In the fall of 1917, the Provisional Government found itself in a situation eerily similar to that of the tsarist regime eight months earlier. For many Russians, it was now the incompetent defender of an unacceptable status quo featuring an unpopular and costly war, a deepening food crisis, and a vast chasm between rich and poor. Its final days were marked by the disintegration of Russia’s army, massive strikes by workers in the country’s railway and textile industries, vigilantism and violent clashes between the left and the right, widespread rural disorders, and the utter paralysis of the state apparatus. Preoccupied with the disintegration of the country and the government’s inability to defeat the German invaders, Pavlov now cursed Kerensky constantly.1
Elections to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (which was to assemble on October 25) and the Constituent Assembly (scheduled to meet in November, but finally convened in January 1918) demonstrated the great strength of antiwar, radical, and socialist sentiments. In the Soviet, radical socialists won an overwhelming majority, with the Bolsheviks holding a slight majority among them. In elections to the Constituent Assembly, about 42 percent of voters chose the Socialist Revolutionaries (the traditional peasant socialist party associated historically with the demand to redistribute the aristocracy’s land among the peasantry, as well as with terrorist attacks upon state officials), 24 percent voted for the Bolsheviks, and another 15 percent voted for socialist-oriented ethnic parties. In the cities, representing about one-sixth of the empire’s population, the socialist vote was 61 percent, with the Bolsheviks receiving 36 percent (45 percent in Petrograd and 50 percent in Moscow). The Kadet Party, most popular among liberal supporters of the Provisional Government, received about 5 percent of the national vote and 24 percent of the urban vote. Soldiers split their votes evenly among the Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks (about 41 percent each), with only 2 percent favoring the Kadets.2
The Bolsheviks, then, were hardly the voters’ choice, but they enjoyed the support of about one-quarter of the Empire’s voting population, and of much more in the military and strategically pivotal cities. Membership in their Social Democratic Workers Party remained small—comrades were required to be disciplined activists rather than mere dues-paying well-wishers—but swelled from 24,000 in February 1917 to 300,000 in October.
In the wee hours of October 24, Lenin and Trotsky directed the Bolshevik seizure of power. This was not the popular storming of the Winter Palace and other state institutions later portrayed by Communist hagiography (an image that fits the February revolution much better) but rather a creeping coup. The Bolsheviks’ Red Guards and sympathizers in Petrograd’s military garrison, virtually unopposed, gradually assumed control over the city’s railway stations, main post office, electrical power stations, and key bridges. The next day, Red Guard detachments entered the unguarded Winter Palace through unlocked doors, meeting only sporadic opposition as they made their way through the palace’s long corridors and ornate chambers, finally reaching the conference room where they discovered and arrested a number of the Provisional Government’s key ministers. Kerensky was missing (he was ineffectually seeking military support outside the city, after which he traveled farther, to Pskov, and then still farther, to Paris and New York City). The Bolsheviks soon controlled the capital, but would establish their authority over the vast country only in the course of a terrible civil war that soon began with bloody clashes in Moscow, took shape as organized military confrontation in the Don Cossack region in winter 1917, and exploded into full-scale conflict between Reds (the Bolsheviks and their allies) and Whites (the opponents of Bolshevik power) in 1918.3
The Bolsheviks had seized power by a coup and under confusing rhetorical cover—claiming, for example, to act on behalf of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies—so the significance of October 24–25 became clear only gradually and unevenly. For the great majority, the fateful developments of those days passed almost unnoticed. “The Bolshevik seizure of power,” noted one Kadet Party activist, “did not in the first days produce any impression on the broad circles of Petrograd’s population.” No mass mobilizations or street demonstrations, not even frenetic huddling in cafes and homes—just scattered skirmishing on a few streets as the Reds took command.4
The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies convened as scheduled in Petrograd from October 25–27 as the Red Guards were consolidating their conquest of the city. Ratifying the Bolshevik seizure of power, it recognized a new state governed by the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovet Narodnykh Kommissarov, or SNK), comprised of fourteen peoples’ commissars (the revolutionary counterparts to ministers) with Lenin as its chair. The meeting also adopted a policy of “immediate peace without annexations”; expropriated the landed property of the gentry, the imperial family, and the Church; and encouraged the peasantry to seize and cultivate those expropriated lands. (Lenin preferred state ownership of the land, but, to garner support in the countryside, implemented instead the Socialist Revolutionary approach to agriculture.) As part of his pledge to institute “real people’s democracy,” Lenin promised through Anatolii Lunacharskii (who soon became Commissar of Popular Enlightenment) to convene the long-awaited Constituent Assembly in January.5
The SNK rapidly promulgated a set of far-reaching decrees. Two edicts of late October pledged the eight-hour workday and universal, free, secular education as fundamental rights. A decree of November 2 offered self-determination to the “captive nations” of the former tsarist empire. On November 14, the Decree on Workers’ Control gave workers in every enterprise the right to elect a committee to oversee management. On December 1, the SNK established the Supreme Council of the National Economy, which assumed control over the “commanding heights” of the economy; all banks were nationalized on December 14, followed shortly by large industrial enterprises.
