Returning home in late November 19041 with his Nobel Prize in hand, Pavlov enjoyed three weeks of congratulations before Russia plunged into crisis. On December 10, his proud patron, Prince Ol’denburgskii, celebrated the country’s first Nobel Prize winner at a gala dinner in his palace on Mars Field, just a few blocks up Millionnaia Street from the tsar’s Winter Palace. The more than forty celebrants included members of the royal family and leading state officials. Pavlov generally disliked such occasions, but, clearly moved, he thanked the prince with an emotional speech. One week later, a gathering of the Society of Russian Physicians greeted its longtime vice president with a celebratory speech and a noisy ovation.2
Four days later, imperial Russia began to unravel. Along with millions of his stunned countrymen, Pavlov learned that the long-besieged Russian garrison at Port Arthur had surrendered to the Japanese. As had defeat in the Crimean War fifty years earlier, military failure emboldened civil society, legitimated doubts about the tsar and the tsarist system, and ignited long-simmering discontent. In late December and early January 1905, militant oil workers in Baku won Russian workers’ first collective agreement, and strikes spread throughout St. Petersburg.
Russia plunged into revolution on January 9, thereafter known as Bloody Sunday. Led by the enigmatic Father Gapon—populist leader, union organizer, and secretly an agent of the tsarist police—tens of thousands of workers wound their way in a peaceful procession through the city on their way to the Winter Palace bearing a petition with their grievances for presentation to the tsar. “We, the workers and inhabitants of St. Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to Thee, O Sire, to seek justice and protection,” their petition began. Loyally addressing the Tsar as “batiushka” (dear father), the petitioners implored him to end arbitrary bureaucratic rule and relieve their oppression and impoverishment. Soldiers opened fire, killing and wounding hundreds and shocking the nation. Father Gapon exclaimed, “There is no God any longer! There is no tsar!” Millions of Nicholas II’s loyal subjects were loyal no longer, and the country plunged into what the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna christened the “year of nightmares.”3
At age fifty-five, Pavlov was on top of his world—acclaimed at home and abroad, financially secure, patriarch of a family that strove to meet his every need, master of a productive and growing laboratory enterprise, and excited about the new and daring research that, he hoped, would unlock the innermost secrets of the human psyche. Yet he was living on an earthquake fault.
The crisis found Pavlov’s political convictions firmly shaped by his life experiences—by the belief in modernization, Westernization, and scientism imbibed in his youth; by the self-discipline and professional success achieved in his middle age; and by a fierce but complex patriotism. A self-described “Russian liberal,” he venerated freedom of speech and assembly and was deeply critical of religion and the Eastern Orthodox Church.4 Yet his liberalism was tempered by a deep-seated belief in balance and moderation, his dislike and fear of disorder, his total absence of faith in the wisdom of common folk, and his distrust of political formulae. Boris Babkin, who frequently discussed politics with Pavlov, recorded that, for the chief, “England represented the ideal of political organization, where monarchical authority was so notably united with the control of the people and with personal freedom.”5 How, though, was Russia, with its particular history and circumstances, to develop from autocracy to a democratizing constitutional monarchy?
Pavlov had gained an abiding distrust of mass movements and political slogans from two important political events of his adult life. As a university student, he had watched in horror as student demonstrators destroyed his mentor Il’ia Tsion. As a graduate student in 1881, he had been appalled by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (which Pavlov came to blame in large part on the relentless criticism of the tsar and his policies) and by what he perceived as the amorally ambivalent reaction of liberals to that terrible event. Of the political reaction that followed under Tsar Alexander III, Pavlov insisted: “We ourselves created it. We, the youth of the seventies and eighties, yes, and not only the youth, literally hounded Alexander II to death...until this folly