As Pavlov’s research expanded into studies of higher nervous activity, it converged on territory occupied by his colleague at the Military-Medical Academy, Vladimir Bekhterev, precipitating a loud, bitter, and mutually demeaning public quarrel. Conducted in the language of experimental science, their confrontation was essentially a struggle for authority between two eminent scientists who came to dislike each other intensely. “A very unpleasant period in the history of Russian science,” as Babkin later put it, “when scientific competition, usually so desirable and stimulating, took the form of polemics conducted in an atmosphere of vituperation.”1
Each was preeminent in his own realm. Though Bekhterev was eight years younger, he and Pavlov had been students together at the Military-Medical Academy, after which both completed its doctoral program and in 1884 each received a two-year scholarship to study in Western Europe. Both spent time in Ludwig’s lab, after which Pavlov worked with another physiologist, Heidenhain, while Bekhterev studied neuroanatomy with Paul Flechsig, neurology with Jean-Martin Charcot, and experimental psychology with Wilhelm Wundt. After they returned to Russia, Pavlov floundered, while Bekhterev flourished. As chair of the department of psychiatry at Kazan University from 1885, he founded a psychophysiological laboratory and became a leading authority on the brain and a wide range of psychological phenomena related to medical practice. In 1893, Bekhterev became Pavlov’s colleague at the Military-Medical Academy as chair of its department of nervous and mental diseases, where he founded a clinic and directed the laboratory research of many coworkers. By 1907, he was renowned for his Conduction Paths in the Brain and Spinal Cord (1882, 1886) and his seven-volume Foundations of the Study of the Functions of the Brain (1903–1907), and had produced about twenty articles annually on neuroanatomy, neuropathology, histology, physiology, psychology, and psychiatry. Founder of Russia’s first journals on nervous and mental diseases (Neurological Herald and Review of Psychiatry, Neurology and Experimental Psychology), he won the Academy of Science’s prestigious Baer Prize for research in 1900 and enjoyed a rich network of connections with tsarist ministries and the international scientific community.2
Bekhterev’s approach to the psyche reflected his clinical perspective and broad interests, combining “subjective” approaches such as Wundt’s “experimental introspection” with research toward an “objective psychology.” In the 1890s and early 1900s, his lab produced many articles on the brain centers that controlled various physiological processes and on experimental psychology, developing physiological analyses of salivary and gastric responses that Pavlov at the time attributed to “psychic secretion.”
The personal and scientific styles of the two men were, as the polymath Alexander Chizhevskii, who admired both, put it, “opposites.” The bulky Bekhterev cultivated the appearance of a Russian peasant or coachman—with a bushy beard and long black hair parted Russian-fashion in the middle and draping the sides of his face; while Pavlov was slight and always impeccably dressed, with hair and beard neatly trimmed in the style of a Western professional. Bekhterev talked loudly and expansively, while Pavlov was (usually) controlled—even in a rage, his words and movements remained precise. Bekhterev’s “rich talent substituted for a firm will and determination,” while Pavlov was “direct and persistent to the nth degree, a model of human determination and strength of will.” Bekhterev’s scientific interests were broad and constantly changing, while Pavlov’s were tightly focused. Their management styles also differed markedly. Babkin, who worked with each and admired Pavlov’s qualities as chief, observed that Bekhterev usually dropped by the lab for half an hour once or twice a week, conferring hurriedly and fruitlessly with workers about research with which he was not truly familiar. “I had therefore to decide for myself all questions which arose during the course of my work and to suffer my doubts in silence.”3 Not surprisingly, when they came into conflict Pavlov scorned Bekhterev as superficial and sloppy, and Bekhterev Pavlov as narrow-minded and dogmatic.
As the pair’s interests gradually converged, occasional testy confrontations punctuated their generally collegial relations. From 1895 to 1906, they served together on dissertation defense committees thirty times. Bekhterev routinely approved the doctoral work completed in Pavlov’s lab, and Pavlov returned the compliment.4 Their first minor clash occurred in 1899, when Bekhterev’s coworker A. V. Gerver reported to the Society of Russian Physicians that Pavlov’s “psychic secretion” was but “a reflex transmitted to the gastric glands through the central nervous system” and claimed to have located the psychomotor center that controlled it. Pavlov’s response reflected his psychological lexicon of the time: he objected that the psyche influenced secretion through two separate processes, desire and thought, and that no single psychomotor center could possibly control both. Bekhterev countered that Gerver’s research supported the scientific and clinical consensus that there existed in the cortex “associational and thought centers” for the secretory organs.
