of their work, so that it would no longer be identified with the monotonous, formalist drill that the majority, including the teachers themselves, associated with the profession.⁴² One solution was to construct the new, progressive teacher as a ‘developer’ of schoolchildren’s ‘souls’. In addition to making the teachers’ tasks more interesting and important, the proposed turning of teachers into ‘applied psychologists’ was used to distinguish the expertise of the pedagogue from that of the scholar, with a view to avoiding the automatic subordination of the former to the latter. It was argued that, in contrast to the university professors’ relationship to their academic specialism, a secondary-school teacher’s ‘material’ was not the academic subject that he imparted to his pupils; the teacher was expected to use his specialist subject simply ‘as a tool for influencing the spiritual forces of the child’.⁴³ This meant that it was less important for teachers to be at the cutting edge of their respective subject than to be up to date with the relevant findings of the ‘science of the human soul’. This realignment of professional priorities was expected to create a much greater sense of corporate unity among educators, combating the fragmentation of secondary-school teachers into a heterogeneous collection of subject specialists.⁴⁴ At Russian universities psychology was at this time taught as part of philosophy, in a general and predominantly theoretical way. The psychology of child development did not form an official part of the subject, which meant that teachers could claim this domain as their own. Some, including a number of ⁴¹ S. V. Zenchenko, ‘I podniatie polozheniia prepodavatelia srednei shkoly i spetsial′naia ego podgotovka (Otvet professoru R. Vipperu)’, VV, 1898, no. 8: 83–103. ⁴² G. R[okov], ‘Eshche o polozhenii’, 91–6. Nechaev, Sovremennaia eksperimental′naia psikhologiia, 1. ⁴³ G. R[okov], ‘Eshche o polozhenii’, 91. ⁴⁴ Vagner, ‘Universitet i sredneobrazovatel′naia shkola’, 143.

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those representing the mainstream of Russian psychology at the time (such as Nikolai Grot, cited in the epigraph to this chapter), argued that since teachers had daily access to children they were best placed to conduct empirical research into children’s psychological development.⁴⁵ One of the key tasks for such ‘teacherpsychologists’ was to determine the psychological traits and mental abilities of the individual children in their care as a basis for deciding how to go about influencing their mental and moral development. As discussed in the previous chapter, the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the notion of ‘pedagogical psychology’ become the most popular framework for grounding the professional expertise of Russian educators in the new sciences of man. Indeed, during the 1890s–1900s, every self-respecting textbook in pedagogy, especially one that sought to present the discipline as a ‘science’, had to provide a detailed account of psychology as its backbone or else face scorn and rejection from reviewers.⁴⁶ Many of the textbooks in pedagogy were effectively courses in psychology, with pedagogical ‘consequences’ tacked on almost as appendices. Psychology here featured as a ‘pure’ science and pedagogy as its ‘application’. Those keen to defend pedagogy’s credentials argued that even if pedagogy was not being taught at university, the discipline could be seen as an extension of psychology, which was a university science.⁴⁷ However, psychology’s own academic legitimacy was at this time far from firmly established. The way in which psychology was taught at the humanities (Historical-Philological) faculties of Russia’s universities, kept the discipline formally subordinate to philosophy. This was the case even though psychology was arguably the fastest growing among philosophy’s subdisciplines, prompting quite a few scholars and students to specialize in it. At the same time, the scientific credentials of psychology as a subdiscipline of philosophy remained under attack from neurophysiologists and neuropsychiatrists, who sought to redefine it in line with paradigms rooted in biology and medicine.⁴⁸ Sechenov’s brain-science and Bekhterev’s ‘objective psychology’, discussed in the previous chapter, were the prime examples of this. The role that teachers began to play in the fate of psychology at this time became an even greater point of contention in the struggles between Russian ⁴⁵ Grot, ‘Osnovaniia eksperimental′noi psikhologii’, 612. ⁴⁶ E.g. see A. F[eoktistov]’s review of V. A. Volkovich, Pedagogika—nauka pered sudom ee protivnikov, 1909 in ‘Retzenzii’, EEP, 1910, 3: 22–3; A. Nechaev’s review of I. S. Andreevskii, Nauchnye osnovy pedagogiki, 1903 in ‘Kritika i bibliografiia’, RS, 1904, no. 2: 1–2; and V. M. Ekzempliarskii, ‘Eksperiment v psikhologii i pedagogike i nauka o vospitanii’, VV, 1917, no. 1: 46–61 (46). ⁴⁷ S. Zenchenko, ‘O podgotovke prepodavatelei srednikh uchebnykh zavedenii k pedagogicheskoi deiatel′nosti’, VV, 1898, no. 4: 60–96 (93–4). ⁴⁸ David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). A. V. Petrovskii, Psikhologiia v Rossii. XX vek (Moscow: URAO, 2000). E. A. Budilova, Bor′ba materializma i idealizma v russkoi psikhologicheskoi nauke. Vtoraia polovina XIX—nachalo XX v (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1960). Irina Sirotkina and Roger Smith, ‘Russian Federation’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology: Global Perspectives, ed. D. B. Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 412–41.

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psychologists over how to develop and strengthen the discipline. Most Russian scholars specializing in psychology, irrespective of their background or agenda, were aware of the interest that teachers showed towards their discipline and they invariably encouraged the idea that psychology should become fundamental to the professional development of all educators.⁴⁹ In fact, it was principally in relation to ‘lowly’ pedagogy, that psychology could assume the role of an unambiguously respectable science. This status had, however, to be actively constituted and consistently maintained, which was how teachers became such an important audience to whom Russian psychologists promoted specific visions of their discipline as a ‘science’. Russian psychologists were far from united, though, on the issue of psychology’s disciplinary identity, including its epistemology and methodology. University-based academics, with Georgii Ivanovich Chelpanov (1862–1936) of Moscow University as their most outspoken representative, gave epistemological pre-eminence to ‘introspection’ (samonabliudenie; literally ‘self-observation’) as the core means through which the psyche could be accessed empirically. While recognizing the crucial importance of experimentation in the discipline’s advancement as a science, Chelpanov referred this part of psychology mostly to the study of elementary psychic functions situated on the boundary with physiology.⁵⁰ Chelpanov was certainly keen to build experimental psychology in Russia, taking Wilhelm Wundt’s conception of it as his model, and in 1912 he opened Russia’s best-equipped psychology lab at Moscow University’s new, privately-funded, Institute of Psychology (Moskovskii Psikhologicheskii Institut, hereafter MPI).⁵¹ Even so, he maintained that experimentation as such was subordinate to general psychology and argued forcefully against the fashion of turning ‘the experiment’ into the be all and end all of psychology’s definition as a science.⁵² He insisted, ⁴⁹ See M. M. Troitskii, ‘Sovremennoe uchenie o zadachakh i metodakh psikhologii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1995, no. 4: 93–107 (106). This a republication of the speech by Professor Matvei Troitskii at the opening of the Moscow Psychological Society in 1885. ⁵⁰ E. V. Levchenko, ‘Istoriia introspektsii v Rossii (konets XIX – nachalo XX vv.)’, Metodologiia i istoriia psikhologii, 2007, no. 2/2: 54–67. For more on Chelpanov see: Alex Kozulin, ‘Georgy Chelpanov and the Establishment of the Moscow Institute of Psychology’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1985, 21: 23–32. Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 107–10. S. A. Bogdanchikov, ‘Nauchnoorganizatsionnaia deiatel′nost’ G. I. Chelpanova’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1998, no. 2: 126–35. T. D. Martsinkovskaia and M. G. Iaroshevskii, ‘Neizvestnye stranitsy tvorchestva G. I. Chelpanova’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1999, no. 3: 99–106. ⁵¹ A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Osnovnye etapy razvitiia nauchnoi deiatel′nosti Psikhologicheskogo instituta’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1994, no. 2: 5–21. Z. Afanas′eva, O. Vorchenko, and A. Iasnova, ‘Osmotr psikhologicheskogo instituta slushatel′nitsami zhenskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta’, ZhMNP, 1914, no. 1 (‘Sovremennaia letopis′’): 1–19. Psikhologicheskii institut imeni L. G. Shchukinoi pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom Universitete: Istoriia, opisanie ustroistva i organizatsiia zaniatii (Moscow: A. I. Snegireva, 1914). See also G. I. Chelpanov, ‘O polozhenii psikhologii v russkikh universitetakh’, VFP, 1912 (vol. 114), no. 1: 211–23. ⁵² G. I. Chelpanov, ‘Sovremennaia individual′naia psikhologiia i ee prakticheskoe znachenie’, VFP, 1910 (vol. 103), no. 1: 306–30. For the importance of the problem of ‘experimentation’ in debates over the identity of psychology as a positivist human science in Russia see Lomov et al., Istoriia stanovleniia i razvitiia.

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moreover, that experimental methodologies needed to be developed cautiously, by properly trained and experienced staff, in controlled laboratory conditions and within a robust, philosophically grounded, epistemological and methodological framework. Even though Chelpanov recognized the promises of experimentation in various applied fields, including the potentials of mass mental testing, he saw the findings of experimental psychological research as far from ready to be applied in real-life settings, such as schools. During the 1900s, he was greatly troubled by what he perceived to be gross simplifications of the notion of the ‘psychological experiment’ as it was being discussed in the field of education, and he was particularly concerned about the risk of compromising the methodology by allowing it to fall into the hands of overzealous unqualified quasi-researchers in the form of practising teachers. Chelpanov’s main rivals in this debate were psychologists whose core base of operations was outside the universities—those working in the rapidly growing field of teacher training. The background of some of them—say, Nechaev—was, like Chelpanov’s, in philosophy; others—say, Lazurskii—were trained in medicine. However, what truly distinguished this group was their eagerness to introduce the culture of experimental research into Russian psychology as a matter of urgency. They foregrounded ‘experimentation’ as indispensable to psychology becoming a true science and they believed that Russia had been waiting far too long to follow German advances in this area. Even more significantly, they were keen to launch Russia in the direction of the strategic expansion of psychological experimentation beyond the prohibitively expensive and methodologically restrictive apparatus-based laboratories and into a wide range of applied fields, the most important of which, at this juncture, was education.⁵³ What the ‘psychologists-experimenters’ (psikhologi-eksperimentatory), such as Nechaev and Lazurskii, focused on above all else during the 1900s–1910s was the development of cheaper psychological methodologies and technologies, especially cognitive and personality tests and psychological questionnaires.⁵⁴ As suggested above, their promotion of the use of the ‘psychological experiment’ in education usually blurred and blended experimentation for the purposes of psycho-pedagogical research with experimentation in support of educational practice. While accepting that any application had to be grounded in thorough lab research, they usually argued that the urgent needs of Russian education made it impossible for applications to wait for the scientific groundwork to be completed, but that the two had to go hand in hand.⁵⁵ ⁵³ The other key fields into which experimental psychology was expanding in Russia during the tsarist period were neuropsychiatry and criminology; industry and the military then overtook these fields during the early Soviet era, while education remained vital throughout. ⁵⁴ These will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. ⁵⁵ P. M. Zinov′ev, ‘Rol′ psikhologicheskogo eksperimenta v psikhiatrii’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1912, no. 8: 605–22.

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Both Chelpanov and ‘the experimenters’ worked hard to win the teachers’ backing for their opposing paradigms of psychology. Support from teachers was arguably more important to Nechaev, Lazurskii, and their followers since their work took place at the newly established teacher-training establishments, and they explicitly cast teachers as ‘disciples’ in the development of a new science. However, Chelpanov too was keenly aware of the importance that the battleground of pedagogy had for the disciplinary future of psychology. He was, as a consequence, extremely vocal at conferences and in publications that promoted psychology to the teaching profession.⁵⁶ In contrast to ‘the experimenters’, though, he engaged with teachers as practitioners whose work in education should be informed by psychology, but who should not dream of trying to do psychological experiments on their pupils.⁵⁷ As a university professor, Chelpanov spoke with authority that was heeded by many teachers. What is more, he was able to exploit the ‘softness’ of non-labbased experimentation promoted by his rivals as a methodological weak spot, mounting, almost singlehandedly, an effective critique of the experimenters’ efforts to shift the institutional centre of psychology away from university philosophy departments. Chelpanov persuasively questioned the teachers’ qualifications to carry out psychological research in schools, warning that such practice would expose psychology to dangerous dilettantism, wrecking the discipline’s still fragile institutional status and public image. As discipline, research practice, and expertise, psychology, he argued, needed to remain in the hands of fully qualified, university-based, scholar-psychologists. Yet Chelpanov was vulnerable to counterattack since he had not established his own laboratory in experimental psychology until the 1910s, whereas Nechaev had instituted his already in 1901. It was only from 1912, after securing substantial private funding to establish MPI, that Chelpanov could start properly defending the claim that the university was, indeed, the institution responsible for defining what counted as a legitimate psychological experiment. However, the creation of MPI’s otherwise superior lab came too late to prevent Chelpanov’s rivals from successfully mobilizing support for their own paradigms among a significant portion of teachers and, by 1916, even among officials in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Nechaev himself was perfectly clear that practising teachers could not seriously think of becoming bona fide scientists. What he was really questioning was the

⁵⁶ G. I. Chelpanov, Sbornik statei: Psikhologiia i shkola (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1912). On Chelpanov’s pedagogical ideas see A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Psikhologo-pedagogicheskie vzgliady G. I. Chelpanova’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1994, no. 1: 36–42. ⁵⁷ Compare Chelpanov’s and Nechaev’s high-school textbooks in psychology: G. I Chelpanov, Uchebnik psikhologii (dlia gimnazii i samoobrazovaniia) (Kiev, 1906; 12th edition in 1915) and A. Nechaev, Uchebnik psikhologii dlia gimnazii (St Petersburg, 1906). For a discussion of their rivalry in this context see Byford, ‘Psychology at High School’, 285–8.

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claim that legitimate psychology could only be done inside the traditional ‘temples of science’, or rather that university-based academics were the only ones with the right to define what counted as legitimate scientific psychology. ‘The experimenters’ argued that what made particular psychological research ‘scientific’ was not who carried it out or at which institution, but whether a properly scientific methodology was being applied.⁵⁸ For them, ‘scientificity’ in psychology came from the epistemological framework of ‘experimentation’, on the model of the natural sciences and in deliberately polemical distinction to ‘scientificity’ defined by the rootedness of nauka (meaning also ‘academic learning’) in institutionalized academia embodied by the university. This was why Nechaev and his followers were so militant about foregrounding the notion of ‘experiment’ as the basis of ‘science’.⁵⁹ They positioned this model of science in explicit contrast to what was current practice at Russian universities, where, they argued, psychological experimentation was (at least until the establishment of MPI) paid merely lip service.⁶⁰ And yet, although a substantial amount of research done by ‘the experimenters’ was developed for use outside the laboratory—in kindergartens, schools, and shelters for abandoned, disabled, or delinquent children—the scientist rhetoric of Nechaev and his colleagues led them to emphasize ‘the laboratory’ as their strategic base. In fact, given that this group developed their science outside its traditional ‘temples’—the universities—the laboratory became particularly important as a legitimizing framework. This was, in their view, the true temple of modern science. Nechaev’s lab at the Pedagogical Museum, equipped with the core psychological apparatuses of this era, specially imported from Leipzig, was the main material embodiment of such a ‘temple’ during the early 1900s.⁶¹ He and his associates regularly displayed their laboratory apparatuses at Russia’s educationalist and childcare exhibitions and conferences, performing what they saw as cutting-edge science in psychology. However, the experimenters’ rootedness in the domain of teacher training and education research also demanded a strategic juxtaposition of the psychology lab with the school. For this reason, in 1906–7 Nechaev and his group at the laboratory of the Pedagogical Museum devised an inexpensive ‘kit’ (kollektsiia priborov), made up of a set of test cards and simplified apparatuses designed for use without electricity. They marketed it partly as teaching aids for the new secondary-school course in psychology which was introduced into the high-

⁵⁸ N. Rumiantsev, ‘Psikhologiia i shkola’, EEP, 1912, 5: 56–75. ⁵⁹ A. P. Nechaev, ‘Ob organizatsii psikhologicheskikh nabliudenii’, RS, 1902, no. 2: 149–54. ⁶⁰ The notable exception was N. N. Lange, professor of psychology at the philosophy department of the Novorossiiskii University in Odessa (discussed in the previous chapter), who ran a small lab in experimental psychology there. See B. M. Teplov, ‘Osnovnye idei v psikhologicheskikh trudakh N. N. Lange’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1958, no. 6: 44–63. ⁶¹ Dzh. A. Grin [J. A. Green], ‘Eksperimental′noe issledovanie pedagogicheskikh problem v Rossii’, EEP, 1910, 3: 1–9.

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school curriculum in 1905,⁶² and partly as a mini-laboratory which teachers were expected to use for their own initiation into ‘scientific pedagogy’ rooted in psychological experimentation. Nechaev promoted these kits in his teachertraining courses and at various conferences, encouraging teachers to set up psychology workrooms (kabinety) at their schools.⁶³ The thorny issue of whether and in what sense teachers could be expected to ‘do’ experimental psychology became the main bone of contention at the First and Second Conferences in Pedagogical Psychology in St Petersburg in 1906 and 1909—events organized on the initiative of Nechaev and his supporters, but with the vocal presence of their opponents, especially Chelpanov.⁶⁴ The title of these two conferences did not imply a rigorous definition of ‘pedagogical psychology’. Its connotations captured the alliance of psychology and pedagogy that everyone was hoping to achieve, while also hinting at the rather more controversial, and still only hypothetical, image of the Russian educator as a ‘teacherpsychologist’.⁶⁵ Teachers, primarily those working in secondary education, flocked to St Petersburg from all parts of the empire with great expectations and enthusiasm, the number of attendees reaching several hundred. Participants included school directors and inspectors, physicians and psychiatrists, as well as psychologists from philosophy departments. The papers read at these conferences dealt with a whole panoply of child study topics, but the most important ones revolved around the problem of the scientific identity and mutual relationship between psychology and pedagogy, or rather, the place of psychology in education. In 1906, Chelpanov’s authority as a university academic (at that time professor at Kiev University, about to transfer to Moscow University) was sufficient to ensure that, whilst highlighting the importance of psychology for teachers, the agreed conference resolutions called for moderation when it came to the teachers’ active involvement in psychological research. Nevertheless, it was at this conference that many teachers, especially those from the provinces, became acquainted with the idea that they could conduct psychological studies on their pupils and they eagerly embraced the promises of the experimental technologies that

⁶² Byford, ‘Psychology at High School’, 277–97. ⁶³ M. I. Konorov and A. P. Nechaev, ‘Kollektsiia prosteishikh priborov dlia prepodavatelei psikhologii v srednikh shkolakh’, VPKAG, 1907, no. 4: 195–203. N. E. Rumiantsev, ‘Shkol′nyi psikhologicheskii kabinet’, RS, 1908, no. 4 (‘Otdel eksperimental′noi pedagogiki’): 147–73. Grin, ‘Eksperimental′noe issledovanie’, 3–4. A. P. Nechaev, Kak prepodavat′ psikhologiiu? Metodicheskie ukazaniia dlia uchitelei srednikh uchebnykh zavedenii (St Petersburg: P. P. Soikina, 1911). ⁶⁴ M. V. Sokolov, ‘Voprosy psikhologicheskoi teorii na russkikh s″ezdakh po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1956, no. 2: 8–22. E. A. Budilova, ‘Polemika o psikhologicheskom eksperimente na Vserossiiskikh s″ezdakh po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, in Istoriia stanovleniia i razvitiia, 76–86. ⁶⁵ This comes across in the plan for the first conference. See ‘Proekt pervogo russkogo s″ezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v g. S.-Peterburge’, VFP, 1906 (vol. 82) II (‘Izvestiia i zametki’): 130–3.

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Nechaev was offering them. A number of teachers purchased his equipment and manuals and started using them in their schools over the coming years.⁶⁶ By the time of the second conference, in 1909 (Figures 8 and 9), a few such teachers had, in fact, made public claims about the supposedly scientific studies they had carried out in the classroom. This gave Chelpanov and others in his camp the perfect opportunity to ridicule such work and to expose the teachers’ methodological naivety.⁶⁷ By demonstrating the teachers’ lack of technical mastery and the gross unreliability of the equipment they were using, Chelpanov continued to argue persuasively not only against the premature democratization of the scientific pursuit of psychology by educators, but also against the paradigms of applied experimental psychology pursued by Nechaev and his followers. Although in his closing speech at the 1909 conference, the chairman— Bekhterev—proclaimed diplomatically that there were no winners in this debate, from this point on everyone became more cautious about the concept of the

Figure 8 Participants of the 1909 Conference in Pedagogical Psychology. Photograph published in Iskry, 14 June 1909, 184.

⁶⁶ Liubomudrov, ‘Psikhologiia i pedagogika’, 66. ⁶⁷ G. I. Chelpanov, ‘Zadachi sovremennoi psikhologii’, VFP 1909 (vol. 99) I: 285–308. Particularly revealing of the kind of experiments teachers were carrying out is A. Feoktistov, ‘Ob odarennosti’, EEP, 1909, no. 2: 1–15. See also A. Feoktistov, ‘Psikhologicheskii khlam’, EEP, 1909, no. 2: 163–8, and V. Volyntsevich ‘V interesakh eksperimental′noi psikhologii’, PS, 1910, no. 11: 422–44; no. 12: 564–601.

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Figure 9 Organizing Committee of the 1909 Conference in Pedagogical Psychology. Sitting: [D. M.] Levshin, N. N. Lange, V. M. Bekhterev, Z. A. Moksheev, A. P. Nechaev, G. I. Chelpanov. Standing: D. A. Dril′, M. I. Konorov, Ia. I. Dushechkin, A. N. Bernshtein, A. F. Lazurskii, Dediulina, N. E. Rumiantsev, N. E. Ignat′ev, [A. S.] Griboedov, Rossovskii, [A. A.] Krogius. Photograph published in Iskry, 14 June 1909, 184.

‘teacher-psychologist’.⁶⁸ Nechaev continued to promote his ideas and to justify the involvement of teachers in the development of psychology in the educational sphere, but he was now forced to retreat and rebuild his defence lines by emphasizing the scientific legitimacy of the work of his laboratory and the rigorous methodological training it provided to educators.⁶⁹ At the same time, he had to concede that the most practising teachers could in reality produce in terms of psychological research was the work of amateur enthusiasts, although he maintained that this was still commendable as part of the mass popularization of experimental psychology at grassroots level, essential to helping the discipline’s growth in the long run. This did not, however, prevent the loss of confidence in the idea that experimental psychology as such was a domain of scientific practice that teachers could assimilate as part of their own professional expertise. ⁶⁸ V. M. Bekhterev, ‘Obshchie itogi deiatel′nosti 2-go s″ezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, VPKAG, 1909, no. 4: 225–30 (227). ⁶⁹ See A. Nechaev, ‘K voprosu o s″ezde po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii i komentariiakh G. I. Chelpanova’, and G. I. Chelpanov, ‘ “Nuzhny li psikhologicheskie laboratorii dlia samostoiatel′nykh issledovanii pri srednikh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh?” Otvet A. P. Nechaevu’, VFP, 1909 (vol. 100) II (‘Polemika’): 805–14.

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Experimental Pedagogy and Pedology Indeed, the teachers’ involvement in psychology was destined to remain secondhand and ultimately reliant on the authority of academic specialists in the subject.⁷⁰ However, what continued to be promoted to the education profession during the 1910s was the idea that there was a new ‘science of education’ to be erected on the ‘ruins’ of old, traditional pedagogy. Two key labels under which this new, properly ‘scientific’, form of pedagogy was promoted in Russia were ‘experimental pedagogy’ and ‘pedology’. The underlying conceptions of these two frameworks were not identical, but in Russia they tended to be promoted in unison, by the same or overlapping groups of people, and with broadly similar objectives in mind. Experimental pedagogy, which was in Russia fostered principally by Nechaev, was still being marketed as an ‘alliance of the teacher and the psychologist’.⁷¹ It was distinguished from the older pedagogical psychology by placing greater emphasis on ‘the experiment’ as its defining methodology. The adjective ‘experimental’, which, it was argued, acquired a ‘magical aura’ in the eyes of some teachers, served as the key marker of innovation in Nechaev’s programme.⁷² The militancy of this term seemed, in fact, to be strengthened by its transposition from the domain of psychology to that of pedagogy (not surprisingly, given that, by the 1900s, experimentation as such was hardly an innovation in psychology). Crucially, though, experimental pedagogy still entailed the study of children’s developing minds by means of psychological experiments adapted to educational contexts. This meant that experimental pedagogy continued to work as an extension of experimental psychology into the field of education.⁷³ Indeed, Nechaev and his followers promoted ‘the experiment’ simultaneously and ambiguously as the defining method of both experimental psychology and experimental pedagogy, so much so that the two at times appeared interchangeable. Experimental pedagogy was distinguished from experimental psychology principally in terms of methodological context. Experimental psychology was said to be fundamentally labbased and geared mostly towards the study of elementary psychological processes

⁷⁰ E.g. see A. Krasovskii, ‘Eksperimental′noe napravlenie v pedagogike’, Nachal′noe obuchenie, 1912, no. 1 (‘Otdel neofitsial′nyi’): 6–14; no. 2: 47–53; no. 3: 75–82; no. 4: 106–12. ⁷¹ M. P. ‘Vozniknovenie i tseli eksperimental′noi pedagogiki’, PS, 1901, no. 6: 508–40 and L. S., ‘Metody, zadachi i nekotorye iz itogov eksperimental′noi pedagogiki’, VV, 1908, no. 5: 46–82. ⁷² S. O. Seropolko, ‘ “Dve psikhologii” ’, Pedagogicheskii listok, 1910, no. 3: 193–201 (198). M. M. Rubinshtein, ‘Pedagogika ili pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia?’, VFP, 1912 (vol. 113), II: 418–36 (420, 435). ⁷³ At the First Conference in Experimental Pedagogy many speakers kept making mistakes and spoke of experimental psychology when they wanted to say experimental pedagogy. See O. Fel′tsman, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike v S.-Peterburge ot 26 dek. po 31 dek. 1910 g. (Vpechatleniia)’, Psikhoterapiia, 1911, no. 2 (‘Korrespondentsii’): 84–94.

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taken in isolation.⁷⁴ By contrast, experimental pedagogy was presented as the study of the full complexity of a child’s psychology in a real-life environment— namely, the school. This distinction between the two was also expressed by framing experimental psychology as essentially ‘analytical’ and experimental pedagogy as ultimately ‘synthetic’.⁷⁵ It was in this latter understanding that experimental pedagogy came close to the other main framework for conceptualizing the science underpinning educational practice—pedology. This term was brought to the attention of the wider Russian public in 1900 by the journalist-philosopher Leonid Egorovich Obolenskii (1845– 1906).⁷⁶ Basing his understanding of this ‘new science’ on the writings of the Frenchmen Alfred Binet and Victor Henri, he described pedology as an ‘exact science of education’, rooted in innovative experimental approaches developed within physiology and psychology. The neologism ‘pedology’ came to be used reasonably regularly, and at times prominently, by those who over the course of the 1900s positioned themselves as leaders in Russia’s burgeoning child study movement.⁷⁷ However, this notion was open to differing interpretations: most commonly it was deployed as a de facto synonym for whatever the researcher promoting it was already developing under another label. For instance, Vladimir Bekhterev framed ‘pedology’ as merely a specialist sub-domain of his broader conception of the ‘psycho-neurological sciences’. He used the notion of pedology to delineate that part of his paradigm of the ‘objective’ study of the human which focused on the early, developmental stage identified with ‘childhood’ (encompassing everything that applied to it, from the physiological and the psychological to the pedagogical and the pathological). This was the sense that the term acquired in the name that he gave to his Pedology Institute. By contrast, Nechaev’s understanding of pedology was as an equivalent of what he was advancing as the new ‘scientific pedagogy’. This was the meaning that pedology had in the title of the Pedology Courses that he ran at the Pedagogical Museum. Pedology here denoted a basic science of educational development, in distinction to pedagogy as the theory underpinning the art or technique of teaching. In promoting pedology, Nechaev

⁷⁴ See P. F. Kapterev, Istoriia russkoi pedagogii (St Petersburg, 2004; originally published in 1915): 533–56. ⁷⁵ Ekzempliarskii, ‘Eksperiment v psikhologii i pedagogike’, 54. ⁷⁶ L. E. Obolenskii, ‘Novaia nauka pedologiia’, Vospitanie i obuchenie (hereafter VO), 1900, no. 1: 29–39; no. 2: 49–70. L. E. Obolenskii, ‘Novosti pedologii’, VO, 1900, no. 8: 252–65. L. E. Obolenskii, ‘Ideal′naia shkola na nachalakh novoi nauki, tak nazyvaemoi “paidologii” ’, VO, 1903, no. 3: 97–117. L. E. Obolenskii, ‘Novye issledovaniia i mysli v oblasti pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, RS, 1904, no. 7–8: 116–31. L. E. Obolenskii, ‘Voprosy vospitaniia na pochve psikho-fiziologii i biologii’, RS, 1906, no. 1: 74–86; no. 2: 45–62. ⁷⁷ N. E. Rumiantsev, Pedologiia, ee vozniknovenie, razvitie i otnoshenie k pedagogike (St Petersburg: O. Bogdanova, 1910).

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and his followers emphasized the same ‘experimental turn’ that characterized his promotion of experimental pedagogy.⁷⁸ The problem that Nechaev faced, however, was that the exotic-sounding term ‘pedology’ was not popular among teachers, his core target audience. The similarity between the terms ‘pedology’ and ‘pedagogy’ often led to confusion, with some mistakenly calling training courses officially dubbed ‘pedological’—‘pedagogical’.⁷⁹ In order to make pedology more appealing to the Russian teacher, Nechaev and his followers often tried to link it to Ushinskii’s concept of ‘pedagogical anthropology’.⁸⁰ However, this did not necessarily help: the term’s function of foregrounding ‘scientificity’ over and above educational practice only worked to alienate educators, who thought that the scientists’ more abstract (‘cooler’) attitude towards the child as their subject made their findings unhelpful or irrelevant to teachers.⁸¹ This was possibly why during the 1910s ‘experimental pedagogy’ became more widely used in Russia than ‘pedology’, as evidenced in the renaming of the three sequels to the above two Conferences in Pedagogical Psychology into Conferences in Experimental Pedagogy (in 1910, 1913, and 1916).⁸² These conferences were initiated by the Society for Experimental Pedagogy, which Nechaev and his followers formed soon after the 1909 conference.⁸³ They also promoted this framework through the Yearbook of Experimental Pedagogy (Ezhegodnik eksperimental′noi pedagogiki), which came out first as a section in, and then as a supplement of, the widely-read pedagogical journal The Russian School. Nevertheless, during the 1910s, the gap between the scientists who were developing this ‘new pedagogy’ and the teachers, whose profession this science was supposed to be underpinning, appeared to be continuously widening.⁸⁴ The differences of perspective between the experts and the practitioners were there from the start, but during the 1890s–1900s the strategy of experts such as Nechaev ⁷⁸ A. Krasnovskii, ‘Eksperimental′noe napravlenie v pedagogike’, Nachal′noe obuchenie, 1912, no. 1 (‘Otdel neofitsial′nyi’): 6–14; no. 2: 47–53; no. 3: 75–82; no. 4: 106–12. ⁷⁹ ‘Proekt pervogo russkogo s″ezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii’, 131. ⁸⁰ Ushinskii himself was, of course, a popularizer of ideas that circulated internationally. Moreover, although he continued to be revered by the teaching profession, his psychological theories were recognized as inevitably out of date. See P. F. Kapterev, ‘Ushinskii ob obshchestvennykh i antropologicheskikh osnovakh vospitaniia’, RS, 1895, no. 12: 65–73. ⁸¹ V. Ivanovskii, ‘Kafedra pedagogiki v Sorbonne’, VV, 1902, no. 1 (‘Referaty i melkie soobshcheniia’): 71–7. ⁸² M. V. Sokolov, ‘Kritika metoda testov na russkikh s″ezdakh po eksperimental′noi pedagogike (1910–1916)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1956, no. 6: 16–28. ⁸³ N. Rumiantsev, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike. (S 26 do 31 dekabria 1910 g.)’, EEP, 4, 1911: 29–77. ⁸⁴ O. Fel′tsman, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike’, Narodnoe obrazovanie, 1911, no. 1: 81–9. N. Georgievskii, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike v S.-Peterburge. (Kratkii otchet i vpechatleniia)’, Pedagogicheskii vestnik Moskovskogo uchebnogo okruga, no. 3 (1912): 3–26. See also K. Tikhomirov, ‘Chto dal nam pervyi s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike?’ EEP, 1911, 4: 78–89, who mentions the audience’s scarcely concealed animosity towards ‘Nechaevism’ (nechaevshchina).

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was to engage practising teachers as actively as possible.⁸⁵ By the 1910s, through the establishment of more stable research hubs and training establishments, such as those discussed above, a corps of young trainee researchers had started to form; and this meant there was no longer such a need for direct involvement in science of the wider teaching masses. On the contrary, such involvement of nonspecialists became potentially embarrassing and compromising. St Petersburg, home to such key institutions as PA and PNI, and the site of the above major conferences, was not the exclusive centre of this growing movement in Russia. In Moscow too, several new hubs of child study research—museums, institutes, and laboratories—emerged at the turn of the 1900s–1910s, similarly relying on the education profession as a major target constituency. Notable among these were the psychology lab affiliated to the Moscow Pedagogical Assembly (Moskovskoe Pedagogicheskoe Sobranie), established in 1908 by the psychiatrist A. N. Bernshtein,⁸⁶ and also the Institute for Child Psychology and Neurology, established in 1911 by the neurologist G. I. Rossolimo, in association with the socalled Moscow Pedagogical Courses.⁸⁷ The work of both Bernshtein and Rossolimo straddled the medical and educational fields and they played a particularly important role in the development of mental testing technologies in Russia.⁸⁸ As mentioned, Chelpanov had by the early 1910s established his own laboratory in experimental psychology at MPI, where he began to build a team of young researchers, a number of whom—N. A. Rybnikov and K. N. Kornilov, for instance—developed a keen interest in the study of children. They, however, linked this particular side of their work not so much with MPI, but with the Pedagogical Museum of the so-called Teachers’ House, which was established in 1912 as a club or centre of the teaching profession in Moscow.⁸⁹ They too called upon teachers to engage in the systematic study of the children in their care. Rybnikov promoted surveys as a mode of studying what was referred

⁸⁵ E.g. A. Nechaev, ‘K voprosu o vzaimnom otnoshenii pedagogiki i psikhologii’, RS, 1899, no. 3: 45–51. ⁸⁶ See Trudy psikhologicheskoi laboratorii pri Moskovskom pedagogicheskom sobranii (Moscow, 1909) and Trudy psikhologicheskoi laboratorii pri Moskovskom pedagogicheskom sobranii, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1911). ⁸⁷ ‘Institut detskoi psikhologii i nevrologii pri Pedagogicheskikh Kursakh v Moskve’, Voprosy pedagogicheskoi patologii, no. 2 (1912): 157–60. Rossolimo established this institute with a number of colleagues from Moscow University who all left in 1911 in protest against the imposition of repressive measures on universities by the then Minister of Public Enlightenment, Lev A. Kasso (the event sometimes referred to as the Kasso affair). ⁸⁸ This will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. ⁸⁹ N. Rybnikov, ‘Pedologicheskii institut’, VV, 1917, no. 6–7: 93–102. Uchitel′skii dom was established in 1912 and the role of its Pedagogical Museum was to showcase innovations in education for the benefit of both teachers and the wider public, especially parents. Rybnikov assumed a dominant role on the research side and he was keen to turn the Museum into a Pedology Institute (of a different kind to what V. M. Bekhterev had established under that same name at PNI). It was under the auspices of this institution that Rybnikov and Kornilov collected and published examples of parent diaries of child development discussed in the previous chapter.

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to as children’s ‘ideals’, but he and Kornilov also contributed to experimental pedagogy by encouraging teachers to conduct psychological experiments in the classroom, publishing their own sets of instructions that rivalled those of Nechaev and his St Petersburg laboratory.⁹⁰ This new corpus of experts thus greatly relied on the teaching profession as an interested ‘consumer’ of their expertise, not least of the new methodologies and technologies of child study which they were creating. However, these experts were finding it more and more difficult to persuade teachers that they could make pedagogy itself ‘scientific’.⁹¹ Indeed, teachers were starting increasingly to express disappointment in the new ‘sciences of education’. Their complaints ranged from lamentations that alien professions were monopolizing what was meant to be their professional territory, to reproaches that the experts were failing to respond to their actual practical needs.⁹² This seemed to put the experts on the back foot: fearing that they were going to alienate teachers irretrievably, they were now at pains to stress that their science did not, after all, seek to replace pedagogy, but simply to create a scientific foundation on which pedagogy would develop in its own right. However, some argued that if experimental pedagogy and pedology were to be understood as simply establishing a value-neutral base of positive facts and general laws about child development, they could not, in and of themselves, be sufficient to guide pedagogy as a fundamentally normative discipline. It was philosophy, as a form of social ethics, that was, in their view, the discipline that should take on the role of normatively defining the goals of education.⁹³ This argument appealed to those teachers who saw philosophical reflection on educational ideals (in contrast to the prohibitively technical science that applied experimental psychology was rapidly becoming) as something to which the educators themselves could perhaps contribute more readily. This argument often went ⁹⁰ K. N. Kornilov, N. A. Rybnikov, and V. E. Smirnov, Prosteishie shkol′nye psikhologicheskie opyty dlia srednikh uchebnykh zavedenii (Moscow: Zadruga, 1916, 2nd edition). See also the review of this book, signed I. M., in RS, 1917, no. 5–8 (‘Otdel eksperimental′noi pedagogiki’): 105–8. The review was a response from the Nechaevites who critiqued their Moscow rivals, students of Chelpanov, for producing a poorly organized manual, replete with badly explained experiments, many of which were apparently unusable in a school setting. ⁹¹ On the crisis of ‘experimental pedagogy’ and attempts to re-establish the autonomy of pedagogy in the 1910s see: Ekzempliarskii, ‘Eksperiment v psikhologii i pedagogike’. Rubinshtein, ‘Pedagogika ili pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia?’. V. Volyntsevich, ‘S″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike’, PS, 1912, no. 9: 240–63. ⁹² V. Komarnitskii, ‘Sovremennyi pedagogicheskii konflikt’, Pedagogicheskii kruzhok studentov pri Imperatorskim Varshavskom universitete (1911): 32–7. Krasnovskii, ‘Eksperimental′noe napravlenie v pedagogike’. ⁹³ Such arguments usually referred to translated works by Hugo Münsterberg and Paul Natorp: G. Münsterberg, Psikhologiia i uchitel′ (Moscow: Mir, 1910). P. Natorp, Filosofiia kak osnova pedagogiki (Moscow: N. N. Klochkov, 1910). P. Natorp, Sotsial′naia pedagogika, teoriia vospitaniia voli na osnove obshchnosti (St Petersburg: O. Bogdanova, 1911). N. Vinogradov, ‘Pedagogika, kak nauka i kak iskusstvo’, VFP, 1912 (vol. 113) I: 190–210 (202). V. M. Ekzempliarskii, ‘K voprosu o putiakh razvitiia nauchnoi pedagogiki’, Shkola i zhizn′, 1914, no. 37 (15 Sept.): 961–7.

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hand in hand with teachers’ complaints about the chaos of conflicting pedagogical agendas that characterized the Russian education scene at the time.⁹⁴ The teachers’ uncertainty about which authority to turn to led to calls for the reintroduction of a more stable system of educational norms that would curb the fashion for uncontrolled, and potentially dangerous, experimentation and innovation. And yet, given the teachers’ increasing frustration with everyone who claimed authority over their professional territory, both the experimental psychologists and the philosophers of education had, in fact, to accord greater respect to the role of the practising teachers themselves, or more precisely, to their pedagogical intuition and creativity, as well as their knowledge of school realities.⁹⁵ Whereas in the early 1900s the ‘new pedagogies’ had built much of their claims to scientificity on stark rhetorical denunciations of the subjective, arbitrary, and ‘unscientific’ judgements of educational practitioners, their proponents now argued that they merely defined certain objective constraints (those they articulated as the ‘laws’ of child development), within the boundaries of which teachers could and should give free rein to their own experience-based knowledge and expertise. Thus, by 1917, a certain form of jurisdictional delineation was emerging between an (empirical) ‘science’, a (general) ‘philosophy’, and a (practical) ‘art’ of education.⁹⁶ Since none of the three axes seemed to have the upper hand, the compromise solution appeared to be a provisional peace agreement—a carving up of pedagogy between educational philosophers (whose job was to define educational goals in the context of overall social and moral demands), experimental psychologists (who provided facts about child mental development, but devoid of value judgements and thin on practical recommendations), and practising teachers (whose role was to deliver education on the ground, bearing in mind both the educational values stipulated by the philosophers and the demands of child development analysed and systematized by the psychologists). However, this division of labour remained tense and unstable, because all parties were still in jurisdictional conflict—firstly, over the question of what it was that ultimately defined pedagogy ‘as a science’, and secondly (and no less importantly), over the question of which principles were the ones that ought to be used, in the last instance, to legitimize the teachers’ concrete choice of educational

⁹⁴ P. Radosavlevich, ‘Eksperimental′nye issledovaniia psikhicheskikh protsessov v matematike, kak nauke i kak uchebnom predmete’, Obnovlenie shkoly, 1911–12, 5: 28–33. V. A. Fliaksberger, ‘Ocherki po istorii i teorii detskoi psikhologii’, Voprosy pedagogiki, 1912, no. 1: 113–37. ⁹⁵ For the revival of the teachers’ role at the expense of the scientists, see N. Vinogradov’s speech at the opening of the Moscow Shelaputin Institute (a new, privately funded, but quite traditional, teachertraining establishment) on 2 Feb. 1912 (Vinogradov, ‘Pedagogika, kak nauka i kak iskusstvo’, 190). For the role of ‘creativity’ in pedagogy see K. Zhitomirskii, ‘Pedagogicheskii modernizm’, PS, 1909, no. 2 (‘Chast′ neoffitsial′naia’): 97–112; no. 3: 193–220, and the review by A. Ostrogorskii of V. F. Chizh, Pedagogiia, kak iskusstvo i kak nauka (Iur′ev, 1912) in PS, 1913, no. 8 (‘Kritika i bibliografiia’): 142–3. ⁹⁶ Fliaksberger, ‘Ocherki po istorii i teorii detskoi psikhologii’, 116.

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practices or to guide the government’s educational reforms. Both the scientists and the philosophers were still claiming to be the ones who should ultimately be shaping pedagogy. Educators remained divided in their allegiance, with some supporting the pre-eminence of the philosophers and others highlighting the decisive role of the positive sciences. Whilst many, of course, saw the virtues of both camps and hoped to see them forming a united front in furthering a ‘science of education’, the majority remained frustrated by the continuing uncertainty over pedagogy’s legitimacy, by the lack of connection between the ‘new pedagogies’ and the daily needs of education, and, finally, by the question of whether educators would ever become the masters of their own professional knowledge-base.

Doctors in Education Psychologists were not the only ones who during this period sought to reframe educational expertise and influence the teaching profession through the development of new forms of pedagogy (in ways that were ultimately rooted in their efforts to further the disciplinary agendas of psychology itself). A number of medical professionals were, in a similar way, systematically crossing over onto the territory of educators, proposing to graft some of their own professional paradigms onto pedagogical theory and teaching practice.⁹⁷ There was, however, an important difference in the way doctors and psychologists accessed the jurisdiction of teachers. There were no school or educational psychologists working in this capacity in Russian schools at this time.⁹⁸ This was precisely why psychologists who wanted to influence education had to resort to the above-discussed controversial strategy of provisionally (and never successfully) turning the teacher into a kind of ‘psychologist’. By contrast, the doctors’ efforts to influence educational expertise came out of the tasks that the medical profession was already carrying out in schools—namely, sanitary controls and the health monitoring of the schoolchild population—tasks that were the responsibility of the school doctor. In consequence, the efforts of some doctors to ‘re-professionalize’ the educational field in a medical key took place mostly through the drive to enhance the role played in this field by the school doctor (often in tension with the role of the teacher), and also to rethink pedagogy principally in terms of the medical sub-specialism of hygiene. ⁹⁷ Portions of text from this section, in edited form, come from Andy Byford, ‘Professional CrossDressing: Doctors in Education in Late Imperial Russia (1881–1917)’, The Russian Review, 2006, 65(4): 586–616. ⁹⁸ Some academic psychologists did, in their youth, combine teaching at university as a privatdotsent with teaching pedagogy in the final year of the female high schools and from 1906 psychology in male high schools. This applied to some of the leading figures in the debate over the relationship between psychology and pedagogy, such as Nechaev and Chelpanov. For more detail see Byford, ‘Psychology at High School’.

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The systematic health monitoring of schoolchildren was being implemented by national governments across the modern world during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the 1860s’ Great Reforms, the tsarist government similarly sought to establish a medical service in all secondary schools.⁹⁹ It formulated a policy whereby each school would be overseen by a qualified physician whose purpose would be: to identify, and then treat or exclude, the sick and the invalid; to instruct staff and students on matters of hygiene; and, finally, to supervise the school’s organization of physical education.¹⁰⁰ In practice, however, only schools run by the Army Ministry ended up fulfilling all these requirements. In schools run by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, the situation was far less regular: local practitioners were formally appointed to serve specific schools, but the extent of their involvement in school life was limited and haphazard.¹⁰¹ There were, however, representatives of the medical profession in Russia who campaigned vigorously for the expansion of the remit of school hygiene and the institution of the school doctor beyond that of a mere auxiliary service. Among the most vocal activists was Aleksandr Samoilovich Virenius (1832–1910), who wrote regularly on this issue in both medical and educational journals.¹⁰² Virenius published original research on topics such as classroom fatigue, eyesight problems, school furniture and the curvature of the spine, the health implications of hardening practices, sexual anomalies in teenagers, the problems of child nutrition, the principles of physical education, and the hygiene of teaching staff.¹⁰³ He was usually highly critical of schools, creating for himself the reputation of ‘the defender of children’ from the supposedly pernicious regimen of school life. In the words of one respectful commentator, he was present ‘wherever it was a question of protecting pupils from assaults on their health by the school and teaching’.¹⁰⁴ From 1891, he headed the section on school hygiene of the Society for the

⁹⁹ For a summary overview of sanitary controls and health monitoring in primary schools run by the zemstvos and city councils, see N. N. Preobrazhenskaia, Istoriia shkol′no-sanitarnogo nadzora za nachal′nymi shkolami v Rossii v period razvitiia kapitalizma (1861–1917 gg.), Avtoreferat (Leningrad: Min. Zdravookhraneniia RSFSR, 1955). ¹⁰⁰ D. D. Bekariukov, ‘Shkol′no-sanitarnyi nadzor’, Spravochnik po obshchestvenno-sanitarnym i vrachebno-bytovym voprosam (Moscow: V. Rikhter, 1910), 150–65. ¹⁰¹ ‘Shkol′nye vrachi’, RS, 1899, no. 12 (‘Pedagogicheskaia khronika’): 339–40. ¹⁰² Egor Arsen′evich Pokrovskii, ‘Doktor med. Aleksandr Samoilovich Virenius. (Po povodu 30-letii ego sluzheniia shkol′nym vrachem)’, VV, 1894, no. 4 (‘Khronika’): 270–80. Pioneering work in the Russian school hygiene movement was also done by Fedor Fedorovich Erisman and the psychiatrist Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii. See Nikol′skaia, Vozrastnaia i pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia, 95–103. On Erisman and the influence of the German hygiene movement in Russia see Heinz E. Müller-Dietz, Ärzte zwischen Deutschland und Rußland (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1995), 123–31. ¹⁰³ For a discussion of the work of Virenius and his colleagues on questions of sexuality in children and youth see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-deSiècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 237–48. ¹⁰⁴ Pokrovskii, ‘Doktor med. Aleksandr Samoilovich Virenius’, 277.

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Protection of Public Health. In 1893, at Russia’s first hygiene exhibition, organized by this society, he headed the display of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Virenius wanted the school doctor to take on a much more active role in directing educational practices and managing school life.¹⁰⁵ The aggressiveness of Virenius’ campaign to impose medical expertise on schools and his lack of respect for the teaching profession is evident in the rhetoric of his articles from the 1890s.¹⁰⁶ He claimed that: ‘[p]hysicians, being well acquainted with physiology, psychology and hygiene, are without doubt far better prepared for the education of children than those who call themselves pedagogues’.¹⁰⁷ Virenius did not pretend to instruct teachers on the delivery of their specialist subjects, but when it came to pedagogy, or more precisely, to ‘rational education’, teachers, according to Virenius, were hopeless without the input of doctors: ‘The future will, of course, clearly show that activity specific to pedagogues is desirably hygienic in kind, in the sense that pedagogues cannot take a single step without the knowledge of hygiene. [ . . . ] Only then will they understand that for the sake of rationally managing education they must either actively seek help from the specialist in hygiene (and not just receive it passively, as is the case at the moment), or else they must start acquiring a medical education – in other words, they must become doctors themselves.’¹⁰⁸ Virenius also argued that by acquainting pupils with the principles of hygiene there would emerge before them a true authority—the authority of science, which would be far more persuasive than the ‘often unsubstantiated rules and admonitions’ of moralizing pedagogues.¹⁰⁹ Hygiene served, therefore, as a form of disciplinary authority, a scientific regulator of pupils’ behaviour. The tsarist state itself was interested in expanding the role of the school doctor mostly as a quasi-bureaucratic registrar of the schoolchildren’s state of health. In 1904, the Ministry of Public Enlightenment set up its Medico-Sanitary Section, headed by Grigorii Vital′evich Khlopin (1863–1929).¹¹⁰ Khlopin published extensive instructions with the aim of systematizing the work of doctors across the school network, setting clear rules and creating standardized forms for the recording of relevant data on children’s health and bodily development, including the use of basic anthropometrics.¹¹¹ However, adherence to these instructions was

¹⁰⁵ A. S. Virenius, ‘Pervyi s″ezd po shkol′noi gigene i fiziologicheskoi pedagogii’, ZhMNP, 1904, no. 11 (‘Otdel po narodnomu obrazovaniiu’): 32–44. ¹⁰⁶ A. S. Virenius, ‘Soiuz medikov s pedagogami’, VO, 1891, no. 3: 65–89. A. S. Virenius, ‘Gigiena, kak predmet prepodavaniia v shkole’, RS, 1897, no. 11: 132–43; no. 12: 110–25. A. S. Virenius, ‘K voprosu o podgotovlenii uchitelei (pedagogov) dlia srednikh uchebnykh zavedenii’, RS, 1899, no. 10: 105–18. ¹⁰⁷ Virenius, ‘Soiuz medikov s pedagogami’, 67. ¹⁰⁸ Virenius, ‘Gigiena, kak predmet prepodavaniia v shkole’, 136–7. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 117. ¹¹⁰ On Khlopin see A. P. Shcherbo, Grigorii Vital′evich Khlopin: Listaia stranitsy istorii (St Petersburg: SPbMAPO, 2006). ¹¹¹ See Bekariukov, ‘Shkol′no-sanitarnyi nadzor’.

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difficult to enforce and hence remained random.¹¹² The official duty to perform medical check-ups of all pupils twice a year and to write a report was usually treated as a routine formality and was done with little concern for scientific precision.¹¹³ Nonetheless, some school doctors did take their responsibilities quite seriously—far more seriously than the Ministry required them to, in fact. They conducted a wide range of scientific studies—on the spread of diseases, on the effects of environmental conditions on children’s learning, on anthropometric norms and deviations in the child population, and so forth. This, however, was the exception rather than the rule, for the work of the school doctor was poorly remunerated and not prestigious.¹¹⁴ Crucially, these medical professionals did not want their participation in the field of education to be reduced to that of health monitors or even simply to researchers in and promoters of hygiene. As is evident from Virenius’ rhetoric, those who invested themselves the most in this area sought to rethink the very meanings of education through an extended medicoeugenic metaphor, which encompassed the entire education system—the school as an institution, the teacher as a professional, and the pupils as objects of educational practice and subjects of all-round development.¹¹⁵ These doctors called for ‘the school to become healthy and to be transformed [ . . . ] into a nursery that perfects the human race in all possible ways’.¹¹⁶ Although many teachers were wary of such attempts to reframe their professional territory, some were keen to assimilate elements of prestige that the medical sciences could bring to teaching practice. Educators were generally accepting of the incorporation of medical subjects, such as physiology or psychopathology, into teacher-training courses, although they, as a rule, saw these as preparatory or auxiliary, rather than core to pedagogy. Teachers by and large imported medical paradigms in the form of partial metaphors or provisional analogies. For example, they would sometimes say that in assessing their pupils they required merely the kind of diagnostic talent that clinicians displayed when assessing complex illnesses, which did not mean that they understood the difficulties that pupils might be encountering in their educational development as forms of illness.¹¹⁷ Similarly, they could be heard deploying the positively connoted notion of ‘health’ when describing their objectives in facilitating the development of their pupils, but their understanding of this term was always loose and broad.¹¹⁸ Finally, teachers always ¹¹² See Mikhail Evgrafovich Gruzdev, ‘K voprosu o vzaimootnoshenii mezhdu shkol′nym vrachem i pedagogami. (Opyt pedagogicheskoi klassifikatsii boleznei)’, RS, 1913, no. 5–6: 144–8. ¹¹³ Zotin, ‘Uchasti shkol′nykh vrachei’, 954. ¹¹⁴ Ibid., 955. ¹¹⁵ A. S. Virenius, ‘Mery bor′by s alkogolizmom putem shkoly’, RS, 1899, no. 1: 53–70 (53). ¹¹⁶ V. I., ‘Gimnasticheskie zaly, kak laboratorii legochnykh boleznei’, VV, 1894, no. 1 (‘Melkie soobshcheniia’): 247–50 (250). See also D. A. Dril′, Etiudy po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: P. P. Soikin, 1907). ¹¹⁷ Rokov, ‘O pedagogicheskoi professii’, 95. ¹¹⁸ Vagner, ‘Universitet i sredneobrazovatel′naia shkola’, 144.

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bore in mind the demarcation of fields of competence between them and the doctors, preferring to see their mutual collaboration in terms of division of labour. In particular, they portrayed doctors as in charge of schoolchildren’s physical well-being, while they saw their own responsibilities, as teachers, lying in the domain of their pupils’ mental and moral development.¹¹⁹ However, the ambitions that doctors had for reforming education during this period went beyond metaphor and analogy, involving instead a breach of established jurisdictions. The programmes of the new, more radical, teacher-training institutions, such as PA and PNI’s Pedagogical Faculty, included a strong influence of medicine, and presented this as a key dimension of their ‘scientific’ reconceptualization of pedagogy. For instance, at the above-mentioned 1904 inauguration of the Pedology Section of the St Petersburg Pedagogical Museum, much was made of the ‘union of doctors and teachers’. Speaking at the ceremony, the paediatrician Nikolai Petrovich Gundobin (1860–1908) argued that ‘the teacher, just like the doctor, must be familiar with all the conditions of the previous development of the child’,¹²⁰ a formulation which made it difficult to separate pedagogical from medical expertise. At the next public meeting of the Pedology Section, the neurologist Leonid Vasil′evich Blumenau (1862–1931) gave a paper on ‘The Joint Tasks of Pedagogues and Physicians’, in which he cited Nietzsche as stating that doctors should become involved in defining moral values together with the philosophers, implying that medicine should be taken seriously as a force contributing to the moral and not just physical recovery of humanity.¹²¹ Moreover, as a practical-professional and not only an academic-theoretical domain, as not merely a mode of studying the child (as was the case with psychology, pedology, or experimental pedagogy), but also of action upon it, medicine could be presented not only as a source of scientific knowledge about child development, but as itself assuming responsibilities for directly impacting on this development, in at least partial rivalry with the traditional role of educators. Although doctors regularly presented teachers as their allies (for example, Blumenau stated in his speech that the teacher was the doctor’s right hand man in the struggle against ‘degeneration’), their ambitions to redefine pedagogy at times caused resentment among educators.¹²² For example, at a meeting of the student pedagogical circle at Warsaw University in 1911, the teacher V. G. Komarnitskii dwelt on this problem in a paper titled ‘The Modern Pedagogical Conflict’. He argued that doctors should not interfere in matters of ¹¹⁹ Rokov, ‘O pedagogicheskoi professii’, 94. ¹²⁰ Nikolai Petrovich Gundobin, ‘O vzaimnom otnoshenii pedagogiki i meditsiny’, RS, 1904, no. 3 (‘Pedagogicheskaia khronika’): 77–82 (81). ¹²¹ K. Dobropistsev, ‘Vtoroe publichnoe zasedanie Pedologicheskogo otdela imeni K. D. Ushinskogo’, VPKAG, 1904, no. 9: 718–20. M. I. Konorov, ‘Pedologicheskii otdel imeni K. D. Ushinskogo’, PS, 1904, no. 10: 327–39. ¹²² Dobropistsev, ‘Vtoroe publichnoe zasedanie’, 719. Ivanovskii, ‘Kafedra pedagogiki v Sorbonne’, 72.

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education because they were dilettantes in pedagogy and psychology, which they mistakenly identified with psycho-physiology.¹²³ However, there were numerous objections in the discussions that followed the presentation of the paper, and Komarnitskii was in the end forced to concede that the medical profession had to be credited for its important role in laying down the foundations of a properly ‘scientific’ pedagogy. Komarnitskii maintained, nonetheless, that doctors should not meddle in matters of didactics, i.e. the part of pedagogy that articulated the principles of correct educational practice.¹²⁴ In other words, teachers were able to defend areas of pedagogy that normatively framed their work as practitioners; however, they were invariably forced to yield the general-theoretical domains of pedagogy to both doctors and psychologists. At the start of the 1910s, though, even some doctors started to argue that the medical profession’s influence on, and even more so their practical involvement in, the field of education required additional subspecialist training.¹²⁵ Whereas in the early days of promoting school hygiene—for instance, by Virenius in the 1890s—doctors were automatically credited with superior competence, the 1910s were marked by a push to further professionalize the role of the school doctor by requiring him to undergo supplementary training, and this principally in the domain of psychology and psychiatry. This initiative came, unsurprisingly, from psychiatrists. Especially prominent in this drive was Adrian Vladimirovich Vladimirskii (1875–1932), who criticized existing school doctors for not having the expertise to intervene outside the domains of physical pathology and prophylaxis.¹²⁶ He argued that doctors who worked in schools needed to become more expert in psychopathology, especially questions of mental and moral hygiene. Only by upskilling in these areas would the school doctor be able to head investigations into matters that became a major concern to teachers, parents, and the public at large—namely, teenage suicides, child alcoholism, juvenile crime, and school superstitions. Additional expertise in the domains of psychology and psychopathology was expected to enable the school doctor to recognize a particular child’s problems well before the teachers did, gaining the child’s trust and intervening sooner.¹²⁷ In other words, Vladimirskii hoped to turn the school doctor into a ‘school doctor-psychiatrist’ and effectively a school psychologist, in charge of what he described as ‘the psychological orthopaedics’ of schoolchildren.¹²⁸ This included the study of the causes of a given pupil’s low achievement (neuspeshnost′) beyond those attributable to some self-evident physical or mental defect.¹²⁹ This jurisdictional incursion into the domain of education via psychology required medical professionals to redefine, or rather blur, two principal ¹²³ Pedagogicheskii kruzhok studentov pri Imperatorskim Varshavskom universitete. 1911 (Warsaw, 1913; supplement to Voprosy pedagogiki, 1913, no. 2: 32–7, 34. ¹²⁴ Ibid., 36–7. ¹²⁵ Vladimirskii, ‘Zadachi shkol′nogo vracha’, 147. ¹²⁶ See B., ‘Voprosy pedagogiki na III s″ezde otechestvennykh psikhiatrov’. ¹²⁷ Vladimirskii, ‘Zadachi shkol′nogo vracha’, 151. ¹²⁸ Ibid., 164. ¹²⁹ Ibid., 151, 154.

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boundaries that delimited (and protected) their own professional heartland— firstly, the boundary between ‘the body’, on the one hand, and ‘the soul’, on the other; and secondly, the boundary between ‘pathology’ and ‘normality’. Doctors argued confidently that the child’s ‘body’ (e.g. in reference to sexual behaviour or juvenile alcoholism, which they described as a ‘physiological evil’) was a ‘no-go’ area for teachers.¹³⁰ However, they then also insisted that the ‘bodily’, i.e. the physiological, the neurological, and especially the ‘hereditary’, lay at the root of children’s behaviour more generally.¹³¹ Similarly, they argued that ‘the area separating health and illness [was] very expandable’, though they did not discard the opposition of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ as such.¹³² Vladimirskii’s campaign seemed to have had some effect as the Ministry of Public Enlightenment undertook measures to make something rather more significant of the institution of the school doctor. In 1915, the then head of the Ministry’s Medico-Sanitary Section, Professor Emel′ian Andreevich Neznamov, requested the expansion of his Section’s role to include surveys and measurements not just of schoolchildren’s physical properties, as was already the case, but also of their psychological health and mental abilities.¹³³ The newly appointed Minister of Public Enlightenment, Pavel Nikolaevich Igniat′ev, responded positively to this idea and the result was the opening, in March 1916, of the Section’s School Hygiene Laboratory. The Lab’s head of school hygiene was Valentin Vladislavovich Gorinevskii (1857–1937), while the person in charge of school psychopathology was the psychiatrist Lev Grigor′evich Orshanskii (1866– 1937).¹³⁴ The task of organizing mass psychometrics was, however, entrusted not to a doctor, but a psychologist, namely Nechaev. Finding suitable ground-level research personnel to carry out ongoing mass monitoring was a problem. The initiative did cause enthusiasm among those doctors who had already developed a strong interest in school hygiene and child psychopathology. A number of them, from across Russia, volunteered to take active part in the Lab’s research activities, while a number of regional hygiene societies requested to become affiliated to the Lab’s network. However, allocating the new tasks and duties, especially those in psychometrics, to the Ministry’s network of school doctors was problematic. It required further training, while the ¹³⁰ A. S. Virenius, ‘Soobrazheniia po voprosu o bor′be s polovymi anomaliiami v poru shkol′nogo vozrasta’, PS, 1895, no. 9 (‘Chast′ neofitsial′naia’): 218–40; no. 10: 310–26. ¹³¹ Viktor Valerianovich Bunak, ‘Antropometricheskaia kharakteristika 16-ti defektivnykh mal′chikov’, Sovremennaia psikhatriia, 1913, no. 7: 527–59. ¹³² Elizaveta Sergeevna Drentel′n, ‘Lechit′ ili vospityvat′?’, VV, 1900, no. 3: 161–89 (187). Grigorii Iakovlevich Troshin, Antropologicheskie osnovy vospitaniia. Sravnitel′naia psikhologiia normal′nykh i nenormal′nykh detei, 2 vols. (Petrograd: Izd. Shkoly-lechebnitsy G. Ia. Troshina, 1915). ¹³³ See P. L., ‘Novye nachinaniia v shkol′noi pedagogike’, RS, 1916, no. 10–11 (‘Eksperimental′naia pedagogika’): 1–11, and I. Evergetov, ‘Shkol′no-gigienicheskaia laboratoriia i Postoiannoe Soveshchanie pri Vrachebno-sanitarnoi chasti Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia’, Psikhologicheskoe obozrenie, 1917, no. 1: 206–8. ¹³⁴ P. L., ‘Novye nachinaniia v shkol′noi pedagogike’, 7.

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Lab already lacked sufficient funds to remunerate the doctors for what was potentially a substantial amount of additional work. Although the Ministry’s ambition for the future was to build a corps of school doctors who would be suitably prepared and adequately remunerated to carry out this work as part of their regular tasks, it was decided, as an interim measure, to start by training-up much cheaper lab technicians (laboranty). These plans were brought to a halt by the fall of the monarchy and the collapse of the tsarist government in February 1917, and then the October revolution and the upheavals of the civil war that ensued. Nonetheless, as will become clear in the chapters that follow, the much broader role that the school doctor was expected to assume in the field of education during the 1910s had by the end of the 1920s become an entirely newly post—that of the so-called ‘school pedologist’. Indeed, the majority of the Soviet school pedologists during the 1920s were medical professionals. And just as had been anticipated in the enterprise of the tsarist School Hygiene Laboratory, one of their tasks was the administration of psychometric testing as a means of assessing schoolchildren, both as individuals and as a population. The measurement of development, the establishment of norms, and the diagnostics of deviations from these norms became, in fact, the locus where different interest groups (teachers, psychologists, doctors, and bureaucrats) came together around ‘the child’ as object of study and intervention. The next chapter discusses how this ‘meeting place’ around norms of development crystallized in Russia during the last couple of decades of tsarism.

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4 The Imperfect Child Between Diagnostics and Therapeutics

. . . he who wants to know normal children, must study abnormal ones, otherwise he deprives himself of a vital method in the understanding of the child’s soul. Grigorii Iakovlevich Troshin, The Anthropological Foundations of Upbringing (Petrograd, 1915)¹ Lately, one hears with increasing frequency the phrase: defective child. In every class of both primary and secondary school there are at least a few children who are driving their teachers to despair by their actions, their behaviour towards their peers [ . . . ] or their total lack of interest in study, their incorrigible laziness, [ . . . ] finally, by their incoherence and general underperformance. And the family, too, so often suffers from the presence of so-called ‘difficult children’ [ . . . ] What are the causes that bring about such children? How, by what means, should one correct and improve them? Is improvement even possible in their condition? And what are ‘defective children’ in the first place? Vsevolod Petrovich Kashchenko, The Upbringing and Education of Difficult Children (Moscow, 1913)²

Modes of Imperfection The last couple of decades under the tsars saw a significant increase in Russian public debates around what appeared to be a worrying rise in various kinds of pathology, subnormality, and deviance in the empire’s child population.³ The ¹ G. Ia. Troshin, Antropologicheskie osnovy vospitaniia: Sravnitel′naia psikhologiia normal′nykh i nenormal′nykh detei, 2 vols. (Petrograd: Izd. Shkoly-lechebnitsy dr-a. med. G. Ia. Troshina, 1915), vol. 1, xv. ² V. P. Kashchenko and S. N. Kriukov, Vospitanie i obuchenie trudnykh detei: Iz opyta sanatoriashkoly doktora V.P. Kashchenko (Moscow: Drukar′, 1913), 3. ³ Portions of text in this chapter have been edited from several previously published articles, including: Andy Byford, ‘The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science’, History of the Human Sciences, 2014, 27(4): 22–58. Andy Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2016, 9(3), 450–69. Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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phenomenon was most often linked to the empire’s accelerated, yet from a social point of view poorly managed, industrialization and urbanization, which had picked up pace since the 1890s.⁴ Such concerns were commonly voiced as part of more general expressions of anxiety over the unanticipated social impact of capitalist modernity. They were sometimes articulated through discourse on the threat of biological decline in the population at large, associated with the notion of ‘degeneration’ (vyrozhdenie), fashionable across Europe and readily promoted among the Russian educated classes (usually by medical professionals, notably psychiatrists).⁵ This matter became increasingly politicized during the 1900s as Russian civil society ratcheted up its critique of the tsarist regime for being too slow to update its institutions of welfare support and for failing to respond adequately to growing social problems. The rise in childhood pathologies and deviance was blamed both on outdated institutions and on major societal upheavals, including the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the 1905 revolution, and finally, the First World War—all of which the tsarist government was seen to handle badly. In order to compensate for the failings of the autocratic state, Russia’s professional intelligentsia endeavoured to create—independently, and thus on an unavoidably unsatisfactory scale—what it understood to be more rational and progressive forms of welfare provision in key domains of social life. This included, prominently, efforts to develop new frameworks of healthcare, education, and juridical provisions focused specifically on children and youth, who were recognized as a distinctive biosocial group. However, while spoken of in familiar terms as ‘our children’, this crucial segment of the empire’s population was seen, in many respects, as ‘unknown’. Indeed, children’s developing biology and psychology, as well as their often-enigmatic social behaviours, were deemed to require systematic scientific study if they were to be suitably supported and rationally acted upon. Getting to know children as objects of care, upbringing, and intervention ultimately meant fitting them, as a population, into a framework of expected or desired, i.e. ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’, biopsychosocial development. Such a normative Andy Byford, ‘The Imperfect Child in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, History of Education, 2017, 46(5): 595–617. Andy Byford, ‘Lechebnaia pedagogika: The Concept and Practice of Therapy in Russian Defectology, c. 1880–1936’, Medical History, 2018, 62(1): 67–90. ⁴ See, for example: A. Neifel′d, ‘Nenormal′nost′ detei na psikhopaticheskoi osnove’, Pedagogicheskii sbornik (hereafter PS), 1895, no. 11: 418–44. I. Odesskii, ‘Ekskursy v dushevnyi mir uchashchikhsia: V zashchitu neuspevaiushchikh’, Vestnik vospitaniia (hereafter VV), 1898, no. 8: 61–82. A. Virenius, ‘Nervnost′ detei’, Russkaia shkola (hereafter RS), 1905, no. 1: 61–75; no. 2: 57–71. A. Shcheglov, ‘Otchet o deiatel′nosti Obshchestva obrazovaniia i vospitaniia nenormal′nykh detei pri Lige Obrazovaniia za 1910, 1911, 1912 gg.’, Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal′noi antropologii i pedologii, 1913, no. 5: 109–18. ⁵ Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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framework did not exist a priori but was constituted through the very process of the scientific study of this population. Crucially, though, its establishment came to be forged through the identification of all manner of ‘imperfections’ in the population under consideration.⁶ Expertise in child development was hardwired to the power to diagnose developmental aberrations—physical, psychological, and social. Thus, defining, identifying, and dealing with ‘imperfections’ became one of the most important functions of child science. At the same time, it was precisely the relatively sudden expansion of research and diagnostics focused on pathologies, subnormality, and deviant behaviour among children which produced the impression that Russia was at this time—between the 1890s and the 1910s— experiencing veritable ‘epidemics’ of such phenomena. Characteristic of this field focused on ‘imperfections’ was the co-existence of different ways of constituting developmental norms and diagnostically establishing their infringement. Russia’s child study movement, which rose rapidly during this period, was built across a range of distinct, if overlapping, institutional contexts of normative assessment, each of which entailed somewhat different logics of defining deviations and abnormalities, as well as different ways of dealing with them. Yet these diverse approaches to diagnosing and treating ‘imperfections’ operated within a single (however broad and heterogeneous) field of research, expertise, and care focused on ‘the child’, i.e. on its development and socialization. One of the most important new means of normatively measuring child development that emerged at this juncture were mental tests.⁷ Psychometrics was received with enthusiasm by quite a few Russian psychologists, psychiatrists, and teachers during the 1900s–1910s, although there was also plenty of scepticism and concern about this new methodology within these same professional groups. There was certainly no consensus on how universal, accurate, or pertinent the norms established through mental testing were. The internationally famous BinetSimon test was arguably the most widely discussed example of psychometrics in Russia, but there were many other foreign and native tests circulating on the Russian market at this time. While some, notably Anna Mikhailovna Shubert (1881–1963), devoted most of their energies to adapting imported tests, those at the forefront of Russia’s child science often preferred to develop and market

⁶ The concept of ‘imperfection’ that I use here was inspired by the ‘Imperfect Children’ symposium, held at the Centre for Medical Humanities of the University of Leicester on 6–7 September 2013, in which I took part. I found that it chimed well with the way in which the non-normative more generally was described in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), and hence useful in conceptualizing the way in which normativity functioned in the sciences of the child. See also the ‘Imperfect Children’ special issue of Social History of Medicine, 2017, 30(4), especially the introductory article by Steven King, ‘ “Imperfect Children” in Historical Perspective’, 718–26. ⁷ E. A., ‘Novye metody nauchnoi diagnostiki sostoianiia umstvennykkh sposobnostei u nenormal′nykh’, Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1907, no. 3: 1–31.

