Vygotsky, Luria, and cross-cultural research in

the Soviet Union

René van der Veer

(To appear in the Palgrave Handbook of the History of the Human Sciences)

In the summers of 1931 and 1932 Vygotsky and Luria organized two psychological studies of
the thinking of Uzbek people who were living in a rural area during the period of collectiviza-
tion. Part of the results of these studies were published with a delay of more than 40 years
(Luria, 1974, 1976) and have been widely discussed by modern researchers (e.g., Tulviste,
1988; Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2016; Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Basically, Luria found
that higher cognitive processes change under the impact of social and cultural changes
whereas lower psychological processes (e.g., elementary visual perception) remain unaf-
fected, which confirmed Vygotsky and Luria’s theory of cultural development advanced from
1928 onwards (Vygotsky, 1928; Vygotsky & Luria, 1930). Thus, Uzbek subjects with little
schooling seemed unable to assign objects to general categories on the basis of their essential
features and focused on their use in practical contexts. Also, these subjects seemed incapable
of making logical inferences on the basis of language propositions when the content of the
premise did not form part or even contradicted their practical experience. Subjects with more
schooling and the rudiments of literacy did better on such tasks and, thus, it seemed that the
acquisition of literacy and the general human experience as established in language changes
subjects’ discursive thinking. In sum, Luria and Vygotsky claimed to have found that little edu-
cated, illiterate subjects engage in concrete, practical thinking, whereas schooled, literate
subjects become capable of abstract categorical thought.
As said above, Luria published only part of his results and we still have no good idea
why he, after a delay of 40 years, chose to publish some results and others not. It is known
from other sources (Zavershnev & Van der Veer, 2018), for example, that he also subjected

1
Uzbek adults and children to various intelligence and personality tests (e.g., Koh’s Block De-
sign Test, the Rorschach inkblot test) and found results that diverged from the average find-
ings for Russian subjects. What we do know, however, is that in the early 1930s, when Luria’s
initial findings became known, the reactions were not entirely favorable. A committee of the
Workers-Farmers Inspection was installed to study Luria’s data and interview the participants
of the expeditions and reached devastating conclusions (Razmyslov, 1934; Van der Veer &
Valsiner, 1991). What stuck the members of the committee was that active and politically
conscious Uzbek kolkhoz members with little or no education, 15 years after the October Rev-
olution with all its societal changes, were still designated as subjects who were incapable of
hypothetical reasoning and categorical thought. Apparently, by 1932 the interpretation of
cross-cultural findings had become such a sensitive issue in the Soviet Union that Vygotsky
and Luria, after some futile defense,1 deemed it wise not to publish their findings after the
committee had reached its negative conclusion.
Luria’s findings were indeed highly interesting and controversial and still merit careful
analysis. However, in this chapter I wish to focus on the scientific and socio-political context of
Luria’s studies. To interpret Luria’s investigations, we need to know somewhat more about
previous cross-cultural studies of Russian minorities, about their findings, and about the sci-
entific and political debates that ensued. We also need to know whether the methods he and
his collaborators used in their comparative research (e.g., mental tests, personality tests)
were generally accepted or, on the other hand, hotly debated. Finally, it is instructive to know
somewhat more about the status of Vygotsky and Luria’s theory of cultural development,
which they used to interpret their findings. In sum, what I will attempt to do in this chapter is
to provide some historical data that allow us to appreciate various aspects of Luria’s investiga-
tions. After all, we can only know whether a study was novel when we know something about
its predecessors and we can only know whether its results are politically sensitive when we
have an idea of the contemporary debates. Finally, we better understand why the results of a

1
Luria (1934; in Luria, 1992, p. 36) defended himself in a letter to Aleksey Stetskiy, the Party official responsible
for Culture and Propaganda (Kultprop), and Andrey Bubnov, Minister of Education (Narkompros), arguing that his
results showed that the forms of concrete thinking he found were exclusively caused by “backward relations of
production” and would rapidly disappear with the further “socialist reconstruction of the area.” He further
stated that the educational system could not afford to ignore these forms of thinking and that his findings had
nothing to do with racist theories but, to the contrary, “dealt them a serious factual blow."

2
study are rejected when we have an idea about the appreciation of the theory that lies be-
hind it.

The announcement of a new study

On October 16, 1931, Science published a short note by “professor A.R. Luria,” which stated
that in July of that year the Uzbek Research Institute of Samarkand and the Moscow Institute
of Experimental Psychology had organized “the first expedition of the Soviet Union” for the
study of psychological characteristics of people in “various stages of cultural development” (Lu-
ria, 1931a). The same note was published in the Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie (Luria,
1931b) and the Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology (Luria, 1932). Luria
explained that the aim of the expedition, which had been prepared by a two month’ seminar
conducted by him in Samarkand in May-June 1931, was to investigate the mental processes of
people living under “very primitive” circumstances in “very backward” communities with a cor-
responding low cultural level. Luria also mentioned that the group wished to develop new
methods to determine the intellectual level of these people, because the usual methods of
determining intelligence were “inapplicable.”
Luria’s note raises several interconnected questions. Dictionaries agree that the word
‘expedition’ is used to describe a carefully organized journey made to explore an unfamiliar
(and possibly dangerous) place. But in the case of an anthropological or psychological expedi-
tion the word certainly also suggests a difference in social status between the visitors and the
group visited: few people would say that a group of aborigines visiting London is engaging in an
expedition. Luria’s whole terminology suggests that he indeed thought along these lines: mem-
bers of a superior culture wished to investigate an inferior, primitive group. So, the question
becomes what Luria exactly meant by levels of cultural development and also why he believed
that the usual methods to determine intelligence couldn’t be applied in these specific groups.
To answer these questions, we have to go back in time and to regard the theory of cultural
development elaborated by Vygotsky and Luria, to take a look at the methods of determining
intelligence used in the Soviet Union of that time, and to examine previous attempts to study
‘primitive’ people in the Soviet Union. In doing so, we will also answer the question whether
Luria was right in claiming that his was indeed the first psychological expedition to take place
in the Soviet Union.

