Sometime in the spring of 1918—at this most desperate time in his life and that of his family, friends, and country—an anguished Pavlov composed a short poem in prose.
Where are you, freedom, the eternal siren of human beings, from [those] of beast-like nature to the most complete exemplar of the human spirit? Where are you, genuine, authentic [freedom]; when will you come and remain with us always? Alas! We are doomed to await you at the end of your long and continuous struggle with your implacable foe, the bridle—your struggle in the family, in society, in the state, in all of humankind and in our very soul....
You will arrive, pacified and wonderful...only at the very end of this struggle...when you and your rival extend to each other the hand of peace, embrace in friendship, and, finally, in kinship, as two halves, you merge into a single whole. And this moment will be the beginning of the highest human culture, of the highest human happiness.1
In three public lectures that April and May, he made clear that this poem concerned a single principle underlying and uniting his basic view of the nervous system, animal and human psychology, and the fate of Russia.
Speaking “On the Mind in General,” “On the Russian Mind,” and “On the Foundations of the Culture of Animals and Man,” he expressed his anguish and analyzed Russia’s plight and prospects in the language of conditional reflexes. Here he articulated the broader meaning of his terms and concepts much more candidly than in his scientific publications. At once emotional and analytical, these lectures reveal his sentiments about Russia and Russians, his thinking about political and social issues, his sense of himself as a scientist, and his style of thought. They express unambiguously the anthropomorphic elements and metaphorical meanings of his research, and his confidence that it was addressing the wellsprings of complex behaviors and consciousness in dogs and humans.
Like his poem, these speeches revolved around a metaphor that united Pavlov’s thinking about human affairs and higher nervous activity, making each a part of the other: his identification of freedom with excitation, and of discipline (“the bridle”) with inhibition. Just as the anthropomorphic metaphor “Dogs are (simple) People, and People are (complex) Dogs” guaranteed that when he looked at dogs he saw people, and vice versa, so did the metaphorical relationship between excitation/inhibition and freedom/discipline ensure that his reasoning about physiological processes, human personalities, and social events was inextricably intertwined.2
Introducing his first speech, “On the Mind in General,” to a packed auditorium at the Women’s Medical Institute on April 28, he invoked the classical commandment to “know thyself.” This injunction, he observed with sad sarcasm, was now especially timely for Russians:
If, in my present condition, never having sung, never having studied singing, I were to imagine that I possess a pleasant voice and a singular gift for singing, and were to begin to treat my intimates and acquaintances to arias and romantic songs—this would be merely curious. But if an entire people, with its main lower mass having only recently left a state of slavery, and with its intellectual strata having for the most part only borrowed foreign culture, and at that not always successfully, a people as a whole having given relatively little of its own to general culture and to science—if such a people imagines itself the leader of humanity and begins to supply other peoples with models of new cultural forms of life, then we have before us lamentable, fatal events that can threaten this people with the loss of its political independence.3
These “lamentable, fatal events”—the February and October Revolutions, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the Bolsheviks’ pretension to leadership of world civilization—all resulted from a fundamental weakness in the “Russian mind.” Russians were chronically unrealistic; they failed utterly to understand the world and act accordingly. This, as he explained through his lab research on dogs, resulted from an imbalance between the excitatory and inhibitory processes in their central nervous system, and so in every aspect of their civic and political life.
