Sergei Rubinstein As The Founder of Soviet Marxist Psychology

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Sergei Rubinstein as the founder of Soviet Marxist psychology
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2
SERGEI RUBINSTEIN AS THE
FOUNDER OF SOVIET MARXIST
PSYCHOLOGY
“Problems of psychology in the works
of Karl Marx” (1934) and beyond
Anton Yasnitsky
Sergei Rubinstein (1889–1960) was definitely and undeniably the founder of

Soviet Marxist psychology. No doubt, he was not the only one to face the chal-
lenge: numerous Soviet psychologists, explicitly or implicitly, sooner or later
aligned themselves with the Marxist strand in psychology as early as the beginning
of the 1920s. A few of them would go as far as to voluntarily assume the role of
the leading creators of the distinctly Marxist psychology and the spokesmen for
the entire discipline or any of its subdivisions. These would infrequently be posi-
tioned as allied to psychology or even fully independent scholarly disciplines such
as well-known internationally applied psychological disciplines and social prac-
tices of “psychotechnics”, “pedology”, “psychohygiene”1 or unique Soviet home-
grown idiosyncratic “reactology” or “reflexology”. One should not be misled by
Konstantin Kornilov’s chapter (1930) that appeared in English in an edited book
collection characteristically titled “Psychologies of 1930”, which featured a wide
range of contemporary psychological theories and reads today as some kind of
more or less comprehensive “who is who” in psychology of its time (Murchison,
1930). Kornilov’s chapter “Psychology in the light of dialectic materialism” (with
its clear Marxist commitment of the contributing author, the proponent of the idi-
osyncratic “reactology” of his own back at home) might have read as the “Marxist
Soviet psychology” in the West, whereas in fact it was only a Marxist psychology
among a few other similar Marxist psychological theories in the Soviet Union. To
be precise, by the 1930s there were no Soviet psychologists who would openly
oppose Marxism or advocate for any alternative to it.
1 For a discussion of the two applied psychological disciplines – “pedology” and “psychohygiene” –
and related social practices see Part II of this book.
Sergei Rubinstein 59
And yet, it was not until Sergei Rubinstein entered the field in the mid-1930s that
a really stable and officially accepted version of Marxist psychology would appear.
In other words, the unified project of the Soviet Marxist psychology emerged in
Rubinstein’s works and was forever strongly associated with his name and contri-
bution. Surprisingly enough, this gigantic figure and the creator of Soviet psycho-
logical Marxism is virtually unknown in the West to this very day: only a few of
his works are available in English (a little bit more are known in non-Anglo-Saxon
psychological communities, for instance, in German scholarly community). This
seems to be not only sufficient, but also a compelling reason for considerable atten-
tion to this Soviet thinker and his ideas, as obscure as they still are for a reader in
English. An in-depth analysis of Rubinstein’s legacy has once been undertaken in a
study of 1960s (Payne, 1968) that is also not so familiar among the Western readers
and appears quite outdated by the standards of our time. That is why this chapter
is much needed as a long-overdue contribution to the discussion of Rubinstein’s
heritage in the context of 21st century psychology. Yet, another in-depth analysis
would require another major book. Instead, the chapter presents only the highlights
of Rubinstein’s life and scholarly legacy. Then, it proceeds to the close reading and
discussion of Rubinstein’s seminal paper “Problems of Psychology in the Works of
Karl Marx” that was his first explicitly Marxist work that paved the way for the rest
of his compatriots and peers to follow in this field of knowledge.
Reliable sources on Rubinstein’s life and legacy

Before we proceed any further, an important discussion of what materials count
as scientifically reliable sources on Sergei Rubinstein’s life and legacy is in order.
This discussion is triggered not only by the requirement of the adherence to the
usual high standards of rigid and objective science. There is another, very compel-
ling reason to inspect and overview the available data, on the basis of which an
understanding of the real career and scholarly contribution of Sergei Rubinstein
can legitimately be made.
Rubinstein was a leading Soviet scholar, whose life spanned seven decades and
whose academic legacy has been presented and discussed on quite a number of
occasions in multiple publications; most of them took place within the Soviet
Union. Yet, there are serious reasons to question these narratives and analyses.
A cult figure for some, Rubinstein happened to supervise the work of a num-
ber of Soviet scientific workers in 1930s–1950s, who later claimed themselves as
intellectual heirs of Rubinstein. Regrettably, though, these individuals were pre-
dominantly raised and enculturated in academia within the “Stalin model of sci-
ence” that was firmly established in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and further
solidified during the period of Late Stalinism of the late 1940s–early 1950s. In
fact, despite certain historical evolution and a number of important mutations, this
model persists in contemporary scientific ethos in Russian Federation to these very
days (Yasnitsky, 2015b, 2016).
60 Anton Yasnitsky
As long as Rubinstein’s postwar students are concerned, the situation is further

aggravated by the social and institutional circumstances of their intellectual milieu:
the majority of them were associated and affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy
of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, deeply entrenched in dogmatic and
scholastic quasi-Marxism. Thus, to give just one example of a direct consequence
of Rubinstein’s students’ partisan involvement, the entire period of Rubinstein’s life
and his scholarship associated with German “idealist” Neo-Kantianism remained
virtually unexplored and greatly omitted in the traditional narratives about Rubin-
stein’s life and legacy – until very recent times. This can be explained by the ideo-
logical loyalty and dogmatism of Rubinstein’s students, as well as the fact that
the overwhelming majority of them did not have the command of the German
language (or, for that matter, any other foreign language) sufficient for reading
their supervisor’s earlier works composed in German. Furthermore, the situation
with Rubinstein’s intellectual legacy in the 21st century has not improved in any
sense, even deteriorated. A handful of Rubinstein’s contemporary self-proclaimed
followers and interpreters, in addition to the deficiencies of the earlier period, tend
to downplay and distance the Marxist core of his writings and speculate on the
“humanist” trends in his work – to the detriment of both German Neo-Kantianist
and Soviet Marxist foundations of his thinking throughout his entire intellectual
life. Apparently, this creates a largely biased and distorted – if not falsified – image
of Sergei Rubinstein, the philosopher and psychologist, and his legacy. A some-
what similar situation in Soviet psychology, specifically, in relation to the legacy of
Lev Vygotsky, has been observed, described and thoroughly analyzed in the course
of the ongoing “revisionist revolution in Vygotsky Studies”, most notably featured
in programmatic landmark English and Spanish publications (Yasnitsky & Van der
Veer, 2016b; Yasnitsky et al., 2016). This is the reason why most of traditional
Soviet and Russian publications are highly suspected of a considerable bias and
distortion (if not dismissed altogether), and a rigorous “audit” of the documentary
materials and sources on Sergei Rubinstein is direly needed.
The main core of Sergei Rubinstein’s personal and scholarly archive has been
preserved in the V.I. Lenin State Public Library and the Institute of Psychology
of Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) in Moscow; some other archival docu-
ments related to Rubinstein are also available in the collections of libraries and
institutional archives in St. Petersburg (former Leningrad), Moscow (both in Rus-
sian Federation), Odessa, Kharkiv (both in Ukraine) and, possibly, in Germany.
Regrettably, the personal file of Rubinstein as a student in Marburg (Germany) was
reported missing (or misplaced), according to a recent publication (Dmitrieva &
Levchenko, 2015).
Perhaps, the earliest albeit somewhat dated trustworthy source on Rubinstein’s
life and scholarship is the book by T. R. Payne titled S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philo-
sophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology (Payne, 1968). The author apparently had
working knowledge of Russian and German and perused an impressive number
of original sources in these two languages, which is mandatory in the case of
Rubinstein’s scholarship. Payne’s first-hand knowledge of the sources and acute

analysis of the texts make his work a valuable source on Rubinstein until this very
day, even despite the book’s shortcomings. The author clearly identifies the focus
of his research and the scope of its coverage:
The purpose of this work is to discuss the philosophical foundations of Soviet

psychological theory. The treatment of this subject is more expository than
critical, though the task of giving a general account of Soviet psychologi-
cal theory necessarily involves a certain element of evaluation. The method
adopted is somewhat unusual. Rather than attempt to give an overall account
of the philosophical aspects of Soviet psychological theory, we have chosen
instead to study these questions as they are discussed in the works of one par-
ticular Soviet writer . . . S. L. Rubinstejn has been chosen as the subject for
this study chiefly because he was, until his death in 1960, the most influential
writer on psychological theory in the Soviet Union. His works, moreover,
cover all the major aspects of Soviet psychological theory, and though it is
doubtful if he can be called a “great” philosopher, his writings manifest a
depth and originality of thought impressive by any standard.
(Payne, 1968, p. 2)
One could only regret that the book has largely remained unnoticed by the
larger academic community of those scholars, who are interested in the issues
the book covers. To this very day, this book remains the main and virtually the
only second-hand source available to an English reader; all other available publica-
tions are mostly in Russian. Among these, particularly important are the studies
of archival nature that document Rubinstein’s life upon his return from Germany
in Odessa (Levchenko, 2012; Romenets, 1989), and, then, in Leningrad (Park-
homenko et al., 1989). One should also mention a remarkable collection of papers
that also included the original and previously unpublished important materials
from Sergei Rubinstein’s archive (Lomov, 1989).
Yet, particularly prominent are the studies of Nina Dmitrieva (of Moscow
State Pedagogical University), who systematically pursues her research in Neo-
Kantian philosophy and has recently published a series of important studies solidly
grounded in the critical reading of original texts and archival materials. The author
and her studies deal not only with the Marburg school of Neo-Kantian philosophy
in its relation to the Russian intellectual milieu and its impact on Russian thought
in humanities and social sciences (Dmitrieva, 2007), but increasingly focus on the
figure of Sergei Rubinstein, his intellectual biography and the personal network of
his peers and interlocutors such as, for instance, Ernst Cassirer (Dmitrieva, 2016a;
Dmitrieva & Levchenko, 2015), as a Neo-Kantian scholar in his dialogue with
Hegelian thought (Dmitrieva, 2016b). These studies complement the traditional
view on Rubinstein as a quintessential Marxist thinker, considerably enrich our
understanding of Rubinstein’s evolution from German Neo-Kantian philosophy
62 Anton Yasnitsky
towards Soviet Marxist psychology and dramatically problematize the phenomenon

