In addition to the various propaganda sciences, psychology department students received hands-on instruction in the natural sciences. They dissected frogs, and were expected to proceed to dissect rats, but Arutyunyan rebelled when it came to that and her group was, blessedly, exempted from having to kill mammals. There was a subject called Anthropology, but this area of study in its Western understanding was disallowed in the Soviet Union, so the course would more accurately have been called Theory of Evolution. It included the study of genetics, banned for decades but recently redeemed, and this was interesting.
Physiology of Higher Nervous Functioning featured human brains in formaldehyde, which were brought in for every class and set on each table. Arutyunyan was too squeamish to use her finger—gloves, in short supply all over the country, were not an option—so she stuck it with a pen, earning the professor's wrath. "You are damaging the brain!" he bellowed.
For the purpose of legitimizing their peculiar area of inquiry, psychology students were also required to undergo detailed and rigorous training in statistical and data analysis. As for the psyche, it was conspicuously absent. If Arutyunyan learned anything in her first couple of years at university, it was only the basic logic behind this absence.
Marxism in the Soviet Union had been boiled down to the understanding that people—Soviet citizens—were shaped entirely by their society and the material conditions of their lives. If the work of shaping the person was done correctly—and it had to have been, since by now Soviet society claimed to have substantially fulfilled the Marxist project by building what was called "socialism functioning in reality"—then the person had to emerge with a set of goals that coincided perfectly with the needs of the society that had produced him. Anomalies were possible, and they could fall into one of two categories: criminality or mental illness. Soviet society had institutions to handle both. No other kind of disharmony was conceivable. Inner conflict was not an option. There was really no reason to take up the subject of the psyche.
To this day, the website of the psychology department of Moscow State University bears the traces of Russia's disjointed history with the study of the psyche. A Psychological Society was established at Moscow State University in 1885 and, the site states proudly, "became the center of Russia's philosophical life."5 In 1914 the society became a full-fledged institute, with teaching and research functions. Then the narrative on the site becomes suddenly depersonalized: "During the years of acute ideological struggle for the construction of a Marxist psychology, the institute's leadership changed." In fact, the institute itself was abolished in 1925. Six years later, the university shut down all departments dedicated to the humanities and social sciences. Ten years after that, the humanities returned, but psychology was now subsumed by the department of philosophy. Only in 1968 did the Soviet government recognize psychology as a discipline in which degrees could be awarded—and the country's leading university resumed, at least on paper, the study and teaching of the psyche—after a break of nearly half a century.6 The new students could hardly have known that less than a century ago Russian thinkers had been reading Nietzsche and arguing with him, or that Lou Andreas-Salome, who popularized the great philosopher's ideas in Russia and broke his heart, was a native of St. Petersburg. She went on to become one of Sigmund Freud's early and close students and to work as a psychoanalyst in Germany almost up until her death in 1937, at the age of seventy-five, but her ties to Russia had been severed by the Revolution nearly twenty years earlier.7
The Bolshevik state set out to create a New Man. The project contained an echo of Nietzsche's Ubermensch idea, but now it was a practical task rather than a philosophical exercise. For a time, it seemed that Freud's teachings could help bridge the gap between theory and practice. His writing had been widely translated before the Revolution, and he and his students had taught a number of Russian psychoanalysts.8 At one point, not long before the Bolsheviks came to power, psychoanalysis seemed to be gaining a foothold in Russia faster than in Western Europe.9 After 1917, the new regime set out to transform Freud's theories into dogma on which massive institutions could be based, much as it was doing with Marxism. In its simplified form, Freudism—a term coined by analogy with Marxism—"was seen as a scientifically valid promise of an actual, rather than fictional, transformation of man, to be carried out on the basis of his consciousness," wrote Alexander Etkind, a historian of psychoanalysis in Russia.10
A newly formed state publishing house put out a three-volume edition of Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis in 1922, and twenty thousand copies—a large press run, considering the era and the topic—were snapped up within a month.11 The Russian Psychoanalytic Society was formed the same year, under the auspices of the state.12 Between 1922 and 1928, state publishers put out an entire library of translations of foundational works by Freud, Jung, and other early psychoanalysts.13 A psychoanalytic preschool opened in Moscow, drawing the children of the newly minted Bolshevik elite. It was a pilot project, the prototype of an imagined future factory for the production of New Man.
It did not work. Not only was psychoanalysis particularly unsuited for reproduction on an industrial scale, but even in the confines of a single elite preschool it had a way of producing discomfort and discontent. The experimental psychoanalytic preschool was shut down in 1925, amid vague fears of precocious sexuality.14 Over the following five or six years, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society ceased functioning, Freud was depublished, and Freudians fell into disfavor or worse. Freud's most important Russian student, Sabina Spielrein, a
patient, student, colleague, and lover of Carl Jung, a teacher of Jean Piaget, and a co-discoverer of countertransference, had returned to Soviet Russia from Germany in 1923 and soon, it seems, faded from view. She died in 1942 in the southern Russian city of Rostov, shot as a Jew by the occupying Nazi troops.15
The demise of Russian psychoanalysis spelled the near-total end of any study of the psyche—in part because psychoanalysis had so dominated psychology and in part because the new state was now rejecting any explanation of human behavior that was not both material and simple. Ivan Pavlov's straightforward theories of cause and effect fit this approach perfectly; it remained only to condition the entire population, rendering it pliant and predictable. Etkind writes of a psychoanalyst in Odessa who installed a portrait of Pavlov on the flip side of a likeness of Freud that hung in his office: Pavlov would face visitors during the day, when an official might happen by, and Freud greeted his clandestine psychoanalysis patients in the nighttime.16
Only a few of the early Soviet psychoanalysts remained in Russia and lived. One long-term survivor was Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev, who narrowly escaped official censure or worse in the 1930s17 and went on to have a long academic career, venturing into psycholinguistics late in life. But the work that had allowed Leontiev to continue research during the darkest Soviet decades was his activity theory, which viewed human beings exclusively through the lens of behavior and any human action as part of a larger process of communal action.18 When Arutyunyan was a student at Moscow State University, Leontiev's course represented the sum total of psychological theory taught in the first few years. His lectures were boring, painful, and infuriating. It made Arutyunyan angry that Leontiev's theory recognized only the conscious part of being human, leaving no room for metaphysics. Leontiev taught by feeding his students uncatchy phrases that summed up counterintuitive theories. One such mantra was "shifting motive onto the goal." For instance, if the student's goal is to pass his exam and he develops interest in the