The Lives of the Blind in a Historical Whirlpool

Abstract

The present article gives a historical retrospective account of studies on the blind and of the general development of the psychology of blindness in Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, in the context of studies of disabled people in general. Research conducted in Russia on the spatial orientation of the visually impaired is reviewed. Soviet authors conducted numerous experiments with blind and deaf populations for various educational and social aims. A description of crucial experiments is given and explained within the main context of the developing discipline of psychology as well as developing political situations in the country over time. Research on the visually impaired is shown to include various samples and methodological conditions, most of which have so far been unavailable to the English-speaking international scholarly community. The research presented has very important theoretical, methodological, and historical significance. The unique status of the area of research on the blind was based on official ideology in Russia and the Soviet Union, which made it possible for the psychology of blindness to proceed relatively free of the dogmatic interventions encountered by the rest of psychology in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It provided sufficient freedom to create a unique scholarly knowledge base that remains valuable today.