Here Bekhterev was following one of his European mentors, Flechsig, who had proposed that—aside from the sensory and motor regions identified by Eduard Fritsch and Gustav Hitzig, Hermann Munk, and others—the cortex contained special associative centers that formed the basis of intelligence and higher moral sentiments. Between 1900 and 1906, his lab produced many studies of these centers and the reflexive processes that controlled them.5
The pair jousted again in February 1903, when Pavlov’s coworker Nikolai Geiman revised the lab’s longstanding view of the mechanism of salivary secretion in light of the chief’s changing view of psychic secretion. Bekhterev persistently questioned him—and then Pavlov himself—seeking an admission that the lab’s previous view had been erroneous. An evasive Pavlov, however, denied him that satisfaction.6
When in 1903–1904 Pavlov reconceptualized psychic secretion as a complex reflex, then, Bekhterev justifiably viewed him as a late convert. Both men also knew that this change owed much to expertise and views that two of Pavlov’s coworkers, Snarskii and Tolochinov, had brought with them from Bekhterev’s lab. Snarskii had been Pavlov’s first coworker to insist that psychic secretion resulted not from a mental judgment but rather from a reflex, and Tolochinov had elaborated by comparing psychic secretion to the knee and eyelid reflexes that he had studied with Bekhterev. Pavlov later recalled a remark that Bekhterev made to Snarskii—but directed at Pavlov—during the thesis defense: “Your duty and mine is to teach physiologists psychology.” The condescension clearly rankled—and Pavlov still cited it resentfully a quarter century later.7
Bekhterev was, as Pavlov’s associate Iurii Frolov observed, a “constant and friendly participant” in the thesis committees of Pavlov’s coworkers. He was, then, thoroughly familiar with the early CR research, including Babkin’s key thesis of 1904, in which he summarized its foundations and basic directions and frequently cited Bekhterev and his coworkers regarding cortical associative centers and the nervous paths through which they conducted “psychic agents” to the subcortex.8
Several events of 1906–1907 set the stage for their confrontation. First, in March 1906, at Prince Ol’denburgskii’s invitation, Bekhterev appeared in Pavlov’s institutional sanctum sanctorum with a proposal to the IEM’s faculty that he create there a Psycho-Neurological Institute (PNI) that would pursue research and higher education in all “branches of neurology and psychology,” including psychopathology, hypnotism, experimental pedagogy, and criminal anthropology. (Pavlov could hardly have been comforted by the omission—in name only—of physiology of the brain.) Bekhterev explained proudly that he had been chosen by the Brain Commission of the International Association of Academies to create and direct this Institute, which would join an international network of such institutions in eight other European countries. Invoking Prince Ol’denburgskii’s interest in psychoneurology, Bekhterev proposed to house his PNI within the IEM. The prince endorsed his proposal enthusiastically.
Pavlov responded shrewdly that, while he had no “objections in principle,” he feared that Bekhterev’s research program was much too broad for a mere division of the IEM and required its own independent institution. The director of the IEM, Podvysotskii, agreed, adding that such a radical expansion of facilities would create budgetary problems and violate the IEM’s statutory focus on the struggle against infectious diseases. The faculty asked Bekhterev to submit a formal proposal and the question was tabled; defeated behind the scenes, it never arose again.9
Rebuffed, Bekhterev mobilized his contacts among tsarist officials and wealthy individuals to secure both state and private funds for an independent, semiprivate PNI. Founded in 1907, it quickly became his institutional center of operations and a massive pedagogical and research enterprise that brought together scientists and humanists for an all-sided study of man. Over the next decade, hundreds of students passed through its classrooms, and it expanded to include laboratories, clinics for neurosurgery and nervous and mental diseases, and a special wing for the study and treatment of alcoholism.10
Two months after Bekhterev’s appearance at the IEM, Pavlov directed his coworker Nikolai Tikhomirov to check the findings of three of Bekhterev’s associates—Gorshkov, Belitskii, and Gerver—who had claimed to prove the existence of associative centers in the cortex for, respectively, taste, salivation, and gastric secretion. Pavlov had previously simply assumed the accuracy of Bekhterev’s findings (indeed, he had approved Gorshkov’s thesis), and verifying them engaged him for the first time in neuroanatomical issues in which he had little interest and less expertise. Furthermore, this research required use of a methodology—surgical ablation of the hypothesized brain centers in order to compare an animal’s responses before and after—that epitomized the “acute” procedures that he had always regarded skeptically because they disrupted sensitive physiological processes in the interconnected animal machine.
Pavlov surgically removed each of the purported associative centers, and from May to October 1906 Tikhomirov studied the results. Bekhterev’s coworkers had demonstrated the existence of these centers by traditional means—by stimulating them with electrical current (to establish that this elicited, say, salivation) and, after ablation, by stimulating the corresponding sensory organ (to establish that this now failed to elicit that same salivation). Tikhomirov, on the other hand, employed Pavlov’s CR methodology. He reported that although in the immediate aftermath of the traumatic operation the relevant CRs indeed disappeared, they reappeared shortly thereafter. In a thesis completed in fall 1906, he (and Pavlov) concluded that these associative centers simply did not exist.11
Pavlov and his allies would later claim that these findings alone precipitated the conflict between the two labs—that their research had led inexorably to the question of associative centers, that repetition of the Bekhterev lab’s experiments had revealed appallingly sloppy methodology and erroneous conclusions, and that Pavlov’s criticisms simply expressed his passionate devotion to scientific truth. Yet Pavlov knew that this issue lay far from his area of expertise and that—predictably, given the sensitivity of the animal machine and the cortex in particular—experiments on cortical localization by a wide range of European authorities had often yielded contradictory results.12 (Indeed, this contradictoriness probably encouraged him to use this issue to highlight the advantages of his own CR methodology.) Furthermore, the question at issue—the presence or absence of localized cortical associative centers—was peripheral to his investigations. Finally, he might have walked across the street to confer with Bekhterev, or engaged him in discussion after any of the four doctoral defenses in which they both participated in 1907, or even, perhaps, have arranged for collaborative research.