3
Pedological research and mental testing
The discipline of pedology or child studies became popular in Russia around 1900 (Van der
Veer, 2020) and after the October revolution it was enthusiastically accepted by the new re-
gime. The Soviet government faced the formidable task of educating millions of adults and
children who previously had no access to schools and pedology seemed to have the tools to
enable or facilitate this process. Pedologists studied the physical and mental development of
children in relation to their environment and soon became an integral part of the whole edu-
cational system. After all, to see what kind of education was needed one first had to know
something about the children’s level of development and knowledge. Pedologists rapidly
spread over the vast territory of the Soviet Union, investigated and tested the children and
adults of various ethnic groups and found immense differences in their living circumstances,
habits, physical condition, body build, and test scores. The primary instrument of the pedolo-
gists, the mental test, became very popular in the mid1920s and was widely adopted to allo-
cate children to various school types and to select people for jobs. In this respect, the Soviet
Union did not differ from many other countries and it was also no novelty that the differences
found between various groups within the population (e.g., urban vs rural children; cf. the first
issue of Pedologiya in 1929) became the subject of scientific and, eventually, sociopolitical
discussion. For a number of years, however, these discussions remained relatively mild and
researchers were not forced to accept a specific worldview.
In 1924 and 1925, for example, the vocational psychologist Isaak Shpil’reyn and his
colleagues studied the language comprehension, vocabulary, etc. of Red Army soldiers (who
mostly had enjoyed just a few years of schooling) to check whether they could understand
the abstract language of their political instructors (Shpil’reyn, Reytynbarg, & Netskiy, 1928).
They concluded that “purely formal logic is not suitable for this audience. No syllogisms will
be understood and in any case they will not seem innerly convincing when the correctness of
the main premise is not obvious to the listeners… abstract examples will always be met by ar-
guments that hold in daily life.” For example, to the syllogism ‘All club members subscribe to
the library—Ivanov is a club member—Hence, Ivanov subscribes to the library’ the Red Army
soldiers objected that Ivanov perhaps hadn’t yet found the time to subscribe (ibid., p. 34).
And in a talk for the Academy of Communist Education on December 2, 1929, Shpil’reyn
added that Red Army soldiers had difficulty in remembering abstract forms: “A circle is more
or less OK. The Red Army soldiers call it a wheel, and a wheel the Red Army soldier

4
remembers. [But] a triangle, a hexagon he does not remember. Such an abstract test form is
not suitable for the farmers’ youth” (Kurek, 1999, cf. Shpil’reyn, 1930). Shpil’reyn’s results,
i.e., the unwillingness of subjects to think in abstract syllogisms and their tendency to refer to
abstract geometrical figures with the names of concrete objects resembling them, anticipated
Luria’s findings by some eight years but even in 1929, when Shpil’reyn finally published his re-
sults, they were not yet seen as politically damaging, despite the unflattering portrait of the
Red Army soldier. This was also true for the cross-cultural studies by Shtilerman (1927; 1928)
and Petrov (1928), which raised much more criticism in the early 1930s than at the time they
were published.
Shtilerman was a medical doctor working at the school clinic of old-town Tashkent
who subjected Uzbek children to the standard pedological investigation, i.e., he measured
their body proportions, determined their health condition, living conditions, and schooling en-
vironment, and tested their mental capacities with the Binet-Simon and short Rossolimo
(Byford, 2016; Kurek, 2004). It was the measurement of the children’s mental development
that would draw huge criticism sometime later. Although the tests were adapted to the Uzbek
culture in terms of text and pictures, the 164 Uzbek schoolchildren from 8 to 15 years old
tested by Shtilerman obtained rather low scores: just 17 percent scored normal, 63 percent
were found to be slightly retarded, and 20 percent seemed deeply retarded. Moreover, with
the short Rossolimo, Shtilerman found that what he called lower mental processes (e.g., at-
tention, observation, visual memory) differed less from the norm than what he saw as higher
processes (thinking and combination). To explain his findings, Shtilerman turned to environ-
mental factors. He suggested, for example, that the Uzbek infants’ prolonged stay (up to two
years) on the cradleboard inhibited their mental development. That Uzbek girls scored on av-
erage higher than boys he explained by pointing to the fact that girls attended boarding
schools where their mental faculties were constantly being trained, while boys entered school
relatively late, if at all. Shtilerman concluded that it was essential to improve the socio-eco-
nomic conditions of the Uzbek subjects and proposed to lower the age norm for the mental
tests for this group. That is, he did not so much analyze why children found it difficult to solve
specific problems but suggested that in the case of Uzbek children lower sum scores should
be sufficient for the average IQ score of 100.
A somewhat similar study was done by Petrov (1928), who investigated children from
the Chuvash, a Turkic ethnic minority, in 1926 and 1927. Petrov physically examined 1398

