Olga Ivanovna Skorokhodova

Soviet Union state institutions Marxism–Leninism 1911–1982 ○ Died

Pupil of Sokolyansky who became the first deafblind research scientist; Soviet defectologist and writer

Born in 1911 to a poor peasant family in the Kherson region, she lost her sight to meningitis at five and gradually lost her hearing. In 1925 she entered the school-clinic for deafblind children that Ivan Sokolyansky had founded in Kharkiv, where under his guidance she recovered speech and began keeping notes of self-observation. Her book How I Perceive the World (1947), drawn from those notes, won the Ushinsky Prize. From 1948 until her death she was a researcher at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, the first deafblind research scientist and at the time the only one in the world. Her life was an early case of the idea the Zagorsk experiment set out to prove, that the mind is formed in education and shared activity.