The force, bitterness, and constant escalation of Pavlov’s public assault may well have resulted from the publication in Bekhterev’s in-house journal of the text of his September 1907 speech to an international audience of psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists. In “The Objective Investigation of Nervous-Psychic Activity,” he announced his innovative approach to objective psychology: the analysis of “associative reflexes” (sochetatel’nye refleksy) through experiments on movements in animals and humans. This approach was strikingly parallel to Pavlov’s CR methodology, but Bekhterev pointedly avoided acknowledging any intellectual debt to him. Acutely aware of Bekhterev’s stature, intellectual ambitions, and familiarity with CR research, Pavlov must have been furious and anxious. As he would muse many years later, “In the realm of thought, science, the sense of property is expressed even more sharply than in the realm of the acquisition of common riches.”13
In this published speech, Bekhterev lauded his methodology of associational reflexes as a breakthrough. Until now, he claimed, those interested in exploring the psychic life of man were dependent upon subjective methodologies and neurological studies of the brain—but these could now be supplemented by an objective psychology based on the study of the associative reflexes manifested in movements. For anybody familiar with Pavlov’s research, Bekhterev’s new methodology would have seemed strikingly familiar. Pavlov used food or hydrochloric acid as the unconditional stimulus; Bekhterev used a mild shock to the dog’s front paw. Pavlov gauged the strength of the resulting unconditional and conditional reflex by measuring salivation; Bekhterev gauged his associative reflex by registering movements of the paw and a respiratory response on a kymograph. Bekhterev’s discussion of the differences between the inborn simple reflex and the acquired complex associative reflex also mirrored earlier discussions by Pavlov and his coworkers. Most important, the line of investigation through which he proposed to use associative reflexes as a methodology for studying “nervous-psychic activity” closely resembled that already being pursued in Pavlov’s lab. Yet in describing his methodology, Bekhterev mentioned his colleague’s work only in passing, noting that associative movement reflexes were formed through repeated pairing with a previously indifferent stimulus, precisely like the “artificial salivary reflex” that Pavlov and his students studied.14
Bekhterev’s goals for this objective psychology more closely resembled those of the American behaviorists than they did Pavlov’s. Less reductive by intellectual orientation—and more informed by a clinical perspective—he believed (at least in 1907) that knowledge about the inner life of man would remain the province of introspection and “subjective psychology.” And he had substantial reasons for regarding his study of movements as an innovative improvement upon Pavlov’s focus on salivary CRs. For one thing, he considered the salivary CR less natural and more problematically related to the UR upon which it was formed than the associative movement reflex. For another, movement reflexes were suitable for experiments on humans.
In any case, throughout his article (and all future publications) he pointedly ignored Pavlov’s earlier development of this basic methodology for studying the psyche. The term “conditional reflex” appeared only toward the end of Bekhterev’s article: “One must note the many investigations in the laboratory of I. P. Pavlov of salivation in dogs, in which...the salivary associative reflex is elicited by the sight of food, its scent, a sound connected with food, and tactile irritation—which is termed a conditional reflex.... In the same way, our laboratory, too, conducted investigations on associative salivary reflexes (Belitskii).” Here Bekhterev ignored Pavlov’s methodological innovation, described Pavlov’s research in the language of his own associative reflex, and, by omitting the date of Belitskii’s thesis (1906), invited the reader to see the two lines of research as developing simultaneously.15
At about this same time, Pavlov reacted anxiously and angrily to the publications of one of Bekhterev’s recent European coworkers, Otto Kalischer, who employed movement reflexes to study cortical localization. Having himself shared very little of his CR research with Western audiences, Pavlov no doubt feared that, given Bekhterev’s stature and international connections, the scientific methodology of which he was so proud, and for which he held such high hopes, would become known under his rival’s name and muddled irretrievably. Confiding anxiously in Babkin, he characteristically admitted to only the second, nobler sentiment: his fear that his young and vulnerable scientific “child” would be smothered by “scientific riders.” Like the “circus riders” who surrounded the main event, sloppy scientists attracted by a promising innovation could confuse things irretrievably. Pavlov’s “indignation knew no bounds,” Babkin recalled, when he learned that Kalischer had changed the term ‘conditional reflexes’ to ‘Dressurmethode,’ that is, “‘method of training’ (in the circus sense).”16 That term was actually Bekhterev’s—and Bekhterev, of course, was no mere “circus rider”; he was quite capable of arranging a main event of his own.
Bekhterev would later deny any intellectual debt to Pavlov by claiming (accurately, but irrelevantly) that he and others had begun their quest for an objective psychology many years earlier than Pavlov, and (relevantly, but less accurately) that Bekhterev and his coworkers had employed the “training method” since the 1880s. He could offer only a few scattered examples—and nothing resembling a sustained line of investigation that used associative reflexes as a methodology. Most frequently, he and his allies cited the work of his coworker Zhukovskii, who in 1899 had recorded the respiratory response of a partially decorticated dog to a cat.17
In later public comments, Pavlov would ingenuously profess indifference to the question of priority, but also noted pointedly that “some years after” his own research on CRs had begun, Bekhterev embarked on his studies of movement reflexes and “designated as ‘associative’ these new reflexes which we called ‘conditional.’”18 Pavlov’s emotional response was no doubt better expressed in his cousin’s later recollection that the “unprincipled” Bekhterev “wormed his way in from the side into the course of [Pavlov’s investigations] and then took credit himself for some of the ideas, and in this way committed unpardonable plagiarism in his scientific works.” Babkin put the same sentiments somewhat more politely: Bekhterev had “at once appreciated the importance of [Pavlov’s] new theory” and his “objective method of studying the complex functions of the brain”—which he then “carried over bodily into psychology” while cloaking himself with a false aura of originality by changing Pavlov’s term “conditional reflex” to his own “associational reflex.”19
Two months after the publication of Bekhterev’s article, in December 1907, Pavlov delivered a short speech to the Society of Russian Physicians that drew upon Tikhomirov’s research to refute the work of two of Bekhterev’s coworkers, Belitskii and Gerver, on associative centers for salivation and gastric secretion. These “false centers,” Pavlov implied, were a myth perpetuated by imprecise and sloppy techniques. In a triumph of CR methodology, his lab had demonstrated that the cortex itself—not any special associative centers—was the organ of CRs.