5
children in the age from 3 to 13 years old and submitted them to the Binet-Simon. Like Shtil-
erman, he found the children to score suboptimally, i.e., below the European norms. The
mental age of some 15 percent of the younger Chuvash children lagged 2 years behind what
was considered normal, while for older children this percentage even increased to 50 per-
cent. Petrov’s explanation of the deviating results and his solution also resembled Shtil-
erman’s proposals: the ‘backwardness’ of Chuvash children was caused by socioeconomic
conditions, and schooling, in Petrov’s case sending the most backward children to special
schools, would solve the problem. Meanwhile, the norms of mental tests for this group
should be lowered.
The results of Shtilerman, Petrov and others (e.g., Shirokova-Divaeva, 1927; Shishov,
1927, 1928; Solov’ev, 1929) highlighted a general problem in the interpretation of inter-eth-
nic differences (cf. Byford, 2016): whereas it seemed totally acceptable to adjust the norms
for different national or ethnic groups in the case of anthropometric measures (e.g., chest or
skull circumference), and growth and weight curves, this seemed more problematic for the
norms for mental development. Accepting lower IQ scores on mental tests seemed equivalent
to accepting that various groups differed in intelligence, whereas using different norms for
various groups seemed to violate the principle that the same property should always be
measured using the same units (e.g., length in meters). In itself, this was not a problem spe-
cific for the Soviet Union; in the 1920s, throughout the world researchers were testing various
groups and many didn’t shy away from attributing differences in average mental test scores
to genetic between-group differences. In their view, some groups were on average simply less
tall and intelligent than others and it seemed self-evident that Western Europeans score high-
est in all positive respects. Others rejected this view and argued that something was funda-
mentally wrong with the cross-cultural use of mental tests (cf. Gould, 1981; Van der Veer,
2007, pp. 75-78; Van der Veer, 2020).
One of the first who tried to formulate a provisional answer to these specific questions
and who addressed the problem of the pedological study of national minorities at large was
Vygotsky (1929). In a talk that sketched a plan for the pedological study of minorities in the
next five years, Vygotsky stated that national minorities are different from Russians, stand on
an economical and cultural lower level, and will have to make “a grandiose leap on the ladder
of their cultural development and skip a whole series of historical levels” to reach the Russian
level. The fact, however, that minority children are culturally backward does not imply they

6
are mentally backward and mental tests that suggest otherwise are wrong. Here Vygotsky,
without mentioning his name, referred to Shtilerman’ s study which found that high percent-
ages of Uzbek children were slightly or deeply retarded. In his view, Shtilerman rightly at-
tributed the results to pedagogical neglect and inhibiting influences in the child’s environment
and was also right in adjusting the content of the test to make it more understandable. But
this was not enough, because the problem went deeper. It is not sufficient to establish what
minority children lack; we must study the particular expression of general laws in their spe-
cific cultural environment and in order to do that the local pedological centers must gather
massive data and pedological expeditions should become as normal as field work in ethnology
(Vygotsky, 1929, p. 374). Using non-adapted tests in such research leads to absurd results:
whole nations are classified as 5 to 7-year-olds. All European countries have adapted the Bi-
net scale and this is a good first step. But what we should do, Vygotsky argued, is to leave the
tests temporarily aside, because the test method rests upon a number of assumptions that do
not necessarily hold in other cultures (ibid., p. 375). First, we must study the structure, dy-
namics, and content of the child’s social environment, which determines their means of think-
ing and behavior: Muslim children cannot be expected to be able to draw as European chil-
dren and people who never saw a pencil will show a delay in writing. Cultures develop and
suppress different genetic capacities and create unique sociopsychological types of children.
Second, we must study the cultural or historical development of mind and behavior. In this
respect, Vygotsky mentioned that studies such as Shtilerman’s confused cultural primitivism
with mental deficiency. Third, we must clarify the role of racial biological properties, “which
no doubt exist and exert their influence on development” (ibid., p. 377).
All in all, it seems that Vygotsky’s talk contained sound scientific advice: study the mi-
nority culture in detail, realize that cultures promote and inhibit different capacities in chil-
dren, understand that ‘bad answers’ do not always reflect low intelligence, and see that
Western tests are based on hidden assumptions (e.g., that children will try their best; that it
makes sense to them to respond to the questions of a person who evidently already knows
the right answer; that it is not impolite to give answers). But, as we will see, Vygotsky’s pro-
posal to study ethnic minorities proved not radical enough for the later critics of cross-cultural
research.

Cross-cultural research within the Soviet Union

7
When Luria (1931a) internationally announced his psychological expedition to Uzbekistan he
suggested this was the first Soviet expedition of its kind and also in his later accounts (Luria,
1974, 1976) he never referred to previous Russian attempts to study the mode of thinking or
intelligence of Soviet minorities. Luria’s expedition was indeed unprecedented because of its
scale (the large group of psychologists who participated, the great number of aspects of psy-
chological functioning being investigated) and because of its explicit goal to compare different
groups within a minority. However, psychological expeditions to distant regions of the Soviet
Union, including Uzbekistan, had been undertaken before and much empirical work had al-
ready been done which anticipated both Luria’s methods and results (see above). The leading
journal Pedologiya, with Vygotsky as a member of the editorial board, and other journals reg-
ularly published the findings of pedologists working in various parts of the Soviet Union (e.g.,
Kapusto, 1928; Rybnikov, 1928; Efimov, 1931b; Leventuev, 1932) and cross-cultural papers
(e.g., Ostrovskiy, 1929; Solov’ev, 1929). Moreover, in 1930, Pedologiya published a special is-
sue about the ‘pedology of the national minorities’ with 11 contributions. Most of these con-
tributions dealt with the study of the cognitive development and way of life of non-Russian
ethnic groups in remote areas of the Soviet Union and thus were directly relevant for Luria.
Luria was, of course, well aware of this research and in many cases knew the partici-
pants personally. Take, for example, the two expeditions that were undertaken in the Sum-
mer of 1929 under the supervision of the psychologist Anna Mikhaylovna Shubert (1881-
1963) of the Institute of Educational Method and Practice in Moscow (Khronika, 1930). Shu-
bert was an expert in mental tests for children, who had published brochures and books on
mental tests and had adapted them for the Russian population (Shubert, 1913; 1922; 1923;
1924; 1926a; 1926b; 1928; Bukhgol’ts & Shubert, 1926). She also published on the drawing
abilities of minority (Oyrotsky or Altay, Tungus or Evenki) children, for example in a paper in
The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology (Schubert, 1930), which was ac-
cepted for publication in April 1929 by Luria himself. The accounts of the two expeditions
were published in five papers in the special issue of Pedologiya, preceded by an introductory
paper by Shubert (1930a). In that paper, Shubert explained that one expedition (with Shep-
alova, Usova, and Bulanov) went to the Northern Baykal region to study Tungus children,
while the other went to the Altay region to investigate Oyrotsky children. Enormous difficul-
ties had to be overcome: no foreign literature, except for a brief guide by Thurnwald (1912),
was available, no Soviet anthropological data was at hand, enormous distances had to be

