The long years of suffering, separation, and insecurity ended in spring 1890 when Pavlov was offered three faculty positions. Yet he could hardly view this good fortune as vindication in his beloved physiology—for he was now to be an assistant professor ... of pharmacology.
The first two appointments are scantily documented. On January 29, 1890, Florinskii informed Delianov that he intended to appoint Pavlov assistant professor of pharmacology at Tomsk University—and made reference to the “laudatory references” collected earlier for the vacancy in physiology. Delianov approved the appointment routinely. At about the same time, Pavlov was offered an assistant professorship in pharmacology at Warsaw University, but he and Serafima preferred the post in Siberia.1
St. Petersburg, however, would be ideal—and the Pavlovs refrained from packing their bags while a stormy selection process played out there. A vacancy at the Military-Medical Academy had appeared unexpectedly in January 1890 when professor of pharmacology P. P. Sushchinskii resigned to become State Commissar of the rapidly expanding Caucasian Mineral Waters complex. The heir apparent was his longtime assistant and lecturer in pharmacology, S. A. Popov. Three professors, however, sponsored Pavlov’s candidacy, including professor of botany and experimental plant physiologist A. F. Batalin and otolaryngologist D. I. Koshlakov, the Botkin protégé who had served on Pavlov’s doctoral committee.
Pavlov’s third and most forceful sponsor was neither a friend nor an admirer: professor of physiology Ivan Tarkhanov, who apparently supported Pavlov from a commitment to physiology as a discipline and belief in its mission as the basis of scientific medicine. Like another key supporter, Pashutin, he portrayed Pavlov as an agent for physiology’s scientific reformation of pharmacology—and both radically revised their earlier opinions of the candidate to this end. Academy physicians also viewed Pavlov as one of their own by virtue of his medical education and supervision of clinically oriented research in the Botkin lab. The Pavlovs’ good friend and professor of eye diseases Vladimir Dobrovol’skii also played a key role in mobilizing faculty support.
A five-member commission that included Koshlakov, Tarkhanov, and Pashutin reported to the faculty on April 12 that both candidates were worthy, but tilted strongly toward Pavlov. The report characterized Popov tepidly as “a prepared and experienced teacher”—faint praise indeed at the country’s leading medical research center. Pavlov, on the other hand, “commands attention by his subtle experimental-physiological investigations and has supervised many physiological works produced by Prof. Botkin’s students. Without question, privatdozent Pavlov will develop into an outstanding pharmacologist when he devotes his activity especially to this subject.” In the faculty vote on April 24, Pavlov won easily with seventeen votes for and five against, while assessments of Popov split evenly, eleven to eleven.2
One of Popov’s supporters, professor of chemistry Nikolai Sokolov, was so outraged that he appealed to the full faculty at a May 7 meeting to overturn the appointment as a breach of Academy regulations. These required a professor to have published works in the field to which he was appointed, and Pavlov had none. Nor had a single dissertation from the Botkin lab thanked Pavlov for his help with pharmacology—the acknowledgements all referred to his physiological expertise. “Nowhere in our bylaws,” argued Sokolov, “is there any indication that the Academy has the right to appoint a person to a teaching position ... based on the hope that he will over time develop into an outstanding specialist in this or that department.” Furthermore, Academy bylaws required that a candidate without teaching experience in the subject for which he was being hired must read trial lectures to the faculty. That Pavlov had not done so was curious and improper.3
Tarkhanov swept aside Sokolov’s objections in a powerful rebuttal. Pavlov had produced several works of “great pharmacological interest” and had supervised fourteen published dissertations “relating directly to pharmacology.” His own research had demonstrated the action of various pharmacological substances upon the pancreas and heart. Were these not pharmacological works? He “has studied the influence of atropine, curare, and Tinctura Convallariae majalis on the various organs of the body, and, due to his fundamental training in physiology, by means of extremely complex and subtle experiments—only rarely accessible to pharmacologists without physiological training—has discovered a series of valuable pharmacological facts worthy of pharmacological textbooks.” Tarkhanov also expressed a newfound admiration for the candidate’s contributions to physiology. When evaluating them in 1885 for a prize competition, he had torpedoed Pavlov’s hopes with a savage twenty-page critique. Now, he praised them as “important.”4