The responses of Bekhterev’s coworkers who were present indicated immediately the larger issues at stake. One, Pussep, invoked Zhukovskii’s earlier observations of a decorticated dog to deny the originality of Pavlov’s CR methodology. Another, Ostankov, complained that Pavlov was unfairly disparaging results from the Bekhterev lab on the basis of experiments that employed a completely different approach. Pavlov replied that he had said nothing “insulting,” but that his CR methodology was indeed superior and his results therefore more reliable.20
He had prepared his lab for a coordinated attack. At meetings of the Society of Russian Physicians from January to May 1908, his coworkers El’iasson, Orbeli, Makovskii, and Toropov presented experimental trials that used CR methodology to disprove the existence of associative centers for sound and sight. Pavlov himself deployed Tikhomirov’s results to deny the existence of salivary, gastric, and taste centers, and he rose periodically after these reports to weave them into a critique not just of the notion of associative centers, but, implicitly, of the Bekhterev lab itself.21
Most of these reports were followed by a lively exchange between the two camps, with Pavlov constantly escalating the conflict—baiting the absent Bekhterev until he finally appeared in April. “Pavlov was attacking Bekhterev, and Bekhterev was defending himself to the best of his ability,” recalled Babkin. The Society’s meeting hall was packed with “physicians, medical students, biologists, and representatives of other spheres of knowledge,” very few of whom understood or cared about the issues under debate. They were there to watch the spectacle of two titans battling it out, enjoying the evident hostility between them, and curious about “who would get the upper hand.”22
There were genuine scientific issues at stake—the nature and extent of cortical localization was (and is) an unsettled question—but the confrontation generated considerably more heat than light, and convinced nobody. As so often occurs in the history of science, differing experimental results devolved into a debate about methodology and interpretation; in the atmosphere of hostile competition, this devolved further into the questioning of each other’s competence and even honesty.
The battle was initially joined over the existence of cortical associative centers, with the Bekhterev camp insisting that they had proven it and the Pavlovians equally adamant that they had exposed it as pure fiction. Both camps made plausible arguments about the bluntness of the other’s methodologies relative to the extraordinary complexity of the subject. When the Bekhterev camp presented evidence that extirpation of a particular center eliminated a specific cortical response, the Pavlovians explained this away by invoking the trauma and generalized inhibition resulting from the operation itself. When the Pavlovians presented evidence that the relevant CRs continued despite extirpation of an alleged center, the Bekhterev camp dismissed it by invoking the differing locations of these centers in different dogs and the phenomenon of “compensation” (that is, after the center was eliminated, other parts of the cortex or subcortex assumed its functions). The Pavlovians objected that the Bekhterev school’s methodologies—electrical stimulation, extirpation, and, later, observation of movement responses—were too crude and nonspecific. The Bekhterev camp argued that the same was true of Pavlov’s salivary CRs. Both camps insisted that the other experimented upon too few dogs and that their animals were too sickly after the operations to generate reliable data. They quarreled about the time interval necessary to determine whether a cortical response had truly disappeared (and whether another part of the brain might have compensated for an ablated associative center), about the precise location of surgical ablations, and so forth. The hostile atmosphere prevented any genuine consideration of the other camp’s results, any search for common ground, and any real progress on the scientific questions at issue. Neither camp ever wavered in its convictions or noticeably modified its views.23
The exchanges grew increasingly hostile, with Pavlov constantly on the attack. At the meeting of February 1908, he delivered an acerbic report, “On the Cortical Taste Centers of Doctor Gorshkov,” in which he attributed the conclusions of Bekhterev’s coworker to methodological sloppiness as well as “prejudice and imprecise observation.” During the heated exchanges that followed, he baited his absent rival by expressing his “regret” that Bekhterev and his coworkers had inexplicably failed to reexamine their results.24 At the March meeting, in a speech “On the Significance of Conditional Reflexes for the Development of Physiology of the Nerves,” Pavlov asserted that studies of the brain had essentially stood still over the past thirty years (thus dismissing much of Bekhterev’s research) and underlined the superiority of his CR method as exemplified by its correction of the Bekhterev lab’s errors.25
Bekhterev and his coworkers appeared in force at the April meeting, and the hall was packed for the confrontation. When Bekhterev took the floor, he spoke for about thirty minutes, indignantly rejecting Pavlov’s assertion that brain physiology had stagnated for decades, denying that CR methodology was more objective than traditional methods and his own studies of movement reflexes, and observing that not only had it added nothing to knowledge of cortical localization, but it was utterly useless for the clinic. The Pavlovians’ “core error” was their failure to understand the complexity of the brain, especially as manifested by the process of compensation.
Pavlov retorted that, “as a physiologist, a man of experiment,” he attached little value to words, so “I challenge V. M. Bekhterev to show me in experiment the facts that I reject.” In the meantime, he consented to engage in a “verbal tournament.” Brain physiology had indeed “stood in place” since the 1870s, using long-exhausted ideas and methods to produce “trivial” results. CR methodology offered a way out of this impasse, a means for the “objective study of the connection between various external stimuli and the activity of the cortex.” The conflict between his lab and Bekhterev’s, however, represented “a contradiction of facts, not of words, theories.” Bekhterev and his coworkers claimed that if specific parts of the cortex were extirpated, the psychic secretion of saliva and gastric juice ceased, but this was simply not the case. Nor had analogous assertions about other centers proven correct. Invoking the unproven notion of “compensation” accomplished nothing. “I attach little significance to words,” he concluded, “and we would be happy to see your experimental evidence.”26
He and Bekhterev then wrangled about what form those experiments should take, with Bekhterev arguing that the traditional methods of extirpation, stimulation, and observation were decisive while Pavlov insisted that he “needn’t bother” repeating well-known thirty-year-old trials. Bekhterev objected to that characterization, but finally consented: “We will try to fulfill your conditions for the experiment.”27
On May 20, 1908, a large and expectant audience gathered at Bekhterev’s Clinic of Mental and Nervous Illnesses in a tense session that demonstrated only that no experiment could settle the differences between the warring labs. First, Bekhterev’s coworker I. Spirtov presented experimental evidence for the existence of cortical salivary centers. Two dogs with salivary fistulas stood on a stand in front of the audience. In one, the “strongest” salivary centers had been removed on both sides of the cortex; in the other, a larger region above the centers had also been ablated. According to Spirtov, the operations had been performed four and five days previous, so compensation had not yet occurred. He slowly rotated a sealed glass jar containing several lumps of sugar in front of the dogs. Despite the visual stimulus, they did not salivate. Bekhterev, it seemed, had triumphed.