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original psychometric tests of their own.⁸ They had to work hard, however, to promote the ways in which this new technology assessed mental development in rivalry with more traditional forms of normative evaluation and diagnostics. Mental tests were usually presented as an advance on established scholastic measurements of educational progression—namely, evaluations that teachers carried out as a matter of course through regular reporting, assessment, and examinations. These were the instruments that teachers used to enforce both explicit standards and tacit norms underpinning Russia’s education system. The system of school evaluations constituted an educational subnorm that was embodied by children who consistently failed assessments and who were, as a consequence, usually forced to repeat the years they failed until they were eventually expelled or sent to another type of institution, if and where one was available.⁹ Russia’s state education was, as a matter of principle, built narrowly and conservatively, with a conscious bias towards reinforcing the cultural capital of a privileged elite and with many hurdles imposed on the lower estates, making access to higher levels of education particularly hard. This made schooling in tsarist Russia notoriously rigid and regimented: educational norms were not expected to be flexibly adjusted as the system expanded to include new populations, especially when these came from the labouring classes. The earliest interest in the systematic use of non-scholastic assessment methods among Russian schoolteachers arose precisely from the need to deal with the notable increase of new entrants in urban primary schools—mostly children of illiterate labourers migrating from the countryside, whose preschool upbringing did not match what city teachers were expecting of their pupils. During the 1890s, many schools claimed to be overwhelmed by what appeared to them like an epidemic of cases of mental deficiency in the expanding schoolchild population.¹⁰ Teachers acknowledged that what they were identifying as ‘low ability’ (malosposobnost′) was in the majority of cases the result of earlier ‘pedagogical neglect’. The progressives among them argued that this made it necessary to adapt pedagogical practice to the growing diversity of abilities that inevitably accompanied the democratization of education. However, this made categorizing children by ability even more important—both in overall terms and by mental function (memory, attention, observation, imagination, etc.), each of which seemed to be developed to different degrees in different individuals.¹¹ ⁸ A. M. Shubert, ‘Opredelenie umstvennoi otstalosti detei po sistemam Bine i Simona, Viegandta, Norsvordsa-Goddarda, Pitstsoli, Rossolimo, Sanktisa i Tsigena’, in V. P. Kashchenko (ed.), Defektivye deti i shkola (Moscow: K. I. Tikhomirov, 1912), 12–58. A. M. Shubert, Kratkoe opisanie i kharakteristika metodov opredeleniia umstvennoi otstalosti detei (Moscow: K. I. Tikhomirov, 1913). ⁹ V. P. Kashchenko, Defektivnye deti shkol′nogo vozrasta i vseobshchee obuchenie (Moscow, 1910). ¹⁰ I. Odesskii, ‘Ekskursy v dushevnyi mir uchashchikhsia: V zashchitu neuspevaiushchikh’, VV, 1898, no. 8: 61–82. ¹¹ This led, for instance, to calls for the somewhat misleadingly phrased ‘individualization’ of teaching. See N., ‘O mnimoi i specificheskooi malosposobnosti uchashchikhsia’, PS, 1900, no. 8: 98–117.

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Furthermore, there were plenty of borderline cases where one had to establish if an individual displaying ‘low ability’ was a ‘salvageable’ case or needed to be removed from regular education and sent to an alternative institution.¹² Children who were deemed to be candidates for referral to a special school were understood to require a doctor’s verdict, based on medical norms rooted in the concept of physical or mental ‘health’. In consequence, many of the ‘imperfections’ identified in schoolchildren were framed as de facto ‘pathologies’.¹³ Yet here too, assessments carried out by doctors hardly followed a uniform diagnostic system. Most school doctors would not have had extensive psychiatric expertise. At the same time, as will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, some psychiatrists and neurologists prominent in Russia’s child study movement (namely A. N. Bernshtein and G. I. Rossolimo) promoted mental tests over and above more traditional, observation-based, neuropsychiatric clinical protocols, using them ambiguously both to diagnose mental pathology and to establish simple ‘low ability’. Thus, this critical period in the rise of Russia’s child science was marked by a plurality, indeterminacy, and intermixing of diagnostic regimes—educational, medical, and psychometric—resulting in an amorphous web of categories of deficiency and a high degree of vagueness about what kinds of norms were being applied and how their infringement was being framed. Distinctions between very broad categories of ‘imperfection’, such as the blind, the deaf, the physically handicapped, and those with learning difficulties or behavioural issues might have been relatively unambiguous in and of themselves.¹⁴ However, in diagnostic practice, physical anomalies, psychopathology, and deficiencies of cognitive function were often treated as interlinked and co-constitutive. Moreover, categories of ‘imperfection’ came from a variety of discursive domains—pedagogical, experimental-psychological, medical, and moral-juridical—but they co-existed on a shared diagnostic plane. One of the new terms to come into diagnostic use within this mélange was the attribute ‘defective’ (defektivnyi). Initially, labels such as ‘mentally defective’ and ‘morally defective’ were used by psychiatrists to describe quite specific classes of children that they examined as clinicians or researchers when visiting charitable shelters and colonies for the poor, orphaned, abandoned, disabled, or delinquent.

¹² P. F. Kapterev, ‘Psikhologicheskaia detskaia statistika’, Vospitanie i obuchenie (hereafter VO), 1892, no. 9: 329–39. N. A. Rybnikov, ‘Umstvennoe razvitie detei, postupaiushchikh v Moskovskie gorodskie shkoly’, Pedagogicheskoe obozrenie, 1912, no. 8: 73–4. ¹³ Troshin, Antropologicheskie osnovy vospitaniia. ¹⁴ For a comparative discussion of the treatment of the key categories of ‘imperfection’ see D. Karoli [Dorena Caroli], ‘Deti invalidy v dorevoliutsionnoi i sovetskoi Rossii’, in Maloletnie poddannye bol′shoi imperii, ed. V. G. Bezrogov, O. E. Kosheleva and M. V. Tendriakova (Moscow: RGGU, 2012), 138–96; translation from Italian of Dorena Caroli, ‘Bambini anormali nella Russia pre-rivoluzionaria e sovietica’, in I bambini di una volta. Saggi per Egle Becci, ed. M. Ferrari (Milan: Franco Agneli, 2006), 198–234.

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The ‘defect’ was here imagined as an ‘organic’ lack—the absence of a moral core in the case of ‘moral defectives’, or the deficiency of certain cognitive processing mechanisms in the ‘mentally defective’. However, ‘defectiveness’ soon evolved into a more loosely determined notion and some started to use the term very broadly. This was especially the case with one of Russia’s pioneers of special education, Vsevolod Petrovich Kashchenko (1870–1943), who placed the term ‘defective child’ prominently in the name of his school-sanatorium (to be discussed in more detail in what follows). The latter opened in 1908 and catered for children with a wide range of cognitive impairments and behavioural problems, mostly those of a milder nature.¹⁵ Thus, while there were some concerted efforts to identify ‘the wrong’ in the child population in objective and systematic ways, there was, in reality, little order to it. Furthermore, ambiguity and lack of precision resulted in significant variations in statistical estimates of subnormality in larger cohorts, including those hazarded for the empire’s schoolchild population as a whole. These estimates ranged from 2 per cent to as high as 10 per cent—something that depended on how far ‘subnormality’ was stretched along the fuzzy boundary between diagnoses of ‘mild retardation’ (understood to be due to ‘heredity’) and ‘low ability’ (ascribed to rectifiable ‘pedagogical neglect’).¹⁶ In certain subpopulations, such as inmates in facilities for young offenders, subnormality and pathology were usually expected to exceed the above figures. These estimates were invariably produced as the outcome of relatively smallscale studies carried out in a handful of schools, shelters, and colonies, using a limited range of testing or other diagnostic approaches that were usually still in the process of being developed and that, as such, remained contested. In fact, the primary purpose of most studies carried out in schools or other children’s institutions at the time was to trial and promote new methods of normative assessment, rather than to produce data that would say something definitive about the empire’s child population. Moreover, the actual application of diagnostics—for example, when assessing individuals for referral to a special school—was cautious, balancing different types of diagnostics—pedagogical evaluations by teachers, the new mental tests developed by psychologists and psychiatrists, and a clinical exam carried out by the school doctor. Consequently, some of the alarming statistics bandied about served a mostly rhetorical purpose, given that the empire’s child population remained outside the Russian professional intelligentsia’s normative purview. It was only during the

¹⁵ Iu. D., ‘K voprosu o defektivnykh (tak nazyvaemykh, otstalykh, slabosil′nykh, nenormal′nykh i t.d.) detiakh i ikh obrazovaniia)’, Svobodnoe vospitanie, 1910–11, no. 9: 75–85. V. P. Kashchenko (ed.), Defektivnye deti i shkola (Moscow: K. I. Tikhomirov, 1912). Kashchenko and Kriukov, Vospitanie i obuchenie trudnykh detei. ¹⁶ Troshin, Antropologicheskie osnovy vospitaniia, vol. 1, ix–xvi.

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First World War, as part of a more general shift of Russian state structures towards an increasingly interventionist welfare/warfare mode, that the tsarist Ministry of Public Enlightenment started to develop a truly empire-wide programme for monitoring not only the general health, but also the mental state and cognitive capacities of the totality of Russia’s expanding school population.¹⁷ This was expected to be done through the Ministry’s newly established School Hygiene Laboratory, the body tasked with devising standardized medical assessments, surveys, and tests, to be implemented across the entire territory of the empire.¹⁸ The Lab’s objective was precisely to normatively chart, measure, and tabulate the physical and psychological development of Russia’s schoolchildren as a population, by age, gender, class, geographical region, and ethnicity. This ambition was not, however, realized as imagined, with the events of 1917 profoundly altering the political context in which the problem would be posed during the 1920s–1930s.¹⁹

Science of Assessment The previous chapter showed how important to the rise of child science in Russia was the proposition of the movement’s leaders that they were grounding the profession-specific expertise of teachers in a science of child development. An essential component of their campaign was the promise that teachers would thereby also become empowered with more advanced diagnostic tools. This seemed crucial since an occupation’s exclusive right and ability to form diagnoses within its proper jurisdiction is decisive to it becoming recognized as a fullyfledged profession.²⁰ If Russian educators wanted to come into their own as professionals, they needed not only to assimilate a ‘new pedagogy’ grounded in science, but also to acquire methods through which they would in an authoritative way assess educational development in individuals and identify problems in it, with a view to responding to these with appropriate pedagogical measures. Indeed, what Russian teachers found particularly attractive when engaging with cutting-edge developments in psychology was the promise that they would be able to deploy psychological tests as more advanced objective instruments of pupil evaluation, profiling, and classification. Crucial here was the association that they maintained between this new technology and their regular occupational tasks. They interpreted techniques of measuring cognitive functions, establishing levels

¹⁷ Nauchnyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Obrazovaniia (hereafter NA RAO) f. 85 op. 1 d. 63; Rukopisnyi otdel Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennoi Biblioteki (hereafter RO RGB) f. 326, p. 30, d. 37. ¹⁸ See the discussion of this body in the previous chapter, ‘Pedagogy as Science’. ¹⁹ This issue is taken up in this book’s last empirical chapter, ‘Pedology at Work’. ²⁰ Terence J. Johnson, Professions and Power (London: Macmillan, 1972), 57–8.

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of mental ability, and mapping personality traits as direct homologues of the standard school practices of marking, examining, and reporting.²¹ A major reason why introducing such ‘scientific’ methods for assessing schoolchildren’s abilities and personalities was so important to Russian educators was that the legitimacy of more traditional forms of school evaluation and classification had become widely disputed in Russian society.²² While the issue extended to all scholastic assessment, it was ‘exams’ that were the target of particularly hostile denunciation. Exams were vital not only to relations between teachers and schoolchildren, but also teachers and parents. The latter fought regular battles at the end of the school year, with parents from the intelligentsia challenging the validity of the teachers’ assessment methods and judgement, especially when their child was being forced to repeat the year.²³ Exams frequently featured in the criticisms that doctors leading Russia’s hygiene movement levelled at schools.²⁴ They were cited as one of the major causes of the ‘epidemic’ of suicides among teenagers in the late 1900s.²⁵ They were also prominent in negative portrayals of Russia’s teaching profession in the general press. The powers that teachers wielded in exam situations were often presented as emblematic of arbitrary authoritarianism, which confirmed their image as the thoroughly bureaucratized servants of a repressive state.²⁶ In the politicized rhetoric surrounding the 1905 revolution, the practice of overly rigorous exams was even identified with the tyranny of tsarist autocracy itself. Schoolchildren were in this context cast as woeful victims of sadistic ‘exam torture’.²⁷ Exams were therefore entangled in a complex web of power-relations pervading tsarist Russia’s education system—both as technologies of power in their own right and as emblems of the negatively connoted bureaucratic power that extended beyond the education system itself. This was why so many teachers recognized in the promise of new, ‘scientific’ forms of assessment a solution to challenges levelled at their professional authority and autonomy. Evaluations ²¹ N. Rumiantsev, ‘Pervyi vserossiiskii s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike. (S 26 do 31 dekabria 1910 g.)’, Ezhegodnik eksperimental′noi pedagogiki (hereafter EEP), 1911, no. 4: 29–77 (67). ²² K. Lebedintsev, ‘Vopros o sposobakh otsenki i kontrolia poznanii uchashchikhsia. (Otmetki i ekzameny)’, Svobodnoe vospitanie, 1913–14, no. 5: 27–44. K. Lebedintsev, ‘Chem zamenit′ otmetki i ekzameny’, Svobodnoe vospitanie, 1915–16, no. 2: 61–76. ²³ P. A. Litvinskii, ‘O perekhodnykh ekzamenakh’, VO, 1893, no. 6: 194–9. ²⁴ I. A. Sikorskii, ‘O iavleniiakh utomleniia pri umstvennoi rabote u detei shkol′nogo vozrasta’, in Sbornik nauchno-literaturnykh statei, vol. 3 (Kiev, 1900), 32–42. N. Vysotskii, ‘K voprosu ob ekzamenakh v gimnaziiakh’, RS, 1894, no. 9–10: 161–97. V. Kaminskii, ‘Shkol′nyi ekzamen po eksperimental′no-pedagogicheskim nabliudeniiam’, RS, 1911, no. 5–6: 32–42. ²⁵ See Susan K. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 312–45, and Aleksandr B. Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia kak fenomen sotsializatsii v Rossii na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov (St Petersburg: MIEP, 2010). To be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. ²⁶ Pupils’ exam results were also being used as a measure in the evaluation of the teachers’ own performance by their immediate bureaucratic superiors—school principals and inspectors. See Ekzamenator, ‘Kak u nas “delaiutsia” ekzameny’, VV, 1913, no. 5: 26–43. ²⁷ N. V. Krainskii, ‘Pedagogicheskii sadzim’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1912, no. 9: 655–8.

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carried out by objective psychometric instruments were supposed to render uncontroversial any decision that a teacher might make on its basis, be this to make a child repeat a year, expel him or her from school, refer a pupil to a special class, or award someone a scholarship. This was why, around 1900, certain parts of Russia’s teaching profession—especially those working in secondary schools (who bore the crucial responsibility for the upbringing of the children of the empire’s educated classes)—looked to pilot new ways of assessing pupils’ abilities. Inspiration for how to carry out more ‘scientific’ evaluations of mental capacity came from abroad—specifically the work of the (at that time) rising star of French psychology, Alfred Binet. The principal of one of Warsaw’s Realschulen, Nikolai N. Agapitov, became acquainted with the tests that Binet had devised with Albert Leclère in 1897–8 and which had also been summarized in Russia’s Herald of Education.²⁸ Adapting Binet and Leclère’s tests, Agapitov set his pupils the task of describing in writing a range of objects that he placed before them, such as a painting, a taxidermy animal, a plant, a watch, and a magnet. The completion of the task was done in time-limited sessions that resembled exam conditions. The pupils’ essay-like answers Agapitov analysed in terms of a typology of descriptive approaches, measuring accuracy and detail of observation, imaginative scope, aesthetic sensibility, and the like, attempting even a quantification of results in terms of percentages of dominant traits. Agapitov’s initiative was warmly received by the Russian pedagogical press and praised for appearing to go much deeper into the pupils’ psychology than was the case with regular school assessments; others were urged to emulate the practice. This appeared to have had some effect, as in 1902 the principals of the empire’s network of commercial schools (kommercheskie uchilishcha—general-educational secondary schools under the control of the Ministry of Finance, expensive and mostly attracting the wealthier bourgeoisie) met up to discuss, among other things, whether it would be desirable to systematically apply such innovative forms of evaluation across their entire school network, citing precedents of similar practices in America, France, and Germany.²⁹ This more ambitious proposal raised the question of how this new system of pupil evaluation would be coordinated since it was not immediately obvious who had the necessary expertise to lead on such a project. S. L. Stepanov, director of the commercial school in Baku, suggested that a central psychology lab should be established to provide instructions to all schools on how to carry out tests and ²⁸ N. Agapitov, Psikhicheskaia deiatel′nost′ uchashchikhsia pri opisanii predmeta. Prilozhenie k otchetu o sostoianii Kalishskogo real′nogo uchilishsha za 1899-I god (Warsaw: Tip. Varshavskogo uchebnogo okruga, 1900). See also: F. Matveev’s review of Agapitov’s book in RS, 1900, no. 12 (‘Kritika i bibliografiia’): 16–19; A. P. Nechaev’s of the same in PS, 1901, no. 3: 302–8, and ‘Noveishie opyty izucheniia psikhicheskoi deiatel′nosti uchashchikhsia (Raboty gg. Nechaeva, Agapitova i Bine)’, VV, 1901, no. 5 (Kritika i bibliografiia): 30–50. ²⁹ A. P. N[echaev], ‘Materialy iz istorii eksperimental′noi pedagogicheskoi psikhologii v Rossii’, PS, 1903, no. 1: 41–5.

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process the data. Another principal, A. Fon-Ern, countered this position, arguing that tests should be designed by the schools’ education committees, as they could then tailor the tests to their own pedagogical needs. The principal of the girls’ commercial school in Kiev, Nikolai N. Volodkevich, took the opportunity of this meeting to promote his own programme of testing, which he was already practising at his school, mostly following Agapitov’s model. Volodkevich admitted, however, that he found the processing of the mass of data that he collected in this way beyond his own capabilities. In the end, nothing came of these proposals, not least because a substantial number of other principals of commercial schools thought this endeavour would amount to little more than ‘a superfluous, if scholarly, amusement’, quite unnecessary, given that pupils’ abilities could be assessed perfectly adequately by means of attentive observation by experienced educators, combined perhaps with some improvement to traditional assessments. A number of participants at the conference also stressed that the new testing protocols were far from properly established and could not therefore be entrusted to regular teachers inexperienced in the matter. These educator-led initiatives were emerging at exactly the time when the psychologist Aleksandr Nechaev began carving out his own leadership role on this same territory as the founder, in 1901, of Russia’s first lab in educational psychology at the Pedagogical Museum in St Petersburg.³⁰ Nechaev developed there an extensive programme of experimental research on memory, attention, mental exhaustion, and the like, using as his core empirical base St Petersburg’s cadet corps schools (kadetskie korpusa), run by the Ministry of the Army. Nechaev was quick to join the above debate in order to assert his expert authority in the matter. Crucially, he repositioned the testing methodologies that the teachers and headmasters were so interested in using for their own purposes away from their incarnation as sheer homologues of scholastic assessment. Instead, he framed mental tests as, first and foremost, ‘psychological experiments’. He emphasized that such ‘experiments’ (opyty) needed to be prepared in the lab and initially trialled on individual subjects by qualified specialists before they could be administered more widely in schools.³¹ Having made this move, Nechaev reprimanded Agapitov and Volodkevich for attempting to go it alone without prior training in experimental psychology. Nechaev and his supporters still promoted mental testing as a much-needed substitute for the discredited exams, which they too criticized as grossly inadequate forms of evaluation that judged all pupils by a single ‘bureaucratic’ yardstick. They argued that psychometrics, when properly developed, provided

³⁰ See discussion in the previous chapter. ³¹ A. P. Nechaev, ‘Ob organizatsii psikhologicheskikh nabliudenii’, RS, 1902, no. 2: 149–54 (154). See also A. P. Nechaev’s review of N. N. Voldokevich, ‘Opyt issledovaniia vysshikh dushevnykh sposobnostei detei shkol′nogo vozrasta’, in PS, 1903, no. 2: 183–7.

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a much more accurate and objective, psychologically meaningful and differentiating form of evaluation, which should be deployed widely in the empire’s schools. They also argued that it was vital for all teachers to acquire training in experimental psychology. However, what Nechaev and his followers insisted on was that they, as trained psychologists, should be the ones responsible for devising and trialling these new techniques of assessment, as well as providing the necessary training to practising teachers; in other words, that those with expertise in experimental psychology should be the ones defining the remits of the use of testing in schools.³² This issue was hotly debated at the five conferences in pedagogical psychology and experimental pedagogy that Nechaev and his allies organized between 1906 and 1916. Although it was assumed that educational establishments could and should use mental tests for a variety of purposes (entrance evaluation, profiling and streaming, general pedagogical monitoring, diagnostics of cognitive dysfunction), the question of who was suitably qualified to carry out testing in schools proved highly controversial. By the early 1910s, the consensus was that ordinary practising teachers could not be trusted to independently deploy this still very new technology as a form of pupil evaluation. From the perspective of Nechaev and his colleagues, mental testing in schools would, in ideal circumstances, be carried out (or at least closely supervised) by a trained educational psychologist, versed in cutting-edge experimental techniques. However, such specialists were few and far between: they were only beginning to be trained at establishments such as the Pedagogical Academy (PA) and the Psycho-Neurological Institute (PNI) in St Petersburg or the Moscow Institute of Psychology (MPI). Even then, the legitimacy of their expertise was not universally accepted and there was no recognized occupational role for such a figure in any Russian school at the time. The professional figure that many considered to be the only one trustworthy enough to perform the systematic testing of pupils in a reliable way was the school doctor. In the school doctor’s hands, psychometrics would become a natural extension of the school medical exam, which included the analogous practice of anthropometrics. The systematic monitoring of schoolchildren’s health was already being mandated by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment (especially after it established its Medico-Sanitary Section in 1904).³³ It was also being encouraged by local authorities and profession-led non-governmental organizations (such as the Society for the Protection of Public Health, which developed its own ‘Programme for the Study of the Sanitary Conditions of Educational

³² See [N.] R[umiantsev]’s review of Trudy vtorogo vserossiiskogo s″ezda po pedagogicheskoi psikhologii (St Petersburg, 1910), in EEP, 1910, no. 3: 16–18. K. Tikhomirov, ‘Chto dal nam pervyi s″ezd po eksperimental′noi pedagogike?’, EEP, 1911, no. 4: 78–89. ³³ D. D. Bekariukov, ‘Shkol′no-sanitarnyi nadzor’, in Spravochnik po obshchestvenno-sanitarnym i vrachebno-bytovym voprosam (Moscow: Rikhter, 1910), 150–65.

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Establishments, the School Programme, and Pupils’).³⁴ It seemed logical and expedient to add the assessment of mental health and cognitive capacities to their portfolio of tasks. The need to test schoolchildren en masse increased significantly in the early 1910s, following the decision by the Moscow City Duma to make the completion of the four-year primary school compulsory.³⁵ Low-achievers who were endlessly repeating grades became a major problem in a context where everyone was mandated to complete the first four grades in one form or another. In order to determine the scale of the problem, a special commission attached to the Moscow City Direction organized in 1911 a study of 4,000 pupils in the first and second grades of Moscow’s primary schools, and in 1912 it assessed a further 34,000 schoolchildren. These studies showed that nearly a quarter of Moscow’s primary-school population was to be classed as low-achievers. The majority, however, were expected to reach the expected standard simply by repeating one or two grades; it was estimated that just over 2 per cent would not. In order to cater for this category of pupil, it was decided to create so-called ‘auxiliary’ classes and schools (vspomogatel′nye klassy i shkoly, a term based on the German Gehülfschulen and Hilfsschulen).³⁶ By 1916, there were fiftyone auxiliary classes at twenty different schools in Moscow. It was argued, however, that the city needed at least twice as many. These initiatives soon spread beyond Moscow, with auxiliary schools and classes opening in Khar′kov and Vologda in 1911, St Petersburg and Ekaterinodar in 1912, and Nizhnii Novgorod in 1913.³⁷

³⁴ Nechaev, ‘Ob organizatsii psikhologicheskikh nabliudenii’. ³⁵ On what follows see Khananii S. Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1980), 296–309. See also my discussion in Andy Byford, ‘Professional Cross-Dressing: Doctors in Education in Late Imperial Russia (1881–1917)’, The Russian Review, 2006, 65(4): 586–616. ³⁶ Russia’s first auxiliary class was established somewhat earlier, in 1908, at the Tret′e Ol′ginskoPiatnitskoe uchilishche. See Iu. D., ‘K voprosu o defektivnykh (tak nazyvaemykh, otstalykh, slabosil′nykh, nenormal′nykh i t.d.) detiakh i ikh obrazovaniia)’, Svobodnoe vospitanie, 1910–11, no. 9 (‘Iz zhurnalov i otchetov’): 75–85. The initiative lay with the school’s director Mariia Pavlovna Postovskaia, but a key role was played by her brother, Dr Nikolai Pavlovich Postovskii, who used the Sante de Sanctis mental test as a way of selecting pupils for the class. See Shubert, ‘Opredelenie umstvennoi otstalosti’, 12–58. Another auxiliary class was founded in 1909 at the Smolenskoe pervoe zhenskoe uchilishche. Here V. P. Kashchenko was responsible for selecting the fifteen girls admitted to it. In the autumn of 1910 this entire school was transformed into Smolenskoe vspomogatel′noe vtoroe uchilishche. Children admitted to it were mostly from the families of factory workers, servants, and beggars (see Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 301–2). ³⁷ On Ukraine see A. P. Dubovetskii, ‘Obshchestvennoe vospitanie umstvenno otstalykh detei na Ukraine v dorevoliutsionnoe vremia’, Defektologiia, 1971, no. 1: 78–83. The St Petersburg school was founded at V. M. Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute in St Petersburg. A number of psychiatrists and psychologists, including L. G. Orshanskii, A. V. Vladimirskii, and A. F. Lazurskii, carried out regular monitoring and research there. They also organized six-week courses for mothers with ‘mentally disabled’ children. See Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 308. On Ekaterinodar and Nizhnii Novgorod see M. Rubinskaia, ‘Iz opyta raboty v vspomogatel′noi shkole dlia umstvenno otstalykh detei’, Svobodnoe vospitanie, 1914–15, no. 4: 73–88, no. 4: 73–88.

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The process of admission to auxiliary classes was as follows.³⁸ The teachers and the school doctor of a primary school were asked to recommend a number of lowachieving students for relegation and to fill out a form detailing each child’s abilities and problems from a pedagogical and medical perspective respectively. The form required general information about the child, his or her psychological profile (kharakteristika), information about family background, and a general medical report, including details of any problems of ‘heredity’, i.e. health issues in the family. The parents were consulted, but they (apparently) most often did not resist the referral. In some cases, a teacher visited the child at home to assess the situation there in person. The pupil was then evaluated by a committee consisting of a teacher who taught in an auxiliary class, a psychiatrist, and a school doctor.³⁹ Not all those recommended by their schools were moved to auxiliary classes or schools. For example, in 1912, out of 580 recommended pupils, 360 were relegated. The evaluation process was not standardized, though, and different types of assessment were used in different schools, depending on who was doing them. Evaluations involved a random mixture of questions, from getting children to tell left from right, to making them remember a sequence of numbers, to presenting them with pictures of varying degrees of complexity and asking them to describe what they saw in as much detail as possible. Early on, assessment included plenty of general knowledge questions, which led to the referral of larger numbers of the ‘pedagogically neglected’ from poorer families. Consequently, more and more schools started to use some of the new mental tests, the administration of which was mostly assigned to the school doctor.⁴⁰ And yet, although school doctors were generally deemed to have the necessary professional training to be trusted to carry out psychometric measurements as methodically as they did anthropometric ones, their relationship to the mental tests themselves was not dissimilar to that of the teachers. Indeed, school doctors were expected merely to dispense ready-made tests, designed by psychologists and psychiatrists who claimed expertise in psychometrics itself. Crucially, by being placed in the hands of medical professionals, mental tests ceased to be an alternative to either scholastic assessment or psychological experiment; instead, they became a tool of clinical diagnostics—in other words, an instrument for identifying, and thus also determining the boundaries of, pathology. Even though auxiliary schools and classes were run by local educational administrations and

³⁸ See Nikolai Vladimirovich Chekhov, ‘Vospomogatel′nye shkoly dlia umstvenno-otstalykh detei v gor. Moskve’, Shkola i zhizn’, 15 Sept. 1914, 967–71, and Rubinskaia, ‘Iz opyta raboty’. ³⁹ Most of the teachers of these classes were graduates of the Moscow Women’s Pedagogical Courses, whose training included observations of children with mental problems as well as lectures on mental retardation delivered by G. I. Rossolimo, whose Institute of Child Psychology was attached to these courses. See Chekhov, ‘Vospomogatel′nye shkoly’, 970. ⁴⁰ On the tests used most commonly in Russia see especially Shubert, Kratkoe opisanie.

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the pupils relegated to them were (for the most part) ‘low achievers’, the distinction between ‘normality’ and ‘pathology’ seemed crucial to the referral, which was why doctors assumed such a prominent role in the selection of pupils. The importance of this boundary is evident in the labels the selection commissions used to classify children considered for referral to auxiliary schools—namely: profound, medium, or mild ‘retardation’ (otstalost′), the category ‘indeterminate’ (somnitel′no), and, finally, the category ‘mentally normal’ (umstvenno-normal′nyi).⁴¹

Diagnosing Pathology Psychometrics was recognized as a technology that had originally been created by experimental psychologists who were themselves neither qualified to, nor responsible for evaluating someone’s state of health. Consequently, medicine’s borrowing of methods from psychology for its own diagnostic purposes required explanation. The link between neuropsychiatry and experimental psychology was usually defended through analogy with other areas of medicine: just as the establishment of somatic pathology relied on empirical research done in experimental physiology, so diagnoses of psychopathology benefited from the work of experimental psychologists.⁴² However, what was really controversial in the shift from the experimental-psychological use of mental testing to the latter’s adoption by medicine in general and neuropsychiatry in particular was that a methodology designed to measure objective deviations from a purely statistical norm (the mean of a particular output of mental performance in a given population) was being converted into a way of clinically establishing de facto organic impairment or psychopathological structure. In the 1900s–1910s, several Russian psychiatrists and neurologists engaged actively in developing mental tests specifically as diagnostic tools of this kind, and these tests became particularly widely used in Russia’s burgeoning child science. One of the main advocates in Russia of the use of mental testing as an innovation in both neuropsychiatric and psycho-pedagogical diagnostics was the psychiatrist Aleksandr Nikolaevich Bernshtein (1870–1922). Bernshtein argued that mental tests gave greater precision to the classification of mental pathology than was possible through the mostly intuitive and subjective method of clinical observation.⁴³ Bernshtein’s critique of ‘clinical observation’ (klinicheskoe

⁴¹ Chekhov, ‘Vspomogatel′nye shkoly’, 970. ⁴² P. M. Zinov′ev, ‘Rol′ psikhologicheskogo eksperimenta v psikhiatrii’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1912, no. 8: 605–22. ⁴³ A. N. Bernshtein, ‘Eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskaia metodika raspoznavaniia dushevnykh boleznei’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1907, no. 9: 289–305. A. N. Bernshtein, ‘Eksperimental′nopsikhologicheskie skhemy intellektual′nykh rasstroistv pri dushevnykh bolezniakh’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1908, no. 5: 193–206; no. 6: 241–53.

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nabliudenie) in the context of psychiatric expertise was close to Nechaev’s lambasting of ‘introspection’ (samonabliudenie) in the context of psychological expertise. The difference was that, while introspection focused on ‘the self ’ (the empirical source that psychologists of this era traditionally relied on to study the psyche as such), clinical observation focused on ‘the sick other’ (the empirical source that psychiatrists used to chart mental pathology). In his promotion of mental tests as diagnostic instruments, Bernshtein argued that the objectivity of mental tests was especially useful to inexperienced, trainee neuropsychiatrists, whose diagnostic intuitions and clinical observations were inevitably fallible. Furthermore, given that mental tests did not require a lab and were relatively quick and simple to administer, they were particularly useful to medics who were not specialists in neuropsychiatry: this included family and school doctors, who lacked the time, expertise, and infrastructure to perform prolonged neuropsychiatric observations of the children in their care. In other words, it was very much on the margins of clinical psychiatry and neurology as an established area of medicine that mental testing, as a new and still controversial diagnostic technology, was promoted most actively and persuasively. Relatedly, Bernshtein stressed another key advantage of mental tests as diagnostic method—namely, that they allowed the clinician to identify specific forms of mental dysfunction not only in clear-cut manifestations of mental pathology but also in borderline cases where mental deficiency or psychopathology were not unequivocal.⁴⁴ This ambiguity between the normal and the pathological lay at the core of Bernshtein’s use of psychometrics. As a diagnostic tool, mental testing was never designed to explain mental disease or even to recognize pathology as such. What psychometric tests identified were mental structures that could then be attributed both to mental dysfunction (in the mentally ill or deficient) and to particular ontogenetic stages of mental development (in children). While Bernshtein worked on designing tests as diagnostic methods at the Central Reception Ward for the Mentally Ill in Moscow (emulating similar work done in labs attached to psychiatric clinics in the West),⁴⁵ he simultaneously developed these same tests in his work on child mental development in the lab affiliated to the Moscow Pedagogical Assembly.⁴⁶ He presented his research not only to fellow psychiatrists, but also at the conferences in pedagogical psychology and experimental pedagogy.⁴⁷ His test cards were included in Nechaev’s kit of experimental-psychological instruments, which was promoted to schoolteachers, ⁴⁴ Bernshtein, ‘Eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskie skhemy’, 193. ⁴⁵ Robert Sommer’s clinic in Giessen in Germany was especially influential. See N. I. Skliar, ‘Zommerovskaia klinika i eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskii metod issledovaniia pri nervnykh i dushevnykh bolezniakh’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1912, no. 6: 471–80. Sommer was a keynote speaker at the 1910 conference in experimental pedagogy in St Petersburg. ⁴⁶ A. N. Bernshtein, Trudy psikhologicheskoi laboratorii pri Moskovskom Pedagogicheskom Sobranii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vestnik Prava i Notariata, 1909). ⁴⁷ Bernshtein, ‘Eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskaia metodika’, 299–300.

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while those same tests could be ordered from the Central Reception Ward for the Mentally Ill, where the target clientele were Bernshtein’s fellow doctors. Indeed, the promoters of mental testing in Russia at this time had no problem in placing its medical and pedagogical uses side by side. For example, F. E. Rybakov’s Atlas for the Experimental-Psychological Study of Personality bore the subtitle Compiled for the Purposes of Pedagogical and Medico-Diagnostic Study.⁴⁸ While Rybakov himself was a medic (assistant at the lab affiliated to the Psychiatric Clinic of Moscow University, where Bernshtein worked too), his Atlas was received especially warmly in the pedagogical press.⁴⁹ The ambiguous use of the same mental test for both medical and pedagogical ‘diagnostics’ was also characteristic of what was arguably Russia’s most popular native test at the time—the so-called ‘psychological profile method’ (metod psikhologicheskogo profilia), developed by the Moscow-based neurologist Grigorii Ivanovich Rossolimo (1860–1928). Rossolimo launched into experimental psychology from 1908, mostly under the influence of Bernshtein and Nechaev, having already been a promoter of experimental-psychological techniques in clinical neurology and psychiatry.⁵⁰ Rossolimo’s test was made up of tasks measuring different cognitive abilities (memory, observation, attention, and so forth), organized so that the level of each discrete mental function was gauged using ten questions.⁵¹ The scores for each function could then be easily projected onto a graph, allowing for quick comparison of their relative degrees of strength or weakness (Figure 10). For example, a subject could be assessed as having a middling attention span, excellent memory, and poor capacity for observation.⁵²

⁴⁸ F. E. Rybakov, Atlas dlia eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia lichnosti: Sostavlen primenitel′no k tseli pedagogicheskogo i vrachebno-diagnosticheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1910). ⁴⁹ F. E. Rybakov, ‘Psikhologicheskaia laboratoriia pri Moskovskoi Psikhiatricheskoi klinike’, Zhurnal nevrologii i psikhiatrii im. S.S. Korsakova, 1908, no. 6: 1010–20. See also V. Iakovenko’s review of Rybakov’s Atlas in VV, 1910, no. 6: 44–8. ⁵⁰ See A. V. Petrovskii, ‘Ob osnovnykh napravleniiakh v russkoi psikhologii nachala XX v.’, in Iz istorii russkoi psikhologii, ed. M. V. Sokolov (Moscow: Izd. APN RSFSR, 1961), 358–438. G. I. Rossolimo, Eksperimental′nyi metod pri izuchenii nervnykh i dushevnykh boleznei (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 1894). Nevrologiia, nevropatologiia, psikhologiia, psikhiatriia: Sbornik posviashchennyi 40-letiiu nauchnoi, vrachebnoi i pedagogicheskoi deiatel′nosti Prof. G. I. Rossolimo, 1881–1924 (Moscow: Narkomzdrav, 1925). ⁵¹ G. I. Rossolimo, ‘Psikhologicheskie profili’, EEP, 1910, no. 3: 87–133. G. I. Rossolimo, ‘Profili psikhicheski nedostatochnykh detei: opyt eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskogo kolichestvennogo issledovaniia stepenei odarennosti’, Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1910, no. 9–10: 377–412. A. M. Sh[ubert], ‘O psikhologicheskikh profiliakh G. I. Rossolimo’, EEP, 1911, no. 4: 217–25. G. I. Rossolimo, Eksperimental′noe issledovanie psikhomekhaniki po individual′nym i massovym metodam (Moscow: Izd. 1-go MGU, 1930). ⁵² Related to Rossolimo’s ‘psychological profile’, but less successful, was Nechaev’s so-called ‘single process method’ (metod edinogo protsessa). This test sought to occupy the niche not between education and psychiatry, but education and psychology, in line with Nechaev’s research framework in experimental pedagogy. See: A. P. Nechaev, ‘Issledovanie intellektual′noi sfery po metodu edinogo protsessa’, RS, 1915, no. 11 (Eksperimental′naia pedagogika): 1–18; no. 12: 1–14.

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Figure 10 Grigorii I. Rossolimo’s ‘psychological profile’ (piskhologicheskii profil′). G. I. Rossolimo, Obshchaia kharakteristika psikhologicheskikh profilei 1) psikhicheski nedostatchnykh detei i 2) bol′nykh nervnymi i dushevnymi bolezniami (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1910), 24.

The term ‘profile’ (profil′), which featured prominently in the test’s name, referred to the shape of the curve that connected the peaks for the different mental functions, as displayed on the graph. This curve (or zigzag) was marketed as a snapshot of the totality of an individual’s mental capacity. Some psychologists, such as Georgii Chelpanov, were highly critical of Rossolimo’s method, arguing that the way it purported to correlate the scores for the different mental functions

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was not based on any psychological theory of their interconnectedness: correlation was a visual effect of the profile curve itself, rather than the result of a quantitative relationship between the different mental processes featured in the profile.⁵³ Such criticism did not, however, prevent the press from being duly impressed by Rossolimo’s diagnostic instrument, portraying the test’s graphic output as tantamount to a ‘photograph of the soul’.⁵⁴ Rossolimo devised several versions of his test: a ‘complete’ one, intended for more considered prolonged clinical evaluation in specialist institutions, and hence reserved mostly for individual assessments in medical contexts; and a ‘short’ one, for quick administration by non-specialists in mass environments, especially schools. In the latter case, it was also possible to work out the average profile shape of a given cohort, such as a class or even the entire school. This, however, hardly amounted to diagnostics in the classical sense. Indeed, Rossolimo was quite vague about what his test was truly measuring in a mass context. When pinned down, he, as a neurologist and psychiatrist, usually claimed that the test was designed to establish forms of relatively profound mental deficiency or pathology.⁵⁵ He would, for example, present and discuss different ‘profiles’ that he found in the mentally ill, categorizing them using medical labels, such as ‘hypotonic’, ‘amnestic’, ‘demented’, or ‘asthenic’. Yet Rossolimo simultaneously promoted his method as the most practical general mental ability test on the market, to be used in schools or other types of children’s institutions. He suggested that it allowed teachers to make far more precise and objective their otherwise purely intuitive and impressionistic explanations of a particular child’s poor educational performance.⁵⁶ One of the key consequences of the different uses to which mental testing technologies were being put was that the very concept of ‘clinical diagnostics’ extended, seemingly quite naturally, beyond the boundaries of the professional realm of medicine. Moreover, despite the fact that mental testing was supposedly neutral on the matter of pathology as such, its diagnostic deployments radically increased the fuzziness of the boundary between ‘normality’ and ‘pathology’, enhancing rather than reducing the ambiguity of any particular borderline case. This ambiguity was evident also in the rhetoric that both psychologists and psychiatrists used to promote mental testing among the education profession, encouraging teachers to see themselves as ‘diagnosticians’ in their own right.⁵⁷

⁵³ RO RGB f. 326, p. 31, d. 12. ⁵⁴ RO RGB f. 326, p. 31, d. 12, l. 24. ⁵⁵ G. I. Chelpanov, ‘Chto nuzhno znat′ pedagogu iz psikhologii? (Po povodu rezoliutsii s″ezda po eksperimental′noi pedagogike)’, Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (hereafter VFP), 1911 (vol. 106), I: 38–69. G. I. Rossolimo, ‘Pismo v redaktsiiu (otvet G. I. Chelpanovu)’, VFP, 1911, (vol. 108), II: 442–7. ⁵⁶ G. I. Rossolimo, ‘Psikhologicheskie profili’, EEP, 1910, no. 3: 87–133. G. I. Rossolimo, Opyt eksperimental′nogo issledovaniia kandidatov iz mal′chikov-krest′ian v stipendiaty O-va imeni Lomonosova v Moskve (Moscow, 1911). ⁵⁷ E. Solov′eva, ‘Opyty psikhologicheskoi kharakteristiki detei’, VO, 1911, no. 1: 21–30 (22).

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Indeed, the new experts in child science—whether psychologists like Nechaev, neuropsychiatrists like Rossolimo, or those like Lazurskii, who occupied an intermediate position as a psychologist with a background in medicine (Figure 11)—all encouraged teachers to assess levels of educational progress not merely in relation to the expectations of the school curriculum, but by forming a comprehensive diagnostic profile of each child in their care in the broader context of human biopsychosocial development. This invariably entailed the modelling of ‘pedagogical diagnostics’ on medical practice. For instance, the verbal account that resulted from Lazurskii’s ‘natural experiment’, while being dubbed kharakteristika (the term conventionally used for teachers’ reports on individual pupils), was articulated by Lazurskii in a language which emulated that of medical aetiology.⁵⁸ The constitution of ‘pedagogical diagnostics’ on the medical model is also evident in the development of the discipline dubbed ‘pedagogical pathology’ (pedagogicheskaia patologiia, from the German pädagogische Pathologie).⁵⁹ This

Figure 11 Left to right: Grigorii I. Rossolimo, Aleksandr F. Lazurskii, and Aleksandr P. Nechaev (1911). Reproduced with the permission of the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Education (NA RAO f. 86, d. 46).

⁵⁸ A. F. Lazurskii and L. N. Filosofova, ‘Estestvenno-eksperimental′nye skhemy lichnosti uchashchikhsia’, VV, 1916, no. 6: 1–51. See also the discussion of Lazurskii’s ‘natural experiment’ in the previous chapter. ⁵⁹ Ludwig Strümpel, Die pädagogische Pathologie oder die Lehre von den Fehlern der Kinder (Leipzig: Boehmes Nachfolger, 1890). E. Lozinskii, ‘Pedagogicheskaia patologiia’, VV, 1910, no. 8, 106–33. Adrian Vladimirovich Vladimirskii, Lev Grigorievich Orshanskii, and Genrikh Adol′fovich Fal′bork (eds.), Voprosy pedagogicheskoi patologii v sem′e i shkole, 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Shkola i zhizn′, 1912).

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subject was promoted in Russia simultaneously, yet differently, to both doctors and teachers. When conceptualized as part of medical training (as expertise essential to doctors who were going to work in schools and other children’s institutions), pedagogical pathology was conceived analogously to forensic medicine: while the latter was part of medicine’s expansion onto legal territory, the former concerned its expansion into the realm of education.⁶⁰ ‘Pedagogical pathology’ became, however, arguably better established as a component of teacher training, and this mostly at the new, more ‘scientific’, institutions of pedagogical education such as PA and PNI.⁶¹ Although invariably taught by psychiatrists, the subject was presented as part of a complex of subdisciplines that made up pedagogy. ‘Pedagogical pathology’ was deemed especially useful to teachers working in school-sanatoria for the defective or colonies for the delinquent, but was also incorporated into general teacher training, because it was expected that all teachers would encounter pathological forms of behaviour of one form or another in their daily work. Teachers were expected to recognize pathology and act upon it (e.g. by referring the pupil to a school doctor or recommending him or her for transfer to a special school). ‘Pedagogical pathology’ was the component of pedagogy that explicitly incorporated into educational expertise the identification of behaviour deemed to be a symptom of pathology. Yet this included a very broad range of behaviours which were not necessarily, in and of themselves, pathological, such as ‘laziness’, ‘slow-wittedness’, ‘weakness of memory’, ‘clumsiness’, ‘stubbornness’, ‘selfishness’, ‘inappropriate laughter’, ‘stealing’, ‘lying’, ‘destructiveness’, ‘maliciousness’, ‘apathy’, ‘distractedness’, ‘irrational fears’, and ‘superstitions’.⁶² At the same time, ‘pedagogical pathology’ was hardly equipping ordinary teachers with actual diagnostic powers—namely, the right to establish the pathological state itself; this right always remained with the doctors. While teachers did have the power to assess a pupil as ‘failing’, this did not in itself amount to teachers patrolling the normative boundary of the kind that existed in medicine between the concepts of health and illness. Children who fell outside the established norms of educational progression were, from the perspective of the education profession, those ‘difficult to teach’ or, in the extreme, ‘unteachable’; as such they were to be excluded from regular schooling. Crucially, though, ‘unteachability’, as a reason for expulsion, came to be construed as essentially a case of ‘pathology’. This was

⁶⁰ A. S. Griboedov and N. P. Kazachenko-Trirodov (eds.), Zapiski kratkosrochnykh pedagogicheskikh kursov po podgotovke personala v uchrezhdeniiakh dlia defektivnykh detei (Petrograd: Kommissariat Sotsial′nogo Obespecheniia, 1918). ⁶¹ At the St Petersburg Pedagogical Academy, the course was taught by A. S. Griboedov, at Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute by A. V. Vladimirskii, and at the Moscow Pedagogical Courses by G. I. Rossolimo. See Kashchenko, Defektivnye deti i shkola, 262–3. ⁶² E. L., ‘Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika’, Vestnik obrazovaniia, 1909, no. 12: 369–80.

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why the assessment by a school doctor (and sometimes by a qualified psychiatrist) was deemed crucial to the decision to refer a child to a special school. On these outer margins of the field of education, teachers in late tsarist Russia were generally happy to devolve the powers of both diagnosis and therapy to doctors, which was why it was those with medical degrees who became the pioneers of Russia’s special education. However, as will be discussed in the next section, this zone of upbringing and care that developed beyond that of regular schooling, while being strongly influenced by medicine—as expertise that did not simply identify and expulse ‘the pathological’, but claimed it for itself—was not monopolized by it. Rather, this field developed into an occupationally ambiguous border-zone in which a new domain of fundamentally hybrid ‘therapeutics’ emerged. The doctors who became the true pioneers and leaders of special education in Russia were precisely those ready to adopt eclectic forms of practice and discourse in which the curative fused with the pedagogical and the correctional. The ‘therapeutics’ in question focused on subjects who, for one reason or another, did not conform to the standard occupational modes and powers of guiding child development towards a given normative goal—that of productive, healthy, and civilized adulthood. The targets of this new kind of ‘therapeutics’ were not so much those who were in one way or another deemed to be ‘pathological’ cases, but those who fell outside of the established (‘normal’) frameworks of pedagogical, juridical, and medical work alike—those categorized as ‘difficult’ not just to educate and socialize, but also to cure.

Curative Pedagogy This border-zone on the outer margins of regular professional work with children was recognized as quintessentially cross-professional in nature. During the last couple of decades of the tsarist era, it was most commonly referred to as ‘medical pedagogy’—in Russian, variously, meditsinskaia, vrachebnaia, patologicheskaia, or lechebnaia pedagogika.⁶³ The latter terms were used interchangeably and synonymously, the adjectives ‘meditsinskii’, ‘vrachebnyi’, ‘patologicheskii’, and ‘lechebnyi’ all connoting medical expertise. Individually, these qualifiers pointed to different semantic facets of medicine. The first, meditsinskii, of Latin provenance, invoked medicine as a modern rational discourse rooted in science; the second (from the Slavonic word vrach, etymologically synonymous with znakhar′— witchdoctor) emphasized medicine as a special (secret, hidden, magical) form of knowledge and skill. The third and fourth highlighted, respectively, two complementary aspects of medical expertise. The former (patologicheskii) flagged ⁶³ For more detail see Byford, ‘Lechebnaia pedagogika’. This section reproduces portions of text from this article in edited form.

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medicine’s diagnostic function, its power to identify what was ‘wrong’, ‘anomalous’, or ‘defective’. The latter (lechebnyi) stressed medicine’s curative or therapeutic dimension, its power to treat and heal.⁶⁴ Genealogically, the ‘therapeutics’ that developed in the context of ‘medical pedagogy’ arose out of three different, yet overlapping, professional contexts—the medical, the pedagogical, and the juridical. The idea of medical treatment (lechenie) was interlaced with that of education and upbringing (vospitanie) as well as that of moral correction (ispravlenie). These three concepts flowed easily into or out of one another: each could be used to redescribe the other to produce the ambiguous meanings and effects of particular ‘therapeutic’ practices. In late tsarist Russia there were four core types of institution that catered for children ‘difficult’ to educate, cure, or discipline: charitable shelters; correctional facilities for delinquents and young offenders; urban ‘auxiliary schools’; and small private school-sanatoria. Early forms of all four types of establishment emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, between the 1850s and 1880s.⁶⁵ More coherent institutionalization then took place from the 1880s onwards, while the greatest expansion followed after 1905. Throughout this period, arguments for the need to create institutions for children who, in one way or another, did not fit the established system of upbringing, education, and socialization were promoted on different platforms, including public lectures, articles in the specialist and general press, papers delivered at educational, medical, and juridical conferences, and through translations of Western works on the topic.⁶⁶ The largest numbers of children, especially those with more profound disabilities, were housed in charitable shelters. These were run by lay, commonly female, philanthropists, and were usually built on a broadly religious foundation. The professionalization of care, treatment, and special education was relatively low at these institutions, which is not to say that they did not keep abreast of professional and scientific developments in the field or seek to develop a practice-based system of special education, including some, for Russia, pioneering contributions. A key example here would be the network of shelters run by Ekaterina Konstantinovna Gracheva, where some innovative practices were being carried out, such as ⁶⁴ This phrase is closest to the German term Heilpädagogik (therapeutic or curative pedagogy), which is used for special education. ⁶⁵ For more detail, see Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 243–6, 271–3. ⁶⁶ Particularly important was the work of the twelfth section of the Second All-Russian Conference on Technical and Professional Education (28 Dec. 1895–5 Jan. 1896), the Society for the Education and Upbringing of Abnormal Children (founded in St Petersburg in 1909–10), and the fourth section of the First All-Russian Conference in Public Education (13 Dec. 1913–3 Jan. 1914), organized by the St Petersburg Literacy Society. See Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 252–60. On the running of the facilities for the mentally defective particularly influential was the work of Édouard Séguin and Jean Demoor. See Edvar Segen, Vospitanie, gigiena i nravstvenoe lechenie umstvenno-nenormal′nykh detei, trans. M. P. Lebedeva, ed. V. A. En′ko (St Petersburg: M. L. Likhtenshtadt, 1903) and Zhan Demor, Nenormal′nye deti i ikh vospitanie doma i v shkole, trans. Raisa B. Pevzner, ed. Grigorii Ivanovich Rossolimo (Moscow: D. I. Sytin, 1909).

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attempts to educate a deaf-and-blind child.⁶⁷ What is more, charitable shelters often engaged as part-time consultants some of Russia’s leading neuropsychiatrists, including Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, Adrian Sergeevich Griboedov, Pavel Ivanovich Kovalevskii, and Grigorii Ivanovich Rossolimo. A. S. Griboedov became, from 1909, a regular presence at Gracheva’s St Petersburg shelter, creating there a research centre for the study of what he called ‘abnormal children’.⁶⁸ In 1911, Kovalevskii, formerly professor of psychiatry in Khar′kov and Warsaw, and at that time professor of medical jurisprudence in St Petersburg, author of manuals on the education of ‘retarded children’, assumed the position of medical consultant at the Mariinskii Shelter in St Petersburg.⁶⁹ Rossolimo occupied a similar position at the Shelter of St Mariia in Moscow, founded in 1905. Psychiatrists were also interested in juvenile correctional facilities (ispravitel′nye zavedeniia), using them as sites for research into the psychopathology of criminal behaviour.⁷⁰ Russia’s network of such facilities, which included shelters (priuty) and colonies (kolonii), housed both young offenders and those considered simply delinquent or unruly.⁷¹ These institutions were overseen by the Ministries of first the Interior and then Justice, and served as places of detention for the underage. However, they were run philanthropically and were, as a matter of principle, conceived not as penal institutions, but sites of ‘moral correction’ (ispravlenie) and ‘re-socialization’ (perevospitanie). The involvement of the medical profession in the running of these facilities was confined mostly to basic health monitoring.⁷² In fact, some isolated attempts in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to frame inmates at these facilities as cases requiring more systematic medical attention—namely that of physical and psychological hygiene—was ⁶⁷ On what follows see Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 274–85. Gracheva’s first shelter was in St Petersburg, but thanks to an increase in donations during the 1900s, she expanded the network to other towns (Kursk in 1902, Moscow in 1905, Viatka in 1907). Between 1912 and 1917 there were around 500 children in all her shelters. See also Gracheva’s diary in Khananii S. Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti: Istoriia ikh izucheniia, vospitaniia i obucheniia s drevnikh vremen do serediny XX veka (Moscow: NPO Obrazovanie, 1995), 355–86, and T. A. Basilova, ‘Kak nachinalos′ obuchenie slepoglukhikh detei v Rossii’, Defektologiia, 1999, no. 2, 61–3. ⁶⁸ Adrian S. Griboedov, Nenormal′nye deti v sem′e i shkole: Ocherki po detskoi psikhopatologii i patologicheskoi pedagogike (Moscow, 1914). Pavel I. Kovalevskii, Otstalye deti (idioty, otstalye i prestupnye detei), ikh lechenie i vospitanie (St Petersburg: Vestnik dushevnykh boleznei, 1906). ⁶⁹ Griboedov, Nenormal′nye deti v sem′e i shkole. Kovalevskii, Otstalye deti (idioty, otstalye i prestupnye detei). ⁷⁰ On Bekhterev’s interest in the inmates of the St Petersburg colony see E. N. and D. G. Andreev, To, chto vspominaetsia. Iz semeinykh vospominanii Nikolaia Efremovicha Andreeva (1908–1982) (Tallinn: Avenarius, 1996), 4–31. ⁷¹ Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 180–92. L. I. Beliaeva, Stanovlenie i razvitie ispravitel′nykh zavedenii dlia nesovershennoletnikh pravonarushitelei v Rossii (seredina XIX—nachalo XX vv.) (Moscow: Akademiia MVD Rossii, 1995). ⁷² See booklet titled Instruktsii Rukavishnikovskogo priiuta (1888–9), which includes a brief section on the role of the doctor as part of the facility’s health and hygiene procedures (sanitarno-gigienicheskaia chast′). NA RAO f. 115 op. 1 d. 5 ll. 18–21ob.

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explicitly resisted. For example, when Ivan Vasil′evich Maliarevskii, who worked as both doctor (vrach) and educator (vospitatel′) at the St Petersburg agricultural colony for young offenders, campaigned to reframe the regime of this colony in a medical key, believing that crime often had at its root pathological deviations from the correct psychological and physical development, his ideas were bluntly rejected by the colony’s board. The board argued that the percentage of feebleminded, psychopaths, and invalids at this institution was very small, the majority being healthy children who had simply been poorly raised, had developed bad habits, and were difficult to control.⁷³ However, from the turn of the twentieth century, the medicalization of criminality became a growing trend in Russian psychiatric circles, while the study of young offenders and delinquents acquired an important role in the rise of criminal anthropology, thanks especially to the work of the criminologist Dmitrii Andreevich Dril′ (1846–1910), who advised the government on juvenile correction.⁷⁴ By the 1910s, psychiatrists were proactively consulted on issues concerning the running of these facilities and arguments were increasingly made that rehabilitation at these institutions should be based on the principles of ‘medical pedagogy’. This was presented as a much-needed advance on traditional, ‘nonscientific’ frameworks of moral correction at these facilities (those developed by their lay directors and staff over the course of the late nineteenth century). Nevertheless, the new ideas that came from psychiatry and criminal anthropology did not lead to significant practical changes during the tsarist era. Moreover, given that these facilities were ultimately answerable to the Ministry of Justice, the framework of debate about their nature and functions remained primarily juridical, rather than psychiatric or pedagogical. Analogous tensions of cross-professional framing were also characteristic of the aforementioned ‘auxiliary’ (vspomogatel′nye) classes and schools.⁷⁵ In the late 1890s, when the need for introducing a wider network of special schools was first discussed, such schools were often imagined in a medical key, as institutions that would be headed by a ‘physician-psychiatrist’ who would be working ‘in close cooperation with a specialist-teacher’.⁷⁶ However, when such schools were finally ⁷³ D. T., ‘Ispravlenie maloletnikh prestupnikov v Rossii’, Iuridicheskii vestnik, 1885, no. 2: 325–62 (331–2). ⁷⁴ Dmitrii A. Dril′, Maloletnie prestupniki, 2 vols. (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 1884, 1888). D. A. Dril′, ‘Nashi ispravitel′no-vospitatel′nye zavedeniia i voprosy ispravitel′nogo vospitaniia’, Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, 1898, no. 8: 173–93; no. 9: 88–120; no. 10: 101–49. D. A. Dril′, ‘Voprosy ispravitel′nogo vospitaniia’, Tiuremnyi vestnik, 1903, no. 3: 244–59; no. 4: 346–57. D. A. Dril′, O merakh bor′by s prestupnost′iu nesovershennoletnikh (St Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1908). For broader context see also: Pavel Bel′skii, ‘Prestupnost′ i deti’, Psikhologiia i deti, 1917, no. 1: 41–51; no. 2: 48–56. D. A. Dril′, Prestupnost′ i prestupniki: Uchenie o prestupnosti i merakh bor′by s neiu (Moscow: INFRA-M, 2006). ⁷⁵ Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 296–309. ⁷⁶ 2-i s″ezd russkikh deiatelei po tekhnicheskomu i professional′nomu obrazovaniiu. 1896–1899: Sektsiia XII, otdel IV (Moscow, 1898), 33 (quoted in Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 259).

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introduced in the late 1900s, they were established as extensions of regular primary education and catered only for lighter forms of learning difficulties and behavioural problems, registered, in the first instance, as poor educational performance in regular classes.⁷⁷ While doctors, as discussed above, played a critical role in assessing children for referral to these auxiliary classes or schools, and while this often entailed the use of diagnostic labels that pathologized the individuals in question, the doctors themselves were not actively involved in the pedagogy that was being practised at these institutions. Thus, at all of the above institutions, the medical profession was active on the health-monitoring, diagnostic, research and theoretical side, or at most as advisers on matters of physical and mental hygiene. However, the role of doctors was much less prominent on the side of either treatment or special education. By contrast, at the fourth type of institution for ‘imperfect’ children—the private medicopedagogical school-sanatoria—experts with medical degrees were the ones who took the lead role in developing new systems of upbringing, education, rehabilitation, and care. Even though here too day-to-day work with children was most commonly carried out by staff without medical qualifications, it was in these establishments that the above-mentioned hybrid forms of ‘medico-pedagogical therapeutics’ were developed most explicitly and systematically. The first such establishment to be created in Russia was Ivan Maliarevskii’s school-sanatorium, founded on the outskirts of St Petersburg in 1882–3. Having failed to make an impact on juvenile correction, Maliarevskii left the St Petersburg colony to set up, together with his wife Ekaterina Khrisafonovna, also a trained doctor, Russia’s first special school where parents had to pay for the care of their children.⁷⁸ Maliarevskii defined it as a ‘medico-educational establishment’ (vrachebnovospitatel′noe uchrezhdenie) and implemented exactly what he was proposing in his earlier post, only now his targets were not young offenders, but a group of children with problems that ranged from mental ‘retardation’ to ‘deficiencies of character’ to epilepsy. Maliarevskii’s therapeutic emphasis was on ‘the strengthening of the organism’, not least through physical work, a schedule of daily routines, a diet regime, and a programme of lessons. The Maliarevskiis argued that parents often failed to recognize the ‘deeper’ causes of their children’s problem behaviour, which was, according to them, rooted in ‘heredity’ and ‘degeneration’ and thus required medical assessment, supervision, and therapy. Staff at the school were said to be engaged in the systematic observation of the development of each child’s body and mind, in order to catch the first signs of pathology, combating it from its earliest ⁷⁷ ‘Po voprosu ob organizatsii shkoly dlia umstvenno otstalykh detei’, Pedagogicheskii listok, 1907, no. 2: 93–8. ⁷⁸ See Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 249–52. Valentin V. Gorinevskii, ‘Vrachebnovospitatel′noe zavedenie Dr-a I. V. Maliarevskogo (Iz ekskursii po Pervoi Vserossiiskoi gigienicheskoi vystavke)’, Vestnik obrazovaniia, 1893, no. 10: 328–36.

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manifestations. The care provided was thus a matter of part-treatment, partprophylactics. This was expressed as the union of medicine and pedagogy: ‘rational pedagogy and medicine are the two factors, which, when combined, form a mighty alliance in the fight against heredity. [Our establishment] strongly believes in the power of this alliance.’⁷⁹ In other respects, the establishment’s objectives were not that different from those of a juvenile correctional facility, charitable shelter, or auxiliary school—namely, to turn the children in their care into useful members of society, especially through manual, mostly agricultural, labour, or, ideally, by enabling them to return to regular education. A related type of institution, but with a somewhat different medico-pedagogical agenda, was V. P. Kashchenko’s aforementioned School-Sanatorium for Defective Children in Moscow.⁸⁰ Kashchenko was the son of a military doctor and studied medicine at Moscow University. His elder brother Petr was a psychiatrist who later, in the 1920s, headed the psychiatric section of the Soviet Commissariat of Healthcare. Vsevolod himself did not complete his studies in Moscow as he was exiled for political activism, and he instead graduated in Kiev. He tried to work as a zemstvo doctor but found it difficult to get employment on account of ‘political unreliability’. After 1905, he returned to Moscow where he became close to the circle of psychiatrists attached to the Moscow Pedagogical Assembly and its psychology laboratory, headed by A. N. Bernshtein. Kashchenko’s school-sanatorium admitted children diagnosed as ‘low-achieving’ (malouspevaiushchie), ‘nervous’ (nervnye), or ‘difficult’ (trudnye), but not the ‘profoundly retarded’ or the epileptic. Although many pupils had learning difficulties, the majority were said to suffer from defects of ‘character’. These were consequently said to be, by and large, ‘temporary’—caused not by deep-seated heredity, but by the poor educational influence of their homes and schools. Such a shift of emphasis to environmental factors was recognized at the time as aligned with the ‘fashionable’ approach of ‘educational modernizers’.⁸¹ The aim of Kashchenko’s school-sanatorium was ‘the recovery of the health of the personality’ (ozdorovlenie lichnosti) through the ‘re-education’ (perevospitanie) of both body and mind.⁸² The classes were small and there was no ⁷⁹ Gorinevskii, ‘Vrachebno-vospitatel′noe zavedenie Dr-a I. V. Maliarevskogo’, 331. ⁸⁰ Kashchenko, Defektivnye deti shkol′nogo vozrasta. Kashchenko, Defektivnye deti i shkola. I. I. Voskoboinkov, ‘Iz zhizni sanatoria shkoly’, VV, 1914, no. 3, 98–121. V. P. Kashchenko, Nervnost′ i defektivnost′ v doshkol′nom i shkol′nom vozrastakh: Okhrana dushevnogo zdorov′ia detei (Moscow: Tseput′kul′t, 1919). V. P. Kashchenko (ed.), Problemy izucheniia i vospitaniia rebenka (Moscow: Moskovskoe aktsionerskoe izdatel′skoe obshchestvo, 1926). NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 152 ll. 1–35ob. A related institution, established somewhat earlier, in 1904, in Kiev was the MedicoPedagogical Institute for the Mentally Underdeveloped, Retarded and Nervous. This school was founded by Ol′ga and Elena Sikorskie, the daughters of the well-known psychiatrist I. A. Sikorskii (discussed earlier as one of the pioneers of Russia’s child study movement). See Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 285–96 and Dubovetskii, ‘Obshchestvennoe vospitanie’. ⁸¹ K. Zhitomirskii, ‘Pedagogicheskii modernizm’, PS, 1909, no. 2: 97–112; no. 3: 193–220. ⁸² NA RAO f. 139 op. 1 d. 20, ll. 1–7. NA RAO f. 139 op. 1 d. 6, ll. 23–6.

