The rapid growth of Pavlov’s labs in the 1920s attracted coworkers with a wide range of political views. Some were former members of the White Army, who found there protection and a milieu in which they could comfortably express their opinions and even swap anti-Soviet jokes. Communists and student militants frequently complained that the coworkers closest to Pavlov (particularly Podkopaev) systematically hindered their attempts to build cooperative relations with the famous physiologist.1
During the NEP years (1922–1928), between five and ten Communist Party members spent some time in Pavlov’s labs.2 The Party cells were still weak and more interested in currying Pavlov’s favor than in challenging his political ideology and behavior. He was much too important a figure for rank-and-file Communists to confront.
Yet Pavlov’s Communists complicated his relationship to the Party. He remained the unchallenged authority in the lab and frequently directed political tirades at Communists there. In a mirror image of common practice in Soviet life, those sympathetic to the regime often endured anti-Party remarks in silence. Nor did the Communists make any headway with the chief by their occasional attempts to defend either the Party or its dialectical materialist philosophy (which he always regarded as philosophical claptrap, at best a form of “animism and dualism”). On the other hand, Pavlov generally abided by his principle of judging coworkers only by their scientific work, and the Communists in his labs were highly motivated, disciplined, well organized, and reliable: the very opposite of the lamentable “Russian type.” These partiinye coworkers were often deeply engaged in the research and on their way to successful scientific careers. In addition, they took to heart the Party’s emphasis on the critical role of science for socialist construction and the great significance of Pavlovian research for the materialist worldview.
The most important Communist in Pavlov’s labs during the 1920s was the quintessential apparatchik Lev Fedorov. The chief’s relationship with him exemplified the practical, cooperative relations that he formed with the Party-state apparatus on the ground while fiercely criticizing its ideology and policies.
A graduate of Tomsk University medical school, where he specialized in physiology and nervous diseases, Fedorov had served as a physician at the front during World War I. In his autobiographical reports to the Party bureaucracy, he was evasive and inconsistent about his political activities in the early years of the civil war. In some, he claimed to have supported the Bolshevik cause during the struggles within his regiment following October 1917; in others, he admitted to serving under the White general Kolchak in 1919 and 1920 before switching sides on the eve of the Red victory. He joined the Party in 1920.3
For about a decade after the civil war, Fedorov juggled scientific research and service to the Party apparatus. Both Pavlov and Orbeli attested to his talent for the former; his rapid rise through the ranks reflected his skills at the latter. Combining organizational savvy with an understanding of science, Fedorov projected the same sense of determined businesslike moderation and unselfconscious service that Stalin cultivated to such great advantage during his struggle for supremacy. “Devoid of haughtiness, he doesn’t think too much of himself,” testified one comrade. “In his interactions with old specialists,” testified another, “he deals very sensitively with anybody who relates honestly to Soviet Power.”4
Fedorov taught experimental psychology for two years at Tomsk University before becoming political commissar there in mid-1923. Shortly thereafter, the SNK transferred him to Pavlov’s lab at the IEM. The significance and volatility of Pavlov’s relationship with the authorities made this a very important political assignment. His tasks were to monitor Pavlov and facilitate his research while organizing a Communist presence at the country’s leading medical-investigative institution and serving as liaison between it and political authorities. In addition to these duties and his scientific research, Fedorov was appointed assistant director of Leningrad’s public health administration in 1923, a member of the governing council of the Leningrad Medical Institute in 1924, and rector of the Lesgaft Institute of Physical Culture (formerly the Lesgaft Courses) in 1925.
Genuinely interested in his scientific research, Fedorov asked in 1925 to be relieved of some Party responsibilities in order better to pursue it. “I am the only Party member working in Pavlov’s laboratory in the field of conditional reflexes,” he argued, “which has an enormous future from a Marxist point of view.”5 Pavlov supported this request with a letter lauding Fedorov’s scientific promise: “One clearly sees in him a real scientific worker. Aside from his scrupulous conscientiousness in work, he is observant, keenly following the often fleeting and barely perceptible physiological phenomena that pass before him; he is thoughtful, pausing to evaluate every particularity of the experiment, and is full of a fervent interest in the process of investigation.... Unfortunately, it cannot be especially fruitful to work only by fits and starts, without concentration of one’s powers and attention. It would be advantageous for science if L. N. Fedorov could devote himself fully to his laboratory affairs.”6 The following year he was temporarily relieved of all administrative tasks except for his assistant directorship in public health, and Pavlov appointed him senior assistant in his lab at the IEM.
