The New Man in Soviet Psychology

253 Pages·1952·5.776 MB·English

by  Raymond A. Bauer

THE RUSSIAN RESEARCH CENTER
The Russian Research Center was established February 1, 1948.
It is supported by the Carnegie Corporation on a grant covering the
period until July 1, 1958. The major objective of the Research Center
is the study of Russian institutions and behavior in an effort to make
for better understanding of international actions and policy of the
Soviet Union. The participating scholars represent all of the social
sciences. In accord with the expressed wish of the Carnegie Corpora-
tion, the fields of anthropology, psycholQgy, and sociology, which
have hitherto played little part in Russian studies in this country, are
strongly represented. The staff of the Center are grateful to the Car-
negie Corporation not only for the opportunity to carry out their
studies under favorable circumstances, but also for the moral encour-
agement and intellectual stimulation which have been provided by
contact with individual officers and trustees of the Corporation.
RUSSIAN RESEARCH CENTER STUDIES
1. Public Opinion in Soviet Rus- 4. Chinese Communism and the
sia: A Study in Mass Persuasion Rise of Mao
by Alex Inkeles by Benjamin I. Schwartz
2. Soviet Politics—The Dilemma 5. Titoism and the Cominform
of Power: The Role of Ideas by Adam Ulam
in Social Change
6. Documentary History of Chi-
by Barrington Moore, Jr.
nese Communism
3. Justice in Russia: An Interpre- by Conrad Brandt, Benjamin
tation of Soviet Law Schwartz, and John K. Fair-
by Harold J. Berman bank
THE NEW MAN IN
SOVIET PSYCHOLOGY
THE
NEW MAN IN
SOVIET PSYCHOLOGY
Raymond A. Bauer
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS · CAMBRIDGE
1952
Copyright, 1952
By the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Distributed in Great Britain by
Geoffrey Cumberlege
Oxford University Press · London
This volume was prepared under a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation of New
York. That Corporation is not, however,
the author, owner, publisher, or pro-
prietor of this publication and is not to
be understood as approving by virtue of
its grant any of the statements made or
views expressed therein.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 52-5385
Printed in the United States of America
TO
Alice and Linda

