Pavel Blonsky

Pavel Petrovich Blonsky (1884 to 1941) was a Russian Soviet psychologist and philosopher, and the founder of Soviet paedology, the study of child development. Born in Kyiv, then part of the Russian empire, he studied history and philosophy at the Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr and became involved with the Bolsheviks, which brought him periods of imprisonment. He became a Privatdozent at Moscow University in 1913, was made a professor there after the October Revolution and led the Academy of Socialist Education. Between 1918 and 1930 he wrote over a hundred works supporting the new socialist educational system, and he brought a behaviorist approach into Russian psychology under the label of objective Marxist psychology. After a 1936 attack on paedology criticised his attachment to psychological testing, his work was disavowed. He died of tuberculosis in 1941.