In policies denounced by the Academy of Sciences as “mechanistic [and] all-centralizing,” the new state reversed the steps taken by the Provisional Government toward the autonomy of scientific institutions and incorporated science into the same structure that was being developed to govern other sectors of the economy.6 This Soviet science system much resembled that of tsarist Russia, with one principal difference: the disappearance of private funding. Science had become an exclusively state enterprise. The People’s Commissariat of Popular Enlightenment (Narkompros) and its special department, Glavnauka, assumed principal authority over the Academy of Sciences and other scientific institutions. The relevance of science to a wide range of social tasks also led to the formation of committees in other commissariats with a stake in science policy.7
Other decrees offended scholars (and lightened their pocketbooks) by equating scientific work with that of other laborers. The Commissariat of Labor in Petrograd set the maximum scholarly pay at that of a highly qualified worker—a measure that probably halved the buying power of Petrograd’s scientists. Another decree abolished traditional scholarly degrees and ranks, along with the privileges attached to each. A scientific worker in institutes would now be either a “full member” or a “scientific coworker”; those in universities would be either a “teacher” or a “professor.” The elective principle pioneered by the Provisional Government was abolished. Collegial committees and administrators would make initial decisions on new appointments, but these were subject to approval by Glavnauka.8
Pavlov reacted to the Bolshevik seizure of power with grief and horror. “He talked constantly about the death of our homeland,” Petrova recalled, “regarded the Bolsheviks with hostility and distrust, and openly expressed his dissatisfaction with their various measures.”9 These sentiments were shared by the great majority of his colleagues. On November 21, Pavlov attended a meeting of the Academy of Sciences that adopted a resolution denouncing the Bolsheviks and urging the upcoming Constituent Assembly to save Russia’s honor:
A great misfortune has befallen Russia; under the yoke of the tyrants who have seized power, the Russian people is losing consciousness of its character and dignity; it is selling its soul and, at the price of a shameful and unreliable separate peace, is prepared to betray its allies and put itself in the hands of its enemies. What do they have in store for Russia, those who forget its cultural mission and its national honor?—internal weakness, cruel disappointment, and the contempt of both its allies and its enemies.
Russia did not deserve such shame. The will of the nation delegates to the Constituent Assembly a responsible resolution of [the country’s] fate: the Assembly must preserve it from domestic and foreign violence, it is called to facilitate the development of its culture and to strengthen its position among enlightened states.
In firm unity with the true sons of the Homeland, the votaries of science and enlightenment recognize its power and bow before its will: they are prepared with all their knowledge and all their power to assist in the great creative work that a free Russia places upon the Constituent Assembly.10
As the only academician at the IEM, it was probably Pavlov who brought this resolution to his colleagues there. Its faculty endorsed the Academy’s protest “against the seizure of power by one political party and its aspiration toward a separate peace with Germany.”11
By this time Vladimir had returned home, and Vsevolod’s letters from the front described the radicalization of rank-and-file soldiers and demoralization within the officer corps. “I hope,” he wrote his mother on November 6, “that the recent coup and transition to a Bolshevik commune have affected only your morale.” Political wrangling, discussions, and elections to the upcoming Constituent Assembly now consumed the soldiers around him. “We here are struggling with endless meetings, formulas, and resolutions.” Only the militantly anti-Bolshevik Cossacks, he noted, seemed immune to the rampant radicalization and disorientation.12 On November 7, Vsevolod presided over a meeting of soldiers to elect representatives to the Constituent Assembly. Perhaps, though, this was a meaningless exercise. Would the Bolsheviks really permit this body to meet? He predicted sadly that the Assembly would probably fall victim to the same “anarchistic hurricane as have all the state and social institutions of the (one must admit it) now already late Great Russia.”
In December he described sarcastically the “egalitarian” practices of the new order and his experiences in Izmail, the small Ukrainian port city on the Black Sea where he spent a few days on furlough: “Izmail has been captured in Bolshevism’s expansive grip; here the equalization of all soldiers has been accomplished by the most direct means: shoulder straps and cockades have been torn from officers’ uniforms, and these decisive actions (carefully and pedantically performed at home and in the street, and during nocturnal inspections of all hotels) are accompanied by equalizing verbal actions, and sometimes by equalizing bloodshed. I arrived yesterday evening; city life was expressed in lively, cheerful, disorderly shooting. No doubt I am its most inoffensive citizen; here some are killing the resisters, others the attackers, and still others mere passers-by.”13
His suspicion about the fate of the Constituent Assembly proved prescient. The Bolsheviks allowed it to deliberate nervously for one day under the guns of Red soldiers and sailors before dispersing it unceremoniously on January 6, 1918. By that time, Vsevolod’s letters had ceased. He had joined the White Army that was forming to oppose the Reds in Russia’s civil war—probably making his way east to Novocherkassk, the Cossack capital where military resisters were gathering.
Russia now plunged into murderous civil war—more than three years of fratricidal bloodshed in a country already bled white by world war, an emotionally and ideologically charged conflict in which both Reds and Whites routinely tortured and slaughtered subdued enemies and their alleged supporters among the populace.
The conflict produced disastrous living conditions throughout the country, and nowhere more dramatically than in “hungry Petrograd.” The city’s population—two million on the eve of World War I, swelling to almost 2.5 million in 1916—plummeted during the most terrible years of 1918–1920 to about 722,000. Many residents fled the city (and the country), but about one in every six Petrograders perished between 1918 and 1920. Victor Serge, a socialist born to Russian exiles, described in January 1919 an eerie ghost town: “We entered a world of deadly frozen ground. Finland Station, glistening from snow, was empty....The wide straight streets and bridges across the Neva, the frozen river covered with snow, seemed to belong to an abandoned city. From time to time an emaciated soldier in a gray hood, a woman wrapped in a shawl, would pass in the distance, resembling ghosts in this silent oblivion.”14
Petrograd was dying from a chronic lack of food and fuel—problems evident from the beginning of 1917 but much exacerbated by civil war. Food shortages had precipitated the February Revolution, and the Provisional Government had resorted to rationing. With the Bolshevik seizure of power, the situation improved temporarily, but the disruption of railway transport and the deepening civil war had, by summer 1918, pushed Petrograd’s residents to the brink of catastrophic hunger. To feed its population, the city required about twenty-eight train wagons of foodstuffs from the countryside each day; by early November 1918 it was receiving only between three and six. By spring 1919, poet Zinaida Gippius recorded, starvation had “changed almost all our acquaintances beyond recognition.”15
Petrograd’s Bolshevik authorities responded to the crisis by establishing in May 1918 a system of food rations (paiki), which were distributed, according to its principle of class partisanship, to key groups of workers. Highest-priority workers received a “first category” ration containing about one-fifth their minimal daily nutritional requirement. Others received less, and still others (including scientists) struggled to be included in the ration system, which developed over the years into a bureaucratically regulated caste system. At the bottom of this food chain were members of the former elite and of the “bourgeoisie” (a term that was used very loosely). Some members of the former elite emigrated, others found various means to survive and even prosper, and many could soon be seen starving, begging, and prostituting themselves on city streets. A second state response to the food crisis was the allocation of gardening plots to individuals and groups. By the spring of 1918, Petrograders cultivated more than 2,000 of these official plots, which became their main source of vegetables.