Pavlov’s other allies now weighed in. Manassein, who had voted yes on both Pavlov and Popov, emphasized that Pavlov deserved the credit for all physiological and pharmacological works completed in Botkin’s lab. Pavlov’s constant contact with the clinic (which was “very important for a pharmacologist”) and his impressive scientific credentials would make him an invaluable faculty member.5
Pashutin, who had just become the Academy’s first faculty-elected president, used the example of his own life to rebut questions about Pavlov’s qualifications for a faculty position in pharmacology. Having himself earlier denied those qualifications in his evaluation of Pavlov for Delianov, he now, like Tarkhanov, changed his tune, emphasizing that “physiology has such a close connection with pharmacology that a correct scientific framing of pharmacological questions, and their elucidation, is based exclusively on the laws of physiology.” Pashutin himself had been trained in physiology before his appointment as professor of pathology at Kazan University, a position he had assumed without having to prove himself with trial lectures. “The results,” observed the Academy’s new president (with no fear of contradiction), “demonstrated that this teaching was not unsuccessful.” Sokolov was isolated in his dissent, and Pavlov’s appointment was overwhelmingly confirmed.6
Over the summer, the new professor of pharmacology composed his lectures on “Pharmacology, Hydrotherapy, Balneology, and the Prescription of Medicines,” which he delivered to third-year medical students in the fall. For his assistant, he chose his close friend David Kamenskii, whose credentials in pharmacology were impeccable. In November, Serafima gave birth to a daughter, Vera, and the Pavlovs exchanged their four-room apartment for the building’s most desirable flat—six high-ceilinged, airy rooms with a private entrance and large windows overlooking Vvedenskaia Square. A stroke of unexpected good fortune had brought them in from the cold; an even less likely and more propitious turn of events was just around the corner.
In his alternately hopeful and anguished letters of 1888–1889, Pavlov had not even mentioned a minor task that had come his way through Botkin: service on the organizing committee of a bacteriological institute planned by a modernizing, famously energetic and idiosyncratic member of the tsarist family.
Prince Alexander Petrovich Ol’denburgskii was heir to a rich philanthropic tradition and the networks it spawned. His grandfather, a member of the venerable Holstein-Gottorp family, had married the daughter of Tsar Paul I. His father, Prince Petr Georgievich Ol’denburgskii, was an enlightened member of the gentry who served in various state bodies and oversaw a network of educational and medical institutions. Prince Alexander Ol’denburgskii had inherited some of his father’s positions, and, with his equally engaged wife, Princess Evgeniia Maksimilianovna Ol’denburgskaia, also struck out in his own direction.
The prince’s effectiveness rested not only on his court connections and financial resources, but also on his forceful personality and his talent for extracting money from influential personages in the government, including the tsar himself. Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who lost many budgetary battles with the prince, noted his ability to persuade high-ranking officials to “agree to the payment of hundreds of thousands of rubles from the state purse, if only to rid themselves of him.” He could also be quite charming, eliciting this description by one foreign visitor of 1886: “With a still-youthful appearance, he was large, with an open and sympathetic appearance—amiable, but commanding respect.”7
Ol’denburgskii enjoyed a close working relationship with Botkin as a result of their mutual connections to the tsarist court and various medical activities. It made good sense, then, for the prince to include a member of Botkin’s network on the organizing committee for his new venture, a bacteriological institute modeled after the Pasteur Institute that was being created to great fanfare in Paris. Pavlov’s good relations with Manassein, the Botkin protégé who edited Russia’s leading medical journal, Physician, was another resource that Ol’denburgskii might put to good use to appeal to a medical community that was increasingly assertive about its professional territory and skeptical of an amateur’s initiative. It made good sense, too, for Pavlov to ignore his membership on this committee while contemplating his future prospects during the desperate years of 1888–1889, since there was no reason to suspect that he might find professional salvation in a bacteriological institute of uncertain future.