Pavlov objected that the experiment proved nothing, because the dogs’ preoperative reaction to the sight of sugar had not been demonstrated, and they might still be subject to the inhibitory effects of their operation. Babkin later provided the Pavlovians’ account of what followed:
Pavlov rose from his seat and firmly demanded a weak solution of hydrochloric acid. He had a resolute appearance, with his lips set and his brows knitted. When he was given the acid he sat down in front of the dogs and, disregarding all protests on the part of Bechterev and Spirtov, he poured acid into the dogs’ mouths several times. This produced an abundant salivary secretion. After the secretion had stopped, the mere sight, smell, or splash of the acid in a test tube without fail caused the secretion of saliva, that is, a [conditional] salivary reflex to the acid was formed in Spirtov’s dogs notwithstanding the absence of the cortical salivary centers. After this, Pavlov did not pay much attention to the proceedings, and soon left.28
For the Pavlovians, it was an “enthralling spectacle,” a decisive triumph of Pavlov’s rigor and truth over Bekhterev’s sloppiness and falsehood.29
For the Bekhterev camp, however, it was nothing of the sort. Bekhterev noted (and Babkin omitted this from his account) that Pavlov had first attempted unsuccessfully to elicit salivation through sight and sound—and by teasing the dog with meat—but that the ablation of the salivary centers had indeed prevented this from resulting in “natural conditional or associative reflexes.” Pavlov’s repeated spilling of hydrochloric acid on the dogs’ tongues, Bekhterev explained, had then produced a generalized reaction, perhaps by radically raising the excitability of the subcortical salivary center. Such an effect usually lasted about a week (and, Bekhterev indicated elsewhere, such “unnatural” generalized effects from one of Pavlov’s standard stimuli constituted a weakness in his basic methodology). From the audience, St. Petersburg University professor of physiology Nikolai Vvedenskii agreed that, since more than one center participated in salivation, Pavlov’s intervention proved nothing. The Military-Medical Academy’s professor of pharmacology Nikolai Kravkov asked Spirtov if the dog had indeed salivated to the sight of sugar before the operation; assured that it had, he noted the dramatic difference after ablation and pronounced the trial convincing. The second experimental demonstration, which featured R. Greker’s demonstration of two dogs—one with ablated gastric centers, the other (a control) having undergone an unrelated cortical operation—elicited a similarly inconclusive quarrel about the individuality of dogs and the relative reliability of each lab’s surgical procedures.30
Perhaps exhausted by their fruitless confrontation—or perhaps each convinced that he had triumphed decisively—the two camps did not meet in force again for a year. Yet Pavlov escalated his attack again, informing a faculty meeting at the Military-Medical Academy in March 1909 that he would no longer serve on doctoral committees for Bekhterev’s coworkers. Having for years noticed “a sort of unnatural straightforwardness and oversimplification” in their works, and now having repeated many of their experiments, he had “no trust” in that lab’s procedures or results. “I do not wish to risk it any more. It suffices that my name, as a reviewer, stands on the cover of the shameful dissertation of Doctor Gorshkov.”31
Bekhterev responded in kind. It was he, he insisted, who had first been compelled to take such a step—having earlier tactfully withdrawn as a reviewer for Orbeli’s thesis, but not wanting to explain his true reason: that this thesis ignored the research of both Russian and Western labs, and confirmed his longstanding distrust of Pavlovian research on the brain. Pavlov’s insularity, imperviousness to criticism, and “astonishing and striking overestimation” of his CR methodology had led his coworkers to conclusions that “completely ignored all the known scientific facts”—such as Orbeli’s absurd conclusion that dogs were color-blind and the many crude errors in “Doctor Tikhomirov’s shameful dissertation.”32
As the faculty looked on, each titan pronounced the other’s research worthless and insisted that his remarks be included in the official record. Identifying himself with the moral dignity (dostoinstvo) of science, Pavlov claimed the high ground: “I am profoundly convinced that the physiological part of the scientific work of Academician Bekhterev, with his school in our Academy, is in large part of a negative character, and this, of course, will soon be revealed completely. It seems to me significant, in the interest of the scientific dostoinstvo of the Academy, that there will remain in its [protocols]...a trace of critical attitude and protest against such activity.”33
Both titans appeared at the April 1909 session of the Society of Russian Physicians for a final heated and fruitless confrontation. Bekhterev’s coworker Larionov reported on problems with Pavlov’s methodology, arguing that salivary CRs appeared and disappeared for unknown reasons, that they might be of subcortical rather than cortical origin, and that their dynamics were so complex that, far from offering an objective reflection of cortical functions, they inevitably confronted the investigator with “much that is unclear.” These were legitimate issues—and Pavlov and his coworkers had grappled among themselves with some of them—but Pavlov dismissed the paper with the comment that most of its arguments could seem new only to “the reporter, who has been working in the provinces.” (Larionov was from Kiev.) Pavlov’s coworker Zavadskii reported that, contrary to the findings of the Bekhterev lab, the ablation of the gyrus pyriformus produced specific changes in CRs to scent, but not their absolute or permanent disappearance. These, too, were substantive findings, but, instead of engaging them, Bekhterev lectured Zavadskii on the perils of operating on the brain with insufficient knowledge of its anatomy.34
Pavlov then delivered an extended critique of Bekhterev’s research that went largely unrecorded by the medical correspondents present, but clearly included a stunning and disturbing note. Whether or not he permitted himself “personal attacks” on Bekhterev (as reported in the latter’s in-house journal), his remarks clearly featured a naked appeal to his status and authority: invoking his winning of a Nobel Prize and a recently published comment by Sechenov about Pavlov’s reputation as a masterful vivisector, he asked rhetorically: “Whom then shall we believe? Myself or Gorshkov?” Even the admiring Babkin cringed, recalling in understated fashion that this “produced rather an unpleasant impression on me at the meeting. It seemed to me both superfluous and lacking in modesty.” In his response, Bekhterev emphasized the inappropriateness of Pavlov’s argument from authority; noted slyly that his rival had won the Prize for studies of digestion, not of the brain; and ended the meeting with a lengthy recitation—the published version occupied eleven single-spaced pages—of his familiar criticisms of his rival’s research. 35
It was the worst moment in Pavlov’s long public career—a reflection of his temper, his habituation to a lab style that made him the single recognized authority in the room (rendering his hypotheses axiomatic in all discussions), and his growing impatience with being contradicted. Fueled by his competitiveness with and disdain for Bekhterev, the entire episode expressed his defensiveness about his hard-won status and the ease with which he sometimes identified his own beliefs, desires, and status with the interests of science itself.