of “Marxist psychology” as an integral part of European Continental intellectual
tradition. So, in sum, despite quite a number of Soviet publications on Sergei
Rubinstein, it is safe to claim that scholarly rigorous and systematic “Rubinstein
Studies” are only in their infancy as a very promising direction of future research
and these are the main studies of primary interest as the most reliable publications
on life and, generally, the intellectual legacy of Rubinstein.
Finally, this chapter provides a close reading of specific Rubinstein’s text: his
ground-breaking article of 1933 (published in 1934) on Karl Marx and the prob-
lems of psychology (Rubinshtein, 1934). The original edition of 1934 is rare and
virtually inaccessible to a contemporary reader; therefore all references to the text
in Russian are given here by its later republication, which is relatively reliable from
a textological standpoint (1973b). The analysis of the text was supported with its
publications in German (1981) and in English (1987). Then, for the references to
the original works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the 50-volume English edi-
tion of Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW, 1975–2004) was used. In addition,
for the original German texts, the author consulted the editions of 44-volume (in
46 books) Marx-Engels Werke (MEW, 1956–1990) and the largest collection, the
ongoing Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2, since 1975; the end of publication
projected in 2025).
Sergei Rubinstein: life and legacy

Sergei Rubinstein was born in Odessa, a major city in the south-west Russian
Empire, in 1889 in a family of Leonid Rubinstein, a successful and wealthy lawyer.
Sergei completed his classical gymnasium education in 1908 with a gold medal
(the diploma of the highest distinction), which – along with his father’s financial
support – allowed him to travel to Western Europe and take a course of uni-
versity studies in philosophy in Germany. The academic subject of Rubinstein’s
choice, philosophy, was dominated there by the so-called Neo-Kantian tradition,
and the famous names of the leading philosophers of this intellectual movement
are Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) (both
in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden), and Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) and Paul
Natorp (1854–1924) (both in Marburg). Also, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) was
both influenced by and notably contributed to the Neo-Kantianist movement.
Rubinstein accomplished his university studies in two cities: first, he studied in
Freiburg under Rickert for over a year (in summer of 1909 and winter semester of
1909/1910), and then, somewhat disappointed with his Freiburg studies, in Mar-
burg, both among the oldest (more precisely, top-ten) German-speaking university
cities (Dmitrieva, 2007).
In 1912, Rubinstein’s mentor Hermann Cohen retired from the university in
Marburg and moved to Berlin. The next year, in 1913, Rubinstein completed his
university courses and followed Cohen. For about a year he stayed in Berlin, where
he took the opportunity to attend the courses of Ernst Cassirer (at the Friedrich
Wilhelm University, later renamed Humboldt University of Berlin) and prepared
for publication of his doctoral thesis in philosophy titled “A Study on the Problem
of Method” (Eine Studie zum Problem der Methode): by German academic standards
this publication was the requirement and precondition for the defense. In 1914 he
published the first part of his dissertation (Rubinstein, 1914); this was immediately
followed by successful defense on July 20, 1914 (Sieg, 1994, pp. 383, 487). Thus,
just a week before the outbreak of WWI (i.e., July 28, 1914), Rubinstein com-
pleted his university studies and, in order not to get interned during the war as a
citizen of a belligerent country involved in the military conflict against Germany,
Rubinstein left for Imperial Russia.
Thus, in 1914 Rubinstein arrived back home in Russia as a full-grown intellec-
tual and mature philosopher of the Marburg school of German Neo-Kantianism,
highly valued by his teacher Hermann Cohen, who considered him as one of his
best students and favorites, as evident from Rubinstein’s and his peers’ in Ger-
many correspondence (Pasternak, 2005, pp. 107–110). It is not entirely clear what
exactly he was involved in since then in his home town of Odessa until 1917 since
when he is known to have been working as a history instructor in a gymnasium
in Odessa. In April 1919 he got a position of privat-dozent (roughly, an equivalent
of an assistant professor in North America) at the Department of Philosophy of
the Novorossiiskii (Odessa) University. He made an impressive fast – albeit brief –
career at this institution (that underwent a series of administrative reforms and
reorganizations during the period) and even reached the position of Full Professor
and the Chair of Department in 1921.
Yet again, under unclear circumstances, in 1922 he switched to an Adjunct
(vneshtatnyi) Professor at the university (Levchenko, 2010), which was chiefly a
teaching (but neither administrative nor research) job, in order to become the
Director of the Odessa Scientific Library. He held this position until 1930 when he
left his home town in order to assume a position of a Director of Saltykov-Schedrin
Central Scientific Library in Leningrad, the former capital of Russian Empire,
which was apparently quite a promotion for him (Romenets, 1989). Interestingly
enough, even as the top city library administrator Rubinstein never abandoned his
intellectual quest and kept profusely writing on various philosophy related topics;
quite a few of his manuscripts have been preserved in his archives. Furthermore, he
made several attempts at publishing these works on various occasions – at home or
abroad – all of them to no avail (Dmitrieva & Levchenko, 2015). This might sug-
gest that the twist of Rubinstein’s career and his departure from academia in 1922
was not exactly his voluntary and eager choice.
Thus, in 1930 Rubinstein left Odessa for Leningrad. Soon thereafter, he
received an offer for another – presumably, way more attractive from his personal
standpoint – position: the Chair of psychology at the Department of Pedology
at the local Herzen Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. The offer was accepted.
Thus, Rubinstein resumed his scholarly life after a decade of supervisory and
64 Anton Yasnitsky
administrative work in the Soviet library system, in the academic year of 1931–
1932 (Parkhomenko et al., 1989).
An active educational administrator in Leningrad and a sharp thinker, Rubin-
stein would not publish anything on philosophical or psychological matters ever
since his return from Germany – with seemingly the only exception: an early small
paper of 1922 on the “principle of creative self-activity” that came out in Odessa
in an obscure local collection of scientific papers (Rubinshtein, 1922). So, it was
only in 1934 that he debuted as a psychologist with a publication of his seminal
paper on the “problems of psychology in the works of Karl Marx” (Rubinshtein,
1934), which did not make an immediate considerable stir, yet nevertheless it had
a profound lasting effect on the entire edifice of Soviet psychology for the years to
come. This article was soon followed by an important book publication: Rubin-
stein’s Foundations of Psychology (Osnovy psikhologii). The book was completed and
submitted in late 1934, then, published in 1935 (Rubinshtein, 1935). Five years
later, in 1940, another of Rubinstein’s book was released. Originally planned as a
revised version of his 1935 volume, his Foundations of General Psychology (Osnovy
obschei psikhologii) eventually turned out a whole new book project that accom-
modated the criticisms of his first Russian book and earned him a reputation of
a stellar psychologist, furthermore, the leading specialist in this field in the Soviet
Union (Rubinshtein, 1940).
The beginning of the German invasion of the USSR in July 1941 during WWII
reached Rubinstein in Leningrad where he stayed even during the German mili-
tary blockade of the city, famine and mass starvation in 1941–1942. Yet, the year of
1942 was the turning point in his life and career. Indeed, in 1942 Rubinstein was
awarded the most prestigious Stalin Prize (of the second degree) for his work on
the general psychology. The same year he left Leningrad for Kislovodsk, and soon
thereafter for Moscow, in order to become the founding Head of the Chair (kaf-
edra) and Department (otdelenie) of Psychology affiliated with the School (fakul’tet)
of Philosophy at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (kept the position
until 1945). The following year, in 1943, he became the first Soviet psychologist
to become a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR
(elected on September 29, 1943). Finally, in 1945 Rubinstein became the founding
Director of the Sector (sektor) of Psychology at the Institute of Philosophy of the
Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The impact of the latter appointment can be
hardly overestimated: it meant, in effect, that psychology as a scholarly discipline
for the first time ever received an official institutional recognition at the highest
level of the Soviet nomenclature of scientific disciplines, albeit somewhat subdued
to Philosophy as its constitutive sub-field. In 1946 the second, slightly revised edi-
tion of his award-winning Foundations of General Psychology was released (Rubin-
shtein, 1946).
Yet, the end of the 1940s was marked by a dramatic shift in the international rela-
tions between the geo-political powers well known as the beginning of the period
of the Cold War. This change had a profound effect on foreign and domestic policy
of the Soviet Union, including its scientific policy (Krementsov, 1997). Thus, as a
result of a few waves of political processes of the late 1940s and the beginning of
the campaign against the “rootless cosmopolitans” (a Soviet newspeak euphemism
for the launch of Anti-Semitic campaign), Sergei Rubinstein was released of all his
administrative roles in 1949 at the Sector of Psychology of the Institute of Philoso-
phy and eventually fired from the Moscow State University in 1952, although he
retained his membership at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In retrospect,
this might be interpreted as a relatively reasonable compromise between the domi-
nant trend in the party-state policy and the resistance of the scholarly community
to give up its major assets such as Sergei Rubinstein, the philosopher-psychologist
and the leading, officially acknowledged intellectual of the time. Yet, the times
would dramatically change very soon.
Despite his public ostracism and official removal from virtually all positions that
Rubinstein had occupied before the beginning of the Cold War and the related
changes in the political and social climate in the country, he would ever remain
an intellectual leader and one of the most reputable figures in Soviet psychology.
Thus, the Francophone psychologists, who had contacts with their peers in the
Soviet Union in the mid-1950s, recall their meetings in Moscow with the group of
the Big Five. Apart from Sergei Rubinstein, this group included Aleksandr Luria,
Aleksei N. Leontiev, Anatolii Smirnov and Boris Teplov, each of whom – but
Rubinstein, of course – would occupy some or another more or less important
position in the official nomenclature hierarchy of the Soviet institutionalized psy-
chology of the time (Piaget, 1956; Zazzo, 1982, 1989). Immediately after Joseph
Stalin’s death in 1953 the policy hardly changed in any radical sense, yet a few
further compromises on the part of the regime were made. Thus, during the so-
called period of The Khrushchev Thaw (or khrushchevskaia ottepel’, called so by
Nikita Khrushchev, the new political leader of the Party and the government after
Stalin) Rubinstein slightly regained some of his lost positions in the academia: for
instance, in 1956 he was reappointed as the Director of the Sector of Psychology
at the Institute of Philosophy. In 1957 his earlier book, prepared for publication
under the title Philosophical Roots of Psychology that was banned by the Late Stalinist
censorship in 1947 and, apparently, subsequently somewhat revised, was eventually
published under the new title of Being and Consciousness (Bytie i soznanie), followed
by another book of 1959 Principles and the Ways of Psychology’s Development (Printsipy
i puti razvitiia psikhologii) (Rubinshtein, 1957, 1959). It turned out, at about the
same time Rubinstein was working on yet another book of his, The Human and the
World (Chelovek i mir): this one – not entirely finished monograph – would become
his “swan song” and the first posthumous major publication that remained unpub-
lished until an edition of 1973 saw the daylight – by admission of a contemporary
author and closest relative of an active and highly involved member of the editorial
team, a considerably “adapted” (Slavskaia, 2015, p. 9), that is, edited and falsified,
therefore, a highly questionable from textological standpoint publication (Rubin-
shtein, 1973a). Eventually, in 1959 Rubinstein was quite deservedly nominated for
66 Anton Yasnitsky
the most prestigious sign of distinction a scholar could have been awarded at that
time in the USSR: the Lenin Prize. Yet, he would never receive it: Sergei Rubin-
stein died on January 11, 1960.
Rubinstein’s “problems of psychology in the works

