Leontiev about Matter and Consciousness: His Critique of Vygotsky in the Soviet context

Abstract

Closing out a set of six articles, this text presents a descriptive analysis of Leontiev’s career between 1936-7 in the context of the profound changes caused by the Decree against Pedology and subsequent public campaign against the Vygotskian legacy. This paper seeks to outline the meaning of this campaign within the sinister context of the Soviet Great Purge and place Leontiev’s main critical text of Vygotsky in the context of the enforcement of a “pure and genuine” Marxism-Leninism on the sciences. We claim that Leontiev confused the ontological and epistemological problem of the relationship of consciousness to matter, reflecting the Stalinist divisions between them. When Leontiev moved away from Vygotsky’s legacy, he pursued a dualist, objectivist, and mechanistic inflection of Vygotsky’s psychological materialism.