The Pavlovs’ time of troubles was over, and what Serafima would later call “the happiest time in our life” began.1 Delivered unexpectedly from the professional wilderness, Pavlov was now, suddenly, both assistant professor of pharmacology at the venerable Military-Medical Academy and chief of the Physiology Division at the new, bountifully funded IEM. The dissenters regarding that first appointment were correct on one count: he was not a pharmacologist, but a committed physiologist—and he would make the fine facilities at the IEM the center of his work and life.
He was fairly exploding with ideas, energy, and ambition. The wilderness years had provided ample opportunity to contemplate how he might use the modern facilities and plentiful coworkers of Ludwig’s lab in Leipzig, how he might organize research if the themes did not “come from Botkin” and were not “entirely incoherent.” His new research on the nervous control of the digestive glands would provide the theme for numerous lines of investigation. “I am thinking of immediately chopping off a large area and then will begin cultivating it in detail,” he had written excitedly to Serafima in 1888. The resources he had acquired would not merely facilitate but transform this quest. He became creator and master of his own physiology factory, an enterprise that harnessed his scientific ideas and management style to plentiful resources (perhaps most importantly, to the skilled hands of his coworkers), catapulting him in little more than a decade into the uppermost ranks of Russian and international science.
He himself was transformed—not merely as a physiologist, but as a man. Viewed from afar, the Pavlov of the 1890s was the antithesis of the undisciplined and unfocused procrastinator of the previous decade, the man who preached the virtues of self-discipline and the systematized life but who was easily distracted, pursuing his research erratically and complaining constantly to his wife that it was not his fault.
Central to the sudden emergence of this new Pavlov was the industrial system that he created in his lab at the IEM. That lab would produce an avalanche of products—discoveries, generalizations, publications, techniques and methodologies, bodily fluids for his colleagues’ research and the treatment of dyspepsia—but its first and most important creation was this transformed Pavlov himself. As its animating intelligence and omnipresent hands-on manager, Pavlov came to embody the virtues that he had long preached—those espoused by Samuel Smiles and exemplified (in Pavlov’s idealized image) by both the modern factories of Russia’s industrial revolution and the digestive system that he studied: in every dimension of his life, he too became purposeful and pravil’nyi.
No person, of course, is completely transformed at age forty-one, but conditions, conjunctures, traumas, and new prospects can profoundly rearrange the parts and the relationship between them. Pavlov now possessed the resources to live and work according to ideals that he had long honored in the breach—ideals that must have seemed desperately desirable after the long years of punishing privation and chaos, of the indignities of constantly petitioning for undesirable minor positions, of watching time slip away as younger physiologists acquired their own labs and professional standing. “My time and strength are not spent as productively as they should be,” he had lamented as an ambitious and still self-confident underachiever at age forty, “because it is not at all the same to work alone in somebody else’s laboratory as to work with students in one’s own.” Responding years later to a eugenicist’s inquiry, he noted that he possessed “strong healthy energy in the pursuit of a goal once it was placed before me.” With his appointment to the Institute, he had both that goal and the means to pursue it.2
Serafima was of the same mind. Finally delivered from a grueling, sometimes nightmarish decade, physically and mentally exhausted, with her faith in her husband vindicated, she was determined to live a well-ordered and comfortable domestic life constructed around her spouse’s scientific mission. As in his lab, the structures, rules and habits of their domestic existence emerged almost full-blown in 1890–1891, testimony to long-nurtured dreams of the life well lived. Theirs was the orderly, comfortable existence of St. Petersburg’s prosperous professionals—raising a growing family in a spacious, well-located apartment, summering with family and friends at their countryside dacha, and combining business and pleasure in trips to Western Europe.
These happy years coincided with Russia’s rapid development along the contradictory path set by Tsar Alexander II’s Great Reforms of the 1860s. For all the differences between the Tsar Liberator and his two successors, Alexander III (1881–1894) and Nicholas II (1894–1917), the tsarist system continued its development along the lines of authoritarian reform. The economic, industrial, and military strength of the empire increased, along with the extension of limited freedoms in the cultural realm—but within the traditional authoritarian political order. Encouraged by the policies of two powerful ministers of finance, Ivan Vyshnegradskii and Sergei Witte, Russia underwent an industrial revolution about a century after England’s had begun. In the 1890s, the country doubled its miles of railway track, more than tripled its coal production, and increased its production of iron and steel more than eightfold. The Trans-Siberian Railway opened vast regions to settlement and exploitation and brought Russian capital and influence to the doorstep of its rapidly developing neighbor to the East, Japan. Factories sprouted in the empire’s largest cities (particularly in St. Petersburg)—large factories of the most modern type. Vyshnegradskii’s policies created a favorable trade balance, in large part through the export of grain—“We may not eat enough, but we will export,” he announced.3
Vyshnegradskii, of course, ate quite well, but many Russians did not, most dramatically during the great famine of 1891 precipitated in part by his policies. Boom times in the 1890s created a new group of Russian entrepreneurs, but brought no prosperity to the great majority, peasants and workers, who remained mired in appalling conditions. A single worker could survive on his factory wages (often making ends meet by sharing with his coworkers one of the city’s many flooded cellars), but if he had a family, his wife and children labored long, dangerous hours as well. Mass poverty and powerlessness combined with the low priority placed by the state on public health to make turn-of-the-century Russia Europe’s leader in infant mortality (roughly 50 percent mortality in the first five years of life) and almost every serious infectious disease.