What were the qualities of the well-functioning human mind? Addressing this question, Pavlov invoked his authority as a longtime habitué of the laboratory, which was, after all, a “small world, a small corner of reality” in which the scientist struggled to comprehend “this reality in order correctly to predict what will happen [and]...to even direct this reality according to his discretion, to command it, if this is within our technical means.”4 Having spent his entire adult life in the lab, he had come to understand how “to evaluate the human mind in general and our Russian mind in particular.”5
His description of mental virtues drew liberally upon reflections about his own experiences, and so reveals much about his scientific style and self-image. (As always when discussing general issues, he moved easily between speaking in the first and third person.) A scientist’s success in understanding reality depended upon four fundamental characteristics of mind. First, single-minded concentration upon a defined question or subject. “You should not depart even for a moment from the subject in the field in which you are working. Truly, you should go to sleep and awake with it, and only then can you be confident that the moment will come when the riddle before you will be revealed, solved.” This trait was critical because “when the mind is directed toward reality it receives from it various uncoordinated impressions that take shape chaotically. These impressions must be in constant motion in your head, like the fragments in a kaleidoscope, so that there will finally form in your mind that figure, that form which answers to the system of reality, being its true imprint.”6
The second characteristic of the well-functioning mind was its determined penetration of the signals that separated it from real nature. Here, too, Pavlov was doubtless thinking of his own scientific practices—of the centrality of the interpretive moments in his own research, whether divining his characteristic secretory curves from the juices of the isolated stomach or the play of higher nervous processes from the drippings of a salivary fistula. He had in mind here not epistemological issues regarding the knowability of nature (he had no doubts on that score), but rather the methodological problems presented by the use of instruments that generated a “very long series of signals” that the scientist needed to evaluate and describe in words. Like a sloppy measurement through the fistula, “word-signals, these labels with which you replace facts,” could easily lead to false conclusions. “Your mind’s task,” then, was to interpret and use such signals critically, and so “to attain a direct vision of reality by means of various signals, while avoiding and eliminating the numerous obstacles that inevitably arise.”7
The third feature of good scientific thinking was “absolute freedom of thought”—the ability to think boldly and unconventionally. “Reality is great, limitless, infinite, and varied; it is never confined within our recognized conceptions, our very latest knowledge. Without absolute freedom of thought one cannot see anything truly new.”8
The hypotheses generated by this freethinking were necessarily tempered by a fourth characteristic, “absolute impartiality.” The scientist’s great challenge was to combine attachment to a guiding idea (without which fruitful scientific investigation was impossible) with the willingness to discard that idea if reality so commanded. This balancing act, this simultaneous commitment to an idea and readiness to abandon it “is a really difficult thing; in this consists the true drama of the scientist.”9
He described other necessary mental attributes more briefly. The good scientist balanced attention to detail with concentration upon the primary and the whole. On the one hand, an important detail could fundamentally change one’s view of reality, but, on the other, “if everything fascinates you from the very beginning you will accomplish nothing, these details will render you powerless.... One must know how to close one’s eyes to many details for a certain time in order subsequently to grasp and unite everything.”10 Finally, the well-functioning mind aspired to clarity and simplicity, and, recognizing the meagerness of human knowledge in the face of an infinitely complex reality, was humble.
In his second speech, Pavlov compared these characteristics of the well-functioning intellect with those of the Russian mind. The results, he warned his audience, were not pleasant: “I beg your pardon in advance, for in this oppressive time that we all are enduring I will now speak of rather sad things. But, I think...that our intelligentsia, that is, the brain of the motherland, has no right to joy and gaiety during this funereal hour of great Russia. We should have one need, one obligation—to preserve the single virtue left to us: to look at ourselves and our surroundings without self-deception.”11
Steeped in the worldview of the “people of the sixties,” Pavlov considered knowledge and ideas the motive forces of social development, so he concentrated on the mind of the Russian intelligentsia. The Russian “scientific mind,” unfortunately, still played an insignificant role in the country’s social and political life, and the “mass mind”—mired in “the very same ignorance that existed hundreds of years ago”—remained backward, naive, and inert. For example:
Several weeks ago, at the very height of Bolshevik power, my servant was visited by his brother, a sailor, and, of course, a socialist to the marrow of his bones. As one is supposed to, he saw all evil in the bourgeoisie; moreover, by “bourgeoisie” he understood everybody except for soldiers and sailors. When somebody remarked that you could hardly get along without the bourgeoisie—for example, when the cholera appears, what will you do without doctors—he replied triumphantly that all this is nonsense: “You know, it has long been known that cholera is set loose by the doctors themselves.” Is it worthwhile to speak about such a mind, and can one place upon it any responsibility at all?12
This primitive “mass mind” was easily manipulated and played only a passive role in social developments.
