Abstract
This chapter presents the first overview and analysis of the Russian scientific studies and debates that preceded Vygotsky and Luria’s famous study of the thinking of Uzbek people in the early 1930s. It is shown that these earlier studies used similar methods, found similar results, and reached similar conclusions. Moreover, it is shown that such cross-cultural studies of Soviet minorities became increasingly suspect in the eyes of leading scientists and ideologists. The use of mental tests for cross-cultural comparison, in particular, was heavily criticized but gradually any difference found in the thinking of minority groups became politically unacceptable because it seemed to imply Russian chauvinism. In addition, Vygotsky and Luria’s theory of cultural development, which they used to interpret their findings, was claimed to be anti-Marxist. This historical background explains why the results and conclusions of Vygotsky and Luria’s study, which essentially found that some Uzbek subjects were incapable of abstract thought, were met with harsh criticism and could not be published at the time.
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van der Veer, R. (2022). Vygotsky, Luria, and Cross-Cultural Research in the Soviet Union. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_82-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_82-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_82-1