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compulsory syllabus. Kashchenko divided the children into ‘families’—groups that did everything together, each of which had a separate teacher (a practice also characteristic of many correctional facilities). Teachers performed regular tests on the children, using these simultaneously as educational activities, thereby combining diagnostics with therapeutics.⁸³ Emphasis was again placed on manual work, but the latter was framed as ‘learning through doing’ (for example, making models of objects or artefacts such as toys and household items). This was intended as a form of craft therapy rather than initiation into an actual artisanal occupation (as would have been the case in facilities for young offenders or Maliarevskii’s school). Other curative/correctional measures included massage, gymnastics, walking, swimming, sunbathing, and a compulsory hour-long rest on a deckchair outdoors, even in mid-winter. Children were expected to eat in silence as a way of exercising self-control. Diet was carefully thought through (e.g. suppers were without meat and extra doses of milk were given to the weaker children). The daily routine was meticulously structured, right down to when the children were expected to have cold and when hot showers.⁸⁴ An original ‘medical’ regimen was used as a disciplinary measure. If a child did something that was forbidden, he or she would be told that they had done this because they were ‘sick’ and they would be asked to spend time in bed to recover.⁸⁵ This was said to work both medicinally (giving the child’s nervous system a rest) and pedagogically (in that the child would want to ‘recover’ and would therefore not commit the offence in the future). In both Maliarevskii’s and Kashchenko’s school, therapeutics amounted mainly to a sanatorium-like regime of physical and mental hygiene—to ‘soft’ kinds of therapy, typical of prophylactic or palliative care used in poorly determined chronic pathologies, where the idea of ‘cure’ was by no means unequivocal. The goals of such therapy were, as mentioned, articulated rather vaguely as the ‘strengthening of the organism’ or the ‘recovery of the health of the personality’. The term ozdorovlenie (‘attaining a state of health’) was used loosely and metaphorically, rather than as an expression of a clearly specified objective, since what was understood as ‘health’ remained open-ended in this context.⁸⁶ However, the fact that ‘curative pedagogy’ did not imply a definitive, unambiguous ‘cure’ as such opened up opportunities for therapeutic innovation which came primarily from the mutual cross-fertilization of concepts and practices between and across the domains of lechenie, vospitanie, and ispravlenie. The distinctiveness of ‘therapy’ in this field lay in the tensions that pertained between its biomedical,

⁸³ Kollektsii spetsial′nykh posobii dlia formal′nogo razvtiia i issledovaniia umstvenno-defektivnykh shkol′nikov i dlia zaniatii v detskikh sadakh (Moscow, 1912). ⁸⁴ Kashchenko and Kriukov, Vospitanie i obuchenie trudnykh detei. ⁸⁵ Zamskii, Istoriia oligofrenopedagogiki, 293. ⁸⁶ Beer, Renovating Russia.

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socio-pedagogical, and moral-juridical framings.⁸⁷ Moreover, it always entailed a blend of occupational objectives: the goals to educate, cure and discipline combined to form the ‘special’ character of medico-pedagogical ‘treatment’. ‘Therapy’ was composed of a wide range of measures which were given, simultaneously and overlappingly, medical, pedagogical, and moral meanings.

Normative Crises and Pathologizations of Childhood The diagnostics of ‘imperfection’ in the empire’s child population and the development of a corresponding, hybrid, therapeutics were intimately tied to the creation of a set of institutions of upbringing to which children understood to be ‘difficult’ to educate, discipline, or cure were being relegated for special treatment. The ‘imperfection’ of such a child was defined precisely in terms of his or her non-conformity to the established, normative system of care, education, and socialization that went on in the family and the school. However, the first couple of decades of the twentieth century were a point when this regular system had itself reached a point of crisis. Indeed, this time was experienced as one of profound societal upheaval in which the very institutions that had been established during the late nineteenth century as the normative framework of development and socialization no longer seemed fit for purpose. During the 1900s–1910s, the Russian empire’s educated classes—both as parents and as professionals—vigorously debated whom to blame for what appeared like a crisis of both the family and the school. While a significant portion of responsibility was placed on the inadequacies of the bureaucratic-autocratic state, the different segments of the intelligentsia were also pointing a finger at each other—parents on teachers, teachers on parents, and doctors on both of them. However, the causes were also sought in the idea of a much deeper crisis which appeared to manifest itself especially tangibly in the violent socio-political events that shook the Russian empire to the core—first the 1905 revolution and then the onset of the First World War. Children—especially those the educated stratum referred to as ‘our children’— acquired an important role in the articulation of the meanings of a much wider normative breakdown that the empire was experiencing in this context. Critical became the pathologization of children who otherwise seemed perfectly ‘normal’, yet who were construed as caught up in a set of cataclysmic events understood to be upturning the empire’s normative structure. The two particularly prominent examples of the pathologization of childhood in this context were: firstly, the ⁸⁷ The underlying ‘tension’ here is between the ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ of lechenie, vospitanie, and ispravlenie respectively, a tension which is the property of metaphor. See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 2003), 232.

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apparently ‘epidemic’ surge of child suicides, ‘diagnosed’ as such in the aftermath of the events of 1905; and secondly, the harmful effect that total war had on the psychology of the Russian child, which became a much-discussed topic among both parents and professionals from 1914 onwards.⁸⁸ In the period between 1905 and 1914, the Russian educated stratum, and the professional community in particular, became fascinated by a remarkable surge of both successful and attempted suicides by teenage schoolchildren, which seemed to escalate rapidly after the events of 1905–6, reaching, by 1909, nearly ten times the levels they had in 1904, although the figures then declined steadily over the course of the 1910s.⁸⁹ This ‘epidemic’ was, to a large degree, an effect of statistics; or rather, of the sudden rise of professional interest in this phenomenon as well as of the advances made in the systematic collection of relevant data. Two parallel statistics were created simultaneously—both by doctors interested in social hygiene. G. V. Khlopin, who was head of the Medico-Sanitary Section of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment (established in 1904), assembled his statistics from school administrative reports. G. I. Gordon, who served as secretary to the Commission for the Struggle against Schoolchild Suicides of the Society for the Protection of Public Health in St Petersburg, assembled his primarily from newspaper reports, which in turn relied on police records.⁹⁰ The atmosphere in which this issue was debated was highly politicized. ‘Child suicides’ (which were, in fact, mostly suicides of youth attending high schools) were presented in the context of the politics of the 1905 revolution and of the government reaction that followed. They were construed as a major symptom of the societal shocks that Russia was experiencing at every level.⁹¹ They were used, in particular, to critique the conservative and unreformed, rigidly bureaucratic and arbitrarily disciplinarian, high school—an institution that was otherwise vital to the self-identity of imperial Russia’s growing and expanding professional middle.⁹² The phenomenon of ‘child suicides’ mobilized experts in different disciplines—medical professionals (those working in hygiene and psychiatry, in particular), educators, psychologists, and jurists (especially those interested in criminal anthropology and moral statistics). They all commented on the matter extensively, usually interpreting the phenomenon in terms of wider social ills, framing them sometimes in explicitly political terms, sometimes in terms of

⁸⁸ See Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology’. ⁸⁹ What follows is indebted to the detailed examination of this case in Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia. See also Chapter 11 in Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic. ⁹⁰ Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia, 22–50. ⁹¹ Evgenii M. Balashov, Shkola v rossiiskom obshchestve 1917–1927 gg.: Stanovlenie ‘novogo cheloveka’ (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), 46. ⁹² Andy Byford, ‘Roditel′, uchitel′ i vrach: k istorii ikh vzaimootnoshenii v dele vospitaniia i obrazovaniia v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii’, Novye rossiiskie gumanitarnye issledovaniia 8 (2013); http://www.nrgumis.ru/.

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biosocial degeneration.⁹³ By contrast, the forensic examination of specific cases, by doctors, school administrations, and the police, sought to determine particular ‘reasons’ for suicide in each case (to the extent to which these could be established or hypothesized on the basis of available evidence). This involved classifying each case of suicide as belonging to some (necessarily simplified) category that could then be inserted into the statistical record.⁹⁴ These categories usually referred to purported external conditions and resulting motives. They typically included the pressures of schoolwork and exams, home and family difficulties, or ‘romantic troubles’ (which could imply unrequited love just as much as unwanted pregnancy). The forensic verdicts rarely went into either depth or detail. However, the category that became the most prominent in the course of the 1900s, and especially in the context of the post-1905 statistical surge, was psychopathology, however vaguely applied in practice. Mental-state aberrations were usually co-diagnosed with various anthropometric abnormalities or sickliness of one kind or another, and they were often associated with a family history of pathology under the label ‘heredity’. Thus, the forensic diagnosis of psychopathology stood for abnormality and deviance. Moreover, among the statistical categories available, this was the only one that did not express a motive or external context for the act, but established, diagnostically and forensically, a more general ‘underlying cause’ (underdetermined and mysterious as it was). This was why the majority of ‘child suicides’, especially when there was no clearly established motive, came to be included in this category. What is more, even in the case of other verdicts, such as exam pressure or romantic troubles, it was understood that some kind of (loosely psychological) pathology was still likely to be underpinning them. This kind of forensic diagnosis was commonly given by school doctors who thereby exculpated the school and the family of any responsibility, excused the police from pursuing the matter further, and allowed a respectable burial in the religious tradition. ‘Child suicide’ thus came to be understood as pathological by definition.⁹⁵ And yet, diagnoses that referred to some inherent individual pathology were carried out side-by-side with overarching critiques of pernicious school regimes, degenerating socio-biological conditions in families, and the moral-political crisis of Russian society.⁹⁶ These two moves coalesced into an ambiguous construction of the suicide child: on the one hand, child suicides appeared as woeful victims of external factors, vulnerable ‘organisms’ suffering traumas inflicted upon them by a society in crisis and by social institutions unfit for purpose (above all the ⁹³ Beer, Renovating Russia. ⁹⁴ Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia, 51–108. ⁹⁵ Ibid., 59–98. ⁹⁶ In this context ‘schoolchild suicides’ paralleled ‘hooliganism’ as another highly mediatized ‘social pathology’ of this era which was explained in terms of degeneration in the wake of revolutionary violence. See Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Power and Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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repressive school, but also the disintegrating family unit); on the other, they were embodiments of the pathological in society more generally—manifestations of ‘school suicides’ in the abstract, which the educated society and professionals in particular took upon themselves to ‘combat’.⁹⁷ This pattern of all out ‘combat’ with a pathology on an epidemic scale—a pathology embodied by the stricken child population—will be repeated later (in the ‘battles’ against delinquency, defectiveness, and underperformance in the Soviet 1920s–1930s). However, in the period between 1905 and the First World War, very little actual ‘fighting’ was or indeed could be done against suicides.⁹⁸ Members of the professional intelligentsia formed the Commission for the Struggle against Schoolchild Suicides, but they had to admit that the best they could do was to research the phenomenon (principally from the perspectives of psychiatry and/or moral statistics), and to offer a critique of institutions responsible for the care of children, namely the school and the family.⁹⁹ Otherwise, this discourse was mostly simply affirming a wider normative crisis in Russian society. Vital to ‘the child’ becoming the prime support of this discourse was its ambiguous ‘otherness’ from the ideally formed healthy member of the educated, professional middle class. In truth, though, many of the ‘children’ committing suicides were youths who could be as old as twenty, and what qualified them as ‘children’ was that they were still in high school.¹⁰⁰ Yet in the broadly evolutionist understanding, shared by most participants in these debates, especially doctors, ‘the child’ could not be identified with the adult—it was a developmentally distinct category. Yet the concern that the educated public and the experts showed was above all for the suicides of children of the very professional intelligentsia that was diagnosing, studying, and expressing concern about this most troubling, fatal, form of pathology. Indeed, a ‘schoolchild suicide’ became a focal point of public anxiety precisely because it made contradictory this highly articulate group’s ideals of its own self-reproduction as the empire’s pivotal social stratum.¹⁰¹ With the start of the First World War, public and professional interest in the epidemic of child suicides was replaced by a new moral panic—the effect that war, especially the new forms of total warfare, had on the psyche of the child.¹⁰² As with ⁹⁷ D. Nikol′skii, ‘O shkol′nykh samoubiistvakh. Pis′mo v redaktsiiu’, Svobodnoe vospitanie, 1910– 11, no. 11: 93–6. ⁹⁸ For exceptions, e.g. psychiatrists who reported cases of successful psychotherapeutic interventions that supposedly prevented suicide in those at risk, see Ivan A. Sikorskii, Psikhologicheskaia bor′ba s samoubiistvom v iunye gody (Kiev: Tip. tov. I. N. Kusherev, 1913). ⁹⁹ Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia, 109–36. ¹⁰⁰ For a discussion of the ‘boundaries of childhood’ in late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, with a focus on the shifting, context-dependent, sometimes formally institutionalized, but often hazy, dividing line between ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, see Kelly, Children’s World, 16–17. ¹⁰¹ Liarskii, Samoubiistva uchashchikhsia, 137–210. ¹⁰² Aaron J. Cohen, ‘Flowers of Evil: Mass Media, Child Psychology, and the Struggle for Russia’s Future during the First World War’, in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 38–49.

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child suicides, the sense of an ‘epidemic’ was largely the effect of the proliferation of data on this topic and the ratcheting up of debate around it, both in the regular press and in more specialist publications, principally educationalist ones. Crucially, the concern here was less with psychological ‘war wounds’, i.e. trauma per se, and more with the transformations that the war appeared to be exercising on the children’s moral core. Yet the effect of the war on children’s moral being was construed largely in terms of its impact on their psychology. The phenomenon of children being interested in military matters and ‘playing war’ was not new.¹⁰³ Moreover, as early as 1914, children were being incorporated into Russia’s patriotic propaganda and featured regularly in it: they were recognized as an important part of the population to be mobilized into total war, literally (for military training or work in the rear) and symbolically (as valuable assets in displays of patriotism).¹⁰⁴ There was even a sense that the spirit of war might be beneficial to children—rousing their love of the Fatherland and inspiring heroism in the case of the boys; inducing selfless dedication on the home front in the case of the girls.¹⁰⁵ However, what very soon started to concern Russian professionals working with children (especially teachers, but also some psychologists and psychiatrists) was growing evidence of the children’s apparently unusual degree of curiosity about, uncritical fascination with, and strong attraction to wartime violence, as presented to them by the media of the day.¹⁰⁶ Children’s war games and war rhetoric became highly disturbing to commentators: they appeared as gross perversions of the romanticization of both war and childhood—an effect generated by their very combination. Naturally, children’s actual responses to and engagements with the war were highly varied; but what became an obsessive topic among the professionals was the idea of children being somehow fundamentally transformed by war, even ‘possessed’ by it, acting as if in a state of hypnosis or intoxication. Public concern with the ‘militarization of childhood’ started with anecdotal reports, but soon led to more systematic studies carried out by teacher organizations as well as some psychologists, notably Moisei Matveevich Rubinshtein (1878–1953). They all used as their main methodology questionnaires on children’s reading practices, personal interests, and worldviews, or else they collected and analysed children’s drawings, diaries, and schoolwork. The war thus gave new focus, relevance, and impetus to methodologies of child study that had been pioneered in the United ¹⁰³ Alla A. Sal′nikova, Rossiiskoe detstvo v XX veke: Istoriia, teoriia i praktika issledovaniia (Kazan′: Kazanskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2007), 142–67. ¹⁰⁴ P. P. Shcherbinin, ‘Detskaia povsednevnost′ v evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh v period Pervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–1918 gg.’, in Maloletnie poddanye bol′shoi imperii, 197–210. ¹⁰⁵ Matthias Neumann, ‘Mobilizing Children: Youth and the Patriotic War Culture in Kiev during World War I’, in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–1922. Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution, ed. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron (Bloomington: Slavica, 2016), 273–300. ¹⁰⁶ Cohen, ‘Flowers of Evil’.

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States by Granville Stanley Hall.¹⁰⁷ Psychologists, teachers, and parents involved in this strand of the movement in Russia keenly observed, noted, and commented on the war-related changes in the behaviour of the children in their care, changes in the topics of their conversations, in the character of their games, in the subjects of their artwork, in the discourse of their school essays. They were fascinated by the children’s remarkable susceptibility to propaganda messages and imagery, and especially their tendency to take these messages literally. They took all this as evidence of the distinctive character of the child psyche, one that required careful professional handling, rooted in specialist knowledge. It was argued that wartime propaganda and media reporting seemed to lead children away from the healthy path of emotional, moral, and civilizational development that educators were hoping to instil in them. The primary worry was that exposure to war imagery was awakening in the child the basest of instincts, cruelty and violence, divesting it of a sense of right and wrong. It was regularly suggested that children seemed more chauvinistic and violent than adults, even in play (e.g. taking it out on the weakest among them or abusing animals). They were presented as enjoying mock executions even more than mock battles. One could apparently observe these changes even in children who before the war showed quite the opposite inclinations and character traits, and girls seemed just as vicious and aggressive as boys. Descriptions of children in areas near the front line in the west of the empire referred to similar disturbing transformations. They included, for example, reports on village children playing with the frozen corpses of enemy combatants that they would discover in the snow, inevitably desecrating them in the process. In this case, the emphasis of the observer was on the similarity that such acts had with the most natural of children’s games, evidenced by the simple, innocent enjoyment that the children displayed as they played with the corpse. ‘The child’ and its ‘games’ emerged here as inherently uncanny—unsettling in their combination of familiarity and alien-ness.¹⁰⁸ Russia’s professional intelligentsia (and the education profession in particular) saw their vocation as the raising of future builders of civilization in their own image. Yet in conditions of war, ‘children’ were turned into a terrifying image of the inherent collapsibility of the very foundations of civilization; it was in the children that the ideals of civilized humanity seemed to decline first. Just as with the child suicide, the stakes were greater than the fate of the children themselves. The concern with children’s souls was largely an enactment of the more general ¹⁰⁷ For more detail see Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893–1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). ¹⁰⁸ See Sal′nikova, Rossiiskoe detstvo, 162, with reference to S. Levitin’s article ‘Deti i voina’ (‘Children and War’) published in Russkaia shkola in the summer of 1915 (Levitin quotes a firsthand witness). For further context on childhood experiences of war in the Ukrainian borderlands see Neumann, ‘Mobilizing Childhood’.

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terror of the breakdown, and hope for the renewal, of some of the core social norms in the context of their crumbling in the midst of wartime destruction. The situation of societal collapse, prompted by violent events, was highly conducive to the construction of child pathology as a society-wide phenomenon, to be targeted through large-scale scientific and professional interventions. The exceptionality of such events translated into framings of the pathological and the deviant in childhood in which children, as key supports for normative discourses and practices, came to be identified with the pathological as such. This led to an ambiguous fusion of deviance/pathology, on the one hand, and victimhood/ trauma, on the other, in both the diagnostics and the treatment of affected children. As we shall see in the next chapter, the scale of intervention grew exponentially in the wake of the collapse of tsarism, the October revolution, and the civil war that quickly ensued. Its consequence was the remarkable expansion of the field of child science in the radically transformed social and political conditions of the early Soviet era.

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5 Child Science in Revolution From Trauma to Transformation

That which has in pedagogical practice come to be known as the morally defective child is often simply a child of the new generation, of the new social context. Pavel P. Blonskii, ‘On So-called Moral Defectiveness’, On the Path to the New School (1923, no. 9)¹ Socio-genetic biology allied with the teaching on reflexes, alongside the careful use of the most valuable of Freud’s concepts and some of his experimental methods, will considerably enrich bio-Marxist theory and practice. G. Daian, ‘Second Psycho-Neurology Congress’, Red Virgin Soil (1924, no. 2)²

Child Science in a Revolutionary Society The October revolution was a game-changer in the history of Russian child science. In the first decade of Bolshevik power, the field experienced levels of institutionalization and pace of expansion unmatched elsewhere in the world.³ What precisely happened at this juncture that facilitated this development? What was the nature of the remarkable rise of child science in the Soviet Union in the 1920s? And what form did it acquire during its initial period of accelerated growth? The rapid rise of the scientific study of child biopsychosocial development in the early Soviet era is most commonly explained by the unparalleled degree of support this field received from the young revolutionary state, including some of its key ideologues, such as Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Trotskii, Anatolii Lunacharskii, ¹ Pavel P. Blonskii, ‘O tak nazyvaemoi moral′noi defektivnosti’, Na putiakh k novoi shkole (hereafter NPkNSh), 1923, no. 9: 41–54 (52). ² G. Daian, ‘Vtoroi psikhonevrologicheskii s″ezd’, Krasnaia nov′, 1924, no. 2: 155–66 (162). ³ Carlo Trombetta, ‘La pédologie russe et soviétique. Naissance et chute d’un mouvement scientifique’, in Une science du développement humain est-elle possible? Controverses du début du XXe siècle, ed. Janette Friedrich, Rita Hofstetter, and Bernard Schneuwly (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 65–81. Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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and Nadezhda Krupskaia.⁴ The growth of this field has consequently been understood as intrinsically embroiled in and dependent on Bolshevik politics and ideology. In the words of E. Thomas Ewing, Soviet child science was ‘situated at the intersection of practical social problems, materialist theories of historical development and political aspirations of creating a new society’.⁵ The Bolsheviks’ approach to child science is usually considered part of their more general strategy to actively foster, as well as administratively control and ideologically direct, scientific advancement in critical domains of state interest. It has consequently been framed as an essentially applied science, consciously developed to assist the new powerholders in achieving a set of revolutionary goals—namely, the creation of what was to be the most progressive and rational system of universal childcare, education, healthcare, and child welfare.⁶ Such a system was expected to become an effective tool for moulding new Soviet generations, first into builders of socialism and then into fitting citizens of a future communist society. The Bolsheviks’ ambitious investment in a science of child development has consequently also been ascribed to their broadly eugenic inclinations—a readily expressed belief in the possibility of fundamentally reshaping humanity; a Promethean dream of acquiring, through science, the powers to create what, in the utopian rhetoric of the times, came to be referred to as ‘the new Soviet person’.⁷ What this framing of the rise of child science in the Soviet 1920s understates, however, is that the mobilization of this field was embedded in a set of rather more ⁴ See: F. A. Fradkin, Pedologiia: mify i deistvitel′nost′ (Moscow: Znanie, 1991). Alexandre Etkind, ‘L’essor et l’échec du movement “paidologique”: De la psychanalyse au “nouvel homme de masse” ’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 1992, 33(4): 387–418. P. Ia. Shvartsman and I. V. Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’, in Repressirovanaia nauka, vol. 2 (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), 121–39. A. V. Brushlinskii (ed.), Psikhologicheskaia nauka v Rossii XX stoletiia: Problemy teorii i istorii (Moscow: Inst. psikh. RAN, 1997), 59–62. Evgenii M. Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii v pervoi tret′i XX veka (St Petersburg: NestorIstoriia, 2012). ⁵ E. Thomas Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers to Their Rights: Soviet Education and the 1936 Denunciation of Pedology’, History of Education Quarterly, 2001, 41(4): 471–93 (476). ⁶ See: Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Evgenii M. Balashov, Shkola v rossiiskom obshchestve 1917–1927: Stanovlenie ‘novogo cheloveka’ (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003). Larry E. Holmes, ‘Soviet Schools: Policy Pursues Practice, 1921– 1928’, Slavic Review, 1989, 48(2), 234–54. Aleksandr Iu. Rozhkov, V krugu sverstnikov: Zhiznenyi mir molodogo cheloveka v sovetskoi Rossii 1920-x godov. 2 vols. (Moscow: NLO, 2014). Wendy Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Elizabeth Waters, ‘The Modernisation of Russian Motherhood, 1917–1937’, Soviet Studies, 1992, 44(1): 123–35. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001). ⁷ Brushlinskii (Psikhologicheskaia nauka, 59), quotes L. N. Trotskii, ‘Neskol′ko slov o vospitanii cheoloveka’, Sochineniia, vol. 21, 110, who saw as one of the key tasks of socialism the creation of an ‘improved edition of human being’ (‘uluchshennogo izdaniia cheloveka’). As Alexander Etkind argues (e.g. ‘L’essor et l’échec’, 396–7), eugenic rhetoric was entirely ordinary at this time, but was nonetheless distinctively inflected by Bolshevik delusions of all-powerfulness. See also Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 55–7.

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specific revolutionary contexts and processes, which need to be differentiated. The Bolshevik revolution had brought about what might be called a ‘revolutionary society’—a distinctive socio-political context that governed the processes of mobilization, and ultimately the character and evolution, of Soviet child science during the first decade or so of Bolshevik power. The revolution, in other words, created a set of opportunities and challenges, conditions and frameworks, which then shaped the organization of scientific and professional activity around the child population, directing it down very particular paths. The most important overarching development that the Bolshevik revolution brought about was the shift in the nature and orientation of the state itself. The years of all-encompassing revolutionary upheaval between 1917 and 1922, following on from a period of total war since the summer of 1914, were conducive to the crystallization of a highly interventionist welfare/warfare state based on the expansion of new governmental powers over a population that was to be both mobilized and acted upon in mass terms.⁸ Crucially, from the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime, children, identified as a distinct and distinctive population, emerged as one of the principal targets of such state-coordinated mass intervention; and this in direct response to conditions of societal collapse, framed by the revolutionaries as the inevitable and necessary breakdown of a corrupt old order. One of the first priorities of the revolutionary state was to respond to the emergencies of revolutionary upheaval itself.⁹ The key context for the initial rapid institutional expansion of child science in the Soviet Union at the start of the 1920s were the efforts of the nascent, and initially fragmented and chaotic, Soviet state apparatus to deal with the unprecedented surge in numbers of displaced, abandoned, and orphaned children who had been living, often for years, outside parental and societal care, suffering from neglect, abuse, undernourishment, and disease, displaying troubling, difficult to manage, antisocial behaviour.¹⁰ This population of homeless waifs, labelled besprizorniki (‘the unsupervised’), peaked at several million around 1921, looming large on the list of social crises that the new regime faced as it emerged victorious out of the devastations of the revolutionary war. At this time, the besprizornik became an exemplary target of mass intervention—a model on which a broad range of new tools of administrative action and professional expertise focused on the child were to be developed, tested, and reproduced. As will be discussed in more detail later, the besprizornik modelled the child as an object of intervention in two distinct but ⁸ David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). ⁹ Andy Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2016, 9(3): 450–69. ¹⁰ Alan M. Ball, And Now my Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Dorena Caroli, L’enfance abandonné et délinquance dans la Russie soviétique, 1917–1937 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).

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interrelated ways—as a victim of trauma who needed to be rehabilitated; and as an embodiment of a pathology that needed to be eradicated. In consequence, a significant part of the child science network at this juncture arose in the context of the state’s all-out ‘battle’ with ‘delinquency’ (besprizornost′) and ‘defectiveness’ (defektivnost′)—especially forms of social deviance, but which were invariably co-diagnosed with a wide range of physical and psychological pathologies. This favoured, in particular, the mobilization of the medical profession into the child science network, as well as the rapid institutionalization and increasing professionalization of the field dubbed ‘defectology’. Defectology was erected on the foundations laid down by pre-revolutionary curative pedagogy discussed in the previous chapter, but which acquired new institutional and conceptual supports, as well as new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, in the context of the expansion and diversification of its operations across a now much larger and more acutely affected target population. However, between 1922 and 1924, as the besprizorniki crisis gradually abated, another context became rather more important to the expansion of Soviet child science—the creation of the new Soviet school. Work on radically reforming the country’s education system had, of course, begun straight after the revolution, but it took a while for Bolshevik revolutionary aspirations in this area to be turned into implementable policy. As will be elaborated later in this chapter, the most concerted action that the Soviet state took to educational reform during the first half of the 1920s was the development of new approaches to teaching and learning in special ‘experimental stations’—complexes of educational establishments in which innovative pedagogical methods, based on both native and imported models of progressive education, were trialled in a systematic way. By the mid1920s, these experiments were translated into a set of officially prescribed school programmes. The crux of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary transformation of education at this juncture lay in the radical realignment of norms of educational development. What was truly revolutionary here was less the utopian plan to create a progressive school around Marxist ideals of labour, in which a new kind of person would be forged, and more the fact that the Bolsheviks set out to create an education system that in the revolutionary present targeted a vastly enlarged and essentially new child population. Indeed, the sudden expansion of the population for whom the education system was to be built took place principally on account of the previously deprived and disadvantaged labouring classes, urban and especially rural— children who were being raised in communities with extremely low levels of literacy and in environments where the demands of labour outmatched ambitions of educational development. This, moreover, was a child population that, despite having always been numerically in the majority, had in pre-revolutionary times not been considered the cohort around which the society’s overarching norms of educational development should be shaped.

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In sum, what the Bolshevik revolution created were two simultaneous shifts that together became critical to the rise of child science in the early Soviet period. The first was the shift in the way in which the state itself operated: as part of its expansion as an apparatus of systematic intervention in a mass population, crucial became the active mobilization of scientific and professional expertise as forms of knowledge-power to be incorporated into key areas of policy and action. The second was the constitution of an entirely new mass population of concern: a population of the previously underprivileged, which the revolution had suddenly promoted into the society’s normative core, yet the properties of which remained to be formulated in normative terms, prompting the drive for this population’s more systematic study.

Initial Mobilization: Pedology as Opportunity Structure The initial mobilization of professional and scientific expertise focused on the child entailed, firstly, the systematic appropriation of already existing establishments of child study and the enlistment of experts associated with these.¹¹ The previously private or philanthropic institutions that had served as hubs of Russia’s pre-revolutionary child study movement were swiftly turned into de facto extensions of an emergent revolutionary welfare state. This process usually involved the establishment’s renaming, as well as its incorporation into a system of state funding and its subordination to regular monitoring from the state administration. State support commonly implied the enlargement of infrastructure, an increase in staff, and consequently also an expansion of activities; however, it also invariably led to a process of institutional reorganization and eventually to the breakup of the original structure of the establishment in question. The state was also creating entirely new structures of expertise under the aegis of key government departments (commissariats), primarily those of education (The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment; Narkompros) and health (The People’s Commissariat of Healthcare; Narkomzdrav). Overall, there were three main vectors of institutional expansion. The first reflected the new state’s ambition to reach a much wider and more diverse population than would have been the case before the revolution. This resulted in the creation of an expanding network of local receiverships, consultancies, diagnostic clinics, and therapeutic centres across the country. The state’s capabilities in this context were inevitably constrained by the severe lack of material and human resources, especially in the peripheries, as well as the fact that the state administrative apparatus was itself only in the process of formation. It meant that this expansion was relatively ¹¹ E.g. see survey of early Soviet institutions in Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii and Etkind, ‘L’essor et l’échec’.

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          

random and that the intensity and character of activities varied from one place to the next, depending greatly on local professional and/or administrative initiative. The second major vector of development was the strengthening of the central administration’s own expert base. This involved the creation of a proliferating set of research institutes, especially in Moscow and Leningrad, built as hubs of more coordinated scientific activity that would in one way or another feed into the administrative work of the growing commissariats. Finally, the third key vector of institutionalization was the setting up of new training establishments and specialist courses in order to as rapidly as possible train up the vitally needed army of educators, healthcare practitioners, and social workers. Both the assimilation of pre-existing institutional infrastructure and the creation of new hubs of child science entailed active collaboration between political/ administrative and scientific/professional agents. Looking to make the most of the revolutionary conditions, the two accepted the need to keep adapting to and negotiating around each other’s priorities while pursuing symbiotic agendas. By and large, the groups from which the field recruited its scientific and professional cadres were enthusiastic about the new power.¹² Its leaders embraced the revolutionary culture of the 1920s, not least the Bolsheviks’ ambition to use science to transform humanity and create a radically new society. Some parts of the expanding network of research institutions were more directly integrated into stateadministrative structures and were thus also more explicitly policy-led. Others remained more science-led, focusing their energies on the development of novel research frameworks in competition with rivals in the field. However, the intimate association of science-building and state-building was crucial across the network. Notable in the mobilization of child science in these new conditions was a suddenly much more frequent use of the term ‘pedology’ (pedologiia) to bring together what was otherwise a wide range of research activities developing around the child. This went counter to the contemporaneous trend in Western Europe where the use of this term peaked just before the First World War and then steadily declined. This apparent divergence can be explained by the fact that, in the early 1920s’ Soviet Union, the expansion of the term ‘pedology’ was not tied narrowly to the creation of a new scientific discipline, as had been the case earlier in the West. What was far more important was that the new state had explicitly identified children and their development as a major policy area, and that a key part of this policy became the enlistment of relevant scientific and professional expertise. The term ‘pedology’ rose to prominence in this very specific context as a label for a particular opportunity structure of mobilization—namely, the mobilization of researchers from the broadly understood human sciences who pitched their work as responding to the new state’s ambition to rationally manage

¹² See Etkind, ‘L’essor et l’échec’.

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the care, upbringing, health, and education of the country’s child population.¹³ The term ‘pedology’ was in this context treated as broad enough to encompass not only almost any strand of scientific research into child development, behaviour, socialization, education, or pathology that wished to be associated with it, but also the construction of a specialist occupational base for managing the child population on behalf of the state. Thus, under the loose umbrella of ‘pedology’ one also finds: the provision of expert support to childcare and educational institutions; the training of ground-level staff working at these institutions; the development of structures responsible for all manner of diagnostic assessment and therapeutic intervention among the child population; and last but not least, the establishment of an expert base within the state administration, directly contributing to government policymaking. Children—who were effectively turned into the wards of the welfare state, to be catered for in a growing network of state institutions providing care and education—became an especially convenient support for the growth of scientific work in the Soviet human sciences more generally. Since the state had become the sole funder of scientific activity, there was every incentive for researchers who worked on or with children to associate their research with pedology in the above sense. Consequently, pedology quickly rose in prominence not as a science in its own right, but as a highly promising territory of work in the human sciences. Research carried out under this banner remained heterogeneous from a disciplinary point of view. As will be elaborated in the next chapter, efforts to turn pedology into a more coherent disciplinary formation ratcheted up only in the last quarter of the decade. For much of era of the New Economic Policy (NEP; 1921–8), work produced under the banner of pedology was characterized by an acceptance of pluralism. In the first half of the 1920s, heterogeneity was not only unproblematic, but seemed beneficial, giving pedology as a framework for the mobilization of scientific work the necessary flexibility to expand across an ever-wider network of state-funded institutions of both research and higher education. The disparate character of what pedology encompassed also reflected the relative incoherence of the early Soviet state’s own policy needs, which remained experimental, openended, in development and flux. Work that fell under pedology was managed by different government departments and stretched across several policy domains, though principally those of education and health. The latter two overlapped and intersected, but they also developed research and training in different directions. The remainder of this chapter will chart in greater detail the key contexts of mobilization that governed the evolution of Soviet child science during roughly ¹³ The concept is borrowed from Dough McAdam with reference to factors in the socio-political environment which stimulate or limit, direct and shape collective action. See McAdam’s ‘Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, Future Directions’, in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, ed. Dough McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23–40.

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the first two thirds of the 1920s. It will start with an elaboration of the effects of the besprizorniki crisis during the civil war and the consequent rise of Soviet defectology. It will then move to the context of the Bolshevik educational reforms in which the creation of new norms of educational development through radical pedagogical innovation ran largely in parallel with the pedologists’ task to build a new normative picture of the totality of the Soviet child population caught up in transformative development. The chapter ends with a discussion of the role that research on children played in the ‘revolutionization’ of the Soviet human sciences more generally during this same period. I argue here that the developing child as an object of state interest became a much-needed anchor for the Soviet human sciences in a context in which some of the key disciplinary structures in this field, notably those associated with psychology, were deliberately thrown into crisis as part of the Bolsheviks’ wider revolutionary tactics.

‘The Moral Defective’ The First World War had already started to generate significant numbers of children outside parental care, education, or work, roaming the countryside or the streets and engaging in delinquent and criminal behaviour, including begging, theft, and prostitution.¹⁴ The situation was exacerbated through further destabilization created by the two 1917 revolutions and the ensuing civil war. Estimates for 1921–2, the worst years due to a bout of famine in the Volga region, went up to several million displaced minors, with figures then dropping to below half a million by 1923, and lower still from then on.¹⁵ The scale of the besprizorniki crisis played a major part in the establishment of new welfare structures in the midst of revolutionary upheaval and war communism, involving practices that combined police, bureaucratic, medical, juridical, educational, and social care measures. Multiple government departments engaged with the problem, setting up specialized commissions and other bodies to deal with the matter. Measures entailed the removal of unsupervised children from the streets, their medical, psychological, and pedagogical assessment, and their placement in institutions for re-socialization, therapy, or correction. An extensive system of receivers, observation-distribution points, and specialized children’s homes, communes, clinics, reformatories, schools, and labour placements were created. These institutions varied in their regimes, practices, and levels of care depending on location and on the government department they belonged to. Most

¹⁴ Parts of this section are reproduced, in edited form, from Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology’. ¹⁵ Statistics for this kind of phenomenon are, of course, notoriously unreliable. See Ball, And Now my Soul is Hardened and Caroli, L’enfance abandonné.

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of them suffered from a dearth of resources and staff. Overall, rehabilitation included a combination of hygiene measures and different forms of re-education or disciplinary civilizing through which the children were expected to be turned into a physically healthy, socially useful, morally responsible, and politically informed labour force. Within a very short period, the besprizornik phenomenon turned children into a target of hands-on intervention on a scale not seen before in the history of Russian statehood. Prior to 1917, Russia’s ‘children’ were a rather abstract category. Moreover, in practice, their normative core tended to be defined rather narrowly: the norm was set by the limited constituency of those who went to school, with a bias towards the urban populations, and especially children of the educated classes who were expected to go on to at least some form of secondary education. Children of the illiterate peasant masses tended to fall outside the normative purview.¹⁶ However, the upheaval caused by war and revolution radically transformed children as a target group of professional interest and intervention. The besprizorniki, understood by the Communists as a by-product of the violent downfall of the long-compromised ancien régime, became the principal support for extensive normative reframing of the ‘children of the nation’ in the first years of Soviet power. Put differently, in the context of the Russian civil war and its immediate aftermath, the besprizorniki became the category that temporarily—as a critical mass population of concern—formed a new core of ‘the children of the nation’.¹⁷ Significantly, though, the besprizorniki at the same time exemplified the normative crisis that the violent upheavals of war and revolution had brought about. And this, in turn, prompted their pathologization, just as had happened in pre-revolutionary times, first with ‘child suicides’ and then with children ‘possessed’ by wartime violence.¹⁸ In other respects, the treatment of the besprizorniki in the period of postrevolutionary crisis built especially on Russia’s experiences of the treatment of young offenders and juvenile delinquents in the late tsarist era.¹⁹ Already during the late 1900s–1910s, there had been pressure from a band of new experts in criminal anthropology (especially Dmitrii Dril′) to introduce into colonies for young offenders what was referred to as ‘medico-pedagogical supervision’

¹⁶ Rare counter-examples are N. A. Rybnikov’s studies of the worldview of the peasant schoolchild, carried out principally in order to assist village teachers. See N. A. Rybnikov, Dervenskii shkol′nik i ego idealy: Ocherki po psikhologii shkol′nogo vozrasta (Moscow: Zadruga, 1916). ¹⁷ As Pavel Blonskii argued, the ‘moral′no-defektivnyi rebenok’ was a ‘rebenok novogo pokoleniia, novogo obshchestvennogo uklada’. See epigraph to this chapter, from Blonskii, ‘O tak nazyvaemoi moral′noi defektivnosti’, 52, quoted in Nikolai Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2004), 32. ¹⁸ For more detail see Byford, ‘Trauma and Pathology’. ¹⁹ Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press), 182–90. L. I. Beliaeva, Stanovlenie i razvitie ispravitel′nykh zavedenii dlia nesovershennoletnikh pravonarushitelei v Rossii (seredina XIX—nachalo XX vv.) (Moscow: Akademiia MVD Rossii, 1995).

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(mediko-pedagogicheskii nadzor).²⁰ This also implied increasingly diagnosing young offenders as suffering from various forms of psychopathology, including, notably, ‘moral defectiveness’ (moral′naia defektivnost′), understood as a form of sociopathy—the absence of the ability to distinguish the moral right from wrong.²¹ This became the core framework for dealing with besprizornost′ in the first years of Bolshevik power.²² In 1918, in what was billed as a progressive emancipatory move, the new powerholders published the decree ‘On Commissions for Juvenile Affairs’ which eliminated both courts and prisons for juveniles. From then on, young offenders were brought to the new commissions, which were expected to deal with them in a more humane way, referring the child to rehabilitative educational or medical establishments, rather than institutions of detention and punishment. The membership of these commissions was to include a doctor, ideally a psychiatrist, an educator, a magistrate, as well as social workers. The 1918 decree itself did not use the term ‘morally defective’, but the unpublished rationale for it featured the label as its key term.²³ The government (Sovnarkom) decree of 4 March 1920, ‘On the Matter of Juveniles Accused of Socially-dangerous Acts’, then radically widened the meaning of ‘moral defectiveness’. While in the tsarist era this term had been used as one specific pathological category of young offenders, it now became a convenient default term for juvenile social deviance in general. The notion of ‘moral defectiveness’ was intentionally broad and could be flexibly subdivided into different kinds and levels of ‘pathology’, leading to a variety of possible ‘treatments’. Article 7 of the 4 March decree stated that: ‘The upbringing, instruction and treatment (lechenie) of morally defective juveniles accused of socially-dangerous acts is a medico-educational task carried out by the Commissariats of Enlightenment and Healthcare in suitable medico-educational establishments (lechebno-vospitatel′nye uchrezhdeniia), to which they are to be referred by the Commissions for Juvenile Affairs.’²⁴ Thus, what in the tsarist era used to be called ‘correctional-educational’ (ispravitel′no-vospitatel′nye) facilities now became ‘medico-educational’ ones. Young offenders were no longer branded ‘juvenile offenders’ (maloletnie prestupniki, the label that foregrounded the prestuplenie— the act of breaking the law), but ‘morally defective’ or ‘ethically backward’ (moral′no-defektivnye and eticheski otstalye)—terms that identified an inherent anomalousness of moral development in the offender. Moreover, the ‘struggle with ²⁰ See: Dmitrii A. Dril′, Maloletnie prestupniki, 2 vols. (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 1884, 1888). Dmitrii A. Dril′, ‘Nashi ispravitel′no-vospitatel′nye zavedeniia i voprosy ispravitel′nogo vospitaniia’, Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, 1898, no. 8: 173–93; no. 9: 88–120; no. 10: 101–49. Dmitrii A. Dril′, O merakh bor′by s prestupnost′iu nesovershennoletnikh (St Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1908). ²¹ Pavel Bel′skii, ‘Prestupnost′ i deti’, Psikhologiia i deti, 1917, no. 1: 41–51; no. 2: 48–56. ²² On what follows see especially Iurii Iu. Bekhterev, ‘Samoupravlenie kak odna iz form ispravitel′notrudovogo vozdeistviia na nesovershennoletnikh pravonarushitelei, lishennykh svobody’, Sovetskoe pravo, 1926, no. 2: 121–6. ²³ Ibid., 121. ²⁴ Cited in ibid., 121–2.

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besprizornost′’ was made to overlap with the ‘struggle with defectiveness’; and ‘defectiveness’ could refer to a whole range of mental and physical deficiencies, lumped together into a vague target of a multipronged (and in practice eclectic) system of state intervention focused on the pathological and the deviant in the child population. However, other, more euphemistic labels, such as ‘exceptional childhood’ (iskliuchitel′noe detstvo) and ‘difficult childhood’ (trudnoe detstvo), were used on a regular basis as well.²⁵ Such phrasings and their elaborations and justifications pointed to a de facto context of trauma, with the children in question appearing as victims of external circumstances. The phrase ‘victims of besprizornost′’ was also used. Yet these terms could still be easily transposed into labels that applied forms of deviance or pathology onto the children themselves, describing them rather than their childhoods as inherently ‘difficult’ (trudnye) or at least difficult to educate or socialize (trudnovospituemye).²⁶ The range of issues that these children were affected by and were displaying was extremely broad and varied. At the First All-Russian Conference for the Struggle with Child Defectiveness in 1921, different types of care institutions were recommended for different categories of ‘difficulty’ to which a child belonged, depending on whether they responded to educational measures, whether they required isolation, how much medical, especially psychiatric expertise, was necessary, or how difficult they were to discipline. But in most cases, it was the regime of daily life at the institution in question that was deemed to have the core therapeutic or rehabilitative function, the idea being to rebalance the delinquent child’s ‘will’, diagnosed as over- or underdeveloped. When the situation was exacerbated by the famine that struck in 1921, causing huge flows of refugees from the affected areas, starvation became a major case for the ambiguous fusion of trauma and pathology in expert discourse on the besprizorniki. Doctors sought to connect the trauma of ‘exceptional childhood’, as experienced by the undernourished besprizorniki, with the pathology of ‘moral defectiveness’. There was considerable interest among psychiatrists in how hunger transformed normal psychological development. It was argued that protracted periods of starvation directly affected basic biological instincts, affecting the entire personality, including the stunting and disabling of the child’s moral senses.²⁷ By 1924, the number of the besprizorniki was in evident decline: besprizornost′ as an ‘epidemic’ looked eminently eradicable. The Bolsheviks now began ²⁵ Vsevolod P. Kashchenko and G. V. Murashev, Pedologiia v pedagogicheskoi praktike: Pedagogicheskaia klinika (Moscow: Med.-ped. stantsiia Narkomprosa, 1926). ²⁶ Marina Goloviznina, ‘Politika sotsial′nogo kontrolia prestupnosti nesovershennoletnikh v SSSR (1917 – konets 1980-kh gg.)’, Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial′noi politiki, 2005, 3(2): 223–40. ²⁷ The influence of famine on the psyche of a developing child was discussed in the psychiatric section of the Moscow Psycho-Neurology Congress in January 1923. See Polina O. Efrussi, Uspekhi psikhologii v Rossii: Itogi s″ezda po psikhonevrologii v Moskve 10–15 ianvaria 1923 g. (Petrograd: Nachatki znanii, 1923), 13.

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transforming the child population into a new kind of political subject—the bearer of a future, emancipated and conscious, socialist citizenry. This had a direct effect on how besprizornost′ itself was reframed as an object of state intervention. What was at stake here was another shift in the normative core of the ‘children of the nation’, which had, as argued, temporarily, in the context of wartime disruptions, focused on the besprizorniki. The First Moscow Conference for the Struggle with Besprizornost′ (16–17 March 1924) challenged the political correctness of the label ‘morally defective’, bringing about its official rejection.²⁸ Nonetheless, the openness and vagueness of what was entailed by this term allowed for its tacit survival in practice, both among those who, as professionals, dealt with socially ‘difficult’ children on a daily basis, and among the general public.²⁹ Moreover, what was being purged through the elimination of this particular term from official discourse was only the sense of inherent deviance, not that of ‘pathology’ as such. The revision of terminology expressed mostly the regained optimistic view (one which reflected the decline in besprizorniki numbers) that such children could, as a population at least, be successfully medically treated and/or socially and pedagogically rehabilitated. Yet this did not remove the idea that they, or at least an exemplary core among them, were unhealthy, even if their pathology could be construed mostly as a reaction to an environment that the revolution would be transforming in a fundamental way.

The Defectologists A major consequence of the above extreme conditions of upheaval, trauma, and pathology was the significant expansion during the early 1920s of institutions for children labelled ‘defective’.³⁰ Sharing the burden of administrating these institutions and preparing staff for them were both Narkompros and Narkomzdrav. There was, inevitably, an increased demand for ground-level staff, as well as continuous calls to form better qualified and more specialized occupational groups out of them.³¹ There was a fairly clear division between doctors and educators in this field (the vrach-defektolog and the pedagog-defektolog). In principle, these were expected to collaborate over both diagnostic and therapeutic duties. However, in practice, the vrach-defektolog was the clinical diagnostician ²⁸ Bekhterev, ‘Samoupravlenie’, 121. ²⁹ Goloviznina, ‘Politika sotsial′nogo kontrolia’. ³⁰ Parts of the text in this section are edited from the author’s previously published work, including Andy Byford, ‘The Imperfect Child in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, History of Education, 2017, 46(5): 595–617, and Andy Byford, ‘Lechebnaia pedagogika: The Concept and Practice of Therapy in Russian Defectology, c. 1880–1936’, Medical History, 2018, 62(1): 67–90. ³¹ A. I. Zhivina, ‘Osnovnye etapy razvitiia sistemy podgotovki uchitelei defektologov v SSSR’, Defektologiia, 1974, no. 2: 68–74; V. Lapshin and A. Zhivina, ‘60 let vysshego defektologicheskogo obrazovaniia v SSSR i rol′ defektologicheskogo fakul′teta MGPI im. V. I. Lenina v podgotovke defektologov s vysshim obrazovaniem’, Defektologiia, 1981, no. 6: 78–81.

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and prescriber of hygiene regimes, with defectological training, usually lasting no more than a year, being merely an appendix to their core medical qualifications. By contrast, the pedagog-defektolog was normally the one working with the affected children on a daily basis, putting emphasis on the implementation of particular routines of mental and physical hygiene and on measures associated with forms of special education. The training of this latter group was longer, around four years, and usually structured as a specialist programme taught at pedagogical institutes which prepared future educators. Pre-revolutionary establishments catering for those considered mentally and physically deficient were used as kernels of the new system after being nationalized and then expanded, with former owners often remaining in place as their directors. This was the case, for example, with V. P. Kashchenko’s school-sanatorium discussed in the previous chapter. In 1918 Kashchenko built on the basis of his school a more ambitious child science research hub, dubbed House of the Study of the Child (Dom izucheniia rebenka), which included a Medico-Pedagogical Clinic as an expansion of the consultancy that he used to run at his school. In 1919, he added a museum which documented and promoted the study and treatment of ‘defective’ children. He also set up short-term training courses, which Narkompros soon turned into the Pedagogical Institute of Child Defectiveness, appointing Kashchenko as rector. In 1921, the entire set of institutions was reorganized into Narkompros’ Medico-Pedagogical Station (Mediko-Pedagogicheskaia Stantsiia; MPS). Its staff was later joined by Lev Vygotskii, who in 1926 replaced Kashchenko as director.³² There were also many new institutions emerging as part of the all-out campaign against besprizornost′ and defektivnost′. Narkomzdrav set up the State Institute of the Defective Child in Moscow in 1918, which opened, however, only in 1921 as the State Medico-Pedological Institute, run by the psychiatrist M. O. Gurevich.³³ This institute worked with Moscow’s childcare institutions of various kinds, from receiverships and commissions for juveniles to children’s homes and psychiatric clinics.³⁴ Those teaching on its courses, at least periodically, included many familiar names from the pre-revolutionary era, such as Nechaev, Rossolimo, and Rybnikov, as well as those who became prominent only in the latter half of the 1920s, such as Vygotskii.

³² V. P. Kashchenko (ed.), Problemy izucheniia i vospitaniia rebenka (Moscow: Moskovskoe aktsionerskoe izdatel′skoe obshchestvo, 1926), 147–74. ³³ M. O. Gurevich, P. P. Tutyshkin, N. S. Ivanov, and D. I. Azbukin (eds.), K detskoi psikhologii i psikhopatologii: Sbornik statei sotrudnikov Gosud. Mediko-pedologichesk. Inst. N.K.Z. (Orel: Orlovskoe otdelenie Gosudarstvennogo izdatel′stva, 1922). ³⁴ Archival material for this institute for the period 1919–25 is available at Tsentral′nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv g. Moskvy (TsGAM; formerly TsMAM, most recently also TsKhD posle 1917), f. 2042. See especially the set of documents for 1922–3, including charters, brief history, and report on structure (f. 2042, op. 5, d. 6, ll. 35–63ob).

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In Petrograd/Leningrad, the main hub of research, diagnostics, and therapeutics clustering around the ‘defective’ child was the complex of institutes that V. M. Bekhterev developed after the revolution out of his Psycho-Neurological Institute (PNI) under the new title—the Psycho-Neurological Academy (PNA).³⁵ The majority of PNA’s newly formed structures were establishments focused on the treatment of developmental pathologies, the study of juvenile delinquency and the provision of special education. PNA’s most prominent defectological establishment was the Child Diagnostic Institute (Detskii Obsledovatel′skii Institut; DOBI), run by the child psychiatrist Adrian Sergeevich Griboedov (1875–1944).³⁶ Founded in September 1918, DOBI arose out of the department in ‘pathological pedagogy’ that Griboedov headed at PNI. This new structure grew into a significant diagnostic and therapeutic centre which housed as many as eighty inpatients of various ages, from pre-schoolers to teenagers, while simultaneously catering for numerous outpatients. Between 1918 and 1927, DOBI examined and treated almost 15,000 children diagnosed with cognitive impairments, psychopathologies, or educational difficulties. DOBI had a variety of specialist diagnostic labs and therapy rooms, as well as, for example, a career service, which performed labourrelated psychological testing among teenagers. PNA sported a number of other establishments focused on the ‘defective’: a model special school used in the training of future defectologists; the Pedagogical Institute for the Socialization of the Normal and the Defective Child (Pedagogicheskii institut sotsial′nogo vospitaniia normal′nogo i defektivnogo rebenka); the Institute of Moral Education (Institut moral′nogo vospitaniia), which both studied and treated deviant behaviour and had attached to it a boarding school for around 100 children; the Educational-Clinical Institute for Children with Nervous Illnesses (Vospitatel′no-klinicheskii institut dlia nervnobol′nykh detei), which focused on psychiatric cases and similarly had a boarding school, as well as a range of diagnostic labs and psychotherapeutic rooms; and finally, the more specialist Central Institute for Deaf-mutes (Tsentral′nyi institut dlia glukhonemykh). PNA published Questions of the Research and Education of Personality (Voprosy izucheniia i vospitaniia lichnosti), edited by Bekhterev, which became one of the most influential publications in early Soviet child science more generally. The training of defectologists in Petrograd/Leningrad was initially organized at the Pedagogical Institute of the Social Education of the Normal and Defective Child, under the directorship of Aleksei Nikolaevich Graborov (1885–1949).

³⁵ A. S. Griboedov (ed.), Novoe v defektologii (Moscow: Gos. Psikho-Nevrologicheskaia Akademiia, 1928). V. M. Bekhterev, ‘Otchet o deiatel′nosti Vospitatel′no-Klinicheskogo Instituta dlia nervnykh detei imeni Akademika V. M. Bekhtereva Psikho-Nevrologicheskoi Akademii’, Voprosy izucheniia i vospitaniia lichnosti (hereafter VIVL), 1926, no. 2–3: 231–4. ³⁶ E. P. Punina-Griboedova, ‘Desiat′ let defektologicheskoi i pedologicheskoi raboty’, in Griboedov, Novoe v defektologii, 1–17.

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Graborov represented a new generation of leaders in defectology who were not medically trained but came out of late-tsarist teacher-training courses.³⁷ In 1923, this Institute acquired PNA’s Higher Pedological Courses and in 1924 it became the Institute of Pedology and Defectology. In 1925, as part of the organizational streamlining of institutions dedicated to the training of Soviet educators, it merged with the Herzen State Pedagogical Institute (Gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut imeni A. I. Gertsena), Leningrad’s main teacher training and child study institution. The role of the defectologist was not, however, standardized and attempts to organize this field in occupational terms entailed constant calls for the clarification of the remit and nature of specialist responsibilities.³⁸ The fact that defectology was stretched between the educational and the medical professions made things especially unclear. In defectological practice, the vospitatel′ was expected to perform a ‘therapeutic’ function in and of him/herself. Kashchenko, for instance, argued that the educator’s personality (lichnost′ pedagoga) was a key instrument of treatment, requiring a particular complex of characteristics.³⁹ Crucial was deemed to be the defectologists’ ‘psycho-hygienic behaviour’ (psikhicheski-gigienicheskoe povedenie).⁴⁰ Yet from a different perspective, the pedagog-defektolog was also cast as something of an ideal teacher.⁴¹ With the waning of the ‘epidemic’ of besprizornost′, which had been so intimately tied to defektivnost′ at the start of the 1920s, Soviet defectology became increasingly more ambitious about the objectives it set for itself. Before the revolution, those working in the domain of curative pedagogy, especially doctors, tended to see themselves as working towards the achievement of a rather vaguely defined state of health (ozdorovlenie).⁴² In the new era, it seemed necessary for defectology to gear itself towards the realization of more definitive forms of recovery (izlechenie). Consequently, Soviet defectology came to play down merely palliative treatment and instead foregrounded the attainment of functional fitness, for schooling and labour, in particular.⁴³ In this context, the key concept of

³⁷ Kh. S. Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti: Istoriia ikh izucheniia, vospitaniia i obucheniia s drevnikh vremen do serediny XX veka (Moscow: NPO Obrazovanie, 1995), 299–300. Graborov trained at Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute before the revolution and from the early 1920s headed the Petrograd Pedagogical Institute for the Social Education of the Normal and Defective Child. He was a major defender of special schools for the ‘defective’. See N. P. Dolgoborodova, ‘Aleksei Nikolaevich Graborov – sovetskii uchenyi-oligofreno-pedagog’, Defektologiia, 1972, no. 5: 82–5. ³⁸ A. S. Griboedov, A. K. Borsuk, and V. V. Belousov (eds.), Voprosy vospitaniia normal′nogo i defektivnogo rebenka (Moscow and Petrograd: Gos. izd., 1924). ³⁹ V. P. Kashchenko and G. V. Murashev, Pedologiia v pedagogicheskoi praktike: Pedagogicheskaia klinika (Moscow: Mediko-Pedagogicheskaia stantsiia, 1926). ⁴⁰ Ibid., 14. ⁴¹ Needless to say, this was an ideal rather than a reality, as testified by many poorly trained vospitateli in the various children’s homes that had to be established at breakneck speed across a vast territory over the course of the 1920s (cf. Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened). ⁴² V. P. Kashchenko, Nervnost′ i defektivnost′ v doshkol′nom i shkol′nom vozrastiakh (Moscow: Tseput′kul′t, 1919), 4. ⁴³ Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti, 301.

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defectological therapeutics became ‘correction’ (korrektsiia), with ‘corrective pedagogy’ (korrektsionnaia pedagogika) becoming a dominant strand of defectological practice.⁴⁴ The idea of ‘correction’, understood as a process of treatment oriented towards a specific positive outcome, had been used before the revolution in a limited way in Kashchenko’s promotion of his school-sanatorium, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, dealt predominantly with cases of learning difficulties and non-standard behaviours that appeared functionally ‘correctible’ through physical and mental hygiene combined with innovative educational measures.⁴⁵ The Museum of Pedology and Pedagogy of Exceptional Childhood at Kashchenko’s MPS included an entire room devoted to displaying the successful correction across different psychological functions.⁴⁶ Moreover, in the context of correcting difficult behaviour, ‘corrective pedagogy’ also retained the sense of ‘correction’ from the moral-juridical realm, with defectological korrektsiia serving as a modulation of juridical ispravlenie. The idea of ‘correction’ was applied fairly literally to children diagnosed with organic, bodily, or sensorimotor impairments (narusheniia), such as those with problems of sight or hearing, and also to children with physical disabilities or speech impediments.⁴⁷ However, the meanings of ‘correction’ were capable of considerable expansion and extended to the treatment of subnormal cognitive development, mental health issues, and antisocial behaviour. What was expected to be ‘corrected’ became, in fact, the entire ‘personality’ (korrektsiia lichnosti).⁴⁸ The idea of ‘correction’ was based on an ‘orthopaedic’ model of therapeutics promoted especially by Graborov who developed a system of exercises dubbed ‘psycho-orthopaedics’ (psikhicheskaia ortopediia). The term ‘orthopaedic pedagogy’ (ortopedicheskaia pedagogika) was also in use.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, in early Soviet defectology, ‘correction’ still seemed to include more or less the same repertoire of sanatorium-like measures and specialeducational methods associated with physical, mental, and moral hygiene, as well as forms of socialization (framed as vospitanie) that had been developed earlier in the context of ozdorovlenie (as opposed to korrektsiia) of the personality (lichnost′). That said, different early Soviet institutions prioritized different approaches, some more educational, others more medical. In better-funded, ⁴⁴ Kashchenko used the variant korrektivnaia, rather than korrektsionnaia, pedagogika. He also saw this term as effectively synonymous with ‘curative pedagogy’ (lechebnaia pedagogika). See Nauchnyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Obrazovaniia (hereafter NA RAO) f. 139 op. 1 d. 234 ll. 4–5. ⁴⁵ NA RAO f. 139 op. 1 d. 20 l. 7. See also V. P. Kashchenko, Pedagogicheskaia korrektsiia: Ispravlenie nedostatkov kharaktera u detei i podrostkov (Moscow: Academia, 1999). ⁴⁶ NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 141 l. 9. ⁴⁷ Kashchenko and Murashev, Pedologiia v pedagogicheskoi praktike, 15–16. ⁴⁸ Kashchenko, Problemy izucheniia i vospitaniia rebenka, 165. NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 152 ll. 7–9. ⁴⁹ Psikhicheskaia ortopediia evoked Alfred Binet’s ‘mental orthopaedics’ but prioritized sensorimotor development and was thus closer to Maria Montessori’s sensorial exercises. What Graborov’s psikhicheskaia ortopediia shared with Binet’s ‘mental orthopaedics’ was a reliance on ‘orthopaedics’ as a medical metaphor of therapeutic intervention.

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centrally-located establishments, such as MPS, therapy included a regimen of work and rest, controlled nutrition, gymnastics and breathing exercises, art and games, as well as prescribed periods of peace and quiet to avoid stress (the idea being to remove the child from the ‘unhygienic’ family environment).⁵⁰ At DOBI, where the institutional and rhetorical framing was more medical, treatments included quartz lamps, electrical impulses, hypnosis, and psychotherapy.⁵¹ At the same time, even ordinary schoolwork was presented as one of the methods of ‘correction’ at these establishments.⁵² Emphasis was placed on ‘work-related creativity’ (trudovoe tvorchestvo) since the motivation of children through ‘creative labour’ (tvorcheskii trud) was considered vital to their rehabilitation.⁵³ Similarly, collective games and celebrations, singing in a choir or performing in an orchestra, were conceptualized as methods of ‘social correction’ (sotsial′naia korrektsiia).⁵⁴ Crucial to defectology remained a continued medical framing of these activities, which included the use of various therapeutic metaphors, such as ‘administering’ a particular ‘dose’ of hygiene or labour activities. At DOBI, there were calls for the ‘pedological grounding of the dose and form of activities’ which were being prescribed as ‘treatment’.⁵⁵ At MPS, the ‘therapeutic effect’ (lechebnoe vozdeistvie) of the ‘organization of a child’s behaviour’ was said to be based on ‘correction, individualization, and the [correct] dosing (dozirovka) of study tasks’.⁵⁶ Such vagueness at the level of therapeutics was matched by an increasingly broad understanding of defektivnost′ itself. By the end of the 1920s, the notion came to be used as an umbrella term for an amorphous web of conditions in which a child’s expected development of physical, sensory, and mental functions had been (unevenly) affected by different causes, from heredity and trauma to infections and malnutrition to neglect and abuse.⁵⁷ ‘Defectiveness’ was thus understood ambiguously as both more and less than ‘illness’ (bolezn′); it was a phenomenon that crossed the boundaries, but also maintained the connections, between the strictly medical and the broadly social.⁵⁸ The consequence of this was that while the ‘defect’ (understood merely as an outer manifestation of a deeper, but also ⁵⁰ Kashchenko and Murashev, Pedologiia v pedagogicheskoi praktike, 11–23. ⁵¹ Punina-Griboedova, ‘Desiat′ let defektologicheskoi i pedologicheskoi raboty’, 7. See also A. S. Griboedov, ‘Trudnovospituemye deti i piskhoanaliz’, VIVL, 1926, no. 1: 57–68. ⁵² Kashchenko and Murashev, Pedologiia v pedagogicheskoi praktike, 20–1. ⁵³ NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 152 l. 8. NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 141 ll. 9–10. See also V. P. Kashchenko (ed.), Putem tvorchestva: Stranichka zhizni i opyta odnoi eksperimental′noi shkoly (Moscow: TsUSTRAN, 1922). ⁵⁴ Kashchenko and Murashev, Pedologiia v pedagogicheskoi praktike, 16–20. NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 141 l. 11. ‘Social correction’ is here contrasted with the ‘natural correction’ (estestvennaia korrektsiia) of sensory analysers and motor reactions. ⁵⁵ Punina-Griboedova, ‘Desiat′ let defektologicheskoi i pedologicheskoi raboty’, 6. ⁵⁶ NA RAO f. 113 op. 1 d. 152 l. 7. ⁵⁷ Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti, 295. See especially A. N. Graborov, Vspomogatel′naia shkola: Shkola dlia umstvenno-otstalykh detei (Moscow and Petrograd: Gos. izd. tip. im. N. Bukharina, 1923). ⁵⁸ Griboedov, Novoe v defektologii, v.

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vaguer, problem) was no longer viewed as meaningfully ‘correctible’ in and of itself, ‘the defectives’ themselves were perceived as eminently ‘corrigible’. This led some, most notably Lev Vygotskii, to question the idea of ‘correction’ targeted on a specific ‘pathology’. Instead, Vygotskii emphasized the importance of reinforcing the ‘healthy’ bodily, mental, and, not least, social functions, which needed to be therapeutically and pedagogically boosted to compensate for the defective, pathological, ‘in-correctable’ ones.⁵⁹ In Vygotskii’s framing, the essence of ‘defectiveness’ lay not in some organic or mental malfunction per se (to be ‘corrected’ by physical, sensory, or mental orthopaedics), but in the character of relations that connected the ‘defective’ to his or her social environment.⁶⁰ It was on the re-establishment of these relations that ‘compensation’ (kompensatsiia) was expected to focus. As a result, Vygotskii stressed ‘social pedagogy’ (sotsial′naia pedagogika) over ‘curative pedagogy’ (lechebnaia pedagogika), reframing the notion of ‘recovery’ (of health or fitness) into that of (social) ‘rehabilitation’.⁶¹ And yet, given that ‘correction’ itself had in practice been understood so broadly and loosely, the seemingly contrasting notions of korrektsiia and kompensatsiia did not result in radically different therapeutic models, but ended up being incorporated into defectological practice as two sides of the same therapeutic coin.⁶²

Revolutionizing Educational Development As the battle against besprizornost′ and defektivnost′ ceased to be an acute priority towards the mid-1920s, the new state refocused its efforts onto the longer-term challenge of establishing a comprehensive system of education for the Soviet child population taken as a whole.⁶³ The Soviet school reforms of the 1920s must be ⁵⁹ See Lev S. Vygotskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1983), which is devoted to Vygotskii’s contributions to defectology. For background on Vygotskii and defectology see René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 60–77, and Peter Smagorinsky, ‘Vygotsky, “Defectology”, and the Inclusion of People of Difference in the Broader Cultural Stream’, Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 2012, 8(1): 1–25. ⁶⁰ Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti, 304–7, 311–14. ⁶¹ Ibid., 305, 315. See L. S. Vygotskii (ed.), Voprosy vospitaniia slepykh, glukhonemykh i umstvennootstalykh detei (Moscow, 1924), 16. ⁶² Zamskii, Umstvenno otstalye deti, 311. ⁶³ This was a priority for Narkompros. In the early 1920s, Narkomzdrav prioritized the care of infants and younger children. At the end of 1922, it established the Gosudarstvennyi nauchnyi institut okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva (GNIOMM, which later became TsNIOMM) in Moscow. Its equivalent in Leningrad was the Nauchno-prakticheskii institut okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva im. K. Tsetkin, which opened in 1925. GNIOMM focused on the pedology of early development, publishing the Journal of the Study of Early Childhood (Zhurnal po izucheniiu rannego detskogo vozrasta), training future ‘nurse-educators’ (medsestry-vospitatel′nitsy), while also contributing to pedology courses at higher educational establishments such as the 2nd Moscow State University. See Balashov, Pedologiia, 122–3. As regards school-age children, Narkomzdrav focused on broadly defined ‘physical culture’, an area to which the Institute of Physical Culture (Institut Fizicheskoi Kul′tury, IFK) was dedicated. Important contributions in this domain were made by Evgenii Radin.