8
covered (in part on horseback), just July and August were available, the budget was very tight,
and the languages not known. In view of these difficulties, it comes as no surprise that experi-
enced pedologists could not be found and in the end just five students of pedology left Mos-
cow for the adventure of their life. Shubert explained that the group decided to be flexible
and modest and that the results should be taken with a grain of salt given the inadequate
preparation and the local peculiarities (e.g., Shubert mentioned, for example, that for the Oy-
rotsky it is good taste to reply “I don’t know”, when asked a question).
The expedition to the Northern Baykal region landed more than 5.500 km from Mos-
cow on the Northeastern shore of Lake Baykal, in Nizhneangarsk, which the students de-
scribed as a humid, unhealthy village. The local population, the Tungus, consisted of three
groups, of which two were nomadic. The mountain Tungus couldn’t be reached as it implied
another trip of 180 km on horseback and swimming across five rivers (Shepalova, 1930, p.
173). Investigating the children of the other two groups was fraught with difficulties: the stu-
dents didn’t speak the language and had to learn their questions and some standard answers
by heart, the children were quickly bored by the test questions (ibid., p. 183) and regularly ran
away, the interviews were conducted in the yurt with other family members present, etc.
Shepalova (1930) described the living conditions of the Tungus in some detail. Infant mortality
rate was (IMR) estimated at 50 percent, infants were breastfed for 2 years and sometimes
switched to tobacco immediately afterwards (ibid., p. 178). Food consisted largely of meat,
dairy products, and large amounts of tea, and the hygienic circumstances and habits were
poor. Remarkable for the time is that Shepalova openly wrote that, in particular, the moun-
tain Tungus disliked the Russians (ibid., p. 185). All in all, she described the Tungus as a peace-
ful group who treated their children lovingly.
Shepalova’s fellow student Usova (1930) focused on schooling and literacy in the re-
gion. There were just two schools in old and dirty buildings without enough facilities. Just
seven percent of the school children were Tungus: many parents resisted school as something
Russian (as Usova put it, they did not yet understand that “the interests of all workers are the
same”, p. 192) and their children often played truant. However, when Tungus children at-
tended school they rapidly caught up with the Russian children and proved perfectly capable
of learning, arithmetic being among their favorite subjects. Usova recommended teaching the
Tungus in small groups and mixed with Russian children. This way they would widen their
horizon and lose their antagonistic feelings.

9
 Finally, Bulanov (1930) focused on the cognitive skills and knowledge of the Tungus
children. He first probed their general knowledge, finding, for example, that they knew the
origin of butter and bread, had an exquisite knowledge of the local rivers, but were less famil-
iar with technological inventions, such as radio and train, and did not know the names of ex-
otic animals shown to them on pictures. Their knowledge of ideology left also something to
be desired: about half of the children knew that the USSR was a ‘good power’, many knew
that ‘the bourgeois do not work’, and 89 percent identified the portrait of Lenin. However,
they had no idea about the Revolution and the Communist Party (Bulanov, 1930, p. 199). Bu-
lanov also administered three mental tests (Binet, Rossolimo, Pintner) to several children. On
the Binet test they scored between 65 and 80 and Bulanov suggested that this test depends
too much on school culture. Probably, he hypothesized, they would do much better on a test
adapted to their culture. In addition, the children were not used to the testing situation and
became quickly bored. More in general, Bulanov warned against international comparisons of
mental test results, also because we have no idea how children arrive at their answers, as Za-
porozhets (1930) also remarked (ibid., p. 204). In conclusion, Bulanov attached very little
value to the low scores obtained by Tungus children, because to him they seemed lively,
skilled, social, and perfectly normal.
The second expedition went to Biysk in the Oyrotsky Autonomous Oblast in Southern
Siberia, Northeast of Kazakhstan. This was a journey of more than 5000 km by train and 100
km on horseback. Golubeva (1930) focused on the daily life and mentality of the local people,
which consisted of various groups with a Turkish background. It is obvious that she was ap-
palled by the living conditions of the Oyrotsky people: all year long the families lived in incred-
ibly dirty yurts which in wintertime they shared with animals; they never washed themselves
and wore the same dirty clothes until these fell apart. IMR was very high and children of three
or five years old sometimes already smoked. Boys and girls were hardly distinguishable: they
wore the same clothes and had their head shaven. Schools were of low quality and the local
children attended school very irregularly. Like in the Northern Baykal region, the Oyrotsky
population had no knowledge of Western ideas about proper food intake (e.g., the advantage
of eating fruit and vegetables) and largely survived on meat, tea, and dairy products. Overall,
Golubeva described the Oyrotsky as culturally backward (e.g., many were illiterate) but very
friendly and social.

