For Pavlov, the 1920s proved exciting and prosperous, as he both dissented and flourished within the terms of his uneasy relationship with the Bolsheviks. Impelled by his conscience and shielded by his special status, he continued throughout the decade to excoriate them privately and publicly, becoming one of Russia’s very few audible voices of dissent. Nurtured by generous state support, his scientific enterprise recovered and expanded; he traveled abroad frequently (including trips to the United States and Europe in 1923 and 1929), and by decade’s end became an international icon.
Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) stabilized the Soviet economy, which by the mid-1920s was approaching prewar levels of production. The “commanding heights” of the economy (large factories, banks, mines, transport, educational and scientific institutions) remained nationalized, but private small-scale production and trade were permitted and indeed flourished. Food production, too, was on the rebound. Peasants were permitted to rent and sell their own land, to hire labor, and to trade their surplus on the market. Enthusiastic about the resultant flow of food to the cities, Communist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin urged peasants to “enrich yourselves,” but the Party kept a wary eye on the stratum of enterprising and prosperous peasants whose use of hired labor dramatized class stratification in the countryside.
Lenin suffered a stroke in November 1922 and was only intermittently at his post until his death in January 1924. Petrograd then underwent its second name change in ten years, becoming Leningrad. Pavlov continued for years to refer to his home as “Petrograd” and shed no tears for the departed leader. Two years later, when visiting émigré friends in Paris, he described Soviet society metaphorically as a combination of syphilis, cancer, and tuberculosis. Lenin embodied the first: Pavlov knew some of the physicians who had performed the postmortem examination of Lenin’s brain and claimed inside knowledge that they had found clear evidence of syphilis. This, he thought, explained much about his policies as Russia’s ruler.1
For the public, Lenin’s best-known lieutenant and most likely successor was Lev Trotsky, the fiery orator, organizer of the Red Army, and hero of the civil war. Bukharin and the head of the Communist Party organization in Leningrad, Grigorii Zinoviev, seemed plausible alternatives. The less flamboyant and apparently moderate Joseph Stalin, however, had already gathered considerable power in his hands as general secretary of the Communist Party. Lenin had sponsored the ascendancy of his “splendid Georgian” to this leadership post—and had made good use of his energetic savagery during the civil war—before becoming disillusioned by his rudeness toward other comrades and to Lenin’s own wife. By that time, however, whatever the dying leader’s intentions, he was already surrounded by Stalin’s agents and unable to dislodge him.
The struggle to succeed Lenin featured disagreements within the Party over a number of pressing issues. His four leading lieutenants debated various approaches to international policy as capitalism stabilized and world revolution seemed increasingly distant, as well as to the task of industrializing the country while preserving the alliance between the urban working class and the peasantry (which still constituted the overwhelming majority of the population). But the central issue was (in Lenin’s pithy phrase) kto kogo?—who would defeat whom? Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Stalin first combined to defeat Trotsky—who was dismissed from his leadership post in the Commissariat of War and Naval Affairs (1925), excluded from the ruling Politburo (1926), exiled to the distant periphery (1928), and expelled from the country (1929). The three victors ruled in an uneasy triumvirate in the mid-1920s, but Stalin had the upper hand. His supremacy became fully public in 1929, when celebrations of his fiftieth birthday initiated the Stalin cult.
Pavlov prospered during these years. State largesse began restoring his scientific enterprise to life in late 1921. By the mid-1920s, it was substantially larger and better funded than at its prerevolutionary peak; by decade’s end, it dwarfed those of his most successful Western colleagues. He remained the unchallenged master of this “small world,” and of much beyond it: a good word from him assured a coworker’s place in the burgeoning scientific institutions across the country, and a negative one sufficed to prevent an overly independent coworker from acquiring his own institute.
