Imperial Normativities and the Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s-1930s

Abstract

Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, Soviet researchers in child biopsychosocial development became especially interested in the question of ethnoracial differences in the Soviet child population. During the First Five-Year Plan a specialist subarea of research briefly flourished within Soviet pedology. Dubbed the “pedology of national minorities,” it was fostered in concert with the broader efforts of the Soviet state to incorporate “backward” populations living in more peripheral parts of the Union into the normatively framed Soviet body politic as part of accelerated economic, social, and cultural “development.” Focusing on examples of psychometric research done on Uzbek children in Tashkent, Tatar children in Moscow, and more remote ethnic groups in Siberia, this article analyzes how the early-Soviet “pedology of national minorities” became embroiled in a complicated knot of contradictions in its attempt to account for and negotiate the ambiguous relationship between, on the one hand, normative deviations in the Soviet child population (a population that was expected to be unified into a single body politic, especially through the expansion and standardization of the Soviet education system) and, on the other, ethnoracial differences within this population in the distinctive context of early Soviet efforts to manage the Union’s federative structure along ethnonational lines through the Soviet state’s nationalities policy. The article argues that this contradiction between “deviation” and “difference” reflected one of the central dilemmas of Soviet modernity as a sociopolitical experiment – namely, how to adapt universalizing thinking and utopian aspirations to an “imperial” reality marked by nonsystemic diversity.