Studies of the influence of the Revolution on the language of the masses were common in the USSR in the 1920s, but what is unusual about the work on which this chapter focuses is that while it constitutes one of the most impressive pieces of empirical work about language of the period, it does not originate within the field of philology at all, but from within nascent applied psychology. The Language of the Red Army Soldier (Iazyk krasnoarmeitsa) by Isaak Shpil'rein (1891–1937) and a group of his research assistants from the Psychotechnics Section of the Moscow Institute of Experimental Psychology (Shpil'rein et al, 1928) was published in 1928, but was based on research carried out in 1924–5. It was commissioned by the Agitation Department of the Political Administration of the military Soviet (Politicheskoe Upravlenie Revoliutsionnogo Voennogo Soveta Respubliki, PUR) and analyses the language of worker and peasant conscripts of the Moscow Garrison at various stages of their military careers during which many progressed from almost totally illiterate and untutored raw recruits through two years of intensive training in literacy, basic education, military and political instruction. In order to understand how such a work came to be written, it is important to recognise that in the 1920s, just as sociological linguistics in the USSR was extricating itself from the hold of the neo-grammarians and Völkerpsychologie, according to which language was understood as an aspect of the national-popular spirit or Volksgeist (Brandist 2006), so psychology was extricating itself from physiology and philosophical idealism.