Yet, as was evident to inhabitants of St. Petersburg, the middle class was growing, educational institutions and the country’s student body were expanding (even amid periods of political reaction), and Russian science and art were flourishing as never before. The signs of prosperity were evident on Nevskii Prospekt, where an increasing number of restaurants, cafés, and stores—such as the Eliseev gourmet food shop—catered to bourgeois tastes. The new entrepreneurs—such as the Tret’iakov brothers—patronized the arts and, together with the expanding urban middle class, fueled the market for Russia’s cultural Silver Age at the turn of the century.
Modernization was evident in ways big and small. Dmitrii Mendeleev, in his capacity as chief of Russia’s Bureau of Weights and Measures, noted that the relatively primitive “manufactory,” in which raw material was subjected to mere mechanical changes, was yielding to the modern “factory,” which deployed the chemical processes devised by science to achieve more profound “molecular transformations.” Russia’s first telephone line in 1882 linked the tsar’s residences at the Winter Palace and Gatchina, the first intercity line joined St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1898, by the mid-1890s about 4,000 St. Petersburgers had private lines, and by 1911 these numbered more than 50,000. The capital’s lesser streets were still illuminated by kerosene, but central avenues boasted gas lamps, and from 1892 the heart of Nevskii Prospekt glowed with electrical light. Residents of the better apartment buildings now summoned the doorman with electrical buzzers, celluloid began to replace ivory in everyday objects, and, to much hullabaloo, St. Petersburg’s firefighters posed proudly in 1904 atop their first motorized vehicle. A few years later, electrical trams began to replace horse-drawn carriages on the main streets.
The existence of a Russian proletariat was now beyond dispute. Concentrated in large factories to a much greater degree than their counterparts in the West, urban workers were increasingly restive and militant. Almost 90,000 workers participated in some 500 strikes across the country in 1903, by which time nearly half a million had participated in at least one strike during their working lives.4 Russia’s populists, who placed their wager for a socialist future on the collective instincts of the peasantry (which still constituted some 70 percent of the population), were now joined on the left by the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which identified the industrial proletariat as the bearer of a new order.
For most socially concerned Russians, however, the 1890s, like the previous decade, was a time of “small deeds” and impotent frustration at the monopoly of political power by the tsar and the omnipresent bureaucracy that presumably worked his will. That bureaucracy exercised a stranglehold over much of daily life: a professor who wanted to deliver a public lecture, take a vacation, or leave the country required written permission from the appropriate bureaucrat, and visitors to his apartment needed to register with the ubiquitous janitors who stood guard at the building’s entrance and reported suspicious goings-on to the authorities.
Neither Alexander III nor Nicholas II proved well equipped to tackle the explosive contradictions of authoritarian modernization. They shared an unbending commitment to the culture and traditions of autocracy, a belief that the tsar’s relationship to the people was that of father to child, and an inability to distinguish between dissent and treason. Each combined distrust, even hatred, of the intelligentsia (“How repulsive I find that word,” Nicholas II once exclaimed) with a lack of intellectual curiosity and an inability to grasp the import of changes in their realm and to learn the political skills necessary to deal with them.
Having become tsar upon the assassination of his father, Alexander III relentlessly hunted down and destroyed revolutionary organizations, and was unyielding in suppression of dissent. Unlike his father (whom Pavlov likened to a “scared crow”), Alexander III suffered just one attempt on his life: a botched effort of 1887 for which all the conspirators, including Lenin’s older brother, were hanged. The tsar considered democracy a “fatal error” and rolled back his father’s reforms in many areas. He pursued an aggressive policy of Russification of the empire’s various national groups and was vehemently anti-Semitic. He was also the only modern tsar to avoid military conflict throughout the years of his reign.
