Russian and Soviet social psychology.

Abstract

Social psychology appeared early in Russia, and was from its start firmly integrated into the social context. As the social context changed with changing ideologies and forms of government, so did the form and practice of social psychology. Yet certain concepts have remained basic throughout its turbulent 150-year existence. This paper sketches a brief history of the field of Russian and Soviet social psychology and identifies some of its guiding ideas.

Psychological theory as administrative politics: Boris Lomov’s systems approach in the context of the Soviet science establishment

“…This is not to say that the later decades have not been covered at all. David Joravsky's (1989) key book on the cultural history of Russian psychology takes its narrative up to the early 1950s, and there are a number of works that examine the Thaw of the 1950s-1960s and the Brezhnev era (Graham, 1987;Kozulin, 1984;Rey, 2014;Sirotkina and Smith, 2012;Strickland, 1991;Valsiner, 1988;Van der Veer, 1990). There is also a growing interest in the later institutional development of fields adjacent to psychology, such as systems theory (Duller, 2016) or psychotherapy (Brokman, 2018), but academic psychology has not received similar attention.…”