Although historians of Russian psychology occasionally mention the bitter squabbles over high school psychology that occurred at major conferences in the 1900s-1910s, they usually present these debates schematically and merely as a side issue, failing to engage with all the difficulties surrounding the introduction of psychology into secondary education. This article aims to fill this gap by examining in some detail both the theory and the practice of studying psychology in Russian secondary schools during the reign of the last two tsars (1881-1917). The author focuses on the complex interactions of teachers, educational theorists, university professors and others who, from a range of divergent perspectives, sought to conceptualize psychology simultaneously as a school subject and as a science. (Contains 101 footnotes.)