Prince Ol’denburgskii’s commitment to building a bacteriological institute had originated when a rabid dog, Pluto, bit one of his officers in St. Petersburg’s Corps of Guards. Pasteur had just announced his treatment for rabies, and Ol’denburgskii dispatched his wounded officer to Paris, together with the military physician N. A. Kruglevskii, whom the prince charged with studying Pasteur’s techniques and acquiring a sample of his vaccine. Kruglevskii returned empty-handed (Pasteur would agree only later to share his vaccine), but the Prince had Kh. I. Gel’man, the veterinarian attached to the Preobrazhenskii regiment, make an emulsion from Pluto’s brain and follow Pasteur’s procedure of passing the “poison” through a series of rabbits. Ol’denburgskii financed the construction of a small anti-rabies station in his division’s veterinary clinic, and that facility was soon engaged not only in the treatment of patients, but also in medical investigations by Gel’man and eminent syphilologist Eduard Shperk on various infectious diseases in animals.8
When the French launched a fundraising drive for Pasteur’s institute, Ol’denburgskii brought the tsar’s contribution to Paris along with his own gift of a malachite vase. The tsar’s donation expressed his gratitude for the many Russian rabies victims—the largest contingent of foreign patients—that Pasteur had treated. But Pasteur’s refusal to share his vaccine, and the leak of his impolitic suggestion that Russian rabies victims should thereafter make haste for Paris (“from Siberia?” Physician commented incredulously), outraged the national pride of Russian physicians. Surely, Physician editorialized, the Russian state would do better to construct its own institute, especially as Prince Ol’denburgskii had already used his personal resources to build the foundations of one.9
Thus inspired, and encouraged by the expanding operations of his rabies station, the prince began in late 1888 to lay the groundwork for a Russian bacteriological institute by inviting Il’ia Mechnikov, the expatriate zoologist-pathologist renowned for his phagocytic theory of inflammation, to become its director. Mechnikov, however, declined.
Undeterred, the prince dispatched Kraiushkin and Gel’man to study relevant institutions in the West and requested permission from Tsar Alexander III to establish an institute similar to the projected Pasteur Institute in Paris and Koch’s Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. The tsar agreed in November 1888, but stipulated that the facility would have to subsist without state funding. Ol’denburgskii addressed a separate request to the Ministry of the Imperial Court and Domains—from which the royal family routinely funded its philanthropic pursuits—and in April 1889 received a credit of 200,000 rubles to be spent over twenty years on the construction of a “bacteriological station.” Given the prince’s ambitions, this was a mere pittance (he had in mind not a “station” but an “institute”), nor did the Ministry provide for the annual costs of the facility he envisioned, so he added his own funds and looked toward a future when he might reverse the tsar’s decision and place his facility on the state payroll.10
Following Pasteur’s example, he chose a spacious location on the outskirts of the city, purchasing more than 37,000 square meters of land on St. Petersburg’s outlying Aptekarskii (Pharmacist’s) Island. The extensive compound that arose on Lopukhinskaia Street included a large building to house the Institute’s labs and others for employee apartments, a machine shop, diseased animals, and patients.
Finding suitable scientists, however, was a problem, and Ol’denburgskii made choices calculated to build relations with the court, the key state ministry, and a skeptical medical community. He chose as the Institute’s director Vasilii Anrep, a distinguished physiologist with excellent court and ministerial connections who occupied the medical community’s preeminent bureaucratic post as scholarly secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affair’s Medical Council. The organizing committee that the prince chose to assist Anrep was largely bacteriological in orientation: M. I. Afanas’ev, an accomplished European-trained investigator of infectious disease who was director of the Clinical Institute of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, a professor at the Military-Medical Academy, and clinician at the city’s main military hospital; A. V. Pel’, a biological chemist and member of the state’s Medical Council; Gel’man, Kraiushkin, and Shperk from the rabies station; and Pavlov.11
In fall 1890, with the physical construction of the institute largely completed, the prince moved to phase two: winning it a permanent place on the state payroll. Just as he had earlier capitalized on Pasteur’s rabies vaccine, he now moved quickly to exploit the announcement of another miracle of medical science—tuberculin, Robert Koch’s treatment for nonpulmonary tuberculosis. His plan was simple: invite the tsar to stroll through the impressive grounds and facilities, and use a demonstration of Koch’s cure to dramatize the great blessings that the new bacteriological institute, if properly funded, could bestow upon Russia. This strategy proved successful in one way and catastrophic in another—and, unforeseeably, it radically transformed the very nature of the prince’s institute and Pavlov’s place in it.
