The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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