led to [his assassination on] the 1st of March.” The successor to the Tsar Liberator, Alexander III, pursued uncompromisingly reactionary policies (for example, intensive Russification, tightened censorship restrictions, and new restrictions on university autonomy), but also presided over an intensifying industrial revolution and an unbroken thirteen years of peace with Russia’s neighbors. Pavlov shared his liberal colleagues’ criticisms of the tsar, but, Babkin recalled, in consideration of his patriotism, “Pavlov forgave Alexander III much, since he too loved and believed in Russia.”6 He was contemptuous of Alexander III’s successor, Nicholas II, whom he characterized as “limited, stupid.” “What a misfortune that such a great body [Russia] has such a small head!” Pavlov commented to his cousin. In later years, he would refer to Nicholas II as a “degenerate.”7
Pavlov’s “state patriotism,” as coworker Georgii Konradi termed it perspicaciously, combined a personal identification with the strength and prestige of the Russian state with his ambivalent feelings about Russians as a national type. On the one hand, he cared deeply about the fate of his homeland and took pride in Russians’ achievements in the arts and sciences; on the other, he worried that the “Russian type” was somehow deficient.8 When among friends or in the lab, Pavlov often expressed himself brusquely about the Russian people. Babkin recalled: “When he was angry at some action of the government or some decision of the Duma, or when he disapproved of some political or social outburst, he would say heatedly: ‘The Frenchman is brilliant and talented; the Englishman is clever and stubborn in attaining his goal; the German is systematic; the American is endowed with a practical mind; but the Russian is merely stupid!”9 Following custom at the Military-Medical Academy, he delivered his first lecture of each academic year on a general topic outside his specialty; in 1908 he devoted this lecture to an impassioned criticism of the “slavishness and lordliness” that plagued Russia and was expressed in the intellectual passivity of his students. As coworker Iurii Frolov put it—using the noun for this passivity that had entered Russian culture with Goncharov’s famous novel—Pavlov “hated ‘Oblomovshchina’ in all its varied manifestations.” Conversely, he took special pleasure when a Russian showed talent and initiative.10
It is not known whether Pavlov shared the general enthusiasm for the Russo-Japanese war at its inception (Minister of Interior Plehve reportedly said that a “small victorious war” would distract the masses from domestic problems) or, rather, the prescience of Prince Ol’denburgskii, who warned that it would prove a serious mistake with “dynastic consequences.” The war drained his lab of its physician-investigators, and at least one of his lab alumni died in it: Andrei Volkovich, who had conducted valuable research on Druzhok and Sultan, perished in December 1904 when the battleship Petropavlovsk was destroyed by a Japanese mine. Whatever his initial attitude, the war aroused Pavlov’s patriotism, and he became preoccupied with the military campaign. Orbeli recalled: “He would come to the laboratory, unroll a map, and begin to place flags marking whether [General] Kuropatkin was advancing or retreating in Manchuria—all this he discussed and suffered very painfully.”11
The news was rarely encouraging. After an eleven-month siege—and about three weeks after Pavlov’s return from Stockholm—Port Arthur fell to the Japanese. Two months later, Russian forces were defeated at Mukden, and several months later suffered a final, decisive rout at the great naval battle of Tsushima, in which the much-vaunted Baltic Fleet was annihilated. On the day that news of the Tsushima disaster broke, Orbeli encountered the chief on Lopukhinskaia Street. Previously convinced that Russia would somehow win the war, Pavlov exploded in fury and despair that “Everything is finished, our navy is sunk, destroyed, smashed!...The rotten government that has led the country to such shame should be overthrown, and this can’t be done other than by a revolution! And now we will get to work. The war is over and...we will return to work.”12 This uncharacteristically radical outburst reflected Pavlov’s extreme distress. For him, losing a war was the supreme sin for a Russian ruler. But any revolutionary sentiments were only momentary. He was a confirmed gradualist, and support for a mass uprising was contrary to his most deep-seated beliefs and instincts.