Prince Ol’denburgskii apparently pressured his medical advisors to obtain quickly the positive clinical results needed to impress the tsar. On November 8, 1890, Physician reported that the prince had dispatched Anrep to Berlin to familiarize himself with Koch’s latest discovery. Three days later, Anrep regaled a Sunday evening audience at the Institute with his positive impressions of the first patients treated with tuberculin in Berlin. “It turns out,” enthused a medical reporter, “that a truly positive result is obtained at the present time only when the new substance is used on patients with lupus and various tubercular illnesses of the bones, joints, and glands. In such cases one cannot doubt the brilliant results of the treatment.” Anrep then proceeded in the audience’s presence to inject three female lupus suffers with tuberculin, and the Institute promised a prompt report on the final results.12
There soon followed, however, an announcement of an entirely different character: Physician reported tersely that “We have heard that the director of the Bacteriological Institute, V. K. Anrep, has resigned his post. Undoubtedly a terrible loss for the Institute.”13
Three days later, on November 24, Tsar Alexander III paid a visit to the Institute and, much impressed, he accepted it as a “gift.” “A fervent sympathy for the suffering,” the tsar wrote thereafter to Prince Ol’denburgskii, “has inspired in you the idea of building in Petersburg an institution for scientific investigations of the most important questions arising in contemporary medicine about new means to treat many serious ailments that were previously considered untreatable.” The prince had clearly spared neither effort nor expense, and his Institute was destined to occupy “a prominent place among institutions devoted to the protection of the people’s health.” As a sign of goodwill, the tsar accepted the Institute as imperial property and decreed that the prince serve as its trustee, “in the conviction that, with the assistance of our best national scientific forces, you will assure it a future corresponding to My intentions and your desires.” Thus was the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine (IEM) born and assured of state funding.14
The tsar’s reference to “our best national scientific forces” captured an important element of the context in which Prince Ol’denburgskii was operating. Alexander III had fashioned a distinctive, personalized monarchical style expressing conservative nationalism. The economic modernization of Russia continued—indeed accelerated greatly—at the same time as the tsar emphasized the special traits of the Russian people and the spiritual connection between himself and the people. Dependent on state patronage and himself a member of the royal family, Prince Ol’denburgskii was of course sensitive to the values of his sovereign, and would be constantly reminded of them while creating the IEM.15
The success of the tsar’s visit and Anrep’s abrupt resignation seem both to have resulted from the same event: the rapid reporting by the prince’s medical team of favorable results in the treatment of lupus with tuberculin. On the day after the tsar’s visit, Physician received a bulletin from Prince Ol’denburgskii detailing the positive effects of tuberculin on the Institute’s three patients. This report, with which the tsar had no doubt been regaled during his visit—inspiring his reference to “new means to treat many serious ailments that were previously considered untreatable”—was signed by Shperk, the Ol’denburgskiis’s physician Pavel Khizhin, and two physicians whom Pavlov had supervised in Botkin’s lab and recruited to supervise the tuberculin trials.16
One of these physicians was David Kamenskii, Pavlov’s friend and assistant in the Department of Pharmacology at the Military-Medical Academy. Kamenskii later recalled that Ol’denburgskii was extremely eager for his Institute to acquire a world reputation by concluding the first clinical investigations of tuberculin. Pavlov participated actively in that effort—recruiting the necessary physicians and delivering supplies of tuberculin from the Institute to the Kalinkin Hospital, where Shperk was senior physician and the trials were conducted. Patients injected with the substance responded as Koch had reported: their temperature rose sharply, their faces glowed, and their respiration and pulse quickened; after which the face become red and swollen. After a day or two, these symptoms disappeared and, Kamenskii recalled, “It seemed to us that tuberculin actually was a good specific remedy for lupus. But E. F. Shperk turned out to be more competent than were we: he photographed these patients when they were brought to the Institute. When we photographed them again one month later, everybody saw that tuberculin had produced no benefits, and the treatment of lupus with tuberculin was terminated.”17
By that time, however, the deed was done. However prescient Shperk appears in Kamenskii’s account, he did sign—perhaps in deference to the prince—the report about the therapeutic benefits of tuberculin that had so impressed the tsar. So did Pavlov’s friends from the Botkin lab, Kamenskii and Kudrevetskii.
