Soviet psychiatrist and leader of the paedology movement who wrote the Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat
In his Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat (1924) he called for abstinence before marriage and monogamy and wrote that sex must in every respect be subordinate to class.
A Soviet psychiatrist, psychologist, psychoanalyst and paedologist born in Kharkov. He graduated in medicine from Moscow University in 1911 and served as an army doctor in the First World War. After the revolution he worked on communist pedagogy in the Commissariat for Education, and in “Freudism and Marxism” (1924) he sought common ground between psychoanalysis and Marxism. The same year his Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat demanded abstinence before marriage and monogamy. He became the first editor of the journal Pedologiya in 1928, but at the end of 1931 he was condemned for “Menshevising idealism” and Freudianism, recanted, and lost his institute and his editorship. He is said to have died of a heart attack in the street in July 1936 after a meeting that criticised his work.
Activities and affiliations
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1911–1936
Science and technology
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1919–1931
Soviet Union state institutionsMain
Science and technology
Related historical events
From the sexual commandments to the fall of paedology
Born in Kharkov, he graduated in psychiatry from the medical faculty of Moscow University in 1911 and served as an army doctor at the front in 1914–1917. After the revolution he headed the Petrograd workers’ faculty and was deputy head of the workers’ faculties department of the Commissariat for Education (1919–1921), then worked at the Institute of Communist Education. In “Freudism and Marxism” and “Nervous Marxism” (1924) he weighed the strengths and weaknesses of psychoanalysis and looked for common ground with Marxism, and he proposed a “party triad” of neurosis, hypertension and sluggish metabolism that he said affected 90 per cent of Communist Party activists. His Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat, published the same year, rejected too early a sexual life, demanded abstinence until marriage at 20 to 25, monogamy and the choice of partners by class and revolutionary purpose, and declared that the class had the right to intervene in its members’ sex lives in the interests of the revolution. Though advisory rather than law, the commandments became the standard text against the sexual mores of the early revolutionary years and the “glass of water” theory. He chaired the First All-Union Paedological Congress in December 1927–January 1928, became chairman of the Commissariat for Education’s interdepartmental paedological planning commission and first editor of the journal Pedologiya in 1928, and led the Behavioural Congress of 1930. That year he wrote a hostile preface to Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, the last of Freud’s works translated in the Soviet era. In 1931 he became director of the Institute of Psychology, Paedology and Psychotechnics, but at the end of the year he was attacked for “Menshevising idealist eclecticism”, Freudianism and “perversions in work”; although he publicly admitted his errors, in December he lost the directorship and the editorship of Pedologiya. According to his daughter he collapsed and died of a heart attack in the street in July 1936 after a meeting that criticised his leadership of paedology; suicide has not been ruled out. He was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.