The Party, however, had bigger plans for Fedorov, and Pavlov contributed to their success by proposing in 1927 that he be appointed assistant director of the IEM. He was, Pavlov recognized, an important asset to the Institute and his own lab there as “a person with great administrative experience, and one who is respected in those Moscow and Leningrad departments upon which various Institute affairs depend.” Fedorov combined that position with two editorships that he could not have assumed without Pavlov’s approval: those of the Institute’s Archive of the Biological Sciences and the Physiological Journal of the USSR.7
In 1930 Fedorov again appealed—this time directly to the head of Leningrad’s Communist apparatus, Sergei Kirov—for an easing of his administrative burdens so he could better pursue his scientific interests. He had by this time published eleven scientific articles, but constant time pressures hampered his research. He needed to relinquish either his position in Pavlov’s lab or in the public health section. In view of the scarcity of Party cadres in science he proposed that he sacrifice the latter, “since I am the only Communist assistant in I. P. Pavlov’s laboratory, and since the laboratory’s work has exceptional significance.”8
That request was granted, but constituted only a brief interruption in his political ascent. In 1931—almost certainly with Pavlov’s support—he became the first Communist director of the IEM.9 In the 1930s, Fedorov became a member of Leningrad’s leading Party Committee and rose to national prominence, planning with Stalin and Gorky the founding of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine in Moscow (VIEM), serving as that Institute’s director, and playing a central political and organizational role in the XVth International Physiological Congress (1935). He remained a senior assistant in Pavlov’s lab until he moved to Moscow in 1934, and his relationship with the chief remained thereafter an invaluable resource for the Party’s dealings with the troublesome scientist.
Pavlov knew, of course, that Fedorov was a well-connected Communist who was monitoring his activities for the Party. Yet his attitude toward him was respectful and even friendly. Pavlov turned to Fedorov when he wanted some costly apparatus, needed to untie a bureaucratic knot, or required some special dispensation. Nor was it all business between them: Fedorov was consistently among those invited to mark Pavlov’s birthdays with a game of gorodki. A talent spotter who took under his wing Pavlov’s coworker and future scientific star Alexander Speranskii (at a time when Speranskii was loudly anti-Communist), he also cultivated friendly relations with Maria Petrova (even tutoring her in dialectical materialism) and with Pavlov’s family (particularly with Serafima and Vladimir). Decades after Pavlov’s death, his family still remembered him warmly as a benefactor and protector.10
Pavlov’s favorite coworker of the early and mid-1920s, Dmitrii Fursikov, never joined the Communist Party, but was a Red Army veteran sufficiently close to the Party and, in particular, to its dialectical materialist ideology to head the Communist Academy’s Institute of Higher Nervous Activity upon leaving the chief at mid-decade. During his stormy tenure in the lab, Fursikov both contributed an enduring conceptual breakthrough and helped inaugurate a new line of investigation on primates. Each would prove central to later Communist attempts to develop Pavlovian doctrine beyond what they considered the chief’s ideological limitations.
The precocious son of an alcoholic peasant craftsman, Fursikov became interested in philosophy as a youth and studied the natural sciences at Odessa University before transferring to the Military-Medical Academy in 1914. During his first year there he worked with Orbeli on nervous-muscular physiology before joining Pavlov’s lab. Serving as a medic during World War I and then for the Red Army, he spent his leave time in Petrograd acquiring his medical degree in 1919 and conducting research on CRs.11 As the civil war wound down in 1920, Fursikov served as assistant in Pavlov’s main lab at the IEM. Rita Rait-Kovaleva, who worked closely with him for several years, characterized him as both passionate and aloof; she never met a “stranger, less comprehensible, more talented” person.12 He was independent, deeply intellectual, and exuberantly physical, a devoted gymnast, boxer, and hunter. He remained Pavlov’s assistant until mid-1925, when he departed for Moscow to organize and direct the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity at the Communist Academy. By this time he was suffering from the tuberculosis that he apparently contracted in the military. By 1926 he could work only intermittently, and three years later he succumbed to the disease at age thirty-six.13
Pavlov and Fursikov—these two passionate, intelligent, strong-willed men—developed what Rait-Kovaleva described as a father-son relationship. “They loved each other, but quarreled constantly.” Pavlov entrusted Fursikov with the coeditorship of his in-house journal Works of the Physiological Laboratories of Academician I. P. Pavlov, and it was almost certainly with his approval that Fursikov was chosen as scientific consultant for the first film about CRs, Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1926). The pair maintained contact after Fursikov left for Moscow, where he even visited Vasnetsov’s studio in pursuit of some additions to Pavlov’s art collection.14
Fursikov entered Pavlov’s lab with ideas of his own drawn both from his broader study of physiology and from dialectical materialism. For him, the chief’s research represented but one important element in the range of approaches necessary to understand CRs, behavior, and the psyche. Pavlov was clearly drawn to Fursikov’s intelligence, initiative, and strong sense of personal integrity and mission, but those same characteristics virtually guaranteed constant quarrels between them.
