According to Alexander G. Asmolov, “Zankov’s pedagogy is a pedagogy of interesting challenges and, while interesting challenges are life challenges, following Zankov means following vital didactics”. The formation of a major humanistic system of personality development in Russian education is closely connected with the life of its founder, an outstanding scholar, psychologist and educator – Leonid Vladimirovich Zankov (1901-1977). Leonid Zankov was born on 10 (23) April 1901 in Warsaw, in the family of a Russian military officer. He graduated from a Moscow gymnasium in 1916, and almost immediately started his teaching career in a rural school in Tula province. In 1919 Zankov switched to a career of first, a homeroom teacher and then, head of a juvenile agricultural correctional facility in Tambov province. He was only 18 (!) at that time. So from 1920 to 1922 still a very young educator worked as Head of Ostrovnaya juvenile correctional facility in Moscow province from which he was sent back to Moscow to study social sciences at the Moscow State University [2]. It was in Moscow where he had a life-changing meeting with the prominent psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, the meeting that entirely changed and defined Zankov’s professional life. Together with his mentor (who was just 26) Zankov took part in experimental psychological studies focused on memory research. A few years later, in 1925, after his graduation from the Moscow State University, he enrolled in a postgraduate program at the University’s Institute of Psychology where, again supervised by Vygotsky, Zankov continued his memory research together with studies of the psyche and development of children with disabilities.