His equally uncharacteristic flurry of political activity during the political convulsions of 1904–1905 probably owed much to the influence of a new friend he had made at Sillamiagi, Dmitrii Zernov. Eleven years younger than Pavlov, Zernov, too, had abandoned his family’s clerical tradition for studies more appropriate to post-Reform Russia—in his case, technical engineering and applied mechanics. When he met Pavlov in 1902 or 1903, Zernov had just been appointed professor at St. Petersburg’s Technological Institute (where he would soon become director). His technocratic views mirrored Pavlov’s scientism, and he propagandized technological achievements as an active member of the Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge. Sharing also an appreciation for bicycling and gorodki, the pair became fast friends. Unlike Pavlov, Zernov was a committed political activist. Deeply involved in the left-liberal political movement, he became an important member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) and a spur to Pavlov’s occasional flurries of political activity during Russia’s political crises of 1904–1917. 13
After the fall of Port Arthur, Pavlov participated briefly in the “banquet movement” of liberal activists pressing for a constitution. Russian liberals borrowed this tactic from the French banquet campaign in the days before the 1848 revolution. The word “banquet” had a slightly ironic ring, since the food was mediocre at best and, in any case, unimportant. As one participant later recalled, “There, among the fraternity of writers, was clearly heard the gurgling of underground springs. The speeches were very obscure, but every hint was understood and elicited empathetic applause.... One still could not call things aloud by their own names, although many were already bursting to pronounce, to cry out the magisterial word ‘Constitution.’” The banqueters knew that they were under police surveillance, but “we took pride in this. It elevated us in our own eyes.”14
Pavlov also earned a black mark from the tsarist political police for his role in organizing an “illegal union” of professors. Here he was following the lead of Zernov (a central figure in the unionization drive) and the left-liberals around Peter Struve and his Union of Liberation, which envisioned activist professional unions as the logical continuation of the banquet campaign. Lawyers, engineers, physicians, agronomists, teachers, and even students at gymnasia were encouraged to form their own unions, which were then united in the politically potent Union of Unions under the leadership of Pavel Miliukov.15
On the eve of Bloody Sunday, Pavlov was collecting his colleagues’ signatures on a liberal petition and recruiting them for a banquet planned for January 12, 1905. He succeeded during the evening of Saturday, January 8, in coaxing signatures from about fourteen professors. The next day’s massacre transformed the political landscape. On Monday, Pavlov received letters from five of the signatories withdrawing their support “in view of present events,” and the others soon followed. He preserved these letters in his personal papers, probably as a reminder of their moral cowardice. Orbeli later recalled that a furious Pavlov pledged that “I will never go to those liberal meetings, because it is all nonsense.”16
That petition was published on January 20, without the names of Pavlov’s colleagues at the Academy, but with his own, as well as those of his friends Dmitrii Zernov and Alexander Dogel’. (Other signatories included Pavlov’s fellow academicians Andrei Famyntsyn and Sergei Ol’denburg; his colleague at the IEM, the leftist bacteriologist Daniil Zabolotnyi; and artist Il’ia Repin.) The petition pressed basic bourgeois democratic demands: it decried the terrible state of Russian higher education and the reduction of professors to bureaucrats, which lowered their “scientific and moral level,” and insisted that the indispensable demand for academic freedom required a fundamental transformation to an order based on “the principle of lawfulness and, inseparable from this, the principle of political freedom.”17
The revolutionary wave during the first ten months of 1905 put the tsar and his supporters on the defensive, but also created fissures among progressives. In August 1905, Nicholas II agreed to the “Bulygin Duma”—a purely consultative assembly that would exclude Jews and most urban dwellers. This split the membership of the Union of Liberation—some urged a boycott, while others accepted it as an initial step toward political freedom. Pavlov was by this time critical of the intransigence of both leftists and rightists, and he considered the Bulygin Duma a good first step. In the lab, according to one coworker, he frequently expressed his disturbance at the country’s weakness and disarray, and the mediocrity of government leaders. One indication of his increasing distance from the left was his changed attitude toward Suvorin’s newspaper Novoe Vremia. Having earlier fumed when coworkers brought it to the lab—detesting its rightist, anti-Semitic line—he himself began to read it after the 1905 revolution, Babkin recalled, both because Suvorin “had now become a constitutionalist and greatly moderated his anti-Semitism” and because Pavlov “disagreed with the radical opinions of the leftist newspapers.” 18
Pavlov’s attitude toward Jews was typical of the liberal intelligentsia. He “really was disturbed by any racial hatred,” according to Konradi, and always took a principled stand against institutional and political manifestations of anti-Semitism, including the limits on Jewish residence and enrollment in institutions of higher learning. Recalling the Tsion affair, he always assigned a good measure of the blame to anti-Semitism. A disproportionate number of his coworkers—including his good friend David Kamenskii—were Jewish, and he threatened to resign from the Society of Russian Physicians when it balked at accepting them for membership. He much disliked Efim London, the Jewish chief of the IEM’s Pathology Division, who, in Pavlov’s view, twice behaved dishonorably toward him, but explained to Babkin that he had not used his influence with Prince Ol’denburgskii to have London fired because, as a Jew, London might not have found another position. Yet, in the lab Pavlov derided London as an “insolent Yid”—a slur that remained always in his vocabulary, along with common stereotypes about Jews as a foreign people characterized by aggressiveness, craftiness, and greed.19