He accomplished this without participating in the competition for patronage from the various ministries of the Soviet state that was mandatory for other ambitious scientists. Unlike Bekhterev, for example, he neither attempted to demonstrate the conformity between his science and Communist ideology nor engaged in popularization of his findings.2 It certainly helped that Communist leaders and intellectuals believed that Pavlov’s research supported their worldview, yet ideological considerations were a distinctly secondary factor in his exalted place in the star system of Soviet science. Much more important was his status as revolutionary Russia’s sole Nobelist and most internationally renowned scientist.3
With three salaries and generous royalties from the publication of his works at home and abroad, he became one of very few prominent members of the tsarist intelligentsia to resume the upper-middle-class style of life that had been interrupted in 1914. Yet his personal life was much sadder and emptier after the tragedies and dislocations wrought by world war, revolution, and civil war. Viktor was dead, Vsevolod in exile. Pavlov’s closest friends—Dubovskoi, Dogel’, Terskii, Zernov, and Berggol’ts—and the rich circle of acquaintances that populated the family photo album had perished or departed. In his early seventies, as life under NEP began, his only intimates were his wife and lover, and this remained true during his final fifteen years.
Sillamiagi was now part of a foreign country. Beginning in 1922, the Pavlovs received special permission to spend summers instead in Kellomäki (now Komarovo), just across the border in Finland. Located on the Gulf of Finland, it was a lovely spot, but provided only a pale reflection of his earlier dacha life, as he complained to Petrova in a letter of August 1925: “The period of my vacation is already expiring and I am completely dissatisfied with it. First of all, there was no task, no goal, unlike in Sillamiagi, and without this it is boring and unpleasant for me.” Nor were there partners for gorodki, cold-water swimming, or even a bicycle. “Because of all this my brain was not occupied and turned in part to conditional reflexes—so I didn’t rest from them.”4
Kellomäki did, however, have its compensations. The Pavlovs befriended the eminent Traveler Il’ia Repin, mingled with visiting artists at his home in nearby Kuokkala (now Repino), and dined at his renowned revolving round table at which guests sat without servants, rotating the table to help themselves to plates, utensils, and food. Repin painted a portrait of Pavlov in 1924, and his rendering of “Pavlov on a Walk in Terioki” (now Zelenogorsk) still hangs in the Repin House-Museum.5
Another advantage of summers in Finland was that Serafima could write candid letters to friends abroad without fear of their being read by the authorities. One letter makes clear that, while they were reconciled to life in Soviet Russia, they despaired for their children’s futures there. Writing in September 1924—when she and her husband were hiding at Kellomäki to avoid formal celebrations of his seventy-fifth birthday—she asked Babkin to find Vladimir a position in a physics department “anywhere in America,” and something for Vera, “I can’t even think where.” Their children did not want to emigrate, “but it is difficult for us to see them wasted, and if they establish themselves in America we will be happy for them and peacefully await our own end. But now we suffer constantly for them, especially when they say ‘All the same, we will never live as well there as with you.’”6
Summers in Kellomäki proved a happy turning point in Vladimir’s personal life. Now divorced from Elizaveta (who had married his good friend Valentin Dogel’), he lived with his sister and parents in their spacious apartment on the 7th Line. Elizaveta’s cool assessment that he never would become a first-rate scientist proved correct, but, no doubt with his father’s help, he had secured a professorship at Petrograd’s Technological Institute. When summering in Kellomäki, the Pavlovs lived at the Villa Renault, which was named after its French owners and managed by their financially comfortable relative, the Finnish widow Vanda Oreshnikova. Vladimir married her daughter Tat’iana in 1926, and she joined the Pavlov household on the 7th Line. “Volia is happy with his young wife,” Serafima informed Babkin. “Ivan Petrovich and I are happy that she has no higher education, but rather is a simple, warm woman who loves life and wants to have children.” Tat’iana soon delighted the Pavlovs by giving birth to two granddaughters, Maria (in 1928) and Liudmila (in 1930).7
Their own intelligent and educated daughter, however, continued to struggle. Vera graduated from the Leningrad Agronomy Institute in 1924 with a special concentration in biology, and from 1925 was officially attached to her father’s lab at the Academy of Sciences. High-strung, constantly complaining about her health, and little appreciated by her parents (despite her intense interest in CRs), she developed neither a professional career nor a personal life outside the family orbit.8
The Pavlovs worried and grieved throughout the decade about Vsevolod. Their talented and articulate son—the childhood “Diplomat” who had seemed destined for a distinguished career in tsarist state service—now languished in Constantinople with other members of the defeated White Army. The family maintained contact and helped him financially as best they could.
