Liaison: Alexandr Fedorov   
Updated: Summer 2007

Rephrasing the not unknown statement of James McKeen Cattell, the history of the Skinnerian science in Russia could be set forth as briefly as the alleged chapter on snakes in a natural history of Iceland – “There are no snakes in Iceland.”

Today, interest to theoretical problems of behavior analysis and its history at the Moscow State University, the most prominent university in Russia, is weak. The influence of radical behaviorism at the Novosibirsk State University is also of small account. Perhaps, one of the reasons for it is that there are only few translations of Skinner’s works in Russian. It is very likely that only two. They are the fifth chapter from “Science and Human Behavior” and “The science of learning and the art of teaching”.

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1. Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior (Chapter V. Operant behavior). New York: Macmillan.
/ Skinner, B. F. (2003). Nauka i chelovecheskoe povedenie (Glava 5. Operantnoe povedenie). In P.Y. Galperin, A.N. Zhdan (Eds.), Istoriya psihologii. XX vek (pp. 530-566) [History of psychology. XXth century: A textbook]. Moscow: Akademicheskiy Proekt. [First edition in 1986] /

2. Skinner, B. F. (1954). The science of learning and the art of teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 24, 86-97.
/ Skinner, B. F. (1968). Nauka ob uchenii i iskusstvo obucheniya. In Programmirovannoe obuchenie za rubezhom (pp. 32-46) [The programmed learning abroad]. Moskow: Vysshaya shkola. /

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Skinner’s works are included in references only in three (!) articles of the journal “Voprosy Psychologii” [Issues of Psychology] over a period from 1992 till 2001. And it’s the oldest and the most readable scientific periodic Russian issue in psychology!
In fact, the term “behaviorism” is often used in the past tense in Russia. For example, ABBYY Lingvo (the most popular dictionary software in Russia) elucidates the term “behaviorism” in the following way. “It is a school in psychology that lost its significance for inanity. But did behaviorism have significance at all?”  How do you like it?

But against all the odds, we believe that Skinnerian science has great future in Russia, the land of Sechenov, Pavlov and Bekhterev. We should combine efforts in promoting behaviorology to find “a future in which people will feel freer than ever before and achieve greater things” (Skinner, 1975).