History of Russian pedology: problem of searching for new interpretational models of developing science in authoritarian systems. Part one: "Formulating the problem"

Russian history of Psychology of the twentieth century contains significant gaps that have been associated with both inaccessibility of sources and with ideological distortions in the perception and interpretation of reality. According to the authors opinion, pedology, like other anthropological sciences, can be referred to as «repressed knowledge». However, scientific ideas did not disappear after the destruction of research directions, the disbanding of teams, even the physical destruction of scientists, flowing into the disciplinary fields of related sciences, evolving as small research traditions. Pedological ideas were integrated into the Philosophy of Education, Age and Pedagogical Psychology and studies of child development. It is shown that Methodology of latent changes helps to focus the attention of historians of science on these «small», marginal researching traditions and the «unobvious movement» of ideas. The author justifies the necessity of using a «networked» historiographic model that adequately reflects the processes that took place in Psychology and Pedagogy after the defeat of a number of trends and schools during the repressions. It is proved that the use of the evolution of psychological and pedagogical knowledge of new patterns of interpretation that take into account the dynamics of complex and contradictory sociocultural contexts makes it possible to focus the «optics» of a research on latent currents in culture and to detect previously unintelligible processes of self-organization of science that include clandestine cultural and intellectual currents, gradually and «imperceptibly» preparing a change in the values and styles of everyday life. Applying the methodology of latent changes to the analysis of the history of the development of pedology in Russia and the USSR, the author receives a lot of evidence that the powerful wave of development of child psychology that occurred in the 1950s-1960s had as its prerequisites not only the evident continuity of scientific schools, but also intellectual flows. The author justifies the importance of reconstructing an incomplete and ideologically distorted picture of the development of psychology in the twentieth century by combining the macrohistorical level of analysis with a microhistorical level, which, in his opinion, can help overcome the 20-year gap in the Russian-language historiography of psychology and related disciplines from most of its international (primarily English) analogues.