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viewed in the context of the revolutionary transformation of the country’s body politic—a seismic shift in both the size and character of the population of concern. In 1923, a mere 32 per cent of the Soviet population was literate, while 52 per cent of children were still out of school.⁶⁴ In this context, the task of making education universal and equitable entailed not only building new schools, getting as many children as possible into the classroom, and training up an army of schoolteachers. It also required a thorough reframing of norms of educational development.⁶⁵ The latter entailed: a radical rethink of the institution of the school and its place in society; a redefinition of the goals and meanings of education; a restructuring of the environment in which education took place; a thorough reform of the methods of teaching and learning; and last but not least, a revision of the standards and measures of educational development. Spearheading this revolution in education was Narkompros’ Scientific Pedagogical Section of the State Academic Council (Nauchno pedagogicheskaia sektsiia Gosudarstvennogo uchenogo soveta; NPS GUS; Figure 12), although work on developing the new school was spread across a number of research institutes.⁶⁶ Particularly important were also several hubs dedicated to pedagogical experimentation, the best known

See Nikolai Krementsov, With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 277–8. ⁶⁴ Etkind, ‘L’essor et l’échec’, 398. ⁶⁵ On the evolution of 1920s’ Bolshevik school reforms see especially Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). ⁶⁶ Key research hubs include: Narkompros’ Institute of Methods of School Work (Institut metodov shkol′noi raboty; IMShR) and Institute of Methods of Extracurricular Work (Institut metodov vneshkol′noi raboty; IMVR). See V. N. Shul′gin, ‘Institut metodov shkol′noi raboty’ and A. Ia. Zaks, ‘Institut metodov vneshkol′noi raboty’, Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 3 (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929), 312–16 and 316–18 respectively. The Central Pedological Institute (Tsentral′nyi pedologicheskii institut; TsPI), which Narkompros established in Moscow in 1921 on the basis of the Pedological Museum of the Teachers’ House (Pedologicheskii muzei Uchitel′skogo doma), and then in 1925 restructured into the Pedology Section of the IMShR. See N. Rybnikov, ‘Pedologicheskii institut v Moskve: Tseli i zadachi’, Pedagogicheskaia mysl′, 1921, no. 1–4: 135–8 and N. Rybnikov, ‘Tsentral′nyi pedologicheskii institut v Moskve’, Pedagogicheskaia mysl′, 1921, no. 9–12: 101–3. The State Institute of Scientific Pedagogy (Gosudarstvennyi institut nauchnoi pedagogiki; GINP), established in 1924 in Leningrad through the merger of the Central Pedagogical Museum (formerly the Pedagogical Museum of the Army Ministry’s educational department in which Nechaev had originally set up his lab) and the Pedology Institute of PNA. The latter was a partial inheritor of the pre-revolutionary Pedology Institute but in fact had a larger structure and assembled different approaches, including those of M. Ia. Basov who followed in the wake of Lazurskii, N. M. Shchelovanov who followed Bekhterev’s agenda, and I. V. Evergetov who continued to develop experimental pedagogy. See: P. Adamovich, ‘Petrogradskii pedologicheskii institut’, Pedagogicheskaia mysl′, 1922, no. 1–2: 116–18. I. V. Evergetov, Metody ob′′ektivnogo izucheniia rebenka (Leningrad: Len. Pedologicheskii institut, 1924). I. Ariamov, ‘Sovremennye metody izucheniia rebenka’, Vestnik prosveshcheniia (hereafter VP), 1925, no. 4: 23–34. The Moscow Institute of Scientific Pedagogy (Moskovskii institut nauchnoi pedagogiki), established in 1926, originally as the Scientific Research Institute of Pedagogy of the 2nd Moscow State University, formerly Moscow Higher Women’s Courses, today’s Moscow Pedagogical State University (MPGU), where some of the key figures in the field, such as Stepan Molozhavyi, Pavel Blonskii, and Lev Vygotskii worked. See also overview of the field’s institutions in Balashov, Pedologiia.

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Figure 12 Educational reformists at Narkompros. The Scientific Pedagogical Section of the State Academic Council (1929). Reproduced with the permission of the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Education (NA RAO f. 112, d. 337). Sitting: S. T. Shatskii, M. S. Epshtein, N. K. Krupskaia, Katanskaia, A. I. Radchenko, E. Zombe, E. T. Lifshits. Standing: V. V. Simanovskaia, O. A. Malinovskaia, M. M Pistrak, E. T. Rudneva, P. P. Blonskii, S. N. Lunacharskaia, N. M. Shul′man, I. T. Rozanov (?). See V. V. Rubtsov and M. G. Iaroshevskii (eds.), Vydaiushchiesia psikhologi Moskvy (Moscow: PI RAO, 1997), 125.

among which was the First Experimental Station in Public Education (Pervaia opytnaia stantsiia po narodnomu obrazovaniiu) led by Stanislav Teofilovich Shatskii (1878–1934).⁶⁷ The comprehensive democratization of education that the Bolsheviks sought to bring about assumed that ‘the proletariat’ would become the bearer of the new society’s biopsychosocial norms, including norms of educational development. To bring this into effect, the Soviet education system was to be erected around the socalled ‘unified labour school’ (edinaia trudovaia shkola), in which education would be refocused onto the development of all-round ‘polytechnic’ labour skills and an ideologically-informed work ethic rooted in a sense of being part of a

⁶⁷ On Shatskii see: G. A. Malinin and F. A. Fradkin, Vospitatel′naia sistema S. T. Shatskogo (Moscow: Prometei, 1993). A. A. Romanov, Opytno-eksperimental′naia pedagogika pervoi treti XX veka (Moscow: Shkola, 1997), 139–262. William Partlett, ‘Bourgeois Ideas in Communist Construction: The Development of Stanislav Shatskii’s Teacher Training Methods’, History of Education, 2006, 35(4–5): 453–74.

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proletarian collective. The labour school was also expected to contribute, in each given locality, to the transformation of what was still a grossly underdeveloped economy, most of it rural. Important here was not only the pragmatic goal to build a qualified, productive, and politically conscious labour force, but also the ideologically motivated ambition to ground education in the Marxist ideal of emancipated labour. And yet, the task of transforming norms of educational development was rather more complex than that of making education fit a particular politico-ideological framework. In order to devise a new curriculum and teaching methodology suited to the schooling of a population with an educationally low starting base, early Soviet reformers experimented with, adopted and adapted a wide range of educational models and techniques stemming from a variety of both foreign and native strands of progressive, special, and extracurricular pedagogy. Stanislav Shatskii’s contribution is exemplary in this respect. While actively contributing to the creation of an ideologically-framed ‘labour school’, Shatskii’s innovations were rooted in his pre-revolutionary pioneering work in the domain of extracurricular education which targeted primarily the children of workers who lacked parental oversight.⁶⁸ At the same time, Shatskii’s pedagogical ideas intertwined closely with the child-centrism of the pre-revolutionary Tolstoyan free-education (svobodnoe vospitanie) movement, as well as with the core principles of American progressive pedagogy, notably the work of John Dewey. Moreover, many of the techniques that formed part of Shatskii’s pedagogical armoury overlapped with those found in curative pedagogy as promoted at this same time by Kashchenko and other defectologists in the context of special education, including the rehabilitation of the besprizorniki. What Narkompros itself focused on, however, was the creation of new teaching programmes that would be formally prescribed to all schools across the country.⁶⁹ Prepared between 1921 and 1923, the so-called ‘GUS programmes’ (because developed under the auspices of NPS GUS) were piloted in 1923–4 and then implemented widely from 1924–5. They were formulated as guidelines on how to reorganize teaching and learning according to a set of radical new principles. They amounted to a veritable revolutionization from above of the understanding of educational development. They entailed: the elimination of fixed curricula and textbooks; the abandonment of homework assignments; the abolition of classical forms of assessment as well as school marks; the banning of traditional forms of ⁶⁸ Shatskii’s own model was not, however, seen as the most progressive ideologically. While his focus on rural communities was deemed useful by Nikolai Bukharin, and his pedagogical progressivism admired by Nadezhda Krupskaia, others, such as the Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii Lunacharskii, saw Shatskii’s prioritization of pre-industrial forms of labour as not conducive to transforming the peasantry into a true proletariat. Lunacharskii favoured Pavel Blonskii’s concept of the labour school (see Blonskii, Trudovaia shkola, 1919) as better aligned with the demands of Soviet development. ⁶⁹ Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse.

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disciplining and punishment; the doing away with traditional school subjects and their replacement with looser frameworks of study under the broad categories of ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘work’. The GUS programmes avoided prescribing precise curricular content on the assumption that the latter had to emerge from the local context. Indeed, the process of teaching and learning was to be turned into a guided exploration of the pupils’ immediate natural, social, and economic environment. Classwork was to shift away from the inculcation of academic forms of knowledge removed from the children’s daily life and towards a mode of learning through doing, with a focus on practical, creative, and productive activity, which was expected to be closely aligned with the needs of socio-economic development of each locality and its population, as well as of the country as a whole. Narkompros’ assumption from the outset was that such a radical revision of educational norms needed to be embedded in and underpinned by the rationality of science; hence its strong support for scientific research focused on both child development and educational practice. At the same time, it was clear that the reform of the education system could hardly wait for the relevant sciences to become fully and authoritatively established, meaning that scientific research proper had to run alongside the experimental development and implementation of new pedagogical approaches. The key consequence of this was that the forging of the new norms of educational development was invariably led by educational reformists, while associated scientific research followed in tow, usually confirming the validity, deepening the meaning, and strengthening the framing of the new, officially prescribed, pedagogical methods. The reformed educational context did stimulate the growth of areas of research that had previously been either marginal or absent. This included, for example, greater interest in non-verbal—visual and practical—forms of cognition among older children and not just toddlers; or the study of the dynamics of child collectives as a vital context of development. However, it was pedagogical theorization and educational experimentation, rather than psychological, neuroscientific, or biomedical research, which lay behind the transformation of norms of educational development in the early-to-mid-1920s. Nevertheless, the new powerholders’ ambition to build an education system that would encompass the entirety of the Soviet child population did present the expanding sciences of the child with a vital task all of their own—namely, to assemble a normative picture of this population as an object of educational intervention. This ambitious assignment presented researchers in the field with exciting opportunities to expand and develop their work, though it also posed a whole new set of challenges. Firstly, the population whose normative picture needed to be reconstructed was from the outset considered to be essentially ‘new’. As already suggested, the bulk of this population was made up of subjects who had not been studied extensively by pre-revolutionary child science. These were the children of the country’s labouring masses, especially the peasantry, whom the Bolsheviks were keen to

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transform into members of the proletariat. This led to increasing interest in studying ‘the evolution of the consciousness of the peasant child’.⁷⁰ Furthermore, the new target population was framed as growing up in an unprecedented type of social environment, which made the post-revolutionary generations very different to children raised in tsarist times. Things were made even more complicated by the fact that this new social environment was itself understood to be rapidly evolving, as it moved from the chaos of revolutionary upheaval that had produced the besprizorniki to the creation of entirely new institutional contexts of upbringing as part of the expanding welfare state, generating categories of children not previously seen or studied by child science. Secondly, the fact that research was now explicitly targeting a mass population meant that assessing the prevailing levels of cognitive ability, physical constitution, and state of health depended greatly on the development of methodologies that could be deployed efficiently on larger cohorts. Research devoted to trialling and perfecting quick-to-administer psychometric assessments, mass qualitative surveys, standardized anthropometric protocols, and readymade tests for major diseases boomed. Work on this was not confined only to the larger central research institutes, but also mobilized researchers based in regional research centres and local clinics. This line of work was also particularly alert to relevant methodological innovations that were being developed in the West, with new tests and other instruments of study, assessment, and diagnosis being readily imported and adapted to Soviet needs.⁷¹ And thirdly, given that research now took place in a wide variety of geographical sites and on a greater diversity of population groups than ever before, the normative picture of the Soviet child population that the researchers were assembling was, for most of the NEP era, inevitably and avowedly heterogeneous. Indeed, for most of this first decade of Bolshevik power there was no sense of a single normative ‘Soviet child’. Researchers were acutely aware of social and regional variations and of the need to differentiate their research subjects by class background, gender, ethnicity, and even racial features.⁷² What Soviet children were seen as sharing was that they were part of a society in revolutionary flux. However, this society was itself understood to be developmentally uneven, meaning that researchers were constantly prompted to highlight the specificities of local geophysical, socio-economic and ethno-cultural context, most often

⁷⁰ N. A. Rybnikov, director of TsPI and from 1925 head of the Pedology Section of the IMShR, was especially interested in this topic, extending his pre-revolutionary work on the peasant child. See NA RAO f. 47 op. 1 d. 46 ll. 1–18. Similar mass research on the peasant child was carried out at GINP in Leningrad, resulting in the volume Krestianskii rebenok (1928), edited by E. O. Zeiliger. See Balashov, Pedologiia, 121. ⁷¹ This will be discussed in more detail later on in Chapter 7 titled ‘Pedology at Work’. ⁷² See Andy Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s’, Ab Imperio, 2016, no. 2: 71–124.

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critically, as a way of drawing attention to local circumstances that needed to be improved as part of building the new society. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, towards the end of the 1920s, the construction of Soviet society was subordinated to the collective goal of accelerated ‘socialism-building’ framed through the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32). The latter was designed to enforce the achievement of a projected level of socioeconomic and cultural-historical development that was expected to apply to Soviet society as a whole. This put considerable pressure on Narkompros’ educational reformers to render norms of educational development universal. In this context, the target of educational intervention could no longer continue to be a mass of children whose uneven development reflected the objectively uneven development of Soviet society. Consequently, the projected target of educational development at that point became the unitary figure of the so-called ‘mass child’ (massovyi rebenok). This prompted Soviet child science to start refocusing its task increasingly—but also with increasing difficulty—on the construction of a singular normative ‘Soviet child’.

Revolutionizing the Human Sciences The expansion of research focused on the child population in the early Soviet Union was not due simply to the above-discussed functions that this research served in supporting the building of a new state system of socialist child welfare, healthcare, and education. The growth of scientific activity around children must also be placed in the context of the revolutionary transformations that the Soviet human sciences more generally underwent during the 1920s. To begin with, there was clear continuity between research established in the context of Russia’s prerevolutionary child study and work that was mobilizing at speed under the umbrella of pedology at the start of the Soviet 1920s.⁷³ Some of the dominant frameworks inherited from tsarist times, such as, for instance, experimental pedagogy, were still there in the early 1920s, shaping key parts of the research agenda during and immediately after the civil war. However, things began to change in more significant ways from around 1923, as the Soviet human sciences were subjected to a more concerted campaign of ‘revolutionization’.

⁷³ E.g. see N. A. Danilicheva, ‘Metody psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia shkol′nikov v praktike uchitelei 20-30-kh godov’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1976, no. 5: 143–7. See also the range of papers published in the short-lived Pedologicheskii zhurnal, which was published between 1923 and 1924 in Orel, under the editorship of V. M. Bekhterev and, more actively, Orel-based V. N. Basov (not to be confused with the better-known Leningrad-based Mikhail Iakovlevich Basov). Indicative also is N. A. Rybnikov’s Rebenok i ego izuchenie (Moscow: Psikhologiia i Pedagogika, 1922), as are the range of activities of the pedology institutes in Moscow and Petrograd and the pedology section of the 1923 psycho-neurology congress in Moscow.

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Crucial to understanding the nature of the Bolsheviks’ mobilization of science is that the latter was never simply an instrument to be supported and deployed at will, but a social field strategically targeted as part of revolutionary takeover.⁷⁴ This takeover involved a campaign of political attack on the former empire’s scientific establishment and the deposing, in various ways, of those identified as ideological opponents of the new regime, while simultaneously encouraging an emergent ‘young guard’, above all those who declared themselves Marxists, to step into positions of scientific leadership. The Bolsheviks’ tactics of takeover included continually testing the scientists’ loyalty by demanding conformity to the ideological framework of Marxism. However, crucial to this tactic was not simply a form of political bullying or the triage between those ‘with us’ and those ‘against us’. It also entailed a deliberate disruption of the internal reproduction of science as an epistemic endeavour—something essential if the Bolsheviks were to take control of the (re)production of science as a social field. Arguably even more important than aligning one’s scientific framework with ‘Marxism’ was the expectation of anyone who aspired to the position of scientific leader to be calling loudly for the overturn of ‘old’ epistemological and ontological frameworks in their discipline, while in turn proposing an alternative radical new paradigm. Of course, one cannot disaggregate here the internal politics of science from the wider politics taking place in the country, since the revolutionization of science in the Soviet 1920s implied a homology between political and epistemic revolution, including the axiom that science could be properly ‘revolutionized’ only along ‘Marxist’ lines. However, what precisely ‘Marxist’ science meant remained, for much of the 1920s, conveniently vague—an object of debate and thus subject to interpretation. Created, though, was a remarkable situation in which extrinsic interference by the new powerholders instigated a veritable revolutionization of epistemic politics within science itself. In a ‘revolutionary society’, there seemed to be little space for ‘normal science’. For in the political environment of the Soviet 1920s the way in which scientific practice acquired legitimacy was not only by serving the state and adhering to ‘Marxism’, but also by mobilizing around programmes of radical innovation—programmes explicitly designed to overturn established disciplinary norms, to change the rules of the game, to introduce new perspectives on the world, and to then turn these into novel techniques for transforming the world. It was the territory of broadly defined psychology, so crucial to clashes within child science in the pre-revolutionary era, that continued in the early Soviet period to serve as the most important arena in which the main battles for revolutionizing the human sciences took place. The principal label used for this territory in the 1920s was ‘psycho-neurological sciences’ (psikhonevrologicheskie nauki). The two ⁷⁴ I. I. Mochalov, ‘Repressirovannia nauka: Stanovlenie fenomena (1917–1922 g.)’, Filosofskie issledovaniia, 1993, no. 3: 107–30.

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key academic events that served as major public platforms on which those who hoped to lead the Soviet human sciences promoted their programmes of revolutionary renovation were the two congresses in ‘psycho-neurology’—one in Moscow, in January 1923, and the other in Petrograd, in January 1924.⁷⁵ Both had large and active pedology sections, which attracted substantial audiences of teachers as well as doctors and psychologists. There was, in this respect, continuity between these events and the pre-revolutionary congresses in pedagogical psychology and experimental pedagogy; so much so, that the 1924 congress ended up being renamed All-Russian Congress in Pedology, Experimental Pedagogy and Psycho-Neurology.⁷⁶ The 1923 congress in Moscow was something of a transitional event, at which methodological debates from the 1900s–1910s intertwined with calls for a more radical transformation of the field’s ontological and epistemological underpinnings.⁷⁷ This congress unquestionably injected revolutionary politics into the mobilization of the Soviet human sciences. Even though the majority of the papers delivered at the event simply echoed pre-revolutionary concerns with refining experimental approaches in psychology, it was the position papers that demanded changes to the very conception of psychology as a science that grabbed all the attention. Spearheading this turn in the field’s politics in 1923 was Konstantin Nikolaevich Kornilov (1879–1957) with his paper ‘Psychology and Marxism’, in which he argued for a thorough ‘dialectical materialist’ revision of the discipline.⁷⁸ His paper was flanked by papers with a related but less politically explicit agenda, such as Pavel Petrovich Blonskii’s call for psychology to be replaced by the study of pure behaviour, and V. M. Bekhterev’s already established critique of the epistemological premises of Wundtian psychology. This frontal attack on frameworks dominant in Russia’s pre-revolutionary academic psychology set the scene for the ousting of Georgii Chelpanov as an exemplary specimen of the ‘old guard’ from the Moscow Institute of Psychology (MPI), which he himself had founded, and the passing of the Institute’s directorship to his former pupil Kornilov.⁷⁹ In 1925, MPI became independent of Moscow State University and was renamed State Institute of Experimental Psychology ⁷⁵ E.g. see A. P. B-v, ‘1-i Vserossiiskii s″ezd po psikhonevrologii ot 10–15 ianvaria 1923 goda’, Pedagogicheskaia mysl′, 1923, no. 2: 80–3. A. P. B-v, ‘Vserossiiskii s″ezd po pedologii, eksperimental′noi pedagogike i psikhonevrologii (2-oi s″ezd po psikhonevrologii) v Petrograde s 3-go po 10-e ianvaria 1924 g.’, Pedagogicheskaia mysl′, 1924, no. 1: 100–1. ⁷⁶ Balashov, Pedologiia, 117. For more detail on this congress see Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 2307, op. 2, d. 249, ll.3–16ob. ⁷⁷ Efrussi, Uspekhi psikhologii v Rossii, 6–37. ⁷⁸ On ‘dialectical materialism’ or ‘diamat’ in Soviet science more generally see Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 24–67 and, with reference to physiology and psychology, 157–219. ⁷⁹ S. A. Bogdanchikov, ‘Pochemu uvolen G. I. Chelpanov?’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1996, no. 1: 85–96. See also A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Osnovnye etapy razvitiia nauchnoi deiatel′nosti psikhologicheskogo instituta’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1994, no. 2: 5–21.

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(Gosudarstvennyi institut eksperimental′noi psikhologii, GIEP). Kornilov was keen to turn it into a hub for developing new ‘Marxist’ directions in Soviet psychology on different fronts, including social, labour, medical, child, and animal psychology. The Institute quickly became a home for a new generation of up-andcoming researchers keen to rethink psychology on radically new grounds, who were thereby given the opportunity to develop, by the end of the 1920s, into a cohort of new leaders of the discipline.⁸⁰ The 1923 and 1924 congresses also initiated the crystallization of the core parameters that innovation in the Soviet human sciences was expected to follow under the ‘Marxist’ banner, and this from the perspective of those in the field. These parameters were developed and elaborated in speeches at the above two congresses, as well as in programmatic writings published during 1924–5, not least those written by some of the researchers that assembled at MPI, such as the head of its psychopathology section, Aron Borisovich Zalkind (1888–1936).⁸¹ A psychiatrist by training, with a background in psychoanalysis, Zalkind was closely connected to the Bolshevik Party and was even keener than Kornilov to position himself as leader of the campaign radically to reframe the Soviet human sciences along ‘Marxist’ lines, acting as something of a spokesman for the ‘Party line’ on the matter. As will be discussed in the next chapter, he successfully assumed such a leadership role only slightly later, between 1927 and 1931. However, his writings at this earlier juncture were important in sketching out the general direction of travel for the Soviet human sciences undergoing revolution.⁸² The overall goal—as articulated by Zalkind, but followed by practically everyone else—was to develop a framework for the scientific study of the human in which (a) biological, psychological, and social phenomena would be reframed as part of one and the same, fundamentally material, substance; and (b) the objective was not just to know this substance in its various dialectically interconnected forms, but to acquire the ability to mould it at will in the desired direction. This meant that moves to revolutionize psychology that could expect to be rewarded were those that reframed the discipline in a way that hardwired it, firstly, to the study of biological laws and physiological mechanisms, and secondly, to the study of social dynamics and social determinants. The balance between these two demands was at first tipped towards the former, biophysiological side—partly as a response to the imperative to avoid any hint of ‘idealism’ in the framing of the

⁸⁰ Van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 112–40. ⁸¹ K. N. Kornilov (ed.), Psikhologiia i marksizm (Leningrad and Moscow: Gos. izd., 1925). ⁸² A. B. Zalkind, Ocherki kul′tury revoliutsionnogo vremeni (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1924), 7–94. See also his ‘Biologiia, revoliutsiia i vospitanie’ and ‘K voprosu ob osnovakh prosvetitel′noi politiki’ in Rabotnik prosvehcheniia, no. 2–3, 5–10 and 11–14 respectively. See also A. M. Etkind, ‘Obshchestvennaia atmosfera i individual′nyi put′ uchenogo: opyt prikladnoi psikhologii 20-x godov’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1990, no. 5: 13–22.

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psyche, and partly because contributors from neurology, psychiatry, and physiology enjoyed greater scientific authority and had better developed research enterprises in the early 1920s. However, no programme for psychology’s renewal could be successful if it did not also explicitly encompass a novel approach to the study of the social and if it did not, crucially, promise to impact on it in ways that would lead society down a politically projected path of development. By the end of the decade, the balance was tipped towards the social side of the scale, something that Zalkind was arguing for already in 1924, with support from Party officials.⁸³ The expectation that Soviet human sciences should be making epistemic moves of a revolutionary kind resulted in a peculiar dialectic of, on the one hand, ardent competition between rival frameworks for studying the human anew, and, on the other, an acceptance that the various competing theoretical positions were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but represented partial perspectives on a single greater truth.⁸⁴ Indeed, at this stage, the various new approaches emerging on the scene were, for all their imperfections and apparent incompatibilities, often accepted as pointing in the direction of the same overall goal of mastering humanity’s biopsychosocial complexity. This was, after all, only to be expected of the dialectics of science in revolutionary flux. The various approaches that rose to prominence in the early 1920s (including, for example, psychoanalysis and reflexology, to be discussed in greater detail below) were perceived as beginnings rather than endpoints of the revolutionary renewal of the scientific study of the human. Given that there was no single programme for renovating the human sciences capable of dominating over all others, it was understood to be in everyone’s interest to look for points of connection and to develop alliances across the various different theoretical and methodological frameworks. A major consequence of this was that eclectic admixtures were encouraged, with researchers free to borrow elements from different theories and weave them together according to need. This chapter’s concluding two sections will discuss two exemplary programmes for renovating the Soviet human sciences that exemplified this. Psychoanalysis and reflexology both thrived in the early to mid-1920s, at a juncture when the Soviet revolutionary society was transitioning from the phase of actively responding to societal trauma caused by revolutionary upheaval to a period in which the urgent goal became to engineer rapid and comprehensive social transformation. In this period, both psychoanalysis and reflexology had a strong impact on

⁸³ In his paper ‘Deti i sovremennost′’, delivered at the second congress in psycho-neurology in Petrograd in January 1924, Zalkind argued for more emphasis to be placed in pedology on the study of social surroundings and not just the psychophysical organization of the child. Balashov, Pedologiia, 118. ⁸⁴ On the variety of approaches in 1920s’ Soviet psychology see S. A. Bogdanchikov, ‘Osnovnye napravleniia i techeniia v otechestvennoi psikhologii 1920-kh gg.’, Metodologiia i istoriia psikhologii, 2006, 1(2): 21–30.

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research focused specifically on children. Both grew out of medico-therapeutic concerns, which shaped much of the Soviet welfare-state provision for the child population during and immediately after the civil war. They were both then turned into programmes for revolutionizing the Soviet human sciences themselves and, as part of this, they were translated into campaigns for transforming the scientific underpinnings of the country’s system of education and upbringing, with specific focus on children caught up in a moment of revolutionary change, straddling trauma and transformation.

Hybrid Psychoanalytics Psychoanalysis rose to prominence in the early Soviet Union thanks to the backing of key members of the Bolshevik elite who had developed a personal, if idiosyncratic, interest in it.⁸⁵ High-placed patronage led to the psychoanalytic movement receiving unexpected levels of material and infrastructural support around 1921–2 and encouraged the vocal promotion of psychoanalytic ideas at the above two psycho-neurology congresses in 1923 and 1924. This is not to say that psychoanalysis was not at the same time considered controversial. It was still regularly critiqued on both ideological and epistemological grounds, and it required extensive rhetorical reworking and plenty of caveats to be framed as a programme aligned with the Bolshevik revolutionary mission. To achieve the necessary relevance and status as a programme contributing to the renovation of the Soviet human sciences, psychoanalysis, reconceptualized as ‘Freudo-Marxism’, was cast as offering a radically new understanding of previously unexplored aspects of human personality, combating outdated bourgeois understandings of the psyche by grounding the latter in biology and evolution, while at the same time framing human development as a form of transformative self-mastery. The latter was to be achieved not only at the level of individual personality, as might be implied in psychoanalytic therapeutics, but also, in its Marxist revision, at the level of the collective. Psychoanalysis had not been particularly visible in the child study movement of the pre-revolutionary era and was during the 1910s perceived mostly as an intriguing, but untested instrument deployed cautiously and experimentally by a handful of psychiatrists. In the aftermath of the revolution, though,

⁸⁵ On ‘psychoanalysis in the land of the Bolsheviks’ see: Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St Petersburg: Meduza, 1993). Tatiana Zarubina, ‘La psychanalyse en Russie dans les années 1920 et la notion de Sujet’, Cahiers de l’ILSL, 2008, no. 4: 267–80. A. I. Belkin and A. V. Litvinov, ‘K istorii posikhoanaliza v sovetskoi Rossii’, Rossiiskii psikhoanaliticheskii vestnik, 1992, no. 2: 9–32. Van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 78–111.

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psychoanalysis came to be used at some of the key institutions dealing with the besprizorniki, and this principally as a tool for diagnosing trauma and pathology. One of Russia’s first trained psychoanalysts, Tat′iana Konradovna Rozental′ (1884–1921), was particularly active in Petrograd during the civil war.⁸⁶ A Marxist even before the revolution, she had studied medicine in Zürich where she received training in psychoanalysis. She returned to Russia in 1912 to work as a doctor. After the revolution she was based at Bekhterev’s newly formed Brain Institute, where she headed the department of child neuro-psychopathology while also carrying out psychoanalytic diagnostics of children at DOBI. She promoted psychoanalysis as a form of psycho-prophylaxis to be used as part of upbringing more generally. In 1919–20 she taught a course titled ‘Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy’ and promoted this at congresses devoted to the problem of the besprizorniki, arguing that psychoanalysis ought to become a vital component of the professional training of anyone who worked with children. In 1921, however, Rozental′ committed suicide, failing to leave a successor to her incipient psychoanalytic pedagogy. A more secure base for Russia’s psychoanalytic movement was at that same time being established in Moscow around a psychoanalytically framed kindergarten-lab (detskii dom-laboratoriia) run by the psychiatrist Ivan Dmitrievich Ermakov (1875–1942).⁸⁷ This kindergarten-lab started its life as part of the Moscow Psycho-Neurological Institute (MPNI), set up by Narkompros in 1920 under the directorship of A. N. Bernshtein. Bernshtein was sympathetic to psychoanalysis as a strand within psycho-neurology, but other members of this Institute thought otherwise, which led to the kindergarten being taken out of MPNI in early 1922. However, Ermakov’s project had already won support from leading Bolsheviks interested in psychoanalysis, who secured funding for it from a variety of sources. The key figure on the kindergarten’s board was Otto Iurevich Shmidt, who was also head of the State Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo RSFSR; GIZ). GIZ at the same time initiated the series ‘Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library’ (1922–8), of which Ermakov became chief editor and in which many translations of Freud, Jung, Melanie Klein and others were published, including several works on child psychoanalysis.⁸⁸ The profits from this series went towards funding the kindergarten.

⁸⁶ Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 187–9. Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, 224–7. Balashov, Pedologiia, 74. ⁸⁷ M. I. Davydova, ‘Ivan Dmitrievich Ermakov (1875–1942)’, Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1989, no. 2: 156–9. ⁸⁸ Psikhologicheskia i psikhoanaliticheskaia biblioteka pod red. Prof. I. D. Ermakova, 1922–1925 gg.: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel′ (Izhevsk: ERGO, 2010). The series included Psikhanaliz detskogo vozrasta (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1923), M. Klein, Razvitie odnogo rebenka (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925), George H. Green, Psikhonaliz v shkole (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1924), and Z. Freid, Psikhanaliz detskikh nevrozov (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925). Volume 30 of the series was expected to be a collection of works of the kindergarten-lab but was never realized.

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The kindergarten’s purpose was to provide preschool upbringing to healthy (as opposed to defective) children, but the pedagogy of the establishment was underpinned by a psychoanalytically-informed ‘prophylactic’ objective, in the sense that this was meant to be upbringing that actively prevented the occurrence of pathologies in the development of the psyche. In practice, the kindergarten served as an elite preschool: situated on the grand premises of the Riabushinkii Palace not far from the Kremlin, it was attended by the children of Party officials and other high-placed individuals, including Stalin’s son Vasilii, born in 1921. Ermakov was the establishment’s director, but the day-to-day care was provided by a team of socalled rukovoditel′nitsy, the most prominent among whom was Otto Iur′evich’s wife, Vera Shmidt, née Iasnitskaia (1889–1937). The Shmidts’ own son Vladimir (b. 1920) was among the children cared for at this institution. The pedagogy practised at the kindergarten had an explicitly Freudian framework: for example, the development of the child was conceptualized as the limitation of the pleasure principle with the reality principle; the rukovoditel′nitsy were expected to consider the various unconscious processes through which a child’s ‘capricious’ behaviour might be explained; the plan was for all teaching staff to undergo psychoanalysis in order to prevent ‘transference’, although such training never took place in practice as staff were always very busy, while their turnover proved to be quite rapid. The kindergarten was also envisaged as a site of psychoanalytic research, i.e. of systematic, carefully recorded observations of child behaviour, to be analysed and interpreted in a psychoanalytic key (for instance, by following the Freudian stages of the psyche’s development). Staff kept diaries containing pages of dense text detailing each child’s every move, his or her relationships to people and things, emotional reactions and behaviours.⁸⁹ Recorded, analysed, and interpreted were children’s games, dreams, drawings, and constructions. Vera Shmidt was particularly active on the research side. Although her background was in pedagogy and she did not have formal psychoanalytic training, she published articles based on her work at the kindergarten-lab and authored a psychoanalytically informed Mother’s Diary, based on observations of her son’s early development.⁹⁰ Ermakov himself was not directly involved in the empirical observation of children, leaving this to the female rukovoditel′nitsy, but he provided guidance on how to interpret the findings. Ermakov’s role as President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society placed the kindergarten at the heart of the Soviet psychoanalytic movement. Among the members of this society were the key educational ⁸⁹ On the diligent keeping of observational diaries by staff working at other types of model kindergartens that had nothing to do with psychoanalysis, see Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades. Kirschenbaum describes a couple of such kindergartens in Saratov where the focus of staff interest was on children’s labour activities. ⁹⁰ Vera Shmidt, Dnevnik Materi: Pervyi god zhizni (Izhevsk: ERGO, 2009). Vera Shmidt, Dnevnik Materi: Vtoroi i tretii gody zhizni (Izhevsk: ERGO, 2009).

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reformists of the day with direct links to Narkompros, including Shatskii, Blonskii, and Vygotskii.⁹¹ While they were not themselves followers or promoters of psychoanalysis, they were certainly interested in the link between psychoanalysis and education. The assumed potential of psychoanalysis to transform education became, in fact, one of the most important ways in which psychoanalysis was promoted in the Soviet Union at this time. The Psychoanalytic Society defined psychoanalysis as ‘one of the methods of studying and educating a person in his/ her social environment, helping fight the primitive asocial drives of an undeveloped personality (lichnost′)’.⁹² The Psychoanalytic Society also had a pedagogical section overseen by Shatskii. Its remit included topics that were hardly typical of psychoanalysis, such as the role of music in child development or the organization of children’s collectives. The meetings of this section served as the main forum in which the kindergarten rukovoditel′nitsy presented their observations to the Society’s wider membership. There was some ambiguity about the institutional positioning of the psychoanalytic kindergarten-lab across the realms of scientific research, on the one hand, and preschool education, on the other. The bureaucracy that took responsibility for it shuttled between Glavnauka (Glavnoe upravlenie nauchnymi, nauchnokhudozhestvennymi i muzeinymi uchrezhdeniiami), which administered research institutions, and Glavsotsvos (Glavnoe upravlenie sotsial′nogo vospitaniia i politekhnicheskogo obrazovaniia detei), which administered children’s homes. The kindergarten was subjected to regular inspections from 1923 and these became increasingly critical, raising questions about the validity of the science conducted there. The absence of an experimental lab was cited as an indication of the nonscientific nature of the enterprise. However, the kindergarten had sympathetic defenders at Narkompros, something that enabled it to continue to operate into 1924. Nonetheless, there was increasing pressure for the kindergarten’s emphasis on psychoanalysis to be toned down. Among the reasons were rumours about controversial ‘experiments’ carried out there which were supposedly ‘advancing’ children’s sexual development.⁹³ The atmosphere soured further when its female staff, who had grown unhappy with Ermakov’s leadership, submitted a collective complaint hoping to have him replaced. The outcome was rather more drastic: Ermakov was removed from post, but so were the rukovoditel′nitsy, while the kindergarten was turned into a standard preschool establishment. It was still attended by the children of Party officials, but it was now under new management and with no hint of psychoanalysis in its provision of childcare. Thus, as a programme of research contributing to the reform of Soviet upbringing and education, psychoanalysis had been positioned mostly as a contributor to ⁹¹ See Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 191–8. ⁹² Cited in Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, 224–7. ⁹³ Zhan Marti, ‘Psikhoanaliz v Rossii i v Sovetskom Soiuze s 1909 po 1930 g. (referirovanie L. E. Komarovoi)’, Rossiiskii psikhoanaliticheskii vestnik, 1992, no. 2: 33–48.

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the study of preschool development, i.e. as particularly well equipped to explore the many mysteries of child behaviour in the early stages of development when the biological, psychological, and social determinants that shaped personality were intertwined in a deep and primitive way. Psychoanalysis did not play a role in Soviet reforms of school-level education, despite the presence in the Psychoanalytic Society of those who were at this very same time forging the new Soviet school, such as Shatskii and Blonskii in particular. There was, in fact, unequivocal resistance at Narkompros (expressed most clearly by Nadezhda Krupskaia) towards using psychoanalysis in the context of school-age pedagogy.⁹⁴ This meant that Soviet educational reform, which was so important to the growth of Soviet child science during the 1920s, remained a no-go area for psychoanalysis. This in no small measure contributed to its limited impact on the wider field of Soviet research focused on the child population even at the point when psychoanalysis was much discussed in the context of the renewal of the Soviet human sciences more generally between 1922 and 1925. The movement remained restricted to a rather narrow, if well-placed, clique, while those who truly identified with it and pursed empirical research in the psychoanalytic paradigm remained small in number and were, on the whole, underqualified in scientific terms. In consequence, the true impact of psychoanalysis on the renovation of the Soviet human sciences in general and the sciences of the child in particular was dubious. For a programme of renovation to achieve a wider mobilization of followers, crucial was the pre-existence of a more stable supporting infrastructure and professional base, a much larger team of qualified researchers, and a far better-established programme of empirical research. The programme that had all this during this same period was reflexology.

Pedagogical Reflexology Reflexology had a particularly powerful base in Petrograd/Leningrad in the network of institutes that had grown out of Vladimir Bekhterev’s prerevolutionary PNI, most notably the Brain Institute, founded in 1918.⁹⁵ The 1924 psycho-neurology congress in Petrograd was dominated by proponents of reflexology who used the event to promote this programme as particularly well positioned to lead the renewal of the Soviet human sciences. Reflexology was ⁹⁴ See Krupskaia’s review of Hans Zulliger, Psychoanalytische Erfahrungen aus der Volsschulpraxis (Zürich, 1921) in NPkNSh, 1923, no. 5: 158–60. ⁹⁵ On Bekhterev’s reflexology in the context of early Soviet psychology see: Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Towards a Social History of Soviet psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 49–61. M. G. Iaroshevskii, Istoriia psikhologii (Moscow: Mysl′, 1985), 440–505. David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 83–91, 273–6.

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presented as ontologically and epistemologically radical, as in possession of a comprehensive and authoritative theoretical and empirical framework, and as promising both epistemic and technological mastery over humanity’s development in all the vital spheres of state policy, from childcare and education to healthcare and labour productivity. The origins of reflexology as a programme for transforming the human sciences lie in Bekhterev’s pre-revolutionary programme of ‘objective psychology’, which he then rebranded ‘reflexology’.⁹⁶ Reflexology can therefore be viewed as an outcome of the long-standing campaign that Russian neuropsychiatrists and neurophysiologists fought to capture the territory of empirical psychology. Essential to Bekhterev’s leadership in this campaign in the early 1920s was that he framed reflexology exceptionally broadly, rooting it in a monist worldview that tallied well with the above-described ‘Marxist’ revision of psychology. Bekhterev’s conceptualization of ‘the reflex’ as essentially a ‘schema’ was abstract enough to permit its flexible use across the domains of the physiological, the psychological, and the social. Bekhterev had from very early on sought to incorporate into his paradigm the study of social dynamics (something hardly atypical of psychiatry more generally), which culminated in his Collective Reflexology (1923).⁹⁷ Crucial to reflexology’s success around the mid-1920s was that it became understood as an epistemic framework which extended beyond a purely ‘Bekhterevian’ programme to include also, prominently, the Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov’s related but distinct paradigm of reflexology which emerged out of neurophysiology rather than neuropsychiatry. It was Pavlov’s student and associate, Nikolai Ivanovich Krasnogorskii (1882–1961), who pioneered the application of Pavlovian experiments to children, focusing on the swallowing and salivation reflexes—a topic on which he published as early as 1907–8.⁹⁸ Pavlov had many followers who promoted his version of reflexology alongside and often in competition with that of Bekhterev.⁹⁹ The fact that there seemed to be two parallel versions of reflexology did not do it any harm—quite the contrary. As ⁹⁶ See Andy Byford, ‘V. M. Bekhterev in Russian Child Science, 1900s–1920s: “Objective Psychology” / “Reflexology” as a Scientific Movement’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2016, 52(2): 99–123. Portions of text in this section of the chapter have been reworked from this article. ⁹⁷ Jaan Valsiner, ‘From Energy to Collectivity: A Commentary on the Development of Bekhterev’s Theoretical Views’, in V. M. Bekhterev, Collective Reflexology, ed. L. H. Strickland (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 1–12. ⁹⁸ Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 312–13. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film The Mechanics of the Brain (1926), which popularized Pavlov’s work, included demonstrations of Pavlovian experiments on children. For more on this film see Ana Olenina, ‘The Junctures of Child Psychology and Soviet Avant-Garde Film: Representations, Influences, Applications’, in A Companion to Soviet Children’s Literature and Film, ed. Olga Voronina (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 72–98. ⁹⁹ For example, Pavlov’s disciple and collaborator Iu. P. Frolov argued that the school should be understood as an apparatus for creating conditional reflexes. See I. A. Ariamov, ‘Refleksologicheskii metod v pedagogike’, NPkNSh, 1926, no. 2: 43–6.

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Raymond Bauer has pointed out, Bekhterev’s and Pavlov’s reflexology intermixed in the popular mind of this era, something that at times created a degree of confusion, but ultimately helped raise reflexology’s prestige.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, to have behind this concept two such ‘big beasts’, each with an army of disciples, a wellarticulated theoretical framework, and an established research base, made reflexology a player to be reckoned with. Finally, reflexology was promoted in a way that permitted it to combine relatively freely with other approaches in the field of psycho-neurology, not least psychoanalysis. Indeed, psychoanalysis was fostered at a number of institutes that Bekhterev had established in Petrograd/Leningrad, in which reflexology was otherwise dominant. The link between reflexology and psychoanalysis was also encouraged by some of the key members of the Bolshevik elite, such as Lev Trotskii who wrote enthusiastically to Ivan Pavlov about the potentials of such an alliance.¹⁰¹ Their combination seemed to be welcomed even by researchers who were not themselves strict followers of either movement, such as, notably, Vygotskii.¹⁰² In its pre-revolutionary incarnation, as ‘objective psychology’, Bekhterev’s reflexology had a proven track record of empirical research focused on infants and children of preschool age, as developed at PNI’s Pedology Institute (PI).¹⁰³ The domain where reflexological research was arguably on safest ground was infant development. This strand of research was after the revolution turned into so-called ‘genetic [or developmental] reflexology’ (geneticheskaia refleksologiia), led by Nikolai Matveevich Shchelovanov (1892–1981), a graduate of PNI, whose base eventually became the Brain Institute.¹⁰⁴ Bekhterev had, however, conceived reflexology as a framework that comprehensively accounted for all stages of human development and all forms human activity, which meant that it was essential for reflexology to prove its applicability in education more generally. The 1924 psycho-neurology congress, a key event in reflexology’s promotion at this time, had attracted a substantial contingent of teachers, something that encouraged the promotion of reflexology as a framework for developing a radical new understanding of the education process more generally, with particular focus on the development of efficient techniques for forging new skills or undoing bad habits. The branch of reflexological research that focused on education was dubbed ‘pedagogical reflexology’ (pedagogicheskaia refleksologiia). The leader

¹⁰⁰ Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology, 55–7. ¹⁰¹ Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, 249. ¹⁰² Van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 78–111. ¹⁰³ See discussion in Chapter 2, ‘The Upbringing of Man’. For more on the evolution of reflexological research focused on child development, see Jaan Valsiner, Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 52–60, and Balashov, Pedologiia, 53–60, 73–8. ¹⁰⁴ N. M. Shchelovanov (ed.), Voprosy geneticheskoi refleksologii i pedologii mladenchestva (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe meditsinskoe izdatel′stvo, 1929). T. D. Martsinkovskaia, ‘Refleksologicheskie issledovaniia detskogo razvitiia’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1990, no. 2: 117–25.

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of this strand of work at the Brain Institute was Vera Nikolaevna Osipova (1876–1954).¹⁰⁵ Pedagogical reflexology targeted especially those aspects of early Soviet educational reformism directed at rapid economic development and mass industrialization. Modelling education on the industrial process, pedagogical reflexology studied children’s relationship to work, levels of concentration, speed and accuracy of attending to particular school tasks, stamina and exhaustion patterns. Many of these topics had previously been studied by school hygienists, but they now acquired a reflexological framing. The underlying ambition of pedagogical reflexology was to base teaching on the organization of class activities that would be understood as a system of stimuli for generating and fixing desired responses.¹⁰⁶ Experiments that Osipova carried out on schoolchildren grew out of experiments that Bekhterev had devised at his psychiatric clinic in the 1900s. These were arguably closest to Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, although they had as their output physical movement, rather than salivation, and used as stimulus electroshocks, rather than food. Osipova placed the child in an isolated chamber and then endeavoured to create ‘associational reflexes’ by applying a low electrical current to the child’s hand alongside visual and/or audio stimuli.¹⁰⁷ In somewhat younger children, or children who displayed anxiety during the experiment, electroshocks were replaced by verbal commands. This adjustment was subsequently presented as a development likely to be of practical use in the classroom.¹⁰⁸ In themselves, these experiments were not geared towards direct and immediate practical application. Rather more important in promoting the role of reflexology in education was to present reflexological theory as the most advanced conceptual framework for rethinking the educational process. This adaptation of reflexology was done especially by Ivan Antonovich Ariamov (1884–1958) who taught courses on the subject at a number of teacher-training colleges and published both textbooks and articles on reflexology and pedagogy.¹⁰⁹ Ariamov ¹⁰⁵ Osipova was one of the first graduates from the Women’s Medical Institute. She worked in Bekhterev’s St Petersburg clinic (1902–6) and at Kazan′ University (1906–16). She returned to Petrograd to head the psychology lab at the Central Pedagogical Museum. From 1920 she was employed at the Brain Institute. See S. E. Drapkina, ‘K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. N. Osipovoi’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1976, no. 3: 146–8. Osipova was not, of course, the only one developing pedagogical reflexology. Another important contributor at this time was Avgusta Aleksandrovna DernovaIarmolenko who authored Refleksologicheskii podkhod v pedagogike (Leningrad: LGONO, 1925). ¹⁰⁶ V. P. Protopopov, V. M. Bekhterev, kak refleksolog (Khar′kov: Nauchnaia mysl′, 1928), 6–7. ¹⁰⁷ V. A. Artemov, Detskaia eksperimental′naia psikhologiia: Shkol′nyi vozrast (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izdatel′stvo, 1929). ¹⁰⁸ For more detail see: V. N. Osipova, ‘Obzor deiatel′nosti refleksologicheskoi laboratorii po detstvu Gosudarstvennogo Refleksologicheskogo Instituta Mozga v Leningrade’, VIVL, 1926, no. 1: 95–9. V. N. Osipova, ‘Shkola V. M. Bekhtereva i pedologiia’, Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1: 10–26. V. N. Osipova, ‘Shkol′nyi kollektiv s narusheniem ravnovesiia deiatel′nosti tsentral′noi nervnoi sistemy’, VIVL, 1928, no. 2: 7–19. V. N. Osipova, ‘V. M. Bekhterev, kak pedolog’, VIVL, 1928, no. 1: 5–6. ¹⁰⁹ E.g. see: I. A. Ariamov, Refleksologiia i pedagogika (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1925). I. A. Ariamov, Obshchie osnovy refleksologii (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1926). I. A. Ariamov, Refleksologiia detskogo vozrasta (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1926).

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was a follower of Pavlov rather than Bekhterev, but it was rare for the promotion of reflexology to teachers to insist on differentiating between Bekhterev’s notion of ‘associational reflexes’ and Pavlov’s notion of ‘conditional reflexes’. What was far more important was for reflexology to be shown to be supporting Narkompros’ reform of the education process, which was precisely how reflexology was promoted on the pages of Krupskaia’s influential pedagogical journal On the Path to the New School (Na putiakh k novoi shkole).¹¹⁰ In the mid-1920s, the promotion of reflexology in the sphere of education was not without success. Al′bert Petrovich Pinkevich, a leading figure in the Bolshevik educational establishment at the time, spoke very positively about reflexology’s promises for education. Around the mid-1920s, the Ukrainian Commissariat of Enlightenment briefly decreed that reflexology rather than psychology should serve as the foundation of a new, scientific pedagogy. However, the promotion of reflexology to the education profession required a continuous, and quite laborious, translation of the specialist, esoteric language of Bekhterevian or Pavlovian neuroscience into the language of traditional pedagogy and lay psychology familiar to the wider teaching masses. This translational work was precisely what intermediaries such as Ariamov understood as their task. Their promotion of reflexology involved mostly reformulating, explaining, and then resolving familiar educational concerns using simplified reflexological terminology.¹¹¹ Yet empirical research focused on the creation of conditional or associational reflexes in children was invariably accompanied by caveats that more time was needed before such foundational research could lead to the development of new classroom techniques. In consequence, although there was an appreciation of the science underpinning reflexology and some excitement about its promises, its applicability seemed remote. The benefits of simply recasting the education process through the lens of reflexological theory was unclear to practitioners, who still needed to be convinced of the relevance of the innovations that this programme was bringing to the table. With Bekhterev’s death at the end of 1927, the influence of his school of reflexology started to wane irreparably among scientists as well, although both ‘genetic reflexology’ and ‘pedagogical reflexology’ continued to be promoted by the Brain Institute as potentially valuable strands of research up until 1931. However, with the advent of state-enforced accelerated industrial modernization from around 1928, a new set of priorities started to

I. A. Ariamov, Osnovy pedologii (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1927). I. A. Ariamov, ‘Refleksologicheskoe obosnovanie vospitaniia navykov’, VP, 1927, no. 10: 75–8. T. Ivanova, ‘Kompleks i distsiplina v svete refleksologii’, VP, 1928, no. 4: 108–18. ¹¹⁰ I. A. Ariamov, ‘Refleksologiia i pedagogika’, NPkNSh, 1924, no. 2: 10–17; no. 3: 48–55. ¹¹¹ E.g. Ariamov, ‘Refleksologicheskii metod v pedagogike’. E. P. Radin, ‘K voprosu o pedologicheskoi i refleksologicheskoi klassifikatsii podvizhnykh shkol′nykh i vneshkol′nykh igr’, NPkNSh, 1925, no. 5: 129–39. B. M. Belous, ‘Fiziologicheskaia teoriia vnushaemosti detei’, NPkNSh, 1926, 5–6: 22–6.

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shape the dynamics of Soviet child science—institutional centralization, political alignment, and social discipline. In this context, there was increasing pressure on the Soviet sciences of the child to come together under a single banner. ‘Pedology’ was at this point turned into a framework of the field’s integration—a process to which the development of specific programmes of innovation, including reflexology, was now expected to be subordinated. This critical shift in the pattern of mobilization of Soviet sciences of the child is the focus of the next chapter.

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6 The Making of Pedology Science and the State

By studying what a child is, according to what laws a child develops, and by which methods this development can be regulated and directed, pedology will shed light on what is perhaps the most important of all productive processes – the process of producing a new human being . . . Anatolii Lunacharskii, speech at the First All-Union Pedology Congress (27 December 1927 – 4 January 1928)¹ Pedology as an integrated and independent science of the development of the child can be formed methodologically and practically only on the basis of a new understanding of its object. Lev Vygotskii, ‘On the Question of Pedology and its Neighbouring Sciences’ (1931)²

Pedology as a Framework of Integration During the first half of the 1920s, pedology arose in the Soviet Union as a means of mobilizing a heterogeneous body of scientific work around the child as an object of state interest. In this early period, pedology expanded mostly as a loose umbrella framework that drew researchers to it without their needing to concern themselves too much about whether pedology was a discipline in its own right, and, if so, what its epistemological structure might be or how exactly their own work fitted into it. However, in the second half of the 1920s, pedology as a framework for professional and disciplinary mobilization began to shift in both form and function.³

¹ ‘Iz rechei N. K. Kurpskoi, N. I. Bukharina, A. V. Lunacharskogo, N. A. Semashko na Pervom pedologicheskom s″ezde’, Na putiakh k novoi shkole (hereafter NPkNSh), 1928, no. 1: 9–14 (9). ² Lev S. Vygotskii, ‘K voprosu o pedologii i smezhnykh s nei naukakh’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 52–8 (56). ³ The end of the 1920s is commonly identified as a decisive moment in the evolution of pedology in the Soviet Union. See: A. A. Piskoppel′ and L. P. Shchedrovitskii, ‘Mificheskoe i real′noe v sud′be sovetskoi pedologii’, Psikhologicheskii zhurhnal, 1991, no. 6, 123–36 (127–9). Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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Crucial to these changes was the fact that Narkompros’ educational reforms started to encounter serious obstacles as they reached the point of wider implementation.⁴ The radical progressivism that was expected to shape the new school was not received well by teachers or parents or those responsible for developing Soviet industry. The flagship State Academic Council (GUS) school programmes were poorly understood, resisted, criticized, or ignored. Teaching staff were not suitably trained to implement them, nor was there infrastructure to make it work, apart from at a few select experimental schools. The new curriculum was failing to meet even the most basic expectations: levels of literacy and numeracy were not rising fast enough; children were not being trained up to join the workforce, nor equipped with sufficient knowledge to move smoothly on to the next level of education; lack of discipline was seen as a major obstacle to making progress on all these fronts.⁵ Pressure was coming from many different sides—the industry lobbying for better vocational training, the Komsomol for the school to do more to shape the future generations’ ‘class consciousness’. Narkompros’ reforms were also criticized as administratively unworkable by local educational bureaucracies charged with implementing them. The Commissariat was thus forced to start making concessions as early as 1926, accepting partial reintroductions of elements of more traditional educational methods, especially in the teaching of literacy and numeracy, and this mostly in acknowledgement of the compromises that were already being made in practice. It was impossible, however, to appease everyone through sheer compromise and concession. What is more, the leaders of Narkompros were by no means ready to give up on the core principles of progressive reform. In seeking to find a suitable response to the various criticisms, the Commissariat, instead of retreating, looked to make its reformism more robust. The main issue underpinning the crisis was understood to be a disconnect between the ideals of the reformists and the realities that the teachers faced in their daily work. The question was how to bridge the gap between the two. A viable connector of ideals and realities was identified in science: firstly, scientific research was expected to enable a much better grasp of the biopsychosocial characteristics of the still poorly known mass schoolchild population, as well as a much clearer understanding of the social environments in which the new school needed to operate; secondly, science was expected to

F. A. Fradkin, Pedologiia: mify i deistvitel′nost′ (Moscow: Znanie, 1991), 19–20. A. V. Brushlinskii (ed.), Psikhologicheskaia nauka v Rossii XX stoletiia: Problemy teorii i istorii (Moscow: Inst. psikh. RAN, 1997), 59. E. M. Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii v pervoi treti XX veka (St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2012), 131. However, it is rarely made explicit that the shift that took place at this point was in pedology as a social form, namely a framework of mobilization of a body of scientific and professional work. ⁴ On what follows see especially Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 67–105. ⁵ E.g. see Ia. Chulit, ‘Iz rezul′tatov odnogo obsledovaniia shkoly-semiletki’, NPkNSh, 1926, no. 2: 76–84.

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establish the general laws of child development that any reformist innovation had to be aligned with if it wanted to succeed. Of course, Narkompros had cast science as a key contributor to its revolutionary transformation of upbringing and education from the very start. However, for most of the early 1920s, educational reformism, including research carried out with a view to developing novel teaching methods, was led principally by educationalists rather than scientists.⁶ Research on child biopsychosocial development and behaviour ran mostly in parallel with this work and was often brought in only post-factum to lend additional legitimacy to the often controversial new pedagogical frameworks. By contrast, what Narkompros embarked on in the latter half of the 1920s—and this specifically in order to bolster its reformist cause in a moment of crisis—was to harness science much more directly and systematically to its ongoing construction of the new school. Scientific research was never going to be the ultimate arbiter of educational policy, but Narkompros resolved to mobilize it as a key instrument of reform in a politically and administratively far more hands-on way than it had done previously. For science to meet these expectations and fulfil its pivotal role in the construction of a new system of universal and progressive state education, it was essential that the scientists themselves reorganize their approach to the task at hand. For part of the blame for the disconnect between educational practice, educational reformism, and scientific research lay at the feet of science. Indeed, the science that had expanded under the banner of pedology during the early 1920s now appeared too fragmented and too self-absorbed. In consequence, from around 1927, pedology started to be developed into a rather different type of formation—namely, a framework of integration. What this meant was not just the coming together of disparate theoretical and methodological strands of scientific research, but the joining up of science, reformism, and practice. ‘Pedology’ was to stand for ‘science’ that was as such expected to infuse and interconnect the design, delivery, and management of a distinctive, Soviet, system of childcare, upbringing, and education. This entailed not so much a subordination of science to state interests, but the hardwiring of science to government policymaking, to the coordination of policy implementation, and to the occupational work of state-employed practitioners. Put slightly differently, pedology stood for science conceptualized as a politically and administratively supported extension of the state itself—a ‘state science’. Whilst pedology as a ‘state science’ was clearly much broader than a scientific discipline—its identity and legitimacy deriving from a structurally and symbolically complex alliance between the academic community and the political elite running the state—the push for ‘integration’ prompted leading researchers in the

⁶ A. B. Zalkind, ‘Voprosy pedologii v SSSR’, in Pedologiia i vospitanie, ed. A. B. Zalkind (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1928), 3–14 (3–4).

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field to argue that pedology also had to become a far more cohesive disciplinary formation.⁷ For sure, pedology could not but remain complex and methodologically plural, but its various components were now expected to cohere into a joint enterprise that had a more explicit common epistemic focus. Articulating epistemic coherence for pedology in the face of its manifestly multidisciplinary character became at this point a conundrum tackled by all the major figures in the field occupying leading positions across the wide network of research institutes, teacher-training establishments, and government advisory committees.

Novelty, Complexity, Synthesis Pavel Petrovich Blonskii (1884–1941) had been one of the chief architects of Narkompros’ school reforms, publicizing his ideas for a labour school as early as 1919 and becoming one of the principal authors of the GUS programmes.⁸ Blonskii was also one of the first to recognize the difficulties that these programmes were facing on the ground and was at the forefront of the abovedescribed shift of approach at Narkompros, arguing that more needed to be done to develop a systematically integrated body of science that would underpin further reforms and guide their implementation. From the mid-1920s, Blonskii, according to his own autobiographical narrative, shifted his intellectual efforts away from educational reformism per se and towards the development of pedology as a science on which any future reform had to be based.⁹ In 1925, his textbook Pedology was published, which became widely used in teacher training across the growing network of pedagogical institutes that Blonskii was helping set

⁷ In 1929, Aron Zalkind suggested that it was only in the last quarter of the 1920s that pedology in Russia finally started to cohere into a discipline properly speaking. See: Zalkind, ‘Voprosy pedologii’ and A. B. Zalkind, ‘Osnovnye issledovatel′skie pedologicheskie uchrezhdeniia v SSSR i napravleniia ikh raboty’, Pedagogicheskia entsiklopediia, vol. 3, ed. A. G. Kalashnikov (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1929), 323–32. ⁸ On Blonskii see: V. Kolbanovskii, ‘Pavel Petrovich Blonskii kak psikholog’, in P. P. Blonskii, Izbrannye psikhologicheskie proizvedeniia (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1964), 5–29. A. V. Petrovskii and M. G. Danil′chenko, ‘P. P. Blonskii kak pedagog i psikholog’, in P. P. Blonskii, Izbrannye pedagogicheskie i psikhologicheskie sochineniia, 2 vols., vol. 1, ed. A. B. Petrovskii (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1979), 8–29. Ol′ga Alekseevna Stepunina, Stanovlenie i razvitie pedologicheskoi kontseptsii P. P. Blonskogo: Aspect izucheniia i formirovaniia lichnosti, Avtoreferat (Moscow: RAO Inst. Teorii Obrazovaniia i Pedagogiki, 1995). Nikolai Petrovich Senchenkov, Pedagogicheskie problemy shkol′noi pedologii v trudakh P. P. Blonskogo, Aftoreferat (Moscow: Smolenskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1999). On the GUS programmes see P. P. Blonskii, Novye programmy GUSa i uchitel′ (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1924; also published in 1925). For their context see Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 69–73. ⁹ P. P. Blonskii, ‘Kak ia stal pedagogom i imenno takim, kakim ia stal’, in P. P. Blonskii v ego pedagogicheskikh vyskazyvaniiakh, ed. I. I. Rufin (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928), 5–17 (15–16). For Blonskii’s memoirs up to the mid-1920s, see P. P. Bonskii, Moi vospominaniia (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1971). See also Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 121–36.

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up during the 1920s.¹⁰ In the same year he published his pedologically-informed Foundations of Pedagogy, which had two further editions (in 1927 and 1929), and a practically-oriented handbook Pedology in the Mass School of the First Level, which saw as many as seven editions between 1925 and 1930.¹¹ Across this period, and especially from 1927–8, pedology started to be promoted in a much more concerted way as the science to be deferred to and engaged with by all those involved in the construction of the Soviet Union’s distinctive education system. However, the pedology that underpinned Soviet education could not be simply an appropriation and adaptation of the pedology that had been invented in the West at the end of the nineteenth century and then pursued in tsarist Russia. A Soviet pedology was a discipline to be defined anew.¹² For sure, no one in the Soviet Union was really starting from scratch; but given that pedology had not become established as a successful independent science anywhere else in the world, it did not seem so difficult to marginalize its earlier institutional history, to rhetorically reject previous international attempts at constituting an independent ‘science of the child’, and to instead reinvent pedology as something directly associated with the Soviet revolutionary project.¹³ Klara Pavlovna Veselovskaia (née Livshits, 1882–c.1956), author of The Pedological Practicum: A Manual for Practical Exercises in Pedology (1928, 2nd edition), suggested that while pedology might have been born in the West, it had failed to take proper root there and had broken up into a range of distinct specialisms.¹⁴ By contrast, it was only in Soviet Russia, Veselovskaia argued, that pedology had begun to evolve into a cohesive discipline in its own right, and this principally by being strategically pursued as a synthesis of otherwise disparate strands of knowledge.¹⁵ Vygotskii too famously declared that pedology in the West had by the end of the third decade of the twentieth century become little more than a ‘living corpse’ (zhivoi trup), having failed to make the most of its specificity, which, according to him, lay in the necessarily holistic conception of its object of study.¹⁶ ‘Soviet pedology’ was, by contrast, presented as a bold new ¹⁰ P. P. Blonskii, Pedologiia (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1925). See also P. P. Blonskii, ‘Vozrastnaia pedologiia’, in Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 1, ed. A. G. Kalashnikov (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1927), 151–78. ¹¹ Pavel P. Blonskii, Pedologiia v massovoi shkole pervoi stupeni (Moscow: Rabotnik prosvehscheniia, 1925). Pavel P. Blonskii, Osnovy pedagogiki (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1925). According to Blonskii himself (Blonskii, ‘Kak ia stal pedagogom’, 15), the title of the latter ought to have been ‘The Pedological Foundations of Pedagogy’. ¹² Piskoppel′ and Shchedrovitskii, ‘Mificheskoe i real′noe’, 129. ¹³ Zalkind, ‘Voprosy pedologii’. ¹⁴ Klara P. Veselovskaia, Pedologicheskii praktikum: Posobie dlia prakticheskikh zaniatii po pedologii (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928), 7–14. This is the second, significantly revised and expanded edition. The first one was published in 1924. The new edition was produced specifically in the context of turning pedology into a systematic discipline. ¹⁵ Veselovskaia, Pedologicheskii praktikum, 10. ¹⁶ See Vygotskii, ‘K voprosu o pedologii’, 57, where he subjects Western pedology to critical analysis as a foil for defining the true identity of pedology as such. The point that Vygotskii makes is reiterated

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project of building an, in terms of both scale and approach, unprecedented scientific framework for understanding the child and its development, serving as a rational basis for systematically managing child development across the entire society, in ways that were possible only in socialism. Indeed, the fact that 1927 was the tenth anniversary of the October revolution offered plenty of opportunities to present ‘Soviet pedology’ as a scientific enterprise with its own ten-year-long history and record of achievement.¹⁷ As Stepan S. Molozhavyi (1879–1937), author of the Programme for the Study of the Behaviour of the Child or the Child Collective (1924), mused in 1928: ‘Pedology as a unified and integrated complex of scientific knowledge about the child, with its own specific theoretical and practical tasks, is the child of our time, the child of our pressing social aspirations and our latest scientific achievements.’¹⁸ However, the key characteristic of ‘Soviet pedology’ was not meant to be novelty per se, but the unity of the enterprise—a unity that was still to be achieved. As Vygotskii highlighted in 1928, despite the fact that there were already many individuals and groups in the Soviet Union doing pedology in different ways, a ‘Soviet pedology’ was yet to emerge through the integration of all this diverse activity.¹⁹ Negotiating the coherence of this enterprise’s epistemic framework and dealing with the vagueness of its epistemic focus remained a challenge.²⁰ The most common starting point was the presentation of pedology as an inherently complex science that needed to be built around the developing child as an inherently complex object.²¹ At the same time, though, what was meant to distinguish pedology as a science was its epistemic orientation towards ‘synthesis’. Pedology

to an extent in recent historiography, say Carlo Trombetta, ‘La pédologie russe et soviétique. Naissance et chute d’un mouvement scientifique’, in Une science du développement humain est-elle possible? Controverses du début du XXe siècle, ed. Janette Friedrich, Rita Hofstetter, and Bernard Schneuwly (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 65–81. ¹⁷ See Ivan Ariamov, ‘10 let sovetskoi pedologii’, Vestnik prosveshcheniia (hereafter VP), 1927, no. 12: 68–75. This was his speech at the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the October revolution at the Research Institute of Scientific Pedagogy at Moscow State University (Issledovatel′skii Institut Nauchnoi Pedagogiki pri 1 MGU). ¹⁸ See Stepan S. Molozhavyi, ‘Nauka o rebenke v ee printsipakh i metodakh’, Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1: 27–39 (27). On Molozhavyi more generally see especially D. Karoli, ‘Kontseptsiia S. S. Molozhavogo: Mezhdu istoricheskim monizmom i represiiami pedologii’, in Istoriko-pedagogicheskoe znanie v nachale III tysiacheletiia; istoriia pedagogiki kak pedagogicheskaia i istoricheskaia nauka. Materialy Desiatoi mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Moskva, 13 noiabria 2014 g., ed. Grigorii B. Kornetov (Moscow: ASOU, 2014), 79–103. See also Stepan S. Molozhavyi, Programma izucheniia povedeniia rebenka ili detskogo kollektiva (Moscow: Izd. Opyt. Masterskoi ped. Teatra Glavsotsvosa, 1924). His major influence was on preschool education. See S. Molozhavyi and E. Molozhavaia, Pedologicheskie puti doshkol′nogo vospitaniia (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izd., 1931). ¹⁹ L. S. Vygotskii, ‘Itogi s″ezda’, Narodnoe prosveshchenie, 1928, no. 2: 56–67 (56). ²⁰ A. V. Petrovskii, ‘Zapret na kompleksnoe issledovanie detstva’, in Represirovannaia nauka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 126–35. ²¹ A. A. Piskoppel′, ‘Pedologiia i psikhotekhnika: Istoricheskii opyt metodologicheskogo oformleniia i obosnovaniia kompleksnykh nauchno-tekhnicheskikh distsiplin’, Medologiia i istoriia psikhologii, 2006, 1(2): 47–56.