The hungry city was also increasingly cold and dark. Electrical stations worked fitfully—about six hours a day in November 1917, no more than three hours daily in December—and were often silent for days at a time. By 1918, electricity was available for two or three hours in the evening on good days. Residents illuminated their homes with kerosene lamps and candles, but the price of these items (like matches) went through the roof. The city’s 15,000 streetlamps of various types worked erratically in the last days of October 1917. By 1918, with kerosene scarce, most streets were dark at night; from 1920, when gas-powered factories fell silent, streets were illuminated only by feebly lit homes. The central heating system was inoperative in most buildings during Petrograd’s cold damp winter of 1917–1918 and in all residences during the exceptionally brutal winter of 1918–1919. Residents scoured the city for firewood, destroying thousands of wooden buildings and burning floorboards, furniture, inner doors, and books. The Pavlovs’ good friend from Sillamiagi, artist Richard Berggol’ts, heartbrokenly sacrificed his treasured easels one by one to the flames.
Public life grew nightmarish. Transport ceased almost completely as the absence of gas and spare parts eliminated cars from city streets and the closing of electrical stations immobilized trams (the remaining few were mobbed). Horses then became central to urban transport, but began to perish of starvation and to themselves enter the food supply. The city was wracked by disease, including epidemics of dysentery, cholera, and typhus in the summer of 1919. Widespread privation, the breakdown of authority, dark streets, and plentiful firearms produced a massive crime wave that rendered much of Petrograd dangerous at night. The streets surrounding the IEM became notorious feeding grounds for brigands. Vartan Vartanov, Pavlov’s former assistant who had become professor of physiology at the Women’s Medical Institute and cofounder of the Society of Russian Physiologists, was murdered during a street robbery in January 1919. Clothing became a scarce and treasured item. One observer commented that “in churches, when people fall to their knees, it is very curious to view the collection of holes in the soles of their shoes. Not one without holes!” The eminent mathematician Andrei Markov advised his fellow academicians in March 1921 that he would be unable to attend the upcoming general meeting because he had no shoes.16
Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, the artist who had frequented Sillamiagi with his uncle, a noted jurist and Pavlov’s friend, now pondered emigration and sought to portray Petrograd’s death throes: “Under my eyes the city was dying a death of unusual beauty, and I attempted, before leaving it forever, to record as much as possible its terrible, depopulated, and wounded appearance.”17
With their very survival hanging in the balance, the Bolsheviks wasted few resources on the welfare of a scientific community that they considered, with good reason, to be politically hostile. Resolutions denouncing the Bolshevik seizure of power from the Academy of Sciences and the IEM, among many other scientific institutions, only confirmed what the party already knew. One Communist activist at the Military-Medical Academy noted that the great majority of faculty and students there were also “very hostile,” as was confirmed by student elections of January 1918 in which the pro-Bolshevik slate received a mere 10 percent of the vote.18
Hunger and privation quickly thinned the ranks of Russia’s most eminent scientists. Of the forty-one full members of the Academy of Sciences in 1917, more than one-third perished between 1918 and 1920, as did another eleven honorary and thirty-five corresponding members.19 A list of 179 eminent Petrograd scholars who had died during the hungry years also included the head curator of the Hermitage and three of Pavlov’s colleagues at the Military-Medical Academy. “Hunger and cold. Cold and hunger,” recorded historian Evgenii Tarle in January 1919. “One hears daily about new deaths from starvation.”20
In addition to the privations they shared with most Petrograders, Russia’s leading scientists faced the punitive treatment meted out to members of the former elite. Many were arrested (usually temporarily) and drafted for work details. Their homes were repeatedly searched for contraband. The state had nationalized precious metals, other valuables, and bank accounts, and now a container of kerosene or a personal library might be confiscated from a “bourgeois” family. On Vasilevskii Island, where the Academy of Sciences was located, the local housing committee energetically exercised its new authority. Attempting both to house the region’s badly cramped proletarians and to avenge itself on the “bourgeoisie,” it set about rearranging the use of space in the Academy’s residence on the 7th Line. The shoeless mathematician Markov, for example, was informed that his sister and her three children could not live with him.
Needy outsiders were sometimes housed in the spacious apartments of academicians, a practice that the president of the Academy of Sciences, Karpinskii, denounced in an angry letter of March 1919. The Soviet state constantly stressed the importance of science to socialist construction, he complained, but systematically deprived Russian scientists of the basic conditions necessary to it. “Is concentrated scientific work possible when the scientist is in daily danger of being stripped not only of necessary household items, but also of acquiring a neighbor in his home office, library, and so forth—a completely unknown resident, perhaps with difficult children lacking respect for science and in any case physically incapable of maintaining the necessary atmosphere for concentrated scientific thought?”21
Pavlov echoed these dire sentiments in a letter marking the 100th jubilee of St. Petersburg University. Hailing his alma mater as the home of “the leading representatives of the scientific Russian mind” led by “the brilliant Mendeleev,” he added: “With my entire being I would like, with faith and hope, to wish a no less glorious continuation of its scientific life in the future. But I am oppressed by torturous doubt: amid the untested novelties of our contemporary state, will our Russian scientific mind be spared or will it fall into decay for all time? The political isolation of our homeland by the entire cultured world, the turning of intellectual labor into physical labor, the deprivation of the most important political and civil rights to representatives of intellectual labor—this is murderous soil and air for this most hopeful fruit of human nature, for science.”22
* * *
Pavlov had just begun his sixty-ninth year when the Bolsheviks seized power, confiscating his Nobel Prize money and even the gold medals awarded to him and his sons by St. Petersburg University and the Academy of Sciences. From winter 1917 through mid-1920, he and his family struggled for survival against hunger and cold. Personal tragedies and desperate privation made 1918 and 1919 the worst years of their lives. Twice in 1919 Pavlov fell seriously ill with pneumonia. His survival amid conditions that claimed the lives of so many of his peers—including many younger men—owed much to his superb physical condition, his indomitable spirit, and his fierce determination to proceed with his scientific research.