At the IEM, the emotional Prince Ol’denburgskii was so disturbed by the gathering of signatures on a liberal petition that, at a meeting of division heads on October 15, 1905, he announced solemnly that he had built the IEM for science, not politics, and intended to resign his post as supervisor. Georgii Ushakov, who attended the meeting as head of the institute’s anti-rabies facility, later recalled: “He said this with tears in his voice, clearly upset. He finished his short speech and turned toward the doors. Everyone was shocked and silent. But [he] had not yet reached the doors when Ivan Petrovich suddenly, purposefully, stepped forward with the words: ‘Permit me. You created this Institute—it is yours. If we have acted inconsistently with your goals, then we should leave, but you should remain.’ There was no reply. A. P. Ol’denburgskii bowed and left. On that day, everyone submitted their resignation.” Political events soon rendered all this moot, and the prince returned the letters of resignation.20
Frightened by the general strike of October 1905, Nicholas II bowed reluctantly to the entreaties of his prime minister, Sergei Witte, and issued the October Manifesto, which established a more representative Duma with genuine legislative authority. This conciliatory step, and the crushing of the armed uprising in Moscow in December of that year, ended the revolutionary upsurge and slowed and eventually reversed the left’s political momentum. Russia’s first national election, conducted in April 1906, elected a Duma dominated by the left-liberal Kadets, Pavel Miliukov’s party. In the sharply polarized context, Miliukov and his comrades adopted a policy of intransigent opposition to the tsar, using their dominant position in the Duma as a platform for political agitation rather than a legislative opportunity. As a matter of political principle, the Kadets even refused to condemn the continuing terrorist attacks on government officials. Nicholas II had always made clear his disdain for the Duma as an institution and his reluctance to accept it as a partner in governing. Seizing upon its revolutionary rhetoric and parliamentary inaction, he formally dissolved it in July. The Kadets’ militant calls for mass protest were ignored, and the political balance of power shifted decisively to the right.
Petr Stolypin, the shrewdest and most competent of the tsar’s advisors, now became president of the Council of Ministers and implemented policies designed to crush the left while extending an olive branch to moderate constitutionalists. At his urging, the Tsar exiled some 35,000 oppositionists, suppressed hundreds of opposition journals and newspapers, funded ultra-right paramilitary squads, and used field courts martial to rapidly try, convict, and execute suspected terrorists (who were hanged with what opponents branded a “Stolypin necktie”). Stolypin reached out to moderate constitutionalists by announcing elections for a second Duma and, in fall 1906, by implementing a series of important agricultural reforms, most notably one that granted each peasant household the right to claim as private property its share of communal property. This freeing of individual initiative, Stolypin hoped, would both increase agricultural production and create a new class of politically conservative private farmers in the countryside.21
The prelude to the elections to the Second Duma witnessed the emergence of a political party, the Octobrists, that supported Stolypin’s strategy to reform and stabilize Russia. Led by Alexander Guchkov, an articulate member of a wealthy Muscovite merchant family, the Octobrists were subsidized largely by merchants, industrialists, and provincial landowners, but also claimed significant support among intellectuals. As implied by its formal name—the Union of October 17th—the party viewed the October Manifesto as the basis for Russia’s future, for the gradual evolution to a constitutional monarchy. Opposing the left’s demands for the expropriation of land, the Octobrists emphasized the importance of public order and held private property inviolate. Unlike the Kadets, they denounced terrorist attacks upon government officials and criticized, as Guchkov put it, “the doctrinaire attitudes of the extreme parties and their isolation from the historical life of Russia.”22
These sentiments accorded closely with Pavlov’s. A firm believer in constitutional freedoms, he was a gradualist by nature and had been sobered (and frightened) by the mass disorders of 1905–1906. Babkin recalled that the chief (like Stolypin) took a critical attitude toward “the ‘dreamers’ who wished to leap at once from an unlimited autocracy, to which he was no less opposed than they, to a responsible ministry or even a republic.... His political opinions in general outline were the moderate views of the best representatives of the Octobrist party.”23
The Kadets’ refusal to denounce terrorist attacks must also have deeply alienated Pavlov—with his bitter memories of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and his rejection of violence (including capital punishment). In 1905, terrorist violence killed and wounded more than 3,600 government officials, and the numbers kept climbing after the October Manifesto and convocation of the First Duma. By the end of 1907, some 4,500 government figures had been killed or wounded, along with 4,600 private individuals.24 Nor, for Pavlov, was this violence abstract or distant. Minister of the Interior Viacheslav von Plehve was killed in a bombing in July 1904 just across the street from the Baltic Station, where Pavlov took the train annually to Sillamiagi; in August 1906, Stolypin’s villa on Aptekarskii Island—not far from the IEM—was blown up, killing twenty-seven people and wounding many others, including Stolypin’s four-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter; and in December 1906, the governor of St. Petersburg, V. F. von Launitz, was assassinated on the grounds of the IEM during the ceremonial opening of its new clinical section.25 Street fights and demonstrations erupted at the Military-Medical Academy, leading to its closure in October 1906 and April 1907.