of Karl Marx” (1934): the context of composition
and publication
The circumstances of the article’s composition are not clear. Yet, the historical con-
text is well researched when Rubinstein’s most remarkable and foundational article
was written and published. Let us sketch it, thus, even if in a few strokes.
Most of the decade of the 1920s was dominated in the Soviet Union by the
New Economic Policy (NEP) that allowed for restoration of private businesses in
the country and resulted in the proliferation of an idiosyncratic Soviet “middle
class”, the “nepmen” (nepmany). A definite success in the regime’s effort to feed the
masses and provide basic services to the country’s population, the NEP was per-
ceived by the majority of the Communist Party members and the state bureaucracy
as social injustice, a retreat from and the betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution of
October 1917 with its pronunciations of the elimination of private property and
inequality in favor of the socialist, communal, egalitarian forms of social life and
state economy. Complicated with the intricacies of the inter-Party struggle for the
power and political leadership, the situation developed to the end of the 1920s,
when the official leader of the Party, Joseph Stalin, and his regime in its initial phase
of Early Stalinism introduced the inseparable unity of the forced industrialization,
collectivization and “cultural revolution” that dramatically impacted the entire sys-
tem of industry, agriculture and social relations in the country, respectively. The
cultural revolution is of primary interest in this context since it had profound effect
on the development of the natural, social and human sciences and the scientific
policies, discussions and practices in the Soviet Union, particularly in philosophy
and psychology. The rupture between the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s was
swift and decisive and is well known under the banner of the Great Break that
Joseph Stalin announced in 1929.
The entire period before the Great Break was dominated in Soviet philosophy
and ideology by the mechanist interpretation of Marxism and its role as the foun-
dation in scientific research. This period is also characterized by continuous and
passionate discussions and critique of the mechanist model from the rival group of
Soviet Marxist philosophers, who proposed an alternative to Marxist philosophi-
cal mechanicism, the “dialectical” model. The continuous struggle between the
two groups was interrupted by Joseph Stalin’s direct intervention in the discussion
in the end of 1929 with his critique of the mechanicism, then, again, the end of
1930 with a critique of the alternative group of Soviet Marxists that he dubbed
“menshevising idealists” (from the name of the “Menshevik” right faction of Rus-
sian Social-Democratic Party, the virtually outlawed by then political opponents of
the ruling former Bolshevik faction, renamed the Communist Party). The history
of this period is well researched and received impressive coverage in the literature
(see, e.g., Bauer, 1952; Graham, 1972; Joravsky, 1961; Todes & Krementsov, 2010).
As far as psychology is concerned, the situation for Soviet scholars in this and
allied fields (such as pedology, psychotechnics or psychohigiene) appeared rather
frustrating. In their attempt to align with the officially sanctioned version of Marx-
ism, they were considerably disoriented with the rapid changes and the zigzags of
the “official course” of Soviet Marxism in its historical evolution and the sequential
of both available alternatives: these were pronounced equally banned, and the war
against the two was launched under the banner of the struggle against the “mech-
anicism” and the “menshevising idealism”. Clearly, a third option, a politically safe
and intellectually robust middle way was needed not only in philosophy, but also
in sciences, including psychology. It is exactly against this background that the
article emerged of a virtually unknown author in the world of Soviet publications,
yet a well-established standing and a reputation of a doctoral graduate in one of
Germany’s best schools of philosophy and a prominent professor of psychology in
Leningrad in 1930s. It seems the combination of the two – the profound training in
German philosophy and the long-time involvement with psychology in the Soviet
Union was the key to the success of this newbie author of a Soviet psychological
paper in his mid-40s.
The text of the paper was finished and submitted for publication on May 31,
1933; the article was not published until the next year. Originally established in
1928 under the auspices of the Moscow State Institute of Experimental Psychology
of RANION (former Institute of Psychology, later renamed Institute of Psychol-
ogy, Pedology and Psychotechnics, the GIPPiP, in 1930) as The Journal of Psychol-
ogy, Pedology and Psychotechnics, the three series of the journal soon thereafter split
into three independent journals, titled, accordingly, Psychology, Pedology and Psy-
chotechnics and Psychophysiology of Labour. The journals on psychology proper and its
educational counterpart, pedology, were closed down upon the decision and the
ruling of the supervisory bodies of the party-state in 1932. The journal on psycho-
technics survived, but it was reorganized and renamed Soviet Psychotechnics, under
which title it kept circulating during the last two years of its life.
Rubinstein’s seminal paper came out in the first issue of the journal Soviet Psy-
chotechnics (Sovetskaia psikhotekhnika) of 1934 (Rubinshtein, 1934), then another
issue followed and the journal followed the other two psychological journals and
was also closed down. This was the last of the three specialized Soviet psychologi-
cal journals, and the article on the problems of psychology might have turned a
“farewell letter” and a “swan song” of this discipline in the country. Yet, as the fate
would have it, it definitely was not.
Despite this clearly negative trend in the world of specialized psychological pub-
lishing in the country that certainly reflected deeper processes and changing atti-
tudes to this field of knowledge and related social practice among the political and
administrative leadership in the USSR, Rubinstein’s paper seems to have met the
68 Anton Yasnitsky
sharp demand in the philosophical interpretation and establishing the ground rules
and conceptual foundations of the quintessentially Soviet Marxist psychology in
its search of the middle way by boldly navigating between Scylla and Charybdis –
that is, the dangers of mechanicism and the “menshevising idealism”. This is how,
it seems, Sergei Rubinstein’s intellectual genius made its truly invaluable and most
foundational contribution to the entire discipline of Soviet psychology in the mak-
ing from the mid-1930s onward. All that the rest of Soviet psychologists had to do
after this publication was to follow Rubinstein’s lead. And this was exactly what
they actually did.
Rubinstein’s sources: Marxist and other