The many deaths among academicians in 1918 created vacancies in the Academy’s choice residence on the 7th Line. Sometime in late 1918 or early 1919, the Pavlovs left their home of more than twenty-five years and moved into their new apartment there. Well located and extremely spacious, their new abode also exacerbated the challenge of keeping warm.
Pavlov spoke constantly of the need to keep his apartment at a good temperature for his paintings, but Petrograd’s damp cold—which often extends from September through April—threatened his life itself. In March 1919, I. A. Golubtsov, head of finance at the IEM, reported that the elderly scientist was “seriously ill and is in a dire state as a consequence of the absence of wood for heating; at I. P. Pavlov’s advanced age, being chronically cold can have serious health consequences.” He had, in fact, contracted pneumonia. Golubtsov arranged to supply the Pavlovs with some firewood from the Institute’s limited supplies, but this did not prevent the scientist from contracting an even more dangerous case of pneumonia in the bitter cold of September 1919.23 After his recovery, a visitor noticed that his voice had weakened and he had “aged visibly.”24
Pavlov insisted on continuing his lectures and lab work even during the worst times, so, in the absence of public transportation, he walked the considerable distances between his apartment, the Academy, and the IEM.25 On days that he lectured at the Academy, he would hike there in the morning—hungry and limping—and then walk to the Institute, and, finally, often in complete darkness, would trudge home through deep snow. Serafima recalled that she and Vladimir sometimes met him on his way home, “fearing that he might fall somewhere, but he always returned energetic and amused at our fear.”26 Unmentioned in Serafima’s narrative were her husband’s frequent visits to Petrova’s apartment (around the corner from the IEM) on his way home. Among the few notes from him that Petrova preserved is one that she dates from this period. His language was formal, as it apparently always was in their written communications (perhaps on the off chance that the wrong eyes would see a note or letter, though this could hardly have fooled anybody): “My dear esteemed Maria Kapitonovna, I will drop by, not on Saturday (there is a meeting at the Academy that I must attend), but on Friday. Sincerely devoted to you, I. Pavlov.”27
Serafima later described their mealtimes during these years:
For supper we had one large potato or two small potatoes each, a teaspoon of vegetable oil (and often only half of that), and a glass of carrot tea with saccharine, and instead of bread some gray mass of uncertain color and taste, and cookies made of potato peels and coffee grounds—and in this we were fortunate. There were days when our son brought from the scholars’ cooperative a sack of dirt with rotten potatoes and several herrings with rotting heads. We would then shovel this mixture into the sink, wash it with icy water and pick out the edible pieces. These we stored on the table for drying. From an entire sack one could pick out only a fourth or a sixth part, and even this portion had a repulsive odor that no spices could conceal.... The men heroically ate this food, but my daughter and I couldn’t swallow a bite. From the rotten herring I made cutlets, which were very popular in our family and those of our friends (the professor Inostrantsev and the sculptor Pozen). But I could not eat them and gave away my portion.28
She bartered and exercised her considerable personal charm to obtain food. One day a peasant boy of about fourteen knocked on their door and asked if she would trade him something for some milk. She exchanged a silk scarf with lace trimmings for a spoon of farmer’s cheese, a jug of milk, and some good country bread. “In order to interest this boy so he might bring us such products in the future” she told him a ghost story she had heard during her own childhood. Enchanted, the boy asked for another—and Serafima promised an even better tale next time. “When my men returned I gave them hot soup with black bread, which delighted them beyond words, but when I served the cottage cheese with milk—one can imagine their delight!” The boy returned in subsequent weeks, but proved himself a skillful trader, asking a considerable amount for the precious products he brought and regarding Serafima’s stories as a just bonus for dealing exclusively with her rather than with the many others who would be equally interested in his goods.29
One day the meagerness of her family’s provisions drove her to risk a visit to an illegal market, “which my husband and son strictly forbade me to do, since [the authorities] arrested both buyers and sellers there.” Fortune smiled on her—she met a sailor who offered a half kilo of sugar (“Sugar! Such a luxury, such joy for the entire family!”) in exchange for a shirt. Thirty minutes later, they met at the Pavlovs’ apartment, where he exchanged his entire food ration for some sheets. After one more such trade, he told her that he was going to Ukraine for a month and offered, in exchange for some valuable item, to return with either flour or grain. Serafima overruled her skeptical menfolk and agreed to the deal, giving the sailor the slipcover from a couch. After the month passed, she endured much teasing for her gullibility. One day, however, the sailor arrived at breakfast time with a large sack of “excellent buckwheat” that “saved us from terrible hunger.”30
When the state allocated gardening plots to workers at the IEM, Pavlov put his dacha skills to good use, digging out and seeding a parcel of land on Institute grounds. “He weeded it himself, permitting our oldest son to help only with watering and guarding the garden at night. When the sprouts appeared (we were then living for the summer at Poklonnaia Gora [north of Petrograd], near Udel’naia), I. P. would walk to his garden and bring us the ripe vegetables. This so exhausted him that he would return voiceless, speaking in a whisper.” He would then chop and ferment the cabbage himself, refusing Serafima’s help because “I don’t want to turn you into a cook.”31 Potatoes and other vegetables piled up in his study at the Institute, and Petrova recalled that she herself always received the first cucumbers and radishes.32