In November 1924, “under the strong pressure of practical necessity,” Vsevolod sent his father a heartbreaking letter. His efforts to establish himself had collapsed and the Turkish government had decreed that foreign employees be replaced by native citizens, so he had little chance of finding even the most modest job. He had long thought about writing frankly about his situation, but “didn’t have the strength to come to grips with the boundless chaos of my thoughts and sufferings as a result of the last decade of this most grandiose epoch.” Pavlov had heard of Vsevolod’s gambling and involvement in some sordid adventure, but his son assured him that he had made no “irrevocable” mistakes. He had not “become entangled, either formally or informally, in family relations or anything of that nature.” The Pavlovs had suggested that he return home—which would, of course, require negotiations with the Communist authorities—but Vsevolod considered this “premature” and now hoped to find a position with the Nobel Company in Paris. He pledged to repay his father the money he had sent to extract him from “my stupidity here,” but for now was compelled to request more funds to settle his accounts in Constantinople and move on. Those plans, too, fell through, and he continued to languish in Turkey. Two years later, nothing had changed. While in Stockholm in September 1926, Pavlov composed a letter to his lost son, confiding to Serafima that: “I will ask him what he knows, what he is doing, and what he is inclined to do, so should he return home I will know what work to seek for him.”9
Vladimir became his father’s enthusiastic partner in pursuing a passion nurtured in prerevolutionary days—the collection of artwork. Long a devoté of the Travelers, Pavlov could now afford the relatively low prices for works by his favorites. Many nobles and bourgeois had abandoned their collections when they fled the country; others had them confiscated—and the Soviet state sold many of these nationalized works to private purchasers. In this way, Serov’s painting of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, which had earlier hung in the palace of Tsar Nicholas II’s uncle, Grand Duke Pavel Romanov, whom the Bolsheviks executed in 1919, journeyed first to the state, then to a private buyer, and finally to the Pavlovs’ collection.10 Many artists and their families survived by selling artwork in NEP’s legalized market. Armed with Pavlov’s three salaries (and Vladimir’s made four), and with healthy royalties from book sales, the pair accumulated a stunning collection.
Vladimir’s letters to artist Vasilii Polenov reflect the collectors’ expertise and avidity. In October 1924, having spotted a painting for sale that his father believed was authentic (forgeries abounded in the NEP marketplace), Vladimir requested confirmation from the artist. “I am a great lover and collector of Russian art and a particular admirer of your works. Your paintings are a great rarity here in Petrograd and I had the great fortune to acquire a wonderful picture that carries your signature. The painting portrays a marvelous quiet dawn over a river with the most beautiful play of colors in the sky and water, and three peasant boys fishing, beautifully illuminated by the [illegible] rays of the sun.” Providing photographs along with the dimensions, date, and identifying note on the back of the painting, Vladimir asked if this was really Polenov’s The Fishermen from the Travelers’ exhibit of 1879.11
Polenov’s confirmation, and the information he provided about the three boys in the painting, sent Vladimir into ecstasy:
We were all inexpressibly delighted to receive your kind and friendly letter. My father, Ivan Petrovich (an academician and professor of physiology), was especially touched by your expression of joy regarding one of your first paintings, saying that he, too, sometimes looks over reprints of his first works with particular tenderness and authorial love. I inherited my passion for art from my father, who in his time was an avid attendee of all the exhibitions (definitely preferring, however, the Travelers) and who was on friendly terms with many artists. As soon as father saw The Fishermen (this was an accidental purchase) he immediately resolved that this was undoubtedly a painting from your brush, and he now celebrates having been correct! He sends you his most profound regards and wishes you good health, and also his gratitude for the pleasure he experiences feasting his eyes on your painting. Now The Fishermen has become our favorite painting! Looking at it we recall you and your former schoolmates and comrades Fed’ka, Grishka, and Aleshka as they were fifty years ago.