It was Russia’s “intellectual mind,” rather, that bore responsibility for the country’s disastrous state. Intellectuals of both left and right had pursued one-sided and shortsighted goals: “If reactionary thought stood for the principle of power and order, and...used the absence of legality and enlightenment to maintain the popular masses in a barbarous condition, then, on the other hand, one must admit that progressive thought did not so much attempt to enlighten and raise the cultural level of the people as to radicalize them.” Addressing his audience of Petrograd intellectuals, Pavlov insisted that “You and I are sufficiently educated to recognize that what has occurred is no accident, that it has its palpable causes, and that these causes reside in ourselves, in our qualities.”13
This general intellectual mind could be analyzed according to the very same criteria that Pavlov had outlined for the scientific mind in his first lecture. Both, after all, had the same task—to comprehend reality correctly. The only difference was that a scientist’s mistakes led only to the loss of a few experimental animals, while those of the intellectual mind brought immense consequences, as Russians now knew well.
If good scientific thinking set the gold standard, the Russian intellectual mind was lamentably debased currency. The first criterion of effective scientific thinking was concentration, but Russians disliked concentrating on anything. Their conversations were characterized by “great diffuseness,” and their meetings were verbose and wasteful. The rare student who concentrated upon a book or task was scorned by peers as “a short-witted thick crammer.” Russians, rather, prized the quick bold flight of imagination. They frowned upon the “boring specialist” (such as Pavlov himself), while such specialists were valued and respected in the West—and quite correctly, since their quality of “concentratedness” distinguished great thinkers.
The very same distinction between concentrators and generalizers was evident among lab dogs. The dog, of course, was a simpler organism than the human, and so, especially in a lab setting, the nature and consequences of this distinction could be studied with scientific precision. Pavlov explained the process by which he and his coworkers formed “what is commonly called an association” (that is, a CR) between a tone and food. When various hungry animals were repeatedly subjected to a tone, followed by feeding, they responded quite differently. In some,
As soon as the tone is sounded, the dog begins to become restless, licks its lips, saliva flows. In a word, there appears in the dog the very same reaction as occurs with food. Speaking simply, with the sound there arises in the dog the thought of food, and this remains for several seconds until it is fed.... At every occurrence of the sound, the dog gives this food reaction, and this remains all the time, for a month, two months, a year.
Well, one can say that this is a pragmatic dog. Food is a serious thing, and the animal aspires to it, prepares itself. That is how it is with serious dogs. One can also distinguish such dogs in life—they are peaceful, untroubled, well-grounded animals.14
Other dogs, however, responded to the tone only by becoming listless and sleepy; they salivate and begin to eat only if one puts the food in its mouth. “You see that for some dogs the thought of food, even for one minute, is unbearable.... They tire and begin to sleep, rejecting such an important thing as food.” Clearly, the two sets of dogs had different types of nervous systems—one was “strong, solid, able-bodied; and the other weak, flaccid, very quickly exhausted. One cannot doubt that the first type is stronger, better adapted to life.”
The first type of dog, then, concentrated upon the association between the tone and food, while the second type was unable to do so. “Transfer this to man and you will be convinced that strength lies not in mobility and scatteredness of thought but in concentratedness, steadiness.”15 Scorning the “narrow specialist” and priding itself on its broad knowledge and flights of imagination, the Russian mind actually shared the weak nervous system of that feckless second set of dogs.
