This complex, deeply researched and theoretically rich monograph examines the rise (and fall) of the concepts, practices, and institutionalization of a heterogeneous, ambiguous and fluid “child science” in Russia between the 1880s and 1930s. It outlines how, against a backdrop of modernization anxieties, “the child” embodied the general concept of development and became constituted as an object of science across a variety of societies.

The study of the laws of child development was presumed to allow the deduction of rational principles of childcare, education, and upbringing. This had specific meaning in Russia as education was seen as key to ending Russia's “backwardness.” The first half of the book looks at how scientists, such as V. M. Bekhterev, medical doctors, teachers, middle school parents, and pedagogues all became involved in the creation of projects to study “the child” and collect and interpret data on child development. These chapters cover in great detail the (attempted) constitution, professionalization, and institutionalization of sciences of the child, with uncertainty over who should control the field: scientists, medical doctors, psychologists, pedagogues, or teachers. Byford shows how this focus on the study of the child—and its goal, the production of norms of development and deviance from the norm—was given extra significance by the sense of accumulating crisis caused by the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution.

The second half covers the fate of “child science,” now under the term “pedology,” between 1917 and 1936. Byford argues that initial Bolshevik support cannot be explained only by ideology and their noted fascination with science. Children were a key group and a target of a “highly interventionist welfare/warfare state” and the desire to expand governmental powers over the population (149). The Bolsheviks faced two complex tasks in the early revolutionary years: dealing with the street children (bezprizorniki) and creating a revolutionary education system that included millions of peasant children. Both the bezprizorniki and the creation of the education system have received scholarly attention, but Byford's re-examination of them via “child science” is fresh and revealing, and he encourages us to look again through the lens of the 1920s. What new norms of educational development were appropriate for peasant children and how could Soviet science help draw up a new curriculum and teaching methods for this population? Could scientists create a new scientific framework for understanding the Soviet child and its development and therefore discover a rational basis for managing development?

By the late 1920s, pedology had become a state science, working with Narkompros to create the new Soviet school system. However, the achievement was short lived. Although the discipline and its practitioners weathered the storm of the “Great Turn,” from the early 1930s it was only involved in occupational practice at a grass roots level in schools, helping with streaming, assessment, and careers advice. Under Iosif Stalin, the school system was entirely revised, with the old progressive educational principles of the “child centered” school and the experimentation of the 1920s being firmly rejected. Teacher authority, a centralized curriculum, exams, grades, and discipline were back and pedology lost even its occupational place. It was ended as a practice and science by decree. While the demise of pedology was later seen as a classic example of a “repressed science,” Byford shows that the reason for its destruction, ordered in the July 1936 Decree “On the Pedological Distortions in the System of the Narkompros” (248), is still uncertain. What is clear is that it came to the attention of Party leaders in the mid-1930s when they were scrutinizing Soviet schools and did not like what they found. Andrei Zhdanov in particular had a strong animus against pedology's involvement in asserting norms of development and streaming. He claimed that too many working class children were being pushed out of mainstream schooling by pedologists and labelled “backward.” Pedologists were satirized as pedantic boffins stamping meaningless numbers onto children's foreheads (250). As well as not being politically acceptable, this was undermining teacher authority and damaging the prestige of the Soviet school. Thus, disciplinary arguments over who dominated the domain of knowledge of “the child” outlined in the first half of the book was settled by the Soviet state in favor of the teacher (in conjunction it seems with the Soviet family, shedding light on debates about the “Great Retreat”).

This monograph rewards intensive reading, and will be essential to those interested in Russian/Soviet science and childhood. Its complexity makes it less likely to be of use in undergraduate teaching.