Rubinstein’s paper was very timely in terms of the pressing demands of the Soviet
psychological community in search of its mandatory Marxist foundations at the
time of crisis and rapid social and cultural changes. Yet, it was also timely in a
very different sense. The paper was almost an immediate reaction to an important
publication of Karl Marx’s work. The work is probably less known and less popu-
lar than the author’s monumental three-volume Capital” (Das Kapital. Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie, 1867–1883) or the programmatic The Manifesto of the Commu-
nist Party (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, 1848). Nevertheless, the importance
this highly influential work for the intellectuals and philosophers around the world
can be hardly overestimated. The “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844”, prepared by the Soviet researchers at the Moscow’s Marx – Engels – Lenin
Institute and first published in 1932 in Berlin (followed by another publication,
also in German, in the Soviet Union in 1933), shed light on the earlier thought
of young Marx on his way to the later foundational classic Marxian works. These
publications of the manuscripts of 1844 provided intellectuals with very promising
insights into the ways how Marx’s early “humanistic” ideas could be applied in a
wide range of contexts, for instance, as a methodological basis of social, human
and even natural sciences. Therefore, not surprisingly, slightly over half of the foot-
notes of Rubinstein’s paper refer to this very inspirational early work of Marx that
he drafted at the age of 26. At this very age, Rubinstein had already defended his
doctoral dissertation and just returned to his home city of Odessa in Imperial Rus-
sia, amidst WWI. Now, at the age of 44, a holder of a doctorate in philosophy in
Imperial Marburg and a professor of psychology in Soviet Leningrad, Rubinstein
debuted with his first psychological publication.
Another third of the remaining number of references in Rubinstein’s paper go
back to the monumental classics: the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital. Then, in
1932 two other important works of young Marx were also published in the same
edition of the Marx-Engels Collected Works (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, the so-
called MEGA1, not to be confused with the ongoing publication project MEGA2
launched in 1975): “Theses on Feuerbach” (Thesen über Feuerbach, drafted in
1845, first published in 1888) and “The German Ideology” (Die deutsche Ideologie,
composed in the spring of 1846, first published in this very edition of 1932). Both
works also found their way to Rubinstein’s article, although neither of them with
their relatively modest three references gave such a remarkable performance in
Rubinstein’s text as the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”. In any
case, these new publications made quite a difference and had quite a revolutioniz-
ing impact on the social and methodological thought of the day. In addition, there
is also a reference to Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature” (Dialektik der Natur, an unfin-
ished 1883 work on the philosophy of natural sciences first published in a bilingual
German-Russian edition in Moscow in 1925), which concludes the list of all refer-
ences to Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ works. In total, slightly less than three
quarters of all cited sources in this text belong to the publications of the founders
of Marxism. Then, in addition Rubinstein cited Lenin three times.
Finally, on various occasions the author refered to the publications of con-
temporary psychologists, mostly in foreign languages. These include: Karl Büh-
ler’s “Bericht über die XII Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie”
(1932) and “Die Krise der Psychologie” (1929), a Russian translation of Theodor
Valentiner’s report about the X International psychological congress (1933, origi-
nally published same year in the Zeitschrift für Angewandte Psychologie), a Russian
text by Rubinstein’s compatriot Nikolai Grot of 1897, another Russian transla-
tion – John B. Watson’s “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” (1924,
Russian publication of 1926), Henri Bergson’s “Evolution créatrice” (1911) and
Henri Wallon’s “Le problème biologique de la conscience” (1929), Friedrich Adolf
Trendelenburg’s posthumously published “Zur Geschichte des Wortes ‘Person’”
(1908), David Katz’s “Hunger und Appetit” (1932), Édouard Claparède’s “La
psychologie fonctionnelle” (1933), and, finally, Kurt Lewin’s “Vorsatz, Wille und
Bedürfnis” (1926). Some of these authors – virtually all of them stellar scholars of
their times and lands – are well known until now, some are still remembered by
the historians of science only, and some are either well forgotten or even have ever
hardly been known to the wider psychological community. Yet, what this list of
names and titles shows is the distinct Rubinstein trade-mark erudition, profound
knowledge of academic literature on all main languages of science of his time, equal
familiarity with the classics and the most contemporary publications of the day, and
devotion to systematic knowledge and perpetual learning well beyond the confines
of geographical and disciplinary boarders. This characteristic of Rubinstein the
thinker and the scholar would remain with him until the very end of his intellectual
career and life itself.
One might speculate on the reasons and the causes of the publication of Rubin-
stein’s article in 1934, but in fact the truth might be very simple. It seems Sergei
Rubinstein was the main asset of the Soviet scholarly community of psychologists
and virtually the only person up to the task. Indeed, Rubinstein’s general erudi-
tion, profound knowledge of German philosophy and intellectual movements of
the time (a part of which Marxian thought undeniably was), his experience of
successful post-graduate doctoral training in Germany, therefore, absolute fluency
70 Anton Yasnitsky
in German and ability to penetrate into the intricacies of Marx’s original texts (the
first Russian translation of the early works of Marx including his “Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” would not appear until a Soviet publication of
1956) – all that made him a natural first-rate candidate for the job. And he splen-
didly did the job.
The structure of the article

The author did not provide any formal structure of the text, yet the whole paper
can be somewhat artificially divided into the following six sections: (a) introduc-
tion, (b) discussion of crisis in psychology, (c) overview of the three dominant
“psychologies”, (d) the rationale for overcoming the crisis, (e) discussion of the
interpretation of Karl Marx’s ideas in psychological terms and (f) conclusion. For
purely rhetorical purposes, let us switch into the present tense as if in order to
observe the drama of creation unfolding right now, before our very eyes.
Introduction: Karl Marx and psychology

In the beginning, Rubinstein finds himself in a typical situation of an author writ-
ing about another long dead thinker, who left a legacy of some kind that does not
quite fit with what exactly the present author is preoccupied with. Yet, for some
reason or another, he is obliged or compelled to bridge the gap and revive the writ-
ings of the past in the contemporary context. So, he needs to provide the rationale
for his interest to the heritage of this old-time intellectual and explain why it can
be of interest to anybody else.
Thus, Rubinstein starts with a general claim that Karl Marx has not left any
single work that would directly deal with the issues of psychology proper, unlike,
for instance, political economy, which is well represented in his critical works.
Yet, continues Rubinstein, a range of ideas generously scattered among different
Marx’s works comprise an internal unity and, if systematized and further devel-
oped, “form a single, monolithic whole that permeates the entire worldview of
Marx”. Therefore, his legacy is not merely of historical or philological value, but
is of great importance in the field of psychology: “We must approach him as we
would approach the most contemporary of our contemporaries, to confront his
thought with the most modern problems” (Rubinštejn, 1987, p. 111).
One might correctly remark that this line of reasoning and argumentation is
far from unique. Furthermore, this kind of argumentation is frequently observed
in historiographic studies that attempt to promote a relatively obscure or seem-
ingly irrelevant author and advance his (or her) legacy among wider audiences and
readerships. Under the circumstances, the advocates of the ideas of some distant
in time author would typically employ a set of virtually ritualistic phrases and
statements (like, for instance, the claim of the contemporary – or even timeless –
importance of the advertised “intellectual product”) quite similar to those claims
that Rubinstein made in relation to Karl Marx. For a discussion of a similar case of
social promotion and “appropriation” see a discussion in a recently published book
chapter with a self-explanatory title “On Vygotsky’s international celebration, or
how to critically appropriate authors from the past” (García, 2019). Furthermore,
somebody might argue that this very chapter on Rubinstein is also an example of
the same phenomenon.
Crisis in psychology
The next section of this paper deals with the topic of the “crisis in psychology”.
Rubinstein casually mentions the methodological crisis in other scientific disci-
plines, specifically in contemporary mathematics and physics, and immediately
proceeds to psychology. The crisis in psychology, simply put, is the lack of the
common theoretical and conceptual foundation of psychology as a unified disci-
pline, which leads to the coexistence of a wide range of rival “schools”. Despite
Rubinstein’s claim to the contrary, these schools are not necessarily involved in
openly fighting one another, but rather have real trouble speaking the same lan-
guage. Yet, from the perspective of his time, Rubinstein is certainly absolutely
right. The representatives of these schools did fight one another back then, and
frequent pronouncements of the crisis and, then, the dire need to overcome it
where merely commonplace. Rubinstein particularly pinpoints a few notable per-
formances and publications to this effect, such as the mentioned Karl Bühler book
of 1927 and his opening statement at the Twelfth Congress of German Psycholo-
gists in Hamburg in 1931, when he warned about the “serious need for rethinking
of the bases of psychology”. This warning was echoed by Wolfgang Köhler, who
delivered a speech at the Tenth International Congress of Psychology in Copenha-
gen in August 1932 and stated that “if we do not find the connecting links within
psychology soon, we will be atomized”. By “being atomized” Köhler certainly
meant the same old problem: the divergence of these different schools to the extent
when any dialogue between them would be impossible due to total separation
and fragmentation into a range of different quasi-disciplines, even though all these
might cumulatively pass under “psychology” as an umbrella term. In retrospect, as
we all too well can see this situation now, the warnings were in vain and had even-
tually minimal – if any – effect on the psychological community. Harsh criticism
of contemporary psychology of the 21st century as “fragmented”, “atomized” and
disoriented in its methodological foundations are, unfortunately, very much not
infrequent these days (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010).
The three “psychologies”

Rubinstein agrees with Karl Bühler that the crisis in psychology stems from the
three “psychologies” that he refers to as “introspectionism”, “behaviorism” and
“psychology of spirit”. In his discussion of the three, Rubinstein certainly has in
72 Anton Yasnitsky
mind specific psychological conceptions of his time and authors that are associated
with them, yet never explicitly mentions any theories or the names. The paper was
published many decades ago and these ideas – albeit in different guises and under
a variety of labels – on many occasions have returned into scientific research since
then. Thus, it is worthwhile to somewhat digress from too close and too literary
reading and employ interpretative analysis of this section of the paper.
What in fact Rubinstein has in mind when he talks about three psychologies
is not exactly specific theories and psychological conceptions, but rather the three
research methodologies, general perspectives or even three philosophies of psycho-
logical research. In doing so, it seems, Rubinstein is quite consistent: ever since
his doctoral study “A Study on the Problem of Method” (Eine Studie zum Problem
der Methode) he was preoccupied with the problem of methodology of scientific
research, and this paper provides a nice example of the product of his thinking
along these very lines.
So, first comes “introspectionism”. As a methodology of psychological
research, Rubinstein claims, it rests on two pillars. The first is the acute interest in
“consciousness” – whatever that means. True, the meaning of the words that serve
as guiding metaphors and, then, turn into the major psychological terms is another
important aspect of Rubinstein’s approach. He emphasizes that the meaning of the
terms is historically grounded and contextualized, and what some authors mean
using the terms does not necessarily mean the same to us now. Furthermore, on
some occasions, he argues, we should voluntarily and consciously revise the mean-
ings of the words and reintroduce them, yet having invested these old terms with
new meanings. “Consciousness” is one of the instances of that.
The second pillar of the “introspectionism” is its reliance on the method of intro-
spection. Differently put, it could probably be also referred to as “self-observation”
or even “self-remembering”. The object of such observation or remembering is the
individual, who reports his (or her) internal psychological processes that become
thus “externalized” and, therefore, available to a researcher’s analysis and interpre-
tation. The assumption is that the report objectively and correctly represents the
inner states of the mind, thus, the phenomenon (the protocol of the participant
of the study of his or her inner world) is identical with the essence. Many would
argue, though, that such assumption is overly naïve and over-optimistic: as the mul-
tiple criticisms of the method go, the verbal protocols of psychological processes
more often than not distort the image and are not sufficient for a rigid study of the
depths of the human psyche. For instance, one line of criticism of the kind can be
found in the fascinating work of Sigmund Freud, who arguably “discovered” the
other side of the mind, with all its depths hidden from conscious self-observation.
In brief, “everybody lies”, as a couple of well-known movie series characters of
our times would famously say. And yet, even despite any criticism of “introspec-
tion” as the main or even the only method of getting inside the individual psyche,
psychological researchers of the past and up to these very days keep getting back to
it and productively using it, not infrequently in combination with other methods
and techniques of research. In some sense, even the inventor of psychoanalysis,