Tending his garden one day in spring 1919, Pavlov saw a low-flying plane overhead, which put him in a contemplative mood. Coworker Iurii Frolov, who worked the neighboring plot, later recalled Pavlov’s rare expression of doubt about the necessary relationship between scientific and social progress: “There flies man, the contemporary Icarus. Hats off to this immortal manifestation of human genius. Winged man is proud, proud of his new invention, which annihilates space and speeds up time. Be proud, but don’t put on airs. I don’t know what this heavier-than-air apparatus will bring humankind—the happiness of a comfortable and safe existence, or cruel wars with their atrocities produced by beastly relations.”33
Death and emigration seared the Pavlov family during these years and annihilated their social circle. The first terrible loss came in February 1918, when Pavlov’s best friend, painter Nikolai Dubovskoi, died suddenly at age fifty-nine. For the heartbroken Pavlov, his friend’s passing was a direct result of and metaphor for Russia’s tragedy. The first military campaign of the civil war had begun in Dubovskoi’s native Don Cossack region, which both Whites and Reds saw as the center of resistance to the Bolsheviks. (Vsevolod may well have been with the White Army there at the time.) Cossack ataman Aleksei Kaledin made common cause with the Whites, uniting with General Denikin’s fledgling Volunteer Army in December 1917 to drive the Bolsheviks out of Rostov. In January 1918, hoping to turn the Cossacks into an effective anti-Bolshevik force, the United States transferred half a million dollars of imperial Russia’s assets from the National Bank of New York to the coffers of the Cossack leader, and England and France pledged generous financial support.34 The Red Army, however, tore through the Cossack heartland, and by late January 1918 was poised to recapture Rostov and seize the Cossack capital of Novocherkassk. In despair, Kaledin resigned as ataman and committed suicide. On February 25, the Red Army captured Dubovskoi’s hometown of Novocherkassk. Reports of Bolshevik atrocities there spread throughout the country. Three days later, Dubovskoi died of a heart attack.
Speaking at his grave, the grief-stricken Pavlov tied his friend’s fate to that of the homeland he had captured so movingly on canvas:
I envy you. You no longer witness with weak, earthly eyes the ever-increasing destruction and disgrace of our homeland, and you have completed your life with a glorious end, a glorious death. You showed that there is no greater blow to the heart than the death of the homeland. At precisely that moment when news reached your ears that the wave of insanity that is hurtling across the broad expanses of the homeland had buried your native Novocherkassk—your heart ceased beating, refused to live!
Long ago the older sister—marvelous Poland!—perished. Now is the turn of the younger sister, Russia, which had seemed so powerful, so Herculean, so invincible! It will perish also during its critical period of political maturation, devoured by the very same ailment of blindness to reality.
This death is an evil that is truly assured by the indomitable, even irresistible power of mercenary, base inclinations, thoughtlessly and carelessly excited and freed from all discipline in the enormous dark mass of the Russian people.
And the homeland was dear to you! You loved her most of all! You lived by its colors and features, and you incarnated them not long ago in your wonderful creation “Homeland.” Let this painting serve as your simple gravestone! It is all of you, with your talent and inextinguishable love for our homeland. No wonder that the brush fell permanently from your hands when the homeland became not yours, but a stranger’s. Farewell, friend! Perhaps we shall meet soon, if beyond this life lies a new future—and, we will believe, a bright one in which we will be forgiven our Russian weaknesses, which have led to the death of the homeland. Forgive us!35
Pavlov’s comment that Russia’s catastrophe resulted from the absence in Russians of the uzda (discipline, restraint, or, literally, “the bridle”) reflected a line of thinking that he would develop in virulently anti-Bolshevik speeches of April and May 1918 in which he analyzed the disastrous turn in Russian history from the perspective of his lab research.36
One month after Dubovskoi’s death, the Bolsheviks signed what Pavlov considered a dishonorable and humiliating separate peace treaty with Germany. In his eulogy, Pavlov had referred to the overrunning of Russia’s “older sister, Poland” by German troops. As the enemy advanced almost unopposed through the Baltic regions toward Petrograd, it indeed seemed as if Russia might be next. Lenin had been initially unable to convince his comrades to sign the harsh terms offered by the Germans. Nikolai Bukharin had argued that German proletarians would refuse to raise their rifles against revolutionary Russia; by resisting, then, the Bolsheviks could turn an imperialist war into a revolutionary uprising on their enemy’s soil. Trotsky had urged that Russia both refuse to sign a treaty and refrain from military actions (which were in any case almost impossible as peasant soldiers deserted in droves to claim land back home). This position—“no war, no peace”—carried the majority on the SNK. German troops then advanced swiftly to within four hundred miles of Petrograd.
The Bolsheviks moved their government to the relative safety of Moscow (permanently, as it turned out)—and the SNK, now convinced of Lenin’s position, signed the Germans’ even harsher terms. The Brest-Litovsk treaty dismembered the tsarist empire and seemed to Russian nationalists such as Pavlov a humiliating emasculation. Russia surrendered its claims to Poland, Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic provinces (including Estonia, where the Pavlovs would summer no more), and the Transcaucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia), and agreed to demobilize its army and refrain from revolutionary propaganda. Pavlov fulminated throughout this spectacle—at Russia’s humiliating military defeat, at Trotsky’s unrealistic negotiation tactics, and, most of all, at the disgrace and dishonor of the Bolsheviks’ separate peace and the dismemberment of the Russian Empire.
