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In the second decade of this century, the Soviet biologist Emmanuil S. Enchmen (1891-1966) proposed a psychological theory that he named the "theory of new biology." The theory advocated the study of human behavior rather than conscious processes. The theory was popular among university students in the early 1920s until it was condemned in 1923 by N. Bukharin, at that time the Soviet regime's main ideologue, for its solipsistic and anti-Marxist tendencies. From that time on, Enchmen was considered a "nonperson." A fragment of Enchmen's work was republished only after the fall of the Soviet regime. A comparison of John B. Watson's and Enchmen's theories show that they developed their versions of behaviorism during the same time period. This independent formulation of behavioristic theories was made possible by the prevailing Zeitgeist that stressed positivism in methodology, Darwinian adaptation, and Pavlov's conditioned reflex findings.
Behaviorism is one of the "schools" of psychology that emerged during the second decade of the twentieth century. In opposition to the then dominating Wundtian experimental psychology with its emphasis on the analysis of immediate conscious experience, behaviorism proposed the objective study of animal and human activity (Boring, 1950).
It appears that behaviorism was primarily an American school of psychology, yet, in the Soviet Union, the biologist Emmanuil S. Enchmen (1920) proposed a behavioristic theory named "t. n. b.," an acronym for "theory of new biology." The theory was popular among Soviet university students in the early 1920s until it was declared incompatible with orthodox Marxism in 1923 by N. Bukharin, at that time the Communist Party's chief ideologue. According to the authoritative Great Soviet
Encyclopaedia, Enchmen's theory was "crushed" in the Soviet Union (Bol'saia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1932, pp. 524-525) and for the next decades of the Soviet era, Enchmen himself was a "nonperson." His writings were proscribed and if mentioned at all by historians of psychology, then in dismissive terms (cf. Petrovskii 1984; Smirnov, 1975). Only recently--in 1990--was a brief excerpt from a work by Enchmen (1990) republished in Russia. The theory's behavioristic leanings, however, did not escape the notice of such perceptive American observers of Soviet psychology as G. Razran (1950) and D. Joravsky (1989).
The aim of this article is to provide a description of Enchmen's work and support...