At the IEM and the Academy of Sciences Pavlov’s activities were confined almost entirely to his own “small world” of the lab, but at the Military-Medical Academy he confronted broader Soviet realities through his contact with students and educational policy.
He packed his five hours of lectures per week into two sessions (each with a short intermission). Fol’bort continued to prepare the experimental demonstrations and to serve as the target of Pavlov’s outbursts (loudly rebuked, for example, for “bringing a bad vial” when the vessel burst on stage while being heated). Another memorable incident delighted the student audience and reflected Pavlov’s anthropomorphic mental habits and concern about the “Russian type.” During a demonstration of an experiment on blood pressure, the head of the mildly narcotized dog lolled over the side of the table, severing its artery on the sharp metal edge. Pavlov was furious, pacing afterward in his lab and muttering to himself: “What a disgrace! What carelessness! Only in the hands of a Russian assistant would a dog be able to commit suicide during a lecture.”1
Orbeli lectured on the sensory and muscular systems, supervised lab exercises for interested students, and joined Fol’bort in after-class demonstrations of experiments that could not be conducted or displayed successfully in the auditorium. Fol’bort also ran study circles for students interested in a deeper knowledge of Pavlovian research. These served both to recruit medical students to the chief’s lab and to educate new coworkers.2
The Military-Medical Academy, however, was changing, and Pavlov felt increasingly less comfortable there as the years wore on. The faculty members closest to him had either emigrated or died, and the student body was being transformed by Soviet educational policy and the growing presence of the Communist Party. The overwhelming majority of students at the Academy (like the faculty there) had welcomed the February 1917 revolution and opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power. Seeking to proletarianize the student body, the Commissariat of Popular Enlightenment had decreed in fall 1918 that, aside from the usual entering class of 150, an additional 1,000 students would be admitted without high school degrees.
Many of these recruits fought for the Red Army during the civil war before entering the Academy in fall 1922. Fervent partisans of Soviet power, they were culturally quite distinct from the traditional student body, with which they came constantly into conflict. The youth branch of the Communist Party was formed on campus in 1922 with 27 members, growing to 180 by 1923. Its journal appeared in the latter year. Our Spark debated Party politics and polemicized against bourgeois attitudes among students and faculty.3
In at least one instance, the Communists pleased Pavlov by their principled militancy. In 1923, Evgenii Kreps, who had worked in Pavlov’s lab as a medical student, was denied one of the five coveted graduate student stipends at the Academy despite exemplary grades and walk-on-water recommendations from Pavlov and another faculty member. The Communist-dominated student Soviet objected to this as a manifestation of anti-Semitism and asked higher authorities to reverse the injustice. Kreps received the stipend, which supported him while he worked in Pavlov’s lab on his way to scientific eminence.4
More commonly, however, Pavlov was at loggerheads with the Academy’s new political culture. Two incidents cast this in sharp relief. In February 1924, Our Spark printed an item about a certain student Luk’ianov who reportedly insisted during an argument that the proletariat could not live without the bourgeoisie, that conditions for workers and peasants were deteriorating, and that historical materialism and political economy were not real sciences. Luk’ianov was “a second I. P. Pavlov,” commented the paper’s correspondent, alluding to the physiologist’s well-known anti-Communism. He further reported that “one of the [student] sailors could not restrain himself and loudly asked ‘can it really be true that such gentlemen are still tolerated in the Academy?’” Thankfully, he added, such students were now few.5
On one occasion, the new atmosphere at the Academy extended into Pavlov’s lecture hall, igniting his helpless rage. Pavlov had always eagerly solicited student questions and was delighted by those rare occasions when an inquisitive hand shot up. He was, then, thrilled when medical student Georgii Konradi began asking such probing questions that lectures sometimes turned into a discussion between professor and student. A gang of the new proletarian students, however, considered Konradi an arrogant show-off. Surrounding him after class one day, they threatened to beat him up if he continued. The questions ceased. Finally, a frustrated and frightened Konradi passed Pavlov an anonymous note explaining his silence. Pavlov read it while lecturing, exploded, and angrily demanded that the thugs show themselves. No reply came from the noisy auditorium. (Konradi joined Pavlov’s lab at the Military-Medical Academy in 1924, moved to his lab in the Academy of Sciences in 1925, and went on to a successful career in physiology.)6
Pavlov continued to lambaste the Bolsheviks both in his annual inaugural lecture and in numerous digressions during class. A. V. Koperina, a female student from the provinces—a member of the first cohort to benefit from the Communists’ removal of traditional barriers to women—was shocked by the sentiments expressed by her famous professor. Her account of one political confrontation in the auditorium probably reflects common attitudes among the less politicized members of the student body:
I will always remember when, during one of his lectures [in the 1921–1922 academic year], he was summarizing the complexities of the work of the digestive organs and suddenly launched into an analysis of Bukharin’s book The ABC of Communism, on which all students were required to take an exam for [the course on] Political Literacy. He said that he had demonstrated to us through examples how every organ works well and harmoniously only in its place, preserving in this manner the wholeness of the entire organism; but Mr. Bukharin (he opened the book) writes that in the complex modern system of Communist society, every cook will have the opportunity to govern the state [Bukharin borrowed this formulation from Lenin’s State and Revolution].... Then he began to analyze the formula of Communism: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” He said that even if one allows that the abilities of each person can be determined, then Mr. Bukharin could hardly define the needs, and so, not without reason, Bukharin had avoided a definition of the word “need.” At this, a number of hands went up in the front rows of the auditorium and words were heard: “Permit me to say!” (apparently the Party people wanted to speak). Suddenly Pavlov pounded loudly on the table and responded sharply: “No, I will not permit it. I am lecturing here and you will hold meetings in your own place!” (I and everybody else were stunned.)