However sterile and nasty, this confrontation—and his rejection of the notion of associative centers—forced Pavlov to develop his own model of the anatomy of the higher nervous system. In the years 1908–1912, he drew, especially, upon the views of Hermann Munk to develop an image that featured nervous “analyzers” interwoven in cortical “projection zones.” For Pavlov, an analyzer was a functionally united tripartite mechanism that began at the periphery of the body as a sense organ or sensory nerve ending, continued as the nerve or nerves that conveyed sensory impulses to the central nervous system, and ended in the receptor cells of the central nervous system. The peripheral end of each analyzer was a receptor for one specific kind of stimulus—visual, auditory, tactile, sense, and taste—and also transformed these stimuli into a nervous process. Both the receptor at the periphery and the specially organized receptor cells in the central nervous system were involved in the analysis of sense impressions. The same was true of “internal analyzers” that responded to the organism’s internal state, such as the motor analyzers that registered movements. For Pavlov, the cerebral hemispheres consisted largely (and perhaps exclusively) of the cortical ends of these analyzers. Rejecting the existence of specific associative centers in the cortex (as proposed by Flechsig and Bekhterev), he conceived of the cortex itself as “projection zones” of interwoven fibers from the various analyzers. So, for example, in Zavadskii’s research, ablation of a specific region did not eliminate CRs for scent, but by eliminating some cortical scent receptors it had damaged the dog’s ability to distinguish between specific scents.
The cortex itself, then, was a grand receptor and associative center. If it was removed, CRs disappeared and could not be formed anew. Pavlov acknowledged the possibility that “under extraordinary conditions” CRs might be formed in another part of the brain, but insisted that available evidence identified the cerebral hemispheres as “the organ of temporary connections, the place where conditional reflexes are formed.”36
* * *
The second confrontation between Pavlov and Bekhterev transpired on the complex political terrain of debates about Russian alcoholism—and here Pavlov caught his rival in an embarrassing position and scored a decisive public victory over him.
Russian temperance activists disagreed on the causes and remedies for the country’s alcoholism problem, but all agreed that its severity was a major factor in poor health, crime, immorality, and degeneracy—and that the state’s role was, at best, morally dubious. The Ministry of Finances had in 1893 become the beneficiary of a state monopoly on the sale of spirits, after which vodka sales quickly became its greatest single source of revenue—enriching state coffers by some 750 million rubles annually by 1912. Supporters justified the monopoly as a means to regulate the quality of vodka, limit sales, and reform the drinking habits of Russians. The state agency for combating alcoholism, the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety (formed within the Ministry of Finances), advocated the official policy of combating alcoholism by encouraging “reasonable and moderate” use. Opponents lambasted the state’s profiteering from alcohol and dismissed the Guardianship’s temperance efforts as base hypocrisy—in Leo Tolstoy’s words, as “either blasphemy or a mere toy.”37 Prince Ol’denburgskii headed the St. Petersburg branch of the Guardianship and supported the official position wholeheartedly, but Pavlov was a near-teetotaler and ardent prohibitionist who, like many other physicians in the quasi-civic, quasi-state Commission on Alcoholism and Means to Combat It (Anti-Alcoholism Commission), was deeply disturbed by the state monopoly and its cynical self-enrichment under Finance Minister Sergei Witte’s slogan of “struggle with abuse, but not with use.”38
Bekhterev, too, was a member of the Anti-Alcoholism Commission. He had often spoken publicly on the evils of alcoholism, had founded an ambulatory clinic for alcoholics on the grounds of his Psycho-Neurological Institute (PNI), and had received substantial funds from the Ministry of Finances to build a large treatment facility there.
In February 1912, he sought to acquire from the Ministry of Finances 400,000 rubles plus a 75,000 ruble-yearly stipend to expand these facilities qualitatively and transform them into an Experimental-Clinical Institute for the Investigation of the Influence of Alcohol on the Animal Organism. The supporting document that the PNI submitted to the Third Duma was unsigned. The task of writing it had been delegated by Bekhterev or the PNI’s Scholarly Secretary Gerver, who apparently assumed that it would be no more than cursorily perused on its way to easy approval, in view of the universal perception of Russia’s pressing alcoholism problem, the Ministry of Finance’s endorsement, the document’s invocation of an esoteric scientific rationale, and Bekhterev’s well-established credentials as an expert.