Dr. Freud, can be regarded as using this very method (of “self-remembering” or
“looking inside”), although with very different (from the true “introspectionists”
in search of the consciousness) analytical tools of profound revision of the obtained
protocol data and critical interpretation.
And here enter the second protagonist of the scene: Russian (better known under
the labels of “reflexology” or the “theory of higher nervous activity” of Vladimir
Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov, respectively) and American “behaviorism”, the fierce
opponent of “introspectionism”. Rubinstein astutely remarks that what the two
psychologies – despite their apparent and multiple differences – have in common is
their understanding of “consciousness” as the inner mental world of an individual,
separated from anything external, therefore, inaccessible to the researcher unless
through the protocol of “self-observation”. Yet, here lies the major difference
between the two: while the proponents of “introspectionism” fully trust the verbal
protocol, the advocates of “behaviorism” are extremely doubtful and suspicious of
it; therefore, the latter reject it altogether. Then, along with the method, they also
quite logically reject the object of “introspectionist” research: the “consciousness”.
This move is quite consistent with such interpretation of “consciousness” as iso-
lated within an individual, hidden from objective observation by another party and
inaccessible to a rigid scientific analysis. Instead, another object of research is pro-
posed: the “behavior”. Then, the method is naturally chosen: observation, in most
general terms (which includes various opportunities for uninvolved observation,
intervention, artificially designed experimental investigation, etc.). Here Rubin-
stein in his paper of 1934 makes another astute terminological remark: external
“behavior” (povedenie) can be termed otherwise “activity” (deiatel’nost’). Someone
might contest this claim and insist on the essential differences between these two
terms. Yet, to Rubinstein (in his treatment of the matter in this very paper, at
least), the two words are different, but their meanings are virtually identical. At this
point we really need to get back to the text as close as possible, and there are two
compelling reasons for that. First, Rubinstein expresses a set of very interesting and
extremely important ideas on “behavior”, “activity” and “consciousness”. Second,
although an English translation of Rubinstein’s Russian text exists (translated from
Russian by T.J. Blakeley of Boston College “with the editorial help of ” Alex Kozu-
lin, of Boston University back then), for some reason this very fragment has never
been translated into English – despite its utmost importance for understanding his
argument and, counter-intuitively, a great deal of the subsequent history of Soviet
psychology. This stipulates the need for the rendering of this fragment here, for the
first time in English:
The first operation that behaviorist psychology performed with human

activity – in order to free itself from the connection with consciousness ([that
it] excommunicated from psychology) and to establish it [i.e., activity] as an
object of psychological research – was interpreting human activity as a set of
74 Anton Yasnitsky
external reactions to the external environmental stimuli [i.e., irritations] and

separating it from acting subject as a concrete, conscious historical person.
In behaviorist psychology, consciousness was separated from activity and set
against activity – behavior that was separated from consciousness.
And subsequently this “activity” inevitably underwent also the second
operation. Regarded as depending exclusively on physiological mechanisms
that it is performed with, human activity was also separated from the con-
nections with the products of this activity and the environment, in which it
is performed. As a result, activity got deprived of its social character, as well
as psychological content; from the spheres of the social and the psychological
it fell out into the physiological plane exclusively.
By this second operation – the separation of activity from the products
or result of this activity, in which it is realized and due to which it becomes
meaningful – behaviorism performed on human activity an operation that
is identical to the one that introspective psychology performed on human
consciousness. Having contained human consciousness in the internal world
[of an individual], introspective psychology separated consciousness not
only from objective activity, but also from its mediating ties with ideology
[i.e., culture, the world of ideas and values].
(Rubinshtein, 1973b, p. 22)
And here enter the scene the third contestant: the “psychology of spirit”. In
fact, Rubinstein does not have much to say about this kind of psychology. He
briefly mentions the names of Husserl and Rickert, who contrasted the logical and
the ideological (in the sense of the world of ideas and values) to the psychological:
by doing this, these philosophers qualify as representatives of “anti-psychologism”
of the leading tradition in the German idealist philosophy of the 20th century (as
of the state of the art in the mid-1930s). Rubinstein does not mention other names
and intellectual movements, but it seems a lot of instances of these ideas can be
found in their roots in the two preceding centuries of German thought that mani-
fested itself in the works of its leading thinkers in humanities, mostly in philoso-
phy, ethnology, or anthropology, and linguistics. These days many of these would
probably qualify under the label of “Cultural studies”. What comes to one’s mind
in this relation is the intellectual legacy of Wilhelm Wundt with his multivolume
People’s Psychology. An Investigation of the Laws of Development of Language, Myth,
and Custom (Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache,
Mythus und Sitte, 1900–1920, in 10 volumes), Wilhelm Windelband or even Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, to mention but a few. Yet,
this is all mostly about philosophy. Then, Rubinstein mentions another name:
his contemporary Eduard Spranger, who apparently attempted to establish the
“genuine psychology” (die “eigentliche Psychologie) on the basis of the analysis of
the world of values, ideas and “meaningful connections” (Sinnbänder) – the “ideol-
ogy” in Rubinstein’s terms – yet separated this “ideology” from individual human’s
consciousness and thus turned “ideology” into something immanent and existing by
itself, seemingly independently of any individual person, therefore, from psychol-
ogy as a scientific discipline altogether. This is in truest sense “anti-psychologism”
that might possibly serve well in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, cultural
studies or even linguistics, but is hardly of any use in psychology proper, especially
in its applied fields.
Overcoming the crisis

Instead of one psychology as a unified scholarly discipline and an institutional-
ized system of knowledge, there are thus three “psychologies” – at least three, one
would add keeping in mind the intellectual tradition originating in the legacy of
Sigmund Freud and his followers, unmentioned in Rubisntein’s paper as yet.
Rubinstein rejects the solution of “synthesis” of the three psychologies –
incompatible as they are – that Karl Bühler (or Rubinstein’s compatriot Konstantin
Kornilov) proposed in the 1920s. In order to unify psychology as a field of knowl-
edge and scientific discipline, Rubinstein proposes to decisively resolve the crisis
and radically sets the goal. For a yet unclear reason, this segment of the original text
with its programmatic statement was considerably abbreviated in the available Eng-
lish translation of 1987 and has never been presented to the Anglophone reader.
This is a real shame, given its importance. Therefore, it has been translated and first
presented in full only here, in this very chapter.
First, Rubinstein produces an introductory, programmatic statement and posi-
tions the “new psychology” in relation to its predecessors:
The genuine task should obviously be not a “synthesis”, but the “struggle on
the two fronts”, not in accepting everything that each of these conceptions
establish, but in overcoming those general presumptions that these contesting
conceptions come from and the controversy between them as such. We need
not to merge the conception of consciousness (soznanie) of the introspec-
tionism with the conception of human activity (chelovecheskaia deiatel’nost’)
of the behaviorism, etc., but overcome these conceptions and transform our
understanding of both consciousness and human activity as they are estab-
lished in those psychological conceptions, which determined the crisis of
contemporary psychology.
Then, he proceeds to the brief overview of the predecessors’ weaknesses and

drawbacks, followed with the call for a radical revision and revaluation of their most
fundamental notions and even the object of scientific psychology as such:
The mistake of introspective psychology was not in its aspiration to estab-

lish consciousness as an object of psychological investigation, but in how it
76 Anton Yasnitsky
interpreted consciousness and human psyche. Not in that was the mistake of
behaviorism that it aspired to explore people in their activity, but first of all
in how it interpreted such activity. And the confusion of psychology of spirit
is not in the acknowledging the essence of consciousness as mediated by its
relation to culture, to ideology, but in how it interprets this relation. There-
fore, the way to overcoming the crisis cannot be in rejecting consciousness
altogether on the basis of the erroneous introspectionist interpretation of
consciousness and – like behaviorism – attempting to build psychology with-
out psyche or trying – like subjectivist psychology of consciousness – to build
psychology without taking into account human activity or, finally, making
an effort to correct the mistake of erroneous interpretation of consciousness
by merging it with another mistake – the erroneous interpretation of human
activity, etc. There can be only one way of overcoming the crisis as demon-
strated by the struggle between these conceptions: only the radical revision
of the interpretation as such of both consciousness and human activity, which
is inseparably connected with the new interpretation of their interrelations.
Only such radical revision can lead to the correct revealing of the object of
psychology. It is exactly this way – and this is our foundational principle –
that with absolute definitiveness is indicated in the psychological claims of
Marx. They clearly suggest an alternative interpretation of both conscious-
ness and human activity, which overcomes the split in its roots and estab-
lishes the basis for the development of Marxist-Leninist psychology as a “a
genuine, comprehensive and real” [in the original German, “zur wirklichen
inhaltvollen und reellen Wissenschaft werden”, the author’s emphasis] science.
Nothing can be added to these beautiful words, it seems.
Marxism-as method: inventing the new language