I was very afraid for him, since at home in the provinces such words would not have passed without consequence. But they showed great patience and indulgence toward I. P. Pavlov because of his selfless love for science and his Homeland.7
A devoted student, Koperina attended Pavlov’s lectures again during the 1922–1923 academic year, arriving early to claim a seat close enough to the stage to see the experiments, hear him clearly, and transcribe his lectures. She did so meticulously, jotting down also many of his political interjections. On December 15, having mentioned the great contributions of Russian scientists to digestive physiology, he added: “I am now living out the remainder of my life with the gloomy thought that Russian science is dying and will probably perish. Professors are not up to their task, the student body is uneducated, the best people are being exiled.... Physiology—my dear science, which is so close to me—suffers from such nonsense.”8 On a day that would have fallen during Christmas under the old calendar,9 he marked the occasion with this commentary: “Seeing our circumstances I am plunged into despair! People are dying of despair.... The Communists and Christmas: mocking religion, which was created over the centuries and guided all of humanity, elevating it to today’s culture. Religion! You know, this is such an exalted defensive reflex!” He then began speaking so rapidly that Koperina couldn’t keep up, finally running out of steam and concluding sadly: “Let’s turn now to the only consolation: science.”10
The Academy’s Bolshevik collective was outraged by such remarks, and 115 militants gathered in October 1922 to discuss an item listed on the agenda as “On Professor Pavlov.” Their hands were tied, however, by larger policy decisions reached by much more august bodies, and they could resolve only “to reply through the press and a lecture.” Those larger considerations were spelled out by agitprop chief Andrei Bubnov—who was also well informed of the physiologist’s politically incorrect lectures—in a meeting of that same year. “If [the historian] Prof. Kizevetter causes harm with his reactionary lectures, then we send him packing abroad. But if the famous physiologist Pavlov scolds us Communists in the introductions to his lectures, we cannot chase him out, for he also does tremendous work that is extremely useful for us. We must arrange things so that Pavlov does needed and useful things for the Soviet state, and we must somehow remove his negative consequences.”11
But he was just warming up. In September 1923 and May 1924, he delivered two more lengthy diatribes against Bolshevik rule, eliciting responses from three members of the national Party leadership. His inaugural lecture of the 1923–1924 academic year eviscerated Bukharin’s Proletarian Revolution and Culture, which Pavlov had read carefully, marking up his copy of that work with angry underlinings, question marks, and “NB”s.
Pavlov’s reputation for political fireworks ensured a packed auditorium. When his introductory remarks confirmed that expectation, guards closed the doors to prevent further contamination.