When Alexander III died suddenly in 1894, his son Nicholas II ascended unexpectedly—and totally unprepared—to the throne. He would doubtless have made a contented country squire, but was utterly unsuited to govern an increasingly complex society during tumultuous times. Industrialization and the growing working-class movement, complex diplomacy and then wars with Japan and the Central Powers, the expansion of civil society and demands for political freedoms and a constitution, the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath—during which the autocracy had perhaps one last chance to negotiate a new contract with civil society—none of these developments left a trace in Nicholas’s copious diaries nor any other evidence that he struggled seriously to comprehend them. Lacking personal drive and vision, he was a narrow-minded, prejudiced man with a particular animus against Jews and intellectuals. Upon assuming the throne, he disabused hopeful reformers of their “senseless dreams,” announcing his determination to “maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as did my unforgettable father.”5 Forced to make concessions under the impossible pressure of events in 1905, he sought to reassert traditional autocratic prerogatives thereafter.
The Pavlovs, then, embarked upon their new life at a time of great dynamism and vitality in the life of their city—a time of industrial development, modernization, entrepreneurialism, and explosive creativity in the arts—but also of unyielding autocratic policies that created a pervasive sense of despair and passivity among reformers and much of the intelligentsia.
Russians in the 1890s still read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, of course, but the literary giant of the decade was Anton Chekhov. In such works as Ward 6, The Seagull, Lady with a Dog, and Uncle Vania, Chekhov sensitively and affectionately portrayed Russians who were generally honest and kind, but also wearily passive, ineffective, disengaged, and helpless in the face of obstacles that condemned even their modest hopes to disappointment.
Pavlov stood out as a dramatically non-Chekhovian type. Constantly moving with his swift stride according to a strict schedule, unswervingly committed to his science, he was not only a charismatic and effective lab manager but also a role model who embodied energetic optimism and Smilesian industrial culture. Boris Babkin later described this dimension of the chief’s appeal:
I myself and surely many of my colleagues in the laboratory are indebted to Pavlov for steering us away from the spineless and fatalistic approach to life which was a legacy of the dull and gloomy people of the eighties and nineties.... And here it must be added that he was a Russian, and not a German or other foreigner [that is, a Jew], whose strength of will Russian authors liked to contrast with the weakness of the Russian character.... Daily contact with such a man as Pavlov taught young people to battle with circumstances and not give in to them. It taught them to advance steadfastly toward their goal and to find happiness in austere labor, and not by dreaming, like poor Sonia in Uncle Vania, that our reward for an unhappy life will come only after death.6
Pavlov’s dynamic purposefulness was manifest in the daily and annual routines that he adopted immediately upon assuming his positions at the Academy and the IEM and to which, with only minor adjustments, he adhered in subsequent years. One could almost set one’s watch by him. He arose at 7:30 or 8 and had tea. As he left home, Serafima put a napkin with food in his coat pocket (French rolls with butter and perhaps some morsel from last evening’s dinner) and checked to see that he had ten kopecks for transportation (should he choose to take a carriage rather than walking). Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays he arrived at his IEM lab promptly at 9:00; Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays he lectured mornings at the Academy, remaining for twenty minutes afterwards to consult with students and coworkers before walking briskly to the Institute, where he arrived by noon. (On Saturdays, he remained at the Academy longer for faculty meetings.) He worked in the lab until 5:30, then sped home by foot to arrive for dinner at precisely 6:00. Uplifted by the day’s work, he arrived home energetic and cheerful, engaging enthusiastically in conversation. After dinner, he rested on the divan in his living room, rising in an hour or so to brew tea from a samovar that had been set steaming. This was the time that visitors were welcome for brief, usually work-related conversation. After they left, he would either return to his lab or read in his study for two or three hours. A steaming samovar and brewed tea awaited him at evening’s end. He drank two cups with some white bread before retiring at about 1:00 a.m.7
During the 1890s and 1900s, systematizing a practice that he had acquired in Leipzig, he spent one evening each week in rigorous gymnastics. Saturdays were for entertaining friends and other guests, and the unvarying centerpiece of Sunday evenings was a card game, durachki (“little fools”), with friends. He often visited his lab at the IEM on Sunday mornings or holidays, returning to the holiday table at noon.
His annual schedule was equally pravil’nyi. Every year in early June, when his teaching duties at the Academy ended, he boarded a train for his beloved country home in Sillamiagi (now Sillamäe, Estonia), where he remained until late August. Here, too, he adopted an unvarying routine designed to compensate for the imbalances of urban life, restore harmony to his mind and body, and prepare him to return, refreshed and eager, to his scientific labors in St. Petersburg.
Pavlov was happiest when his life moved smoothly and precisely along these daily and annual schedules—when he entered the lecture hall at exactly 9:00, when he reached his lab just as the cannon at the Peter and Paul Fortress announced the noon hour, when the family sat for dinner at 6:00 sharp, and when the card players who assembled Sunday evenings at his apartment knocked on his door at precisely 9:00 p.m. In the lab, at home, and at “rest” in the countryside, he sought, loved, and required regularity, precision, and a sense of purposefulness, balance and control.