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was envisaged as a framework for studying the child that was more complete and more ‘dialectical’ than the inevitably partial perspectives generated by narrower, specialist disciplines such as the anatomy, physiology, or psychology of child development.²² This conception found its most explicit articulation in Vygotskii’s writings on the subject, but it was embraced by most others too.²³ Vygotskii’s own position in pedology has been a matter of some debate, given that his work is normally viewed as exceeding the parameters of what is conventionally understood as ‘Soviet pedology’.²⁴ Vygotskii taught pedology as a subject to trainee teachers from 1924 until his death in 1934, and he engaged vocally in the integration of pedology as a scientific enterprise at the turn of the 1920s–1930s. However, he is in this context usually recognized as an independent-minded contributor who inscribed into ‘Soviet pedology’ his own distinctive theories of child, human, or mental development. This was, indeed, precisely how he himself understood pedology— as an overarching frame that enabled and encouraged free, original, innovative thinking, while at the same time ensuring that all research, however wide-ranging, would in the end coalesce around a common epistemic focus; and this by virtue of the fact that pedology’s epistemological orientation was, by definition, meant to be towards epistemic synthesis. ‘Synthesis’ mapped pedology’s inherently multipronged approach onto what was at the same time presented as its fundamentally holistic conceptualization of its object.²⁵ Crucially, though, the notion of ‘synthesis’ that was elaborated at the end of the 1920s was not meant to emerge out of some eclectic interweaving of different strands of innovation in the human sciences, as had been typical of the field in the first half of the 1920s (say, in the intertwining of reflexology and psychoanalysis, as discussed in the previous chapter). At the same time, it was quite clear that pedology’s synthesis was not going to come from some singular theory or ²² L. S. Vygotskii, ‘Pedologiia i smezhnye s neiu nauki’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 7–8: 12–22 (14). ²³ E.g. Vygotskii, ‘Pedologiia i smezhnye s neiu nauki’. See also L. S. Vygotskii, ‘Psikhotekhnika i pedologiia’, Psikhotekhnika i psikhofiziologiia truda, 1931, no. 2–3: 173–84. Compare with A. Zalkind, ‘O metodologii tselostnogo izucheniia v pedologii’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2: 1–17. ²⁴ See: Ivan Z. Holowinsky, ‘Vygotsky and the History of Pedology’, School Psychology International, 1988, 9: 123–8. René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 293–327. E. M. Strukchinskaia, ‘L. S. Vygotskii o pedologii i smezhnykh s neiu naukakh’, in Sofiia: Rukopisnyi zhurnal Obshchestva revnitelei russkoi filosofii, 2002, vyp. 5 (http:///virlib.eunnet.net/sofia/05-2002/text/0523; last accessed 8 July 2005). Guillaume Garreta, ‘Pragmatisme et pédologie: Dewey, Vygotski et la pédagogie soviétique des années 1920’, in Une science du développement, 107–36. ²⁵ Pedology’s methodological pluralism was not a problem in itself: it was perfectly rational for a science studying a complex phenomenon not to seek to limit its range of potentially useful instruments of investigation. There was, in fact, considerable interest within the field in developing and perfecting new methods and thus little pressure to constrain the expansion of pedology’s research arsenal as such. The question of what methods were appropriate concerned not their multiplicity or eclectic use per se, but their objectivity, validity, and sometimes, of course, their politico-ideological implications. See for example, the discussion of mental testing in Ia. Shapiro, ‘Osnovvnye voprosy pedologii’, VP, 1927, no. 7–8: 65–76 (69–76).

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dominant conceptual framework, to which all research would be adhering by default. Rather, ‘synthesis’ was to be arrived at ‘dialectically’, in and through pedological inquiry as such. What distinguished those who were at this point actively constructing the identity of ‘Soviet pedology’—not just Vygotskii, but Blonskii, Molozhavyi, Zalkind, and others—was that their respective intellectual backgrounds and interests, their distinctive modes of thinking and forms of writing, in themselves exemplified the (various) ways in which concepts, methods, and findings that came from a range of different disciplinary domains and conceptual frameworks in the human sciences could, in fact, be brought together—both in the conceptual work that went on as part of theory-building and in the analytical work that went on in the context of empirical research.²⁶ In other words, the work, discourse, and expertise of the leaders in the field, taken collectively, provided paradigms for what ‘pedological inquiry’ as scientific practice inherently oriented towards ‘synthesis’ ultimately meant. Thus, what pedology was as a science was ultimately embodied in these leading figures’ general writings on the subject and especially their textbooks directed at an audience of disciples and trainees. The authority of such exempla of pedology as science was often reinforced by arguments that pedology could not but be ‘difficult’; and this would also be regularly accompanied by denunciations of the ‘hackwork’ carried out by amateurs or underqualified personnel who believed (mistakenly) that pedology as science could be done in a routine and mechanical way.²⁷

Pedology as a Science of Development Ultimately, though, the teleological ‘synthesis’ that Vygotskii and others had in mind was derived principally from their conceptualization of pedology as a human science that, while being tasked with solving various concrete, practical problems of child development, upbringing, and education, also entailed, at its core, a general theory of human development. Despite the fact that pedology’s mobilization in the late 1920s was driven by the imperative of aligning scientific research with policymaking and occupational practice, those engaged in defining pedology were adamant that, as science, pedology could not be reduced to or exhausted by its applied dimension. Even the otherwise practically oriented leaders of the enterprise, such as Blonskii, insisted that the impact and legitimacy of pedology in the practical realm were contingent on its development as a general ²⁶ Petrovskii (in ‘Zapret’) argues that despite the drive towards synthesis, the diversity of models on offer meant that Soviet pedology never integrated epistemologically and was merely forced to do so politically. However, the idea of epistemic synthesis was not necessarily about pedology’s unity as a disciplinary project, but about its epistemic orientation. ²⁷ See P. P. Blonskii, ‘Kak obespechit′ budushchim uchiteliam znanie vozrastnykh osobennostei detei’, Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie, 1934, no. 6: 40–4 (42).

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human science. Rather than envisaging it as functional expertise supporting the management of children’s services and educational institutions, Blonskii and others ultimately saw in pedology a science of first and foremost human ontogenesis, although they also assumed that pedology made vital contributions to the study of human phylogenesis, insofar as child development appeared to be providing critical clues about the evolution—both physical-anthropological and cultural-historical—of humanity as a species.²⁸ It was precisely pedology’s claim over the general theorization of development that came to shape the battle-lines between rival factions within the overall enterprise at the turn of the 1920s–1930s. This juncture in the history of Soviet pedology is usually understood as a period dominated by the clash between the socalled ‘biogenetic’ (e.g. Blonskii’s) and ‘sociogenetic’ (e.g. Zalkind’s) perspectives on child development, with certain other approaches, especially Vygotskii’s ‘cultural-historical’ theory, seen as weaving in between or standing in parallel to them.²⁹ However, the binaries erected here, both in the polemics of the day and in subsequent historiography, often oversimplify the underlying concerns of the scholars in question. The core of this conflict is typically reduced to the question of whether a particular school of thought accords priority to biological or social determinants of development (a variant of the age-old nature vs. nurture debate); and this is then associated with the question of whether greater stress is placed on the influence of environmental factors, above all those of the social environment, or whether development is understood to be governed by inherent, usually biological, laws (supposedly implying determination by ‘heredity’).³⁰ In truth, however, all Soviet scholars framed their object—the developing child and/or child development—as a biosocial phenomenon, meaning that they as a matter of principle recognized that when it came to human development, the ‘social’ and the ‘biological’ were in the final analysis inseparable; that they could be neither neatly disentangled nor linked up in a mechanical way.³¹ Similarly, all scholars worked on the assumption that human development, like the development of any living being, was ultimately driven by the organism’s dynamic ²⁸ P. Ia. Shvartsman and I. V. Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’, in Repressirovannaia nauka, vol. 2 (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), 121–39. ²⁹ Fradkin, Pedologiia, 15–19. ³⁰ This is not, of course, to say that this was not an explicit issue debated as such, and one of the major ones at that. See for example ‘Iz rechei’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 10–12. For a different context in which this question was discussed in the same period—namely that of genetics and eugenics—see Nikolai Krementsov, With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 237–349. ³¹ E.g. see S. S. Molozhavyi, ‘Biologiia i sotsiologiia v ikh vzaimootnoshenii v vospitatel′no-obrazovatel′nom protsesse’, in Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 1, 305–14. Molozhavyi emphasizes the ‘monist’ perspective of pedology. See also Vygotskii, ‘K voprosu o pedologii’, where the failure to bring the biological and social dialectically together is seen as the major failing of Western pedology. See also Zalkind, ‘K voprosu o peresmotre’, 40–1, where he identifies the most recent and progressive phase in pedology’s development as, in his terms, ‘socio-biological’, overcoming the previous, purely ‘biological’ stage.

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relationship to and interaction with its environment, which in the case of humans was in large part, though not exclusively, social and cultural.³² The divergence between scholars had to do less with these binaries in and of themselves and more with their grappling to define the epistemological nature of pedology as a science. Blonskii, who is usually presented as the main representative of the ‘biogenetic’ understanding of child development in Soviet pedology, construed pedology as a science that elaborated the ‘characteristics’ (osobennosti) of ‘childhood’ (detskii vozrast′). He explained that childhood was to be divided into stages, each with its own pattern of characteristics which he dubbed ‘symptom-complexes’ (simptomokompleksy).³³ Crucial here was that these stages were understood as succeeding each other with a certain lawful regularity. Being able to seize and define these regularities as ‘laws’ of child development, was, from Bonskii’s perspective, what made pedology a science. Bearing in mind individual human variation, Blonskii was clear that pedology formulated such laws not in absolute terms but as statistical clusters around the ‘mass’ (i.e. typical, normative) child.³⁴ Blonskii in fact saw both a child’s inherited characteristics and the characteristics of the environment in which the child was growing up not as competing causes or determinants, but as dynamically interlinked, i.e. codependent, variables.³⁵ Blonskii certainly had a penchant for metaphors that reduced humans to the same level as other living beings, not just animals but even plants, which meant that he often rhetorically construed the social environment by analogy with the natural environment. However, Blonskii’s ‘biogenetic’ position did not entail either the marginalization of environmental factors of development or a side-lining of the influence of the social environment. At worst, his conception of the character of this influence was somewhat vague and, overall, rather conventional. The stark opposition of biological vs. social determination was raised deliberately, as a polemical manoeuvre, by those who propounded the ‘sociogenetic’ position, the most prominent among whom was Zalkind.³⁶ In his 1928 work ³² Stepan Molozhavyi, who is commonly placed in the ‘sociogenetic’ camp because he stressed the importance of social factors, also based his approach on the idea that a developing organism sought a form of ‘balance’ with its environment. This idea was, however, critiqued by Ia. I. Shapiro. See Shvartsman and Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’. ³³ Blonskii, Pedologiia, 8. ³⁴ See also P. P. Blonskii, Pedologiia: Uchebnik dlia vysshikh pedagogicheskikh uchebnykh zavedenii (Moscow: Gos. ucheb. ped. izd., 1934). ³⁵ See Fradkin, Pedologiia, 17–18, citing P. P. Blonskii, ‘O nekotorykh vstrechaiushchikhsia u pedologov oshibkakh’, NPkNSh, 1930, no. 6, 9. ³⁶ For more on Zalkind see, for example: A. Etkind ‘Obshchestvennaia atmosfera i individual′nyi put′ uchenogo: opyt prikladnoi psikhologii 20-kh godov’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1990, no. 5: 13–22 (17–20). Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St Petersburg: Meduza, 1993), 326–32. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 272–7. Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia, 16–17. K. Faradzhev, ‘Pedologiia A. Zalkinda i mif o preobrazovanii cheloveka’, in Aron Zalkind, Pedologiia: Utopiia i real′nost′ (Moscow: Agraf, 2001).

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The Fundamental Questions of Pedology, Zalkind launched an attack on the ‘biogenetic’ position by highlighting the danger of pedology, precisely as science, potentially perpetuating class and ethno-racial inequality, and this above all by adhering to the epistemological principle of ‘non-interference’ (nevmeshatel′stvo) in its object of study—namely, in development itself.³⁷ Thus, underlying Zalkind’s position was less an alternative theory of development and more an alternative definition of pedology as science. While Blonskii hoped to construct a science that earned its credentials by mastering the laws of human development, for Zalkind, pedology had little value as a science unless it could master and control development itself. Zalkind’s ‘sociogeneticism’ was ultimately about subordinating the epistemic challenge of articulating a general theory of biopsychosocial development to the techno-political challenge of mastering developmental transformations as such. The emphasis that Zalkind in this context placed on the principle of the ‘plasticity’ of the human, and the child in particular, served mostly as an attack on Blonskii’s understanding of statistically-established psycho-physical norms as expressions of lawful regularities of development.³⁸ Zalkind challenged the very idea that pedology as science should be establishing norms as ways of framing development and he especially critiqued methodologies, such as cognitive tests, through which developmental norms appeared to be enshrined as de facto laws.³⁹ Instead, according to Zalkind, pedology was to be understood as a science that looked for ways through which a given population could be proactively ‘re-engineered’ in the desired direction. Key to this was the creation of a particular ‘technology’ of transformation, which Zalkind in his earlier writings identified with a combination of techniques stemming especially from psychoanalysis and reflexology, but which he now hoped to see developed in ‘Soviet pedology’. As will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, what Zalkind was doing here in his polemic with Blonskii forms part of his political move to assume command of the enterprise of ‘Soviet pedology’, both epistemologically and organizationally. His success in the period between 1928 and 1931 lay in his aligning his version of pedology with the renewed push by the Bolshevik establishment at this juncture to set the country on a course of further revolutionary transformations. Indeed, the much-publicized debate between ‘biogeneticism’ and ‘sociogeneticism’ was staged very publicly and quite consciously as part of the ³⁷ See A. Zalkind, ‘Osnovnye voprosy pedologii’, in Zalkind, Pedologiia: Utopiia i real′nost′, 19–140 (29). The first edition of this work was published as A. B. Zalkind, Osnovnye voprosy pedologii (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1927), while the second edition came out in a small and cheap edition in as many as 33,000 copies. The publication has been reprinted in 2001 in Zalkind, Pedologiia, 19–140. ³⁸ See discussion in Shvartsman and Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’ on the bioplasticity of the child’s organism, which was by no means restricted to figures like Zalkind. ³⁹ See also discussion in Nikolai Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2004), 54–7.

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rhetorical enactment of so-called ‘revolutionary optimism’, which the political establishment was keen to promote at the end of the 1920s.⁴⁰ The role that pedology was assigned in this performance was of a science—a science of human development no less—that confirmed the fundamental assumption on which the Bolshevik revolution was built—namely, that humanity (or, more specifically, its structural inequalities) was not something given by nature, but something socially made; and that it could therefore be both dismantled and rebuilt anew through social and political action of a revolutionary kind.

Pedology and Pedagogy Pedology’s function in further revolutionary transformations was not expected to be merely ritual, rhetorical, or performative. Pedology’s development into a ‘framework of integration’ was tantamount to the mobilization of human and technical resources to be poured into the urgent task of transforming the country’s population into a mass industrial workforce—a suitably qualified, politically educated and economically emancipated proletariat.⁴¹ And indeed, when bringing in pedology to reinforce its reformist agenda, Narkompros was keen to respond to those who critiqued the new school for having failed to support the country’s industrial progress even while placing ‘labour’ at the centre of its conception of progressive education.⁴² In this context, the Soviet school itself came to be construed as effectively a ‘producer’—the producer of new generations of communist labourers. Pedology was certainly expected to play an important role in said ‘production’; however, it was never envisaged as a ‘technical’ science that somehow directly engaged in ‘production’. Rather, it was presented largely as a science that articulated the possibilities of human transformation by supplying systematic knowledge of the ‘factors’ and ‘regularities’ of biopsychosocial development. For sure, it was assumed that such knowledge would also encompass an understanding of the mechanisms through which development could be ‘technically’ controlled (this was where the appeal of reflexology and psychotechnics lay, for instance). However, the actual manipulation of development, especially in the social rather

⁴⁰ Shvartsman and Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’. ⁴¹ See especially excerpt from the speech by Lunacharskii reproduced in ‘Iz rechei’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1, 9, cited in the epigraph to this chapter. ⁴² Pedology of labour did indeed become an important strand of work in the field, with specific focus on schools that fed directly into the production process. See: E. A. Arkin, Ekonomika chelovecheskogo organizma (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1927). B. L. Ol′shanskii, Pedologiia truda (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. ucheb.-pedagog. izd., 1931). Pedologicheskaia rabota s neuspevaiushchim podrostkom fabzaucha (Moscow, 1931). V. A. Artemov, Umstvennyi i fizicheskii trud pionera (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1930). P. E. Iu. Shurpe and V. N. Skosyrev, Pedologicheskii analiz programmy po proizvodstvennomu obucheniiu (Moscow: Biomedgiz, 1935).

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than laboratory context, was not something that pedology as a science was expected to do. Such manipulation was to be achieved through the rationally planned state system of childcare, education, healthcare and welfare. Pedology was tasked only with helping direct the latter’s design and then with monitoring and regulating its functioning. But the execution of the actual day-to-day work of shaping new generations of workers was in the hands of not pedology, but frontline educators of one kind or another. This was why one of the most important contexts in which Soviet pedology grew as a seemingly coherent domain of scientific knowledge was the preparation of future educators. The formation of new teaching cadres was something that all leading figures in Soviet pedology engaged in especially actively. Every single one of them participated in the training of teachers, whether as lecturer, course director, or author of textbooks and manuals, and this usually across several different institutions. And yet, pedology was never presented as an academic form of expertise specific to the educators themselves. The profession-specific expertise of teachers was still, as it had been since the nineteenth century, pedagogy. Pedology was instead constructed and promoted as a science which, precisely by virtue of forming a ‘synthesis’, mediated between, on the one hand, the full range of specialist human sciences, each with its own set of narrower disciplinary concerns and methodological limitations, and, on the other, the expertise of educators as practitioners. This still left open the question of what exactly pedology was to pedagogy, and vice versa. In his early writings, Blonskii had tried to re-imagine pedagogy precisely as a technical science devoted to the ‘cultivation’ (in the agricultural sense) of human beings (chelovekovodstvo), by analogy with crop-production (rastenievodstvo) and animal husbandry (zhivotnovodstvo).⁴³ He thereby turned pedagogy into de facto pedotechnics by analogy with zootechnics (zootekhnika) and phytotechnics (fitotekhnika).⁴⁴ The construction of pedo-logy as a general science of child development did seem to call for the creation of a separate, but dependent, pedo-technics; and pedagogy, if suitably reformed, appeared like a likely candidate for this role. However, this reframing of pedagogy would have resulted in a very particular type of subordination of pedagogy to pedology, in which the former would have been reduced to an applied or technical extension of the latter.⁴⁵

⁴³ See P. P. Blonskii, Pedagogika (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1922), 31, cited in Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, 318. See also Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii, 13. ⁴⁴ See also discussion of pedagogy as ‘pedotechnics’ or ‘experimental anthropotechnics’ in P. P. Blonskii, Pedagogika (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1924), 13. The first edition of Blonskii’s Pedagogika came out in 1922, the second in 1923, and there were as many as six further editions in 1924. The term antropotekhnika (anthropotechnics or anthropotechnique) was also used in the context of eugenics. See Krementsov, With or Without Galton, 247–8. ⁴⁵ See also the more general discussion of the transformation of sciences in the context of revolution in P. P. Blonskii, Reforma nauki (Moscow: Izd. Otd. nar. prosv. MSRD i KD, 1920).

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In practice, though, the relationship between pedology and pedagogy had not changed much since before the revolution: it remained governed by the same core issue that dominated the rise of child study in Russia since the time of Ushinskii— namely, the question of how precisely a new science of the child, to be understood as an all-round anthropology of a developing human organism, should inform or support the professional expertise and occupational practice of teachers. In other words, just as had been the case under the tsars, the articulation of pedology’s identity as science in the Soviet 1920s was performed especially in the context of the professionalization of educators as an occupation in conditions of accelerated expansion.⁴⁶ The question of the relationship between pedology as a science and pedagogy as the expertise of the teaching profession, which included the question of which of these was subordinate to which and how precisely, remained a controversial one, and was consequently kept as ambiguous as ever.⁴⁷ For example, in his efforts to ‘sell’ pedology to teachers, Nikolai Bukharin argued that pedology was merely pedagogy’s ‘servant’ (sluzhanka), but one that directed, rather than obeyed.⁴⁸ Using a different image, the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, suggested that in the ‘brain’ of every Soviet teacher ought to live a ‘small but powerful’ pedologist.⁴⁹ Both these ways of linking pedology as science to the professional identity of teachers was very close, in fact, to how, in the early 1900s, General Apollon Makarov presented the role that the Pedology Section of the Pedagogical Museum of the Army Ministry was expected to play in raising the standards of teaching practice in the Russian empire; and also to how Aleksandr Nechaev promoted his experimental pedagogy to Russian teachers across the 1900s–1910s.⁵⁰ Further parallels with the pre-revolutionary era can be found in the way psychology was taught to future teachers during the Soviet 1920s. Even though psychology as a discipline came under fire for its idealist and subjectivist roots, it continued to feature as the traditional underpinning of pedagogy in teacher training, and teachers still perceived psychological knowledge as particularly relevant to their practice. There were attempts to oust psychology from this role—for example, in the campaign to replace ‘pedagogical psychology’ with ‘pedagogical reflexology’.⁵¹ However, these proved unsuccessful in the end. ⁴⁶ K. Prilutskii, ‘Opyt raboty s uchitel′stvom po pedologii’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 2: 50–6. ⁴⁷ See also S. Shatskii, ‘Pedologiia i pedagogika’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 49–54. ⁴⁸ See excerpt from Bukharin’s speech reproduced in ‘Iz rechei’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1, 10. ⁴⁹ See excerpt from Lunacharskii’s speech reproduced in ibid. ⁵⁰ See Chapter 3, ‘Pedagogy as Science’. Nechaev was still active in the 1920s but moved into psychotechnics. Psychotechnics was institutionalized in parallel with pedology, principally in the context of the organization of mass labour and the military, though its role in education was very important as well. On the interconnection between pedology and psychotechnics see especially Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii. See also L. S. Vygotskii, ‘Pedologiia i psikhotekhnika’, Kulturno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia, 2010, no. 2 (Arkhiv): 105–20. ⁵¹ See the discussion of ‘pedagogical reflexology’ in the previous chapter.

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Potentially more effective was to try and reconfigure psychology for educators into something more acceptable-sounding, such as, for example, ‘pedagogical psychotechnics’.⁵² However, in practice, psychology continued to dominate teachertraining courses and textbooks throughout the 1920s, and psychologists continued to promote psychological methods to schoolteachers, just as they had done before the revolution. Of course, this psychology was framed as emphatically materialist and objectivist; yet its promotion to trainee teachers remained remarkably similar to what had been done in pre-revolutionary times. Both Leningrad-based Mikhail Iakovlevich Basov (1892–1931) and Moscowbased Konstantin Kornilov argued that teacher training must include hands-on initiation into properly scientific forms of psychological inquiry.⁵³ As the director of the State Institute of Experimental Psychology (GIEP), Kornilov championed ‘the experiment’ as that which defined psychology as a materialist science. He in fact simply continued with his pre-revolutionary strategy of promoting the setting up of mini psychology labs in schools and teacher-training establishments—an approach that he had developed in the 1910s both in emulation of and in competition with Nechaev.⁵⁴ Kornilov also incorporated hands-on training in experimental techniques as a key feature of the courses he ran for future educators at the Pedagogical Faculty of the 2nd Moscow State University.⁵⁵ Basov, who taught at the Herzen State Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad, promoted, in turn, a systematic programme of psychological observation of child behaviour in schools, of the kind he had practised as a student and disciple of Aleksandr Lazurskii in the 1910s.⁵⁶ He also supported the use of Lazurskii’s ‘natural experiment’ as a technique that made psychological observation closer to a controlled experiment. Nevertheless, even with its materialist and objectivist credentials tightened, psychology was ultimately unable to claim the status of the dominant science

⁵² The experimental educational psychology that Nechaev had been promoting to teachers in the 1910s under the name ‘experimental pedagogy’ was by the end of the 1920s being recast as ‘pedagogical psychotechnics’. Vygotskii understood ‘pedagogical psychotechnics’ (pedagogicheskaia psikhotekhnika) as a sub-strand of psychotechnics that focused on educational problems. See Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii, 13. In fact, although ‘experimental pedagogy’ was still used in its original sense in the early 1920s, by the end of the decade Vygotskii used it to label what was in fact pédagogie expériencée, i.e. educational experimentation practised in experimental schools (opytnye shkoly) with a view to solving didactic problems. ⁵³ N. A. Danilicheva, ‘Metody psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia shkol′nikov v praktike uchitelei 20-30-kh godov’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1976, no. 5: 143–7. ⁵⁴ See K. N. Kornilov, N. A. Rybnikov, and V. E. Smirnov, Prosteishie shkol′nye psikhologicheskie opyty (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1922; 4th edition). The first edition came out in 1915, the second in 1916, the third in 1918. ⁵⁵ K. N. Kornilov (ed.), Praktikum po eksperimental′noi psikhologii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927). ⁵⁶ M. Ia. Basov, Metodika psikhologicheskikh nabliudenii nad det′mi (Moscow: Gos. izd., 1924, 2nd edition; 1926, 3rd edition). M. Ia. Basov (ed.), Pedagog i issledovatel′skaia rabota nad det′mi (Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1925). On Basov’s conception of child psychological development and its study see also Jaan Valsiner, Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 166–206.

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underpinning pedagogy, as would have been the case in tsarist times. While in the early 1920s it was still unclear which new science might assume this role, during the latter half of the 1920s, pedology emerged as the only viable candidate, and this in part on account of the strategically broad and vague way in which it was being conceptualized. Indeed, by the end of the 1920s, all psychologists who were in one way or another engaged in training teachers were prompted to effectively ‘fold’ their courses in psychology to educators into courses in pedology. This was essentially what Basov did with his 1928 General Foundations of Pedology, while Kornilov added the term ‘pedological’ to the title of the fifth edition of his textbook (the first edition of which came out before the revolution), renaming it Simple School Psychological and Pedological Experiments (1927).⁵⁷ At the same time, given that one of Narkompros’ key goals was to ensure teachers were fully on board with its reforms, there was no appetite to try and subordinate pedagogy as expertise and teaching as practice to pedology as science. Rather, as suggested above, pedology was promoted to teachers as a synthetic mediator positioned in between the various specialist biopsychosocial sciences and the teachers’ own professional expertise. This also meant that the relationship between pedology and pedagogy remained tense. In practice, the principal means through which the ‘tiny pedologist’ would (in Lunacharskii’s terms) enter the teacher’s ‘brain’, in order to issue beneficent guidance, was by pedology assuming a more prominent, officially prescribed role in teacher training. Indeed, from 1928 onwards there was a more concerted effort than before to ensure that pedology featured as a compulsory foundation in the preparation of educational cadres at all pedagogical institutes across the country, through new or revamped lecture programmes, textbooks, and readers. On the other hand, the main way in which pedology would act as (in Bukharin’s terms) a ‘servant’—supporting, but also directing—the pedagogical process, was through the constitution and expansion of the so-called ‘school pedology service’, which included a more systematic development of the role of the ‘school pedologist’. As will be discussed in the next chapter, these two became the principal forms in which ‘Soviet pedology’ existed in the 1930s.

Inaugurating a ‘State Science’ The push for integration initiated towards the end of the 1920s amounted to much more than defining pedology as science in epistemic terms, whether in its ‘basic’ or

⁵⁷ K. N. Kornilov, Prosteishie shkol′nye psikhologicheskie i pedologicheskie opyty (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1927). M. Ia. Basov, Obshchie osnovy pedologii (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1928). The second edition of the latter came out in 1931; see also the republication of this work (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2007), edited by E. V. Levchenko.

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‘applied’ dimensions. Arguably even more important was the integration of the field’s institutional and professional structures—something that both its political and scientific leadership embarked upon with eagerness from 1927. The event that was to serve as a rallying cry, bringing together scientists and officials to performatively enshrine pedology as a Soviet ‘state science’ in front of an audience of well over two thousand delegates, was the First All-Union Pedology Congress, which took place in Moscow between 27 December 1927 and 4 January 1928.⁵⁸ The idea for this congress formed already at the beginning of 1927. However, the Scientific Pedagogical Section of the State Academic Council (NPS GUS) decided to first organize a preliminary conference (soveshchanie) which took place in Moscow in early April.⁵⁹ The key purpose of this event was to debate and resolve potentially controversial conceptual and methodological divergences in the field with a view to formulating a cohesive agenda for the larger congress that would follow later in the year.⁶⁰ Assembling key representatives from Moscow, Leningrad, and Ukraine, the meeting involved vigorous discussions of issues where epistemic and political agendas needed to be aligned.⁶¹ Given that the reorganization of scientific work combined here with the delivery of a political message, Zalkind, whose approach to pedology thrived on this very boundary, assumed a prominent role.⁶² The organization of the First All-Union Pedology Congress that followed was led by NPS GUS, but Narkomzdrav was included as a key partner.⁶³ Prominent Party figures were on board, and the initiative was publicized beyond specialist circles and interested occupational groups to the public at large.⁶⁴ The event itself ⁵⁸ This is usually identified as the seminal event in the history of Soviet pedology and is highlighted as such in most extant studies. See for example: Piskoppel′ and Shchedrovitskii, Mificheskoe i real′noe, 127; Fradkin, Pedologiia, 20–30; Shvartsman and Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’, 129–32; Balashov, Pedologiia, 131–5. See also materials and reports in ‘Pedologicheskii s″ezd’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 1–59. ⁵⁹ The event was also reported on in Pravda. See A. Zalkind, ‘Pervoe pedologicheskoe soveshchanie’, Pravda, 26 February 1927 (no. 047), 6. A. Zalkind, ‘Itogi pervogo pedologicheskogo soveshchaniia’, Pravda, 17 April 1927 (no. 087), 4. ⁶⁰ This conference took place on 2–7 April 1927. See the articulation of its rationale in A. B. Zalkind, ‘Pervoe pedologicheskoe soveshchanie’, NPkNSh, 1927, no. 3: 121–3. Throughout 1927–8 there was a ramping up of initiatives aimed at integrating pedological work at local level as well. For what went on in Leningrad see ‘Khronika’, Voprosy izucheniia i vospitaniia lichnosti (hereafter VIVL), 1928, no. 1: 81–4. ⁶¹ See Ia. Shapiro’s reports titled ‘Osnovnye voprosy pedologii’ in VP, 1927, nos. 5, 6, 7–8. See also discussion in Shvartsman and Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’. ⁶² See especially A. B. Zalkind (ed.), Pedologiia i vospitanie (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928), which is prefaced by Zalkind’s manifesto-like opening essay ‘Voprosy pedologii v SSSR’, dated 20 August 1927. ⁶³ See discussion at NPS GUS in November 1927 about how best to stage-manage the congress in order to reach the best possible effect, both in plenaries and in specialist sections. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 298, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 98–101. Some concern was expressed (e.g. by Blonskii) that teachers might end up asking questions for which pedology still had no answer. The congress also had an exhibition for the purpose of wider publicization. See GARF, f. 298, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 139–139ob. ⁶⁴ The event was reported on in Pravda on a daily basis. See N. Krupskaia, ‘1-i pedologicheskii s″ezd’, Pravda, 25 December 1927 (no. 296), 1; ‘Pervyi pedologicheskii s″ezd’, Pravda, 29 December 1927

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did not, however, begin quite as scripted. On the eve of the congress, Vladimir Bekhterev, who was expected to feature in the line-up of keynote speakers as one of the scientific ‘big guns’ and long-term contributor to pedology, died suddenly from what appeared to be a bad case of food-poisoning.⁶⁵ The first day of the congress was devoted to his commemoration, while the funeral followed a few days later.⁶⁶ Although wholly unexpected, there was symbolism in the passing of a scientific eminence with roots deep in the pre-revolutionary era, whose distinctive paradigm of psycho-neurology in general and child science in particular, progressive as it might have been in the early-to-mid-1920s, was by this point on the wane, to be surpassed by a new conception of ‘Soviet pedology’ that this very congress was expected to inaugurate. From 28 December, things continued as programmed, with plenary sessions devoted to the politico-epistemic framing of pedology as a ‘state science’ assuming particular importance. Speeches delivered by prominent Party figures—Nikolai Bukharin, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and Nadezhda Krupskaia—defined pedology’s role in socialist construction in general and the development of Soviet education in particular. They emphasized its enrolment in support of Narkompros’ ongoing educational reforms, while foregrounding the question of its relationship to the expertise and practice of the education profession.⁶⁷ On behalf of Nakomzdrav, Commissar Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko (1874–1949) highlighted the importance of the alliance of education and medicine in supporting child development in the context of upbringing (vospitanie) and the achievement of health (ozdorovlenie). He also dwelt on the vital relationship between the human organism and its social environment—an understanding that Soviet medicine was said to share with Soviet pedology.⁶⁸ These speeches provided the field with more than just routine sanction from state officials. The politicians delivering them invested Soviet pedology with meanings that seemed genuinely to matter to them ideologically, while contributing in a serious way to its conceptualization as a new kind of science. Moreover, the explicit blessing and patronage bestowed on the enterprise by someone like Bukharin, who was at the time one of the Party’s most prominent ideologues, were crucial to pedology shifting successfully from being just a provisional umbrella

(no. 298), 4; followed up on 30 December 1927 (no. 299), 5; 1 January 1928 (no. 001), 3; and 3 January 1928 (no. 002), 2. ⁶⁵ Bekhterev’s death was considered mysterious, with rumours circulating ever since that he might have been poisoned on Stalin’s orders, although this remains unproven. E.g. see Fradkin, Pedologiia, 21. ⁶⁶ ‘V. M. Bekhterev’, Pravda, 28 December 1927 (no. 297), 3, I. V. Kozlov, ‘Umer Bekhterev’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 6–9. ⁶⁷ ‘Iz rechei N. K. Kurpskoi, N. I. Bukharina, A. V. Lunacharskogo, N. A. Semashko na Pervom pedologicheskom s″ezde’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 9–14. ⁶⁸ Ibid., 12.

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structure to becoming a framework of more focused, integrative mobilization.⁶⁹ This was bolstered further by the promise of material investment and administrative support for pedology’s expansion, which came in unison from both commissariats overseeing the field. The keynote on pedology as a ‘Soviet science’, titled ‘Pedology in the USSR’, was delivered by Zalkind.⁷⁰ While his speech was in some respects a list of achievements, what was more important was his charting of the steps to come. His core message was that pedology must constitute a more united front of research with a singular purpose. He declared that work on creating a cohesive theoretical framework was already under way, but that more still needed to be done on linking pedology to educational practice and the clinical work of doctors. This implied not only enhancing organizational coordination, but also providing leadership—a role that Zalkind as head of the presidium of the congress performatively embodied. The rest of the congress was devoted to research papers and methodological discussions where representatives of different institutions and research schools were able to display their wares to a wider audience.⁷¹ On this occasion, however, the purpose of such display was the performance of ‘Soviet pedology’ as such. Even though some of the papers, such as those related to defectology, reflexology, or mental testing, echoed earlier debates, what was being explicitly performed was an integrated enterprise that had moved beyond the rather relaxed idea of pedology as featured at the two psycho-neurology congresses of 1923 and 1924. A set of new strategic priorities was articulated for the forthcoming phase of pedology’s development. Firstly, researchers in the field were warned to avoid both loose eclecticism and petty rivalries in favour of methodological cohesion. Secondly, they were prompted to focus their minds on issues that were of direct relevance to state policy, of immediate concern to practitioners, and of clear benefit to the ‘working masses’. And thirdly, the ‘materialism’ that pedology as science was supposed to be grounded in had to encompass much more than before the study of (materialistically framed) social determinants of development.⁷² These were said to have been neglected earlier on in favour of biophysiological

⁶⁹ Ibid., 11. As Fradkin, Pedologiia, 22, highlights, Bukharin was at the height of his popularity and at that point still an ally of Stalin against the Left Opposition. In his speech he interpreted pedology’s functions closely with his specific take on the revolutionary transformation of the proletariat. ⁷⁰ A. Zalkind, ‘Pedologiia v SSSR (szhatoe izlozhenie doklada na plenume s″ezda)’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 14–21. ⁷¹ For summaries of papers see A. Zalkind (ed.), Osnovnye problemy pedologii v SSSR (Moscow: Izd. Orgbiuro s″ezda, 1928) and ‘Pedologicheskii s″ezd’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 22–49. The most prominent topics included the difficult, underperforming, and defective child, the psychometric measurements of educational development, the pedology of labour and the child collective, and finally, research focused on specific social categories, such as the peasant child. The division of sections also followed the main school ages. On discussions in the primary school section which accounted for 70 per cent of Soviet schoolchildren at the time, see N. A. Rybnikov (ed.), Sovetskii shkol′nik po rabotam I pedologicheskogo s″ezda (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929). ⁷² A. Zalkind, ‘K itogam I-go Pedologicheskogo s″ezda’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 54–9.

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models, which risked taking intervention in development outside of social and political control. For pedology to be successfully incorporated into the state’s own functions and powers, government structures had to perform their own share of bureaucratic integration. Indeed, the field that was being called upon to come together was not only heterogeneous in disciplinary, methodological, and professional terms; it was also administratively messy. Its many institutions were being managed by distinct and in themselves complex government departments. The field was criss-crossed by several parallel networks of institutions and cadres, answerable to separate bureaucracies. Contact was especially poor between the centre and the peripheries, with only a vague understanding of how much and what kind of work was being carried out in different parts of the country. One of the principal ways in which institutional integration was to be initiated was through a census of the field. The Pedology Congress was expected to act as a key vehicle for this. Its organizing committee entrusted the task to Nikolai Rybnikov who published a report based on responses received to the conference call.⁷³ For the purposes of the census, the field was, despite its manifest fragmentedness, conceptualized as an already existing ‘network’ (set′) made up of a large number of ‘cells’ (iacheiki). In his report Rybnikov noted an unexpected level of activity in the provinces, revealing a large number of ‘ground-level cells’ (nizovye iacheiki) based in schools, clinics, or teacher-training institutes, which seemed to be spread widely, if somewhat randomly, across the Union.⁷⁴ However, Rybnikov also highlighted a number of organizational weaknesses. Pedological establishments were being run by different commissariats—not only Nakompros and Narkomzdrav, but also the educational branch of the Commissariat of Transport (Tsutranpros, Narkomput′). Each of these had its own system of variously interconnected hubs. Rybnikov contrasted the professionally coherent but narrowly specialist system operating under Narkomzdrav, and the wellconnected but arbitrarily distributed network operating under Narkomput′, with Narkompros’ own rambling system of establishments, which suffered from poor coordination and an unclear overall structure.⁷⁵ While much intense

⁷³ See N. A Rybnikov, ‘Pedologicheskie uchrezhdeniia respubliki’, Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1: 181–9. See also discussion in Balashov, Pedologiia, 126–30. ⁷⁴ Rybnikov, ‘Pedologicheskie uchrezhdeniia’, 181–2. See also discussion in Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, 324. Typical of endeavours associated with regional centres, where the role of local enthusiasts for the project were crucial, would be, for example, the kind of work carried out in Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky), where the key figure was Serafim M. Vasileiskii (1888–1961). See ‘Pedologiia v Nizhnem Novgorode: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie’, Nauchnye idei F. A. Fradkina v kontekste sovremennykh issledovanii istorii i teorii vsemirnogo pedagogicheskogo protsessa (Vladimir: Vladimirskii gos. gum. un., 2008), 210–15; and S. M. Vlasileiskii (ed.), Osnovnye voprosy pedologii v izbrannykh stat′iakh (Moscow and Leningrad, Gos. izd., 1928, 2nd edition; the first came out in 1926 and the third in 1930). ⁷⁵ Rybnikov, ‘Pedologicheskie uchrezhdeniia’, 188.

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planning and research seemed to be going on at Narkompros’ central institutes in Moscow and Leningrad, work that was done in local hubs appeared haphazard, without a clear sense of larger objectives or a properly formulated rationale for selecting research priorities and identifying the most appropriate methodologies. Another issue that Rybnikov raised was that the occupational role of ‘the pedologist’ (pedolog) was still not uniformly recognized within the network.⁷⁶ While this term was often used loosely to designate almost any cadres that were expected to be mobilized into the enterprise of pedology, ‘the pedologist’ that Rybnikov had in mind was the ground-level occupation that did exist in some children’s facilities, but by no means everywhere.⁷⁷ As a job title, ‘pedologist’ could feature on its own, but it was more common to see it as part of a more complex occupational designation, such as ‘doctor-pedologist’ (vrach-pedolog) or ‘pedologist-pedagogue’ (pedolog-pedagog), which entailed different professional backgrounds, types of training, and levels of qualification. At the point when Rybnikov was writing his report there was still no integrated standardization of these roles.⁷⁸ At this stage, though, Rybnikov was less concerned with what exactly ‘the pedologist’ was or did (this became crucial later, during in the 1930s, as will be discussed in the next chapter). His point was more simply that if pedology was to serve as the science joining up the entire state system of childcare and education, pedologists as an occupational group needed to be present on the ground in far greater numbers and to be defined in a more systematic way. For the time being, what featured at the congress as ground-level pedological work was carried out by individuals with any number of titles and qualifications working in different types of institutions. Doctors based in local clinics mostly performed routine anthropometric measurements and studied the spread of certain diseases, such as tuberculosis, though some also carried out studies of mental health and cognitive ability.⁷⁹ Those with qualifications in pedagogy and psychology mostly subjected children in their care to investigations based on surveys, observation programmes, and mental tests which were developed in central institutes but then circulated freely within the field. While some of this local research, especially of a medical kind, was being published, usually in profession-specific and often locally produced periodicals, there was little overall communication within the field as a whole. There was, therefore, a clear mission ahead for both scholars and bureaucrats. For the state administration, the task was to make planning more coherent, to enhance collaboration across the two main commissariats, and to improve ⁷⁶ Ibid., 189. ⁷⁷ Tellingly, leading figures in the field who taught pedology and wrote textbooks on the subject were unlikely to foreground the title ‘pedologist’ in their own personal disciplinary self-identification. ⁷⁸ See also Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, 324–5. ⁷⁹ E.g. see Andy Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s’, Ab Imperio, 2016, no. 2: 71–124 (78–86).

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administrative links between the centre and the periphery. To achieve this, in the spring of 1928 Narkompros formed a special commission attached to its main body responsible for coordinating academic and cultural activity (Glavnauka) to which it entrusted the task of planning pedological research, at least for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Narkomzdrav was brought on board during the summer, and this commission was then redubbed Crossdepartmental Pedological Planning Commission (Mezhduvedomstvennaia pedologicheskaia plannovaia komissiia).⁸⁰ The main task of pedology’s scientific leadership was to establish better means of coordinating the field’s intellectual agenda and empirical research. The key way in which they sought to do this was by forming an official organ for the field— the journal Pedology (Pedologiia), to be published under the auspices of the above Cross-departmental Commission, and which started coming out already in May 1928.⁸¹ Pedologiia’s editorial board assembled the most prominent individuals in the field, including Blonskii, Vygotskii, and Rybnikov, but it was Zalkind who, as chief editor, set the tone. While only two issues came out in 1928, their number grew steadily, reaching around six issues per annum in 1930 and 1931 (some of these being double issues). Circulation expanded accordingly, starting with 1,000 copies in 1928 and reaching 5,000 by 1932. Pedologiia embodied Soviet pedology as an integrated ‘state science’ quite successfully: its pages reflect well the manner in which the centre engaged the wider field and looked to coordinate the enterprise as an integrated whole. Its issues are especially instructive about the evolution of this project for the duration of the First FiveYear Plan (1928–32).

⁸⁰ See A. Pechatnikov, ‘V planovoi komissii po pedologii pri Glavnauke’, Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1: 198–9, and A. Pechatnikov, ‘Mezhduvedomstvennaia planovaia pedologicheskaia komissia’, Pedologiia, 1928, no. 2: 198–9. Narkomzdrav itself looked to streamline its own operations in children’s healthcare by creating larger research hubs. For instance, during 1927–8 it had established the State Scientific Institute for the Protection of the Health of Children and Youth (Gosudarstvennyi nauchnyi institut okhrany zdorov′ia detei i podrostkov imeni 10-letiia Oktiabr′skoi revoliutsii) which was established on the basis of a pre-existing looser network of clinics, sanatoria, and research labs. Narkomzdrav explicitly framed this Institute’s approach as ‘synthetic’, while also emphasizing that it placed both the study and the care of the developing organism in the wider social context (as Semashko had insisted in his speech at the congress). Medical research still prioritized the physical, physiological, and pathological sides of child development, but the new Institute also had several subdivisions which focused on providing more general pedological support to childcare and educational institutions. ⁸¹ On Pedologiia see especially Irina Leopoldoff, ‘La science du développement de l’enfant en URSS. Chroniques de la revue Pedologija 1928–1932’, in Une science du développement, 83–105. Before the appearance of this journal, articles that discussed pedology would have been published in journals specific to education, medicine, or psychology. The only journal that came close to a general pedological journal was Questions of the Study and Upbringing of Personality (Voprosy izucheniia i vospitaniia lichnosti; VIVL), edited by Bekhterev and his followers. However, VIVL focused mostly on defectology and reflexology, and its articles tended somewhat narrowly to emphasize work that went on at the Leningrad-based Psycho-Neurological Academy and the Brain Institute. It continued to be published until 1929.

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The First Five-Year Plan and the ‘Takeover’ of Child Science In 1928 and at the beginning of 1929 Pedologiia focused on elaborating the field’s mission as set out at the First All-Union Pedology Congress.⁸² Its role at this point was mostly to secure pedology’s position as a ‘state science’ supported from the top and harnessed to the ongoing construction of the Soviet education system. Pedologiia presented pedology as a cohesive, ideologically thought-out enterprise with a united leadership that gave it its overall direction. Its aim was to promote pedology in this guise as widely as possible to relevant constituencies—both researchers at the various institutes and practitioners involved in children’s services, childcare institutions, and schools. Some reviewers of Pedologiia’s first issues regretted that the journal’s presentation of empirical research was rather haphazard; that its news section, chronicling developments in the field’s institutionalization, was limited in scope; and that its reviews section was especially disappointing.⁸³ However, from the latter half of 1929 and across 1930, rectifying these early flaws seemed less important to the editors than the task of ensuring that pedology was fully responsive to the urgent demands of the First Five-Year Plan.⁸⁴ At this point, Narkompros more generally came under pressure to adapt its operations to the Plan’s overarching imperatives. For instance, it was asked to redesign the curriculum for rural schools to include topics relevant to forms of production that went on in collective farms; it was expected to make vocational training a priority in secondary education; it was pushed to mobilize schoolchildren into campaigns relevant to the cultural revolution.⁸⁵ Leading officials at Narkompros were divided over the new measures and many were unhappy about the fact that some of these impositions ran counter to their long-standing approach to pedagogical reform. This time, however, resistance or evasion seemed futile. As Stalin began to gather the reins of the Party, Narkompros became one of the key targets of his ‘revolution from above’.⁸⁶ This included not only the swift marginalization and purge of opponents in the Party structures, but also a more systematic campaign of subordinating the state-administrative apparatus

⁸² Compare Zalkind, ‘K itogam’, Vygotskii, ‘Itogi s″ezda’, and Ia. Shapiro, ‘Na putiakh sovetskoi pedologii. (O I Vserossiiskom pedologicheskom s″ezde)’, VP, 1928, no. 2: 77–81. ⁸³ A. Nevskii, ‘Zhurnal Pedologiia. Vyp. 1-i i vyp 2-i. 1928/29, Org Glavnauki RSFSR. Izd. Pod red. A B. Zalkinda’, NPkNSh, 1929, no. 9: 92. ⁸⁴ On the period in question see Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), especially Moshe Lewin, ‘Society, State and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan’, 41–77. ⁸⁵ Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 118–36. The latter would have been done through the socalled ‘project method’, which was promoted especially by Viktor Nikolaevich Shul′gin, head of the Institute of the Methods of School Work (Institut Metodov Shkol′noi Raboty; IMShR). Shul′gin was also on the editorial board of Pedologiia. See also Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, ‘Educational Strategies and Cultural Revolution: The Politics of Soviet Development’, in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 78–104 (94–9). ⁸⁶ For a general discussion of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ see, for example, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), 69–171.

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(including, prominently, its scientific extensions) to much firmer Party control. The principal means of achieving this was through the change of cadres, combined with the tightening of ideological screws—the two domains in which the power and authority of the Party ultimately lay. Lunacharskii was removed from the post of Commissar of Enlightenment in 1929 and replaced by Andrei Sergeevich Bubnov (1884–1938)—a Party official with no experience in education, science, or culture, but who was ready to follow directives.⁸⁷ His immediate focus as Commissar was neither the curriculum nor teaching methodology, but the realization of targets set for building new schools and increasing pupil enrolments. While most of the old guard at Narkompros was either moved or downgraded, Krupskaia remained in post as Deputy Commissar, continuing to edit her journal On the Path to the New School (Na putiakh k novoi shkole) and to act as the voice of the formerly dominant reformist spirit. She in this context continued to defend the idea of pedology as a vitally needed human science tasked with constituting the foundation of knowledge about the child and its development, on which a new, more progressive and rational, education system remained to be built. In practice, however, the development of pedology was at this point incorporated into the more general mass mobilization of human and technical resources as part of the Party’s renewed push for accelerated ‘socialism-building’. In this context, pedology was expected to formulate its own five-year plan.⁸⁸ Zalkind, as leader, immediately made grand promises about how, by mobilizing on a large scale, pedological research would produce rapid solutions to burning issues of relevance to the general Plan. In particular, pedology was to be sharpened as an instrument for delivering on the key production targets in the domain of education. A survey of topics addressed by Pedologiia during 1929 and 1931 reveals that pedology was now to focus especially on the problem of efficiency of the work of schools, both urban and rural, which were themselves conceived as generators of the much-needed industrialized and collectivized workforce. Pedology was also to be harnessed to the realization of the cultural revolution. This included the task of raising levels of education among the Soviet Union’s many ethnic minorities, as well as of supporting political education among schoolchildren more generally (for example, through studies of children’s beliefs, ideals, and understandings of the Union’s political structure and ideological value system). It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss this turn simplistically as an extrinsic imposition of a political agenda on science. Crucial to the construction of ⁸⁷ Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 119–20. ⁸⁸ See the entire issue of Pedologiia, 1929, no. 3, which opens with A. B. Zalkind, ‘Osnovy piatiletnego plana po nauchno-issledovatel′skoi pedologicheskoi rabote’, Pedologiia, 1929, no. 3: 273–305—his paper delivered at a special meeting on the issue in Moscow on 14–15 June 1929. See also A. S. Griboedov, ‘Piatiletnii plan nauchno-issledovatel′skoi raboty po pedologii’, VIVL, 1929, no. 1–2: 87–99, which discusses this meeting, summarizing Zalkind’s presentation and other discussions.

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pedology as a ‘state science’ had always been the alignment of epistemic frameworks with ideological ones. Those at the forefront of pedology saw in the demands of the First Five-Year Plan some genuine opportunities for scientific advancement and innovation. For instance, the constitution of a ‘pedology of national minorities’, which added the study of ethnic difference to the problem of charting norms of development, was an important addition to the enterprise of pedology.⁸⁹ Another example would be the promotion of the ‘child collective’ into a new object of pedological study. The popularity of this topic was rooted in the Bolsheviks’ ideological emphasis on ‘collectivism’, which became particularly important in the context of mobilizations for the First Five-Year Plan.⁹⁰ However, the foregrounding of the ‘child collective’ also entailed an epistemologically radical move—a shift away from pedology’s traditional focus on the development of individual personality (lichnost′) towards reconceptualizing pedology’s core object as, in fact, a social form.⁹¹ The main promoter of the ‘child collective’ as a new unit of pedological analysis was the Ukrainian Aleksandr Samoilovich Zaluzhnyi (1886–1941). He argued, for instance, that ‘an [individual] child was interesting only to the extent to which [s/he] served as an endogenous stimulant (endogennyi razdrazhitel′) of the [child] collective’.⁹² Zaluzhnyi’s innovation was eminently ‘pedological’ insofar as it constituted simultaneously an innovative scientific perspective and a new lens through which practitioners (i.e. teachers) were supposed to re-envision their own (pedagogical) work and objectives. Crucially, though, forging ‘Soviet pedology’ in the context of the First Five-Year Plan was not simply a matter of mobilizing a complex body of scientific work and associated innovations around a set of strategic government objectives. In the context of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, this very process was turned into a form of revolutionary takeover of this field of scientific work. Between 1928 and 1931 this ‘takeover’ was led principally by Zalkind. As discussed in the previous chapter, Zalkind had been one of the earliest proponents of the ‘Marxist’ overhaul of the epistemology of the Soviet human sciences.⁹³ However, Zalkind was no discipline-builder. Rather, what he was consistently enacting was ongoing

⁸⁹ For more detail see Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities’. ⁹⁰ Of course, the importance of developing collectivism as key to Soviet upbringing and the role that the human science should play in facilitating this had been raised much earlier, for instance by Zalkind and his paper ‘Deti i sovremennost′’ delivered at the 1924 psycho-neurology congress. See Balashov, Pedologiia v Rossii, 118. ⁹¹ Petrovskii, ‘Zapret’. ⁹² A. S. Zaluzhnyi, ‘Za marksistko-leninskuiu postanovku problemy kollektiva’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 44–51, cited in Shvartsman and Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’. Zaluzhnyi’s model owed a lot to reflexology, of course, as can be seen even in this short quotation. But other researchers became interested in the pedology of the child collective too and there were many articles published on this topic in Pedologiia. Yet as Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii, 30, shows, ‘child collectives’ were not necessarily studied as unequivocally positive. ⁹³ Zalkind had campaigned for the development of an explicitly Marxist pedology as early as 1923–4. See A. Zalkind, ‘K voprosu o peresmotre pedologii’, VP, 1925, no. 4: 35–69.

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epistemic revolution.⁹⁴ For Zalkind, pedology was not a new discipline, but a formation akin to a political movement. For this reason, when it came to the mobilization of ‘Soviet pedology’, Zalkind’s emphasis was not on theoretical coherence or even methodological innovation. What he worked on first and foremost was to ensure that all those who were being mobilized into the enterprise were committing to a common overarching politico-epistemic cause.⁹⁵ The germs of Zalkind’s takeover were visible already at the 1927–8 Pedology Congress and in his editorship of Pedologiia. However, they became much clearer at the next major event over which he presided—the First All-Union Congress in the Study of Human Behaviour, which took place in Leningrad between 26 January and 1 February 1930.⁹⁶ This was another mass gathering, which assembled up to 3,000 participants of various disciplinary and professional profiles, with around 170 papers presented. While the event’s remit were the Soviet human sciences more generally, pedology featured prominently, with a number of sessions allocated to it and with Pedologiia reporting on them extensively. Research presented at this congress still featured a wide variety of approaches, but the event’s core purpose was to subordinate the organization of the Soviet human sciences to the greater enterprise of socialist construction, as articulated in the objectives set out by the five-year plans.⁹⁷ Crucially, though, Zalkind’s success in dominating the field at this point was due less to his ideas being somehow aligned with the vision of the Party, and more to his allying his mode of politico-epistemic takeover to the kind of takeover that the Party undergoing Stalinization was carrying out more generally across state structures.⁹⁸ Zalkind’s approach was modelled on the Party’s own mechanisms of ⁹⁴ Ibid., 44. See also A. B. Zalkind, ‘Voprosy pedologii v SSSR’, in Pedologiia i vospitanie, ed. A. B. Zalkind (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1928), 3–14. ⁹⁵ This included, of course, an explicit politico-epistemic programme, which Zalkind developed as a radical take on human plasticity and the social shaping of personality. See Zalkind, Osnovnye voprosy pedologii. Krupskaia was one of the few who dared lament what looked to her like the hijacking of pedology’s original purpose. She was especially unhappy about pedology being reduced to ‘some kind of scholastics’, which seemed to abound in ‘dead schemas’ and ‘empty buzzwords’ (modnye slovechki). See Krupskaia’s letter to a teacher, cited in Fradkin, Pedologiia, 30–1. ⁹⁶ See: A. B. Zalkind (ed.), Psikho-nevrologicheskie nauki v SSSR: Materialy I Vsesoiuznogo s″ezda po izucheniiu povedeniia cheloveka (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. Med. Izd., 1930). A. B. Zalkind (ed.), Stenograficheskii otchet I Vsesoiuznogo s″ezda po izucheniiu povedeniia cheloveka (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. Med. Izd., 1930). A. B. Zalkind, ‘Psikhonevrologicheskie nauki i sotsialisticheskoe stroitel′stvo’, Pedologiia, 1930, 3: 309–22. A. P., ‘Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s″ezd po izucheniiu povedeniia cheloveka’, NPKnSh, 1930, no. 2: 54–5. See also van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 300–2. ⁹⁷ See: A. B. Zalkind, ‘Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s″ezd po izucheniiu povedeniia cheloveka (25 ianvaria – 1 fevralia 1930 g.)’, Pedologiia, 1930, no. 2: 161–4. A. B. Zalkind, ‘Psikhonevrologicheskie nauki i sotsialisticheskoe stroitel′stvo’, Pedologiia, 1930, no. 3: 309–23. S. S. Molozhavyi, ‘Pedologiia na I s″ezde po izucheniiu povedeniia cheloveka’, Pedologiia, 1930, no. 3: 329–40. ‘Rezoliutsiia pedologicheskoi sektsii I Vsesoiuznogo s″ezda po izucheniiu povedeniia cheloveka’, Pedologiia, 1930, no. 3: 341–6. Discussions of pedology at the conference were also reported in the ‘Khronika’ section of Pedologiia, 1930, nos. 2 and 3. ⁹⁸ On the Stalinization of Soviet science from 1929 see especially Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 31–53.

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ideological control and was positioned as effectively the latter’s extension in the domain of the human sciences. Zalkind’s move, which was political in more ways than one, was made easier by the fact that the field he was targeting was still epistemologically amorphous, and thus susceptible to programmatic takeover piggybacking on the seemingly neutral push towards ‘integration’. Aside from being urged to maintain methodological unity, scholars were now also being called upon to look out for, critique, and purge any remnants of ‘metaphysical idealism’, on the one hand, and ‘mechanistic materialism’, on the other, since these, it was argued, still seemed to linger in the ways in which psychology, human behaviour, and the physiology of the nervous system were being conceptually interlinked. At this point, however, there was little sign that pedology as such was implicated in this. The targets of critical attention in 1930 were mostly approaches in experimental, physiological, and behaviourist psychology.

The U-Turn and the Disciplining of Pedology The 1930 Human Behaviour Congress was arguably the summit of Zalkind’s role in the Soviet human sciences. By the end of that year he replaced Kornilov at the helm of the State Institute of Experimental Psychology (GIEP) and reorganized it into the Institute of Psychology, Pedology and Psychotechnics.⁹⁹ Yet Zalkind’s position at the top was a vulnerable one. While he enjoyed close links with the Bolshevik Party throughout the 1920s, the Party itself was undergoing exceptional turbulence. As 1931 approached, with the end of the First Five-Year Plan well in sight, Stalin rushed to the next phase of his ‘revolution from above’ by embarking on a still more stringent imposition of politico-ideological controls as a means of instilling Party loyalty (partiinost′) in all spheres, not least science. Instigated at this point was a yet more urgent campaign of ‘vigilance’ against any ‘deviations’ from the Party line, whether to the ‘left’ or the ‘right’.¹⁰⁰ The decisive turning point in this was the decree of the Party’s Central Committee of 25 January 1931, which explicitly called for struggle against deviations from Marxism-Leninism in science.¹⁰¹ In consequence, practically every single discipline, scientific framework, and major school of thought was subjected

⁹⁹ A. A. Nikol′skaia, ‘Osnovnye etapy razvitiia nauchnoi deiatel′nosti psikhologicheskogo instituta’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1994, no. 2: 5–21 (8). This was the consequence of the downfall of Kornilov’s reactology, which was accused of being a distortion of Marxism. Others, such as Rybnikov, were also forced to leave, as part of similar kinds of accusations. See ‘Iz avtobiografii N. A. Rybnikova’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1994, no. 2: 11–16 (15). ¹⁰⁰ The campaign was effectively launched on 9 December 1930 when, at a meeting at the Institute of Red Professors of Philosophy and Natural Sciences, Stalin initiated a campaign against ‘Menshevik idealism’ that was apparently at the heart of Soviet ideological institutions. This led to the sacking of the editor of Pod znamenem marksizma, Abram M. Deborin, who was also removed from the Institute. ¹⁰¹ See Piskoppel′ and Shchedrovitskii, ‘Mificheskoe i real′noe’, 127.

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to criticism for potentially containing pernicious ‘distortions’ (izvrashcheniia) of Marxism-Leninism. The objective of the campaign was to destabilize, disorient, and thereby bring into line the scientific elite that had over the 1920s become closely integrated with the bureaucratic and Party elite. This included not just downgrading and humiliating prominent scientific figures, but also denouncing dominant epistemic frameworks.¹⁰² The purpose of this was to impose Party authority over and above scientific authority as a matter of principle, and to do this not just at the ideological but also the epistemic level, since this was where scientific authority asserted itself. Pedologiia, as the official organ of the ‘state science’ responsible for scientifically managing the construction of the socialist education system, was asked to take on a new, self-critical attitude and to explicitly subordinate itself to the service of ‘socialist pedagogy’.¹⁰³ Early calls for such subordination were in evidence already during 1930, with some politically active teachers, who were keen to build a ‘Marxist pedagogy’, explicitly critiquing pedology, presenting it as a discipline inescapably caught up in the contradictions of bourgeois pedagogy.¹⁰⁴ Zalkind’s position as editor of Pedologiia was put into question with the appointment of R. G. Vilenkina as deputy chief editor, starting with the second issue of 1931. Marxist postgraduate youth across a number of institutes were encouraged to critique their mentors in specially staged ‘scientific discussions’ or denunciatory pamphlets. In April 1931, Mikhail Basov was ganged up on by his students in debates that took place over several evenings, with criticism of his work also appearing on the pages of Pedologiia.¹⁰⁵ Most of the third issue of Pedologiia in 1931 was devoted to a form of ideological self-disciplining of pedology.¹⁰⁶ By the middle of 1931 Narkompros itself was effectively taken into special measures as the Party’s Central Committee condemned its unmanageability, ¹⁰² See V. V. Umrikhin, ‘ “Nachalo kontsa” povedencheskoi psikhologii v SSSR’, in Represirovannaia nauka, ed. M. G. Iaroshevskii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 136–45. Reflexology, for instance, was now seen as itself a ‘distortion’. E.g. see denunciation of Zaluzhnyi’s work on the child collective in L. M. Shvarts, ‘Refleksologicheskie izvrashcheniia v uchenii o kollektive’, Psikhologiia, 1931, 4(1): 128–40. ¹⁰³ ‘K polozheniiu na pedologicheskom fronte’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 1: 1–2. ¹⁰⁴ As Dorena Caroli has revealed, such ‘Marxist pedagogues’ argued that pedology was failing to deal adequately with the relationship between the biological and the social. They sought to develop a ‘Marxist pedagogy’ that would be independent of pedology and defined on its own terms as a social science of upbringing. See Karoli, ‘Kontseptsiia S. S. Molozhavogo’, 86, citing I. Svadovskii, ‘Chto takoe vospitanie (K diskussii o marksistkoi pedagogike)’, Detskii dom, 1930, no. 7: 9–12. ¹⁰⁵ V. I. Kapustin and M. A. Levina (eds.), V bor′be za marksistko-leninskuiu pedologiiu: Diskussiia po rabotam prof. M. Ia. Basova 25–29 Marta 1931 g. (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. ucheb. ped. izd., 1932). M. P. Feofanov, ‘Metodologicheskie osnovy shkoly Basova’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 27–43. See discussion in Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii, 77–83. Basov, who was only 39 at the time, died not long after, on 6 October 1931. His confessions of error and repentance were published posthumously as M. Ia. Basov, ‘O nekotorykh zadachakh predstoiashchei perestroiki pedologii’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 5–6: 3–28. ¹⁰⁶ A. B. Zalkind, ‘Psikhonevrologicheskii front i psikhologicheskaia diskussiia’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 1–6; F. F. Korolev, ‘Pora ob″iavit′ reshitel′nuiu bor′bu mekhanisticheskim techeniiam v pedologii’, 1931, no. 3: 15–26. P. Leventuev, ‘Politicheskie izrashcheniia v pedologii’, 1931, no. 3: 63–6.

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ordering a comprehensive U-turn of educational policy.¹⁰⁷ The Party decree of 25 August 1931 ‘On the Primary and Secondary School’ (‘O nachal′noi i srednei shkole’) denounced all earlier progressive reformism as ‘hare-brained’ leftist deviationism and comprehensively reinstated previously denigrated traditional methods of schooling, from the renewed emphasis on the three Rs in primary school to the return of formal subjects, school marks, and classroom discipline in secondary school.¹⁰⁸ This was framed as the long-awaited ‘reinstatement’ of the pedagogical profession to its rightful role in the school.¹⁰⁹ The U-turn was explicitly supported by articles in Pedologiia, thus formally disassociating the enterprise of pedology from Narkompros’ earlier reformism.¹¹⁰ In November 1931 Stalin published an open letter calling for the fight for partiinost′ in science, which led to a similar call appearing in Pedologiia, prompting all those involved in pedology to subject both their own work and the work of their peers to systematic critique.¹¹¹ This generated a swathe of articles across a range of publications, in which practically every scholar who played any kind of leadership role in pedology was compelled to confess his or her sins as well as expose those of others. An especially common form of self-denunciation was the apology for being unduly influenced by foreign science. However, scholars were also expected to disown fallen homegrown figures, from previously prominent Party ideologues, such as pedology’s former patron Bukharin, who was himself at this point forced to confess to his ideological mistakes, to deceased scientific eminences, such as Bekhterev, whose work was now definitively confirmed as wanting, with everyone working at the Brain Institute, for instance, being expected to renounce ‘Bekhterevism’ and to rethink the direction in which they would be taking reflexology. ¹⁰⁷ See: Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 137–46. Larry E. Holmes, Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School No. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 10–12. Warshofsky Lapidus, ‘Educational Strategies and Cultural Revolution’, 99–104. E. Thomas Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism: Policy, Practice and Power in Soviet Schools in the 1930s (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). ¹⁰⁸ A. S. Bubnov, ‘Po-bol′shevistski vskryt′ do kontsa dopushchennye oshibki’, Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie (herafter PO), 1933, no. 1: 4–7. See also other articles that follow it in this same issue of the journal (pp. 7–19). ¹⁰⁹ See K. M. Kukhanov, ‘Rol′ pedagoga v vospitanii zdorovoi smeny’, PO, 1933, no. 3: 1–12. ‘O vypolnenii direktiv partiii i pravitel′stva po perepodgotovke i povysheniiu kvalifikatsii uchitelei’, PO, 1933, no. 4: 1–2. E. N. Medynskii, ‘Vooruzhit′ pedagoga metodikoi eksperimental′no-pedagogicheskogo issledovaniia’, PO, 1934, no. 6: 30–2. ¹¹⁰ Issue no. 4 of Pedologiia in 1931 opens with the Party decree ‘Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) o nachal′noi i srednei shkole’, followed by an editorial declaration titled ‘Pedologiia – na bor′bu za realizatsiiu postanovleniia TsK VKP(b) o shkole’. See Pedologiia, 1931, no. 4: 3–13. See also A. B. Zalkind, ‘Eshche o zadachakh pedologii na dannom etape’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 4: 14–16. ¹¹¹ I. V. Stalin, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol′shevizma’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1931, no. 6: 3–12. See discussion in Balashov, Pedologiia, 159–66. See issue no. 5–6 of Pedologiia in 1931, which opens with the editorial ‘Pis′mo t. Stalina i metodologicheskaia bditel′nost′ na pedologicheskom fronte’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 5–6: 1–2. See also M. Levina and D. El′konin, ‘O bor′be za marksistkoleninskuiu pedologiiu’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 5–6: 29–40. Similar kinds of articles appear in issue no. 7–8, which is the last issue of 1931.

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Those who had been heavily involved in earlier educational reformism, such as Blonskii, had to apologize for their mistakes and to express enthusiastic support for the new educational policy. Works that came out only a few months earlier were lambasted for their ideologically problematic content. No one escaped attention. Vygotskii and Aleksandr Luria were critiqued for ‘eclecticism’ and for finding too much inspiration in ideas stemming from Western science. The ‘sociogenetic school’, which encompassed figures like Zalkind, Molozhavyi, and Zaluzhnyi, was now dismissed for overstating the importance of the social environment. Zalkind was also forced to apologize for his earlier associations with psychoanalysis and promotions of reflexology.¹¹² He came personally under attack by a group of young researchers working at the Institute of Psychology, Pedology and Psychotechnics and was forced to leave the Institute early in 1932.¹¹³ Starting with Pedologiia’s first issue of 1932, Zalkind was also no longer the journal’s chief editor. This role now passed on to Vilenkina who overhauled the journal’s entire editorial board. Mutual criticism within the field was not, however, purely ideological and did not simply mimic Party rhetoric. Debates often took place between scientific rivals and consequently, especially early on, included some more careful methodological critique. While it seemed almost too easy to find fault with virtually any method or theory, discussions also exposed some genuine methodological issues that would previously have been brushed over in the enthusiasm of building pedology as a still young science. But what became crucial at this point was that methodological critique was always expected to be framed as the exposure of a specific category of ‘deviation’ from some supposedly normative, yet not necessarily precisely articulated, correct line, which was defined only negatively, by means of identifying what fell to the ‘right’ or the ‘left’ of it. Moreover, in contrast to the debates of 1923–4, which concerned the epistemological and ideological underpinnings of the Soviet human sciences more generally, what was being exposed to criticism now were certain quite specific theoretical frameworks, identified with concrete scholars and research groups. Also critiqued were specific methodologies and research projects. For example, studies around explicitly political topics, such as surveys in which children and youth were asked to display attitudes, identify with moral standpoints, express beliefs or demonstrate politically sensitive understandings of Soviet society, were subjected to especially close scrutiny and some of the methods used in such research were explicitly banned for fear that their findings revealed contradictions in the larger political narrative of Soviet society’s speedy march to socialism.¹¹⁴

¹¹² A. B. Zalkind, ‘Diferentsirovka na pedologicheskom fronte’, 1931, no. 3: 7–14. ¹¹³ Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia, 20–1. ¹¹⁴ On tests carried out by S. M. Rives see Balashov, Pedologiia, 161–2.