Experiments on differentiation also demonstrated that “this tendency of which we are so proud toward general propositions, toward generalizations distant from reality...is a primitive quality of nervous activity.” When a CR to the sound of a harmonium was first established, a dog also salivated in response to various other sounds. This was termed “generalization.” During succeeding trials, as the experimenter reinforced with feeding only the sound of the tone, a process of “differentiation” occurred: the tone consistently elicited salivation, while other sounds did not. Here again, however, dogs varied greatly in their ability to understand reality: “One dog retains this generalization for a very long time, and with difficulty changes over to a pragmatic and purposive specialization. Among other dogs this occurs quickly.” The difference was even clearer in more complex experiments. For example, in one set of trials the tone was accompanied by another stimulus, the scratching of the dog’s skin, and that combination was not reinforced with food. Some dogs adapted quickly, salivating to the tone alone but not to the combination of stimuli. “But do you know what occurs in other dogs? Not only does there not occur such a pragmatic distinction, but, on the contrary, there occurs a food reaction to this additional stimulus as well—that is, to the scratching alone, which neither itself nor in combination with the sound is ever accompanied by food. You see what a muddle, what inefficiency, inadaptiveness. Such is the price of this tendency to generalization. Clearly, this is not a virtue, not a strength.”
For Pavlov, then, the penchant of the Russian mind for imprecise generalization reflected the very same nervous processes that created in the muddled dog a continued “generalized” salivary response. His scientific terms “differentiation” and “generalization” clearly expressed a metaphorical connection between experimental phenomena and much broader psychological and intellectual characteristics.
Drawing upon his own experiences, he found Russians equally deficient regarding the other characteristics of a well-functioning mind. As for the attempt to make direct contact with reality, his Russian students rarely asked questions in lectures, while foreign attendees frequently did so: “While the Russian nods his head without really understanding, the foreigner attempts to go directly to the root of things.” Russians lacked the mental rigor necessary for the interpretation of signals and penetration to underlying realities, preferring loose verbiage to hard facts: “We occupy ourselves with the collection of words and not the study of life.” As for “absolute freedom of thought,” he recalled his own experience more than forty years earlier when, as a student at St. Petersburg University, he was one of Tsion’s few defenders. “To say anything against the general mood was impossible. You were dragged down and practically labeled a spy.” The same intolerance characterized Russian adults, for example in the Duma, where political opponents treated one another as enemies.16
Russians did manifest one necessary component of good scientific thinking—strong attachment to a guiding idea—but lacked the necessary complements to it—“absolute impartiality of thought” and detailed, critical rigor. Deaf to objections both from those who disagree and from reality, their basic mental characteristic was to take propositions to their extreme: “We suppose all virtue to lie in driving things to the limit, regardless of any conditions.” The Russian mind was chronically imbalanced. Its failure to temper passion for a guiding idea with disciplined impartiality was a reflection of its general failure to temper freedom with discipline.
The catastrophic consequences of this imbalance—and of the consequent failure to correctly understand reality—were legion:
Let us take another example of vital importance, our social democracy. It contains a certain truth; of course, not a complete truth, since nobody can pretend to absolute truth. For countries where factory production is beginning to involve enormous masses, there emerges, of course, the great question of preserving the energy and protecting the life and health of the worker. Furthermore, the cultured class, the intelligentsia, usually has a tendency to degenerate. Replacements, new forces, must rise from the popular depths. And, of course, in the struggle between labor and capital the government must stand for the protection of the worker....