An incalculably greater family tragedy soon followed—the death of the Pavlovs’ second, and favorite, son, twenty-five-year-old Viktor. This “rare child,” who combined his father’s passion for science with his mother’s religious faith, shared also the family’s antipathy toward the Bolsheviks. Sometime in the second half of 1918 he had set off for the south, almost certainly to join the White Army. Viktor carried with him a letter from the SNK signed by Lenin’s lieutenant Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, whom Pavlov had met years earlier at the home of a mutual friend. That letter asked safe passage for Viktor, who, it attested, was gathering food for his father, “the pride of Russian and world science.” Viktor provided another reason for his trip to a friend who saw him off at the train station: he intended to continue his histological research in association with faculty members from Novorossiisk University. But these were almost certainly cover stories.
In her memoirs, Serafima remained silent about Viktor’s reason for traveling to this central front in the civil war, but Petrova—who spoke of the trip with Pavlov and had no reason to dissemble on this score in memoirs written during Stalin times and sent to Party officials—recalled that Viktor, like her own son Boris, “motivated by patriotic sentiments, departed in order to fight, and died of typhus on the road.”37 Viktor perished in a hospital in Kharkov. His grief-stricken father, unable to believe the news, wrote to the attending physician for confirmation. “To my great sorrow,” replied V. Balinskii, “I do not doubt that the person who died in the hospital is your son.”38
Shortly thereafter, Pavlov appeared briefly in Petrova’s apartment, pale and tearful, and responded to her concerned questions with vague references to “family grief.” Only the next day did he tell her of Viktor’s death. He had still not informed Serafima, explaining to Petrova that he feared his wife’s weak heart would not sustain the blow. Indeed, she complained of heart spasms from the time of Viktor’s death. “We waited and waited for Viktor,” Serafima would write years later, “but only his ghost ever returned to me.” For solace, she turned to the Bible and to the new friend “God sent me in these years”—a younger woman who had also recently suffered the terrible loss of her son. “I went totally out of my mind for some time. The children and I. P. went off to work and I remained alone (this was during the hard years) and gave myself over to heavy physical labor.... In the most difficult moments [my friend and I] read the Apostles, and our thoughts would often linger on one and the same texts. This surprised us at first, but then we understood that God was comforting us identically.” For years afterward, Pavlov was “not myself,” and he would dedicate his 1927 monograph on CRs “to the sacred memory of our son Viktor,” heatedly refusing to pacify Communist censors by eliminating the word “sacred” (sviatoi). “With [Viktor’s] lofty moral qualities,” Serafima explained proudly, “it was impossible to find a more appropriate expression.” “He was a remarkably pure soul, the embodiment of honesty and sincerity, a rare nature,” Pavlov recalled late in life.39
Pavlov’s brother Sergei was also swept up by the war and killed in 1919. As the White Army approached Riazan, the Reds arrested him while he was home drinking tea—no doubt because they considered him, as a priest, to be an enemy sympathizer. He was sent to a labor camp in Moscow where prisoners were deployed during the harsh winter of 1919 demolishing the city’s many old wooden homes for firewood. Unaccustomed to strenuous labor, he contracted pneumonia and was released in hopeless condition. He staggered across the considerable distance to his sister Lidiia’s home, where he perished.40
For one terrifying morning, the Pavlovs—with one son dead and another fighting for the Whites—feared that their third son, Vladimir, had been either arrested or forcibly impressed into the Red Army. The Cheka (political police) was well aware of the Pavlovs’ White sympathies and searched their home frequently for valuables and signs of oppositional activity. “They never took anything,” Serafima later recalled, “although they searched carefully and even tasted the kerosene in one bottle, probably thinking they would find wine or spirits.” One search continued so long—past 3 a.m.—that only Vladimir remained awake. When his parents awoke, he was gone. According to Serafima, he left a note informing them that he had been arrested under suspicion of desertion from the army. Vladimir’s daughter later provided a different account: the police had found his hunting rifle and taken him into the courtyard to shoot him—but were fortuitously called away before doing so. In any case, some terrifying hours later—during which Pavlov “paced the apartment with clenched fists and a morose face” while his wife prayed to her icon of the Kazan Holy Mother and implored the deceased Viktor to plead with God to spare his older brother—Vladimir returned home unharmed.41
The civil war completely destroyed Petrova’s family and her circle of wealthy friends. According to Petrova, her husband was, like herself, an anti-Bolshevik socialist and wanted to emigrate, but “for me, then, there existed only my [son] Boris and work with I. P.” Petrov traveled to the White south on a lecture tour and Boris joined the White Army. Sometime in 1919, Petrova learned that her brother Mikhail had died of cholera; shortly thereafter her sister arrived in Petrograd to break the news that Boris, too, had perished. Taking to bed “like a wounded beast,” she refused Pavlov’s visits for ten days, so he sat alone day after day in the neighboring room. He had recently lost Viktor, and “this common grief which we endured together brought us even closer.” Petrov fled to the West and died a few years later.42
In the years 1918–1920, then, those dearest to the Pavlovs were constantly fleeing and perishing. A simple accounting suffices. Their middle son Viktor died in 1919, and their youngest son Vsevolod departed for the White Army—and, with the Red victory in 1921, fled to Constantinople and a life of indefinite exile. Pavlov’s brother Sergei was worked to death in 1919 and Serafima’s brother Sergei, author of the Provisional Government’s official file on Lenin’s relations with Germany, fled to Latvia, where he lived out his days as a night guard at an asylum. Pavlov’s best friend, Dubovskoi, died in 1918; another good friend and Sillamiagi-mate, artist Richard Berggol’ts, perished in 1920. One-third of Pavlov’s colleagues at the Academy of Sciences died (some starved to death in apartments just above or below his own in the Academy’s residence), and his longtime assistant and colleague, Vartan Vartanov, was murdered during a robbery in 1919. Petrova’s son Boris was killed during the civil war. Serafima’s closest friend, Kiechka Prokopovich, and her husband, Pavlov’s longtime friend and former coworker David Kamenskii, lost first their son-in-law and then their daughter. The former had returned from the war too frail to survive on the “bits of so-called bread” available, and died of consumption. Their grief-stricken daughter committed suicide soon thereafter. The two family friends with whom Serafima had shared her cutlets of rotten