Their fiercest and lengthiest confrontation concerned Fursikov’s theory of mutual induction. One day, when Rait-Kovaleva hastened to console Fursikov after a fierce scolding by the chief, he confided: “That was nothing. Once he refused to speak for me for two years, but then it passed.” Intrigued, she investigated that episode. Her version of the story casts both Fursikov and Pavlov in the best possible light, but has a certain ring of truth. Based on his experiments on the dynamics of inhibition and excitation, Fursikov had proposed an “unexpected and bold hypothesis” that Pavlov rejected as nonsensical. Fursikov, however, insisted on pursuing it, and Pavlov, taken aback by this effrontery, acquiesced, but “for the next two years did not once approach Fursikov’s [experimental] table.” Only then did a now well-armed Fursikov convince the chief to examine his experimental evidence, and Pavlov, “having seen Fursikov’s brilliant work, which opened a completely new page in the study of conditional reflexes, exchanged his fury for kindness and publicly praised Fursikov; from that day he consistently promoted his work.” The tension between them, however, remained—expressed by Pavlov’s “abruptness and even captiousness,” and by Fursikov”s “respectful irony and sometimes openly ironical smile.”15 Pavlov, who stood corrected, was hurt; and Fursikov, having triumphed, was condescending.
Fursikov’s hypothesis of mutual induction represented a fundamental reinterpretation of the lab’s view of the relationship between excitation and inhibition, and so of more than a decade’s experimental results. Yet it survived Pavlov’s initial hostility to become a mainstay of subsequent Pavlovian theory—providing both a fundamental law of higher nervous activity and a usefully flexible variable in the interpretation of data. By this new view, excitation elicited inhibition and inhibition elicited excitation.
Like the view of the relationship between excitation and inhibition that it replaced, Fursikov’s theory originated, not only in experimental data, but in a metaphorical conception. That earlier view was structured by the metaphor of the “struggle and balance” of excitation/freedom and inhibition/discipline —a metaphor that, for Pavlov, joined the world of higher nervous activity to that of the constitution, behavior, and mentality of individuals, peoples, and societies. Fursikov’s new metaphor of “mutual induction” apparently drew upon two sources that reflected his own broader reading and interests. The first was British physiologist Charles Sherrington, who had coined the term “mutual induction” to describe the mechanism by which the peripheral nervous system produced coordinated muscular movements. (Sherrington, in turn, had borrowed this metaphor from Michael Faraday’s notion of magnetic induction.) For Sherrington (following Faraday), the essence of “induction” was that when two agents were joined in a single unit (for Faraday, the unit created by a magnetic field; for Sherrington, by a nervous connection), a change in one element of the unit elicited a change in the other. Accordingly, Sherrington attributed the rhythmic coordinated movements of limbs to the interaction and mutual excitation of antagonistic nerves and the muscular movements they controlled. Unlike most of Pavlov’s coworkers, Fursikov had read widely in the foreign physiological literature, and he had certainly studied Sherrington’s concept when working with Orbeli on nervous-muscular physiology. Using a notion that Sherrington had developed to explain the dynamics of localized movements in the peripheral nervous system, Fursikov reconceptualized the relationship between the waves of excitation and inhibition that Pavlovians envisioned as radiating and interacting throughout the cerebral cortex.
