In discussing these six papers on Soviet pedagogical psychology, I will not comment on the representativeness of these ideas in Soviet educational practice, nor on how well substantiated these ideas are in Soviet educational research. With respect to the first limitation, the position of our Soviet colleagues is no different from our own: We would not want the degree of acceptance of our ideas to be a criterion of their validity, and so we can sympathize when Davydov makes it clear (as he did in a conversation in Moscow in December, 1978) that the Ministry of Education is responsible for dissemination, not himself. With respect to the second limitation, firm data on children’s learning would be extremely interesting, but we just don’t have it. Instead, I will highlight what I see as the importance of the Soviet work for the development of educational psychology here in the United States. A fundamental question in all Soviet psychology is what kind of experience produces what kind of changes in, or transformations of, human consciousness. The theory of activity discussed by Pick is one answer to this question. And when simplistic (and mechanical materialist) answers such as the now discredited motor-copy theory are avoided, Soviet psychologists offer many imaginative designs for both psychological research and instruction. I remember when I was teaching first grade in the late 1950s trying an idea from one of the first books that reprinted Soviet psychology for English audiences (Simon, 1957): According to Slavina (in the Simon volume), when “Voya” could do simple sums if he had objects to manipulate but could not do the sums in his head, an intermediate stage was introduced: After manipulating the objects and counting out loud, Voya was asked to do the same operations out loud, but without looking at the objects which were still arrayed before him. Slavina found, as did I, that this intermediate activity seemed to help children form a mental representation of the objects and aid their progress toward a completely covert computation. One important category of activity for young children is play. Pick describes El’konin’s idea about the development of play itself. But in other Soviet works, play is considered as a setting of special importance