herring both died; the first was Professor of Geology Alexander Inostrantsev (Pavlov’s colleague at the Military-Medical Academy), who perished in December 1919. He and his wife were both very ill and without food or medicine; apparently, he could not face another desperate year and swallowed cyanide tablets. The sculptor Leonid Pozen, a friend whose art Pavlov much admired and would soon collect, perished in 1921. Pavlov’s old friend Alexander Dogel’ seriously considered emigration in 1920 (“to escape from captivity”) but remained in Petrograd and died of a stroke in 1922. Another friend, longtime professor and director of the Technological Institute and revolution-minded Kadet Dmitrii Zernov, also died in 1922. Many others emigrated, including Nikolai Terskii (Pavlov’s fellow success story from Riazan, the high-ranking tsarist official who had offered to multiply Serafima’s share of her husband’s Nobel money through insider trading) and Pavlov’s longtime coworkers Babkin and Boldyrev. Many friends and colleagues were arrested (usually temporarily). The son of Pavlov’s former patron Sergei Botkin, Evgenii Botkin, whose doctoral research Pavlov had guided in the elder Botkin’s lab and who had since succeeded his father as physician to the tsarist family, was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad together with the monarch and his family at Ekaterinburg in July 1918.43
* * *
Amid tragedy and privation, Pavlov struggled to continue his research, but shortages of heat, provisions, dogs, and assistants soon brought it to a virtual halt.44 His labs were unheated, all but a few coworkers were at the front, and his dogs were starving. Furthermore, he complained to his cousin, “Workers at the Institute held endless meetings, conferences, and simple conversations whenever they wanted” in his lab and adjacent buildings, “and insisted on their right to do so regardless of its effect on scientific work.”45 Yet he arrived regularly at the lab; when it was cold and dark, he wore a fur coat and a fur hat with long earflaps, and used a watchman’s ember for light.46 By September 1918, however, he lamented to a colleague that “work has almost completely ceased. And now there are new problems: cold and darkness. We spend a number of hours at home in inaction because it is dark. There are no candles, no kerosene, and electricity is provided for only a limited number of hours. Bad, very bad. When will there be a turn for the better?”47
With dogs and food in short supply, the gastric juice factory ground to a halt, and even when conditions permitted experiments, the dogs’ hunger rendered any data questionable. In late 1916, the lab established a “minimal norm” for experimental dogs of 1,600 calories per day (including 100 grams of meat, 160 grams of groats, and 500 grams of bread). As that minimal standard became unobtainable, “there were always observed deviations from the norm in experimental animals, and, generally, it became impossible to maintain the animals at a constant weight and to acquire from them uniform results.”48
So they adopted a new line of investigation: the influence of extreme hunger on CRs. “During summer and fall of 1918,” reported Iosif Rozental’ several years later, “the dogs of our laboratory were starving from the insufficiency and poor quality of their food.” He recorded the results as they starved to death: the first symptoms—loss of differentiation, followed by the disappearance of CRs—preceded the visible signs of starvation (weight loss, lassitude, chronic sleepiness, and death). Rozental’ worked with one veteran lab animal that had a previously established CR to a metronome, but which, as it wasted away, failed to respond to its beating in 348 trials. When the dog’s weight fell to 13.4 kilograms from its original 20–24, it entered a sleepy state (“sleep inhibition”) that destroyed differentiation and prevented formation of any new CR. The same phenomenon was sadly familiar to any Petrograder: “In people, too, one observes lowered excitability (apathy, loss of interest in life, and so forth), sleepiness, lassitude, weakened memory, and enhanced irritability (weakening of inhibition); so we are justified in concluding that in the human, too, starvation lessens the work of the brain.”49
At a meeting of the Institute on October 15, 1919, his first after about two months in bed with pneumonia, Pavlov thanked his colleagues for their greetings on his seventieth birthday and requested their assistance to save the lives of his remaining dogs. “Should the experimental animals die, work in the Division will halt completely.” Orbeli had been promised the carcasses of horses from the First Cavalry Division, and IEM administrator Golubtsov agreed to arrange for their transport to the Institute. This helped, but the supply system required tweaking. Several months later, at a meeting in February 1920, Orbeli asked that measures be taken to increase the number of horse corpses acquired and better to inspect them, since they “often lie uncovered for several days and parts of their carcass are subject to plundering.”50
The death of his dogs and longstanding difficulties keeping his experimental animals awake on the stand combined in these years to deepen Pavlov’s long-standing interest in psychiatry. Like most people, he had some personal experience with psychiatric ailments. He had grappled with his mother’s erratic emotionality, the strange behavior of his defrocked uncles, the deep melancholy of his friend Bystrov, and the bizarre hallucinations of Chel’tsov. He himself had suffered from “neurosismus” at university and from repeated bouts with “neurasthenia or hysteria” in the late 1880s, and had been virtually immobilized for months in 1889 during an especially serious attack that had convinced him (to his retrospective embarrassment) that he was “dying of tabes.”51
Perhaps as a result of those experiences, and years before he began research on CRs, Pavlov frequently visited the Alexander III Home for the Care of the Mentally Ill at Udelnaia, outside Petersburg, where his friend and former associate from the Botkin lab, Alexander Timofeev, was director. Beginning in 1891, he frequently bicycled there on Sundays, arriving at about noon to engage “over breakfast and tea in friendly conversation” about their work. Timofeev, who had trained with the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, would then present and review for him various psychiatric cases.52
By 1918, then, Pavlov had for years observed patients and pondered the similarities between their symptoms and the responses of his experimental dogs. The first evidence of this in his lab notebooks dates from before the war, in his reflections about the dog Norka. These illuminate the connection between a recurring problem with experiments and his emerging ideas about hypnosis and mental illness. Pavlov had long been vexed and intrigued by the fact that experimental animals were constantly falling asleep during experiments. He concluded that sleep was a state of generalized inhibition, and that there existed various hypnotic phases between wakefulness and slumber. (These phases, of course, provided another variable that could be invoked to explain puzzling experimental data.) In the years 1911–1915, he worked closely on the physiology of sleep with coworker Leonid Voskresenskii.