This concept was also probably influenced by his studies of dialectical materialism. For the dialectician, opposites do not merely “struggle” (as in Pavlov’s notion of the clash between excitation and inhibition); rather, they interpenetrate and transform one another. Freedom and discipline, for example—to take Pavlov’s favorite description of the forms taken by excitation and inhibition in daily human life—are not irrevocably opposed: “real human freedom” involves a measure of discipline. This dialectical notion was indeed at the heart of Fursikov’s description of mutual induction a few years later in an address to the Communist Academy. His basic approach to excitation and inhibition, he explained, “consists in this, that every process...turns into its opposite; that is, excitation in some manner facilitates the emergence of inhibition, and inhibition in some way facilitates the emergence of excitation.” Using “exclusively physiological data,” he had demonstrated this dialectical truth in the relationship of excitation and inhibition and termed it “induction in the cerebral cortex.”16
By April 1922, Fursikov had convinced Pavlov, who in his speech that month in Helsinki, included mutual induction as one of six fundamental processes in higher nervous activity. Here are the protocols of one experiment in which Fursikov—and, finally, Pavlov—glimpsed mutual induction in action: a metronome beating 76 times per minute (M76) had been established as a CS; that same metronome at 186 times per minute (M186) had been established as a CI.
| Time17 | Agent | Salivation (drops) |
| 5:05 | M76 | 17 |
| 5:15 | M76 | 19 |
| 5:24 | M186 | 0 |
| 5:25* | M76 | 25 |
| 5:43 | M76 | 16 |
| 5:51 | M76 | 18 |
The revelation here resided in the augmented response to the CS in the fourth trial (twenty-five saliva drops, rather than the sixteen to nineteen in other trials). Fursikov and Pavlov concluded that this resulted from a nervous reaction to the CI that had immediately preceded the CS. In other words, the inhibitory wave elicited by M186 had temporarily heightened the excitability of the nervous system. On the basis of trials during which he varied the time interval between M186 and M76, he concluded that the inhibitory response to the CI, M186, actually passed through two phases: an initial one of heightened excitability, followed by the expected inhibition. He termed the first phase of heightened excitability following the action of a CI positive induction (since the “negative” inhibitor leads to a “positive” excitatory response). The same two phases were identified following the use of a CS—that is, they initially drove down salivation before, as expected, driving it up. This he termed negative induction (a “positive” agent eliciting a “negative” response).
Fursikov and Pavlov were both delighted with this simple physiological explanation of such familiar psychological phenomena as “narrowness of consciousness” and a sharp sense of “contrast.” Previously mysterious, these were “apparently entirely explained by the physiological processes of positive and negative induction”—that is, by the dialectical interplay of excitation and inhibition.18
Mutual induction introduced yet another series of flexible variables into the interpretation of experimental data, since, as Fursikov noted, it appeared in various degrees among different dogs, occurred in crudely defined phases, and was very sensitive to variations in time interval, specific exciters, and other factors. Years later, a senior coworker would refer sarcastically to mutual induction as the “deus ex machina” of Pavlovian experiments. Like divine intervention, it could “save” any experiment with an apt, highly flexible explanation. For later Communist coworkers during the Great Break of 1929, mutual induction served as an example of the dialectical principles governing higher nervous activity, and Fursikov’s success in overcoming the chief’s “bourgeois” views by pursuing an independent line of investigation, eschewing philosophical jargon, and generating convincing experimental data provided an example well worth emulating.19
Pavlov now embraced mutual induction wholeheartedly, and Fursikov mined lab publications from previous decades to find many examples of results that could be reinterpreted according to his hypothesis. (Other trials, of course, did not manifest mutual induction—but there were always explanations for that.) In his first article on this subject, Fursikov could not write, as coworkers usually did, that his investigation had resulted from Pavlov’s suggestion or assignment. He was, however, as generous as honesty allowed: “Working in the laboratory on the investigation of the activity of the cerebral cortex by the method of conditional reflexes and under the guidance of my profoundly respected and good teacher, academician I. P. Pavlov, we unwittingly came to the study of facts...”20
During his tenure, Fursikov also pursued the Pavlov labs’ first sustained research on CRs in primates. This research apparently began at Pavlov’s suggestion, but Fursikov took a deeper and more enduring interest in this subject than did the chief. During Pavlov’s trip to the United States, Yerkes had eagerly demonstrated his primates to him and soon afterwards sent him some of his recent works on their behavior. Pavlov, in turn, asked Fursikov and another coworker, psychiatrist Ivanov-Smolenskii, to investigate CRs in monkeys. The chief never displayed any special interest in these studies—he apparently never observed the experiments, nor did he comment on them in his own reports and correspondence—but each coworker pursued them for his own reasons. Ivanov-Smolenskii was interested in the ontogenetic development of psychic processes in children and in CRs among humans—subjects that, for the evolutionist, might well be illuminated by primate studies.
