This situation accounted for the radical and even arrogant nature of the new Marxist psychology. In contrast to static concepts and implicit theories of immutable human nature, domineering in Western psychology, Russian AT, driven by the idea of managing human evolution in order to prove the "bolshevik understanding" of Marxist theory that dominated Soviet discourses after 1920s, focused on the understanding of human as an infinitely changing creature. Culture in humans was considered as first of all the ability to change under the influence of social surroundings, the speed and extent of changes making humans unique among other animals. This entailed a primary focus of ruptures and discontinuities in evolution, first of all, on the principle difference between human and animal (Mironenko, 2009b; 2010). The unity of nature and culture in humans was considered as not only based on affinities, but also on contradictions, and investigations mainly focused on these contradictions, as they were supposed to account for the dialectics of change and development, both cultural and biological.

As repeatedly has been noted in the literature (Castro and Lafuente, 2007; Marsella 2012, Moghaddam 1987, Rose 2008), the 20th с Western psychology developed based on assessments of personality of a human belonging to contemporary Western culture and practices of culturing traits, sought after in Western culture. These psychological characteristics acquired the status of universality in mainstream psychology. Due to the stereotype of taking a western citizen for a human in general, mainstream psychology is dominated by an implicit tendency to blurring boundaries between human culture and human nature and perceiving both as basically static. Culture is regarded here as a kind of superstructure on the foundation of biology, and the unity of nature and culture in humans is considered as somewhat indivisible and forever given and specified.

It should be noted, that in the mainstream the fact is virtually neglected, that commonly quoted Vygotsky counterposed drastically higher mental functions, which he called "cultural", and believed to be specific only for humans, to the "natural" functions, that both humans and animals have. Vygotsky is mainly popular among specialists in "linguistic turn" in cultural psychology, while, perhaps, the most striking example of development of his ideas we find in neuropsychology, in Vygotsky's colleague Luria's theory of dynamic brain localization of higher mental functions (Cole & Wertsch,1996). Luria has proved that unlike "natural" functions, which are linked to specific brain structures, higher mental functions are organized as chains of conditional reflexes, accessible to dynamic transformations and substitutions of brain units. As Galperin, a younger colleague of Vygotsky and Leontiev, stressed, "Vygotsky focused on the influence of the higher (social) mental functions on the development of natural mental functions" (Galperin 1983, p. 241).