Cosmopolitan patriot: The life and scholarship of Peeter Tulviste (1945–2017)

Photo courtesy of Tiia Tulviste.

On a trip to Tartu in 1990, I went with Peeter Tulviste to visit Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, the semiotician and most revered scholar in Estonia at the time. On that day, Yuri Mikhailovich was holding forth on the future of his beloved Tartu University, and at one point he paused and asked, “Who do you think we should ask to be the rector of Tartu University? We need someone who is both a cosmopolitan and a patriot.” And with a twinkle in his eye, he glanced at Peeter and said, “What about Peeter, for example?” With that, Peeter burst forth with his famous laugh and said, “This is a crazy world. Either one of those labels could have put me in prison in Soviet times, and now I may be put in another kind of prison by becoming the rector!” As things turned out, he soon was elected as the first post-Soviet rector of Tartu University, an honor he enthusiastically embraced, and he went on to carry out the very difficult, but important work of that office from 1993 to 1998.

Lotman’s comment about being both a cosmopolitan and patriot provided an opening for Peeter’s celebrated humor, but it also provided insight into him as a scholar, leader, and human being who managed to navigate his way through a complex period in European history. Peeter spent his early years in an Estonia that had been forcibly annexed into the USSR, something that Soviet authorities saw as liberation, but ethnic Estonians considered to be occupation. The latter had good reason for believing this, given the tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen who had been exiled to Siberia or executed in the post-war years. To be sure, Peeter’s generation grew up in a much more normal atmosphere than Soviet citizens who had suffered through the Great Purges of the 1930s or the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, but it remained an atmosphere laden with political repression where only Soviet loyalty was allowed and even the slightest indication of Estonian patriotism could be met with severe punishment.

As for cosmopolitanism, during the Soviet years, it was a term of opprobrium, usually with anti-Semitic overtones. From early on in life, however, Peeter had a strong desire to meet and know people unlike him. This took concrete form when he decided to leave the familiar confines of Estonia in 1964 to enter Moscow State University (MGU). Very few Estonians made such a daring decision in those years, especially when it meant moving to a city that was not only alien, but at the heart of a state that had occupied Estonia. At MGU Peeter was one of the first students in the newly created Faculty of Psychology, and his cultural horizons expanded rapidly. He got to know people such as his dormitory roommates, a Latvian Jew who later emigrated to New York to become a renowned neuropsychologist and an ethnic Russian who became a high-ranking officer in the Moscow police force. Despite their different backgrounds, these three young men became lifelong friends and managed to leave behind stories at MGU not only of their brilliance, but of their lively personalities and humor.

Upon completing his undergraduate studies, Peeter continued his studies as a graduate student at MGU and rubbed shoulders with some of the most interesting psychologists and philosophers of his time, figures such as Aleksei Nikolaevich Leont’ev, Vladimir Petrovich Zinchenko, and Aleksandr Vladimirovich Zaporozhets. But above all, Peeter was influenced by Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, one of the founders of modern neuropsychology and the Soviet psychologist best known in the West. Luria became famous for his groundbreaking research on aphasia, a systems approach to the brain, and neurolinguistics, but the line of research that fascinated Peeter most and shaped the rest of his life came from studies Luria carried out in the early 1930s in Central Asia.

In those years Luria and his mentor Lev Semënovich Vygotsky were interested in the psychological impact of introducing literacy and formal education into a society. Soviet authorities were rushing to transform a largely rural, non-literate population into a technologically advanced state, and Luria and Vygotsky viewed this as a natural laboratory for research. In 1931 and 1932 Luria carried out a series of ingenious studies in Central Asia on the abstract, or “theoretical” thinking that emerges with schooling, which he contrasted with “practical thinking” that characterizes reasoning in other contexts (Luria, 1976). These results did not see the light of day for decades, however, because the findings were judged by Soviet authorities to be damaging to the project of fostering brotherly relations among the nations of the USSR. This had become a very sensitive topic in light of the brutal treatment Soviet authorities had meted out to Ukrainians, Chechens, and others, and it led Luria to keep the findings locked away in his files. But in the 1960s, Michael Cole (1979) convinced Luria to make the data available for analysis, and in the 1970s Peeter decided to take up this line of inquiry through additional empirical studies of his own.

