p APRAUSHEV, Alvin (b. 1930), Cand. Sc. (Education), director of the Zagorsk Boarding-School for Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children.

p Apraushev finished a vocational school in 1943 and volunteered to do economic reconstruction work in the Donbass area. He was severely injured in a mine explosion and was hospitalised until the end of the war in 1945. He then finished a chemical and pharmaceutical specialised secondary school and spent thirteen years working in industry. In 1952 he completed a degree course at the Moscow Institute of Education, by correspondence, majoring in literature and Russian language.

p He has worked at the Zagorsk boarding-school since 1965, first as a teacher, then as director of studies starting in 1967, and since 1970 as director of the school.

p In 1970, under Meshcheryakov’s guidance, he defended a Candidate’s dissertation on "Technical Aids in the Instruction of the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind.” He is currently working on a Doctoral dissertation on "Labour and Social Rehabilitation of the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind”. He has more than forty scientific and popular scientific papers to his credit.

p MAREYEVA, Raisa (b. 1928), head of the Sokolyansky Laboratory for the Study and Education of Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy.

p After graduating from the handicapped studies 301 department of the Lenin Institute of Education in Moscow, she worked at a school for children with impaired hearing and later at a kindergarten for deaf children. She completed a graduate course at the Institute for the Studies of the Handicapped under the guidance of Sokolyansky. She has been on the staff of the laboratory since 1960 and became its head after Meshcheryakov’s death in 1974.

p Her major work is Education and Instruction of Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Children at Home (1979). Many of her articles have appeared in scientific journals.

p SKOROKHODOVA, Olga (1914-1982), Cand. Sc. ( Education), senior research worker at the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy. As a result of meningitis, she became completely blind and deaf in early childhood.

p This chapter contains a compilation of materials about her life and work.

p Olga Skorokhodova wrote numerous scientific articles and three books, among them, How I Perceive, Imagine and Understand the Surrounding World, which is available in translation.

p SMIRNOV, Anatoli (1894-1980), Dr. Sc. (Education), Professor, Member of USSR Academy of Pedagogy since 1947.

p After taking a degree in history and philology at Moscow University (1916), he worked at the Institute of Psychology, then at the Academy of Social Education, at the Institute for Extra-Mural Education, and at the Moscow Institute of Education. From 1941 to 1951 he was Professor at Moscow University, and from 1957 to 1963, he was President of the Psychological Society of the USSR. He was head of the Institute of Psychology for thirty years and chief editor of the journal Voprosy Psikhologii for a quarter of a century.

p Smirnov’s experimental work was devoted to visual perception and problems of memory. He wrote papers and books on general and child psychology, psychology of education, and the history of psychology; he co-edited the two-volume work, Psychology in the USSR.

p His major works are: Psychology of the Child and Adolescent (1926), Occupational Psychology (1927), The Psychology of Remembering (1948), Problems in the 302 Psychology of Memory (1966) and The Development and Present State of Psychology in the USSR (1975).

p SOKOLYANSKY, Ivan (1889-1960). Sokolyansky was born into a Cossack peasant’s family in the Kuban. He received an elementary education in his village and graduated from the Kuban Teacher’s College. In 1908, after receiving a matriculation certificate, he entered the Education Department of the School of Natural History at the St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, from which he graduated in 1913.

p Sokolyansky received further training in the field of studies of the handicapped at the Mariinsky Educational Courses in the department for the education and instruction of deaf mutes. He took a course in experimental psychology under Professor Lazursky and Professor BogdanovBeresovsky. Lagovsky was also among his teachers. Sokolyansky studied education of the blind under Professor Krogius. He attended lectures by outstanding Russian physiologists Vvedensky, Bekhterev and Pavlov.

p He began his career as a teacher while still an undergraduate. Between 1910 and 1919, he taught at a school for deaf mutes. He wrote his first works on special education and public education during that period.

p His involvement in revolutionary activities resulted in his being blacklisted and exiled to the Vologda Region.

p After the October Revolution of 1917, Sokolyansky worked with tremendous energy to set up new Soviet schools. At that time there was no educational journal or newspaper of any significance in the Ukraine to which he did not contribute.