10
 It was Zaporozhets (1930) who focused on the application of mental tests to children
living on this “economically and culturally low level.” Fifty-two children were investigated with
Shubert’s version of the Binet-Simon and the results were as follows: four children were ex-
cluded as being mentally retarded and the others scored an average of 67 (SD = 8.5). Zapo-
rozhets noted that this was significantly below the Western average but that we should be
very careful in interpreting these numbers. The testing took place under difficult circum-
stances (in the yurt with all the family), with children who refused to answer or tried to run
away, and took up to four hours, leaving both experimenter and child exhausted. The children
failed to comprehend abstract verbal questions, did not understand why a stranger wanted to
know these things, and the instruction had to be repeated frequently. Asked to define objects
they referred to their use (e.g., a knife is “a thing to cut with”) and abstract questions were
constantly turned into concrete ones (e.g., “What would you do if you broke another person’s
thing?” – “Which thing?” “Whose thing?”; “What should you do before you do something im-
portant?” – “Which important thing?”). Children hardly noticed contradictions in the verbal-
logical plane. Confronted with a contradictory statement (e.g., “A flood reached the village
but nothing serious happened. Just 60 people were killed.”) they refused to accept it (“People
would run away”) or came with arguments (“The water cannot reach the village”). The
Pintner-Paterson test2 produced somewhat better results (Zaporozhets, 1930, p. 226) and the
short Rossolimo3 yielded mixed results: the subtest measuring voluntary attention caused
considerable difficulty (just three of 50 children obtained a sufficient score) and the descrip-
tion of pictures produced very strange results, because the children didn’t recognize the cir-
cumstances (e.g., a picture of a man in a prison cell was described as “Lenin in his cabin”). Za-
porozhets concluded that we face a methodological problem: the same children who seem
totally normal in daily life score low on Western mental tests. To interpret this finding, he
turned to Vygotsky’s theory of cultural development: the problem of the Oyrotsky children is
that their cultural development is somewhat backward. They have a phenomenal memory for
local things but have difficulty memorizing things at will; they have lots of energy but it is

2
The Pintner-Paterson Performance Scale was a nonverbal intelligence test for children (Pintner & Paterson,
1917) largely consisting of wooden jigsaw puzzles.
3
Rossolimo’s Psychological Profile Test (Short Version) gave a profile score for 11 cognitive capacities, such as
voluntary attention, volition, imagination, and visual perception.

11
difficult for them to engage in sustained work without external stimulation; the mnemonic
tool of writing is hardly developed because of the socio-economic circumstances and hence
their cultural memory is less developed (ibid., p. 229); they rely on primitive counting meth-
ods (e.g., carves in wood), tend to think concretely, and fear to pronounce ‘dangerous’ words
like “bear,” which points to the mixing up of sign and meaning (ibid., p. 231). In sum, the chil-
dren do not just lack academic knowledge, but their mind seems to function differently. The
whole picture led Zaporozhets to doubt Blonskiy’s (1925/1930, p. 113) claim that the Binet
could be applied everywhere: it is not just a matter of replacing items by more familiar ones;
we cannot just lower the standards because of the lack of school knowledge. The whole point
is that these children think in a qualitatively different way and although under the guidance of
the Soviet national policy the children now made rapid progress which they otherwise
wouldn’t have made in centuries, we should take their particular way of thinking into account.
Thus, the results of Shubert’s two expeditions to two remote regions of the Soviet Un-
ion seemed to confirm the picture that the local inhabitants of these regions obtain low
scores on the standard intelligence tests. However, the students were inclined to blame the
tests and to explain the scores by referring to local cultural peculiarities and inadequate
schooling. Zaporozhets, in particular, submitted the possibility of an inadequate cultural de-
velopment as advanced by Vygotsky. In no way did the students believe that the members of
the primitive societies they visited were innately less intelligent or gifted than Russians.
Other accounts published in the special issue of Pedologiya in 1930 largely confirmed
these findings. Grant and Zagorzhel’skaya (1930) visited the Buryats, another ethnic group liv-
ing near lake Baikal. They found the same living conditions as Shepalova (1930): people lived
in yurts with cattle and large numbers of insects, personal hygiene did not exist (the authors
claim they met adolescents who had never washed since birth), and diet was very one-sided.
Nevertheless, the Buryats proved surprisingly healthy and obtained a normal score on the
short Rossolimo (Grant & Zagorzhel’skaya, 1930, p. 254). Lavrova-Bikchentay (1930) and Bik-
chentay and Karimova (1930) studied Tatar children living in Moscow in 1927 and 1928. They
measured their body proportions in various ways, using Blonskiy’s indices (cf. Van der Veer,
2020), and tested the children using various adapted Binet tests. In a sample of 380 children
from five schools the IQ varied from 82 to 99 and was believed to depend on the profession
of the parents, school attendance, and other social circumstances. Baranova (1930a; 1930b)
pointed out that mental test results reflect both innate abilities and cultural background and

12
argued that great care is therefore needed in applying such tests in other cultures. She men-
tioned, among several other things, that Uzbek or Kazak children may not be familiar with the
use of perspective in drawings or obtain low scores on color tests, because they have one
word for both yellow and blue. To express their performance on mental tests in one number
is misleading, Baranova argued; we always need careful qualitative analysis to understand the
results.
In her concluding overview of the international literature, Shubert (1930b) raised the
question whether various ethnic groups might differ in mentality. With Thurnwald, she sug-
gested that some groups might be less able to organize their behavior for longer periods of
time (hence their distractibility and spontaneity) and with Thurnwald, Boas, and Wertheimer,
she posited that the difference between various ethnic groups might reside in the “instru-
ments, tools, cultural auxiliary means of thinking, such as language, writing, the counting sys-
tem, etc., i.e., in the ways they utilize their natural thinking mechanisms.” Here she referred
to the “excellent” explanation of this view in Vygotsky & Luria’s Studies on the history of be-
havior: Ape, primitive, and child (1930). That did not yet explain the cultural differences and
Shubert went on to discuss a great number of ethnographic studies (e.g., Lévy-Bruhl, Mead,
Porteus, Thurnwald), the use of verbal and performal tests in studying intelligence, the need
to study not just intellect but temperament and character as well, etc., without reaching de-
finitive conclusions.