Gentlemen, perhaps you have been remade into internationalists, but I was, am, and will remain a Russian person, a son of the homeland; I am most of all interested in its life, I live by its interests, its dostoinstvo fortifies my own. I was not a little surprised when very significant [events] in Russian history placed before me the question: would my homeland be or not be?...I speak truthfully when I say that the very thought that my homeland will perish would deprive me completely of the basic sense of my scientific activity. For whom, then, would I strive? These are my true feelings. It will now be understandable why I live with two thoughts. On the one hand, with thoughts about physiology, and on the other—what will come of my homeland, what awaits my homeland, to what end is all this leading?12
As always when pronouncing on larger issues, Pavlov reminded his audience that, as a scientist, he was accustomed to daily “verifying my impartiality” and rendering objective judgments. The first harsh truth he offered was that the Bolshevik dream of world revolution was an illusory nightmare. “I have just made a great journey” to the West, he informed his audience, “and I saw nothing that would indicate the possibility of a world revolution.” Significant strikes and disorders had occurred only in countries defeated and ruined during the war—he mentioned Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria—but the Communist Party of Germany, upon which the Bolsheviks had placed their greatest hopes, was small, and proletarian revolution offered no escape from the country’s problems.13
It was indeed fortunate that other nations were not following Russia’s lead, for “if the wish of our Party were realized, a massacre would take place in all nations that would immeasurably exceed that which we had here.” As terrible as Russia’s civil war had been, its horror had been vitiated by the characteristic indolence and weakness of the “Russian type.” The German and Anglo-Saxon—and even the Finn—were much more energetic and efficient, so civil war among such peoples would be unimaginably destructive and bloody.14 In any case, the solution for humanity’s problems lay elsewhere. Science alone could enable humankind to “resolve its struggles with nature and with its own human nature”—“whether on proletarian or capitalist foundations, it makes no difference.”15
And now Communist policies threatened to destroy Russian science. Pavlov excoriated Bukharin’s vision that the Party—whose members were scientifically illiterate—would abolish the “anarchy of cultural-intellectual production” by using the same planning principles employed to produce textiles and sausage. At Odessa University, this had already resulted in the firing or flight of its most talented professors. “To what will this lead when they examine all the sciences [to determine] what is worthwhile and what is not?”16
These same inexperienced hands were now reaching clumsily into the very heart of the academic system, “remaking everything, constantly revising programs, abolishing an order recognized by the entire world, eliminating doctoral degrees.” Agreeing with the Bolsheviks’ desire to make education available to the working masses, Pavlov insisted that this could only be accomplished by having the most gifted working-class students traverse the same academic path as did their bourgeois counterparts. The current system of rabfaki—the militantly pro-Communist working-class auxiliaries to traditional schools that hurriedly prepared proletarians for higher education—was a vain and fanciful shortcut.17
He concluded by asking his listeners to take science seriously. If they did, they would abandon “this dogmatism of Marxism or the Communist Party,” because “science and dogmatism are completely incompatible things. Science and free criticism are synonyms.... If you relate to science as one should, if you become fundamentally familiar with it, then...you will nevertheless recognize that Marxism and Communism are not at all absolute truth, that it is one theory that contains perhaps part of the truth and perhaps no truth, and you will regard life with a free point of view, and not with such a slavish one.”18
A transcript of Pavlov’s remarks was distributed among the Party leadership. Zinoviev and Trotsky responded briefly during speeches in November 1923 to the Conference of Scientific Workers in Petrograd. Deriding Pavlov’s “childish prejudices” and “limited horizon” regarding the prospects for world revolution, Zinoviev commented that in Russia, where revolution had already occurred, the intelligentsia has “recoiled from the proletariat,” but in Germany, where revolution would next occur, much of the intelligentsia had already come around. “Einstein has already come to this position, but our academician Pavlov still insists on his disagreement with ‘Marxism,’ although his scientific investigations go wholly to the support of Marxism.” Trotsky professed his admiration for Pavlov’s scientific contributions, but forcefully rejected his view that scientific progress alone would alleviate human suffering. “We know, for example, that the psycho-technology that can acquire a serious grounding only in reflexology...permits the selection of people, of individuals who are best adapted to artillery, to aviation, or to chemical warfare. In other words, the deepening of our knowledge of individual human nature permits the better organization of the destruction of man by man, that is, the very same mission which we, together with I. P. Pavlov, consider the greatest horror of contemporary human culture.” The uses to which science would be put, Trotsky insisted, depended upon the organization of society, and in this realm Marxism had the same scientific status as did Darwinism and Pavlov’s doctrine in their own realms.19
Bukharin, who had replaced Gorky as the Party’s leading emissary to the intelligentsia, published in 1924 a sixty-page response to Pavlov titled On the World Revolution, Our Country, Culture, and Other Things. His brochure was pointedly republished in the May and June issues of Our Spark with the additional subtitle “Response to Professor I. P. Pavlov.”20
He adopted a tone of serious and respectful, if self-assured and sarcastic, intellectual engagement, and combined respectful nods to Pavlov’s scientific credentials with some strong arguments, clever rhetorical gambits, and triumphalist wishful thinking. Pavlov was “one of the leading Russian scientists,” the creator of an important new orientation and school in physiology. Although politically very “distant from the working class,” his “undoubted services to humanity” were especially precious to Marxists because they “pour water into the mill of materialism.”21
Yet Pavlov was guilty of precisely the error he attributed to the Communist Party—of pronouncing boldly on subjects that he did not understand. A great physiologist, he did not recognize that “the social sciences, too, comprise a science”—and here he was out of his depth. Pavlov claimed naively that his scientific experience made him “objective” and “dispassionate,” but the great chemist Mendeleev had been a passionate defender of tsarism and protectionist economics, and the brilliant Newton a fervent believer in the Apocalypse. Scientists, too, had political ideologies, so “the dispassionateness of science, in the sense that Academician Pavlov attributes to it, is a myth.”22 Here, it seems, Pavlov found Bukharin convincing: his longstanding insistence that, as a scientist, he saw social and political developments objectively dropped out of his rhetorical arsenal thereafter.