The fact that Peeter had chosen to leave his native Estonia and move to Moscow for his education and the fact that he chose to study exotic populations who exhibited profoundly alien ways of thinking suggest that his quest for cosmopolitanism was an important part of who he was. But his basic commitment as an Estonian patriot remained another thread in his life, and it became increasingly in evidence starting in the 1970s. Even while studying at MGU, he regularly visited Tartu University as a lecturer in the department of Psychology and Logic, and his activities there expanded when he finished in doctoral degree in 1975. At that point, he was invited by senior faculty members at MGU, individuals who were the scientific elite of the entire Soviet Union, to join the Faculty of Psychology as a faculty member, but he decided to return to his native Estonia to take up a full-time position at Tartu University. This was met with consternation and incredulity in Moscow. According to Peeter and others, his mentors at MGU had a hard time understanding why someone would turn down a position at the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the USSR to return to a “provincial” university. As many who knew Peeter understand, he was capable of making up his mind about something and allowing nothing to get in the way, and his resolution to return to Tartu in mid 1970s proved to be a case in point.

Upon joining the faculty of Tartu University in 1975, Peeter began the regular duties of teaching and research, but he also engaged in other activities that reflected his growing commitment as an Estonian patriot. Of particular note were the “domashnii seminari” (home seminars) on Estonian history and memory that he offered for students. These unofficial, underground (hence “home”) discussion sessions touched on issues that were not only left out of any formal curriculum in Soviet Estonia, but were considered dangerous to broach in any setting. The fact that a junior faculty member was engaging students at Tartu University in this way was a red flag to Soviet authorities, and Peeter soon began to suffer the consequences.

In the view of Soviet authorities Peeter’s activities did not rise to the level of making him an official dissident, partly because of his proven ability to work with colleagues from all segments of Soviet society and also because of the slightly more lenient Soviet authorities in out-of-the-way Tartu. But the signals and warnings he undoubtedly was receiving were unmistakable to any Soviet citizen. Despite his extraordinary academic pedigree from MGU and strong publication record, he appears to have been stuck at the lower rungs of the career ladder while others, often Communist Party members—something Peeter was not—rose quickly. None of this, however, stopped Peeter from pursuing his project of patriotism or from raising difficult questions about Estonian history and memory.

A particularly striking episode from those years occurred in 1980, which was in the depths of the Cold War and at a time of heavy-handed oppression by Soviet authorities. In October of that year Peeter was among a group of Estonian patriots who signed the “Letter of 40 Intellectuals,” a document that protested the local Soviet authorities’ decision to ban the public performance of a popular musical group. This ban, along with student protests that followed, was the immediate cause of the letter, but it reflected a deeper set of concerns about Moscow’s Russification policies, including its efforts to discourage the use of the Estonian language. The Letter of 40 Intellectuals was addressed to the Soviet newspaper Pravda as well as to two official Estonian media outlets, but, unsurprisingly, it was not made public by any of them. It became much more of an embarrassment to Soviet authorities, and hence more of a danger to its signatories, when it appeared in December 1980 in Eesti Päevaleht, a weekly published by Estonians in Stockholm. This, in turn, led to its being broadcast into the Soviet Union by Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and to its widespread circulation in underground “samizdat” publications and recordings in Estonia.

Soviet authorities started repressive measures against those who signed this letter almost immediately. Many were called in for “interviews” by their workplace supervisors and Communist Party organizations and were invited to renounce their signature. The KGB searched the home of one of the intellectuals suspected of having led the drafting of the document, and it tried, unsuccessfully, to track down those who had sent the letter outside the country. Meanwhile, a prominent conservative Estonian academician expressed outrage at these intellectuals’ protest by sending a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia demanding reprisals against the “gang of forty.” In the end, four of the signatories were fired from their jobs, and for those like Peeter who did not lose their positions, the message was that their future prospects—and possibly those of their children—were not bright. This was perhaps the heaviest penalty that Peeter suffered for his efforts on behalf of Estonian patriotism, but it was part of a larger pattern of daily reminders of his vulnerability at a time that virtually no one in the USSR or the West expected the Soviet Union to collapse or Estonia to regain its freedom as an independent country.

In reviewing all this, a striking fact about the Letter of 40 Intellectuals is that Peeter’s involvement with it remained little known to many who knew him. It was something that he did not bring up, and he did not consider it to be a particularly heroic act on his part. Indeed, it was only with the publication of a book years later about the actions of the signatories of this letter that his role came to light for most of us, and when asked about it, Peeter passed it off as just “another typical Estonian story.”