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Similarly, psychometric and anthropometric studies that made class or ethnic differentiation explicit and thus risked revealing systematic inequalities between groups based on such categorizations were vilified as classist or racist.¹¹⁵ While practically everyone had to confess to their mistakes, there were still many who, initially at least, tried to defend themselves, who expressed frustration in meetings and argued against some of the more absurd or plainly unjustified accusations, at least in an effort to soften the indictment. However, it soon became clear that the matter was not going to be resolved with rational arguments and logical justifications, for even well-supported demonstrations of one’s adherence to ideological expectations were usually summarily dismissed as rhetorical pretence. ‘Discussion’ was turned into discursive ‘quicksand’ that had the effect of disorienting participants and grinding debate, as well as research itself, to a halt.¹¹⁶ The Party’s core objective was, indeed, to dismantle the authority that the leadership of the field had claimed in the framing of pedology as an enterprise; and this meant disciplining precisely the symbolic work on which the figures in questions had built their leadership. In consequence, for most of 1932, the content of Pedologiia was made up of denunciations of previous mistakes and editorials declaring that the slate had been cleaned, a new page turned, and the correct direction restored, though it was far from clear what this new direction was precisely: all that remained was the warning that one must stay vigilant. It is therefore hardly surprising that the publication of Pedologiia itself ceased that same year. Yet 1932 was not the end of Soviet pedology. Those still representing its leadership resolved to accept the disciplining they had received from the Party, but they also immediately looked for ways to limit the damage that had been caused by the storm of confessions and denunciations, and to see what could still be done to salvage the enterprise. The general strategy was to admit faults and weaknesses and to vow not to repeat them in the future; but what also seemed necessary was to do more to reposition pedology as science. Key to this proved to be a series of meetings on pedology which Krupskaia organized at the Communist Academy under the auspices of the Society of Marxist Pedagogues (Obshchestvo pedagogov-marksistov).¹¹⁷ All those present at these discussions looked for a way

¹¹⁵ See especially Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii. ¹¹⁶ I borrow the metaphor of ‘quicksand’ from Lewin, ‘Society, State and Ideology’, 56, who uses it to describe Soviet society during the First Five-Year Plan in a more general way. I have redeployed it here with a more specific meaning to describe discursive and ideological disorientation in particular. See also Fradkin, Pedologiia, 36. ¹¹⁷ On what follows see ‘Diskussiia o polozhenii na pedologicheskom fronte v Obshchestve pedagogov-marksistov’, Pedologiia, 1932, no. 4: 94–108, and ‘Materialy diskussii po pedologii v Obshchestve pedagogov-marksistov. Polozhenie na pedologicheskom fronte i zadachi pedologii na dannom etape’, NPkNSh, 1932, no. 6: 33–54. There were discussions on 24 April, 18 May, 2 and 9 June 1932. See also discussion in Fradkin, Pedologiia, 43–52 and Balashov, Pedologiia, 166–7.

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out of the dead end of ritualistic autocritique in order to see under what guise pedology might still re-emerge as viable. Zalkind opened the discussion on 24 April 1932 proposing an approach that did not differ very much from what had already been tried before. He continued to make claims about pedology’s usefulness to the state by declaring that it should serve loyally as an instrument in the delivery of the next five-year plan. This included remaining vigilant on the methodological front and adopting a more critical stance towards methods and ideas coming from the bourgeois or fascist West. It also meant focusing especially on studying the Soviet mass child and its development in the distinctive Soviet context, with a view to supporting the education system while fostering the progress of society towards communism. A number of figures at the meeting responded critically to Zalkind’s paper. Viktor Nikolaevich Kolbanovskii, the person who had replaced Zalkind at the helm of the Institute of Psychology, Pedology and Psychotechnics, criticized pedology for its claim to being a synthetic super-science and suggested a retreat that would see it become just a nominal frame for a cluster of more specialist human sciences, each researching a different aspect of child development.¹¹⁸ This solution was, in turn, critiqued by Mikhail Pavlovich Feofanov, the head of the Institute’s pedology section.¹¹⁹ Feofanov defended the specificity of pedology, but emphasized its inherently practical functions. Others at the meeting echoed this position, suggesting that while there was a crisis of theoretical thinking in pedology, this ought not lead to a dismissal of pedology’s vital role in supporting an education system that was still in the process of being built.¹²⁰ Blonskii looked to bring these two positions together. He argued that pedology as science had to stop pretending it could operate on all disciplinary territories as if effectively replacing psychology, physiology, or sociology. Instead, it needed to assume a humbler role of supporting Soviet educators.¹²¹ It still had to bring together a body of general knowledge rooted in physiological and psychological research that was essential to anyone involved in upbringing and education (to be communicated to them as part of their occupational training or through a wider promotion of ‘pedological culture’). However, those who called themselves ‘pedologists’ could not claim to be either psychologists or physiologists but were to root their specificity in ‘pedological work’ (as opposed to the specificity of ‘pedological inquiry’, as was the case in the late 1920s when the construction of pedology as a science was key). Blonskii’s argument was complemented by Krupskaia’s proposed revision of pedology’s engagement with theory.¹²² Pedology was no longer expected to get embroiled in ‘scholastic’ debates around grand theories of development or behaviour ¹¹⁸ ‘Materialy diskussii’, 43–6. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., 46–8. Feofanov had in fact been particularly active in the earlier disciplining process, writing a number of critical articles in Pedologiia denouncing the work of Mikhail Basov in 1931 and Lev Vygotskii in 1932. ¹²⁰ Ibid., 49. ¹²¹ Ibid., 53. ¹²² Ibid., 39.

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(such as the abstract polemic between biogeneticism and sociogeneticism). This also meant that pedology was no longer committed to either embracing or rejecting specific theoretical frameworks that supposedly explained human development and behaviour in some fundamental way. According to Krupskaia, it was vital for pedology to remain pragmatically multipronged: even while maintaining a critical stance towards every theory and subjecting it to a careful Marxist analysis, pedologists as practitioners should not dismiss problematic approaches (say, biogeneticism or reflexology or indeed psychoanalysis) automatically and wholesale; rather, they should make suitable use of all potentially instructive findings.¹²³ Thus, without implying that the epistemological could ever be disentangled from the ideological Krupskaia looked to dissociate pedology from the politics of this entanglement by re-envisaging it as a fundamentally pragmatic science. However, this certainly did not entail a suggestion that these problematic approaches be revived as viable paths of active pedological research. Since the government had with its 1931 educational policy U-turn effectively abandoned the idea that the school should be fundamentally child-centric (something that Krupskaia greatly regretted), there now seemed little sense in insisting that educational programmes should conform to precepts set by an entirely separate science of the child and its development. And yet, everyone agreed with Krupskaia that the future of Soviet pedology lay in supporting the ‘job’ or ‘task’ (delo) of education.¹²⁴ Its function now was to be, much more straightforwardly, the enhancement of the delivery of that which teachers as a profession were ultimately responsible for. Krupskaia even argued that it would be essential for those who were being trained to work as pedologists in schools to spend some time doing the practical work of teachers in order to fully comprehend their perspective, needs, and concerns.¹²⁵ In the end, the Party appeared satisfied with the above revision of pedology’s core role and identity. Pedology had undoubtedly experienced a fall from grace in 1931–2, but a solution to its survival had been found. In fact, by 1933 the authorities were praising pedology’s leadership for successfully overcoming earlier methodological errors and theoretical difficulties.¹²⁶ From this point on, aside from retaining its function as a foundational subject in teacher-training programmes, pedology became identified above all with the so-called ‘school pedology service’. The rise and fall of this—occupational—incarnation of Soviet pedology is the focus of the next chapter. ¹²³ Ibid., 40–1. ¹²⁴ Ibid., 39. ¹²⁵ Ibid., 43. See also ‘Ruka ob ruku s pedagogikoi. K organizatsii pedologicheskoi sektsii Obshchestva pedagogov-marksistov’, Pedologiia, 1932, no. 4: 1–3. The objective was expressed as the ‘pedagogization’ (pedagogizatsiia) of the pedologist. ¹²⁶ See Fradkin, Pedologiia, 64–5, with specific reference to the ‘Postanovlenie kollegii Narkomprosa “O sostoianii i zadachakh pedologicheskoi raboty” ot 7 maia 1933 g.’, Biulleten Narodnogo komissariata po prosveshcheniiu RSFSR, 1933, no. 13: 6. Both give special credit to Krupskaia for managing to halt the dissolution of pedology at this point.

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7 Pedology at Work Instrument and Occupation

Dry formalists who are unable to sense the emotions of the one they are examining, are as unfit to be in a pedology lab as a bull is in a museum of Chinese porcelain. E. V. Gur′ianov (1932–3)¹ . . . and so, the pedologist arrived at our school, a docent or professor, bursting with confidence, and started to check us over, explaining what she saw to the students that she had brought with her – a whole pack of them, 15 or 20 even. For some reason science demanded that we should be examined unclothed. I remember it as if it were yesterday: I, a twelve-year-old boy, am standing stark-naked in a circle of white coats and that harpy is expounding on the fact that there before them stands a eunuchoid type, that this part of me is underdeveloped and that part of me is developed abnormally. And that this is why I am, of course, mentally retarded and get bad marks. At that point I breathed a sigh of relief and thought to myself: you’re the retard! But on the main score there was nothing I could say. At twelve years of age, I had no way of knowing what would become of me. Grigorii Pomerants, Notes of an Ugly Duckling (2003)² . . . specialist scientists would busy themselves around our children with all kinds of apparatuses and instruments, with entire libraries of tables, diagrams and charts, measuring and weighing them, applying formulas and logarithms; and at the end of such mysterious labours they would place above a child’s soul an equally mysterious cabbalistic sign: 1-0.85. Anton Makarenko, ‘Conversations with Parents’ (1949)³

¹ Nauchnyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Obrazovaniia (NA RAO), f. 13 op. 1, d. 413, l. 16. ² Grigorii Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka (St Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ, 2012), 15. ³ A. Makarenko, ‘Beseda s roditel′iami’, Pedagogicheskie proizvedeniia, vol. 4 (Moscow: APN RSFSR, 1949), 254–60 (259). Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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Pedology Black-Boxed One of the key effects of pedology’s political disciplining in 1931–2 was a certain closure of debates around it: 1932 was the point where Soviet pedology became strategically ‘black-boxed’. 1931 had been dominated by the campaign of criticism, 1932 by a search for means of survival. The outcome was the conclusion that the most important ideological contradictions had been resolved and that pedology could continue with its useful work, while remaining vigilant not to repeat earlier mistakes. For this to happen, pedology had to cease serving as a framework for the mobilization of science. If the late 1920s were a period of Soviet pedology’s active construction primarily as a scientific enterprise, by 1932 this process was deemed effectively complete. What was left was pedology as occupational practice; pedology as instrument in the service of the Soviet education system. Crucially, though, even in this instrumentalized occupational form, pedology’s practices were still expected to be invested with the authority of science. However, it was no longer helpful to interrogate and debate the core premises of this science. The leaders of pedology who had been at the forefront of pedology’s political cleansing in 1931–2 were well-aware of this. While they continued to give lectures on pedology to trainee teachers and to produce manuals in the subject, they no longer sought to develop, debate, or promote pedology as an active and innovative scientific enterprise. They remained cautious about how they framed pedology in textbooks, avoiding issues that had been highlighted as controversial in 1931–2, while repeating the criticisms that had been voiced during this campaign.⁴ Most of them repositioned and reframed their own scientific work as contributions to psychology, physiology, or paediatrics, rather than pedology per se. Some of the more intriguing large-scale projects, such as research on twins carried out during the 1930s at the Moscow Medico-Biological Institute, while furthering the understanding of human biopsychosocial development in general and including research in child mental development in particular, were framed as contributions not to ‘pedology’ but ‘medical genetics’.⁵ A related form of black-boxing was happening in the way pedology was being communicated to teachers. In the first half of the 1920s, much had been made of the fact that traditional teacher-training programmes were to be revolutionized with approaches emanating from experimental psychology, neurophysiology, and biomedicine. In the late 1920s, there was a push to integrate these into the new

⁴ E.g. P. P. Blonskii, Pedologiia (Moscow: Gos. uch.-ped. izd., 1934). A. B. Zalkind (ed.), Pedologiia (Moscow: Gos. uch.-ped. izd., 1934). L. S. Vygotskii, Osnovy pedologii, ed. M. A. Levina (Leningrad: Gos. Ped. Inst. im. A. I. Gertsena, 1935). ⁵ See A. R. Luriia, Etapy proidennogo puti (Moscow: MGU, 1982), 70–93. For more detail on Soviet twin studies in the context of the history of ‘eugenics’ and ‘medical genetics’ at the point where the latter strategically replaced the former, see Nikolai Krementsov, With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 333–49.

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synthetic science of pedology that would be taught to trainee educators as the foundation underpinning and shaping their practice. The critique of pedology in 1931–2 certainly impacted on how it was going to be taught in the future. Many trainee teachers had at that point been enrolled into Party-orchestrated calls for the overhaul of pedology at their own pedagogical institutes.⁶ Nevertheless, from the academic year 1932–3 onwards, once the wave of criticisms had passed, the delivery of pedology as a core subject on teacher-training programmes became remarkably secure, with no indication that pedology departments at pedagogical institutes were under any threat, quite the contrary.⁷ Crucial to this was: de rigueur critical reflection on pedology’s past mistakes, with warnings not to borrow uncritically from bourgeois science;⁸ the avoidance of promoting pedology as a replacement for either pedagogy or psychology;⁹ and, finally, the framing of pedology as expertise that supported the practical, day-to-day work of education that went on in schools or kindergartens.¹⁰ The most important form in which pedology existed in the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1936 was, indeed, the applied, occupational work of groundlevel pedologists, working in schools or local clinics, labs and centres with direct links to local educational establishments (Figure 13). Pedology had, of course, been developed as a body of practical work already in the 1920s, combining anthropometric assessment, psychometric and pedagogical testing, health-checks and the study of the children’s social environment.¹¹ In the latter half of the ⁶ On the case of Gorky (Nizhnii Novgorod) see N. Iu. Stoiukhina, ‘Pedologiia v Nizhnem Novgorode: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie’, in Nauchnye idei F. A. Fradkina v kontekste sovremennykh issledovanii istorii i teorii vsemirnogo pedagogicheskogo protsessa (Vladimir: Vlad. Gos. Gum. Un., 2008), 210–15. ⁷ ‘Pedologiia v pedvuzakh’, Pedologiia, 1932, no. 1–2: 8–10. ‘Programma po pedologii dlia pedtekhnikumov’, Pedologiia, 1932, no. 1–2: 106–11. A. Bolotnikov and R. Vilenkina (eds.), Pedologiia dlia pedagogicheskikh tekhnikumov vsekh otdelenii pervogo kursa (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. uch.-ped. izd., 1932). Although there were occasional proposals during the mid-1930s for pedology to be taken out of teacher training, this was strongly rebuffed. See P. P. Blonskii, ‘Kak obespechit′ budushchim uchiteliam znanie vozrastnykh osobennostei detei’ and T. K. Chuguev, ‘O prozhektorskikh atakakh na pedologiiu (otvet tt. Dymentu i Babskomu)’, Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie (hereafter PO), 1934, no. 6: 40–4 and 44–51, respectively. ⁸ E.g. A. A. Dokukin, Pedologiia dlia pedvuz-a: Zadanie 1e i 2e (Riazan′: Riazanskii Pedagogicheskii Institut, 1932). See also M. P. Feofanov, ‘Kritika ucheniia P′iazhe o razvitii rechi i myshleniia rebenka’, PO, 1935, no. 1: 120–7. E. N. Medynskii, ‘Eksperimental′noe napravlenie v pedagogike (Meiman, Lai i dr.)’, PO, 1935, no. 2: 22–32. ⁹ By 1935–6, both pedagogy and psychology were being promoted to teachers much more strongly as sciences independently of pedology. On scientific pedagogy see: P. P. Blonskii, ‘K voprosu o soderzhanii kursa pedagogiki’, PO, 1935, no. 2: 32–5. P. A. Turko, ‘O podgotovke nauchnopedagogicheskikh kadrov dlia vysshei pedagogicheskoi shkoly’, PO, 1935, no. 5: 53–63. A. S. Gintovt, ‘Nauchno-issledovatel′skaia rabota pedagogicheskikh institutov’, PO, 1936, no. 2: 18–28. On psychology see: S. L. Rubinshtein, ‘Voprosy prepodavaniia psikhologii v pedvuze’, PO, 1935, no. 4: 40–4. K. N. Kornilov, ‘Metodika prepodavaniia psikhologii v pedagogicheskikh insitutakh’, PO, 1935, no. 5: 40–53. S. L. Rubinshtein, ‘Pedagogika i psikhologiia’, PO, 1935, no. 6: 16–24. ¹⁰ E.g. E. I. Radina, Pedologiia v pomoshch detskomu sadu (Moscow: Shkola FZU OGIZa, 1932). ¹¹ E.g. Klara P. Veselovskaia, Pedologicheskii praktikum: Posobie dlia prakticheskikh zaniatii po pedologii (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928). P. P. Blonskii (ed.), Metodika pedologicheskogo obsledovaniia detei shkol′nogo vozrasta (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1927).

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Figure 13 Medical check-up of pupils of the secondary general-educational school no. 30, Leningrad, 1932. Reproduced with the permission of the St Petersburg Central State Archive of Cinematic, Photo and Phono Documents (TsGAKFFD SPb, d. 477188).

decade such work was also regularly promoted as vital to helping teachers adapt to Narkompros’ new, child-centric, school programmes.¹² Around 1928, this applied work was seen as requiring greater systematization as part of the wider project of turning pedology into an integrated ‘state science’.¹³ However, even while considered crucial, the development of this dimension of pedology was at that juncture still treated as subordinate to the development of pedology as a science more generally. From 1932, as this process of building pedology as a science ground to a halt, occupational work was left as the only domain where pedology continued to P. P. Blonskii (ed.), Pedologiia i shkola: Raboty kabineta shkol′noi pedologii, vyp. 2 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1929). At that juncture, reflexologists based at the Brain Institute were keen to promote their own approach to ground-level pedological work. See Pribory dlia oborudovaniia pedologicheskikh kabinetov (Leningrad: Nauchnaia tekhnika, 1927). ¹² Ia. N. Stepanova (ed.), Pedologicheskaia rabota v sel′skoi shkole (iz opyta urusovskoi shkoly) (Moscow: Gaginskaia opytnaia stantsiia Narkomprosa, 1926). ¹³ I. L. Stychinskii, ‘Pedologicheskaia praktika v shkolakh’, Pedologiia, 1928, no. 2: 95–109. P. Blonskii, ‘Ocherednye zadachi pedologicheskoi raboty’, Vestnik prosveshcheniia (hereafter VP), 1928, no. 10: 110–11.

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mobilize and expand, to organize and professionalize. Indeed, it was principally in the 1930s that ground-level pedologists suddenly came to the fore as an occupational corps in its own right, tasked with a set of functions critical to the day-today running of schools. This principally entailed helping schools deal with any issues specific to the children themselves, whether the question was low achievement or poor discipline; whether the problem was perceived as acute or systemic; whether the matter concerned an individual child, a particular class, or the entire school; whether the cause lay in the school environment or the child’s family. During this same period, the state administration’s main overall objective was to enhance efficiency in the delivery of projected outcomes; i.e. to ensure that educational goals were being met. One of Narkompros’ key policies in this context was streaming by ability and the referral to special schools of pupils who slowed down the pace of pedagogical work. Underpinning this policy of differentiation was not the principle of meritocracy. The matter was, rather, one of ensuring that education was not being disrupted and that all pupils received education in the form appropriate to their pace of development, with a view to optimizing delivery and maximizing overall achievement. Stratification was not deemed problematic if its purpose was the efficiency of realizing set objectives, and the differentiation of ‘normal’ and ‘subnormal’ levels was an expression simply of deviations from the objective norm of development. However, wherever such stratification ended up mapping onto politically significant markers of difference, principally those of class and ethno-nationality (as defined in the Soviet context), streaming and referrals to special schools could and did become hugely problematic. Pedologists were situated right at the centre of the Soviet administration’s policy of streaming schoolchildren. Some of pedology’s leaders, most prominently Pavel Blonskii, were influential in shaping this policy already during the late 1920s. The policy’s realization eventually became the core task of the school pedology service, which under Narkompros expanded principally during the 1930s. This service was expected to carry out comprehensive assessments of the schoolchild population, on the basis of which individuals would be selected for transfer to an auxiliary class or special school. Pedological evaluation was complex and not solely the work of the pedologist. It included contributions from teachers and the school doctor, anthropometric measurements and psychometric tests, as well as a report on the child’s home circumstances and family medical history. A certain proportion of children selected for referral were considered simply ‘difficult to educate’ (trudnovospituemye), while another group were those diagnosed with a mental health condition (psikhonevrotiki). These two groups were seen as pedagogical and medical cases respectively. However, the largest group were those labelled ‘mentally retarded (or backward)’ (umstvenno otstalye).¹⁴ ¹⁴ It was estimated that the percentage of such children was up to 3%. See L. Zankov, ‘Umstvennootstalye deti i ikh vospitanie’, Na putiakh k novoi shkole (hereafter NPkNSh), 1928, no. 3: 21–31.

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What was meant by this seemingly harsh term was not so much the more profound forms of cognitive impairment and learning difficulties. Rather, the term entailed a subnorm, to be understood as a significant enough deviation from the average level of mental development found in the overall schoolchild population for the child in question to be taken out of a regular class. Even though referrals to a special school were always consciously based on an all-round assessment, which included medical findings and pedagogical judgements, crucial to the diagnosis of the ‘mentally backward’ became the objective measure of a child’s level of mental development. One of the pedologist’s principal tasks was precisely the measurement of children’s levels of mental development expressed as a deviation from an objective, mathematically expressed, statistical norm. Thus, crucial to the work of pedologists became instruments with which an ‘objective’ level of mental development could be determined—namely, various types of tests.¹⁵ However, pedologists in the early Soviet Union were not operating with standardized tests that everyone would be using in the same way and for the same purpose across the system. While there were persistent calls for standardization, in practice, Soviet pedology was throughout this period experimenting with a large number of different kinds of tests that were, moreover, being deployed in a variety of ways and contexts. What was critical to the work of school pedologists was that tests were expected to measure a child’s level of mental development as something that could be mapped onto levels of educational development. This meant that there was some ambiguity about what precisely the various tests were measuring—a form of general intelligence (expressed as ‘giftedness’ or odarennost′), or the level of development of specific mental functions, skills, and understandings (cognitive, motor, creative, even moral); a person’s suitability for schooling at a given level, or their realization of educational goals in core skills (literacy, numeracy) and areas of knowledge (nature, society) as provisionally set for their age level (something referred to as ‘achievement’ or uspeshnost′). As instruments, tests were black boxes par excellence. They in many ways embodied the instrumental nature of pedology as a service, of the pedologist as an occupation with specific technical expertise, and of the pedological assessment as the main form of work that a pedologist did. All of these were de facto ‘instruments’ to which particular decisions within the system were delegated. Decision-making—say around whether a child should be referred to a special ¹⁵ On mental testing in the USSR see V. M. Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov: Monografiia (Moscow: Narodnoe obrazovanie, 2004), 295–379. Irina Leopoldoff, ‘A Psychology for Pedagogy: Intelligence Testing in USSR in the 1920s’, History of Psychology, 2014, 17(1): 187–205. Andy Byford, ‘The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science’, History of the Human Sciences, 2014, 27(4): 22–58 (42–5). V. S. Avanesov, ‘Sovetskii period’, Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika, 2004, no. 2: 5–8.

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school or not—was neither automated nor automatic. And yet, it was (of necessity, since otherwise such decision-making would be neither efficient nor replicable) enclosed in a series of black boxes, each fitted inside the other—starting with the test administered by the pedologist as an autonomous expert-practitioner representing a bureaucratically organized service and finishing with pedology as a science that had supposedly mastered the laws of child development and the techniques of its objective measurement. The comprehensive black-boxing of pedology, both as a science and as an instrument serving the education system, was essential to pedology’s continued existence in the Soviet Union following the criticism that it had received in 1931–2. However, this black-boxing was also, arguably, one of the key reasons for pedology’s remarkably swift downfall in 1936 when this instrument was suddenly seen to be no longer trustworthy; when it, by contrast, became perceived as at best redundant and at worst harmful. Black-boxed as pedology had become, it was very difficult to defend. Just as a particular set of decision-making had been delegated to this instrument, so the blame for the various glitches that had arisen in the system ended up being deferred to that same instrument—not just to tests, but also to those administering them, to pedology as a service, and, finally, to pedology as a ‘science’. And the reason for this was that Soviet pedology had in this last period of its existence been reduced precisely to a form of science-based expertise black-boxed into an applied instrument.

Combating Underperformance One of Narkompros’ first decrees, in May 1918, had been to abolish school marks and other forms of assessment and examination.¹⁶ In the new school system, the evaluation of children was meant to take into account the child’s all-round development, the formation of a creative personality, and the development of a range of skills. Narkompros’ policymaking was grounded in the idea that progressive free-educational methods would revolutionize traditional practices not just in learning but also in how educational progress would be evaluated. Exams were dismissed as a repressive form of assessment, exemplary of the old school at its worst. School marks were to be replaced by verbal feedback. Particular emphasis was placed on self-assessment, with both the child and the teacher expected to be involved in the evaluation of progress, based on the view that children were active subjects of their own education rather than passive objects of the educators’ pedagogical influence.

¹⁶ E. A. Mikhailychev, G. F. Karpova, and E. E. Leonova, ‘Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika v reshenii obrazovatel′nykh zadach Rossii pervoi poloviny XX veka’, Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika, 2005, no. 3: 3–9.

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However, there was still the need to measure the educational progress of individuals, to evaluate the work of schools, and to track the effectiveness of the education system. Yet the new approach to assessment was neither systematic nor rigorous, while its outcomes appeared vague and unreliable. To deal with the issue, some of the more powerful local administrations, such as the Moscow Department of Public Education (Moskovskii otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia; MONO) introduced in 1923 an end of year assessment (zakliuchitel′nyi uchet), although this was strongly resisted by progressive-minded model schools (opytnopokazatel′nye shkoly), with support from Narkompros.¹⁷ From early on, many local administrations were attracted to the idea that traditional forms of assessment could be replaced by tests that measured educational progress in a precise but less arbitrary way. Such a function of tests had already been promoted by those developing psychometrics in Russia before the revolution. Cognitive tests had the appeal of being independent of any particular curriculum while still providing a hierarchy of levels that matched those of schooling insofar as normative educational levels were expected to match the average mental capacity of a child of a given age. Furthermore, testing could be replicated in an efficient way on many subjects, producing outputs that lent themselves to statistical processing and allowed the administration to monitor educational development across a mass population. All this seemed extremely useful in the context of early Soviet efforts to build a brand-new education system in conditions where children were often still not attending school in a regular way and where educational norms and standards were in flux. This was why some local educational administrations experimented with deploying mental tests as a means of getting a sense of the level of development of the child population under their watch.¹⁸ The school network under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Transport (Narkomput′) was especially keen to use tests to identify children who fell below the norm but did not warrant transfer to a special school for the ‘defective’.¹⁹ Tests were also promoted as an efficient diagnostic instrument for mass triage among the besprizorniki and ‘the defective’ as part of the all-out ‘struggle’ with these phenomena that was taking place at this same time. Tests, for instance, featured prominently in V. P. Kashchenko’s Museum of Pedology and Pedagogy ¹⁷ E. A. Mikhailychev, G. F. Karpova, and E. E. Leonova, ‘Diagnostika i pedagogicheskaia korrektsiia v shkole 20-kh godov’, Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika, 2005, no. 5: 3–6. ¹⁸ For example, in 1921, the provincial department of public education (gubernskii otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia) of Syzran′ on the Volga commissioned Aleksandr Nechaev to prepare tests, based on the method that he had devised before the revolution, for teachers in the province to use on their pupils. See Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov, 297–8. ¹⁹ See A. P. Serebrennikov, ‘Rabota Obsledovatel′skogo Kabineta v Trudovoi shkole. (Rezul′taty i predpolozheniia)’, in Metody ob″ektivnogo izucheniia rebenka: Sbornik statei po pedologii, ed. I. V. Evergetov (Leningrad: Leningradskii Pedologicheskii Institut, 1924), 148–59. The Obsledovatel′skii Kabinet was created at the end of 1923 to study pupils at the 2nd railway school run by the Otdel prosveshcheniia upravleniia Sev.-Zap. zheleznykh dorog.

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of Exceptional Childhood. At the First All-Russian Congress in Psycho-Neurology in Moscow in January 1923, it was said that cognitive tests played a particularly important role in ensuring the correct distribution of children across different types of children’s homes, especially the selection of those diagnosed as ‘mentally backward’ (umstvenno otstalye).²⁰ However, from around 1925, mass ‘underperformance’ (malouspeshnost′ or neuspevaemost′) replaced defektivnost′ and besprizornost′ as the problem of seemingly ‘epidemic’ proportions that needed to be combated and defeated.²¹ This became the core focus of attention of those managing the construction of the new education system. And just as had happened with the notions of defektivnost′ and besprizornost′, neuspevaemost′ was construed rather vaguely as an issue into which a whole host of more specific problems were folded. Indeed, neuspevaemost′ tended to be treated less as an individual failing than a general phenomenon. However, the figure of the ‘underperforming pupil’ (the neuspevaiushchii) was invariably invoked in discussions around it.²² The neuspevaiushchie were not simply pupils who performed badly in the traditional sense of getting bad marks. They were said to be highly varied in type and the symptoms they presented were neither simple nor uniform.²³ Crucially, experts claimed that teachers and schools were both inconsistent and unreliable when trying to identify ‘underperformers’, and had a poor understanding of what precisely made a given pupil ‘underperform’. From the teachers’ perspective the neuspevaiushchii was essentially a ‘difficult’ (trudnyi) pupil; this, however, could potentially mean all sorts of things—troublesome, disruptive, resistant to education, slow, of a peculiar cognitive or emotional predisposition, and so forth. When attributed to an individual, underperformance (neuspeshnost′) was certainly not automatically equivalent to ‘mental deficiency’; rather, the neuspevaiushchii was said to be a child with a mind and behaviour that did not fit the teachers’ expectations and who as a result required more detailed study.²⁴ The assessment of such children was precisely where pedology as a body of practical work was expected to find its occupational niche. As Blonskii argued, it was only through all-round, properly pedological, evaluation that one could get an accurate picture of the neuspevaiushchii. This assessment had to include the careful study of the child’s family background (socio-economic and medical) as ²⁰ See Polina O. Efrussi, Uspekhi psikhologii v Rossii: Itogi s″ezda po psikhonevrologii v Moskve 10–15 ianvaria 1923 g. (Petrograd: Nachatki znanii, 1923), 7. ²¹ E.g. see P. O. Efrussi, Shkol′naia neuspevaemost′ i vtorogodnichestvo (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1928). ²² Ibid., 30–40. See also P. P. Blonskii (ed.), Problemy shkol′noi pedologii (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929). ²³ On what follows see P. Blonskii, ‘Neuspevaiushchii shkol′nik I stupeni’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 31–7. ²⁴ There were, however, attempts to identify underlying biological underpinnings of neuspevaemost′ associated with the physical development, state of health, and family medical history of the neuspevaiushchie. See E. Chernomordikova, ‘Biologicheskie osobennosti neuspevaiushchikh detei’, VP, 1928, no. 11–12: 126–30.

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well as of the child’s general health and physical constitution. These were seen as crucial to explaining some of the underlying reasons for the child’s neuspeshnost′, while also providing a clue about specific social measures or medical help needed to improve the situation. However, this did not in itself allow one to understand the pupil’s neuspeshnost′ as such. What was needed for this was the construction of the child’s ‘profile’ (kharakteristika), which would combine the teachers’ observations and medical data with detailed psychological assessments, including results obtained in cognitive tests and various questionnaires. The key purpose of such an evaluation was not only to better understand a concrete ‘underperformer’ but also to identify more precisely how to reorganize education for him or her within the existing system.²⁵ Significantly, of all the different elements in the pedological diagnostics of neuspeshnost′, there was only one that could be used to measure its level—and that was testing. When it came to producing an all-round profile of an individual underperforming child, the results obtained in cognitive tests were certainly not meant to be decisive in and of themselves. Nonetheless, they were vital to, firstly, positioning an individual child relative to a cohort of peers, and secondly, measuring (ne)uspevaemost′ in the context of a single class, a school, a regional network of schools, and potentially even the education system as a whole. Tests by their very nature turned neuspevaemost′ into a mass phenomenon; but they were also pitched as critical to combating this ‘mass’ problem. They revealed the problem’s scale in a given context. They identified where the problem lay, above all by pinpointing the children in the ‘problem’ category. And finally, they categorized such ‘problem’ children, enabling triage into appropriate classes, streams, and schools where suitable methods of education or other kinds of intervention could be applied more efficiently. As a mass phenomenon, ‘underperformance’ was often associated with disorganization and anarchy, which was seen as endemic in the Soviet school of the 1920s.²⁶ The latter was blamed on many factors—overly lax teaching methods, underqualified staff, and the general lack of emphasis on discipline and authority within the system. However, what some key experts presented as lying at the root of children’s persistent misbehaviour was the apparently overly wide variety of levels of mental and educational development that pupils attending the same class and school seemed to be displaying.²⁷ Underlying this diagnosis was the hypothesis that properly differentiating children by level of development could solve many of the issues that Soviet schools seemed to be struggling with.

²⁵ Efrussi, Shkol′naia neuspevaemost′, 40–8. ²⁶ Indiscipline was sometimes treated as a pathology that required treatment. See L. Os′kina, ‘Kak lechit′ nedistsiplinirovannost′ rebiat’, VP, 1927, no. 4: 40–4. ²⁷ Ia. Chulit, ‘Iz rezul′tatov odnogo obsledovaniia shkoly-semiletki’, NPkNSh, 1926, no. 2: 76–84. See also NA RAO, f. 4 op. 1, d. 67, ll. 6–7ob.

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The idea that children who had suffered pedagogical neglect or were simply ‘slower’ (in other words anyone whose educational development was for one reason or another ‘retarded’) needed to be sent to auxiliary classes dates back to the pre-revolutionary era. However, in the 1920s, this policy acquired entirely new meanings and dimensions in the context of the Bolsheviks’ efforts to build a universal education system equal for all.²⁸ This led to the belief that the core, standard form of education had to be calibrated for the average ‘mass child’. This, in turn, prompted the creation of separate classes or schools for those who, for whatever reason, deviated from the statistical average to a sufficient degree.²⁹ The argument was that without special classes and schools, whether for children significantly below or above the norm, both the progress of such children and, crucially, the progress of the schoolchild population as a whole would be slowed down.³⁰ The overall aim was to ensure the smooth and orderly functioning of the education process, something that appeared to require the segregation of elements that for whatever reason disrupted regular schoolwork. Though overachievement posed its own challenges, underachievement was seen as by far the more important problem, which was why the selection of pupils for auxiliary classes and schools for the ‘underperforming’ received more attention.³¹ Blonskii was among those who promoted streaming especially keenly.³² He grounded the argument for it not only in pedagogical common sense, but also in what he presented as one of pedology’s crucial scientific insights—namely, the idea promoted earlier in the century, especially by Alfred Binet, that an individual’s ‘mental age’ did not automatically coincide with his or her ‘passport age’.³³ In the Soviet context, though, differences in ‘mental age’ relative to ‘passport age’ ²⁸ E. N. Evergetova and A. P. Serebrennikov, ‘K voprosu o vyrabotke metodov ob″ektivnogo izucheniia detei doshkol′nogo vozrasta’, in Metody ob″ektivnogo izucheniia rebenka: Sbornik statei po pedologii, ed. I. V. Evergetov (Leningrad: Leningradskii Pedologicheskii Institut, 1924), 135–47. ²⁹ On experiments with streaming within regular classes (into ‘fast’, ‘average’, and ‘slow’ groups), on the example of a primary school in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, see M. Kotov and A. Zen′kovich, ‘Na putiakh k zdorovoi shkole’, VP, 1926, no. 9: 90–5. Another example, from Perm, which included more thorough medical assessment, is discussed in M. Shardakov, ‘Raspredelenie detei po gruppam v shkole I stupeni: Pedologicheskii opyt’, VP, 1927, no. 1: 74–80. On streaming into a larger variety of groups but purely on the basis of cognitive testing, see N. P′ianyleva, ‘Komplektovanie pervykh grupp po rezul′tatam pedologicheskogo obsledovaniia’, VP, 1928, no. 10: 111–21 (this approach, which did not include health assessment and the study of social conditions was criticized by the journal’s editors). On referrals to special schools conducted in Moscow in the late 1920s, see M. Sokolov, ‘O chem govoriat itogi otbora detei v moskovskie vspomogatel′nye shkoly’, VP, 1927: 69–74. ³⁰ V. Cherkasov, ‘Pedologicheskoe obsledovanie uchashchikhsia i rezul′taty perevoda’, VP, 1928, no. 9: 136–7. ³¹ There were also upper-end schools (shkoly povyshennogo tipa), although the idea of schools for the specially gifted were perceived by some as ideologically more problematic than auxiliary schools. Al′bert Petrovich Pinkevich, rector of the 2nd MGU, argued, for example, that they posed the risk of creating an ‘intellectual aristocracy’. See NA RAO, f. 4 op. 1, d. 67, l. 6ob. ³² P. Blonskii, ‘Pedologiia i shkola’, NPkNSh, 1925, no. 2: 134–7. ³³ P. P. Blonskii, ‘Umstvennyi i pasportnyi vozrast v ikh sviazy s nomerom gruppy shkoly I stupeni’, in his Pedologiia i shkola, 45.

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were not meant to reflect a hierarchy based on innate abilities, but on different dynamics of (broadly understood) educational development. The latter was, as a matter of principle, seen as something that was not fixed, but could be influenced through social and educational measures. Indeed, ‘mental age’ was never meant to be a biological reality that somehow pertained to and defined an individual. It was a statistical construct designed to express an individual’s level of development at the point of carrying out the measurement. It was a measure that could serve as a progressive alternative to development measured in terms of levels of schooling that a person had successfully completed. At the same time, ‘mental age’ was expected to be translatable precisely into a specific level of educational development. More specifically, it was seen as suggesting the educational level for which a given child was ready, irrespective of their ‘passport age’. This seemed highly important in the early Soviet Union where large swathes of children were entering school for the first time at very different ages and where many were repeating grades. Moreover, these were children with a variety of life experiences, whose education, especially during the 1920s, continued to be irregular, depending on family and other circumstances. The concept of ‘mental age’ also seemed of considerable value in a system where traditional school assessments had been abolished and where the dynamics of educational development were not based straightforwardly on some specific body of knowledge or set of skills that had been systematically imparted to all pupils. What the Soviet system seemed to require at this point was a subtler measure that only a science of child development could, it was believed, provide; and this measure was found in the basic idea of ‘mental age’. Blonskii also argued that this concept made the notion of the ‘mentally deficient’ child redundant since ‘mental age’ more accurately expressed the fact that a given child simply required education at a different level. The recommendation by Blonskii and his followers was for schools to start streaming as early as possible.³⁴ This meant that the child was to be subjected to testing (as well as other forms of all-round pedological assessment) immediately upon entering schooling, whatever age they happened to be. Those who fell significantly below the average ‘mental age’ expected for a given educational level would then be promptly referred to a special class or school where suitable adjustments would be made for them (for instance, the weakest groups were seen as benefiting from smaller class sizes). Critical in all of this, was that one needed an objective measure of development and an accurate and reliable instrument with which to carry out the measurement.

³⁴ V. Ia. Vainberg, Pedologicheskie osnovy komplektovaniia shkol′nykh grupp (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929).

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Measuring Development Within the complex of pedological evaluations used for streaming, tests were merely one of many different methods used to assess a child. Indeed, the result obtained in a test was never treated as in itself decisive to someone’s relegation to a special school. However, psychometrics became perceived as an especially important part of the pedologist’s toolbox. The reason for this was that it was the one component of pedological evaluation explicitly designed as an analogue of and replacement for the discarded traditional school assessments.³⁵ In the early 1920s, tests were, just as before the revolution, defined principally as a variant of the psychological experiment that could be applied outside the lab and that found particular uses in education.³⁶ From the mid-1920s, though, tests came to be discussed especially as methods that could be used to objectively measure educational performance (ob″ektivnyi uchet shkol′noi uspeshnosti) in the context of accounting for ‘work’ that was being done in schools more generally (uchet shkol′noi raboty).³⁷ In 1925, when the Central Pedological Institute (Tsentral′nyi pedologicheskii institut; TsPI) became the Pedology Section of the Institute of Methods of School Work (Institut metodov shkol′noi raboty; IMShR), it promptly formed a Commission for Tests tasked with developing, trialling, and standardizing tests in different areas of knowledge or skill. These were, significantly, not mental tests as such, i.e. tests designed to evaluate general intelligence or specific cognitive functions as defined by psychologists; but nor were they forms of assessment tied directly to what was taught in a given school or class. They were seen as assessing abilities, understandings, knowledge, and skills (mostly those expected at primary-school level) in a universal way. There were tests in arithmetic, reading and writing, and tests in the understanding of nature (prirodovedenie) and society (obshchestvovedenie).³⁸ Models for such tests came from abroad and the American experience was cited as especially inspiring. For instance, the most widely used tests in arithmetic were adaptations of tests that had been developed during the 1910s by Clifford Woody in the United States.³⁹

³⁵ L. Odintsova, ‘Praktika pedologicheskiikh izmerenii i osnovnye standarty’, Pedagogicheskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1927), 178–90. See also E. A. Mikhailychev, G. F. Karpova and E. E. Leonova, ‘Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika v reshenii obrazovatel′nykh zadach Rossii pervoi poloviny XX veka’, Pedagogicheskaia diagnostika, 2005, no. 2: 3–10; no. 3: 3–9. ³⁶ ‘Rabota uchashchegosia kak predmet eksperimental′no-psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia’, Pedagogicheskaia mysl′, 1921, no. 1–4: 50–64. N. A. Rybnikov, Metody izucheniia rebenka (Orel: Krasnaia kniga, 1923), esp. contribution by A. M. Shubert, ‘Metod testov’ (27–51). ³⁷ M. Zaretskii, ‘Nauchnyi uchet shkol′noi raboty’, VP, 1926, no. 3: 20–35. NPS GUS was especially concerned with the problem of the methodology used to keep track of performance (the ‘metody ucheta i kontrolia’). It entrusted work on tests as a key method used in this context to the IMShR. See Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 298, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 165–6 and ll. 177–9. ³⁸ NA RAO f. 47 op. 1 d. 47 ll. 37–9. ³⁹ P. Blonskii, ‘Pedologiia na sluzhbe u shkoly’, NPkNSh, 1925, no. 5: 120–8.

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Given that these tests were measuring core skills and basic knowledge, they were not, in principle, far off from traditional forms of assessment and examination (I will henceforth refer to them as ‘scholastic tests’ in order to differentiate them from ‘mental tests’ proper). Nevertheless, the key idea was that this new way of measuring performance was being done in a scientific way.⁴⁰ The principles behind such scholastic tests emulated those used to frame mental tests—they were expected to be comprehensive and systematic, rather than random and fragmentary; they were to measure authentic understanding, knowledge, and skills at the level suited to the child’s age, rather than one learned by rote; they were to identify individual ability in specific areas, i.e. establish where precisely an individual’s strengths or weaknesses lay; and most importantly, they were to be based on an objective, statistical, and hence universal norm against which everyone tested was being measured fairly and precisely. Crucially, though, these tests were expected to measure not so much the performance of a given child but the successes of the education system.⁴¹ The results obtained in scholastic tests were to be used to assess whether the delivery of education in a given school was thriving or failing. This was usually framed more positively and constructively: the mass testing of uspeshnost′ could, it was argued, be used by teachers, researchers, and policymakers to establish with rigorous evidence whether a particular teaching approach was working or not. Given that the Soviet education system was undergoing radical reform and that new methods were being continuously experimented with, mass tests were seen as a way of identifying the most effective approaches to learning. Either way, the deployment of testing was grounded in the understanding of education as a system with inputs and outputs. Mass scholastic testing became essentially a way of ‘scientifically’ measuring the system’s outputs. Their function was to support the management of educational progress in the system as a whole, specifically in a context where traditional forms of assessment and examination were proclaimed unfit for purpose. The Moscow Department of Public Education (MONO) was especially keen on using and perfecting such mass standardized tests, and it began deploying them more widely from around 1926. The practice was initially implemented across the Moscow region, but it soon spread to the entire territory of the RSFSR, sparking debates about their merits at educational conferences and on the pages of the pedagogical press.⁴² There were certainly teething problems and those responsible

⁴⁰ S. N. Shreider, ‘Noveishie techeniia v oblasti ucheta shkol′noi raboty’, NPkNSh, 1925, no. 6: 62–75. ⁴¹ See GARF, f. 298, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 19–25, which includes Shatskii arguing that tests should be evaluating not children as individual persons but the pedagogical work carried out by schools. ⁴² MONO relied for this on its Central Pedology Lab, which had been set up in 1919, but then became affiliated to the IMShR. Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov, 356–9. For an example of the study carried out by MONO’s Central Pedology Laboratory on Moscow’s schoolchildren, see ‘Psikhologicheskie osobennosti moskovskogo shkol′nika’, VP, 1928, no. 1: 118–39.

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for developing the tests admitted that more time was needed to get them right. But overall, these tests became popular and were supported by Narkompros. The Commissariat insisted that such tests had to be developed, trialled, and standardized by qualified specialists based at the central research institutes and labs,⁴³ but it also acknowledged that input from teachers was vital if the tasks set were to match educational realities on the ground. The scientists developing the tests were encouraged to ‘descend’ into the ‘thicket’ of school life, though they were at the same time urged not to ‘lose touch with their labs’ (i.e. give up the rigours of science) in the process.⁴⁴ Significantly, the fact that scholastic tests were produced in central pedology and psychology labs meant they were devised by the same researchers who simultaneously created and trialled tests that measured not educational but general mental development. For sure, the two types of tests were understood to be measuring different things—while scholastic tests measured uspeshnost′, mental tests measured odarennost′. And yet, it was also argued that there was a ‘structural-morphological analogy’ (strukturno-morfologicheskaia analogiia) both between the two types of tests and between the notions of uspeshnost′ and odarennost′ as measured by them.⁴⁵ Tests of both kinds were trialled by all the major pedology departments and labs, especially in Moscow and Leningrad.⁴⁶ The Pedology Bureau of the Academy of Communist Education (Akademiia komunisticheskogo vospitaniia), directed by Blonskii, worked on a version of the Binet test as well as on scholastic tests. The Pedology Bureau of the Medico-Pedagogical Section of the Central Institute of Physical Culture trialled both the Rossolimo mental test and the MONO scholastic tests as ways of assessing school entrants for purposes of early streaming. In Leningrad, the Child Diagnostic Institute (Detskii obsledovatel′skii institut; DOBI), moved from assessing defektivnost′ by using general mental tests to trialling tests for uspeshnost′ in arithmetic, based on American models, and in reading aloud, based on a British model.⁴⁷ Another important Leningrad institution was the Herzen State Pedagogical Institute, where the key figure developing

⁴³ See E. V. Gur′ianov, Uchet shkol′noi uspeshnosti: Testy i standarty (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1926; three further editions came out between 1927 and 1929). ⁴⁴ Serebrennikov, ‘Rabota Obsledovatel′skogo Kabineta’, 148. ⁴⁵ Vainberg, Pedologicheskie osnovy, 27. This did not mean simplistically that higher intelligence automatically led to better grades; factors of character affected uspeshnost′ independently of a person’s odarennost′. On the complexity of linking the two see also V. Ia. Vainberg, Ponizhennaia odarennost′ v svete sotsial′no-biologicheskikh faktorov (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929). ⁴⁶ Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov, 360–70. There were of course prominent ‘testologists’ elsewhere in the country as well. For example, an influential manual became the work of Gorky-based S. M. Vasileiskii, Vvedenie v teoriiu i tekhniku psikhologicheskikh, pedologicheskikh i psikhotekhnicheskikh issledovanii (Minsk, 1927). ⁴⁷ Iu. A. Levin, Novye metody ispytaniia shkol′noi uspeshnosti v leningradskikh shkolakh (Leningrad: DOBI, 1927).

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tests was Aleksandr Pavlovich Boltunov (1883–1942).⁴⁸ Boltunov’s lab tested children both for scholastic uspeshnost′ and for general odarennost′. The latter type of test was used more commonly on pre-schoolers, but the lab also worked on creating tests for uspeshnost′ to be given to those transitioning from preschool to school.⁴⁹ This lab trialled tests developed by DOBI, MONO, and IMShR, but Boltunov also personally translated and adapted various American tests. Significantly, he reworked the Binet scale to create the Binet-Boltunov test in which the meaning of ‘mental age’ was explicitly redefined to enable its users to evaluate a child’s suitability for regular schooling at a given level within the Soviet education system.⁵⁰ The tests used in the USSR during the 1920s and early 1930s were extremely varied.⁵¹ Many of those that had been pioneered in the pre-revolutionary era, such as Rossolimo’s ‘psychological profile’, remained popular.⁵² There was, however, a large number of tests imported from abroad and then adapted in various ways. There was an especially strong interest in tests developed in the United States since this was the country where mass testing was being carried out especially actively. But tests were also imported from Germany, France, Belgium, and Great Britain. The famous Binet-Simon test circulated in various international versions (e.g. Binet-Termen and Binet-Burt), as well as in the pre-revolutionary Russian version created by Anna Mikhailovna Shubert. Foreign tests were adapted and calibrated to the local context and many of the adaptations resulted in variants that warranted a separate name (e.g. the Binet-Sokolov or the already mentioned Binet-Boltunov test).⁵³ The problem of translating and adapting tests was itself an object of vigorous debate. There was no consensus on which tests were the best to use, and it was usually argued that different tests afforded different advantages and disadvantages. Most were deemed imperfect in one way or another, but it was usually said that those that had been trialled by experts and that happened to be used widely were good enough, provided other diagnostic methods were employed as well. Researchers often compared tests in terms of reliability, efficiency, and ease of use before deciding which ⁴⁸ See A. P. Boltunov (ed.), Pedologiia v shkole (Moscow and Leningrad, 1930). A. P. Boltunov, Izmeritel′naia skala uma dlia poklassnykh ispytanii shkol′nikov (Leningrad: Seiatel′, 1928). ⁴⁹ A. P. Semenova-Boltunova, ‘Printsipy sostavleniia testov shkol′noi uspeshnosti dlia nulevykh klassov’, in Pedologicheskie issledovaniia, ed. M. Ia. Basov, A. P. Boltunov, V. O. Mochan, and V. N. Miasishchev (Moscow and Leningrad: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1930), 74–95. ⁵⁰ NA RAO, f. 13 op. 1, d. 411. ⁵¹ See esp. Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov, which gives numerous examples of tests used in the USSR at the time. ⁵² V. Ia. Vainberg, Issledovanie metodiki massovykh ispytanii po ‘psikhologicheskomu profiliu’ prof. G. I. Rossolimo (Moscow: Izd. 1 MGU, 1927). G. I. Rossolimo, Eksperimental′noe issledovanie psikhomekhaniki po individual′nym i massovym metodam (Moscow: Izd. 1 MGU, 1928). ⁵³ See, for example, the various tests worked on by staff at the psychology lab (Kabinet po psikhologii) at the Central Scientific-Research Institute in Pedagogy at the Higher Instititute of Education (Tsentral′nyi Nauchno-issledovatel′skii institut pedagogiki pri vysshem institute prosveshcheniia; TsNIIP). NA RAO, f. 13 op. 1, dd. 408–33.

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might be more suitable for which category of child in terms of age, degree of ‘backwardness’ or type of ability that needed testing. The fact that in the 1920s universal schooling had not yet been systematically implemented, that large proportions of children were still illiterate, and that many came from a diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, there was special interest in non-verbal, image-based, ‘silent’ or ‘mute’ (nemye) tests. Another type of test that was deemed important in the context of the labour school, in which manual labour was meant to be equal to intellectual work, were tests for ‘motor intelligence’ (motornaia odarennost′).⁵⁴ Tests were, moreover, not only developed by those working with children in the context of education, but also by those specializing in psychotechnics and providing support to the state’s management of the labour force and the army. There was, in fact, considerable overlap between tests used on children and adults, not just in their form, but also their function, since one of the key tasks of the pedologists was to test young people in the context of career orientation (profotbor or proforientatsiia).⁵⁵ Finally, as a mass technology, tests stood side-by-side with questionnaires, some of which were designed as tests of sorts—not of cognitive ability, but of children’s conformity to a particular set of moral, social, and political norms. Notorious in this context was the so-called ‘collision method’, developed by Solomon Markovich Rives (1892–1953)—a multiple-choice questionnaire in which children were given real-life scenarios where they were expected to decide what action to take in a given situation, bearing in mind that some answers were ideologically inappropriate.⁵⁶ In May 1927 the most ardent Moscow-based supporters of mass testing formed the so-called Moscow Testological Society (Moskovskoe testologicheskoe ob″edinenie), with a base at the Pedology Section of the IMShR and with Blonskii as their de facto leader.⁵⁷ The society saw its purpose in systematizing research on tests, with a view to standardizing their development and use. The group, sometimes dubbed ‘pedologists-objectivists’ (pedologi-ob″ektivisty), believed themselves to be in tune with cutting-edge developments abroad. They devoted many meetings discussing testing in the United States and sent a delegate to visit the Binet Society in Paris. They worked on standardizing tests and released collections of tests for use in Soviet schools. Their organ was the non-periodical publication Tests: Theory and Practice, which, in addition to publishing methodological

⁵⁴ See esp N. I. Ozeretskii, Metricheskaia shkala dlia issledovaniia motornoi odarennosti u detei (Orekhovo-Zuevo, 1923). Ozeretskii’s test was still being used in the early 1930s. See NA RAO, f. 13 op. 1, d. 416. ⁵⁵ E.g. Testy dlia psikhotekhnicheskikh ispytanii podrostkov (Zaporozh′e: Nauchno-issledovatel′skii institut promyshlenykh kadrov, 1931). ⁵⁶ See Balashov, Pedologiia, 113–14. Rives was especially interested in children’s views on religion. See S. M. Rives, Religioznost′ i antireligioznost′ v detskoi srede (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1930). ⁵⁷ Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov, 371. The other key figures in the executive were M. S. Bernshtein, S. G. Gellershtein, and M. I. Zaretskii.

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articles, reported on work carried out in various labs and kept track of relevant conferences and publications.⁵⁸ Another reason why an association of this sort seemed to be needed was that tests were by no means viewed positively by everyone in the field. While testing in the Soviet Union became both popular and widespread, it was never uncontroversial—on the contrary, it was continuously debated, questioned, and critiqued. What is more, the criticism of tests came from many of the figures who were otherwise considered leaders in pedology. Reflexologists were among the earliest critics: they were especially dismissive of the concept of general intelligence (odarennost′),⁵⁹ although there were those who saw psychometrics as compatible with reflexology so long as what was being measured by tests was not understood as general intelligence.⁶⁰ Vygotskii was initially, in the mid-1920s, interested in the potentials of testing, but after he began work on the pedology of national minorities in 1929, he noted significant methodological problems when tests were applied to groups culturally remote from European forms of modernity, and he started to question what it was precisely that tests measured.⁶¹ From then on, he and his followers used tests not as instruments of evaluation, but as psychological experiments in which they could observe how (i.e. with the help of what ‘cultural tools’) minds solved problems.⁶² Zalkind was one of those who objected to tests on both ideological and epistemological grounds. He saw them as misrepresenting the potential for development of the Soviet labouring classes and ethnic minorities, and he questioned the very idea of the statistical norm as an expression of some lawful regularity of development. Finally, there were also those, such as Stepan Molozhavyi, who were unhappy with the unwarranted infatuation with, and consequent indiscriminate overuse of, tests within the education system. He especially lambasted mass scholastic tests as an over-simplistic and ultimately dubious form of evaluation of educational progress, based on a technology that was not properly rooted in a scientific understanding of either the education process or the complexities of child development.⁶³ Probably the most basic, but consistent, objection was that

⁵⁸ Testy: teoriia i praktika, vols. 1–3 (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928–30). ⁵⁹ I. Ariamov, ‘Postanovka pedologii v pedtekhnikume’, NPkNSh, 1925, no. 4: 54–61. ⁶⁰ Andy Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s’, Ab Imperio 2016, no. 2: 71–124 (90–1). ⁶¹ L. S. Vygotskii, ‘K voprosu o plane nauchno-issledovatel′skoi raboty po pedologii natsional′nykh men′shinstv’, Pedologiia, 1929, no. 3: 367–77. ⁶² Leonid Vladimirovich Zankov was influenced by Vygotskii’s theories of learning and cited him in his deployment of tests to study of the process of memory as such rather than to measure levels of development. NA RAO, f. 13 op. 1, d. 414. Aleksandr Vladimirovich Zaporozhets (mis)used the Binet tests in a similar way when conducting research among the Altai people in 1929. See Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities’, 107–10. ⁶³ See S. Molozhavyi (ed.), Pedologicheskii analiz pedagogicheskogo protsessa v shkole (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1930), especially his ‘Testirovanie i pedagogicheskii protsess’, 123–8, and the alternative that he proposes in ‘Puti pedagogicheskogo ucheta’, 151–9.

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tests could never give a full picture of an individual child’s personality and were therefore, inevitably, of limited value.⁶⁴ There was also criticism of the practice of testing among the ‘testologists’ themselves. This group often expressed exasperation at tests being circulated and misused by unqualified personnel without first undergoing a proper process of verification and standardization. This is not to say that there was no scrutiny of tests: the most important job that professional psychometricians were doing was precisely the critical analysis of tests.⁶⁵ However, the psychometricians’ own insistence that tests were never perfect and that they had to be constantly improved was one of the main reasons why such a variety of tests were used. The acknowledged imperfection of tests paradoxically made the practice of testing both more widespread and more unsystematic. Narkompros itself was cautious about tests, and looked to shift responsibility for them both to science (by arguing that research institutes needed to be in charge of their development) and to local educational administrations (who were allowed to deploy them at their own discretion). However, despite caveats and reservations, it was reluctant to dismiss tests outright. Not unimportant in this was the fact that testing seemed to be thriving in the West, not least the United States, and there was a sense that it would be premature to abandon the practice since problems with it might be simply down to teething problems. The most serious charge against testing was that the methodology had an inherent class and ethno-racial bias.⁶⁶ However, the reigning assumption at the turn of the 1920s–1930s was that such biases were not necessarily inherent in the methodology but were down to their misuse or to a misinterpretation of outputs. It was believed that Soviet researchers could successfully design tests without these flaws (including suitably redesigning imported ones), while at the same time providing ideologically correct interpretations of the phenomena measured. It was acknowledged that mistakes could, of course, still be made, but the methodology as such was not, at this stage, deemed incompatible with Soviet values.⁶⁷ Any expression of criticism or caution tended to be accompanied by statements that

⁶⁴ See minutes of a staff meeting at the Research Institute of Scientific Pedagogy at the 2nd Moscow State University (on 26 December 1926 Issledovatel′skii institut nauchnoi pedagogiki pri 2 MGU). NA RAO, f. 4 op. 1, d. 67, ll. 6–7ob. ⁶⁵ See for example V. Ia. Vainberg’s analysis of Rossolimo’s test in Vainberg, Issledovanie metodiki. See also discussions in Testy: teoriia i praktika. ⁶⁶ P. Stanevich, ‘Protiv izlishnego uvlecheniia metodom variatsionnoi statistiki i nepravil′nogo ego primeneniia v antropometrii i psikhometrii’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 67–9. This was a prominent accusation during the 1931 campaign of criticism. See Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities’, 115–20. ⁶⁷ See especially A. M. Shubert’s paper on tests at one of the meetings of the Research Institute of Scientific Pedagogy at the 2nd MGU (NA RAO, f. 4 op. 1, d. 68, ll. 90–2). Shubert argued that tests needed to be adapted for working class and ethnic minority children by making them focus on real-life rather than abstract problems. She did not think that this meant avoiding language, using images, or assessing motor action, since there was nothing special about the mental structure of the worker or member of an enthic minority. See also NA RAO, f. 13 op. 1 d. 417.

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the practice should continue, but that further work on rectifying glitches and improving the methodology must continue as well.⁶⁸ The First All-Union Pedology Congress in 1927–8 was a major occasion at which researchers looked for consensus over what methods were legitimate to use within pedology.⁶⁹ Several sessions were devoted specifically to the topic of tests, both mental and scholastic.⁷⁰ The agreed resolution was to acknowledge that tests were a valuable diagnostic instrument but that it was dangerous to rely solely on them in determining the fates of individual children, especially when it came to referrals to special schools. Concern was also expressed that tests should not be administered by unqualified personnel. Extra care had to be taken to appropriately adapt tests imported from abroad. A separate session was devoted to scholastic testing. Practising teachers and pedologists based in schools seemed especially interested in this type of test, including how to use it for purposes of streaming.⁷¹ This was, in fact, how many practitioners seemed to understand the ‘pedologization of the school’ (pedologizatsiia shkoly). One of the most important issues that arose in these debates was the question of who precisely should be carrying out testing in schools. Many assumed that, initially, in the absence of trained specialists, teachers would need to be the ones doing the testing.⁷² Arguments were made that ready-made test cards could serve as the teacher’s ‘pocket psychology lab’ (‘karmannaia psikhologicheskaia laboratoriia’).⁷³ However, just as before the revolution, there were those who worried that the run-of-the-mill teacher (the pedagog-massovik) would not be sufficiently qualified to administer tests, let alone process the results. And just as then, doctors were cited as potentially more reliable, even though they too needed to be equipped with a ready-made instrument.⁷⁴ Leading figures in the field, such as Blonskii, produced manuals in practical pedological work that he addressed specifically to teachers. These invariably contained instructions on testing. It was not always clear, though, if Blonskii was expecting teachers to carry out systematic pedological evaluations themselves as part of their professional duties or whether his textbooks were simply a way of providing teachers with a form of hands-on understanding of what pedological ⁶⁸ And indeed, work on perfecting tests for schoolchildren and youth, including adaptations of tests imported from abroad continued well into the 1930s. See NA RAO, f. 13 op. 1, dd. 408–33. ⁶⁹ M. S. Bernshtein, ‘Voprosy metodologii na pervom vsesoiuznom pedologicheskom s″ezde’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 37–43. ⁷⁰ M. S. Bernshtein, ‘Metod testov na 1-om pedologicheskom s″ezde’, Testy: Teoriia i praktika, vol. 1, 1928, 59–64. ⁷¹ N. Rybnikov, ‘Sovetskii shkol′nik po rabotam sektsii pervogo shkol′nogo vozrasta’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 1: 43–9. See also N. A. Rybnikov (ed.), Sovetskii shkol′nik po rabotam I Pedologicheskogo s″ezda (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929). ⁷² Blonskii encouraged teachers to engage in studying their pupils in a systematic pedological way for most of the 1920s. This included testing. See P. P. Blonskii, Kak izuchat′ shkol′nika (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1926; further editions came out in 1927, 1928, and 1929), 15–20. ⁷³ Evergetova and Serebrennikov, ‘K voprosu’, 136. The expression is attributed to Nechaev. ⁷⁴ M. Ionova, ‘Ot chego zavisit umstvennoe razvitie detei’, NPkNSh, 1925, no. 4: 61–6.

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assessment meant in practice so that they would then be able to take an informed view of any conclusions and decisions that might arise from it.⁷⁵ After the discussion of testing at the 1927–8 First All-Union Pedology Congress, Blonskii became much more explicit about the fact that teachers should not be the ones entrusted with pedological evaluations in general and testing in particular: when it came to administering tests, teachers could assist but should not interfere.⁷⁶ Blonskii at this point described pedological assessment as a serious and complex examination of a ‘clinical’ kind, although its aim was to assess and foster ‘development’, rather than ‘health’. From then on, he argued that pedological work in schools had to be carried out by a specialist figure—namely, the pedologist. He regretted that Narkompros and local educational departments were still not providing funds for specialist pedologists to be appointed across every school. He did think, however, that some teachers could and should be additionally trained up to become ‘pedologist-pedagogues’, after which they could be made responsible for precisely this kind of work. Creating such ‘pedologist-pedagogues’ was something that Blonskii was aiming for in some of the higher-level teachertraining courses that he ran at the Academy of Communist Education.⁷⁷

The School Pedology Service The specialist occupational role that Blonskii was invoking was not expected to exist in a vacuum, but to form part of a comprehensive service through which pedology as a form of work in schools would be organized.⁷⁸ Across the 1920s, the pedological servicing of schools was not implemented systematically. Most of it was under the auspices of Narkomzdrav, with the exception of Moscow and Leningrad where it was under Narkompros RSFSR, although much of the coordination was done by regional educational administrations and specific research institutes.⁷⁹

⁷⁵ Blonskii, Kak izuchat′. P. P. Blonskii (ed.), Metodika pedologicheskogo obsledovaniia detei shkol′nogo vozrasta (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1927). P. P. Blonskii, Pedologiia v massovoi shkole I stupeni (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1929; 6th edition). ⁷⁶ See debate sparked by P. Blonskii, ‘Zachem uchiteliu nuzhna pedologiia’, NPkNSh, 1928, no. 9: 28–32: namely, N. Kovalevskaia, ‘Po povodu stat′i P. P. Blonskogo, “Zachem uchiteliu nuzhna pedologiia” ’, NPkNSh, 1929, no. 1: 68–70, followed by P. Blonskii, ‘Otvet tov. Kovalevskoi’, NPkNSh, 1929, no. 1: 70–2. ⁷⁷ See Blonskii, Pedologiia i shkola. ⁷⁸ What follows is indebted to V. F. Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba v sovetskoi shkole 20-30-kh gg.’, Voprosy psikhologii, 1991, no. 4: 100–12. For a specific case study see also S. N. Tseniuga, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba v uchebnykh zavedeniiakh Prieniseiskogo kraia (1920–1930 gg.)’, Pedagogika, 2010, no. 4: 79–84. ⁷⁹ MONO was key to organizing pedological work in Moscow schools. See E. Gur′ianov, ‘Itogi pervoi moskovskoi pedologicheskoi konferentsii’, VP, 1929, no. 8–9: 142–53. In Leningrad, the Pedology Institute formed its own ‘pedagogical clinic’. See ‘K organizatsii Pedagogicheskoi Ambulatorii pri Leningradskom Pedologicheskom Institute’, in Evergetov, Metody ob″ektivnogo izucheniia rebenka, 160.

