Borrowing the term of psycho-sciences (Rose, 1998), I am trying to present how the psychology was used in governing people by creating new regime (conceptions and ideas about individuality), through a special case. More concretely, my proposal speaks about the development and characteristics of politicization and institutionalization of psychology and related areas (neurology, psychiatry, psychotechnics, pedology, testing movement and so on), between 1917 and 1945 in the Soviet Union (to the various nature of this complex knowledge field, see Dafermos, 2013). A special form of applied psychology emerged, aiming to transform attitudes and behaviour in education, production from a Marxist-Leninist perspective; increasing effectiveness everywhere – this process was similar in the Western World, as we can see optimization tendencies in big organizations and parallel publications about same topics (González Rey, 2014). The research corpus is a unique one (see later); showing the US perception of communist psycho-sciences, in the context of the early Cold War.

The American administration collected every data from behind the Iron Curtain, so the US officials interviewed as much Soviet emigrants as they could in Western Germany after WW2, to create interpretation schemes and getting competitive advantage against the enemy. A new discipline developed in the United States (Kremlinology/Sovietology), in which the meanings, roles and uses of psycho-sciences were crucial, to win the psychological warfare (Engerman, 2009). Experts and politicians “translated” the communist system and the Soviet Union for their selves, using accessible sources to find the vulnerable and weak points of the enemy. These intentions are main limitations in the interpretation, because all of these aspects affected the interview process, information and respondent selection – we can see the Soviet reality through several screens and transformation. Analysing life story-interviews tell as much about Americans as about Soviet emigrants.

Originally, it was a university project, initiated by the Harvard Russian Research Center, to find “displaced” Soviet citizens in Austria and West Germany after 1945, made meetings and interviews with them (from 1949 to 1953, following a strict, psychological methodology), to gather every knowledge about the new communist super power in the bipolar world (Edele, 2007). The work was processed in collaboration with the US Army, financed by the Human Resources Research Institute, based at Maxwell Air Base (Mandelstam, 1980): cooperation of academic and military sphere was not an exception in these years, both in the Eastern and Western Bloc. In my presentation, I am going to introduce the actors of interviewing (sometimes psychologists from both side), and their possible motivations (as a background), then the patterns and narratives about psycho-sciences will be revealed from the sources. My research questions are the following:

1. How and what the US officials might have known about the communist psychology, neurology, psychiatry and so on?
2. What kind of interpretations can we draw from different perspectives of contemporary views and the history of education?

My main hypothesis is at this point, that the psycho-sciences were mostly used as applied disciplines, subordinated by economic and political goals, without any professional competence in this period.

The outcome of data collection, including life story interviews of Soviet emigrants and manuals are available online, see: Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), https://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/collections/hpsss/index.html. Everyone can access now to this unique corpus, to the transcripts of the original records, translated into English, altogether 343 personal life histories (Schedule A) and 362 interviews on special topics. Alex Inkeles, a sociologist and Raymond Bauer, who worked as a social-psychologist developed the methodological framework related to interviewing, with codes and sub-codes, like B11, which was about professions. Here, intellectuals confessed about their reputation, professional debates, possibilities and boundaries – they had middle and higher positions before leaving the Soviet Union, in hospitals, institutions, administrative bodies and so on. Historians usually consider HPSSS as a “depositories of fact”, not taking in mind the development of this corpus, how the Soviet emigrés actively remembered their past, interacting with the interviewers (Prendergast, 2017, 19). Working with an already existing oral history archive, we always re-contextualise, re-use the corpus, following our research questions (Tureby, 2013); in this case, there were two main steps: 1. Searching by the keyword psych* online, as a result, making a database with all appearances (490 times in 218 interviews); 2. then screening and selecting the interviews, where psychology, psychiatry, etc. is the main and dominant topic. The syllable psych* occurred many times in different phrases, because of the overall psychological nature of the survey, aimed to discover the Soviet “mentality”; and the participating intelligentsia, the apparatchiks, who were connected psycho-sciences through several channels (e. g. as a patient, leader, expert). Nine interviews remained at the end, both from Schedule A and B; doctors, professors, psychologists gave information for the US administration in Austria, West Germany or USA. The number of items is very small, but the deep level of description and details contained mean a significant contribution to our knowledge about everyday Stalinism (Fitzpatrick, 2000), which is worth to study. In the analysis, I focus on the thematic topics, the human agency in the narratives (Tamura, 2011), more precisely uses of psycho-sciences in propaganda, industry, testing in schools, etc.; issues of career, socialisation in the profession; development of disciplines.

From 1956, different books published in the USA, summarizing the experiences and lessons from the interviews, characterizing the Soviet citizen, system and medicine (Bauer, Inkeles & Kluckhohn, 1956; Field, 1957; Inkeles & Bauer, 1959). These were scientifically based images about the communist state from the Western hemisphere, with two key ideas about the totalitarian state, and the forced modernization to create an industrial society (Edele, 2007). As an interpretational framework, it is very useful to reflect the outside views about Soviet psycho-sciences, which was highly influenced by the ideology and actual political goals, voluntarism. According to Marxism-Leninism, theory and practice of psychology can typically describe by determinist logic of history and social categories. Every question in the discipline and profession was politicized thoroughly, which is clear, if take a close look at the psychological schools, representatives, debates, activities and life careers. Utilizing HPSSS and other archives is very important in the discourses of Stalinism, as a balance of the official language of articles, party decrees and resolutions of these years, which affected even the scholarly works about this period. There are only a few contemporary private sources about everyday Stalinism (some diaries for example, see: Hellbeck, 2006; Paperno, 2009), and these documents somehow functioning like this: with several transformations and modifications, they shed light to the socio-historical reality of the 1920s, 1930s years in the Soviet Union. The US viewpoint and the Cold War context bring a special dynamic to the analysis, raising the crucial aspect of sources and methodology again. This corpus gives us a lot of possibility to think these questions and challenges repeatedly; furthermore, intersections of economy, schooling, psy-sciences and ideology (Borgos, Erős & Gyimesi, 2019) has been still a great field waiting to explore in the history of education.

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