Although Vygotsky's approach became the general theoretical foundation of the scientific research and discourse of his Russian colleagues and followers (Elkonin, Galperin, Leontiev, Luria, Zaporozhets, and others), they were far from considering this approach a dogma. For many years after Vygotsky's death, their scientific effort was aimed at overcoming the shortcomings of his approach and elaborating those of his ideas that he had merely sketched.

The starting point of the neo-Vygotskians' analysis was the same as the starting point of Vygotsky's discourse, that is, the difference between the practical activity of humans and animals that results in the difference in their mental processes. Vygotsky (1930) saw the difference between the practical activity of humans and animals in the fact that humans systematically use tools in the course of their activity, whereas animals either do not use such tools or, in the case of apes, use these tools episodically. This view, however, reduced the difference between the use of tools by humans and animals to quantitative differences (systematic vs. episodic use of tools), and it did not explain why the use of tools by humans requires a qualitatively new level of mental processes. In contrast, the neo-Vygotskians have shown qualitative differences between both the use of tools by humans and animals and the structures of animals' and humans' activities and have analyzed as well how these differences lead to differences between mental processes of humans and animals.