Bukharin’s arguments on other points could only have convinced his partisans. Like most of the Communist leadership, he knew that Pavlov was fully justified in dismissing the near-term prospects for world revolution. He could defend the Party position only in abstract Marxist terms and argue that—however bloody—the body count from proletarian revolution would pale in comparison to that of imperialist world war and capitalist oppression.23 As for Pavlov’s concerns that the proletariat was too ignorant to administer Russian science, Bukharin assured his readers that it would do so with the same success as it organized the Red Army and state administration. The Party’s class approach to education—which so alarmed Pavlov—would ultimately enrich Russian science by expanding and widening the pool from which scientists were selected.24 (Over time, this last argument would indeed acquire greater force for Pavlov as he appreciated the new cadres in his labs.)
Bukharin closed on the same rhetorical note as had Pavlov—by imploring his opponent to take science seriously and be objective. “He has committed a sin not only from the perspective of Communism, but also from the perspective of that very objective method that he so brilliantly defends with reference to the salivary glands, and which he so fundamentally forgets when analyzing the events of social life.”25
These polemics notwithstanding, Pavlov was invited in May 1924 to deliver a public lecture in the great hall of the City Duma on Nevskii Prospekt—the same venue where, some sixty years earlier, his heroes among the “people of the sixties” had spoken passionately for social reform guided by the development of science. The organizers of the event would hardly have knowingly provided a political forum to the physiologist who had just been roundly criticized by three members of the Politburo. Perhaps they thought that the title of his lecture, “Some Applications to Life of the New Physiology of the Brain,” referred to psychological insights or medical treatments. Many clearly suspected otherwise. The huge hall was packed for the two-hour lecture, no doubt by some enthusiasts for science, but also by those who anticipated, eagerly or otherwise, a rare instance of public political dissent.
Pavlov did not disappoint them, delivering an updated version of his speeches in 1918 on the “Russian mind” and Soviet power. During the first hour (which even one political critic labeled “masterful”) he summarized his concept of unconditional and conditional reflexes, explained the nature and interaction of excitation and inhibition, dwelled upon the reflexes of freedom and self-preservation (citing the experiments by Erofeeva and Gubergrits), and explained how, in differentiation experiments, the rapid alternation of CSs and CIs strained and disturbed the “brain machine,” resulting sometimes in a “breakdown” characterized by abnormal, neurotic behavior.26
During the second hour he applied these findings “to our Russian revolution.” The suppression of private property and persecution of religion had profoundly shaken Russians’ nervous system, causing a mass neurotic “breakdown” characterized by “tendencies to succumb to fantastic suggestions.” Having always suffered from an imbalance between excitation and inhibition, Russians were now totally incapable of seeing things as they really were. Their reflexes “are coordinated, not with reality, but with words.” Soviet rule rested upon the use of the instinct for survival to suppress the reflex of freedom. This cruel tactic was effective—just as it had been in compelling Gubergrits’s dog to submit to experiments on the stand—and the ultimate results were appalling:
In one of his speeches the late Lenin said that the proletariat can hold power only by a dictatorship. And this is the very truth. Now we all know what this dictatorship is: every moment, you fear being shot, and this tension excites strongly your reflex of life or death. You also have been every moment in danger of starving; this too grips you through the food reflex. And under these conditions it is quite plain that you may rule as you like. But it is wholly wrong to think that in such a way you can build a state; you will never have a real government, but only the administration of slaves.27
The audience stirred noisily and some accused Pavlov of treason. Standing his ground, he “faced the audience almost ferociously and, pounding the table forcefully with his fists until there was silence, continued, ‘It makes no difference whether it is sweet or bitter for you to listen to this—you must hear it, you must know the truth, I speak only the truth.’” Seated behind him, Fol’bort noticed that Pavlov “quavered with strong emotion, and the back of his ears changed from red to white and back again.” The audience finally quieted down and he spelled out his final point: Bolshevik methods had nothing to do with freedom, but merely strengthened the reflex of slavery.28
Pavlov was not invited to speak in public for another five years, and then only to deliver what the organizers thought would be a few harmless words to introduce a program in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Ivan Sechenov’s birth. (On this occasion, too, they proved mistaken.)