But what have we made of this? We have overextended this idea into the dictatorship of the proletariat. We have placed the brain, the head, below and the feet above. That which constitutes the culture, the intellectual strength of the nation, has been devalued, and that which for now remains a crude force, replaceable by a machine, has been moved to the forefront. All this, of course, is doomed to destruction as a blind rejection of reality.17
The irresponsible behavior of the Russian intelligentsia in the years since 1905 illustrated the follies of the imbalanced Russian mind, with its imperviousness to reality, and the disastrous consequences for the homeland:
Take the faith in our revolution. Was there really here a congruity with, a clear view of, reality on the part of those who created the [February 1917] revolution during wartime? Was it not clear that the war in itself was a terrible and great task? God grant that we manage this alone. Was there really any chance that we would be able to perform both enormous tasks immediately—the war and the revolution?... Take our Duma. As soon as it convened, it stirred up social indignation against our government. That there sat upon the throne a degenerate, that our government was poor—this we all knew. But you [the intelligentsia] pronounce inflammatory phrases, you raise a storm of indignation, you agitate society. Is this what you want? And so you ended up confronted with two things, a war and a revolution, which you could not accomplish simultaneously, and you yourself perished. Is this truly seeing reality?18
The Russian mind, then, was characterized by its imbalance and resultant failure to correctly assess reality. Passionately attached to guiding ideas, it lacked the discipline to moderate and temper them; bold in generalization, it lacked the attention to methodology and detail necessary to temper generalizations with facts and necessary distinctions. Russian intellectuals had grasped the basic truth in social democracy, but, lacking moderation, had raised it to a fantastic dogma; they had consistently abandoned sober criticism for destructive polemics, and freedom for license.
This gloomy characterization of the Russian mind was, Pavlov insisted, an “accounting of vital importance.” Perhaps Russia would lose its political independence and fall under the hegemony of foreign powers, but the Russian people would survive. Like the patient made aware of a heart defect, Russians must take account of their mental deficiency in order to adapt and seek treatment.
Yet his research also provided grounds for hope. Thinking of experiments on Petrova’s dog Gryzun, he assured his audience that experiments had demonstrated that Russians’ defects could be remedied. “You can have a nervous system with a very weak development of the important inhibitory process, of that which establishes order, moderation. And you will witness all the consequences of such a weak development. But after a certain amount of practice, training, there proceeds under our very eyes an improvement of the nervous system, and a very substantial one.” Therefore, his analysis did “not constitute an absolute sentence upon our people.... Despite all that has occurred, we should not lose hope.”
One week later, in a final lecture on “Foundations of the Culture of Animals and Man,” he deepened this physiological analysis of Russians’ fatal lack of moderation. All animal activity, he explained, was consumed by the struggle to survive—to secure the necessities for life and avoid harm. This activity was governed by the nervous system, and particularly by two sets of reflexive mechanisms: inborn instincts (URs) and associations acquired through experience (CRs). The latter were necessarily subtle and temporary, enabling the animal to adapt to a constantly changing environment.
These reflexive activities in animals—and the range of emotions, behaviors, and characteristics they produced—differed only in degree from those in humans. Observing birds and fish in the Petrograd zoo, he had been “astonished by the resemblance of their behavior to ours, even in its details; moreover, this resemblance was so great as to even be insulting.” One small fish, he recounted, defended its young with “the truest heroism and selflessness, in no way worse than among us.” Observing the bird cages, “I was struck by the variety of characters and types represented by its inhabitants.... There passed before me literally all the types in Gogol’s Dead Souls.”19
Shifting gears, he introduced his central point: all these visible manifestations of life activity represented just one half of the underlying nervous mechanisms that produced them.
This is the result of what we call excitation. This is the animal’s freedom in the very broadest sense of the word, but this, I say, is only one half of life. If there were only this half, life could not exist, it would end in the quickest manner. There must be another half of entirely the same value and necessity; this is the part of the activity of the organism that we call delay, inhibition, and, in human activity, discipline, the bridle. Without it life is impossible.20
Drawing upon Krasnogorskii’s and Petrova’s doctoral research, he emphasized that inhibition was a nervous process equal in importance to excitation. In an animal, a person, a people, or a society, the necessary “order, measure, and timeliness” to meet the challenges of the external world could only be achieved by a balance between excitation-freedom and inhibition-discipline.