We have now collected quite a few works by Russian artists, but of course very many big names are still absent. Incidentally, we have V. Vasnetsov’s Snow Maiden, Repin’s Head of a Soldier, Vl. Makovskii’s The Teacher, and landscapes by Shishkin, Dubovskoi, and Kryzhitskii. Our small collection of paintings serves as our sole unchanging source of joy and comfort during the current difficult humdrum days. Truly, artists bring much beauty, radiance, and good to life!12
Touched by the Pavlovs’ sentiments, Polenov sent them his artist’s sketches for The Fishermen, for which Vladimir thanked him profusely: “Now Fed’ka, Grishka, and Aleshka all have acquired reality for us, too, and the painting itself has acquired its history.”13
In late 1925 or early 1926, Vladimir visited the Moscow studio of another famous Traveler, Viktor Vasnetsov, to view his paintings for sale. He resolved to buy with his own funds Oleg and with his father’s the artist’s copy of the famous Three Bogatyrs. Vasnetsov’s asking price, though, was “terrible,” and Vladimir urged him to lower it. “Father is prepared to pay you in the spring when he will receive royalties for his new book. I will begin to pay slowly. We both impatiently await your response. Father has already chosen the very best place in our hall for your Bogatyrs.” Vasnetsov’s reply reveals much about the conditions that forced even the country’s most eminent artists to sell their work at low prices:
You, esteemed Vladimir Ivanovich, were horrified by the price I quoted for my works. Before the war I would have asked no less than three thousand [rubles] for Bogatyrs and a thousand, or at least 800, for Oleg. I offered you a price about one-half of that. Aside from the general expensiveness of life, one must bear in mind the terrible cost of art materials. The paintings were begun long ago and I labored much upon them. I will try to lower the prices to make them accessible to you: for Bogatyrs 1,200, and for Oleg 350.... I most of all need money in the winter for firewood, clearing the snow, and so forth. Several years ago my studio went unheated for two hears and I was very afraid for my paintings. Now I fear the same thing.14
The parties agreed, and Vasnetsov’s paintings joined the Pavlovs’ burgeoning collection. Three Bogatyrs now occupied a central place in the family living room. Vladimir replied to the artist’s query: “What impression do they make? Enormous, all-engrossing! In father’s words upon seeing Bogatyrs, it precisely reproduces the mood that he experienced upon first seeing this painting: aside from the might of the native Russian type, he feels deeply the poetry of our Homeland’s childhood.... Father comes into my room several times a day to look at Oleg, which I have for now fastened to the wall there, and he decided to reread Pushkin’s ‘The Song [of the Wise Oleg]’ in order better to experience it.”15
Pavlov had strong opinions about art but did not consider himself an expert. He related to his paintings mainly as a form of self-expression and reminiscence. In the 1920s, he routinely lay after dinner on the small divan in the living room, drinking them in; in later years, he often enjoyed a midday break in the same way. Contemplating his artwork and sharing it with others was the occasion for nostalgia and storytelling about Russian life and his own. Polenov’s The Fishermen elicited descriptions of the three boys’ personalities, which he related to his own childhood experiences, and Dubovskoi’s The Breakers set him talking about the glories of Russian nature and its people.16 He thus found peace and comfort amid a busy schedule and upsetting times, reaffirming his basic values and transmitting his love of art and country to his children and grandchildren.