p The articles he published—“On Education" (1917), “Misfortune or Social Crime" (1920), “Handicapped Children in the System of Social Education" (1923), “On the Behaviour of the Personality" (1925), “The School and the Children’s Movement" (1925), “Dire Legacy" (1925), “The Children’s Movement, the School and the Teacher" (1925), “The Problem of Organising Behaviour" (1926)—evoked great public response.

p In 1919, Sokolyansky organised a school for deaf-mute children in the town of Uman. In 1920, the Ukrainian Minister of Education appointed him Associate Professor of Education of the Deaf and Psychology at the Special 303 Education Department of the Public Education Institute in Kiev. In 1923, he joined the Kharkov Public Education Institute, and in 1926 was appointed Professor of the Handicapped Studies Department at that Institute and Dean of the Special Education Department.

p Immediately after the October Revolution, Sokolyansky became involved in work with homeless children and was appointed officer of the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and later inspector of institutions for handicapped children.

p He founded a network of educational institutes for handicapped children in the Ukraine shortly after the establishment of Soviet government. On his initiative, joint medical and educational centres were set up to coordinate all the research in studies of the handicapped.

p Sokolyansky was among the organisers of the Educational Research Institute in the Ukraine. In 1926 he became the director of that institute and head of the department for the study of the handicapped. In 1930, Sokolyansky became the first director of the newly organised Research Institute for the Study of the Handicapped in Kharkov.

p During these years, he held other leading posts in the system of education of handicapped children and wrote articles on special education that are still relevant today: “On So-Called Lip Reading in Deaf Mutes" (1925), “ Articulation Schemes in the Receptive and Effective Speech of Deaf Mutes" (1926), “On the Method of Teaching Oral Speech to Deaf Mutes" (1930), to mention but a few.

p Sokolyansky’s research and educational activity in studies of the handicapped was wide-ranging. He was a major specialist in the education of deaf children. His works on the teaching deaf mutes their native language, lip-reading, and the speech regime of the deaf were very important for the general development of the social education of deaf mutes. In these studies, he did not confine himself to specific questions of the education of deaf mutes. His work was aimed at improving the whole system of education for handicapped children. His works in education of the blind are known to those who work with the handicapped. Sokolyansky constantly took on the most difficult cases in special education. He developed individual methods of education for persons not covered by the existing system of public education. For example, he developed a manual for 304 individual instruction of adult deaf mutes living in rural areas and a special primer for schools for adult deaf mutes. On his initiative, a school-and-clinic for deaf, dumb, and blind children was set up in Kharkov.

p That institution was visited by delegates to an international congress of physiologists. According to their comments in the visitors’ book, the clinic for the deaf, dumb, and blind was an outstanding research institution in Soviet and international science... “An institution like the one in Kharkov could hardly be found anywhere else in the world,” they wrote.

p Sokolyansky’s work with deaf, dumb, and blind children attracted Gorky’s attention. In his letters to Sokolyansky and Skorokhodova, the great writer stressed the signficance of that work.

p In 1939, at the invitation of the RSFSR Ministry of Education, Sokolyansky came to work at the Moscow Special Schools Research Institute (now the Institute for the Study of the Handicapped of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy), where he resumed his work on the problems of teaching the dead, dumb, and blind.

It was characteristic of Sokolyansky’s activities as a scholar and educator that he constantly used the latest technical achievements in the instruction of deaf, dumb, and blind, deaf-mute, and blind children. He had himself invented some valuable technical equipment for use in these fields: the Braille screen for deaf mutes (1941), the mechanical primer and others. He developed an ordinary-script reading machine for blind, and deaf, dumb, and blind persons. See his articles: “The Blind Can Read Any Book" (1936), “A New Method of Reading for the Blind”, “On the Reading of Flat Script by the Blind and Deaf, Dumb and Blind" (1956). Various teletactors designed and suggested by him are now indispensable instruments in the instruction of the deaf, dumb, and blind. Sokolyansky worked fruitfully in that field until his last days.