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Narkomzdrav oversaw school doctors and medical staff working in local ‘school prophylactic clinics’ (shkol′nye profilakticheskie ambulatorii) which were responsible for monitoring children’s health in a given area, usually servicing several schools.⁸⁰ Some of these doctors bore the title ‘doctor-pedologist’ (vrach-pedolog), having received some training in pedology-related subjects, especially psychological methods, not least psychometrics. Aside from performing assessments for practical, mostly diagnostic, purposes, these doctors carried out general studies where they, for example, compared the physical and mental development of children from different classes (white-collar, blue-collar, peasant) or different ethnic groups.⁸¹ Given their primary training, the physicians’ approach was understood to be biased towards a concern with health, hygiene, sanitation, matters of bodily development, and manifestations of pathology. And indeed, doctors who performed cognitive tests most often looked to correlate evidence of mental deficiency with physical symptoms and wider conditions of development—an unhealthy or stressful living environment, poor nutrition, inherited diseases or chronic illness. While they argued that the child’s ‘environment’ must be made ‘healthy’, their recommendations were often seen as remote from teaching practice as such. Yet distance from day-to-day educational work was also evident in assessment clinics overseen by Narkompros, such as those based in local research institutes. Their main purpose was the diagnostic, especially psychometric, assessment of ‘problem’ children, something for which there was considerable demand among parents, teachers, and kindergarten staff.⁸² At the turn of the 1920s–1930s, the broadly clinical and specifically medical and psychometric biases of ground-level pedological work were highlighted as a problem.⁸³ Narkompros was keen to make the pedology service its own and became increasingly explicit about dissociating the concept of the ‘school pedologist’ from that of the ‘school doctor’.⁸⁴ As Anatolii Lunacharskii put it: ‘We do not ⁸⁰ G. Solonovich, ‘Shkol′nye profilakticheskie ambulatorii’, VP, 1927, no. 12: 76–82. See also the various reports published in the Biulleten′ Narodnogo Kommissariata Zdravookhraneniia (hereafter BNKZ), including S. Koltunov, ‘Vrachi-pedologi na organizatsionnom fronte ozd.: Iz opyta IvanovVoznesennskoi gubernii’, BNKZ, 1925, no. 14: 30–2. M. Krymko, ‘O povyshenii kvalifikatsii vrachei po okhrane zdorov′ia detei na transporte’, BNKZ, 1926, no. 3: 33–5. M. Krymko, ‘K voprosu ob organizatsii raboty pedologicheskikh kabinetov na transporte’, BNKZ, 1926, no. 4: 29–34. M. Krymko, ‘Voprosy pedologii i okhrany zdorov′ia detei na transporte’, BNKZ, 1926, no. 8: 48–50. D. Samorodnitskii, ‘Nekotorye itogi raboty kursov vrachei O.Z.D. na transporte’, BNKZ, 1926, no. 13–14: 53–7. ⁸¹ E.g. Byford, ‘Imperial Normativities’, 78–86. ⁸² I. V. Evergetov (ed.), Metody ob″ektivnogo izucheniia rebenka: Sbornik statei po pedologii (Leningrad: Leningradskii Pedologicheskii Institut, 1924). ⁸³ Zalkind was a prominent figure in this turn. See his discussions of the problem in various presentations discussed at NPS GUS (GARF, f. 298, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 27–8, ll. 62–3 and ll. 112–19). ⁸⁴ See also Pedagogicheskaia rabota v shkole (Tomsk: Tomskii pedagogicheskii tekhnikum, 1928). Teachers were in fact being encouraged to train themselves up to carry out some of the work that was normally the job of school doctors, such as anthropometrics. See brochure A. A. Dokukin, V pomoshch′ shkole: Pedologicheskaia rabota v massovoi shkole, vyp. 1 (Riazan′: Riazanskii gubernskii otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia, 1929).

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only need a school doctor; we need also a pedologist without whom the school cannot operate. The Soviet school cannot and should not exist without a large number of full-time pedologists working in it.’⁸⁵ This, of course, raised the problem of how to go about training up a sufficient number of school pedologists, and the most logical proposal seemed to be to do this within improved pedologopedagogical streams at pedagogical institutes.⁸⁶ In 1928 Narkompros and Narkomzdrav RSFSR issued the joint document ‘On the Implementation of Mass Practical Work in the All-round Study of Childhood’, the purpose of which was ostensibly to create a more unified service across the two government departments. In truth, the document differentiated the medical and pedagogical sides of the service (the vrachebno-pedologicheskaia and the pedologopedagogicheskaia sluzhba), with a view to stimulating the expansion of the latter. Explicitly encouraged was the development of the network of pedologopedagogical units that would be staffed by pedologist-pedagogues. At this point, the plan for expansion was vague and in its implementation relied almost entirely on local initiative and resources, which meant that the idea was not realized as extensively or consistently as originally envisaged.⁸⁷ At the start of 1931, Narkomzdrav still ran the lion’s share of ground-level labs and clinics, especially in the peripheries, while the pedological network overseen by Narkompros was lambasted for its many flaws: pedologists were underpaid and there was still not enough of them; there was an insufficient number of special schools to which the underperforming could be referred, and those that existed were being populated by very different categories of children; referrals were done in a chaotic way and since many schools still lacked a pedologist, decisions were being made by teachers, doctors, or the administration.⁸⁸ Efforts to deal with the problem of the multiple oversight of pedological work on the ground were ramped up in 1931. In early March, the Council of the People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh komissarov; Sovnarkom) RSFSR issued the directive titled ‘On the Organization of Pedological Work Carried out by Different Government Departments’, which distinguished between the tasks of pedologists working under Narkompros and Narkomzdrav, and also those based in factory schools subordinated to the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy

⁸⁵ A. V. Lunacharskii, O vospitanii i obrazovanii (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1976), 284, cited in Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba’, 103. ⁸⁶ See discussion on this at NPS GUS in November 1927 (GARF, f. 298, op. 1, d. 38, l. 70). See also discussion of this issue as part of the formulation of resolutions of the First All-Union Pedology Congress (GARF, f. 298, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 27–8, ll. 62–3) and in response to a paper by Zalkind titled ‘Osnovnye printsipy podgotovki pedologov’ and dated by hand 22 Dec. 1927 (l. 65). ⁸⁷ This notably included the initiative of schools to train up teachers for the role of pedologist. See M. Sokolov, ‘O shkol′nom pedologe’, VP, 1928, no. 9: 107–11. ⁸⁸ I. P. Shumskii, ‘Pedologicheskaia rabota v OPU Narkomprosa’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 1: 57–61 (61).

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(VSNKh), where proforientatsiia was key.⁸⁹ A series of articles were simultaneously published in Pedologiia, focusing especially on defining the role and remit of ground-level pedologists working for Narkompros. Reiterated was the earlier injunction that the pedologists’ tasks should be clearly distinguished from those of the school doctor and that pedologists should be trained up in much larger numbers in specialist pathways at pedagogical institutes and faculties.⁹⁰ Crucial to further systematizing the pedology service under Narkompros’ oversight was a set of directives issued between 1931 and 1933: ‘On the Organization of Pedological Work in the Network of Organs of Public Education’ (6 May 1931) and ‘On the State and Tasks of Pedological Work’ (7 May 1933).⁹¹ The 1933 document reaffirmed the aim of appointing a pedologist for each school and described the work that pedologists were meant to do. The tasks of the school pedology service included: studying pupils in order to raise the quality of the teachers’ pedagogical work and improve discipline in schools; working on the problem of difficult children with a focus on prevention (‘rabota po profilaktike detskoi trudnovospituemosti’); educating teachers and parents in pedology; and finally, performing the job of career orientation for those leaving school. Narkompros was also keen to improve the administrative coordination of the pedology service.⁹² General regulations and directives were to be formulated by the Narkompros-affiliated Central Interdepartmental Pedology Commission. However, the next level, the regional labs attached to local educational administrations or pedagogical institutes, were the critical hubs of the service, responsible for coordinating and overseeing all work on the ground within their respective area.⁹³ They produced protocols for streaming, designed template forms for completing a child’s all-round profile (kharakteristika), and issued instructions on how to carry out tests, surveys, or anthropometric assessments.⁹⁴ At the same time, they provided consultations to local schools, parents, and even schoolchildren.⁹⁵ They ⁸⁹ ‘Postanovlenie Sovnarkoma RSFSR. Ob Organizatsii pedologicheskoi raboty v respublike, provodimoi razlichnymi vedomstvami’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 80–1. See also Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba’, 104. ⁹⁰ M. A. Shneider, ‘Nekotorye predposylki metodiki i organizatsii pedologicheskoi raboty v massovoi shkole’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2: 78–83. B. Ol′shanskii, ‘Rol′ i rabota shkol′nogo i raionnogo pedologa’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2: 84–90. ‘K voprosu o profile pedologa’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2: 91–3. ⁹¹ ‘Ob organizatsii pedologicheskoi raboty po linii organov narodnogo obrazovaniia’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 82–3. See also Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba’, 104. ⁹² Complaints that the service was not properly coordinated were still being voiced in 1932. E. Radina, ‘Za planovost′ i uchet v pedologicheskoi rabote na mestakh’, Pedologiia, 1932, no. 3: 4–6. ⁹³ On Moscow see ‘V tsentral′noi pedologicheskoi laboratorii MONO’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2: 101– 4. On Samara see ‘Pedologicheskaia laboratoriia Sr.-volzhskogo ONO v Samare’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2: 104–7. On Ukraine see Nikolai Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2004), 24. ⁹⁴ For a sample local form, published in Khabarovsk, see V pomoshch′ uchiteliu (Khabarovsk: Pedologo-pedagogicheskaia laboratoriia, 1933). ⁹⁵ See: T. Spasskaia, ‘Prichiny i vidy upriamstva shkol′nikov i metody pedologicheskoi terapii’, Za kommunisticheskoe vospitanie (hereafter ZKV), 1931, no. 6: 37–42. ‘Ob uchastii pedologa v vospitatel′noi rabote shkoly’, ZKV, 1935, no. 6: 34–8. A. Kholerskaia, ‘Rabota s roditeliami’, ZKV, 1935, no. 6: 50–1.

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published advice and research findings in local pedagogical publications and organized public lectures and study circles on key topics of general pedological interest (e.g. ‘difficult children’, ‘the pedological analysis of school tests’, ‘the rational organization of pupils’ time-budgets’). These regional labs were expected to be well-equipped with all the essential anthropometric instruments, psychological apparatuses, and test cards. They were also supposed to be suitably staffed. In ideal circumstances, their staff would be composed of several pedologist-pedagogues, a specialist in psychometrics, a defectologist, a couple of doctors with pedological training, one of whom would also have expertise in neuropsychiatry, and a handful of technical staff.⁹⁶ They were also expected to form temporary multidisciplinary task groups that could jointly work on more complex questions. It is unclear how many such ambitiously conceived regional labs were set up successfully, but local administrations did seem to be serious in trying to establish them during the early 1930s, especially in the Moscow region. In many parts of the country, though, such labs emerged out of already existing pedology labs and bureaus based at local pedagogical institutes.⁹⁷ The above-cited 1933 directive also stipulated that pedological work had to be firmly embedded in the daily life of each school. This was to be achieved by having every school set up a pedology office (kabinet) staffed by a resident pedologist. The latter post was to be filled either by a specially appointed qualified pedologist or by an existing member of teaching staff who underwent additional pedological training and was then permanently re-employed in this new role. The number of pedologists employed by schools increased sharply in the 1930s, although arguments continued to be made that there were still not enough of them, considering the large numbers of schoolchildren awaiting assessment. Complaints were also being made that those appointed were not always suitably qualified.⁹⁸ Overall, schools perceived pedologists as useful—a resource that they would have been reluctant to give up. Even in cases where teachers were sceptical about the value of the pedologist’s input, there was no indication that the service was foisted upon schools against their will. The school pedologists were meant to offer different kinds of support and perform all manner of consultative functions as part of the ‘pedologization of the school’.⁹⁹ Especially important was their role in assessing pupils with a view to referring those considered ‘difficult’ to an auxiliary class or special school. The policy of streaming and that of relegating ⁹⁶ Aleksandr Etkind, Eros Nevozmozhnogo (St Petersburg: Meduza, 1993), 324–6. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 270–1. ⁹⁷ On the Kraevaia pedologicheskaia laboratoriia Gor′kovskog nauchno-issledovatel′skogo instituta politekhnicheskoi shkoly see Stoiukhina, ‘Pedologiia v Nizhnem Novgorode’, 213. ⁹⁸ R. G. Vilenkina, ‘Pedologicheskie kadry’, Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3: 70–4. A. Zalkind, ‘O podgotovke pedologicheskoi aspirantury’, PO, 1934, no. 6: 32–4. ⁹⁹ E.g. I. Kolosov, ‘K pedologicheskomu analizu uroka’, NPkNSh, 1932, no. 1: 66–72; ‘Ob uchastii pedologa v vospitatel′noi rabote shkoly’, ZKV, 1935, no. 6: 34–8.

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underachievers was taken seriously by schools and implemented promptly since school authorities believed that this was genuinely having an effect on discipline and performance. The school pedologist sat on the school’s board and various subcommittees, such as those responsible for lesson planning or the development of teaching materials. Schools, moreover, formed pedology ‘cells’ or ‘brigades’ where the school pedologist was the core expert, but which were usually made up of a few regular teachers, the school doctor, an administrator, and sometimes even pupil representatives. The ‘brigade’ was seen as crucial to integrating pedological work with the work of the school as a whole. It was expected to make pedology more transparent, while at the same time ensuring that recommendations were aligned with the needs of the school and were actioned in practice. Within the ‘brigade’, the pedologist provided relevant expertise and advice, educating others in pedology whenever necessary. However, decisions on specific actions were ultimately a matter for the ‘brigade’ as a whole. This meant that the pedologist’s recommendations could be diluted or even voted down depending on circumstances.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, the groundlevel pedologist’s influence on what schools did or did not do was by no means as decisive as subsequent accusations of pedology seemed to suggest. At the same time, the school pedologist was expected to work under the supervision of the regional pedology lab and to be in regular communication with it. This could involve the regional lab asking the school pedologist to take on certain tasks, such as gathering a body of data for some study or report; or it could, conversely, involve the school pedologist asking the regional centre to help out with a problem that he or she could not deal with (most commonly to assess an especially problematic child).¹⁰¹ What was significant here was that the school pedologist was never simply a school role but also, simultaneously, a function in a wider service that was autonomous from the schools themselves. Indeed, even while serving the school, pedologists formed a distinct occupational group that called upon the authority of expertise separate from that of teachers. The occupation-specific expertise of practising pedologists was understood to be rooted in the authority of science—specifically the science black-boxed as ‘pedology’. While all Soviet teachers were expected to acquire a grounding in pedology as part of their training (from 1928 onwards in particular), pedology was not considered to be the underpinning of their profession—pedagogy was. In fact, pedology as science, despite featuring prominently in teacher training and despite being promoted from the top, still seemed mysterious and unfamiliar, specialist and technical, to the run-of-the-mill teacher. Yet it would have been relatively rare for teachers to explicitly express resentment at the pedologists’ claim to the authority of science or to argue that pedological expertise was somehow

¹⁰⁰ Baranov, ‘Pedologicheskaia sluzhba’, 105–6.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 105.

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fundamentally dissociated from the interests of teachers or the aims of education.¹⁰² Of course, the pedologist’s recommendations could be perceived as unfeasible and interfering or, worse still, as implying unjust criticism of the teachers or the school management. However, the separate nature of pedology’s authority, which was distinguished from the professional authority of teachers, and black-boxed as ‘science’, was often useful to schools. Indeed, teachers and administrators would invoke it whenever required, notably in situations where a case needed to be built to reallocate a troublesome or underperforming pupil.

Pedology Exposed Nevertheless, it was precisely the practical work that pedology as a service and pedologists as an occupation were doing that gradually led to a build-up of antagonism to pedology more generally across various constituencies, from parents and teachers to administrators and the Party officialdom. Even though pedological work was in full swing across the early 1930s, thanks to support from Narkompros and the local education departments, different issues kept arising in schools in various parts of the country, suggesting that pedology’s position within the education system at both preschool and school level was being increasingly seen as extraneous and misaligned with the tasks and interests of those delivering education itself. Most often the problems were relatively minor and specific to a locality, but from time to time there was also some very public venting of frustration with pedology. For example, an article titled ‘Pedological Nonsense’, published in Pravda in August 1934, criticized preschool educators for blindly following instructions found in pedology textbooks even when these seemed to defy common sense.¹⁰³ From time to time articles were published in the pedagogical press praising teachers who showed that they could improve the behaviour of pupils without having to resort to a pedologist.¹⁰⁴ Some articles also signalled failures in the system of properly assessing and supporting seemingly ‘difficult’ children.¹⁰⁵

¹⁰² Someone who would have been dismissive of pedology’s scientific claims over education was Anton Makarenko (as evidenced in the third epigraph to this chapter). However, his position during the late 1920s and early 1930s was as head of a juvenile labour colony in Ukraine, and his impact on Soviet pedagogical thought surged only at the point of pedology’s downfall when ‘Soviet pedagogy’ needed to be defined anew. ¹⁰³ L. Rovinskii, ‘Pedologicheskii bred. Malen′kii fel′eton’, Pravda, 14 August 1934 (no. 223), 4. The article presents as absurd Zalkind’s suggestion that one should start with political education already at nursery. ¹⁰⁴ S. Kamenev, ‘O kommunisticheskom vospitanii detei’, Pedagogicheskii zhurnal, 1935, no. 3: 16, cited in E. Thomas Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers to Their Rights: Soviet Education and the 1936 Denunciation of Pedology’, History of Education Quarterly, 2001, 41(4): 471–93 (480). ¹⁰⁵ V. Golubeva, ‘Pochemu pioner Malek ushel iz shkoly’, Pravda, 7 March 1935 (no. 065), 4. M. Chebyshev, ‘Vnimanie trudnovospituemym detiam’, Pravda, 22 July 1935 (no. 200), 4.

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Not insignificantly, given that traditional school marks had been reintroduced in 1931, the purpose of tests which measured uspeshnost′ were increasingly called into question. In fact, by 1935 some psychologists shifted their interest onto the psychology of the teachers’ own pedagogical evaluations.¹⁰⁶ In a word, the ‘black box’ of pedology had started to crack. The most significant issues with pedological assessments arose in the context of streaming and referrals. The speed at which triage was being carried out during the 1930s had taken everyone by surprise. Efficiency had been part of the plan, since the aim was to solve the problem of underperformance and poor discipline as swiftly and simply as possible. However, the suddenness with which schools for underachievers began to mushroom had not been entirely anticipated. When taken as a percentage of the entire child population, the numbers of those relegated was not that huge—in the region of 2 per cent, which was something to be expected, especially if one’s understanding of underachievement was fluid. However, grouping underachievers into larger cohorts produced unintended effects. When expressed in absolute numbers, these populations suddenly appeared much bigger, especially when they formed entire schools, often quite large ones.¹⁰⁷ The matter was made worse by the way such children were collectively labelled. While individual cases varied widely, they were categorized by labels such as trudnovospituemyi or umstvenno otstalyi, which carried stigma not just for the children, but also their families, leading to complaints. Finally, managing large schools populated entirely with the underperforming or the disruptive was a challenge, not least since providing such schools with additional resources or expertise, as had been recommended by leading pedologists, was not within the state’s means. These issues did not in themselves lead to the eventual dramatic downfall of the pedology service. Crucial to the stark denunciation of pedology in the summer of 1936 was the suddenly much closer attention that pedological work came to receive from the Party’s highest echelons during 1935–6.¹⁰⁸ In January 1935, an incident took place at School no. 4 in Moscow’s Frunze district (Frunzenskii raion) as fights broke out among pupils when school meals ceased to be provided for free. This school happened to have a significant proportion of children from families of high-placed officials and the cancellation of free meals made the inequality between the pupils starkly visible, leading to open conflict between ¹⁰⁶ B. G. Anan′ev, Psikhologiia pedagogicheskoi otsenki (Leningrad: Institut Mozga; Izd. Vepred, 1935). ¹⁰⁷ Much of this came out, however, only after the publication of the Party’s anti-pedology decree of 4 July 1936. See Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers’. ¹⁰⁸ What follows is indebted to the work of A. M. Rodin, who has established the key steps that led to the infamous 1936 decree by the Party’s Central Committee, based on archival research at the Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (RTsKhIDNI) and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). See A. M. Rodin, ‘Iz istorii zapreta pedologii v SSSR’, Pedagogika, no. 4: 92–8. See also summary in Balashov, Pedologiia, 172–4.

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them. Among the children involved was twelve-year-old Timur Frunze (1923–1942), son of the famous Red Army general from the civil war, Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925), after whom this part of Moscow had been named in 1930. Timur was at the time being raised in the family of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Commissar of Defence and Stalin’s loyal supporter.¹⁰⁹ In consequence, already in February 1935, the question of politically sensitive incidents in schools was put on the agenda of the Politburo, with a special commission, which included Voroshilov, being formed to look into the matter. Suddenly, all manner of ‘anti-Soviet’ ‘hooligan’ behaviour taking place in schools was revealed, including incidents such as gang rapes and the sexual abuse of girls, leading to Narkompros being rebuked for not doing more to clamp down on it. Three further commissions on schools were formed, each for a different level of schooling, and each headed by a leading Party figure, including Andrei Zhdanov, who became responsible for high schools. The investigations of these commissions led to their members becoming much more closely acquainted with the work of ground-level pedologists, especially in Leningrad, where Zhdanov was Party boss. What they discovered started to raise alarm bells. The commissions were focusing especially on matters of indiscipline in schools and they confirmed, in fact, that referring disruptive pupils to special schools was necessary.¹¹⁰ The Commissar of Education, Andrei Bubnov, warned, however, that such referrals should not disproportionately affect the children of workers. Significantly, these commissions also condemned the routine collection of detailed personal information on children’s families by pedologists, seeing this as a potentially highly sensitive matter, and they recommended that parents should not be asked to provide schools anything beyond the most basic and essential information regarding their child. There was no immediate threat to the pedology service as such here, but some of the core elements of pedological work were called into question. What was important in this development was something else, though—namely, that the pedology service now came onto the Party’s radar in new ways. The pedology service was run and overseen by Narkompros as part of delivering on its educational policy and it was in practice coordinated locally by the relevant administration or institute. Since the top of the Party had not been expressing particular interest in or serious concerns about pedology since the 1931–2 campaign to discipline its scientific leadership, the work of ground-level pedologists had not been watched that closely or systematically by local Party structures. This had been key to pedology’s survival post-1932. However, following the work of the Party’s commissions on schools in 1935, the local Party organs overseeing schools,

¹⁰⁹ Timur Frunze would go on to become a pilot during the Second World War, dying in 1942 as Hero of the Soviet Union. ¹¹⁰ See the decree of the Party’s Central Committee ‘Ob organizatsii uchebnoi raboty i vnutrennem raporiadke v nachal′noi, nepolnoi srednei i srednei shkole’ of 3 September 1935.

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not least those in Leningrad, where Zhdanov was in charge, were now suddenly on high alert; and this even without pedology being the prime target of concern; for what was ultimately being monitored and assessed was the work of Narkompros more generally. At the start of 1936, the section for schools of the Leningrad-area Party committee alerted Zhdanov that the recommendations his commission had issued only a few months earlier seemed to be falling on deaf ears.¹¹¹ Zhdanov’s attention was drawn especially to extensive surveys that the Leningrad Pedology Institute was still carrying out among the families of children attending schools in the Pskov district. Zhdanov was clearly annoyed: on 4 April 1936 he gave a speech at the meeting of the Leningrad Party bureau where he denounced pedologists for going around prying into people’s private affairs, seeking out negative aspects of family life, scrutinizing not just the children themselves, but also their parents and grandparents, asking questions concerning class origins while at the same time seeking out only defects and anomalies. At first, Zhdanov appeared to be targeting just the Leningrad Pedology Institute, calling for it to be disciplined. However, such a call quickly escalated and spread as part of a campaign designed to impose Party control over the work of Narkompros more generally. What happened at this moment was the sudden exposure by Zhdanov of the pedology service as Narkompros’ weak spot. In this context, the Leningrad Pedology Institute came to serve as an example of a much wider problem. The torch was suddenly shone very brightly onto the occupational work of pedologists and the pedology service as such. Zhdanov was at the forefront of this campaign and his criticisms, initially published in the Leningrad Pravda, began to attract and concentrate the various isolated complaints about the service expressed over the years across the country.¹¹² Among the most problematic issues to emerge was the pedologists’ critical role in referring so many children to special schools. Zhdanov singled out tests as the instrument most likely to lead to indiscriminate, unverified referrals. He complained about the false impression that such mass referrals gave of Soviet society as supposedly experiencing ‘degradation’ (degradatsiia). He argued that the policy disincentivized teachers, discouraging them from trying to improve their pupils’ behaviour or performance themselves, and he suggested that children relegated to special schools were only going to deteriorate further into criminals and troublemakers. With these indictments, coming from the very top of the Party, the ‘black box’ of pedology now truly came apart. In June 1936 Zhdanov organized a meeting with Leningrad teachers and pedologists billed as ‘The Audience of Teachers and Pedologists of Leningrad ¹¹¹ Larry Holmes, Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School No. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 137–8. ¹¹² This was part of a more general encouragement of complaints from the public regarding education that started to take place around this time and went into 1937, specifically as part of the campaign designed to discipline Narkompros. See ibid., 136.

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Schools by Comrade Zhdanov’. Here he gave a speech titled ‘On the Pedological Distortions in the Narkompros RSFSR’ (‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v Narkomprose RSFSR’) in which he told the terrified audience he had called them in not because he wanted to drill them about the many mistakes that they were making as part of pedological work, but because he saw the pedologists themselves as victims of a system of educational management that required radical revision. He accused Narkompros of giving pedologists too prominent a role in making critical decisions affecting the work of schools, and he also accused pedology’s leading theorists who had supposedly set out to demonstrate the ‘backwardness’ (otstalost′) of the working class. Officials from the local educational administration who spoke at the meeting turned up the heat on ground-level staff, seeing— correctly—that they themselves, as those administratively responsible, were going to be the first in the firing line. Thus, the head of Leningrad’s city educational administration, M. A. Aleksinskii, called for all pedologists to be sacked and suggested that this should even apply to all teachers who had over the years been indoctrinated by pedology. However, Zhdanov at that point announced that the question of pedology was, thanks to his personal initiative, already on the agenda of the next meeting of the Politburo, which would make a definitive and, in his words, ‘wise’ decision on the matter. Crucial therefore was that Zhdanov had persisted in raising the matter of pedology from the local level to that of the Party’s highest organ and that he turned it into the most scandalous blot on Narkompros’ record to date. Two days after his meeting with the Leningrad pedologists, the Politburo discussed the agenda item tabled by Zhdanov, titled ‘On the Pedological Distortions in the System of the Narkompros’ (‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v sisteme Narkomprosov’). The Politburo decided that a new commission, made up of Komsomol leader A. V. Kosarev, Commissar of Education A. S. Bubnov, Commissar of Health G. N. Kaminskii, and Zhdanov himself, who clearly took the lead in the matter, should prepare a formal decree on behalf of the Party’s Central Committee.¹¹³

Pedology Dismantled On 4 July 1936 the Central Committee issued the now infamous decree ‘On the Pedological Distortions in the System of the Narkompros’.¹¹⁴ The Party accused ‘the so-called “pedologist” ’ of undermining the role of the teacher in the school ¹¹³ It is noteworthy that Kosarev, Bubnov, and Kaminskii were all arrested and executed in the next couple of years. ¹¹⁴ ‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v sisteme narkomprosov’, KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s″ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK (Moscow: Politizdat, 1985), vol. 6, 364–7. See also TsK VKP(b), ‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v sisteme Narkomprosov’, PO, 1936, no. 4: 25–7. Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii, 293–9.

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and of using ‘pseudoscientific’ experiments and harmful questionnaires to instil a belief in biosocial determinism and to frame the poor performance or lack of discipline in schoolchildren as something that was due to their family background and social conditioning. Pedologists searched for pathology not only in the child, but also their parents and grandparents, as well as their immediate social surroundings, and they then used such ‘dodgy’ diagnostics to justify the exclusion of a child from the ‘normal’ school collective. While some of the charges against pedology echoed those heard in 1931–2, the accusations that were being voiced in 1936, even while denouncing pedology as a science more generally, were focused much more on the occupational work of ground-level pedologists. The decree entailed a condemnation of and blanket ban on the key instruments that pedologists used in their daily work, especially tests, questionnaires, and family surveys. The decree included the denunciation of both the policy and the practice of assessment, streaming, and referrals to special schools as biased against the proletariat. It also argued that the occupational work of pedologists was in conflict with the occupational work of teachers: referrals implied distrust in the teachers’ pedagogical abilities, while tests implied distrust in the teachers’ marks. While in 1931–2 the priority was a campaign of kritika and samokritika among pedology’s scientific leadership, crucial in 1936 was the dismantlement of pedology’s ground-level occupational infrastructure. This began already on 7 July 1936, as Commissar Bubnov sent a telegram to local educational administrations with the directive to relieve all school pedologists of their duties with immediate effect.¹¹⁵ The speed of the U-turn engineered by Zhdanov had caught Narkompros by surprise. For not only had the Commissariat not been planning to do away with its pedology service; it had been proceeding on the assumption that the pedologists’ role in schools needed to be deepened. Instead, Bubnov now had to rush out a directive cancelling all previous instructions on pedological work that he himself had been issuing since he took office in 1929. The dismantlement of the pedology service amounted, firstly, to the mass redeployment of pedologists working in schools, kindergartens, or children’s homes to other available posts. The bulk of such staff became teachers, though some were reallocated to educational administrations. Where necessary, redeployment included a short re-qualification course. Those with medical degrees were turned into school doctors. By August 1936 over half the staff had been successfully given a new role. Yet the summer was a period of grave uncertainty and school pedologists had every right to worry about becoming targets of more ¹¹⁵ On what follows see also Balashov, Pedologiia, 174–9, Kurek, Istorii likvidatsii, 113–22, and D. Karoli, ‘Kontseptsiia S. S. Molozhavogo: Mezhdu istoricheskim monizmom i represiiami pedologii’, in Istoriko-pedagogicheskoe znanie v nachale III tysiacheletiia; istoriia pedagogiki kak pedagogicheskaia i istoricheskaia nauka. Materialy Desiatoi mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Moskva, 13 noiabria 2014 g., ed. Grigorii B. Kornetov (Moscow: ASOU, 2014), 79–103 (89–93).

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Figure 14 ‘The pedologist at work’, Pravda, 31 August 1936, 3, by Kukryniksy—the team of Soviet graphic artists consisting of Mikhail Vasil′evich Kuprianov (1903–91), Porfirii Nikitich Krylov (1902–90), and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Sokolov (1903–2000).

serious forms of repression, given what was taking place in Soviet society more generally at this time and how those declared ‘saboteurs’ were being treated. Many pedologists were no doubt intimidated by the explicit or implicit threat of further sanctions, while a typical punishment was the loss of right to claim the years spent in the post of pedologist as part of one’s pensionable employment (stazh). However, there was no mass repression of ground-level school pedologists. The Party decree had certainly singled out ‘the so-called “pedologist” ’ who was then caricatured in the press as an evil scientist sabotaging the Soviet system (Figure 14). However, such a pedologist was the caricature of a particular kind of occupational work, to be eradicated as such. It was not necessarily identified with concrete individuals who had held the job-title ‘pedologist’ in schools. It was the role and the work that needed to go, not the person. Secondly, critical to pedology’s dismantlement was the eradication of the system of streaming and regular referrals of children to special schools. This meant not only putting on the breaks, but actually reversing the tide, i.e. moving

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children from special schools back to regular ones.¹¹⁶ Zhdanov put pressure on Bubnov for the reversals to be completed by the start of the new school year on 1 September. He wanted to see the ‘difficult to educate’ category eliminated altogether and special schools to be reserved only for serious cases of indiscipline (the so-called deti-dezorganizatory),¹¹⁷ cognitive underdevelopment (the idioty), and psychopathology (the psikhonevrotiki). Local administrations rushed to execute the order and re-evaluations were done at speed. The vast majority of those in the borderline categories were declared fit to return to regular schools. In some cases, entire schools for the trudnovospituemye were recategorized from special to normal. Narkompros was not happy about having to move at such speed, with both Bubnov and Krupskaia anticipating logistical problems and calling for a more measured approach to ensure that all children were correctly reassessed and that there were suitable places available for everyone. The process did, in fact, prove to be chaotic and confusing. Neither the teachers nor the pupils seemed happy with what was happening. Many teachers complained and looked to retain special classes for underachievers within the regular schools, but this was quickly clamped down on and teachers were warned that they needed to be instilling classroom discipline and improving performance by other means. Indeed, the pressure was on the administration itself to show that it was taking the directive seriously, with Bubnov expected to keep track of the reduction in the number of special schools and to demonstrate progress in reports sent directly to Stalin. Narkompros was also expected to apply further measures of dismantlement, such as removing all pedological diagnostic data and kharakteristiki from the files of pupils, and even abolishing the practice of test-based proforientatsiia in schools.¹¹⁸ Thirdly, vital was the dismantlement of pedology as a body of knowledge informing the professional work of educators. This entailed the swift removal of courses in pedology from the syllabuses of pedagogical institutes and their replacement with programmes in pedagogy and psychology.¹¹⁹ The latter were, however, still likely to be taught by the same staff who had previously taught pedology, but they had to confess to their errors and declare readiness to mend their ways, just as had been done in 1931–2. What was required this time, though, ¹¹⁶ On what follows see especially Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers’, 483–8, and Rodin, ‘Iz istorii zapreta’. See also ‘Likvidatsiia pedologicheskikh izvrashchenii v shkolakh Moskvy’, Pravda, 28 September 1936 (no. 268), 6. ¹¹⁷ On this group see, for example, A. Smirnov, ‘Deti dezorganizatory’, VP, 1929, no. 12: 82–92, based on the study carried out in Moscow schools by MONO’s Central Pedology Lab in 1928–9. ¹¹⁸ On the effect it had on model schools in 1937, see Holmes, Stalin’s School, 138–48. ¹¹⁹ S. A. Kamenev and A. P. Pinkevich, ‘Rabota nad novymi programmami po teorii i istorii pedagogiki’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 3–6. V. N. Kolbanovskii, ‘Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi psikhologii’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 7–21. S. L. Rubinshtein, ‘O programme po psikhologii’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 21–9. D. Iurov, ‘Pedagogicheskaia praktika v pedagogicheskom institute’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 29–38. ‘Na soveshchanii zaveduiushchikh kafedrami pedagogiki i prepodavatelei psikhologii v pedvuzakh’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 39–50.

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was the abolition of pedology departments and labs, or rather, their reorganization into departments of pedagogy or labs in educational methods or educational psychology. The same applied to any units associated with pedology within the various research institutes. A key part of the purge was the censoring of all textbooks in the subject.¹²⁰ From this point on, the term ‘pedology’ could not feature in any materials used in the training of future teachers. ‘Marxist pedagogy’ was promoted into the concept around which the Soviet education profession, finally ‘reinstated in its rights’, would rally from now on—a shift that was portrayed as long overdue. Fourthly, the dismantlement of pedology included a compulsory campaign of its public vilification. A large number of articles and brochures devoted to lambasting pedology came out in the wake of the decree, both in the general press and in professional journals and newspapers read by teachers.¹²¹ While this campaign was especially vigorous in the first six months, articles critical of pedology continued to come out even several years later. Some aspects of the 1936–7 campaign resembled the one of 1931–2. Indeed, targeted were exactly the same figures as before and many of the accusations levied at them were almost identical to what had been said during 1931–2. The arguments used often referred to older works and rehashed earlier criticisms.¹²² Yet there were some notable differences. Given that tensions with the West had escalated during the 1930s, the accusation of pedology’s dependence on bourgeois theories of biosocial determinism and Nazi racial science now had added resonance, which was what lay behind pedology’s description as a reactionary pseudoscience.¹²³ Indeed, already on 5 July 1936 Pravda published as its editorial the article titled ‘The Exposure of the Pseudoscience of Pedology’ in which pedology was bluntly accused of being ¹²⁰ For the list of books that were taken out of circulation see Karoli, ‘Kontseptsiia S. S. Molozhavogo’, 93–9. ¹²¹ Pravda itself did not hold back, with several articles coming out already in July, including N. Semashko, ‘Teoriia i praktika pedologii’, Pravda, 11 July 1936 (no. 189), 3. However, it was the start of the new school year on 1 September that served as the key opportunity to drive home the message about the purge of pedology. In addition to the front-page editorial (‘Zavtra nachinaetsia uchebnyi god’, Pravda, 31 August 1936 (no. 240), 1), which highlighted yet again the importance of the anti-pedology decree, Pravda devoted the entire page 3 of this issue to a whole series of critical articles, including ‘Vosstanovit′ polnost′iu v pravakh pedagogiku i pedagoga’, A. Tumanova, ‘Za vospitanie detei otvechaet uchitel′’, I. Mal′tsev, ‘Komplektovanie klassov po ukazke pedologov’, V. Braun, ‘Groznye diagnozy i opytnye pedagogi’, O. Aleksandrov, ‘Narkomprosovskie popravki’, Pedagog, ‘Entsiklopediia otpetogo nevezhestva’, and Tikh. Kholodnyi, ‘Iku’. As regards the professional press, the following articles came in Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie alone: I. F. Svadkovskii, ‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v pedagogike’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 51–7. M. P. Feofanov, ‘Lzhenauchyi uchebnik’, PO, 1936, no. 5: 57–63. P. N. Shimbirev, ‘Pedologicheskie izvrashcheniia v uchebnike po pedagogike’, PO, 1936, no. 6: 38–44. I. V. Chuvashev, ‘Iskorenit′ do kontsia pedologicheskie izvrashcheniia v doshkol′nom vospitanii’, PO, 1936, no. 6: 45–70. N. A. Konstantinov, ‘Lzhenauka pedologiia na sluzhbe imperializma i fashizma’, PO, 1936, no. 6: 70–5. Many more items are cited in Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii and Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers’. ¹²² Kurek, Istorii likvidatsii, 122–8. ¹²³ On accusations of fascism aimed at both pedology and psychotechnics during 1934–5, see also ibid., 99–104.

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rooted in the idea of the superiority of the exploiting classes and higher races.¹²⁴ However, the most poignant criticism in 1936–7, in contrast to the campaign of 1931–2, was of the harmful role that the pedology service had supposedly played in Soviet education and society at large, adversely impacting on teachers, parents, and children. Whereas in 1931–2 the issue had been one of ideological deviations within the politico-epistemic underpinnings of pedology as science, this time it was pedology as such that was singled out as a ‘deviation’. The validity of pedology was challenged in a far more fundamental and irrevocable way, with no room for argument, which was why anyone accused of pedological errors had no option but to turn against the concept itself and join the chorus of accusations. Krupskaia was, as before, very unhappy about the indiscriminate dismissal of all aspects of pedology, but this time she was powerless to do anything about it.¹²⁵ And indeed, the Party had unequivocally laid the blame squarely at the feet of Narkompros itself, directing it in no uncertain terms to expunge ‘pedology’ from its system.¹²⁶ Aside from implementing the dismantlement of pedological infrastructure, Bubnov, while accepting the disciplining that Narkompros was hereby receiving, also looked to deflect some of the blame away from the Commissariat onto pedology’s scientific leadership.¹²⁷ However, given that pedology had already been effectively ‘decapitated’ in 1931–2, the denunciation of the work of the most prominent figures associated with pedology was even more ritualistic than before. In fact, many of those singled out for criticism, such as Basov and Vygotskii, had passed away a few years earlier (in 1931 and 1934 respectively). A few other key names were dead by the end of the summer: Zalkind suffered a heart attack in early July soon after he learned about the anti-pedology Party decree; Molozhavyi died a few months later, having already submitted a letter to Bubnov confessing to his errors.¹²⁸ There was a tendency, both among Narkompros’ leadership and the surviving scientific leaders of pedology, to focus their critique on those who had passed away. This allowed some of the formerly prominent figures, such as Blonskii, to survive the onslaught and continue to work, though now within the reframed fields of pedagogy and psychology. For sure, Blonskii had to endure considerable criticism, given his visibility in pedology as

¹²⁴ ‘Razoblachenie pedologicheskoi lzhenauki’, Pravda, 5 July 1936 (no. 183), 1. This article was published on the front page side-by-side with the decree itself, acting as its elaboration and interpretation. ¹²⁵ Rodin, ‘Iz istorii zapreta’. ¹²⁶ Narkomzdrav was, of course, also expected to eliminate its own pedology-related structures. See ‘Likvidatsiia pedologicheskikh uchrezhdeniiakh narkomzdrava’, Pravda, 30 July 1936 (no. 208), 6. ¹²⁷ On Bubnov’s denunciation of Zalkind see A. Bubnov, ‘O teorii i praktike sovremennoi pedologii’, Pravda, 28 July 1936 (no. 206), 2–3. See also A. S. Bubnov, ‘Vosstanovit′ polnost′iu v pravakh pedagogiku i pedagogov’, PO, 1936, no. 6: 1–37 (32–7), where he critiques a number of others, including Blonskii and Vygotskii. ¹²⁸ Karoli, ‘Kontseptsiia S. S. Molozhavogo’, 87–8.

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promoted to teachers in particular. However, his prompt repentance was duly accepted, and he carried on writing and publishing until his death in 1941.¹²⁹ And finally, essential to completing the dismantlement of pedology as occupation, was its replacement by an alternative that would make pedology’s own occupational work and tasks effectively redundant. One of the key turnarounds that followed the anti-pedology decree was the active promotion of the occupational role of ‘the teacher’ in a way designed to oust the discredited ‘pedologist’.¹³⁰ Teachers were mobilized en masse into the campaign of pedology’s denunciation: they were expected to critique it from their own practitioner perspective, playing the part both of pedology’s victims and of witnesses to its harmful effects on school life, children, and their families.¹³¹ More importantly still, teachers were now promoted into the new heroes of the successes of Soviet education, ‘liberated’ to, through their hard work as practising pedagogues, transform Soviet children into productive, disciplined, and patriotic citizens of a socialist society. ‘The teacher’—a very particular kind of ‘Soviet teacher’—was, in Socialist Realist fashion, cast as the figure equipped not just with the indispensable support from above (the Party and its leadership), but also with the right kind of professional consciousness, ethos, and expertise, to take this task all onto him or herself. The academic frame circumscribing the expertise needed for the execution of this task was now simply ‘Soviet pedagogy’, which in 1937 acquired as its organ the journal of that name—Sovetskaia pedagogika.¹³² This opened a new chapter in the history of Soviet education, to coincide with Stalin’s announcement in the new Soviet constitution of 1936 that the country had at this point successfully attained the historic stage of socialism.

¹²⁹ Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers’, 490. This is not to say that ‘pedological distortions’ were not used as an argument for the dismissal of anyone who happened to be associated with it in the past. For instance, S. M. Vasileiskii, the most prominent figure representing pedology in Gorky (Nizhnii Novgorod), was sacked only in 1939, on the grounds that his course in child psychology, which he taught in lieu of pedology at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute, remained tainted with pedological ‘distortions’. ¹³⁰ Bubnov, ‘Vosstanovit′ polnost′iu’, 1–32. ¹³¹ See especially Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers’. In truth, though, the suddenness and sharpness of the attack on the school pedology service was met with confusion by the teaching profession and they were quite unsure how precisely to interpret the new injunctions, often worrying that they themselves might be at fault, for they had been complicit in the system of relegating children to special schools and were inherently part of the referrals process, being often the ones initiating the evaluation of a disruptive or underperforming child. ¹³² The spirit of ‘Soviet pedagogy’ will over the coming years become shaped especially by the pedagogical ideas of Anton Makarenko, whose Method of the Organization of the Educational Process, based on his work in state-security-run children’s labour colonies, was first published in 1936. On Makarenko’s pedagogy see, for example, S. S. Nevskaia (ed.), Vospitanie grazhdanina v pedagogike A. S. Makarenko (Moscow: Akademicheskii Proekt; Al′ma Mater, 2006).

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8 Conclusion The Afterlife of a ‘Repressed Science’

The Post-Mortems and Rehabilitations of a Science Called Pedology The anti-pedology decree of 4 July 1936 dramatically and definitively ended the role that pedology had played in the early Soviet Union as a framework for mobilizing scientific and occupational work, supporting the state’s provision of care and education for the country’s child population. The structure of roles, work, and expertise that had become associated with pedology now dissolved across several disciplines, whose legitimacy was both explicitly and implicitly reaffirmed with pedology’s downfall. This required a careful disentanglement of these disciplines from anything that had been compromised by pedology.¹ The frameworks to which relevant responsibilities were devolved were those that already overlapped with different facets of pedology—namely, pedagogy, psychology, defectology, parts of neuroscience, and medical specialisms such as paediatrics and child psychiatry. Pedagogy, whose legitimacy as a science had always been under question, was ‘reinstated’ with particular fanfare and declared free from the hegemony of a devious impostor-science.² It was psychology, however, that absorbed key elements of relevant academic research, now under the headings of educational or developmental psychology, making sure, though, to avoid anything that smacked of mass psychometrics.³ Something similar took place in neuroscience, which had already in the early 1930s retreated towards the more specialist study of the physiology or pathology of neurological development. Defectology, as the discipline underpinning the system of special needs care and education, survived principally by limiting its focus to the clinical

¹ On one case of negotiations among psychologists at the time, see Anton Iasnitskii [Yasnitsky], ‘Ocherk istorii Khar′kovskoi shkoly psikhologii: pervaia nauchnaia sessiia Khar′kovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta i poiavlienie “Khar′kovskoi shkoly psikhologii” (1938)’, Kul′turno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia, 2009, no. 2: 95–106. ² E. Thomas Ewing, ‘Restoring Teachers to Their Rights: Soviet Education and the 1936 Denunciation of Pedology’, History of Education Quarterly, 2001, 41(4): 471–93. ³ There was, however, some revival of interest in psychometrics in the post-Stalin era. See V. M. Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov: Monografiia (Moscow: Narodnoe obrazovanie, 2004), 380–411, and Nikolai Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2004), 134–8. Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia. Andy Byford, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andy Byford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198825050.001.0001

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diagnostics and corrective treatment of specific ‘impairments’ in individual children.⁴ Doctors working with children resumed traditional functions of managing health and illness. Between 1936 and the collapse of the Communist regime in 1991 the term ‘pedology’ carried only negative connotations—pedologiia was effectively turned into shorthand for pedologicheskie izvrashcheniia. From 1938, the term was invoked rarely, mostly to lambast the odd re-emergence of certain ‘bad’ practices that from time to time cropped up in Soviet educational practice. For instance, in December 1948, a teacher from the Tambov oblast warned in a letter to Pravda that it looked like ‘pedology’ was being ‘revived’ in the approach taken by some of his fellow teachers who, when compiling their pupils’ kharakteristiki, sought to diagnose causes of underperformance in a manner reminiscent of school pedologists from the 1930s.⁵ Those who in the late Soviet era studied children, whether as educationalists, psychologists, defectologists, paediatricians, or psychiatrists, had nothing to gain from associating their work with the disgraced concept of pedology. The Soviet human sciences and related professions had enough on their plate negotiating ideological and other constraints and impositions. The last thing they needed was to reignite debates over a controversial framework that had received such political bashing in the 1930s and which was hardly likely to receive renewed patronage from the party-state. Pedology was therefore simply not worth reviving. Most scholars in the relevant fields were careful to avoid even passing references to pedology, fearing that association with it could potentially jeopardize their work and careers. Such prudence was not misplaced since many of the leading figures in late Soviet psychology, pedagogy, and defectology were students of those who had been at the forefront of pedology in the 1920s–1930s, and some of them were, as young people, involved in projects directly or loosely connected with it. From the late 1950s, as de-Stalinization began, it became much easier to remember and promote the work of those who had in one way or another been associated with pedology in the 1920s and 1930s, but again, only in their guise as psychologists, pedagogues, defectologists, or neuroscientists, not as pedologists. Indeed, those who charted the history of Russo-Soviet pedagogy, psychology, or defectology, mostly as part of rebuilding these as Soviet disciplines in the postStalin era, continued to ignore or downplay the embarrassing episode that pedology had become. This trend continued until perestroika. The way in which pedology was presented in Vygotskii’s Collected Works, published in the early 1980s, is telling. Volume 4, edited by Daniil Borisovich El′konin (1904–84), bears

⁴ Andy Byford, ‘Poniatiia subnormy i patologii v istorii rossiiskoi nauki o rebenke’, Voprosy psikhologii, 2015, no. 1: 111–22. ⁵ V. Voitulevich, ‘Vozrozhdenie pedologii’, Pravda, 27 December 1948 (no. 326; ‘Pis′ma v redaktsiiu’), 3.

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the title ‘Child Psychology’ and includes Vygotskii’s Pedology of the Teenager (Pedologiia podrostka, 1930–1). While the visibility of the term ‘pedology’ in one of the headings gives the impression that, by 1984, something has clearly shifted in the reception of pedology in the Soviet Union, in the afterword, the editor (who was 80 at the time and passed away that same year) presented pedology as a concept likely to be unfamiliar to the reader and thus requiring editorial elaboration. In his commentary, El′konin was at pains to reinterpret what Vygotskii had labelled ‘pedology’ as a form of developmental psychology. More interestingly perhaps, El′konin, while citing Vygotskii’s definition of pedology as a discipline, decided to explicitly bracket this issue out of his own discussion. While expressing reservations about the way in which Vygotskii framed pedology’s right to call itself a science, El′konin stated that such a question needed to be referred to the expert opinion of naukovedenie—Soviet ‘science studies’, which combined the philosophy of the scientific method with a sociology and history of sciences.⁶ In other words, by the 1980s, one was able to cite pedology as a seemingly archaic, historically unsuccessful, scientific framework, but only insofar as a more detailed discussion around it was suspended or deferred. A few years later, as the spirit of glasnost grabbed hold of Soviet society with the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, some were prompted to take another look at pedology as a science that appeared to have been ‘forgotten’ (or, in the psychoanalytic sense, ‘repressed’). Nevertheless, pedology’s place in the history of the Soviet human sciences was at this point (the late 1980s) still being treated with ambivalence: while it was felt that pedology should certainly be exonerated from the extreme Stalinist charge of fundamental politico-epistemic izvrashcheniia (i.e. accusations which annulled its scientific legitimacy by framing it as reactionary in essence), pedology nonetheless continued to be presented as having suffered from a range of theoretical misconceptions and methodological errors.⁷ With the collapse of the Communist regime in 1991, pedology was suddenly reframed as a victim of Stalinism—a prime example of a ‘repressed’ (in the sense of ‘purged’) Soviet science (repressirovannaia nauka).⁸ At this juncture, pedology came to be presented as a discipline which had certainly been materially ⁶ L. S. Vygotskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, ed. D. B. El′konin (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1984), 387. On naukovedenie see Elena Aronova, ‘The Politics and Contexts of Soviet Science Studies (Naukovedenie): Soviet Philosophy of Science at the Crossroads’, Studies in East European Thought, 2011, 63(3): 175–202. ⁷ A. V. Petrovskii, ‘Neprochitannye stranitsy istorii psikhologii – tridtsatye gody’, Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1988, no. 4: 125–38. ⁸ D. Nikolenko, A. Gubko, and P. Ignatenko, ‘Zlokliucheniia nauki pedologii: Pora vernut′ imia’, Narodnoe obrazovanie, 1990, no. 10: 117–24. A. V. Petrovskii, ‘Zapret na kompleksnoe issledovanie detstva’, in Represirovannaia nauka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 126–35. P. Ia. Shvartsman and I. V. Kuznetsova, ‘Pedologiia’, in Repressirovannaia nauka, vol. 2 (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), 121– 39. This frame continued to be referred to throughout the decade and beyond. E.g. see A. Asmolov, T. Martsinkovskaia, and V. Umrikhin, ‘Iz istorii repressirovannoi nauki’, Pedologiia: Novyi vek, 2001, no. 1: 16–18.

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supported, ideologically shaped, and politically harnessed by the Bolshevik regime over the course of the 1920s, but which was then—under Stalin, during the 1930s—subjected to a show trial, unfairly slandered, systematically dismantled, and, in the end, unjustly censored out of history. The case of pedology—a Soviet science abolished by Party decree—became notorious in the context of the indictment of Stalin’s regime for crimes against the disinterested pursuit of scientific knowledge, and more generally, crimes against ‘truth’ itself. The outcome of this shift in the understanding of pedology’s place in Soviet history has been a de facto reopening of its case. This has involved, firstly, a form of ‘autopsy’—an attempt to establish pedology’s exact ‘cause of death’, i.e. the ‘real’ reasons for its destruction by the Stalinist establishment in 1936; and secondly, a form of ‘rehabilitation’—a re-evaluation of pedology’s legacies as a science, designed principally to reverse the Stalinist verdict of its inherently ‘pseudoscientific’ nature. And yet, neither the ‘autopsy’ nor the ‘rehabilitation’ of pedology in the post-Soviet era was entirely successful or conclusive.⁹ Most commentators accept that there is no single, straightforward cause for the dismantlement and stigmatization of pedology in 1936. The anti-pedology decree was, of course, itself a list of accusatory reasons.¹⁰ Official charges included: pedology’s alleged adherence to the principle of biosocial determinism, deemed counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet; the enactment of this principle in class- and racially-biased mass testing; the consequent arbitrary and harmful labelling of otherwise normal children of working-class, peasant, or ethnic-minority backgrounds as ‘backward’; and finally, the more general undermining of the Soviet education system, not least by artificially limiting the contribution of the teaching profession (which ought to have been in full, autonomous control of children’s educational development) to the realization of the system’s outputs. Historians and other commentators have looked beyond these indictments to produce a variety of alternative ‘causes’ or ‘reasons’, ranging from highly personalized ones, such as rumours about offences caused to prominent members of the Party leadership by unflattering pedological assessments of their progeny, to general political explanations, such as the argument that the case of pedology was merely an episode in Stalin’s campaign to eliminate the ‘Leninist guard’, specifically at Narkompros.¹¹ Other ‘explanations’ include the argument that following the 1931 U-turn in educational policy, which entailed the return of teacher-led pedagogical paradigms, pedology became increasingly redundant and ultimately a liability. For instance, by continuing to produce unflattering data on ⁹ See also Endi Baiford [Andy Byford], ‘Zagrobnaia zhizn′ “nauki” pedologii: k voprosu o znachenii “nauchnykh dvizhenii” (i ikh istorii) dlia sovremennoi pedagogiki’, Prepodavatel′: XXI vek, 2013, no. 1: 43–55. The text that follows in this section represents a reworked version of parts of this article. ¹⁰ ‘O pedologicheskikh izvrashcheniiakh v sisteme narkomprosov’, KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s″ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK (Moscow: Politizdat, 1985), vol. 6, 364–7. ¹¹ See esp. Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii.

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the Soviet child population and their conditions of upbringing and education, the pedologists appeared to have been unwittingly undermining the thrust of contemporaneous Stalinist propaganda, which included the motto: ‘Thank You Comrade Stalin for Our Happy Childhood!’ Key to pedology’s ‘autopsy’ has therefore been the dissection of its role in the Soviet state apparatus and the way it got caught up in the internal politics of the Bolshevik Party. However, the renewed scrutiny to which pedology was subjected in the process has also resulted in it being effectively put on trial once again, only this time with a view to giving it a purportedly fairer hearing. Pedology’s ‘mistakes’ are now, as a rule, attributed to historical contingencies rather than fundamental flaws. Its failings are seen to be mostly down to its ‘youth’ as a science. Commentators invariably point to the chaotic conditions of its institutional rise in the context of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals; to the Zeitgeist of the interwar period with its overblown ambitions of eugenic social-engineering; and, above all, to the Bolsheviks’ capricious political meddling in matters of science more generally. In contrast to the 1936 verdict, which did away with pedology lock, stock, and barrel, its contemporary reassessments have been at pains to separate the wheat from the chaff, to downplay what, by current standards, might indeed be deemed methodologically flawed, theoretically old-fashioned, or ethically problematic, while celebrating and reviving those elements of pedology’s legacy that could be framed positively and promoted in the present. This has not been easy, though, as is evident, for example, in the vigorous polemic that unfolded on the pages of the journal Questions of Psychology (Voprosy psikhologii) in 2000, in which the wellestablished and invariably positively evaluated legacy of Lev Vygotskii and Aleksandr Luria became entangled with some rather problematic attempts to rehabilitate other, methodologically shaky and ethically controversial, 1920s’ pedological research on Uzbek children, carried out by A. Shtilerman, whose work had in the early 1930s featured as one of the more glaring pieces of evidence of pedology’s ‘chauvinism’.¹² Significantly, though, the rewriting of pedology’s history has not been limited to its reassessment as a thing of the past. Indeed, despite the rhetoric of ‘death’ that surrounds it,¹³ pedology’s ‘rehabilitation’ has never been simply about getting the

¹² N. S. Kurek, ‘Pedologiia i psikhotekhnika o nravstvennom, intellektual′nom i fizicheskom urovniakh razvitiia naseleniia SSSR v dvadtsatye gody’, Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1997, no. 3: 149–59. B. G. Meshcheriakov and V. P. Zinchenko, ‘L. S. Vygotskii i sovremennaia kul′turno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia (Kriticheskii analiz knigi M. Koula)’, Voprosy psikhologii, 2000, no. 2: 102–16. N. S. Kurek, ‘O sotsial′noi istorii kul′turno-istoricheskoi psikhologii: Otvet B. G. Meshcheriakovu i V. P. Zinchenko’, Voprosy psikhologii, 2000, no. 6: 67–72. B. G. Meshcheriakov and V. P. Zinchenko, ‘Domysly kritika i kritika domyslov’, Voprosy psikhologii, 2000, no. 6: 73–5. ¹³ V. V. Kuzin and B. A. Nikitiuk, ‘K 60-letiiu tragicheskikh sobytii i ikh posledstviiam (rekviem po pedologii)’, Fizicheskaia kul′tura, 1996, no. 3: 18–21.

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historical record right.¹⁴ For sure, in the early 1990s, delving into the history of the ‘purge’ of pedology as a science has been primarily a question of uncovering and redressing the wrongs of Stalinism. However, this has also involved hypothesizing about some of the long-term consequences of Stalinist crimes against this science across the remainder of the Soviet period. Those writing about pedology in the post-Soviet era have regularly argued that its dismantlement in 1936 and the ban on any research that smacked of it had had a detrimental effect on the development of the disciplines of psychology and pedagogy in the USSR, as well as on Soviet children’s services and education more generally, including the training of Soviet teachers.¹⁵ Some have gone so far as to argue that the ban on testing, in particular, had reduced the country’s ability to adequately manage its ‘human capital’, undermining the principle of meritocracy in educational and professional selection, and consequently reducing the country’s overall intellectual potential.¹⁶ The basic assumption here is that pedology was a science whose fate in the USSR resembled that of genetics: in other words, had pedology not been so brutally and definitively stopped in its tracks in 1936, it could have matured into a scientifically important and socially valuable enterprise. Throughout the 1990s–2000s, pedology has also been invoked in Russian debates concerning the contemporary reform of childcare, education, pedagogy, teacher training, defectology and child psychology. The post-Soviet era has been a period of revisionism in Russia’s systems and practices of upbringing, education, and psychology, resulting in considerable uncertainty about which principles to adopt as the new ideological foundations of educational and childcare policy and practice. Those calling for the full restoration of pedology as a science that could provide much-needed guidance in this context are relatively rare.¹⁷ However, a few commentators have argued that at least certain key aspects of this former ‘science of the child’ are badly needed in contemporary Russia and deserve to be revived in updated form.¹⁸ This has led to pedology starting to be effectively (re)constructed anew in twenty-first-century Russia, albeit in limited, modified, and largely virtual ways. The most important, idealized, properties of this ‘virtual pedology’ are its supposed humanist child-centrism, anthropological holism, and synthetic interdisciplinarity. This particular conceptualization of the ‘good bits’ of what was once pedology tends to refer especially to the legacies of Vygotskii’s approach to ¹⁴ A. Asmolov, ‘Ot redaktora’, Pedologiia: Novyi vek, 2000, no. 1: 4. ¹⁵ A. V. Gavrilin, ‘Pedologiia: Vozvrashchenie v budushchee’, Nauchnye idei F. A. Fradkina v kontekste sovremennykh issledovanii istorii i teorii vsemirnogo pedagogicheskogo protsessa (Vladimir: Vladimirskii gos. gum. Un., 2008), 187–210. ¹⁶ Kurek, Istoriia likvidatsii, 138–45. ¹⁷ N. I. Speranskaia, ‘Pedologiia v sovremennoi shkole’, Obrazovanie: Problemy, poiski, resheniia (Sbornik nauchno-metodicheskikh trudov), vyp. 4 (Khanty-Mansiisk: GUIPP Poligrafist, 2002), 149–58. ¹⁸ E.g. A. V. Svetlichnaia, Pedologiia kak nauka o razvitii rebenka: Genezis, sostoianie, perspektivy, Aftoreferat (Ekaterinburg, 2006).

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education, child psychology, and defectology, though it is also incorporated into the revival of so-called ‘pedagogical anthropology’ (pedagogicheskaia antropologiia), which simultaneously emphasizes the legacy of K. D. Ushinskii—Russia’s nineteenth-century precursor to pedology.¹⁹ Certain legacies of early Soviet pedology are also finding their way into contemporary Russian ‘childhood studies’ (detskie issledovaniia). The latter is a relatively new development in Russia, which has taken the form primarily of a social and cultural history and anthropology of childhood, although the field maintains links with educational theory and child psychology.²⁰ Some of those involved in this movement, especially social historians of early twentieth-century Russo-Soviet childhood, use as their sources some of the sociological surveys, psychological questionnaires, diaries, and related data collected by early twentiethcentury pedologists.²¹ They pay special attention to those parts of pedology’s legacy that entailed a similar interest in children as objects of historical, social, and anthropological study, including ethnographies of childhood and documentations of children’s folklore. Such approaches were, in truth, relatively marginal in early twentieth-century pedology, where the agenda was shaped not by anthropologists but by psychologists, educationalists, physicians, and neuropsychiatrists, who all approached the child as an object of scientific understanding and technological improvement rather than as a subject with agency, voice, and rights. Indeed, while the focus of early twentieth-century pedology was principally on child development (its stages, norms, and deviations) and on related problems of socialization (its methods and aims, obstacles and challenges), the focus of contemporary ‘childhood studies’ is on constituting ‘the child’ as a subject in its own right.²² This is why those working within the framework of contemporary Russian ‘childhood studies’ are especially interested in the approach of pedologists such as N. A. Rybnikov, who showed particular interest in data that captured the perspective of the child.

¹⁹ T. N. Gavrilova, ‘Istoriia otechestvennoi pedologii v nachale XX veka v svete idei pedagogicheskoi antropologii’, Psikhologicheskoe i pedagogicheskoe soprovozhdenie obrazovatel′nogo protsessa (Iaroslavl′: Izd. IaGPU, 2005), 195–8. E. G. Il′iashenko, ‘Otechestvennaia pedologiia v kontekste razvitiia pedagogicheskoi antropologii (pervaia tret′ XX v.), Trudy kafedry pedagogiki, istorii obrazovaniiia i pedagogicheskoi antropologii universiteta RAO, vyp. 17 (Moscow: URAO, 2002), 59–76. See also E. G. Il′iashenko, Pedagogicheskaia antropologiia v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost′ (Moscow: URAO, 2003). ²⁰ Andy Byford, ‘Childhood Studies: Russia’, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Childhood Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/page/ childhood-studies (last accessed 27 June 2019). Current research activities in this field can be gleaned, for example, from the website of the research group specializing in the ‘culture of childhood’ based at the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet in Moscow. See http://childcult.rsuh.ru/ (last accessed 27 June 2019). ²¹ E.g. A. A. Sal′nikova, Rossiiskoe detstvo v XX veke: Istoriia, teoriia i praktika issledovaniia (Kazan′: Kazanskii gos. un., 2007). ²² E.g. see Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-Sebastian Honig (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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However, pedology’s legacies are being revived in today’s Russia in rather different ways as well. Notable here is the movement devoted to expanding the practices of testing in education, which goes under the label of psychological, pedagogical, or psycho-pedagogical ‘diagnostics’ (psikhologo-pedagogicheskaia diagnostika).²³ This movement harks back to pedology’s psychometric strand, and its representatives invariably point to the 1936 ban on testing in the USSR and the eradication of both pedology and psychotechnics as acts that stunted some valuable native traditions of psychometrics. Their objective is to restore psychological and educational testing technology in twenty-first-century Russia. To realize this, they are again looking for inspiration in Western practices, just as the ‘pedologists-objectivists’ had done a century ago. What will become of ‘pedagogical anthropology’, ‘childhood studies’, or ‘psycho-pedagogical diagnostics’ in contemporary Russia remains to be seen. However, while they are all making different kinds of conceptual or historical links with early twentieth-century pedology, such links need to be understood as products of these movements’ own self-construction and self-historicization. In reality, they are shaped by a post-Soviet social, political, and cultural context. What is more, their historical origins are rather closer to the present day. Even when these movements claim, as they invariably do, an intellectual ancestry that dates back to the early twentieth or even the late nineteenth centuries, their actual roots can be more plausibly located among some of the ‘dissident’ strands within psychology, pedagogy, and historical anthropology from the late Soviet era. So where does that leave pedology in twenty-first-century Russia? It could be argued that as a result of all this intricate interweaving of a fraught history and a complicated present, pedology has, in the post-Soviet era, been leading the rather peculiar existence of a ‘ghost science’—its ‘scientificity’ constantly in a limbo, its ‘pseudoscientificity’ never fully exorcized; its ‘death’ never quite accepted (for how could science possibly die?); its ‘resurrection’ usually little more than wishful rhetoric. But why would this be the case and what lies at the bottom of it? The main reason for this situation is that pedology was never a ‘science’ in a straightforward sense, just as it had never been a ‘pseudoscience’. The ease with which pedology was turned from an officially sanctioned ‘state science’ into an officially vilified ‘pseudoscience’ shows just how dependent its status was on political and academic rhetoric and theatre, i.e. on proclamations of it as a ‘science’ in ritually and peformatively significant contexts: in textbooks or at major conferences, in newspaper articles or in university courses, in encyclopaedias or in party decrees. What is at stake here, however, is not so much the performative construction of pedology’s (il)legitimacy, but rather its reification as a ‘science’. Irrespective of whether one is proclaiming pedology a legitimate

²³ E.g. M. K. Akimova, Psikhologicheskaia diagnostika (St Petersburg: Piter, 2005).

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‘science’ or an illegitimate ‘pseudoscience’, these are simply the opposite sides of the same coin of pedology’s reification. In fact, as can be seen from pedology’s demise in 1936, this coin has been fascinatingly easy to flip. If anything, pedology’s reification as a science has, paradoxically, only been reinforced by it being proclaimed a ‘pseudoscience’. Furthermore, this process of reifying pedology as a ‘science’ continued in its 1990s’ reframing as a ‘repressed science’ that had been ‘killed off’ (likvidirovana) by the Soviet party-state.²⁴ All this, I would argue, explains pedology’s ‘ghostliness’ in the present: it is its reification that should be seen as the primary cause of the impasse where pedology is neither properly ‘interred’ as a ‘thing’ (a ‘science’) of the past, nor properly ‘revived’ as a ‘thing’ (a ‘science’) of the present.

Reframing (Russo-Soviet) Child Science So where does the way out of this impasse lie? My answer to this question, which I have sought to elaborate throughout this book, is that it is essential to reconsider what the field I refer to in the title as ‘science of the child’ is as a social form. What this book has argued is that the ‘science of the child’ (or ‘child science’) cannot be viewed as a ‘science’ in any simple understanding of this term. Rather, it must be analysed as an evolving social frame within which a particular—highly heterogeneous, but also deeply interconnected—body of scientific and professional work (intellectual as well as occupational) was mobilized. The period covered in this book—stretching roughly from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century—was historically crucial to the emergence of this frame of ‘child science’, both in terms of the dynamism that said mobilizations attained across the decades in question and in terms of the distinctive (yet by definition impermanent and changeable) forms that these mobilizations took during this time. I have placed the emergence of ‘child science’ in the nexus between, on the one hand, the growth of ‘professional society’, and on the other, the rise of the ‘welfare/ warfare state’—two critical developments that coincided at a historical juncture associated with both accelerated modernization and exceptional socio-political upheavals. As suggested from the outset, ‘child science’ as a social form entailed the mobilization not only of various groups of scientific specialists, but also of teachers, doctors, and other professions and occupations, as well as ‘lay’ individuals, such as parents, bureaucrats, or politicians. Inherent to this mobilization has been the ongoing construction and reconstruction of specific disciplinary and professional institutions, practices, and identities. ²⁴ This also includes its rhetorical ‘anthropomorphization’, as in O. A. Artem′eva, ‘K voprosu o sotsial′noi biografii pedologii v Rossii’, Vestnik Moskovskogo univesiteta. Seriia pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie, 2010, no. 3: 139–49.

