Comparative-Cultural Research in Soviet Psychology

Abstract

In this special issue of the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, readers will get a glimpse of a research tradition in Soviet psychology that has never been widespread. It could barely emerge in the midst of the social turmoil of the 1920s, but came alive in the work of Alexander Luria in the early 1930s (Luria, 1931a, 1931b, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1974, 1976), and then vanished into the oblivion of Soviet ideological discourse for decades. A comparative-cultural focus in psychology in the USSR remained largely nonexistent (with very few exceptions) until the breakup of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, its relevance in the history of the cultural-historical line of thought initiated by Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria is profound.