By the mid-1920s, he had become a national symbol of political resistance. One widespread rumor—encouraged by his protests against the persecution of religion—held (falsely) that he was himself a religious believer. His personal archive contains many letters and entreaties from those encouraged by his reputation. For example, in 1925 the exiled Luke, bishop of Tashkent and Turkestan, warmly congratulated Pavlov on his seventy-fifth birthday and apologized for his tardiness in doing so. “Banished for Christ to the very ends of the earth,” he had just learned of Pavlov’s jubilee. “Aside from my most profound respect,” he wrote, “accept my love and blessing for your piety, about which word has reached me from those who know you.” Pavlov replied: “I am profoundly touched by your warm greeting and extend my heartfelt thanks. In this difficult time, full of relentless grief for those who think and feel, who feel in a human way, there remains only one support in life—to fulfill one’s duty insofar as one’s powers permit. With all my soul I sympathize with you in your torment.”29
It was one thing to spar verbally with the Communists (and even to endure threats and interrogation), and quite another to confront everyday practices that he found objectionable. In his labs, Pavlov experienced Soviet science policy mainly as increased funding, facilities, and coworkers; at the Military-Medical Academy, however, he directly confronted Soviet educational policies. These led him to resign his position there sometime shortly after the end of the 1923–1924 academic year.30
He had first officially objected to the Communists’ “class approach” to education at the Academy in 1922, when he convinced faculty members to protest against the new policy of distributing scarce food rations among students according to their political convictions and social background. Academic performance and financial need, he insisted, were the only criteria consistent with “the dostoinstvo [moral dignity] of institutions of higher education and scholarship.” Pavlov also mobilized faculty to support the disenfranchised upperclassmen (drawn overwhelmingly from nonproletarian ranks, and so targeted by this new policy) by raising money through public lectures and facilitating the sharing of rations among students.31
Two years later, the authorities began “academic purges.” Ostensibly to weed out weak students, these actually targeted those of undesirable social background. At least four purged students—one the son of a former landowner, another of a merchant, and two of priests—approached Pavlov, showed him their grades, and asked for help. The second to do so was Rita Rait-Kovaleva’s friend Nikolai Ushin, whom she escorted to the chief’s office at the Military-Medical Academy. After their meeting, Pavlov stormed downstairs, “turned to Lev Nikolaevich Fedorov, the only Party member in the laboratory, and said angrily: ‘The devil only knows what’s going on.’” The expulsion of the two students from clerical families hit especially close to home. “Have mercy! I myself am from the clergy! Is this really just?”32
Pavlov wrote to the director of the Academy, V. N. Tonkov, demanding that the students be reinstated and threatening that otherwise he, as the son of a priest, would resign. He boycotted Academy functions as a show of resolve. Delegations of professors, students, and Communist Party activists asked him to remain, but the Academy did not (and, for obvious political reasons, its administration could not) yield to his conditions.
So ended his more than thirty-five years as a professor. As he later explained to Babkin: “I liked lecturing very much and parted with it unwillingly because of the ‘purge.’” He set foot on Academy grounds only five years later, to participate in an event honoring a longtime lab attendant.33
Excoriating the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s in both private and public settings, he did, on one occasion, also utter a backhanded compliment. In January 1926, talking with his coworkers at the IEM lab upon his return from a short trip to Paris, he shared his surprise at the “cramped conditions in which French scientists worked, the scanty equipment, the constant paucity of experimental animals and means for experimental work.” Falling silent for a moment—and no doubt thinking of his own fine facilities—he added: “Yes, you must give our barbarians one thing: they understand the value of science.” This was the first recorded expression of a sentiment that some years later—alongside his never-ending hostility to official repression and dogmatism—would complicate his assessment of Communist rule and vindicate the regime’s patience with its prosperous dissident.34