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Yet fundamental to ‘child science’ has been the plurality of distinct but conjoined frameworks of mobilization. Indeed, what I have emphasized throughout the book has been the understanding of ‘child science’ as a dynamic of interdisciplinary and inter-professional interactions. For sure, previous discussions of this field, both at the time of its formation and in subsequent reflections on it, have described ‘child science’ as inherently multi- and interdisciplinary. However, this has tended to be either idealized as producing some holistic epistemic synthesis, or, conversely, critiqued as in reality amounting to little more than an amorphous epistemic hotchpotch (vinegret in Russian), while the precise form of this disciplinary complexity has, most often, been taken for granted and left unanalysed. What I have argued in this book is that what ‘child science’ was, specifically as a framework of mobilization, can only be comprehended as a dynamic of interdisciplinary and inter-professional interactions, both at the epistemic level (i.e., that of knowledge-production, to include theories and methods, research practices and empirical findings), and at the social level (i.e. in terms of interactions between rival scientific and occupational groups, to include also the highly important rhetorical constructions of these very interactions from each of their respective perspectives). This book’s overall analysis has been guided by an effort to explain in some detail how this exceptionally heterogeneous field of scientific and professional work, knowledge and expertise functioned in practice. This has entailed carefully scrutinizing negotiations taking place across a multiplicity of stakeholder interests, professional territories, occupational languages, disciplinary boundaries, institutional structures, and communities of practice. It has involved dissecting the rhetoric of collaboration and consensus-making as well as analysing different modes of disciplinary and occupational boundary-work. In carrying out such analysis, I have been especially interested in the articulation of power-relations between the interacting scientific and professional groups, especially their efforts to accumulate forms of symbolic power, material resource or social means of recruiting peer, public, or political support. Significant has also been the analysis of how some of the key instruments of scientific and occupational work within ‘child science’ (notably, mental tests) became crucial as a means of interconnecting the field’s sub-domains, and this specifically by being flexibly transposed between and diversely interpreted within each of them. Given this heterogeneity, it is important not to reduce ‘child science’ to a singular enterprise. Rather, this field abounded in a whole host of signifiers around which various programmes of scientific innovation or professional work, together with associated occupational roles, disciplinary identities and instruments of work, formed, transformed, and eventually dissolved. Many of these signifiers, which served as foci of mobilization for specific groups, meant different, and usually multiple, things, often at the same time. This has been the case especially (though by no means exclusively) with ‘pedology’, which became a dominant

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framework of mobilization of ‘child science’ in the early Soviet era. Even before the October revolution, though, how Bekhterev understood ‘pedology’ and how Nechaev used the term, were two quite different things. And again, what ‘pedology’ meant as a synthetic science of child development or what it was as a form of occupational practice deployed in early Soviet schools, were distinct, if interconnected, entities. Moreover, what was mobilized under a given label at any given point kept changing, often imperceptibly so. The periodization of the evolution of Soviet pedology as a framework of mobilization that I have followed in this book is not particularly original in and of itself. However, what is original is my argument that, as a framework of mobilization of scientific and professional work, pedology in the Soviet Union kept assuming different forms—from ‘bandwagon’ to ‘framework of integration’ to ‘programme of takeover’ to ‘occupational service’. This means that what is so often taken as a singular phenomenon—‘Soviet pedology’— was in fact a series of different, overlapping, frameworks and modes of mobilization. Understanding pedology as different in different moments allows us to see more clearly what pedology’s ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ really entailed at each point, and why what went by ‘pedology’ would have been supported or instead delegitimized at different stages between the early 1920s and the mid-1930s. The various, often rapid, shifts in the evolution of ‘child science’ in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union were not governed by some predetermined teleology of the evolution of disciplines, but by the historical and political contingencies of the late imperial and early Soviet eras. Much of the politics discussed in this book are disciplinary and professional; however, I have placed these in the wider context of social and biopolitics of both tsarist and Soviet times, including, of course, politics associated with state power itself. While civic, professional, and scientific communities were the main bearers of the mobilization of Russian ‘child science’ in the imperial era, even the slowly modernizing tsarist state was taking increasing interest in this field during the 1900s–1910s. In the 1920s–1930s, the emergent Soviet state, unprecedented in its forms, powers, and interventionist ambitions, came to play a decisive role in the mobilizations discussed in the second half of the book, not least since the politics of the Soviet state became so directly entwined both with the politics of science in this new society and with this society’s biopolitics. The young Soviet state was certainly not unique in turning to science as a source of technologies for exerting control over, and engineering change in, its population; however, the way in which it went about this during the 1920s was distinctive.²⁵ Indispensable to the development of the new state’s interventionist

²⁵ On what Michael Oakeshott called the ‘politics of faith’—a governmental attitude which looks positively at promoting and making the most of the expansion and diversification of all manner of powers—see Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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          

powers was the systematic mobilization of knowledge-practices and types of social technology for the purposes of, first, the recovery of a society in post-conflict collapse, and second, the transformation of its previously oppressed and disadvantaged majority population, which the new powerholders saw as needing to be pulled out of historic ‘backwardness’ as speedily as possible. In this context, the radical novelty of the social and political situation, the ‘suddenness’ of the many problems emerging on the horizon (and which were themselves not always straightforward to define), matched the dynamism of non-institutionalized, innovative, and transformative science of the type discussed in this book. Indeed, science that mobilized in the early Soviet ‘revolutionary society’ was by definition controversial and on the boundaries of legitimacy, insofar as it was explicitly geared towards challenging existing patterns of scientific inquiry. Thus, the various programmes of scientific work mobilized in the context of early Soviet ‘child science’ essentially lacked legitimacy from the outset; or rather, they were defined by their struggle for it. And yet, like any other state, the revolutionary Soviet state was also interested in harnessing ‘science’ to lend legitimacy to its own exercise of power over specific fields, notably that of education, which the Bolsheviks had subjected to radical reform on an unprecedented scale. Consequently, the Soviet state required ‘child science’ not only to be revolutionary, but also to assume the legitimacy and authority that ‘science’ was meant to stand for. In consequence, the Soviet state ended up playing a vital part in transforming this controversial and initially very loosely organized body of work into a state-sanctioned ‘Soviet science’. Yet this same state was then crucial in narrowly instrumentalizing the work that was to be carried out under the banner of ‘pedology’, and finally, in 1936, destroying any pretension to legitimacy that ‘pedology’ might have had as either science or occupation. In analysing ‘child science’ as a body of scientific and occupational work, knowledge and expertise, this book has not focused only on the formation of its disciplinary and professional forms and identities, but also on its social functions. I have presented these as lying, at their most abstract, in the normative construction of human (child) development and human (child) populations. My discussion of ‘child science’ has revolved less around the formation of a domain of knowledge about ‘the child’ as such and more around the practices of measuring, evaluating, or fostering ‘development’. What I have emphasized throughout has been the plurality of ways in which ‘development’ was framed and measured—as physical, including anatomical and physiological; psychological, including cognitive and emotional; educational; and, finally, broadly and diversely, social. These were all understood and studied at the time as deeply and diversely interconnected. Even more important to my analysis has been the plural and contrasting ways the very normativity of development was constructed in ‘child science’— whether as objective deviations from a statistical average, as clinically diagnosed pathologies, or as variously established forms of social deviance.

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However, this book’s narrative of the evolution of Russo-Soviet ‘child science’ across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including, crucially, the periodization of its various mobilizations, has been shaped by the way those at the forefront of this field normatively constructed the child population, via which they then constructed ‘the child’ more generally as the object of their work, knowledge, and expertise. I have argued that before 1917, the empire’s child population, as object of study, was a largely hypothetical construct, based not on empire-wide empirical research, but on a set of normative assumptions rooted in the scholars’ and professionals’ class expectations. The overwhelming majority of the empire’s child population—the peasants and ethnic minorities, who were being raised in conditions of development and socialization very different to those of the social group developing child science—were for the most part outside their purview. Instead, the norms they constructed referred to a largely abstract child, one made up of norms and standards which, it was assumed, were universal and could, at least in principle, be imported from the scientifically more advanced West. The year 1917 brought about a sudden and radical transformation of the population of concern. The previously oppressed classes—those whose access to schooling had been minimal and who had, as a rule, been bracketed out of attempts to standardize developmental norms—now assumed a central position. This had a seismic impact on the normative framing both of the Soviet child population itself and of the core institutions within which ‘development’ was expected to take place, namely the family and the school, which the Bolsheviks were prompted to reform at speed. In the immediate aftermath of the civil war, it was the displaced besprizorniki who, as a mass population outside both family and school, became the principal support for the initial rise and expansion of Soviet ‘child science’. For this reason, the core focus of interest of those in the field, shaping much of their professional work, knowledge-practices, structures of expertise, and institutional organization in the early 1920s, became the so-called ‘defective’ child. Yet in the long run, rather more important proved to be the Bolsheviks’ radical redrawing of educational norms, which had significant implications for setting standards and objectives, and for how development was to be measured and monitored. These were not just practical problems, but also politically highly sensitive issues. The task was complicated further by the Bolsheviks’ partially conflicting desires to, on the one hand, universalize and democratize education, and on the other, ensure rational streaming in order to forge as quickly and efficiently as possible an effective labour force to outcompete the bourgeois West. Child science, the core task of which was the establishment of biopsychosocial norms of development, was called upon to help unravel this tangle and lay scientific foundations for a new system of care and education in which to raise future generations of Soviet citizens. Yet what arose in the 1920s under the framework of ‘pedology’ proved unable to meet this task. Towards the end of the decade its practitioners constructed the

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          

idea of the ‘mass child’ as the expression of the Soviet child population norm, against which the actual child population was to be systematically measured. The unintended outcome of this was the turning of ‘subnormality’ into a mass phenomenon statistically distributable across, and thus attributable to, the Soviet child population as a whole. The effect appeared to be a spiralling ‘overdiagnosis’ of ‘subnormality’ among Soviet children, not least those from the labouring strata. The 1936 abolition of pedology served as the sword that cut the Gordian knot of such ‘over-diagnosis’ by abolishing, through the ban on tests in particular, the very possibility of constituting ‘subnormality’ as something that would be sought in and attributed to the Soviet child population as such; in other words, by undoing the concept of the ‘mass child’ itself. The history of child science in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union concerns issues that are still highly pertinent today, both in the Russian Federation and elsewhere. Children remain a major focus of continuously evolving scientific inquiry, professional expertise, and public concern worldwide. Problems of interdisciplinarity and radical innovation are regularly highlighted as topical issues in the contemporary organization of scientific and medical research or educational and welfare services focused on children. Just as important remains the problem of normativity—its conceptualization and measurement—in the understanding of human development and socialization. The reader of this book has hopefully found it pertinent not only as an account of the history of ‘child science’ in Russia and the USSR between the Crimean War and the Second World War, but also as a lens through which to look at this field both transnationally and transhistorically. Nevertheless, it is important to stress the historicist argument that the RussoSoviet ‘child science’ analysed in this book is indisputably a phenomenon of its time. ‘Science of the child’ is not an entity that assumes this or that form across time and space, let alone a phenomenon that can be ‘made’ and then ‘destroyed’, that might perhaps be ‘forgotten’ and later ‘recalled’, ‘resurrected’ or ‘re-made’. It is essential to break the spell that has doomed what is known in Russia as ‘pedology’ to becoming the ghostly, virtual entity that it is in contemporary discourse. What this means is not that the historical dynamics of Russo-Soviet ‘child science’ and the various forms through which it mobilized between the midnineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, should simply be ‘understood’ for what they are and then ‘archived’. Quite the contrary, these dynamics offer vital lessons from history where we can learn a great deal about related but, of course, very different dynamics in equivalent fields of today. What this does mean, though, is that only if we view and analyse ‘child science’ in a de-reified form will historical examples, such as those explored in this book, prove to be of genuine value and use in both the present and the future.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’ following the page number. aberrations 115, 142 Academy of Communist Education 232–3, 237–8 adolescents 1, 13 see also teenagers adult, adulthood 8–10, 12, 18, 133, 143, 145, 234 advice (expert) 13–16, 46n.26, 47–50, 54, 60, 62–3, 64n.96, 66–7, 131–2, 241–3 Agapitov, N. N. 11–12 alcoholism 110–11 Aleksinskii, M. A. 247–8 Alexander II, tsar 27 amateur 13, 76–7, 97–8, 191–2 anatomy 85, 190–1 animals 9–10, 54n.56, 121, 145, 172–3, 194, 197 anthropology 1, 7, 9–10, 23n.50, 50–2, 80, 192–3, 198, 260–2 see also pedagogical anthropology; criminal anthropology anthropometrics 3–5, 7, 10–11, 16, 20–1, 23–4, 28–30, 72–3, 86–7, 107–8, 123–6, 142, 169, 205, 214–15, 220–2, 239n.84, 241–2 anthropotechnics 197n.44 anti-pedology decree (1936) 33–5, 37, 245nn.107–8, 248–50, 252–5, 257–8 Antonovich, M. A. 47n.30 Ariamov, I. A. 182–3 assessment (educational, medical, psychological, pedological) 2–3, 11, 19–20, 23–4, 86–8, 113, 115–26, 132–3, 137–8, 152–5, 167–9, 220–7, 228n.29, 229–31, 237–9, 241–2, 245, 248–9, 258–9 see also exams; diagnosis Astrakhan 64 Australia 28 Austria-Hungary 23n.51 authority (of science, medicine, experts, professions) 1–2, 15, 49–50, 71–2, 76–7, 88–90, 94, 96–7, 99, 103–4, 107, 120–2, 173–4, 191–2, 211–12, 215, 219, 243–4, 266 autocracy, autocratic state 27, 68, 79, 114, 120, 140 auxiliary classes and schools (vspomogatel′nye klassy i shkoly) 124–6, 134, 136–8, 222, 228, 242–3 see also special schools

backwardness (otstalost′) 31–2, 58, 247–8, 258, 265–6 mental 222–3, 225–6, 233–4 ethical 156–7 see also retardation Bain, Alexander 52–3 Baku 121–2 Baltalon, Ts. P. 64 bandwagon 40, 265 Basov, M. Ia. 165n.66, 170n.73, 199–200, 212, 216n.119, 253–4 Basov, V. N. 170n.73 behaviour 15, 45–6, 72–6, 114, 153, 177–9 correction, regulation of 107, 163, 244–5, 247 non-standard, deviant, pathological 5, 16, 110–11, 113–15, 117–18, 132, 135–8, 144–5, 149–50, 154, 160–2, 177, 226, 245–6 observation, study 9–10, 36, 52, 71–2, 87–8, 172, 187, 189–90, 199, 210–11, 216–17, 246 parental 15, 57 psycho-hygienic (of defectologists) 161–2 symbolic 72–3 Bekhterev, V. M. 40, 70–7, 87–8, 91, 97–8, 98f, 100–1, 102n.89, 124n.37, 132n.61, 134–5, 135n.70, 160, 161n.37, 165n.66, 170n.73, 172, 175–6, 179–84, 201–2, 206n.81, 213, 264–5 Bekhterevian 180–1, 183 Bekhterevism 213 Bekhtereva, N. P. 70–1 Belgium, Belgian 3, 22, 25n.56, 85–6, 233 Bernshtein, A. N. 98f, 102, 117, 126–8, 138, 176 Bernshtein, M. S. 234n.57 besprizorniki 149–50, 153–8, 167–9, 175–6, 225–6, 267 besprizornost′ 40, 150, 155–9, 161–2, 164–6, 225–6 Binet, Alfred 11n.25, 100, 121, 162n.49, 228–9 Binet tests 11n.25, 115–16, 121, 232–3, 235n.62 Binet Society (Paris) 234–5 biogenetic law 9–10 see also Haeckel, Ernst biogeneticism (vs. sociogeneticism) 193–6, 217

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biophysiological 173–4, 203–4, 215–16 biopolitics 1–6, 265 biopsychosocial 2–3, 14–15, 23–4, 114–15, 130–1, 147–8, 166–7, 174, 186–7, 194–7, 200, 219, 267 biosocial determinism 249, 252–3, 258 development 6, 193–4 group 114, 193–4 reproduction 9, 42–3 black box, black-boxing 219–24, 243–5, 247 Blonskii, P. P. 147, 155n.17, 165n.66, 166f, 167n.68, 172, 177–9, 188–9, 191–7, 201n.63, 206, 214, 216–17, 222, 226–9, 232–5, 237–9, 237n.72, 253–4 Blum, Eugène 24n.53 Blumenau, L. V. 85n.26, 109–10 body (vs. mind, soul) 18, 45–6, 110–11, 137–9 body politic 3–4, 18, 31–2 Bolshevik, Bolsheviks 6, 30–2, 36–7, 147–54, 156–8, 165n.65, 166–71, 173, 175–6, 181, 183, 195–6, 208–9, 211, 228, 257–9, 266–7, see also Party, the; power, Bolshevik; revolution, Bolshevik Boltunov, A. P. 232–3 boundaries (professional, disciplinary) 14, 17, 19–20, 62–3, 69–70, 73–5, 92–3, 104, 110–111, 118, 125–6, 130–3, 143n.100, 163–4, 201, 264–6 boundary-work 18, 264 Brain Institute 175–6, 179–84, 206n.81, 213, 220n.11 brain-science 91 see also neuroscience Britain, British 3, 11n.25, 22, 23n.52, 24n.55, 28, 52–3, 63, 85–6, 232–3 Bubnov, A. S. 208, 246, 248–51, 253–4 Bukharin, N. I. 147–8, 167n.68, 198, 202–3, 213 Bulgaria 25–6 bureaucracy, bureaucratic, bureaucrats 10–11, 17, 19–21, 27, 33, 42, 63–4, 79, 88–9, 107–8, 112, 120–3, 140–2, 154–5, 178, 186, 204–6, 211–12, 263 Burt, Cyril 11n.25 Buyse, Raymond 25n.56 Canguilhem, Georges 4–5 Central Interdepartmental Pedology Commission 241–2 Central Pedological Institute (Moscow) 67, 102n.89, 165n.66, 170n.73, 230 charitable shelters 95, 117–18, 134–8 Chelpanov, G. I. 92–4, 96–7, 98f, 102–3, 105n.98, 129–30, 172–3 Chernov, D. I. 48–9

childcare 11–12, 20–1, 23–4, 27–8, 42–3, 47–8, 56–9, 62–3, 70n.127, 76, 95, 147–8, 152–3, 159, 178–80, 187, 196–7, 205, 206n.80, 207, 260 childcare guru 15–16, 54, 58–9, 62–3, 75–6 child-centrism 3–4, 8, 167, 217, 220–1, 260–1 child-rearing 13–15, 54, 59, 76 child study (practice, movement) 1, 13–14, 20n.45, 23–7, 36–7, 39–40, 52–7, 65–6, 69–71, 82, 84, 96, 100, 102–3, 115, 117, 138n.80, 144–5, 151, 160–1, 170, 175–6, 198 childhood 2–3, 9–10, 143n.100, 194, 240, 258–9 anthropology of 1, 23n.50, 261 early 15–16, 76–7, 100–1 illnesses, pathologies 14–15, 47–8, 113–14 institutions 4–5 normativization of 3–4 militarization of 144–5 pathologization of 140–6 politicization of 3–4 romanticization of 8, 144 sciences of 4–6, 10, 68–9 Soviet 37–8 exceptional, difficult 157, 161–2, 225–6 childhood studies 261–2 children of the nation, ‘our children’ 114, 140–1, 155, 157–8, 218 children’s arts and crafts 24–5, 72–3, 138–9, 144–5, 162–3 drawing 72–3, 144–5, 177 essays, writing 23–4, 121, 144–5, 230 games 85, 144–5, 162–3, 177 ideals, interests, understandings 5, 144–5, 208, 214–15, 223, 230 reading 144–5, 230, 232–3 superstitions 65, 110, 132 children’s homes (Soviet) 154–5, 159, 161n.41, 178, 225–6, 249–50 Chrisman, Oscar 23n.50 citizen, citizenship, citizenry 2–3, 9–10, 41–2, 79, 147–8, 157–8, 254, 267 civil society 27, 113–14 civil war (revolutionary) 40, 112, 145–6, 149–50, 153–5, 170, 174–6, 245–6 civilization, civilizational, civilizing 2, 8–10, 29–30, 133, 145–6, 154–5 mission civilisatrice 58 Claparède, Edouard 24n.54 classification (of children) 2–3, 9, 119–20, 125–7, 141–2 clinical (observation, assessment, diagnostics) 5, 14, 108–9, 117–18, 125–8, 130–1, 158–9, 203, 237–40, 255–6, 266

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 cognitive development 266 functions, abilities 72–3, 87–8, 117–20, 123–4, 128, 168–9, 205, 223, 226, 230, 234 impairment, underdevelopment 117–18, 123, 160, 162, 222–3, 250–1 tests 13, 28–9, 83–4, 93, 195, 225–7, 228n.29, 239 Cold War 36 collaboration 17–21, 28, 78, 108–9, 152, 158–9, 205–6, 264 collective (of children) 168, 177–8, 189–90, 203n.71, 208–9, 212n.102, 248–9 collectivism 2, 6, 166–7, 170, 175, 208–9 Commissions for Juvenile Affairs 155–7 communism, communist society 30–1, 154–5, 196–7, 216 Communist (Party, regime), Communists 30, 33–5, 37, 155, 256–8 compensation (kompensatsiia) 164 Comte, Auguste 7 correction, defectological (korrektsiia) 113, 161–4, 255–6 corrective pedagogy (korrektsionnaia pedagogika) 161–2 of personality (korrektsiia lichnosti) 162 social (sotsial′naia korrektsiia) 163 correction, moral (ispravlenie) 3–4, 9, 133–7, 154–7, 161–2 correctional facility (ispravitel′noe zavedenie) 50, 134–6, 138–9, 172–3 Crimean War 27, 41–2, 268 crime (juvenile) 110, 135–6 criminology, criminologists 1, 5, 14, 16, 24n.54, 84–5, 93n.53, 136 criminal anthropology 136, 141–2, 155–6 cultural-historical (development, school) 170, 192–3 see also Vygotskii, L. S. cure, curative 133–4, 139–40 see also therapy curative pedagogy (lechebnaia pedagogika) 133–40, 150, 161–2, 164 see also defectology Darwin, Charles 7, 21n.47, 52–3, 54n.56, 69 deaf, the 117 deaf-and-blind 135–6 Deborin, A. M. 211n.100 defect, defective, defectiveness (defektivnost′) 3–4, 8, 39–40, 110, 113, 117–18, 132–4, 134n.66, 138, 143, 147, 150, 154–66, 177, 203n.71, 225–6, 232–3, 267 defectology (defektologiia), defectologist (defektolog) 35, 38, 150, 153–4, 158–64, 203, 206n.81, 218, 242, 255–7, 260–1

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deficiency 5–6, 116–18, 127, 130, 226, 239 degeneration (vyrozhdenie) 7, 15, 45–6, 75–6, 109–10, 113–14, 137–8, 141–3 Delianov, I. D. 79 delinquency, delinquent 3–4, 37–8, 40, 65, 95, 117–18, 132, 134–6, 143, 150, 154–7, 160 see also besprizornost′ Dernova-Iarmolenko, A. A. 60, 61f, 67, 182n.105 de Sanctis, Sante 124n.36 Detskii Obsledovatel′skii Institut (DOBI) 160, 162–3, 175–6, 232–3 Detskii sad (Kindergarten) 48, 52–3 deviance, deviant 5, 113–15, 142, 145–6, 150, 157–8, 160, 266 deviation, ideological 211–12, 214, 253 normative 4–5, 108, 112, 115, 126, 135–6, 222–3, 261, 266 Dewey, John 24–5, 167 diagnosis, diagnostics 5, 16, 18–20, 23–4, 39–40, 47–8, 51–2, 82, 108–9, 112, 114–19, 123, 125–34, 136–43, 145–6, 150–3, 155–60, 162, 169, 175–6, 222–3, 225–7, 232–4, 237–239, 248–9, 251, 255–6, 262, 266–8 diary 52–3, 60, 61f, 62–3, 65–70, 72–3, 75–6, 135n.67, 177 diet 137–9 see also feeding; nutrition difference (of class, ethnicity, race, gender) 6, 31–2, 208–9, 222 difficult child (trudnyi rebenok), difficult to educate (trudnovospituemyi) 113, 132–6, 138, 140, 149–50, 157–8, 162, 203n.71, 222–3, 226, 241–5, 250–1 see also ‘problem’ child(ren) discipline (of behaviour), disciplined, indiscipline, disciplinarian 9–10, 49–50, 58–9, 62–4, 134, 138–42, 154–5, 157, 167–8, 183–4, 186, 212–13, 222, 225, 227, 241–3, 245–51, 254 discipline (scientific), (inter/multi) disciplinarity 1–2, 6, 12–13, 15–20, 23–7, 33–5, 39, 50–1, 70, 79–83, 91–5, 103–5, 107, 131–2, 141–2, 152–4, 171–4, 185, 187–92, 197–9, 204, 205n.77, 209–12, 216, 242, 255–261, 263–6, 268 disciplining (political) 33, 40, 211–17, 216n.119, 219, 247, 247n.112, 253–4 distortions (ideological) 211–12, 211n.99, 212n.102, 253–4 see also anti-pedology decree; izvrashcheniia dose, dosing (dozirovka) 138–9, 163 Doshkol′noe vospitanie (Preschool Upbringing) 64 Dril′, D. A. 85n.26, 136, 155–6 dysfunction 123, 127

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eclectic, eclecticism 23–5, 30, 58–9, 75–6, 133, 156–7, 174, 191–2, 191n.25, 203–4, 214 educated classes, stratum 26–7, 44–6, 48, 57–9, 63–4, 75–6, 113–14, 120–1, 140–1, 155 see also middle classes education reform see reform of education see also progressive education educational research 28, 37–8, 67n.116 educationalist 13–14, 24–5, 30, 95, 143–4, 187, 256, 261 Ekaterinburg 64 Ekaterinodar 124 El′konin, D. B. 256–7 empire, Russian 26–32, 39–42, 43n.11, 79, 81–2, 96, 113–14, 118–23, 140–1, 143, 145, 171, 198, 267 Enlightenment, the 6–7, 9–10, 42, 47–8 Entsiklopediia semeinogo vospitaniia i obucheniia (The Encyclopaedia of Family Upbringing and Education) 63 environment, the 8 of an organism 75 social 5, 70, 99–100, 153n.13, 157–8, 162–9, 171, 177–8, 193–4, 202, 214, 220–2, 239 epidemic 114–16, 120, 140–1, 143–4, 157–8, 161–2, 225–6 epistemic 18–20, 171, 174, 179–81, 187–8, 190–1, 194–5, 200–2, 208–12, 253, 257, 264 epistemology 4–5, 31–2, 70, 92–5, 171–2, 175, 179–80, 185, 191, 192n.26, 194–6, 208–11, 214–17, 235–6 Erisman, F. F. 106n.102 Ermakov, I. D. 176–8 ethnic, difference 9, 20–1, 118–19, 169–70, 208–9, 214–15 minorities 29, 208, 235–6, 236n.67, 238–9, 258, 267 eugenics 2–3, 7, 9, 15, 75–6, 147–8, 193n.30, 197n.44, 219n.5, 259 Europe, European 11–12, 19–22, 25–6, 28–30, 70–1, 80n.11, 113–14, 235 Western Europe, West European 83, 152–3 evolution (biological) 7, 9–10, 12, 52, 54n.56, 72–3, 143, 175, 192–3 exams 49–50, 64n.96, 85, 116, 120–3, 142, 224, 231 exhibitions 67n.116, 95, 106–7, 201n.63 experience, experiential knowledge 60, 67, 82, 104 experimental lesson 87–8 see also natural experiment experimental pedagogy 21–2, 24–6, 38n.87, 99–105, 109, 123, 127–8, 128n.52, 165n.66, 170–2, 198, 199n.52 see also Society for Experimental Pedagogy Ezhegodnik eksperimental′noi pedagogiki (Yearbook of Experimental Pedagogy) 101

family 2, 5, 10, 33, 51, 59–60, 63–5, 70, 76, 113, 124n.36, 125, 127, 138–40, 142–3, 162–3, 221–2, 226–7, 229, 245–9, 254, 267 famine, hunger 154, 157 father 44, 57, 66, 68–9 feebleminded 136 feeding 15–16, 43–4, 182 see also diet; nutrition female (education, professionals, work) 13–15, 27–8, 49n.40, 57–60, 66–7, 71–2, 76–7, 80–1, 105n.98, 134–5, 177–8 femininity 27–8, 57, 60, 68–9 Feofanov, M. P. 216 First All-Russian Conference for the Struggle with Child Defectiveness (1921) 157 First All-Russian Congress on Matters of Family Upbringing (1912–13) 49n.42, 65, 76 First All-Union Congress in the Study of Human Behaviour (1930) 210–11 First All-Union Pedology Congress (1927–28) 185, 200–2, 204–5, 207, 210, 237–8, 240n.86 First Experimental Station in Public Education 164–6 First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) 32, 170, 206–11, 215n.116 First Moscow Conference for the Struggle with Besprizornost′ (1924) 157–8 First World War 3, 11n.25, 19–21, 24–6, 36–7, 113–14, 118–19, 140, 143–4, 152–4 Fon-Ern, A. 121–2 Foucault, Michel 3–4, 44 France, French 3, 11n.25, 15, 20n.46, 22, 24–5, 24n.53, 29, 85–6, 121, 233 Free Economic Society 47–8, 56n.60 Freud, Sigmund 147, 176 Freudian 40, 177 Freudo-Marxism 175 Fröbel, Friedrich 24–5, 59 Fröbel kindergartens 76 Frunze, T. M. 245–6 Frunze, M. V. 245–6 Galton, Francis 23n.52 Gaupp, Robert Eugen 65–6 Gavrilova, N. I. 68 Gellershtein, S. G. 234n.57 genetics 193n.30, 259–60 see also medical genetics German, Germany 3, 6–7, 13, 20n.46, 21n.47, 22–3, 25–6, 28–9, 32, 47–8, 54, 59, 76, 83–6, 86n.31, 93, 106n.102, 121, 124, 127n.45, 131–2, 134n.64, 233 Glavnauka 178, 205–6 Glavsotsvos 178 Goddard, Henry H. 11n.25

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 Gordon, G. I. 141 Gorinevskii, V. V. 111 Gorky see Nizhnii Novgorod Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo (GIZ) 157 Graborov, A. N. 160–2 Gracheva, E. K. 134–5 Great Reforms 27, 41–2, 47–8, 50, 79, 106, 134 post-reform era 28, 45–6, 57–8 Greece 25–6 Greek, Ancient 23 Green, John Alfred 24n.55 Griboedov, A. S. 98f, 134–135, 160 Grot, N. Ia. 78, 90–1 growth (physical) 7, 10–11 Grum-Grzhmailo, K. I. 41, 47–8, 56n.60 Gundobin, N. P. 85n.26, 109 Gurevich, M. O. 159 Haeckel, Ernst 9–10, 54n.56 Hall, Granville Stanley 20n.45, 84, 144–5 hardening practices 106–7 healthcare 2, 17–18, 26–7, 30, 56n.60, 114, 147–8, 151–2, 170, 179–80, 196–7, 206n.80 health monitoring 11, 20–1, 105–6, 108, 123–4, 135–7, 220–1, 238–9 see also medical assessment Henri, Victor 100 heredity (nasledstvennost′) 6, 10, 45–6, 110–11, 118, 125, 137–8, 142, 163–4, 193–4 Herzen State Pedagogical Institute 160–1, 199, 232–3 heterogeneity 1, 17–21, 23–4, 39, 45, 90, 115, 134, 153, 185, 204, 263–5 Higher Women’s Courses 85–6, 165n.66 Historical-Philological Institutes 80 Historical-Philological Faculties 91 historiography 32n.71, 34–7, 39–40, 189n.16, 193 Holt, L. Emmett 16n.34 hooliganism 142n.96, 245–6 House of Teachers (Uchitel′skii dom) 67, 102–3, 165n.66 House of the Study of the Child (Dom izucheniia rebenka) 159 Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm 47–8, 56n.60 humanity, humankind, human race 2–3, 7, 9–10, 20, 30–1, 41–5, 75–6, 108–9, 145–8, 152, 174, 179–80, 192–3, 195–6 human material, human capital 9, 259–60 hygiene (school, mental, moral, physical, social) 3–4, 10–12, 15–16, 21–2, 26–7, 47–51, 54, 56n.60, 60, 65, 67, 80–1, 81n.13, 85–7, 105–8, 110–12, 118–20, 135–7, 139–142, 154–5, 158–9, 161–3, 182, 239

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ideology 3, 9, 30, 147–8 Igniat′ev, P. N. 111 illness 14–15, 72–3, 108–11, 132–3, 163–4, 239, 255–6 impairment (narushenie) 117–18, 126, 160, 162, 222–3, 255–6 imperfection 5, 39–40, 113–19, 140, 174 index (body) 20–1 industrialization 3, 8, 113–14, 182–4, 196, 208 infancy, infant 1, 13–16, 18, 41, 45–6, 47n.30, 48–50, 53–4, 56–7, 68–9, 75–7, 164n.63, 181–2 innocence (in children) 8–9, 145 innovation 7, 11–13, 16–18, 20, 22–6, 29–30, 36–7, 39, 59, 75–6, 82–3, 88–9, 99–100, 102n.89, 103–4, 121, 126–7, 134–5, 139–40, 150, 153–4, 161–2, 167, 169, 171, 173, 183–4, 186–7, 191–2, 208–10, 219, 264–265, 268 instrument(s) 1–4, 11n.25, 17, 30, 32–4, 69, 73–5, 82–3, 85, 115–16, 119–21, 125–30, 161, 171, 173–6, 187, 191n.25, 208, 216, 218–19, 222–6, 229, 235, 237, 242, 247–9, 264–5 instrumentalization 70, 219, 266 integration (of pedology) 19–20, 26–7, 183–91, 192n.26, 196, 200–1, 201n.60, 202–6, 210, 219–21, 243, 265 intellectual development 2, 5–6, 10–11, 24–5, 42–3, 233–4, 259–60 intelligentsia, professional intelligentsia 27, 29, 30, 41–2, 114, 118–19, 120, 140, 143, 145–6 see also educated classes; middle classes international, internationalism 6–7, 11n.25, 20–3, 25–6, 28–32, 36–7, 42, 48–9, 52–3, 101n.80, 115–16, 189 International Pedology Congress (Brussels, 1911) 21–2, 28 intervention, interventionism 1–5, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 31, 39, 112, 114–15, 118–19, 145–6, 149–53, 155–8, 168, 170, 203–4, 265–6 introspection (samonabliudenie) 46–7, 70, 92–3, 126–7 Iurkevich, P. D. 44–7 izvrashcheniia (distortions) 34–5, 211–12, 256, 257 see also anti-pedology decree; distortion Judenkunde 23 Jugendfürsorge 23 Jung, Carl 176 Jews 54n.56, 88–9

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Kaminskii, G. N. 248 Kapterev, P. F. 51–2, 54, 62–3 Kashchenko, P. P. 138 Kashchenko, V. P. 113, 117–18, 124n.36, 138–140, 159, 161–2, 167, 225–6 Kasso, L. A. 102n.87 Kazan′ 64, 182n.105 Key, Ellen 8 Kiev 54, 64, 96–7, 121–2, 138, 144n.105 kharakteristika (profile) 87–8, 125, 130–1, 226–227, 241–2 Khlopin, G. V. 107–8, 141 Kinderforschung 23 kindergarten 13–14, 23, 38, 44, 52–3, 57, 59, 76, 95, 176–8, 219–20, 239, 249–50 Klein, Melanie 176 knowledge-power 3–4, 45, 151 knowledge-practices 51–2 Kolbanovskii, V. N. 216 Komarnitskii, V. G. 109–10 Komsomol 186, 248 Kosarev, A. V. 248 Kornilov, K. N. 68, 102–3, 172–3, 199–200, 211 Kovalevskii, P. I. 134–5 Krasnogorskii, N. I. 180–1 Krichevskaia, E. K. 66–8 Krupskaia, N. K. 147–8, 166f, 167n.68, 178–9, 182–3, 202, 208, 210n.95, 215–17, 217n.126, 251, 253 lab, laboratory 13, 21, 70–3, 75–6, 83–7, 92–8, 102–3, 111–12, 118–19, 121–2, 127–8, 138, 165n.66, 176, 178, 182n.105, 196–7, 218, 230, 231n.42, 232–3, 233n.53, 237, 243, 251n.117 labour (trud) 150, 161–2, 166–7, 179–80, 198n.50, 233–4 colony 244n.102, 254n.132 creative (trudovoe tvorchestvo, tvorcheskii trud) 163 division of (professional) 2–3, 18, 66, 78, 104–5, 108–9 educational activities 177n.89 force 154–5, 166–7, 234, 267 pedology of 196n.42, 203n.71 psychology of 173 school (trudovaia shkola) 166–7, 188–9, 196, 233–4 therapy 137–8, 154–5, 163 Lange, N. N. 54, 62–3, 95n.60, 98f Lay, Wilhelm August 24n.55 Lazurskii, A. F. 124n.37 Leclère, Albert 121 Leningradskaia Pravda 247

‘Leninist guard’ 258–9 Lenskii, B. P. 53 Levonevskii, A. F. 65–8 lichnost′ see person life (biological, human, child’s) 2–6, 13–14, 41–2, 46–7, 52, 54, 56, 59, 68–9, 75, 167–168, 229 psychic 75, 78 life sciences 4–5 League of Education 85–6 Lunacharskii, A. V. 147–8, 167n.68, 185, 196n.41, 198, 200, 202, 208, 239–40 Luria, A. R. 214, 259 McMillan, Margaret 24–5 Makarenko, A. S. 218, 244n.102, 254n.132 Makarov, A. N. 83–5, 198 Maliarevskaia, E. Kh. 137–8 Maliarevskii, I. V. 50, 135–40 malosposobnost′ (low ability) 116 Manasseina, Maria 59 Marxism, Marxist(s), Marxism-Leninism 30–1, 147, 150, 166–7, 171–3, 175–6, 180, 209–13, 211n.99, 215–17, 251–2 mass child (massovyi rebenok) 170, 216, 228, 267–8 see also ‘Soviet child’ materialism 45n.20, 46–7, 88–9, 147–8, 198–200, 203–4, 210–11 dialectical (diamat) 172 medical assessment, check-ups, exams, monitoring, service 10–11, 15–16, 23–4, 86–7, 106–8, 118–19, 123–4, 137–8, 154–5, 221f, 222–3, 226n.24, 228n.28, 240 see also health monitoring medical genetics 219 medicalization 50, 136 medico-pedagogical, medico-educational (establishment, supervision, treatment, task) 50, 137–40, 155–7, 159, 232–3 Medico-Pedagogical Station (MPS) 159, 161–3 Mediko-pedagogicheskii vestnik (Medico-Pedagogical Herald) 50 mental age 11n.25, 228–9, 232–3 meritocracy 2–3, 5–6, 222, 259–60 metaphor 2–3, 9, 14–15, 51–2, 108–9, 139–40, 162n.49, 163, 194, 215n.116 Meumann, Ernst 24n.55 middle classes, social middle, professional middle 1–2, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13–14, 16, 57–8, 69–70, 76, 141–2, 143 see also educated classes; intelligentsia Military Medical Academy (St Petersburg) 71f, 73f, 87–8

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 mind 45–6, 99–100, 137–9, 226, 235 Ministry of Finance 121 Ministry of Justice 136 Ministry of Public Enlightenment 70–1, 80–2, 85–6, 94, 106–8, 111–12, 118–19, 123–4, 141 its Medico-Sanitary Section 107–8, 111, 123–4, 141 the latter’s School Hygiene Laboratory 111–12, 118–19 Ministry of the Army 62, 83, 106, 122, 165n.66, 198 its Department of Military Education 62, 83, 165n.66 see also Pedagogical Museum (St Petersburg) minorities (ethnic, national) 2, 208, 235–6, 267 pedology of national minorities 208–9, 235 modern 1, 3–8, 10, 25–7, 29, 53, 58–9, 80n.11, 95 modernity 2, 28–32, 113–14, 235 modernization 1–6, 27, 30, 32, 41–2, 57–8, 62, 79, 183–4, 263 Molozhavyi, S. S. 165n.66, 189–92, 193n.31, 194n.32, 214, 235–6, 253–4 monism 180, 193n.31 monitoring (of child development, health) 10–11, 15–16, 20–1, 23–4, 60, 71–2, 86–7, 105–6, 108, 111–12, 118–19, 123–4, 124n.37, 135–7, 196–7, 225, 238–9, 267 Montessori, Maria 24–5, 162n.49 moral being (of a child) 143–4, 157 defective 8, 117–18, 147, 154–8 development 6–7, 42–5, 47–8, 90–1, 109, 145, 156–7 hygiene 162–3 panic 143–4 statistics 141–3 see also correction, moral (ispravlenie) moral-juridical (realm, frames) 5, 117, 139–40, 161–2 Moscow Department of Public Education (MONO) 225, 231–3, 238n.79 Moscow Institute of Psychology (MPI) 67–8, 92–5, 102–3, 123, 172–3 see also State Institute of Experimental Psychology Moscow Pedagogical Assembly 102, 127–8, 138 Moscow Psycho-Neurological Institute (MPNI) 176 Moscow State Pedagogical University (2nd Moscow State University) 165n.66, 199, 236nn.64, 67 its Institute of Scientific Pedagogy 165n.66, 236nn.64, 67

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Moscow (State) University 45–7, 92–3, 96–7, 102n.87, 127–8, 138, 172–3, 190n.17 Moscow Testological Society 234–5 Moscow Women’s Pedagogical Courses 125n.39 mother, motherhood 10, 13–15, 23, 41, 47–9, 49n.40, 53, 57–63, 61f, 65–9, 71–2, 124n.37 motor skills, reactions, intelligence 72–3, 163n.54, 223, 233–4, 236n.67 Münsterberg, Hugo 103n.93 Museum of Pedology and Pedagogy of Exceptional Childhood 159, 161–2, 225–6 Na putiakh k novoi shkole (On the Path to the New School) 182–3, 208 nanny 44–6, 57–8 Narkompros (Commissariat of Enlightenment) 33–4, 40, 151–2, 158–9, 164n.63, 167–8, 170, 176–9, 182–3, 186–9, 196, 200, 202, 204–8, 212–13, 220–2, 224–5, 231–2, 236–42, 244–9, 251, 253–4, 258–9 Narkomput′ (Commissariat of Transport) 204–205, 225 Narkomzdrav (Commissariat of Healthcare) 66n.111, 138, 151–2, 156–9, 164–6, 201–2, 204–6, 238–41, 253n.126 nation, national 3–4, 8–10, 20–2, 106 nationalism (in science) 20 Natorp, Paul 103n.93 natural experiment 87–8, 130–1, 199 nature (of child, development, humans) 6–9, 44–5, 54, 75–6, 195–6 nature and nurture 6–7, 42–3, 75–6, 193 naukovedenie (science studies) 256–7 Nazi 252–3 Nechaev, A. P. 22, 28, 83–8, 91n.46, 93–103, 105n.98, 111, 121n.28, 122–3, 126–8, 130–1, 159, 165n.66, 198–9, 225n.18, 237n.73, 264–5 Nechaevism (nechaevshchina) 101n.84 Nechaevites 103n.90 Neo-Kantian 84 neurology, neurologist, neurological 75, 102, 109, 111, 117, 126–8, 130, 173–4, 255–6 see also psycho-neurology neurophysiology 91, 180–1, 219–20 neuropsychiatry 12, 70, 91, 93n.53, 117, 126–7, 130–1, 134–5, 180–1, 242, 261 see also psychiatry neuroscience 7, 40, 75–6, 168, 183, 255–7 see also brain-science; neurology neuspeshnost′, neuspevaemost′ see underperformance New Economic Policy (NEP) 153, 169–70

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new human being, Man, people 8–9, 185 New Soviet person, 36, 147–8 Neznamov, E. A. 111 Nietzsche, Friedrich 109 Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky) 124, 204n.74, 220n.6, 254n.129 normative crisis 140–6, 155 normativity 4–5, 115n.6, 266, 268 nursery 71n.130, 108, 244n.103 lab-nursery 72–3 see also kindergarten nurture 2–3, 6–7, 9–10, 14–15, 42–4, 42, 48–9, 50, 57, 75–6, 193 see also nature; vospitanie nutrition 16, 106–7, 163, 239 see also diet; feeding objective (knowledge, laws, measurement, norms, observation) 4, 44–5, 60, 69, 73–5, 82, 88–9, 222–4, 229, 231, 266 objective psychology 70, 76–7, 91, 100–1, 180–2 see also Bekhterev, V. M. objectivity, objectivism 10, 68–70, 88–9, 127, 191n.25, 198–200 pedologists-objectivists 234–5, 262 Obolenskii, L. E. 100 obrazovanie (education, ‘formation’) 42–3 obshchee obrazovanie (general education) 81 observation (as method) 6–7, 10, 13, 23–4, 42, 44–9, 52–3, 56, 60, 61f, 62–3, 63n.89, 65–78, 81n.13, 86–8, 92–3, 117, 121–2, 126–7, 137–8, 145, 177–8, 199, 205, 226–7 self-observation 45, 92–3 occupational intermediaries 56, 183 odarennost′ (giftedness, intelligence) 223, 232–3, 235 motornaia odarennost′ (motor intelligence) 233–4 Osipova, V. N. 181–2 ontogenesis, ontogenetic 2–3, 6, 9–10, 52, 54, 127, 192–3 opportunity structure 27–8, 151–4 Orel 170n.73 organism, organic 9–10, 15–16, 48, 73–5, 78, 137, 139–40, 142–3, 193–4, 195n.38, 198, 202, 206n.80 organic impairment 117–18, 126, 162, 164 Orshanskii, L. G. 111, 124n.37, 131n.59 orthopaedics (as therapeutic model) 110, 162, 164 orthopaedic pedagogy (ortopedicheskaia pedagogika) 162 psycho-orthopaedics (psikhicheskaia ortopediia) 110, 162

otherness, of the child 10, 143 of the Soviet Union 36 ozdorovlenie (becoming, making healthy) 138–40, 161–3, 202 paediatrics, paediatrician 12–16, 24n.54, 48n.33, 49n.42, 71–2, 78n.2, 85n.26, 109, 219, 255–6 parent circles 64 parent diaries see diary parental authority 44–5, 57 parenthood 48–9, 69–70 Parents’ Circle (St Petersburg) 62–5, 83n.20 partiinost′ (party loyalty) 33, 211, 213 Party, the 32–5, 37, 40, 173–4, 177–8, 201–3, 207–8, 210–17, 219–20, 244–50, 253–4, 257–9, 262–3 its Central Committee 211–13, 245n.108, 246n.110, 248–9 see also anti-pedology decree; Bolshevik party-state 19, 31, 36–7, 256, 262–3 pathologization 15, 122, 136–7, 140–6, 155 Pavlov, I. P. 40, 75n.139, 180–3 Pavlovian 180–1, 183 peasant, peasantry 167n.68 childcare 58 children 29, 155, 168–9, 203n.71, 238–9, 258, 267 nanny 57–8 Pedagogical Academy (St Petersburg) 85–90, 88n.36, 102, 109, 123, 132 pedagogical anthropology 50–1, 104, 260–2 Pedagogical Museum (St Petersburg) 62–4, 83–4, 95–6, 100–1, 109, 122, 165n.66, 182n.105, 198 its Pedology Section 84–6, 109, 198 pedagogical neglect 116, 118, 228 pedagogical pathology 131–3 pedagogical psychology 24–5, 51–2, 54, 85, 91, 96, 97f, 98f, 99–101, 123, 127–8, 171–2, 198–9 pedagogical thought, theory 35, 37–8, 50, 59, 80–1, 100–1, 105, 244n.102, 261 Pedagogicheskii listok (Pedagogical Bulletin) 48 Pedagogicheskii sbornik (Pedagogical Compendium) 48 pédagogie expériencée 24–5, 199n.52 pedagogy, Marxist 212, 215–16, 251–2 new 24–5, 101–2, 119 scientific 82–90, 95–6, 100–1, 110, 164–6, 166f, 183, 190n.17, 201, 220n.9, 236n.64 social (sotsial′naia pedagogika) 164 socialist 212 Soviet 244n.102, 254 see also correctional pedagogy; curative pedagogy

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 Pedologiia (journal) 206–7, 207n.85, 208, 209n.92, 210, 212–13, 215, 216n.119, 240–1 pedologization (of the school) 237, 242–3 Pedology Institute (post-revolutionary; Petrograd/Leningrad) 165n.66, 170n.73, 238n.79, 247 Pedology Institute (pre-revolutionary; St Petersburg; PI) 70–2, 73f, 75–6, 87, 100–1, 165n. 66, 181–2 pedology service 33–4, 40, 200, 217, 222–4, 238–47, 249–50, 252–3, 254n.131 pedotechnics 23–4, 197 Pérez, Bernard 21n.47, 52–3 Perkin, Harold 1–3 Persigout, Gabriel 24n.53 person, personality, personhood (lichnost′) 42–3, 51–2, 88, 119–20, 138–40, 157, 161–3, 175, 177–9, 208–9, 210n.95, 224, 235–6 Pestalozzi, Johan Heinrich 6–7 philanthropy, philanthropists 20–1, 72n.131, 82, 85–7, 134–6, 151 philosophy (university) 13, 44–7, 80n.11, 83–4, 90–1, 93–4, 95n.60, 96, 103–5, 109 photography 72–3 phylogenesis 9–10, 192–3 physical development 2–7, 15–16, 18, 42–3, 49–50, 82, 118–19, 135–6, 163–4, 206n.80, 226n.24, 238–9, 266 education, culture 16, 106–7, 164n.63 harm 43–4 hygiene 135–7, 139–40, 158–9, 161–3 health, well-being 10–11, 108–9, 117, 154–5 norms 195 nurture, care 49–50 pathology, defect, anomaly 5–6, 11–12, 56, 110, 114–15, 117, 150, 156–7, 159, 162, 239 properties, constitution (of child) 11, 51–2, 111, 169, 226–7 therapy 164 physiology 3–4, 7, 11, 13, 23–4, 45n.20, 46–8, 50–2, 72–5, 80–1, 81n.13, 85, 92–3, 100–1, 107–11, 126, 172n.78, 173–4, 180, 190–1, 206n.80, 210–11, 216, 219, 255–6, 266 Piaget, Jean 22n.49 Pinkevich, A. P. 183, 228n.31 Pirogov, N. I. 41–2 plasticity (child, human) 195, 210n.95 Pokrovskii, E. A. 78n.2 Politburo 245–8 polytechnic education 166–7 population of concern 151, 155, 164–6, 267 positivism, positivist 4–5, 7, 92n.52, 103–5 Postovskaia, M. P. 124n.36 Postovskii, N. P. 124n.36 Povarnin, K. I. 71–2, 73f

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power, Bolshevik 30, 37, 147–9, 152, 155–6, 169–70, 266 bureaucratic 120–1 diagnostic 114–15, 120–1, 132–4 ideological 207–8 juridical 44–5, 57 normative 45 parental 43–5, 57, 63–4 professional 17, 63–4, 120, 264 relations 13–14, 18–19, 79, 120–1, 264 state 3–4, 43–4, 149, 204, 265–6 therapeutic 133–4 Pravda 201nn.59, 64, 218, 244–5, 252–3, 256 preschool 13–14, 42–3, 52–4, 56–7, 59, 62–4, 67n.116, 76–7, 116, 177–9, 181–2, 190n.18, 232–3, 244–5 see also Society for Preschool Education Preyer, Wilhelm (William) Thierry 52n.47, 53–4, 62–3, 65–6, 69 ‘problem’ child(ren) 9, 33–4, 137–8, 227, 239, 243 profession, quasi- 57, 67 professional dynamics (inter, cross, multi-) 17–20, 39, 133–4, 136–7, 264 hierarchies 13–14, 17–19, 50–6, 62–3, 86, 89–90 jurisdictions 14, 18–19, 49–50, 53, 64, 104–5, 109–11, 119 professional society 1–3, 263 professionalism 1–2, 12–13, 16 professionalization 1–2, 12–14, 26, 56–7, 59n.69, 70n.127, 76–7, 80n.8, 105, 110, 134–5, 150, 198, 221–2 proforientatsiia, profotbor (career orientation) 160, 234, 241, 251 progressive education, reform, progressivism 3–4, 7–8, 30–1, 76, 83, 90, 114, 116, 147–8, 150, 155–6, 167, 186–7, 196, 208, 213, 224–5, 228–9 proletariat, proletarian 166–9, 196, 203n.69, 248–9 prophylaxis (profilaktika), prophylactic 16, 110, 139–40, 175–7, 241 school prophylactic clinics (shkol′nye profilakticheskie ambulatorii) 238–9 prostitution 154 pseudoscience 33–5, 252–3, 258, 262–3 psyche, soul 13, 18, 48–51, 54, 67, 90, 92–3, 110–11, 113, 126–7, 130, 143–6, 157n.27, 173–5, 177, 218 see also mind psychiatrists 11n.25, 14, 16, 18, 49n.40, 54, 84–5, 96, 102, 106n.102, 110–11, 113–15, 117–18, 124n.37, 125–8, 130–3, 135–8, 143n.98, 144, 155–7, 159–60, 173, 175–6, 256

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psychiatry, psychiatric 1, 5, 16, 27–8, 110, 117, 126–8, 134–6, 138, 141–3, 157, 159–60, 173–4, 180, 182, 255–6 see also neuropsychiatry psychoanalysis 3–4, 30, 37–8, 40, 173–9, 181, 191–2, 195, 214, 216–17 psychology, child 60, 102, 125n.39, 254n.129, 256–7, 260–1 developmental 22n.49, 90, 255–7 educational 1, 21–2, 25–6, 35–8, 84–6, 105, 122–3, 128n.52, 251–2 empirical (opytnaia psikhologiia) 46–8, 180 experimental 13, 24–5, 39–40, 78, 83–5, 92–100, 102–4, 117, 122–3, 126–8, 172–3, 199, 211, 219–20 Gestalt 30 instrument kit (kollektsiia priborov) 95–6, 127–8 labs see laboratory objective see objective psychology pedagogical see pedagogical psychology theoretical (umozritel′naia psikhologiia) 46–7 psychologist-experimenters (psikhologieksperimentatory) 93–6 psychometrics 3–6, 11n.25, 19–20, 23–4, 86–7, 111–12, 115–17, 120–7, 169, 203n.71, 214–15, 220–2, 225, 230, 235–6, 238–40, 242, 255–6, 262 Psycho-Neurological Institute (PNI) 27–8, 70–2, 87–90, 102, 102n.89, 109, 123, 124n.37, 132, 160, 161n.37, 179–82 Psycho-Neurological Academy (PNA) 160–1, 165n.66, 206n.81 psycho-neurology, psycho-neurological sciences (psikhonevrologicheskie nauki) 73–5, 100–1, 171–2, 176, 181, 201–2 First Psycho-Neurology Congress (Moscow, 1923) 157n.27, 170n.73, 171–2, 175, 203 Second Psycho-Neurology Congress (Petrograd, 1924) 156–7, 171–2, 174n.83, 175, 179–82, 203, 209n.90 psychopathology, mental illness 85, 108–12, 117, 126–8, 130, 135–6, 142, 155–6, 160, 173, 175–6, 250–1 psikhonevrotiki (the mentally ill) 222–3, 250–1 psycho-pedagogical (diagnostics, monitoring, research) 86–7, 93, 126–7, 262 psychotechnics 196–9, 198n.50, 211, 214, 216, 234, 252n.123, 262 puériculture 15 race, racial 6, 20–1, 169–70, 194–5, 236–7, 258 racial science (Nazi) 252–3 racist 214–15

Radin, E. P. 164n.63 rational education, upbringing, pedagogy, welfare 2–3, 8, 23–4, 26–7, 49–50, 52, 56, 58–9, 77f, 80n.11, 107, 114, 137–8, 148–9, 152–3, 189–90, 196–7, 208, 241–2, 267 rationality (of science) 1–2, 8, 168 Realschule 121 recapitulation (theory) 9–10 reflex 47n.30, 75–6, 147–8, 180–4 reflexology 40, 174–5, 179–84, 191–2, 195–7, 203, 206n.81, 209n.92, 212n.102, 213–14, 216–17, 220n.11, 235 genetic/developmental 181–4 pedagogical 179–84, 198–9 reform of education, educational reformism 41–2, 59, 64, 80, 150, 164–6, 166f, 168, 177–9, 182–3, 186–9, 196, 207–8, 212–14, 231, 260, 266–7 regression 8 rehabilitation, of children 136–7, 150, 154–8, 163–4, 167 of pedology 35, 258–60 reification (of pedology as science) 39, 262–3, 268 repressed science (repressirovannaia nauka) 37, 40, 257–8, 262–3 reproduction (biological, social, cultural) 2–3, 9, 42–3, 45–6, 57, 143 of the scientific field 171 retardation 118, 125–6, 125n.39, 134–5, 137–8, 218, 222–3, 228 see also backwardness revolution, 1905 114, 120, 140–2, 145–6 Bolshevik 6, 30–1, 112, 147–55, 157–8, 160–2, 164–6, 168–9, 175–6, 181–2, 189–90, 195–6, 198–200, 225, 230, 237, 264–5 cultural 32n.72, 207–8 from above 207–11 revolutionary society 147–51, 169–71, 174–5, 266 revolutionization, of the field of education 150, 164–70, 187, 219–20, 224 of the scientific field 40, 153–4, 170–5, 197n.45, 209–10 rhetoric, rhetorical 8, 16, 18, 32, 58–9, 95, 104, 107–8, 118–20, 130–1, 144, 147–8, 162–3, 175, 189, 194–6, 214–15, 259–60, 262–4 Rossolimo, G. I. 102, 117, 125n.39, 128, 129f, 130–1, 134–5, 159 Rossolimo’s ‘psychological profile’ test, method 128–31, 129f, 232–3, 236n.65 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 6–7, 9–10 Rozental′, T. K. 175–6 Rubinshtein, M. M. 144–5

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 rural (population, communities) 58, 150, 166–7, 167n.68 rural schools 207–8 Rusk, Robert R. 24n.55 Russian Psychoanalytic Society 177–8 Russian Soviet Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR) 205–6, 231–2, 238–41 Russkaia shkola (The Russian School) 62–3, 65n.103, 81–2, 101, 145n.108 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 113–14 Rybakov, F. E. 127–8 Rybnikov, N. A. 66n.107, 67–9, 76–7, 102–3, 155n.16, 159, 169n.70, 170n.73, 204–6, 211n.99, 261 samokritika (autocritique, self-criticism) 33–5, 215–16, 249 sanatorium, school-sanatorium 85, 87, 117–18, 132, 134, 137–40, 159, 161–3, 206n.80 Shmidt, O. Iu. 176–7 Shmidt, V. F. 177 Shmidt, V. O. 177 school doctor 105–8, 110–12, 117–18, 123–7, 132–3, 142, 222, 238–40, 239n.84, 240–1, 243, 249–50 School-Sanatorium for Defective Children 117–18, 138–9, 159, 161–2 see also Kashchenko V. P. science (nauka), foreign, bourgeois 33, 175, 213, 219–20, 252–3 normal 171 non-scientists 12 state science 32, 40, 187–8, 200–9, 212, 220–1, 262–3 scientific work 30, 84–5, 153, 185, 201, 209–10, 219, 265–6 scientificity 94–5, 101, 104, 262 scientist (adj.) 7, 95 scientization 3–4, 6–7, 12–13, 16, 50–2 temple of (khram nauki) 81–3, 94–5 see also rationality (of science) Sechenov, I. M. 47n.30, 75, 91 Second World War 246n.109, 268 Semashko, N. A. 202, 206n.80 Semeinoe vospitanie (Family Upbringing) 60, 64 Sem′ia i shkola (Family and School) 48 sensorial, sensory 72–3, 85, 162n.49, 163–4, 163n.54 sexual anomalies, behaviour, development, sexuality 5, 106–7, 178, 246 Shatskii, S. T. 18, 25n.56, 111, 129f, 166f, 167, 177–9, 231n.41 Shchelovanov, N. M. 165n.66, 181–2

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Shelaputin Institute 104n.95 Shtilerman, A. 259 Shubert, A. M. 115–16, 233, 236n.67 Shul′gin, V. N. 207n.85 Sigismund, Berthold 48–9 Sikorskaia, E. I. 138n.80 Sikorskaia, O. I. 138n.80 Sikorskii, I. A. 138n.80 Simon, Théodore 11n.25 Simonovich, A. S. 52–3, 59 Simonovich, Ia. M. 52–3 socialism, socialist 19, 30–2, 147–8, 157–8, 170, 189–90, 202, 208, 210, 212, 214–15, 254 socialization 2, 10–11, 13–16, 18–20, 26, 29, 42–5, 56–7, 69–70, 115, 134, 140, 152–3, 160, 162–3, 261, 267–8 re-socialization, re-education (perevospitanie) 135–6, 138–9, 154–5 Society for Experimental Pedagogy 101 see also experimental pedagogy Society for Preschool Education 76 see also preschool Society for the Protection of Public Health 106–7, 123–4, 141 Sokolov, N. 68–9 Sommer, Robert 127n.45 Sovetskaia pedagogika (Soviet Pedagogy) 254 see also pedagogy, Soviet ‘Soviet child’ 169–70 see also mass child Soviet child population 153–4, 164–6, 168–70, 258–9, 267–8 Sovietization (of child science) 32 Sovnarkom (Council of the People’s Commissars) 155–6, 240–1 Spain 25–6 special (needs) education 1, 13–14, 16, 25–6, 30, 37–8, 50, 117–18, 133–5, 134n.64, 137, 158–60, 167, 255–6 see also auxiliary classes and schools; special schools special schools 33–4, 40, 117–18, 132–3, 136–7, 160, 161n.37, 222–3, 225, 228n.29, 230, 237, 240, 242–3, 246–51, 254n.131 see also auxiliary classes and schools speech (children’s, development of, impediments, therapy) 72–3, 85, 162 Spencer, Herbert 9–10, 54n.56 Stakhorskaia, M. P. 68–9 Stalin, I. V. 19, 33, 37, 177, 202n.65, 203n.69, 207–11, 213, 245–6, 251, 254, 257–9 de-Stalinization 34–5, 256–7 post-Stalin era 255n.3, 256–7

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Stalin, I. V. (cont.) Stalinism, Stalinist 36, 257–60 Stalinization 210–11 Stalin, V. I. 177 State Academic Council (GUS), and its Scientific Pedagogical Section (NPS) 164–8, 166f, 186, 201–2, 230n.37, 239n.83, 240n.86 GUS school programmes 167–8, 186, 188–9 State Institute of Experimental Psychology (GIEP) 172–3, 199, 211 see also Moscow Institute of Psychology statistics, statistical 4–5, 7, 29, 118–19, 126, 141–3, 154n.15, 194–5, 222–3, 225, 228–9, 231, 235–6, 266–8 Stern, Clara 65–6 Stern, Wilhelm 65–6, 69 streaming 2–3, 5–6, 23–4, 40, 123, 222, 228–30, 228n.29, 232–3, 237, 241–3, 245, 248–51, 267 subjectivity, in psychology 70, 198–9 of clinicians 126–7 of educators 104 of parents 60, 68–70 subnorm, subnormality 5, 113–16, 118, 162, 222–3, 267–8 suicide 110, 120, 140–6, 155, 175–6 Sully, James 23n.52 surveys, questionnaires 5, 11, 13, 23–4, 28–9, 102–3, 111, 118–19, 169, 205, 214–15, 241–2, 247–9, 261 svobodnoe vospitanie (‘free education’ movement) 24–5, 167 Switzerland, Swiss 3, 6–7, 22, 27–8, 59, 85–6 synthesis 19, 40, 50–1, 188–93, 197, 264 Taine, Hippolyte 21n.47, 52–3 teenagers 106–7, 120, 160, 256–7 see also adolescents teleology 2–4, 192–3, 265 Terman, Lewis 11n.25 territory (disciplinary, occupational, professional) 3–4, 11–16, 18–19, 23–5, 27–8, 51, 56, 103–5, 108–9, 122, 131–2, 153, 171–2, 180, 216, 264 testologists 232n.46, 236 textbooks, manuals (in childcare, hygiene, pedagogy, psychology, pedology, defectology) 15–16, 33–4, 41, 47–9, 49n.40, 51–2, 54, 56n.60, 60n.75, 62–3, 67n.116, 69, 91, 94n.57, 96–7, 103n.90, 134–5, 182–3, 188–92, 197–200, 205n.77, 219, 232n.45, 237–8, 244–5, 251–2, 262–3

Thaw, the 35 therapy, therapeutics, treatment (lechenie) 3–4, 9, 16, 18, 39–40, 85, 117n.14, 133–5, 137–40, 145–6, 150–64, 174–5, 227n.26, 255–6 Tiedemann, Dietrich 6–7 Tiflis (Tbilisi) 64 toddler, toddlerhood 48n.33, 53, 57, 68–9, 76–7, 168 Tolstoi, D. A. 43n.11, 79–80 Tolstoi, L. N. 9–10 Tolstoyan 24–5, 167 totalitarianism 36 translation 28, 47–8, 47n.30, 48–9, 49n.40, 52–4, 56n.60, 62–3, 64n.93, 65–6, 134, 176, 183, 232–3 transnational 20–34, 268 trauma, traumatic 8, 49–50, 142–6, 149–50, 157–9, 163–4, 174–6 Trotskii, L. D. 147–8, 181 Troshin, G. Ia. 113 Uchitel′ (Teacher) 48–9 Ukraine 124n.37, 145n.108, 183, 201, 208–9, 241n.93, 244n.102 underperformance (malouspeshnost′, neuspeshnost′, neuspevaemost′) 40, 110, 113, 143, 221–2, 224–30, 245, 256 underperformer (malouspevaiushchii, neuspevaiushchii), the underperforming 33, 138, 203n.71, 226–8, 240, 243–4, 247, 254n.131 see also uspeshnost′ United States of America (USA), North America, American 3, 11–12, 11n.25, 16n.34, 20–1, 20n.45, 22–3, 25–6, 28, 30, 32, 36, 63, 81–3, 85–6, 90, 121, 167, 230, 232–6 universal child 29 education 147–8, 164–6, 187, 228, 233–4, 267 norms 90, 115–16, 170, 230–1 universalism, universalizing 20–1, 30–2 urbanization 113–14 Ushinskii, K. D. 50–1, 84, 101, 198, 260–1 uspeshnost′, uspevaemost′ (achievement, performance at school) 223, 227, 230–3, 244–5 utopian 7–9, 36–7, 75–6 Vasileiskii, S. M. 204n.74, 232n.46, 254n.129 Veselovskaia, K. P. 189–90 Vessel′, N. Kh. 48

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 Vestnik vospitaniia (Herald of Education) 63, 78n.2, 81–2, 121 Vilenkina, R. G. 212, 214 Vinogradov, N. D. 104n.95 Virenius, A. S. 106–8, 110 Vladimirskii, A. V. 110–11, 124n.37, 131n.59, 132n.61 Vodovozova, E. N. 59 Vodovozov, V. I. 59 Volga region 154, 225n.18 Vologda 124 Voprosy izucheniia i vospitaniia lichnosti (Questions of the Research and Education of Personality) 160, 206n.81 Voprosy psikhologii (Questions of Psychology) 259 Voroshilov, K. E. 245–6 vospitanie (upbringing) 39–52, 54–62, 65–6, 75–6, 133–4, 139–40, 162–3, 202 nauka o vospitanii, nauka vospitaniia (science of upbringing) 44–6, 47n.30, 50–2, 57, 60, 84–5, 212n.104 voprosy vospitaniia (questions of upbringing) 49–50 perevospitanie (re-socialization, re-education) 135–6, 138–9 vospitatel′ (educator) 44–6, 135–6, 161 vospitatel′nitsa (kindergarten caregiver) 44, 57, 71–2 medsestra-vospitatel′nitsa (nurse-educator) 164n.63 mat′-vospitatel′nitsa (mother-educator) 66–7 Vospitanie i obuchenie (Upbringing and Instruction) 48, 63, 65 VSNKh (Supreme Soviet of the National Economy) 241 Vvedenskii, A. I. 83–4 Vygotskii, L. S. 37–8, 159, 164, 165n.66, 177–8, 181, 185, 189–93, 199n.52, 206, 214, 235, 253–4, 256–7, 259 Vygotskian 36–7

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war (effect on the child) 140–1, 143–6 Warner, Francis 23n.52 Warsaw 109–10, 121, 134–5 welfare 2, 17–21, 26–7, 30, 113–14, 147–8, 154–5, 170, 196–7, 267–8 welfare state 1–2, 151, 153, 168–9, 174–5 welfare/warfare state 3, 25–6, 118–19, 149, 263 West, the 27, 33, 36–7, 84, 127–8, 152–3, 169, 189–90, 216, 236, 252–3, 267 Western 3–4, 22n.49, 27, 30, 36–7, 134, 189n.16, 193n.31, 214, 262 Westernized 29, 42 see also Europe; United States of America wet-nurse 44–6, 57–8 woman, women 13–14, 27–8, 41, 56, 56n.60, 57–60, 67, 88–9 woman doctor (zhenshchina vrach) 27–8, 49n.40, 59 see also female; femininity Women’s Medical Institute 182n.105 Woody, Clifford 230 Wundt, Wilhelm 92–3 Wundtian 172 Zalkind, A. B. 173–4, 188n.7, 191–6, 201, 203, 206, 208–12, 214, 216, 235–6, 239n.83, 240n.86, 244n.103, 253–4 Zaluzhnyi, A. S. 208–9, 214 Zankov, L. V. 235n.62 Zaporozhets, A. V. 235n.62 Zaretskii, M. I. 234n.57 zemstvo 106n.99, 138 Zhdanov, A. A. 246–51 Zhuk, V. N. 47–8, 58–9, 62–3, 67 Zhurnal dlia vospitaniia (Journal of Upbringing) 48 Zimin, V. T. 72n.131, 76n.142 Zürich 175–6 zvezdochka (star diagram) 88, 89f