In preparation for the elections to the Second Duma, the Kadets and Octobrists sought to attract new faces for the campaign, and the Octobrists recruited Pavlov to their electoral slate in the Petersburg district of the city. Pavlov’s political views were familiar to the Octobrist Party leadership both through its leading figure Dmitrii Miliutin, who had met the physiologist a few years earlier at the home of a mutual friend, and through Pavlov’s longtime coworker Vladimir Savich, whose older brother was a leading Octobrist member of the Duma.26 The Petersburg district was reliable Kadet territory, and Octobrist leaders conceded that their chances of electoral success there were minimal, but Pavlov (though not a party member) agreed to show the flag.27
“Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, professor of physiology” thus became candidate #10647 in the Octobrist list. Five of his colleagues at the Military-Medical Academy, including his good friend Nikolai Simanovskii, also ran as Octobrists. Kadet candidates included Pavlov’s friends Vladimir Dobrovol’skii and Dmitrii Zernov, the academician and botanist Andrei Famintsyn, and Pavlov’s former coworker Iakov Bukhshtab.28
Pavlov received the highest total of any Octobrist candidate in his district (1,851 votes), but all those elected were Kadets. The winners included Zernov, Bukhshtab, and—with 3,282 votes, the most of any candidate in the district—a charismatic populist priest, Grigorii Petrov, whose fate would soon become intimately entwined with that of the Nobel laureate he had vanquished.29
In the nation as a whole, militants of both the left and right gained considerable ground in the elections to the Second Duma; a full two-fifths of members in the new body rejected constitutional politics as a matter of principle. Stolypin would soon dissolve it and institute by fiat a new electoral law that guaranteed a much more conservative Third Duma. This action of dubious constitutionality (with good reason, many Kadets and Octobrists denounced it as a coup) was accompanied by mass arrests of the left opposition and the systematic use of field courts-martial against accused terrorists. By crushing the threat from the left, however, Stolypin freed Nicholas II to follow his instincts and return to the embrace of his most reactionary advisors—thus much reducing the prime minister’s leverage. The Octobrists became a largely impotent “left” opposition, and Stolypin himself was rapidly losing influence with the tsar when he was assassinated in September 1911.
Pavlov’s brief flurry of political activity ended in February 1907 with his failed candidacy for the Second Duma. His political views remained basically unchanged until the upheavals of 1917. Babkin later recalled a conversation of about 1910: Professor Salazkin, a convinced Kadet, was arguing that life under Stolypin was intolerable and that a second revolution was necessary to put an end to the monarchy. Savich and Babkin insisted that one revolution was enough and that, whatever the weaknesses of the current order, it might gradually develop into a genuine constitutional government. “Pavlov listened to us approvingly and...remarked that, if Russia had a second revolution, then Russia would perish.”30
In his inaugural lecture of September 1913 at the Military-Medical Academy, Pavlov addressed the fashionable subject of suicide to express guarded optimism about Russia’s future. Like those of Western Europeans, Russians’ nervous systems were much strained by the novel pressures of the “nervous century”—by the stresses of industrialization and the new, unnaturally rapid pace of urban life. Russian nerves were under special strain because of the two great changes their society had recently undergone, the Great Reforms of the 1860s and “our revolution” of 1905. Pavlov counseled his countrymen to ease their nervous strain (and so reduce the danger of suicide) by developing more regularized lives and engaging in sports.
Most important, however, was developing one’s “reflex of purpose”—the inborn drive to attain an objective. This precious instinct was most highly developed among the English and the Jews, and was conspicuously weak in Russians. Russia’s recent feudal past and its continuing autocratic and bureaucratic strictures had inhibited this instinct, but he expressed a mildly optimistic thought, which perhaps represented his hopes for the long-term fruits of the October Manifesto and Stolypin’s reforms: “But now our life begins to take shape. Serfdom, thank God, is eliminated. The direct guardianship of the bureaucracy is also receding into the past.”31
For his own part, he returned wholeheartedly to his science, to the research that he hoped would illuminate and eventually ease the difficulties that plagued his country and human nature in general.