That proposal was destined, however, for a much broader and more critical audience. Among the Duma members who read it, one, M. D. Chelyshev, was a zealous teetotaler and prohibitionist devoted to having alcohol officially designated a poison and the vodka monopoly abolished. He and his ally N. N. Shchepin were appalled by the document, insisted that it be submitted to experts before any vote, and passed it along to M. N. Nizhegorodtsev, head of the Anti-Alcoholism Commission. He, in turn, solicited the opinions of pharmacologist Nikolai Kravkov and three leading physiologists—Pavlov, Vvedenskii, and Danilevskii. Danilevskii was ill and Kravkov out of town, but Pavlov and Vvedenskii produced pointed critiques that set the terms for a well-attended and lively discussion at the Commission’s meeting of April 26, 1912.39
Pavlov was of course predisposed to think the worst of Bekhterev, and the document provided ample grounds for his suspicions. Titled “On the Construction of Laboratories for the Investigation of the Influence of Alcohol on the Organism and for the Investigation of Alcoholism in the Population,” it promised both to place a scientific imprimatur upon the official state position of moderate use and to facilitate its implementation by the vodka monopoly.
The essential argument in the PNI’s document was this: First, a rational approach to Russia’s problem must rest upon an all-sided scientific investigation of “the influence of alcohol upon the organism.” Second, alcohol in moderate quantities constituted a stimulant and “nutritive substance.” Third, scientific research could identify dosages and forms of alcohol consumption that had no harmful effect, and might provide “new data for the development of a product” (i.e., an alcoholic beverage) that would diminish alcohol abuse. Bekhterev and his colleagues at the PNI would soon claim that this document had been hastily and misleadingly drafted, but this basic rationale mirrored that of Bekhterev’s later official report to the state. The Institute, he wrote, was designed “to answer a question of special importance to the Ministry of Finances in the period of the existence of the liquor monopoly, specifically how to eliminate the abuse of alcohol by the population and generally to say how possible and permissible was the use of alcohol as a nutritive and stimulating substance, and if this was possible, in what doses.”40
To pursue that goal with the necessary scientific rigor, the proposal requested financing for an expansive modern lab complex at the PNI: new labs in physics and chemistry (with zoological, botanical, and histological divisions), biology (with divisions of zoology, botany, and histology), pathology (with a division of forensic medicine), physiology-pathology (with a division of physiological chemistry), hygienics (with divisions of medical statistics and bacteriology), and psychology (with divisions of physiology and experimental psychology).41
Pavlov reported to the commission that the proposal created a “strange impression” by its homage to scientific impartiality, on the one hand, and its commitment to identifying a “harmless dosage” of alcohol that would justify and even enlarge the profits of the proposed Institute’s sponsor, the Ministry of Finances, on the other. He ridiculed the PNI’s request for sumptuous facilities worthy of “an entire faculty of natural science” and clearly unnecessary for its stated goal. During the discussion that followed his and Vvedenskii’s reports, he also accused Bekhterev of cherry-picking and editing citations from scientists in his attempt to argue that alcohol sometimes played a positive, even nutritive role in the organism. (The editors of the commission’s protocols documented Pavlov’s point in their published version of this discussion by footnoting Bekhterev’s citations and adding excised passages that undermined his use of them.) Vvedenskii was even more explicitly contemptuous and sarcastic—insisting that the influence of alcohol upon the organism was well known (it was a poison), that the search for harmless levels and means of alcohol consumption was illusory, and that this “Alcoholic Academy” was a “monstrosity” that would consume resources needed for Russia’s seriously underfinanced and more worthy scientific institutions. Defended only by Bekhterev and other members of the PNI, the proposal was roundly condemned.42
Pavlov’s critique proved just the beginning of a relentless public campaign. He wrote angry letters to the lay and medical press, debated representatives of the PNI at St. Petersburg’s Club of Social Activists, and pressed the science division of the Academy of Sciences to defend the moral dignity (dostoinstvo) of Russian science by condemning the proposed Institute.
The content and flavor of his campaign is captured by the polemical essay he dispatched in mid-1912 to Russian Physician, where it appeared in two installments under the title “The Experimental Institute for Consolidating the Greater Dominion of Alcohol over the Russian Land.” “I consider it my scientific and civic duty to inform comrades about this extraordinary Institute,” he began. Citing the original proposal, Pavlov derided its emphasis upon the “positive sides of the action of alcohol,” its attachment to the notion of a harmless dose, and its devotion to the task of delivering it. At the Anti-Alcohol Commission’s discussion in April, one physician had inferred that the PNI estimated this harmless dosage as one glass of vodka each day. The PNI’s advocates had hastened to correct this, but Pavlov cited that estimate in his essay, exclaiming, “How enormously the income from state sales will multiply!” Nor would the state be the only beneficiary. The PNI would obtain luxurious lab facilities, “since the achievement of its great goal of harmless alcohol or the harmless, if widespread, use of alcohol will demand ideas and means from practically all of natural science.”43
In response to his earlier letter in Evening Times, Pavlov noted, Bekhterev had scolded him for “consciously or unconsciously distorting his longstanding negative attitude toward alcohol.” And the PNI had disavowed the language of its original proposal and remained cagey about the identity of its author. Yet that hardly relieved Bekhterev of responsibility: “Readers probably know that Academician Bekhterev is the founder, builder, and president of the Psycho-Neurological Institute.... As such, if he didn’t compose or edit this document, he has in any case...led the experimental alcohol Institute with the peculiar task identified in this document.” And that Institute would grace Bekhterev’s prized PNI. “Yet another example of Academician Bekhterev’s negative attitude toward alcohol!”44