If Peeter were reading what I have said so far, he would undoubtedly be impatient with all the preliminaries about him and would want to get on to the discussion of research topics that he considered to be of real interest. As noted above, the research that shaped so much of his conceptual perspective came from Luria and Vygotsky, but Peeter went on to make his own distinctive contribution in his 1988 volume Kul’turno-Istoricheskoe Razvitie Verbal’nogo Myshleniya (published in English in 1991 as The Cultural-Historical Development of Verbal Thinking). On reading this book, the first impression from early chapters is of the thoroughgoing scholarship Peeter brought to his writing. In particular, this was scholarship about the history of philosophy and psychology, reflecting the fact that he sometimes described himself as an historian of psychology first, and an empirical researcher second.

For Peeter, any understanding of human mental life is fundamentally shaped by the history of psychology, whether we know it not, and it is best to know it. This meant that he started his 1988 volume with a review of psychological research stretching back more than a century. He traced the intellectual genealogy of his claims to Darwin, Spencer, Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and other Western scholars, as well as to the writings of Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole, Sylvia Scribner, and other contemporaries. His citation of Cole and Scribner stemmed in part from personal ties made via Luria. Indeed, Michael Cole had asked Luria to send Peeter to participate in the landmark studies that he and Scribner were conducting in the early 1970s in Liberia, but political conditions ruled out any such a trip outside the USSR at the time.

Peeter made sense of all this scholarship of others by examining it through the lens of the intellectual tradition of Vygotsky and Luria, and he arrived at a general framework concerned with the “heterogeneity” of human thinking, “the co-existence in any culture and in any individual of qualitatively different types of verbal thinking” (1991, p.28). Employing a metaphor used by others, he insisted that “different genetic [developmental] forms coexist just as layers of the most varied geological epochs coexist in the earth’s crust” (p.83). Peeter’s stance on this issue reflects his effort to understand the variability of human mental functions without reducing it to a single developmental hierarchy that overtly or covertly leads to claims about “higher” and “lower” mental processes. He accepted the notion that different forms of mental functioning, such as scientific reasoning, may arise at different times in human history, and he accepted the notion that some forms of mental functioning arise early in an individual’s life, whereas others emerge only later. However, such facts about sociocultural history and ontogenesis did not translate for him into hierarchies of mental processes. Rather than talking about higher and lower mental processes, often accompanied by the assumption that the lower forms would disappear as they were “replaced” by higher ones, Peeter focused on how various types of mental life continue to exist alongside one another in society and in an individual. His claims in this respect represent a break from some of the assumptions of Vygotsky and Luria, and these claims were encouraged by the theory of activity of A.N. Leont’ev (1975, 1981), with the latter’s assumption that heterogeneities of various sorts exist in all sociocultural settings.

These ideas underlay the empirical research Peeter conducted in 1977 in the far northern reaches of Siberia. This research was carried out in the village of Volochanka in the Taimur Autonomous Region of the USSR with the Nganasan people, who numbered only about 1000 at the time. Peeter also conducted a field study in the summer of 1977 in isolated regions of the Central Asian republic of Kyrgystan. He had originally wanted to go to Uzbekistan, which is where Luria conducted his studies in the 1930s, but cholera there at the time led him to shift to Kyrgystan. Results from these studies were first reported in Tulviste (1978) in Estonia and in his first publication in the West thanks to the Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (Tulviste, 1979). The findings also appeared in papers by Tamm and Tulviste (1980) and in the dissertation by Peeter’s wife Tiia (Tamm) Tulviste (1985). These reports then became the core of The Cultural-Historical Development of Verbal Thinking.

One of the most interesting questions Peeter raised in this volume concerns what happens when people who return to a traditional, non-literate environment after having developed theoretical thinking in formal education settings. Building on the basis of multiple studies showing that “two or three grades of schooling are enough to teach a person to solve simple syllogistic problems with practically no errors” (p.134), he asked how people might perform who have had such schooling but then take up life in settings that involve virtually no demand for theoretical thinking. Data from his 1977 study in Kyrgystan suggest that such thinking fades away in such cases.