PREFACE
It is axiomatic in the field of Soviet studies
that one is never right; he is only wrong with varying degrees
of vulnerability. In this area more than in most the writer must
make the choice between avoiding risks and eliciting the maxi-
mum of meaning from the material. Obviously no one person
can hope to command adequately all the skills and knowledge
that a work such as this demands. Relying on the charity and
forbearance of the community of scholars, I have chosen to
run risks rather than sacrifice meaning.
This book is essentially an essay in the history of ideas. It
is partially a history of the science of psychology in the Soviet
Union, partially a study of the pattern of social change in that
country, largely an analysis of changing conceptions of human
nature under conditions of social change, to a certain extent
an inquiry in the relation of ideology to action, somewhat a
study of the relationship of psychology to society. Being so
many things, it is not satisfactorily any one of them. I have
tried particularly to avoid excessive documentation, so that the
general reader might not be diverted from the main argument
of the book. The specialist will find a more detailed treatment
of the work of psychologists, and a vastly greater source of
bibliographical references in my doctoral thesis "The Con-
ception of Man in Soviet Psychology," on deposit at the
Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
χ PREFACE
There are certain topics with which it would have been
tempting to deal, but which I have deliberately not touched on.
I have not discussed the assumptions about human nature
which are found in pre-Revolutionary Marxist writings. I
have not done this because I feel that the question of the
orthodoxy of the position taken by Soviet Marxists at any
subsequent period is peripheral to the question of why a par-
ticular interpretation was put on Marxist doctrine. There was
in Marxist writings a sufficient store of ideological weapons
to arm both sides of the controversy. What was important was
the reason for selecting one rather than another view. The
writings of Marx and Engels on human nature are treated in
Vernon Venable's book, Human Nature: The Marxian View
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945).
The problems and material of Soviet psychiatry are suf-
ficiently different from those of psychology, so that an ade-
quate treatment of these topics would have demanded a
separate book. Because of the inherent interest which Soviet
psychiatry has for the American reading public, I would have
attempted some coverage of this topic if it had not been for
the publication of Dr. Joseph Words' Soviet Psychiatry
(Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1950). There are some
rather basic points of disagreement between Dr. Wortis' in-
terpretation of the political and social context in which Soviet
sciences operate and the interpretation presented here, but
this does not detract from the value of the psychiatric material
he has gathered. I wish also to take the opportunity to thank
Dr. Wortis for his generous sharing of materials with me dur-
ing the period in which we were both doing research, and for
the many stimulating conversations we have had on this topic.
In recent years there has been a spate of books and articles
about political interference with science in the Soviet Union.
They have been devoted almost exclusively to demonstrating
the fact of political intervention, a matter about which there
PREFACE xi
was some need for educating the citizens of Western countries.
The effect of these writings has been to illustrate that the
Soviet system operates according to an entirely different set
of values than ours does—which is worth restating—and to
generate in Western readers feelings of righteous indignation,
certainly one of the most comforting of human sentiments.
This book attempts to take one step beyond this and to inquire
into the rationale behind interference in one science, psy-
chology, and thereby to get further insight into the nature
of the system.
Leninists are fond of insisting that the scholar who studies
a phenomenon and demonstrates the causal relationships that
account for its existence tends to become an apologist for that
phenomenon. This is a point which Leninists have in common
with other critics. While everyone grants that the Soviet
Union is a potent political and military threat to the West,
somehow it must be insisted simultaneously that the system
does not work. It is my belief that the Soviet system is based
on a set of values to which we in the West are antipathetic,
but it is a system which has both strengths and weaknesses.
The fact that in this book we are dealing with one of its areas
of greatest weakness should not lead us to overconfidence. To
deal with this system effectively we must understand it in its
own terms. For this purpose we need to scrutinize it with cold
objectivity, particularly avoiding the temptation to easy self-
delusion about its internal weaknesses.
In the Soviet field one works always from small islands of
information, and he is compelled often to infer what lies be-
tween these islands. I have tried at all points to indicate the
degree of certainty or uncertainty with which I feel my
statements are established.
Some comment is also in order about the sources I have used.
This book is based primarily on official Soviet sources, and
these sources pose some problems of interpretation. In using
xii PREFACE
these sources, I have drawn on the accumulated experience of
Western scholars working with Soviet materials, and on my
own background of research in the Soviet field. In addition, I
have been able to check occasional points against the testimony
of Westerners who have observed some of the events dealt
with in this book, and also have had the opportunity to talk
to Soviet emigres who had been involved in many of these
events.
The procurement of sources was in itself a major problem.
Utilizing the combined resources of the major libraries of the
country, and of a few private individuals who had rare ma-
terials in their possession, I was able to assemble an almost
complete collection of the Soviet psychological journals for
all periods, copies of almost all major textbooks published since
the Revolution, and a fair representation of other works.
The major psychological journals ceased publication in the
period 1932-1934, and after these years, publication facilities
for psychological research were very sparse until 1946, when
the serial publications of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences
were inaugurated. In the intervening period, large quantities of
psychological research went unpublished. At all times, and in
this period in particular, the publication of psychological re-
search has been so widely distributed through such a variety
of publication media that a systematic treatment of the empiri-
cal work of Soviet psychologists has seemed to me to be un-
feasible. Accordingly, I have more or less limited the discussion
to theoretical positions which have been accepted as officially
correct at various periods of time, and I have concentrated on
the reasons for the adoption of a particular point of view at a
particular point in time.
Especially after 1930, there has been virtually no oppor-
tunity for the expression of "noncorrect" views in print. This
makes it more difficult to establish whether or not such "in-
correct" views are held in private (as indeed they must be)