The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

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-Salomé, 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.