As a dialectical materialist, Fursikov was interested in evolutionary comparative psychology—in the evolution of psychic capacities across the animal kingdom and the relationship of those capacities to the varying structure of their brains. These were hot topics amid the debates in the 1920s about the relationship of Darwinism and Marxism, and all the more so after the Russian publication in 1927 of Engels’ manuscript on the role of labor in the evolutionary transition from primate to human—a manuscript to which Fursikov would refer in one of his first addresses to the Communist Academy.
Pavlov assumed that the same basic processes he studied in the dog would, with allowance for their greater complexity, suffice to understand the behavior and psyche of primates and humans. Moreover, especially after being led embarrassingly astray by mice during the Studentsov affair, he was comfortable and content studying his familiar and dependable model organism. Primates posed special, unfamiliar challenges—for example, they could not be confined to an experimental stand, nor would they consent peacefully to the implantation of a salivary fistula.
Fursikov’s intellectual inclinations were quite different. Encouraged by his studies and philosophical interests prior to entering Pavlov’s lab, he saw the dog as but a single point in a broader evolutionary series and Pavlov’s experimental methodology as just one among the many necessary for a science of behavior and the psyche. As a materialist and evolutionist, he explained a few years later, he recognized that “in his elementary processes, Man is entirely subject to the very same laws of higher nervous activity” as the dog. But as a dialectical materialist, he also recognized that “Man and animal are not one and the same,” that the scientist must appreciate the particular characteristics of humans and avoid “dogifying Man.” To this end, he saw the value of studying a variety of organisms (even during his years in Pavlov’s lab he coauthored an article on CRs in children) and employing a variety of investigative approaches—including not only Pavlov’s salivary reflexes, but also Bekhterev’s movement reflexes, Ukhtomskii’s notion of the “dominant,” and the tools and perspectives offered by chemistry, cellular biology, endocrinology, comparative anatomy, and comparative psychology.21
Fursikov and Rait-Kovaleva set up shop in the monkey house at the Petrograd zoo. Rait-Kovaleva conducted most of the experiments; Fursikov supervised her in Pavlovian style. Rait-Kovaleva’s short description of her travails makes clear the difficulties of experimenting on primates:
My experimental monkey was a pretty, large, grey rhesus marmoset, Leshka. A very good conditional reflex to the metronome was developed in him: as it just began to sound he would jump down and, chirping rapidly, extend his paw. But during differentiation, when the quickened beat of the metronome was not accompanied by food, all this was accompanied by such “human” mimicry, such a stormy emotional reaction, that it was difficult to remain on strictly objective positions and to avoid “forbidden” terminology: “He became enraged,” “He took offense,” “He threw a tantrum,” “He doesn’t want,” “He is angry.”
It was difficult to explain in the usual “conditional” language this interesting scene: The monkey had succeeded in differentiating among figures hopping on a peg: the circle was positive, the square negative.... Differentiation was very unstable and often broke down—that is, the monkey extended its paw at both the circle and the square, not differentiating between them. But nevertheless [I] succeeded in strengthening the reflexes, and at the sight of the circle Leshka would extend its paw and “request” [food], and at the sight of the square would hide in a corner and “become enraged.”
When Rait-Kovaleva finally succeeded in establishing this differentiation, she summoned Fursikov. He asked that she demonstrate several times in a row trials in which the monkey responded to a CI. She knew from experience that the monkey would become very upset at this signal that no food was forthcoming—but Fursikov insisted:
After several repetitions something terrible came over Leshka; he began screeching and shaking the fence. “Do it once more!” said Dmitrii Stepanovich [Fursikov]. A pause. Leshka looked intently through the fence. The square noiselessly jumped from the box. Leshka jumps down, extends his paw to its entire length, grabs the square and with all its strength throws it directly at Fursikov’s face: the presence of the new person had been quite correctly linked with the unusually frequent appearance of the “unpleasant” square, provoking a “defensive” reaction—an attack on the enemy.22
Fursikov found all this intriguing and maintained an active interest in primates for the rest of his life, but Pavlov did not. So Fursikov’s departure for Moscow in 1926 marked the end of primate studies in Pavlov’s labs until, in summer 1933, the Communist coworker Denisov brought the chimps Roza and Rafael to the chief’s science village in Koltushi.23
Fursikov’s recruitment to the Communist Academy in 1925 resulted from his well-known ideological and political convictions, his scientific achievements, the tensions between him and Pavlov, and his desire to pursue his own investigative ideas. The Communist Academy represented one prong of the Bolsheviks’ twofold strategy for dealing with the scientific intelligentsia that they had inherited. On the one hand, they viewed “bourgeois scientists”—non-Bolsheviks and even anti-Bolsheviks—as an important resource and so supported their research, allowed them to pursue long-standing lines of investigation without ideological interference, and discouraged (and prevented) emigration as long as they did not actively oppose the regime. (In Pavlov’s special case, that condition was waived.) At the same time, the Communist Party began to cultivate a new generation of truly Soviet scientists to replace their bourgeois predecessors. To this end, it enforced a much stricter ideological and political line in the country’s educational institutions than in purely research centers, and also created a series of Communist research institutes and scientific societies.