Others, including Anrep, however, did not—and a conflict over this episode no doubt precipitated the eminent physiologist’s abrupt resignation as director on the very eve of the tsar’s visit. Afanas’ev and Pel’ followed suit, leaving a much-depleted and generally undistinguished committee—Shperk, Pavlov, Gel’man, and Kraiushkin—to set the Institute’s course. These resignations severely damaged the Institute’s reputation within the medical community, making it all the more difficult to fulfill the tsar’s charge to recruit “the best national scientific forces.” Physician never commented explicitly on the tuberculin incident, but one week after Anrep’s resignation it observed that recent studies of the substance were “distinguished by a haste that is incomprehensible to clinicians who are not enthusiasts.”18
Discredited within the medical community, Ol’denburgskii became increasingly dependent on the remaining loyalists on his organizing committee. Pavlov’s standing with the prince rose quickly. By December 1890, hoping to appoint a director before the upcoming founding ceremony and unable to lure a more distinguished candidate from a skeptical medical community, Ol’denburgskii offered Pavlov the position. Guarded about the Institute’s prospects, uninterested in an administrative post, and having just been appointed assistant professor of pharmacology at the Military-Medical Academy, Pavlov declined. In an expression of increasing skepticism toward the prince’s venture, Physician praised him for doing so.
Pavlov had his eye, instead, on the superbly equipped lab in the Institute’s Physiology Division (which, unlike the directorship, he could acquire without relinquishing his position at the Academy). Anrep had apparently intended the Physiology Division for V. Ia. Danilevskii, Kharkov University’s distinguished professor of physiology, but Danilevskii’s candidacy had evaporated with Anrep’s resignation. (That candidacy may well have been doomed in any case, as Danilevskii was Jewish and so did not qualify by Tsar Alexander III’s definition as a “national scientific force.”) The position became Pavlov’s for the asking—and by late 1890, even before the IEM opened formally, he was using his new physiology lab to supervise a study of the pharmacological action of tuberculin and to pursue an exotic (and, it turned out, pivotal) operation on dogs that he had been unable to implement fully in Botkin’s lab.19
One last important happy contingency was about to break his way, transforming this position in an uncertain venture into the opportunity of a lifetime. This development, too, resulted from the politics of the prince’s venture and the dual consequences of his tuberculin gambit.
Having secured the tsar’s blessing, Ol’denburgskii submitted a plan and budget for the IEM to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Finance—invoking the special needs of experimental investigations and a disease-wracked nation, and deploying his court connections and famously intimidating manner to gain unprecedented salaries and benefits for his facility’s investigators. Pavlov’s salary of 4,000 rubles per year would considerably exceed that of full professors at Tomsk and St. Petersburg universities, where he had only the year before been denied an assistant professorship in physiology. At the same time, the prince struggled to find suitable heads for the IEM’s scientific divisions from within Russia’s skeptical medical community.
In June 1891, one month after approval of the IEM’s budget, Ol’denburgskii began to appoint the chiefs and assistants of its six scientific divisions (Syphilology, Physiology, Pathology-Anatomy, Chemistry, General Microbiology, and Epizootology) and its one “practical division” (Inoculations). Four months later, after a long and fruitless search, he finally settled the directorship upon the most distinguished member remaining on his organizing committee, Eduard Shperk.
Theoretical and practical work in bacteriology occupied more than half of the IEM’s divisions, but this was not the bacteriological institute that the prince had originally envisioned. The departure of Anrep, Afanas’ev, and Pel’; the failure to recruit a leading microbiologist such as Mechnikov; and the political necessity to recruit not foreigners or Jews but rather, as the tsar had decreed, “our best national scientific forces” had forced the prince to create a broader investigative institution than those in Paris and Berlin.
The identity of the division heads also reflected the IEM’s low standing within the Russian medical community and the prince’s failure to recruit the leading lights of Russian medical science. Of those who had been residing in Russia, only Shperk possessed “a European reputation.” Sergei Vinogradskii, whose research on microbiology and nitrification was beginning to win him scientific acclaim, was lured back to Russia from Zurich to head the Division of General Microbiology—and he proved an inspired choice. But Vinogradskii confided to a colleague that the other division chiefs “left much to be desired.” One physician who solicited the advice of a senior colleague about a proffered position at the Institute later recalled that the response was typical of St. Petersburg medical opinion: “You know, it does not take much to build a house and even to paint it in fine white oil paint! One still must choose good personnel and organize things. We will see what comes of it!” Pavlov, too, was wary, confiding to a friend that he would probably remain there only long enough to establish himself financially.20
Ol’denburgskii’s prize catch was Marceli Nencki, who had been born in what is now Poland, participated as a youth in the failed Polish uprising against Russian rule in 1863, and so had been forced to emigrate. At the time of Ol’denburgskii’s overtures, Nencki was chair of the Department of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Bern and a distinguished scientist with interests that ranged broadly from the liver to blood chemistry to the etiology of various diseases. He arrived in St. Petersburg with great clout and big plans, receiving an extra 3,000 rubles annually from the Prince’s discretionary funds and bringing with him from Switzerland not the single assistant allowed other division heads, but two—followed by a stream of foreigners attracted to his lab. Most important, Nencki was accustomed to a spacious lab with a large staff. He rejected the relatively modest facilities originally offered for his Chemistry Division in the single building erected for the Institute’s labs and insisted on a separate, grand one designed, constructed, and equipped to his specifications.