Climate change
The many minority groups, subcultures, and nations constituted a problem for the govern-
ment of the Soviet Union from its inception. The problem was to find a middle way between
monolithic unification and extreme diversity, or, as Stalin put it at 12th Party Congress in 1923,
between ‘great power chauvinism’ and ‘nationalism.’ Stalin was initially inclined to see the
first option as the greater evil and for years no strong pressure was exerted on minorities to
adopt a common (read: Russian) culture as long as one adopted the communist worldview.
Indeed, the policy of korenizatsiya (nativization) encouraged or even prescribed the promo-
tion of local languages with the ultimate goal to integrate non-Russian nationalities in the gov-
ernment of their Soviet republics. Of course, this was a lengthy process with scores of prob-
lems and it fascinating to see how the Russian officials wrestled with the question as to what
was acceptable and what was inacceptable in the minority cultures. Language was one thing,

13
but religion and quite another, and remnants of a bourgeois mentality (e.g., exploitation, une-
qual income distribution) had, of course, to be eradicated (e.g., Dimanshteyn, 1929). Gradu-
ally, however, the Party tightened its grip on the scientific debates and the right answers to
the sensitive dilemma’s became increasingly prescribed. Whereas the pedologists and voca-
tional psychologists involved in measuring and testing children were first relatively free to ad-
vance their hypotheses to explain inter-ethnic differences and could, for example, refer to dif-
ferences in genetic make-up,4 this became now anathema. Explanations based on children’s
socio-economic background became increasingly mandatory and the existence of differences
in mental make-up was called into doubt.
As often, it was the leading pedologist Aron Zalkind who set the tone. At the 1st All-Un-
ion Congress for the Study of the Behavior of Man, held from 25 January to 1 February 1930,
he boldly stated that if Western tests show children in Turkestan to be idiots, it is because
these tests were idiotic themselves (Zalkind, 1930). Western children would presumably ob-
tain low scores on test developed in Turkestan, Zalkind stated, and he added some phrases
about the suppression that took place bourgeois colonies and the necessity to use a social
class approach. When Stalin—during a visit at the Institute of Red Professors in 1931—called
for the intensified struggle with the distortions of Marxism in the social sciences, the debate
became increasingly vicious (e.g., Gur-Gurevich, 1931). Pedology and psychology were threat-
ened by, on the one hand, ‘idealism’ and ‘mechanicism’ on the other. Soon researchers en-
gaged in a process of criticism and self-criticism where it was often difficult to separate scien-
tific from ideological arguments and both past and contemporary research were subjected to
scrutiny (Rezolutsiya, 1931).
Efimov (1931a) now attacked Petrov’s (1928) study mentioned above and claimed that
Petrov was still infected by the tsarist spirit. Literacy in Chuvash subjects had grown from 20
to 85 percent in the period from 1917 to 1931 and Chuvashiya now prided itself with two
higher Institutes. Hence, to call Chuvash children ‘backward’ just betrayed Petrov’s prejudice.
Moreover, Petrov’s attempt to explain the differences by referring to the different social-eco-
nomic conditions was mistaken: these were created by the Soviet regime under the

4
It is not generally known that until 1929 Russia had its own Eugenic Society and a Russian Eugenic Journal in
which authors published articles about, for example, the criminal nature of Jews. Cf. Vermel’ (1924).

14
leadership of the Communist Party and, thus, Petrov objectively accepted the viewpoint of
the counterrevolution.
Leventuev (1931), a participant in Luria’s first expedition, fulminated against an Uzbek
schoolmaster who had used a survey from the Leningrad Herzen Pedagogical State Institute in
his school. The survey was meant to reveal the children’s worldview and asked the children,
among other things, who were the ‘best’ people (minority) and why, and whether they
wanted to be rich or believed in God. Of course, the children turned out to have several ‘prej-
udices’ and a commission was installed to investigate the issue. In Leventuev’s view such sur-
veys did immense harm to the highly suggestible children and he pleaded for much more po-
litical control on pedological research to prevent such harmful practices.
One year later, Leventuev et al. (1932) retrospectively attacked several of the cross-
cultural studies mentioned above, arguing that the spread of socialist culture meets with vi-
cious resistance by chauvinism and local nationalism. Shirokova-Divaeva (1927) was accused
of ‘great power chauvinism’, because measurements with the Pignet index in her view
showed that the Uzbeks constituted a ‘weak’ group. Shtilerman (1928) was attacked because
he made the Uzbek children seem like “a mass of idiots.” (Leventuev et al. 1932, p. 48) and
Baranova (1930a; 1930b) was criticized for her suggestion that Uzbek children have problems
with the perspective used in the images in mental test. In the view of Leventuev and his col-
leagues this showed she believed the Uzbek children had some organic defect, which again
suggested chauvinism and racism. After some equally dishonest remarks about the work of
Bikchentay, Leventuev concluded with the remark that all this was terrible given that the
Party had decided to liquidate the classes and cultural inequality.
In sum, by 1932 the scientific journals were filled with highly political accusations and
self-accusations and monographs and textbooks (e.g., Gur’yanov, Smirnov, Sokolov, & She-
varev; 1930) that went unnoticed several years before now became the subject of heavy and
often unfair criticism. The interpretation of mental test results in pedology and vocational
psychology was hotly debated and drawing inferences from cross-cultural or inter-ethnic dif-
ferences had become a political issue. In this climate it took some courage to organize a cross-
cultural study, also because Vygotsky and Luria’s theory of cultural development, which lay at
the basis of Luria’s expeditions, did not escape criticism either (Van der Veer & Valsiner,
1991).