for psychology
Basically, the lion’s share of Rubinstein’s positive program is implicitly contained
in his critical discussion of the three psychologies: introspectionism, behaviorism
and the “psychology of spirit”. Now we proceed to the section of the paper where
Rubinstein provides his sketch of Marxist psychology in its explicit form as it is
presented in the system of psychological insights and ideas scattered in the writings
of Karl Marx, especially in his “Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844”.
Let us have a look at the table of contents of this work, which is the most cited
source in Rubinstein’s paper. What we encounter here is the mind-blowing list of
words and expressions such as: capital, wages of labour, profit of capital, the rule
of capital over labour and the motives of the capitalist, the accumulation of capitals
and the competition among the capitalists, rent of land, estranged labour, antithesis
of capital and labour, landed property and capital, private property and labour,
private property and Communism, human needs and division of labour under the
rule of private property, the power of money, critique of the Hegelian dialectic and
philosophy as a whole.
When a psychologist or an educationist (and let us think especially about, for
instance, a professional in early childhood education or clinical psychology) sees
that, she might think: all this may be a good subject for a highly intellectual specu-
lation about neoliberalism, postcolonialism, feminism, capitalism, power, libera-
tion, emancipation, mind, brain, culture, social activism and their interrelations,
but what does it all have to do with what I deal with in my profession? Indeed, the
gap is more than obvious, and a great deal of interpretative mind work and transla-
tion of the terms is needed to bring all this intellectual capital closer to the realities
that practitioners (or even intellectual workers) in human sciences are challenged
with every day in their mundane work. In fact, providing this kind of interpreta-
tion is the goal of this part of the chapter.
One should also realize that Rubinstein’s goal was very different: he made his
analysis and wrote his paper with a very different readership in mind. This was
the readership of two main kinds: first, the official Soviet philosophers who were
socially positioned as the supreme judges and the supervisors over the politically
(and philosophically, of course) correct interpretation of the works and ideas of
Marxist classics in their application in science; and only then, the second group was
the psychological community in search for the “new language” of their discipline,
acknowledged and approved as truly Marxist by those in power. The reference to
“power” is not incidental. The reader should also realize that, unlike the content
of concrete theories and ideas characteristic of a knowledge field in a specific
scientific discipline, the Marxist legacy was quite well explored by virtually every
top-rank Communist Party member in power, well versed in most foundational
principles of this doctrine. For them, Marxism was the intellectual tool that led
them to power and guided their actions in their fight for a better society, and there-
fore, was a political issue of primary importance.
Therefore, certain liberties in analysis of this fragment of Rubinstein’s paper
in contemporary context are not only forgivable, but also advisable. In order to
impress and convince the philosophers, the author eagerly peruses philosophi-
cal sources, copiously quotes and incidentally gets involved into arguments with
the contemporary psychological scholarship, not necessarily of relevance from the
standpoint of our time. Many of these are largely abbreviated or omitted in this
chapter. After all, the text is available in translation and any reader with a special
interest in philosophy and desire to get really deep into the details on Rubinstein’s
line of reasoning is invited to get acquainted with it in English, better – in Ger-
man, yet better – in original Russian. What follows is a somewhat simplified and
reorganized presentation of Rubinstein’s take on application of Karl Marx’s ideas
in psychology. It seems, for our current rhetorical purposes it is most beneficial to
start from the end, that is, from where Rubinstein came in the conclusion of his
analysis of Marx and psychology.
78 Anton Yasnitsky
Psychology studies personality as a whole, and not isolated psychological phe-

nomena, processes or functions: this is the mandatory requirement for a Marxist
psychology, claims Rubinstein. This claim is supported with Marx’s statement that
Rubinstein gives in a somewhat abbreviated form. The longer version of the para-
graph runs thus:
Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner,

that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world –
seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing,
wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like
those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective
orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the
object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is
the manifestation of the human reality, it is human activity and human suf-
fering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.
(Marx, 1975, pp. 229–300)
The notion of “personality” is intrinsically linked with the notions of “need”,

“motive” and “interest”. Specifically, “need” (and closely related to it “motive”) is
an extremely important concept and, according to Rubinstein, will become one
of the research areas in the works of future Marxist psychologists. Virtually all con-
temporary psychology has either lost the notion of personality, claims Rubinstein
in 1934, or frequently interprets it in Freudian (or post-Freudian) terms. Marxist
interpretation of “personality” differs in many ways.
In order to clarify his standpoint, Rubinstein involves into a discussion of
philosophical categories of “subject” and “object” that should be paralleled with
“human being”, “personality” or “inner world” and, on the other hand “physi-
cal bodies” (or “objects”), “reality” or “external world”. The principal point is,
Rubinstein emphasizes following Marx, to think about “subject” and “object” not
in opposition to each other, but as in inseparable unity. This is a good mental exer-
cise and one can possibly accept this, but hardly understand the real meaning of
this proposal. Indeed, a mechanism that would inseparably connect an object with
a subject is needed. Rubinstein finds the mechanism of the link in Marx.
“Activity” (deiatel’nost’ in Russian, Tätigkeit in German) is the missing link.
Rubinstein borrows from Marx’s analysis of industry as the inseparable unity of a
worker, the work, the instruments (tools), the product of work (or labor) and the
interrelations between them, then, he extends it to psychology at a higher level
of generalization. Thus, activity unites a personality with the external world to
the extent we can hardly separate them into the internal and the external. This
methodological principle allows Rubinstein to overcome the traditional methodo-
logical problem of psychological science in its “introspectionist” versus “behavior-
ist” alternatives. Indeed, human actions reveal the mind and the mind guides the
actions.
Then, like in industrial labor with its tools of productions and the industrial
product, human actions require objects of action. The materials are transformed
into goods in the process of labor. On the other hand, the actors themselves get
transformed: they learn, acquire skills and automatisms, or even get more advanced
in creative or intellectual sense, if they are lucky enough with the job. So, the
transformation is mutual: not only the object gets transformed, but the subject
also changes in the process of activity. Rubinstein alludes to Marx’s Capital and
proposes the idea that people change themselves, their own nature by virtue and
in the process of changing their physical and social environment, the “external”
nature. Overcoming the bounds of the nature – the physical, the biological and the
social – as one might argue, is the real liberation, emancipation of human being
ever possible and worth fighting for. Rubinstein quotes:
Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is

the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty
of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming them-
selves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For
not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical
senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the
senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. . . .
Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and
practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create
the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural
substance.
(Marx, 1975, pp. 301–302)
Interpreted in psychological terms, we can say that Rubinstein has just formu-
lated the main law of human psychological development: personality develops not
unless in transformative activity. Thus, Marxist psychology is necessarily a devel-
opmental science of a personality. And it is here that another important concept of
the system emerges: the “consciousness”. The notions of the “consciousness” and
“activity” form another inseparable unity in Marx’s and, therefore, in Rubinstein’s
thinking. In order to clarify the link that bounds the two, Rubinstein retreats to
Marx’s notion of the “ideal” as it is presented in his analysis of industrial produc-
tion in The Capital. He reminds the reader that labor as a distinctly human form of
activity is characterized by its two features:
First, the process of work ends in a result that was present in man already at
the inception of the process, ideally (ideal’no): the real activity involves the ideal
as its goal that makes this activity not direct but mediated. Then, second, the
actor, the person, who performs this mediated activity not only changes the
environment, but also realizes and materializes the consciously established goal
that determines the method and character of the person’s actions and volition
(Rubinštejn, 1987, p. 118).
80 Anton Yasnitsky
In other words, the kind of human activity that Rubinstein has in mind and dis-
cusses in this paper is essentially conscious: first, it is driven by consciousness and,
on the other hand, it may transform consciousness in the process of activity or as
its outcome. In order to avoid any confusion in the future and to better understand
Rubinstein’s psychological innovation and his distinctly Marxian interpretation of
the concepts and terms, it seems most beneficial to coin a new psychological term,
entirely in the spirit of this theoretical and methodological perspective: the blend
of “activity – consciousness” as a psychological unit. An illustrative and observ-
able manifestation of “activity – consciousness” in this sense is human language,
more precisely, perhaps: “oral speech”. Alternatively, one can think about the phe-
nomenon of “conscious activity” or even better, “meaningful activity” that equally
informs the observer about both the conscious and the operational aspects of human
activity. The parallels between the “conscious”, “consciousness”, “meaning” and
“sense-making” are entirely not incidental here: their linguistic interconnections in
Russian and ways of rendering in English have already been productively discussed
elsewhere (Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2016a).
Rubinstein points out that “activity” is never a characteristic of an isolated
individual and supports this statement with another important quote from Marx:
“Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are
social: social activity and social enjoyment” (Marx, 1975, p. 298). Then, he warns
the reader not to get confused by potentially misleading the “social” in Marx and
clarifies this specific interpretation:
Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of
some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although
communal activity and communal enjoyment – i. e., activity and enjoyment
which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other
men – will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from
the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature
of the enjoyment. But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity
which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my
activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my
activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the
thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which
I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of
myself as a social being.
(Marx, 1975, p. 298)
Thus, all human activity is necessarily social, therefore not individual and direct,
but essentially collective (explicitly or implicitly) and mediated by social relations
and products of such activity. Besides, as it follows from the quote, Rubinstein
agrees with Marx that activity is not necessarily of practical nature (like, in case
of industrial production), but can well also be intellectual or theoretical one, for
instance, in science. Not surprisingly, the point on the social essence of activity is
also valid for consciousness. According to Marx, consciousness as such is a social
product and everything that relates to the psychic, mental and psychological sphere
is necessarily socially determined. Hence, by virtue of being social, consciousness is
historically concrete and ever changing in time, rather than abstract and universal.
The point on the historical nature of historical consciousness triggers a relatively
lengthy discussion in Rubinstein’s paper that seems to primarily address the con-
cern of his peers, Soviet philosophers, very much preoccupied with the Marxist
theory of historical materialism with its emphasis on the historical development of
humankind as the reflection of historically changing socio-economic formations.
Yet, this seems not to be of major relevance to 21st century psychology as such,
which hardly shares the acute interest of Rubinstein’s contemporaries in the radical
reconstruction of human nature and the creation of the better, advanced, utopian
and somewhat idealized “new man” of the future classless society of Communism.
This line of argumentation leads Rubinstein to this conclusion:
All the politically necessary changes we face under socialism – the reconstruc-
tion of people’s consciousness, and the overcoming of remnants of capitalism
not only in economics but also in people’s consciousness – find their theo-
retical grounding in Marx’ notion of how consciousness develops historically
under the influence of transformatory social practice. In turn, itself primarily
the product of historical development, consciousness is the precondition of
this same historical development – its dependent but essential component.
(Rubinštejn, 1987, p. 122)
This is one of those rare instances when there are some – albeit not sufficiently
grounded as yet – reasons to doubt and question the utmost sincerity of these very
words of Rubinstein.
Conclusion: psychology as a “genuine,

