The History of the Moscow Institute of Social Psychology (Based on Materials from Institute Meeting Reports. 1917–1924)

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The purpose of this article is to draw the attention of specialists in the field of social sciences to a unique collection of documents at Moscow’s Institute of social psychology (1917–1924) created by V.M. Khvostov — a legislative science expert, philosopher, sociologist, who set himself the task of separating sociology and making it a specialized scientific discipline. The only work to date devoted to the Institute was an article written by its employee L.A. Byzov in 1923 (published in 2011), where he speaks about the history of the Institute, its development, achievements and failures from the point of view of a person who knows the situation from the inside. This makes it invaluable in terms of studying the history of the Institute of social psychology, in this work in particular, which provides more detailed information about the activities of V.M. Khvostov, the Institute’s employees and specialists involved in its work. These people were actually performing a scientific feat, creating a new direction in the field of social sciences, working in the extremely difficult conditions of the post-revolutionary era. The content and completeness of those of the Institute’s protocols which found their way into our hands, them currently being stored in the archives of the European University in St. Petersburg, are worthy of a full-fledged scientific publication that could write another page in the history of Russian sociology.