15
 Talankin (1931a; 1931b) warned that the “group of Vygotsky and Luria” uncritically ac-
cepted foreign theories and claimed that their concepts of ‘instrument’ and ‘culture’ were de-
cidedly un-Marxist. After having criticized his own Freudian views, Zalkind (1931, p. 13), the
main editor of Pedologiya, noted that “the serious critical assessment of the works of L.S.
Vygotsky and A.R. Luria has begun. These comrades should not wait for ‘attacks’ and are in-
vited to reconsider their very grave mistakes as a form of proactive self-criticism on the pages
of our journal.” To leave no room for doubt, Zalkind added in a footnote that “comrade Lu-
ria’s psychological specialization does not exempt him from his responsibility before pedol-
ogy.” In the next issue, Mukovnin (1931, p. 80) mentioned that Vygotsky and Luria were slow
to admit their mistakes. A committee had visited the Psychological Institute and found their
“so-called theory of cultural development’ wanting. It was a theory that did not take social
class into account and its authors did very little to fight behaviorism, Ganzheitspsychologie,
Freud, and Adler. Also, Vygotsky and Luria’s ideas suffered academism and had little rele-
vance for praxis. Several issues later, Bolotnikov et al. (1931), in a longer article about the “sit-
uation at the pedagogical front,” argued that Vygotsky’s combination of “behaviorism, reac-
tology, and the basically idealist Gestalt theory” was a clear example of “eclecticism.” In that
same issue, Bikchentay (1931) and Kostin (1931) followed suit. Kostin just affirmed that
Vygotsky neglected the leading role of the collective in personality growth. Bikchentay’s, who
with his wife, himself was involved in the study of Tatar schoolchildren (Bikchentay & Kari-
mova, 1930; Lavrova-Bikchentay, 1930) voiced more explicit criticism, although he did not
mention Vygotsky by name. Bikchentay noted that 80 languages were spoken in the Soviet
Union and that pedological knowledge was largely based on the study of Russian children.
Meanwhile, we didn’t know enough about the ways to develop children into the new builders
of a communist society. We must not study ‘memory,’ said Bikchentay (1931, p. 32), but chil-
dren’s readiness to join in the building of socialism. “We are not so much interested in the
level of the primitive on the biological or even the historical ladder (all bourgeois researchers
write about this). We are interested in the level of the former hunter in socialist production…
we do not need tests for Tatar or Chuvash children, we need yardsticks to establish the pro-
ductive level of children” (ibid., p. 33). This was no easy thing, however, and different perni-
cious foreign theories had to be avoided. Some Soviet theorists, for example, adhered to evo-
lutionary theories, placing ‘savages’ between ape and ‘cultural man.’ Such ideas, inspired by
Spencer and Taylor, are racist and reactionary. Others, said Bikchentay, advanced what he

16
called “historico-culturological ideas,” in which primitive people are only capable of imitation
and prelogical thinking in the spirit of Lévy-Bruhl. As Bikchentay noted, “several ethnologists
and psychologists who wrote ‘Studies’ and ‘Outlines’ worked in this direction” (ibid., p. 35).
Still others belonged to the “culturological” current based on the ideas of Spranger. This cur-
rent “strongly influenced our psychologists who study cultural memory, cultural attention,
etc.” Finally, we may discern the historico-labor approach, which does not study the psychol-
ogy of the kulak or the kolkhoz member but the influence of the environment on backward
people. This was equally wrong, Bikchentay argued, because “we must remember that all re-
gions of the USSR already entered the period of socialism. There is no feudalism, no capital-
ism in the USSR” (ibid., p. 35). It was easy, of course, to recognize aspects of Vygotsky and Lu-
ria’s theory (e.g., as described in their Studies on the history of behavior: Ape, primitive, and
child; Vygotsky & Luria, 1930; 1993) in the various approaches that Bikchentay condemned.
In a particularly vicious paper in the journal of the Communist Academy (Vestnik Kom-
munisticheskoy Akademii) by Sapir (1931, p. 43), the author observed that “idealist and vitalist
ideas from the rotten bourgeois world penetrate also here in the form of uncritical flirts with
Freud, Adler, Gestalt psychology, Thurnwald’s ethnopsychology, etc.; they separate psycho-
logical laws from sociohistorical conditions and neurology or abstractly reduce the social de-
termination of behavior to the influences of cultural-historical development, taken without its
organic link with the economic base and the processes of the class struggle (advancing this
theory together with positivism is the anti-Marxist mistake of Vygotsky and Luria, in particu-
lar).”
Feofanov (1932) published a lengthy and somewhat incoherent criticism of Vygotsky’s
Pedology of the school age (cf. Van der Veer, 2020) in Pedologiya. In his view Vygotsky de-
fended a biological view of development and did not take its social class environment into ac-
count (Feofanov, 1932, p. 22). Feofanov particularly objected against Vygotsky’s distinction of
‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ behavior, arguing that there is no such thing as natural behavior in hu-
mans, because they are born into a specific social class environment (ibid., p. 27). Hence, we
cannot talk about a natural stage that precedes cultural development; the developmental
stages all form part of the same social dialectical process, where the distinction between nat-
ural and cultural has no meaning (ibid., p. 29). The same holds for cross-cultural comparisons:
the memory of a savage is just as ‘cultural’ as ours in the sense that it is a product of his socio-
cultural milieu (ibid., p. 32). Feofanov concluded that Vygotsky and Luria’s theory of cultural