To illustrate, he used Gubergritz’s dog Refleks and his reflex of freedom. This “very cultivated domesticated animal,” whose ancestors had apparently lived in freedom for many generations, initially would not tolerate any constraints and refused to eat on the experimental stand. In order to inhibit this inborn response, the experimenters began to feed him only on the stand. “For a long time, the dog did not take the food, preferring to go hungry.” This, however, “was unreasonable, not in accord with the demands of reality,” and the well-balanced animal eventually adjusted his behavior, not only tolerating the stand but jumping eagerly onto it. Possessed of an exemplary balance between excitation and inhibition—between “activity, the aspiration to freedom” and “the lawful inhibition of this activity according to the demands of specific life conditions”—Refleks had developed a “purposeful inhibition of this reflex of freedom.”21 Pavlov’s interpretation of the broader meaning of these trials had changed markedly over the past year. In March 1917, he had pointed to this same dog’s reflex of freedom as a positive, inborn response that had unfortunately been suppressed in many Russians. In the much different circumstances of May 1918, however, he feared disorder, fanaticism, and national weakness—and emphasized that this same reflex, if not balanced by inhibition, produced an unreasonable response to reality.22
He also invoked Erofeeva’s experiments to make the same point. When her dog was very hungry and electrical shocks were repeatedly paired with feeding, he responded to these shocks—even those that painfully scorched his skin—not with a defensive reaction but with salivation.23 This demonstrated a “completely purposeful interrelation with life,” as the animal needed to undergo pain to order to avoid starvation—just as a street dog sacrificed its blood, fur, and even body parts when battling competitors for food.24
Interacting with excitation as a full partner, inhibition produced a realistic, measured, purposive reaction to any situation. It restrained and moderated the reflex of freedom when necessary for Refleks’s survival and produced an appropriate response when Erofeeva’s dog was confronted with the pairing of electrical shock and feeding. That same balanced interaction was necessary to an animal’s adjustment to a dynamic world in which the significance of signals was constantly changing. When a dog formed an association between a sound and food, and that sound was subsequently not reinforced with feeding, the well-balanced animal responded appropriately to the new situation because the excitatory effect of the sound was suppressed by inhibition.
Inhibition, in sum, was responsible for “all perfection, all the subtlety of life.” Without it, there would be only excitation, only “chaos, which will destroy...all correspondence between the animal and the surrounding world. So we must recognize as a basic law of life, like the law of gravity, that life activity consists of two halves, of two phenomena—of freedom, excitation; and of inhibition, discipline, the bridle.”25
When an individual lacked the necessary balance between excitation-freedom and inhibition-discipline, the result was “an uncultured type lacking correspondence with reality.” Experiments demonstrated this dramatically: if a dog has acquired an association to a specific tone—salivating in response to it, but not to similar ones—and its excitatory process is then overstimulated with caffeine, it “begins to mix up sounds, loses the ability to react subtly to reality.” If a series of trials “overstrained” and weakened inhibitory activity, this too “results in a chaotic state. The animal becomes ill, neurasthenic, poorly adapted.”26 Experiments also demonstrated that inhibition was more fragile, labile, and easily destroyed than excitation, but Russians could take comfort in the fact that it also could be strengthened by exercise and training.”27
This brought Pavlov to a subject that was increasingly attracting his attention in the lab: nervous types. There existed two basic types, he claimed. The even-tempered type, with a good balance between excitation and inhibition, performed well in differentiation experiments and in life was “more perfect and adapted,” measuring and calculating its every move. The excitable type, on the other hand, required many more trials to succeed in differentiation experiments. “Less perfect” and “insufficiently cultured,” it “reacts to external phenomena nonsensically.”28
The same, of course, held true for individual humans and peoples. Humans, however, faced more complex tasks, and so for them the balance between excitation and inhibition was even more important. Leading nations inculcated this balance through a set of “social inhibitors”: religion, laws, state authority, moral upbringing, customs, and habits.