Consider, for example, field notes about a 26-year-old female who had finished 10 grades of school and then returned to her village to became a mother and work on a collective farm. Peeter’s research team posed the following problem to this woman: “Every morning Asan plays on the kamuz [a Kirghiz musical instrument]. Did Asan play his kamuz yesterday morning or not?” (p.135), to which the subject replied, “How should I know? (The problem is repeated.) Maybe he did play.” This response is typical of non-literate subjects in that it reflects an inability or an unwillingness to engage in abstract reasoning that operates within the confines of a linguistically created problem spaces and does not allow the introduction other information from everyday (practical) experience.

In further interchanges with this subject, Peeter reported the following interchanges:

[Researcher] Asan and Kenesh always drink tea together. Asan is drinking tea now. Is Kenesh drinking tea or not?

Again, these answers show all the hallmarks of what Luria termed “practical,” as opposed to “theoretical” thinking and are standard responses for non-literate subjects. The essential additional insight provided by Peeter was that such theoretical thinking can disappear with extended periods of nonuse, a finding that raises fascinating challenges for standard assumptions about “higher” form of mental functioning. Namely, it challenges the assumption than once such a level of mental functioning appears, there would be no reason for it to fade away. As Peeter noted, claims by figures such as Jean Piaget to the effect that higher, more abstract mental functioning are locked into place by their position in a fixed hierarchy of stages in mental functioning have a hard time accounting for results such as those he found in Kyrgyzstan and Siberia.

In sum, Peeter’s ongoing quest to understand others’ worldviews led him to see how they can differ in ways that extend even beyond the claims of Vygotsky and Luria about how human mental life is situated in cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. He never lost his fascination with these issues, which reflected his lifelong cosmopolitan leanings. At the same time, his commitment as an Estonian patriot grew stronger over the course of his career. This was a time when the Soviet Union began to broach to new discussions with the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as the leader of the USSR in the 1980s. In the new era of “glasnost’,” or openness, it became possible for the first time for Peeter to travel to other countries, opening up new opportunities for cosmopolitan explorations, but it was also a time that made open, frank discussions of national identity possible. When the opportunity arose, he quickly took advantage of it and traveled to the U.S. in 1989 as a research fellow at Clark University. He and his family then spent the 1990–91 academic year there as he worked as a visiting professor, and this gave him the opportunity to develop some of his ideas about Estonian memory and identity.

In those years, Peeter pursued research on national memory and identity, but he resisted a temptation that proved so strong for many others in newly independent Estonia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, namely the temptation to become a radical nationalist, which could be accompanied by strong, indeed rabid anti-Russian sentiment. He remained in contact with his Russian colleagues, sometimes visiting figures such as V.P. Zinchenko in Moscow, and he continued to recognize legitimate contributions to science by other Russian colleagues. His efforts during those years were reflected in the awards he received, including an honorary doctorate from Voronezh State University in 1989. He kept these various contacts open while also taking on increasing responsibilities as a major public intellectual in Estonia, and he began publishing in professional journals on the issue of national memory. For example, he was one of the first scholars to point out that people in places like Estonia had for generations developed not just one, but two distinct national memory projects, an official and an unofficial one (Tulviste, 1994; Tulviste & Wertsch, 1994).

One of the strengths that allowed Peeter to weather the stress of living for years as both a patriot and a cosmopolitan was his powerful sense of humor. He was famous among Estonians and others from around the world for his impressive knowledge of jokes, including massive numbers of Soviet “anekdoty.” This expertise allowed him to go on in circumstances that might have crushed others, and one of his strategies for keeping an even keel during times of great tension as the first post-Soviet rector of Tartu University was never to lose sight of the humorous side of life. An accomplishment that distinguishes him from just about any other figure in sociocultural studies, let alone university rector or president was the publication of his 2001 volume University Jokes: Student, Professors, and Others.

In the end, it was Peeter’s deep commitment to taking on serious, and sometimes dangerous activities, coupled with an unfailing ability to see the humor where others saw only hopelessness that made it possible to live such a worthwhile life. Indeed, his secret gift for navigating vastly different worlds, and for thriving as both patriot and cosmopolitan with all the risks entailed, was his great sense of humor, which it turns out was a family trait. When others gave in to despair and frustration at the bickering cast of characters around them, Peeter had the capacity to shrug it off with a laugh and a quote that he got from his father: “God’s zoo is very large.”