17
development was based on the idealist ideas of Spranger, Stern, Bühler, and Adler and should
be considered very harmful. The editorial board added a note that Feofanov’s paper was not
fully correct and that further criticism of Vygotsky and Luria’s theory was needed.
Finally, Abelskaya and Neopikhonova (1932) repeated the criticism that Vygotsky and
Luria’s theory of cultural development neglected the concrete sociohistorical conditions.
Their view of auxiliary means—instruments, tools, and signs—Abelskaya and Neopikhonova
(1932, pp. 33-34) considered to be isolated from the “relationships of production,” the “con-
crete labor activity,” and the specific “social-class environment.” Hence, their theory of child
development suffered from formalism and biologism. Again, the editorial board added a note
saying that the theory also had its serious methodological defects.
In sum, from 1931 onwards (see also the posthumous attacks by Georgiev, 1936,
Kozyrev & Turko, 1936; Rudneva, 1937) Vygotsky and Luria’s theory of cultural development
was heavily criticized and deemed anti-Marxist and harmful. The fact that, to the best of our
knowledge, Vygotsky and Luria never recanted or publicly defended their points of view did
not make things much better. In view of this circumstance, Razmyslov’s (1934, p. 83) judg-
ment that their study in Uzbekistan was based on a “pseudoscientific, reactionary anti-Marx-
ist theory” cannot have come as a big surprise.

Conclusions
When Luria (1931) announced his cross-cultural study as the “first expedition in the Soviet
Union” this was somewhat misleading. Several pedological expeditions to remote areas of the
Soviet Union had already been undertaken, including one in which his own student Aleksandr
Zaporozhets participated. The results of these studies were published in the main journal Pe-
dologiya, where Vygotsky was one of the editors and which Luria knew very well. Moreover,
from the 1920s onwards pedologists increasingly used foreign and national intelligence tests
(e.g., Binet-Simon, Rossolimo) to compare the mental capacities of the various ethnic groups
living within the Soviet Union. For some reason, data from Uzbekistan were especially well-
known. From about 1931 the interpretation of mental tests became the topic of increasingly
vehement debates. The use of mental tests for vocational selection or the allocation of chil-
dren to various school types became more and more contested. Differences in average scores
could no longer be attributed to putative differences in genetic make-up and had to be at-
tributed to differences in the subjects’ socioeconomical background. But even this gradually

18
became a risky card to play as negative socioeconomical circumstances by definition could no
longer exist in the Soviet Union. Hence, low average group scores on mental tests had to be
attributed to the tests’ inadequacy and any other interpretation was liable to be seen as the
manifestation of ‘great power chauvinism.’ Thus, differential psychology and cross-cultural
psychology became increasingly sensitive research areas. In this respect, it is quite telling that
even in 1974, that is, 40 years after a committee deemed his results ‘anti-Marxist,’ Luria did
not yet mention the IQ-scores he found in the Uzbek population.
The results that Luria obtained had in part already been anticipated by other Soviet
researchers. That subjects with little or no schooling tended to interpret images as the pic-
tures of concrete objects (‘a plate’) and not as a specimen of abstract geometrical categories
(‘a circle’) had been found before. That such subjects had difficulty dealing with abstract syllo-
gisms (e.g., of the form ‘All A are B, x is A, hence x is B) had also been shown before (e.g., the
study by Shpil’reyn mentioned above). That these persons have the tendency to define ob-
jects in terms of their practical use and turn abstract questions into concrete ones, had been
demonstrated by Luria’s student Zaporozhets. That it can be very difficult to test children or
adults from foreign cultures (e.g., individual testing is often impossible, children tend to run
away, the researcher needs to speak the native language) had been demonstrated multiple
times in the existing Soviet cross-cultural studies.
Vygotsky and Luria explained their findings by arguing that the Uzbek subjects were
culturally disadvantaged. When cultures do not provide the training in certain cultural instru-
ments (e.g., categorical classification; logical reasoning) subjects will find it difficult or impos-
sible to attain the heights of abstract verbal reasoning. This does not mean that these persons
are inherently less intelligent (‘mentally backward’) but implies that education should offer
them the opportunity to appropriate new cultural tools (e.g., literacy) and allow them to
make the next step in their ‘cultural development.’ In this sense, Vygotsky and Luria spoke of
‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ cultures, which was an unfortunate term since it suggested that cul-
tures can be compared on a global scale and that European culture is best. The distinction
they made between ‘mentally backward’ and ‘culturally backward’ or ‘primitive’ children or
adults was somewhat subtle and in the sociopolitical climate of the 1930s Vygotsky and Lu-
ria’s theory of cultural development became the subject of heavy criticism. As we have seen,
to point out any differences between ethnic groups living in the Soviet Union became highly
suspect, in particular when the persons belonging to these groups were politically active

19
communists, and in the end not even explanations that referred to different living circum-
stances were acceptable, because it was claimed that negative living circumstances no longer
existed in the socialist state. In this sense the 1930s differed dramatically from the 1920s
when the popular authors Ilf and Petrov could still portray extreme poverty, poor housing
conditions, and begging street children during the New Economic Policy (Ilf & Petrov, 1928).
In conclusion, with the benefit of hindsight, the expeditions to Uzbekistan organized
by Vygotsky and Luria seem ill-timed and unlikely to be acclaimed by the most vocal ideolo-
gists of the time. Their methods, results, and interpretations were similar to those of previous
Soviet studies and expeditions, which had become the subject of heated debate. Because the
theory behind their cross-cultural study had been deemed anti-Marxist by the leading ideolo-
gists, it was unlikely that their study would be published. Interviewing kolkhoz members in the
period of dekulakization was sensitive enough but questioning their abilities in the field of ab-
stract reasoning was asking for trouble. In the present chapter I have more fully provided the
background of the expeditions to Uzbekistan (cf. Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991) in order to
better appreciate how contemporaries may have received their findings and why it became
well-nigh impossible to publish their results. Now, almost 90 years later, it seems Luria was in
the wrong place with the wrong study at the wrong time.

20
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