This demand fundamentally changed the very nature of the emerging IEM, transforming it from a set of small scientific workshops into a potential center of large-scale scientific production. In summer 1891, after discussions with Nencki, Prince Ol’denburgskii bought an additional tract of land, doubling the size of the Institute’s grounds. There in 1892 a two-story chemistry facility was erected, followed by new buildings for Pathology-Anatomy, the Inoculations Division, and the Physiology Division. When a new Division of General Pathology was organized in 1894, it, too, acquired its own building. The prince himself initially financed this new construction, but in April 1893 the state allocated 150,000 rubles for expansion and modernization. These funds, Ol’denburgskii wrote gratefully in his report of 1893, had made possible the fundamental transformation of his creation.
The tsar and his ministers, of course, were unlikely to expend such sums simply to satisfy the vanity of a chemistry professor, let alone the desire of his lesser colleagues to have their own buildings as well. Nor would these larger facilities themselves have changed the nature of the Institute. An essential element in both developments was, as Ol’denburgskii put it, the unanticipated “influx of scientific forces wishing to use the Institute’s facilities.” Writing to the minister of finance in March 1893, he boasted: “From the first days of the Institute of Experimental Medicine it turned out that the number of those wishing to work in it exceeded all our initial expectations and assumptions.” This was good public relations, but it was also the truth.21
This new labor force—these praktikanty (the singular is praktikant)—had been created by a medical bureaucracy that sought to modernize Russian medicine by encouraging physicians to study science. Convinced of the military and economic importance of medicine, and persuaded that the progress of Western European medicine rested upon science, the Ministry of Internal Affairs launched a grant program to encourage physicians “to improve themselves scientifically.” Participating physicians were granted a service leave lasting from six months to two years for studies at the Military-Medical Academy, a university medical school, a university clinic, or a hospital close to a university. By the 1890s, the state offered substantial incentives for using this study leave to earn a doctorate in medicine; these included a higher salary and survivor benefits, elevation on the Table of Ranks, preferential hiring to desirable posts in the medical establishment, and, for Jewish physicians, exemption from a number of discriminatory laws. There was, however, one catch: with little training in the sciences, these physicians had a maximum of two years to define, research, complete, and defend a doctoral thesis.
The praktikanty, then, streamed to the IEM in search of scientific expertise and, especially, a quick doctoral degree. More worked in the Chemistry Division than in any other, but by the turn of the century Pavlov’s Physiology Division rivaled Chemistry as the Institute’s primary attraction.
These praktikanty seeking quick doctoral degrees, and the splendid lab facilities built to accommodate them, provided unique resources for division chiefs at the Institute—resources that they used according to their own styles as scientists and managers. They presented Pavlov with an opportunity unprecedented for a Russian physiologist.22
Neither Pavlov nor Serafima possessed a developed sense of irony. If they had, by January 1891, delivered from a grueling decade and basking in their new circumstances, they might have dwelled upon the contradictory consequences of Pavlov’s decision to follow disciplinary convention and go to medical school, the unforeseeable lingering results of the Tsion affair (which had led both to his estrangement from Ovsiannikov and his inclusion in Botkin’s network), the unlikely bedfellows of academic politics, and the unexpected turns of fortune. They might have enjoyed the irony that, had Pavlov triumphed over the mediocre Velikii to become professor of physiology at Tomsk, he would never have acquired the incomparably richer opportunities that, as it turned out, awaited him at the IEM. Pavlov, however, no doubt agreed with his wife that the painful debacle at Tomsk, for example, resulted from simple injustice and bad luck—as an adult he reserved the word sluchainosti for unfortunate accidents and cruel chance—and that his appointments at the Military-Medical Academy and IEM were the overdue rewards for his talents and achievements.