In the second part of his polemic Pavlov intensified his attack upon Bekhterev and the PNI. In an earlier letter to Evening Times, he had accused supporters of the new Institute—naming two PNI physicians, Gerver, and Bekhterev himself—of dishonesty, of an “unconscientious” and misleading interpretation of the proposal’s language in order to deflect criticism by concealing the Institute’s goal of discovering a harmless dose of alcohol. The two physicians had responded by summoning Pavlov to defend himself before the medical community’s honor court. Pavlov had professed himself eager to appear, and had challenged Bekhterev and Gerver to do so as well, since his accusation of dishonesty applied to them most of all. Bekhterev demurred, but Pavlov kept him squarely in his sights. “The [two] simple physicians invite Academician Pavlov to the Honor Court, but the titled physicians (the professor and academician) stand to the side and point their fingers.... And these are the seekers and teachers of scientific truth?!” Why was “alcohol so dear to the psychiatrists, neurologists, experimental psychologists and chemists of the Psycho-Neurological Institute, and why do they hope, with the aid of a new Institute, to increase its use?” The answer to his rhetorical question was clear: they hoped thereby to enrich their own, dubious institution. “Although it has already existed for several years, [the PNI] is a mysterious, hazy institution, with its legitimacy and usefulness still unproven. But to seriously hinder—and on a purportedly scientific basis—attempts to establish that alcohol is a poison and to in every way diminish its use by the Russian people is an enormous, unforgiveable evil.”45 The source of Russia’s alcoholism problem, he added in a later public discussion, would not be discovered in the PNI’s new labs. “In this case we don’t have a microbe, thank God, but rather a large and obvious cause: billions in income, countless buckets being poured into Russian stomachs. There is no need to look any further.”46
As in the debate over cortical localization, Pavlov’s ferocity owed much to his rivalry with and dislike for Bekhterev, yet in this case his passionate arguments resonated with broad sentiments. In May 1912, the science division of the Academy of Sciences endorsed Pavlov’s “authoritative position” that, while “a truly scientific investigation of the action of alcohol on the animal organism would be very desirable, any investigation with preordained results has no right to be called scientific”—a slap at the self-interested assumption that there existed a “harmless dose.”47 In June, the Honor Court expressed its “regret” that Pavlov had used “insulting” language in his response to the two PNI physicians’ defense of the proposal—but the court also ruled that “the circumstances gave I. P. Pavlov a basis for his subjective sharp evaluation.”48 In December, the Anti-Alcohol Commission dismissed the defense offered by Gerver and Bekhterev, and adopted a resolution condemning the proposed Institute as “unscientific and deserving condemnation from the perspective of social ethics” for planning to use funds from the Ministry of Finance (“which has an interest in the sale of vodka”) to “develop a scientific justification for the use of alcohol by the population—foreseeing some possibility of developing new alcoholic beverages and finding a means of using them without any harmful affect.”49 Repudiated, Bekhterev resigned from that commission.50
He fared somewhat better in official circles. In late April and early May 1912, an interministerial committee reevaluated the proposed Institute in light of the public controversy. The Military Ministry opposed it, while the Ministry of Finances remained firm in its support. The committee decided to fund the Institute, but substantially narrowed its scope, changed its name (eliminating the controversial reference to “investigation of the influence of alcohol on the animal organism”), and specified that its investigative goal was “to elucidate preventive measures of struggle with alcoholism.”51 The original proposal was withdrawn from the Duma, Gerver presented a new and more palatable one to the Anti-Alcohol Commission in November 1912 (failing, however, to forestall the angry membership’s resolution of condemnation), and a more modest Experimental-Clinical Institute for the Study of Alcoholism was officially founded in late 1912. One year later, it began publication of its journal Questions of Alcoholism, featuring the research of Bekhterev and his coworkers.52
For Bekhterev, however, even this hard-won, partial triumph proved fleeting. After providing important forensic evidence in support of Mendel Beilis, a Ukrainian Jew accused of ritual murder in a notorious 1913 trial, he was removed by tsarist authorities from the directorship of the PNI and his professorship at the Military-Medical Academy. The new Institute never acquired the splendid labs originally envisioned, and construction of its new buildings had barely begun when, with the outbreak of World War I, it was converted to a military hospital.
On the eve of that war, in August 1914, Tsar Nicholas II banned the sale of vodka and wine except in first-class restaurants and clubs. Special dispensation was made for wine at church services and vodka at the front.
How did the Battle of the Titans affect Pavlov’s image? The conflict over localization—and particularly his outburst about the Nobel Prize and his grand reputation—probably tarnished it, at least among his medical colleagues. Yet the conflict over alcohol policy attracted a much broader audience and seems to have established him as a spokesman for science and morality. His angry criticisms were frequently cited by the nation’s press, which roundly condemned the proposed Institute as the fruit of state cynicism and academic opportunism. Bekhterev, who conducted a vigorous letter-writing campaign on behalf of his proposal, collected articles and letters in newspapers about the controversy, but seems to have found few, if any, supportive voices. One article in his personal papers, published in Odessa News under the title “Two Academicians,” detailed the history of the confrontation and concluded:
Academician Pavlov is a man of enormous spiritual power—of great...spiritual beauty: science alone, science for humanity—this is the banner of Academician Pavlov, a scientist raised on strict scientific discipline. Delivering weighty accusations against another scientist, he must have known what he was doing—what a blot he was placing on another scientist’s reputation. Yet he did so all the same. In our grey, dreary, measured and precise era, this brave step of Pavlov’s (if his accusations are confirmed) was the step of a great citizen. When on one side of the scales rest personal interests and that of “the state sale of drinks,” and on the other...the ideals of pure science and the welfare of the people, there are not and cannot be any friends, comrades, or academicians—and, no, there cannot be any question whether or not it is necessary to raise against recognized scientific forces the accusation of unconscientiousness.53
In the same spirit, one military physician and state advisor, asked by a high-ranking military official to assess Bekhterev’s political reliability after his testimony at the Beilis trial had enhanced his reputation among leftists, invoked the recent controversy with Pavlov to assure his superior that Bekhterev was capable of opportunistically “moving to the right or left,” but was not to be feared as “a person of firm, unshakeable convictions.” He had, after all, taken money from the vodka monopoly to demonstrate “the harmlessness for the human organism of a dose of alcohol.” In this, however, he had been foiled by a person of entirely different type: “Professor Pavlov, as a scientist-idealist, attacked Bekhterev with all his enormous scientific material and, of course, dealt him a savage defeat.”54