comprehensive and real science”
The concluding section is among the smallest and the most superficial of all. Here,
Rubinstein reiterates the claim of the system of psychological thinking contained
in Marx’s works, appeals to the need of critical application of Marx in psychology
and regrets that his own paper is only a rough approximation of what this discipline
could potentially gain from the wealth of Marx’s ideas in their enrichment of the
conceptions of consciousness and personality in their relation to human existence
and development.
The final statement that concludes Rubinstein’s paper goes as follows:
A serious task now stands before Soviet psychology: to use concrete research
work in order to actualize the potentialities, by accomplishing the unity of
82 Anton Yasnitsky
both methodology and the factual material, both in theory and in practice,
to strengthen its methodological position and conscious service to the con-
struction of a classless society which is under way in the USSR, where we
students of Marx and Lenin are carrying on what was central for the whole
life of Marx.
(Rubinštejn, 1987, p. 128)
This looks like a clear statement of political loyalty and the Soviet psychologists’
eagerness to conform to the rules of the Communist Party-state. True, that is the
kind of statement it is. And yet, there is something else Rubinstein wisely does in
the final part of his paper published in the penultimate issue of the last psycho-
logical journal in the country at the time of the Soviet political leadership’s clear
distrust of the psychologists of different kinds and their activities of various sorts.
At the very end of his programmatic paper he enters another important Marxian
quote that hinted at that place in Marx’s “Economic and Political Manuscripts of
1844”, where he equated the history of human industry and its actual existence
with an “open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psy-
chology”: “das aufgeschlagne Buch der menschlichen Wesenskräfte, die sinnlich vorlieg-
ende menschliche Psychologie”, in Marx’s own phrasing, the word “psychology”
emphasized in the original. Yet, here “psychology” only means the psychic (as
contrasted with physical, physiological or socio-cultural) aspect of human being.
Yet further, Rubinstein brings about the final part of the quote, following Marx
and stating affirmatively that only by taking into account the complexities of the
entire social make-up of human existence from the perspective of industrial rela-
tions in the spirit of Marx’s teaching, or somewhat metaphorically and closer to
the very text of Karl Marx, a psychology, for which this book becomes open, can
“become a genuine, comprehensive and real science” (in the original German, “zur
wirklichen inhaltvollen und reellen Wissenschaft werden”, yet again, the emphasis is
the author’s). In this context, “psychology” clearly stands not for the inner mental
world of a human being, but for a name of a scholarly discipline that, according to
Marx, is quite legitimate and possible, albeit mandatorily on a solid foundation of
his, materialist thinking. Rubinstein not only repeated this claim in his paper, but
also confirmed the Soviet psychologists’ readiness and eagerness to do the job and
zealously follow the path.
This was a very strong political “take-home message”. It was efficiently com-
municated and, not the last, very well received, it appears.
The aftermath of the publication: paradise regained . . .

or paradise lost?
As mentioned, the issue of the journal that followed the one with Rubinstein’s
publication of 1934 was the last one. The journal closed down. Psychology lost
its last specialized periodical publication outlet. That was definitely a bad sign to
the professional community for those who made decisions on scientific policy
in the Soviet Union. In 1935 the number of psychological publications in the
Soviet Union kept slightly rising, but considerably dropped in 1936. Also in 1936,
on July 4, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
issued a well-known Decree of Union “On Pedological Perversions in the System
of Narkomproses” that banned the entire discipline of “pedology” (i.e., the integra-
tive science of the child) and related mass movement. In addition, this very official
document prohibited the use of the method of testing in the country, as strange and
incomprehensible as it might appear to some of the contemporary readers raised
in the context of industrially developed countries of the West. This episode in
the history of the USSR is somewhat controversial and seems to have two general
interpretations.
According to the first interpretation, this episode is a quintessential example of
the brutal intrusion of power (the regime of the Communist Party) into the inter-
nal affairs of academia and the beginning of the “dark ages” for the entire field of
psychology (and, generally, science) in the Soviet Union for the subsequent two
decades, until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, at least. This interpretation had
some popularity in Western historiography in the 20th century and is quite popu-
lar in contemporary post-Communist Russian Federation where it is well known
under the label of the “oppressed science” (alternatively, the “repressed science”).
According to the alternative interpretation, the image propagated by the “oppressed
science” is one-sided, naïve and historically incorrect. In fact, as demonstrated by
numerous studies in the history of Soviet science, its representatives and the entire
social institute of theoretical and applied research – even despite the brutalities,
political purges and tragedies in the biographies of a few individual scholars caused
by the regime’s decisions and activities – proliferated and prospered. Introductory
reading on this counter-intuitive finding can be found in the contemporary classics
on the history of Soviet science such as (Kojevnikov, 2004; Krementsov, 1997).
The history of Soviet psychology truly corroborates this interpretation.
Unlike bad news, good news travels slow. The good news was that – largely
owing to the intellectual effort of Sergei Rubinstein demonstrated in and propa-
gated by his truly pioneering article of 1934 and the two university textbooks of
1935 and 1940 – Soviet psychology eventually found and gradually mastered its
own Marxist language that was apparently approved by the leading official Marx-
ist philosophers in their function of the supervisors of the entire Soviet academia.
We have no definitive documents or official declarations to this effect. Yet, the
sequence of events that followed the turbulence of the mid-1930s speaks for itself.
Consider just one example. In 1938 the first post-Decree of 1936 textbook on
psychology was published, and it was followed by a number of other ones that
came out in the late 1930s–early 1940s. These publications took place not only in
Moscow, the capital of the state, but also in Kiev and Tbilisi, the capitals of Soviet
republics (the Ukrainian and the Georgian SSR), in the languages of the national
minorities within the USSR. This is an unambiguous indicator of the dramatically
84 Anton Yasnitsky
improved status of psychology as officially recognized and, even more importantly,