Pavlov’s lab notebook reveals that during their experiments he constantly compared the responses of Voskresenskii’s dog, Norka, with cases of hypnotism and catalepsy that he had observed at the Alexander III Home. Leading Western authorities believed that mental illness reflected a chronic hypnotic state, and Pavlov’s observations of Norka may well have been shaped by his familiarity with that view as espoused by the leading French psychologist Pierre Janet, a friend and associate of Charcot, whom Timofeev almost certainly knew in Paris.
As Norka fell into a sleepy state, the dog’s salivary CRs remained constant, but its movement reactions to food disappeared. “This obviously has occurred with the development of a hypnotic state,” Pavlov noted. “Does this not present an analogy with that phase of hypnotism in man when a completely cataleptic state has developed and the person maintains normal consciousness and conducts a conversation[?]” Shortly thereafter, he concluded that Norka’s refusal to eat even when salivating and another dog’s habit of falling asleep in front of the feedbag both represented “hypnotic phenomena.” Other such thoughts followed quickly: “An idea about hypnotism: The cataleptic phase with preservation of consciousness: this is the spread of inhibition from the skin analyzer to only the movement [analyzer]. Consciousness is maintained by the still normal excitability of the other analyzers. The following phase of automatism: this is the decline of excitability in the other analyzers as well.” The nature of dreams, he speculated, followed from this general state of cortical inhibition: “The chaotic and senseless linking of phenomena when asleep probably results from the absence of the constant regulating role of the now inactive sense organs...with the resultant break with reality.”
How, he wondered, would various conditional stimuli produce a “hypnotizing effect,” and what procedures might elicit a “neurasthenic state”? He coauthored an article with Voskresenskii on this subject in 1915 and continued to ponder this complex of issues during the cataclysmic years of 1918–1920, reporting to the Academy of Sciences on “so-called animal hypnosis” (1921), and declaring in an article a year later that the “internal inhibition of conditional reflexes and sleep are one and the same process.” By this time, he had developed an analysis of various hypnotic phases, each exhibited by his dogs as they passed from wakefulness to sleep and each with a specific effect upon salivary and movement reactions.
When the war prevented him from summering in Sillamiagi in 1918, Pavlov instead moved his family close to Udelnaia in order to spend those months “studying a number of cases of insanity.” “Speak with A. V. [Timofeev] about a psychiatric case for collaborative work,” he jotted in his notebook.53
Within a year, he completed his first formal excursion into the field, “Psychiatry as a Partner of the Physiology of the Cerebral Hemispheres” (1919). Here he proceeded from an analogy with Norka to analyze physiologically the symptoms of two patients he had observed at the Home over the summer. During the first phase of hypnosis, Norka approached a proffered feedbag but failed to salivate to any established CS; during the second phase, the animal exhibited precisely the opposite behavior. That second phase, Pavlov suggested, was identical to the state of cataleptics, who also retained consciousness while suffering from the chronic inhibition of motor movements. (That is, in the second phase of hypnosis, Norka’s consciousness was intact—as evident in its healthy response to an established CS—but, despite its great hunger, the animal did not move to eat the food right before its eyes.) One of the patients that Pavlov observed at Udelnaia, a certain Kachalkin, had regained normal motor activities at age sixty after spending twenty-two years “lying like a living corpse without making the least voluntary motion, without pronouncing a single word.” His awakening, Pavlov suggested, confirmed his own diagnosis that the physiological cause of Kachalkin’s malady had been chronic inhibition of the cortical points governing motor activities. As people aged, he reasoned, their inhibitory processes weakened (as was evident in the frequent babbling of the elderly), and this natural process of “senile decline” had finally released the patient from the grip of a deep chronic inhibition.54 These ruminations would prove important for his research during better years to come—for lines of investigation on experimental neurosis and psychiatry in the 1920s and 1930s.
The nightmare years 1918–1920 were by far the worst in Pavlov’s life—a period of overwhelming, horrific, and tragic sluchainosti for a man who cherished pravil’nost’. Yet he proved physically and spiritually indomitable. An emissary from the state who visited his lab in late December 1920 captured Pavlov’s determination to survive and continue his scientific research under impossible conditions. He described the “terrible picture of the complete death of the enormous initiative of this singular scientist.” The Towers of Silence were “completely closed and frozen because of an absence of firewood.” In the old lab building, there huddled during the day “two (instead of the previous twenty-five-plus) Pavlovian experimenters,” who worked by the feeble light of “the embers in a broken iron stove (there are not even candles and kerosene lamps).” The dogs had been subsisting on the refuse from a local “artificial bread” factory, which had turned out to be poisonous. All the animals had died, including many long-lived veterans—dogs that had been passed from generation to generation of experimenters and whose well-studied CRs made them especially precious. Ten new dogs had been acquired and the best of these were kept alive by scraps from the coworkers’ rations. “The elderly seventy-two-year-old toiler-enthusiast, Pavlov, in order to spend two hours in the lab with an ember in his hands (formerly he spent five hours, but the lack of coworkers makes a longer stay in the laboratory useless), expends daily an astounding amount of energy and time (aside from cleaning potatoes at home) on the trip from home to the lab and back (the lines for the tram are so long that it is impossible for the old man to board), that is, he covers a distance of about twelve versts [almost nine miles].”55
By this time, Lenin himself was convinced that something needed to be done—for Pavlov, especially, and for Russian scientists in general—but the Bolsheviks’ dealings with the elderly “toiler-enthusiast” were already complicated by his outspoken opposition to their rule, by his international reputation and connections, and by the unyielding sense of personal dostoinstvo—of moral obligation and integrity—that always characterized this strong, willful, principled, and most unusual man.