The two leading peoples in this respect were clearly the English and the Germans. Drawing upon his own travels, Pavlov reviewed the role that social inhibitors played in their cultures. England combined outstanding intellectual achievements (he mentioned Newton, Darwin, and Shakespeare) with omnipresent religiosity. He recalled that during his trip to London and Cambridge in 1912 both a banquet for leading physicians and breakfast at a leading medical colleague’s home had begun with a prayer, and the jubilee celebration of the Royal Society began with a service at Westminster Abbey. Here the scientists paid homage to God and the abbot paid homage to scientists as “seekers and accumulators of truth.” Recounting his embarrassment when “I, like a typical Russian liberal,” began chattering to William Ramsay during the service and was rebuked by the religiously devout Nobel Prize–winning chemist, Pavlov concluded: “Such is the attitude toward the first inhibitor, toward the first bridle, by the most freedom-loving and intellectual people.”29
Other effective social inhibitors included the omnipresent small fines in Germany, professorial inspection of student behavior in the streets of Cambridge and Oxford, and the strict propriety of English dress. In each case, well-established freedoms were balanced by strictly enforced limitations. “The leading nations of England and Germany ascribe the very same significance to inhibition, the bridle, as to the manifestation of activity, freedom.... The ideal consists in a balance of one with the other, when inhibition and laws together confine freedom within limits.”30
Russia, where social inhibitors were paltry and powerless, provided a lamentable contrast. Not mentioning his own atheism, Pavlov mourned the absence of religion’s inhibitory influence in Russian culture, particularly among the intelligentsia. Moral upbringing was lax, and parents hastened to satisfy their children’s every whim, creating “an internal slave, a slave to his inclinations and wishes [who]...lacks the ability to inhibit himself.” Schools lacked all discipline, and laws were sporadically enforced.31
This characteristic absence of inhibition was now on full display: “What is revolution in general? It is liberation from all the inhibitors about which I spoke. It is complete absence of restraint. There were laws, customs, and so forth. All of this has now come to naught. The old is gone, the new still does not exist. Inhibition is eliminated, there remains only excitation. And this produces all sorts of excesses in the realms of desire, thought, and behavior.” Student committees now demanded the right to govern universities, and laboratory councils composed of young assistants demanded the right to overrule experienced scientists like himself—tried and tested directors—in setting the direction of scientific inquiry. “Is this not revolutionary madness?”32
He spoke most passionately about another consequence of Russians’ lack of inhibition, namely the dissolution of the empire and the country’s vulnerability to Germany:
For centuries the peoples of Russia existed together, becoming accustomed to one general state language, joined by common interests, by habits of life, and so forth. We occupy one-sixth of all the earth’s surface, encompassing all climates, so we in fact came very close to the ideal dream of solidarity, of a union of all peoples. Of course our autocracy oppressed individual peoples, but the autocracy oppressed everyone, both the Great Russians and the Little Russians [Ukrainians], and so forth. After the revolution, one could hope that each people’s wishes would be satisfied, that each would be given schools and laws, and so on. The union between them was already prepared.
But what happened? As soon as the revolution occurred, we all scattered, turned away from one another, and each wants self-determination. What sense is there in this? Together we are strong, but if we are separate, those who are stronger will make short work of us....
This aspiration clearly does not answer the demands of humankind and is the result of the removal of the bridle from us: this is the manifestation of liberty, of freedom, without any participation of the other half of life, of discipline, of inhibition....
And suddenly, from somewhere, there appears an irresistible aspiration to disintegration! What justifies this, why is it necessary? And we are doing this when Germanism threatens us....
When our historical enemies from the West to the East are in motion, we consider it good to split apart in order to be several times weaker.33
Now extremely agitated, he spoke too quickly for Serafima to transcribe his words.
Finally slowing down, he ended on a “conciliatory note” by reciting his poem, which “unites in it everything I have said,” and expressed his vision of the happiness that awaited humanity when excitation-freedom and inhibition-discipline were finally integrated and reconciled.
“But gentlemen!” he concluded. “I am devoured by torturous doubt. Are such a merger and such happiness possible for the Russian and the Slav in general, or is it impossible?”34