supported by the regime academic discipline throughout the entire country within
its “system of Narkomproses” (i.e. Narkomats of Enlightenment, somewhat equiva-
lent to the Ministries of Education and Cultural Affairs) of the Soviet Republics.
A series of other events and processes corroborate and confirm this conclusion
(Yasnitsky, 2015a). Therefore, if only there was any “Golden Age” in the history
of Soviet psychology it would not start until 1936 – even though this year is also
well known as the beginning of the “Great Purges” (alias, the “Great Terror”) of
1936–1938 in the Soviet Union. The culmination of the disciplinary establishment
of psychology in the USSR took place a decade later with a truly glorious decision
of the leadership of the state and the party: in 1946 psychology was officially pro-
nounced a public school subject and triumphantly entered educational curricula
throughout the entire country along with other, long and well-established aca-
demic subjects. Finally, the career of Sergei Rubinstein until the beginning of the
Cold War period is perhaps the best illustration of the real meaning of the “Golden
Age” of Soviet science.
Yet, this story would be not quite complete without mentioning another histor-
ical episode. This episode took place in 1969, nine years after Rubinstein’s death.
Aleksei N. Leontiev and the closest members of his circle – some would refer to it
as a “clan” – gathered at Aleksandr Luria’s Moscow apartment in order to discuss
the current issues in contemporary psychology and specifically the problems and
the status of the “activity approach” (later known under the label of “activity the-
ory”), which was the trademark of their own tradition in psychological research,
allegedly with its roots in the works of Lev Vygotsky, their former associate, collab-
orator or teacher. Apart from Leontiev and Luria, Aleksandr Zaporozhets, Daniil
El’konin and Piotr Gal’perin were present. The whole meeting and discussion
was tape-recorded by Vladimir Zinchenko, their younger yet very promising and
trusted colleague and the son of the late Piotr Zinchenko of Kharkiv (in Ukraine),
yet another member of the geographically extended research group. The tapes were
later transcribed and the texts of the discussion were published, even in the English
translation.
Leontiev gave his “crown speech” as the undisputable leader of the “school”
and the self-proclaimed official founder of Soviet Marxist psychology firmly based
on allegedly his “activity approach”. It was this very “approach”, its advantages
and drawbacks that was the main topic of discussion. All present but Luria and
Zinchenko responded to the presentation with their talks, but of most interest to
us in this context is the critical performance of Gal’perin. He gave an historical
overview of the whole line of development of this intellectual tradition starting
with Vygotsky (whose pioneering work he praised as innovative and consistent,
although at the same time cited as incomplete and unfinished) until the later stud-
ies of Leontiev and his associates of the 1930s through 1960s. Let us skip the
numerous exciting and intriguing details for now. Somewhere half-way through
his presentation Gal’perin – well known among those in audience and beyond for
his sharp mind, ever critical intellectual stance and unbiased judgment – introduced
an explosive argument that, according Vladimir Zinchenko’s later memoirs
(Zinchenko, 2003), had an effect of an atomic bomb for the entire theoretical con-
struction of Leontiev’s and cost the speaker Leontiev’s good disposition ever since
then. Gal’perin’s direct speech is in order:
Everything has its time. There was a time when these studies did something
very important. They were the first to demonstrate new facts; but the point
was that they stopped with these facts, whereas it was necessary to go further
and decipher this activity substantively, and this was not done. A number of
studies of the role of the nature of the broader activity of which a specific
psychological activity is a part (for example, an investigation of will, which
was also done under the leadership of Aleksei Nikolaevich [Leontiev] and
showed that, if a child is playing, he tolerates voluntary assignments, but if
he is not playing, he does not tolerate them): revealed a cardinal fact. There
is an activity that is called play activity, and there is an activity that is called
learning activity. In some cases some things go better in play activity, and in
others, the opposite is true: learning activity is better.
(Galperin, 1995, p. 23)
In this sequence Gal’perin refers to the famous interrelated studies that Leon-
tiev’s students Manuilenko and Istomina did in the mid-1940s in Moscow imme-
diately after WWII (Istomina, 1948; Manuilenko, 1948). Of the two, Istomina’s
research is particularly notable for the stir it made across the state border of the
USSR. Published in English translation (Istomina, 1975, 1978), this study virtually
immediately made the author a scientific celebrity and became arguably one of the
best known experimental psychological studies ever produced in the Soviet Union
in the fields of developmental psychology and psychology of memory. Indeed, this
publication provoked a controversy and triggered roughly a dozen of Western rep-
lication studies. Yet, the reason for controversy remained hidden from the eyes of
Western scholars. Gal’perin elaborates on his arguments to Leontiev and suggests a
few hints on the mystery of the controversy about Istomina’s research in the West:
But why does this happen? What is the mechanism of the fact that a child,
say, begins to withstand all enticements in play, to which he must oppose his
will? How does this happen? What occurs here? What is at work here? None
of this was studied. But, strictly speaking, this would include what is called
the transition to meaningful activity, and to study of the latter. And, since this
was not done, we slipped into a theory of facts, i.e., what happened was that
this factor, that factor and that factor acquired significance. The only thing
that remained of the entire rich content of intention was the utterly barren
fact that such and such a factor was important. The nature of mental activity
itself remained as unknown as before and hence, despite all the talk about
86 Anton Yasnitsky
the meaningful activity of the subject, to explain these mental processes we

ended up turning to physiological processes. Is it not characteristic that all
the investigations being carried out today under the direction of Aleksei
Nikolaevich are oriented toward study of physiological processes: in percep-
tion, in emotions, studies of stress, etc.? The reason is that it is assumed that
there are external conditions and there are mental processes. The mechanism
of these mental processes is conceived as before in purely physiological terms.
All of this is a deciphering of what I said then, that the concrete content of
object-related activity, its operational side, was missing. Only now I should
add, it was missing not only from theory: it was missing from experiments as
well, because in experiments efforts were made to secure the external form
of an object-related activity in which mental processes took place in one way
or another.
(Galperin, 1995, pp. 23–24)
And now the speaker is ready to pronounce his final judgment. It does not quite
look like an acquittal:
But this external object-related activity, especially a child’s meaningful activ-

ity, say, learning or at play, did not become an object of study. It was not a
direct object of study, and hence its relation to the corresponding mental
activity was a relation of a condition summarily assumed. And no matter
how hard it is to acknowledge it, the objective situation is that we can think
anything we want about ourselves, but essentially we did not change the old
psychology. We introduced new factors, we derived new facts, but we did
not introduce new developments of these facts. Now it is time to ponder
what we are going to do from here on in. If we continue this line of investi-
gation, which lasted through the fifties and all of the sixties, we shall, in the
end, come back to where we have already been, i.e., to a totally eviscerated
concept of activity that commits no one to anything at all.
(Galperin, 1995, p. 24)
And then, as if those in the audience did not understand where all this leads
and what kind of conclusion the speaker most directly drives at, Gal’perin refers to
Rubinstein and, by doing so, he performs a coup de grâce, merciful killing or a control
shot directly into Leontiev’s head – whichever phrasing of the metaphor one prefers:
So you get the same situation that Sergei Leonidovich [Rubinstein] pro-
claimed: on the one hand, consciousness, and on the other, activity. How can
one conceive of this? Its most illustrious formula is “the unity of conscious-
ness and activity.” There is consciousness, and there is activity, and there is
their unity as something desirable. Strictly speaking, the implication is that
here there is no unity.
(Galperin, 1995, p. 30)
What has just happened, one might ask? Well, this is very simple: Gal’perin
has just pronounced (and quite correctly so!) Aleksei N. Leontiev – the Dean, the
Member of Academies, the President and Vice-President, the Soviet psychologist,
the Marxist philosopher, etc. etc. and, most importantly, the alleged co-founder of
“cultural-historical psychology”, the leading Soviet Marxist theoretician in psy-
chology and the founder of the dominant “scientific school” of “activity theory” – a
mere behaviorist.
This last episode serves as a perfect illustration of virtually the entire history
of Soviet psychology. Rubinstein indeed “was, until his death in 1960, the most
influential writer on psychological theory in the Soviet Union” (Payne, 1968, p. 2).
Soviet psychological research developed under the slogans of Marxist theory and
published with numerous quotes from the founders of Marxism-Leninism. Rubin-
stein always remained the figure of great authority even in the worst times in his
scholarly career during the early Cold War. The ideas that he somewhat briefly
sketched in his paper of 1934 were further developed in his books (1935, 1940,
1946) and were openly accessible to all scholars and students throughout the Soviet
Union. By unanimous consensus of virtually all leading Soviet psychologists and
their followers “activity” was declared the main object of psychological research
and countless pronouncements to this effect can be found in Soviet publications
in psychology. Furthermore, Rubinstein’s ideas on activity, consciousness and per-
sonality were seemingly picked up and realized in Aleksei N. Leontiev’s “own”
declaratively Marxist activity theory that remained a dominant intellectual trend in
the Soviet Union for quite a while. Even now Leontiev is considered as one of the
leading Marxist psychologists in the world, at least by many of those international
scholars who are familiar with his work. And yet, as it follows from the materials of
internal discussions within the narrowest circle of top-rank members of Leontiev’s
circle, the whole enterprise boils down to an array of abstract quasi-philosophical
Marxist pronouncements in published works of a theoretical and empirical nature,
on the one hand, and a range of experimental empirical studies totally devoid
of the Marxist research method indicated in Rubinstein’s programmatic writings.
True, the consciousness and activity fell apart. Even worse, ideology (in the sense of
cultural norms and social values) was totally ignored and forgotten in psychological
research in the Soviet Union. What was left instead can be best described in terms
of a quasi-Marxist behaviorist psychology.
And this is perhaps the most disappointing and tragic discovery ever made by an
historian of Soviet psychology.
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Sergei Rubinstein as the founder of Soviet Marxist psychology

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Sergei Rubinstein (1889–1960) was definitely and undeniably the founder of

Reliable sources on Rubinstein’s life and legacy

As long as Rubinstein’s postwar students are concerned, the situation is further

Rubinstein’s scholarship. Payne’s first-hand knowledge of the sources and acute

The purpose of this work is to discuss the philosophical foundations of Soviet

towards Soviet Marxist psychology and dramatically problematize the phenomenon

Sergei Rubinstein: life and legacy

Rubinstein’s “problems of psychology in the works

Rubinstein’s sources: Marxist and other

The structure of the article

Introduction: Karl Marx and psychology

The three “psychologies”

and techniques of research. In some sense, even the inventor of psychoanalysis,

The first operation that behaviorist psychology performed with human

external reactions to the external environmental stimuli [i.e., irritations] and

Overcoming the crisis

Then, he proceeds to the brief overview of the predecessors’ weaknesses and

The mistake of introspective psychology was not in its aspiration to estab-

Nothing can be added to these beautiful words, it seems.

Marxism-as method: inventing the new language

Psychology studies personality as a whole, and not isolated psychological phe-

Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner,

The notion of “personality” is intrinsically linked with the notions of “need”,

Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is

Conclusion: psychology as a “genuine,

The aftermath of the publication: paradise regained . . .

improved status of psychology as officially recognized and, even more importantly,

the meaningful activity of the subject, to explain these mental processes we

But this external object-related activity, especially a child’s meaningful activ-

Dmitrieva, N. A. (2016a). Novye shtrikhi k portretam filosofov. Dva pis’ma E. Kassirera k

Institute]. In B. F. Lomov (Ed.), Sergei Leonidovich Rubinshtein: Ocherki, vospominaniia,

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