At the apex of these institutes was the Communist Academy, which operated according to Bolshevik principles. Envisioned as an eventual successor to the bourgeois Academy of Sciences, the Communist Academy developed approaches to scientific issues from a militant, often polemical, and explicitly Marxist point of view. As Lenin had put it: “No natural science, no materialism can withstand the struggle against the pressure of bourgeois ideas and the bourgeois worldview without a sound philosophical basis. In order to be able to withstand the struggle and to accomplish it successfully, a scientist must be an up-to-date materialist, a deliberate follower of the materialism presented by Marx, that is, he must be a dialectical materialist.”24
Fursikov, the authorities decided, fit Lenin’s description quite well. At a June 1925 meeting of the Communist Academy’s Section of the Natural and Exact Sciences, the Bolshevik A. Zalmanzon described what clearly were advanced discussions about recruiting him. It was important, Zalmanzon explained, to create a research center at the Academy to pursue broad investigations of higher nervous activity on the basis of dialectical materialism. Pavlov’s overly narrow approach was suffering a “profound creative crisis,” and it was of course impossible to reason with the reactionary physiologist. So Zalmanzon had conferred with some of Pavlov’s coworkers (including, no doubt, Fedorov) and had learned of Fursikov. “One of Pavlov’s most talented students,” Fursikov found it “impossible to work under academician Pavlov’s supervision and, aspiring to independent work, hopes to create a new institute.” (Zalmanzon’s references to the “narrowness” and “profound creative crisis” of Pavlov’s research may well have originated with Fursikov himself.) Politically and ideologically, Fursikov was “very close to Soviet power and the Russian Communist Party, and would with great enthusiasm work under the intellectual supervision of the Communist Academy.” Stressing the urgency of recruiting the talented young scientist, Zalmanzon observed that, in view of Pavlov’s advanced age, the struggle over his scientific legacy would soon begin. Referring ominously to Pavlov’s recent overseas trip and to the émigrés Babkin and Boldyrev, he warned that the United States had shown great interest in that legacy and had “captured” some of Pavlov’s senior coworkers. The great political question, then, was: “Who will master the great scientific legacy of academician Pavlov: America or the USSR [?].” Happily, Fursikov had already expressed his tentative agreement to develop that legacy in a Marxist spirit at the Communist Academy. 25
During his brief tenure as director of the Communist Academy’s Institute for the Study of Higher Nervous Activity, Fursikov continued his studies of excitation and inhibition, and began to implement his broad vision for an “all-sided” materialist analysis of behavior and higher nervous activity in animals and man. His plan of work for the years 1926–1929 reproduced much that Pavlov was doing, but also drew upon other approaches offered by biophysics, biochemistry, histology, cytology, comparative anatomy, and physiology. The projected research also had a clinical dimension—including, for example, studies of stroke and the prevention of exhaustion.26
As scientific consultant to Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain, Fursikov left his mark on this first film about CRs and so on Pavlov’s iconic image. That film was universally (and misleadingly) advertised as a record of Pavlov’s research. Echoing the Soviet Cinema Trust, a New York Times columnist characterized it as “an animated photographic record of the experiments and studies of a single individual, Professor Pavlov.” Another reporter explained that it had been “prepared in the seventeen Russian laboratories [sic] supervised by the Russian scientist, Professor Ivan Pavlov.” Yet Pavlov’s relationship to the film was quite distant. There is no record of any contact between him and the director, nor, for that matter, of his reaction to the final product.27
Fursikov and his assistant at the Communist Academy, Leonid Voskresenskii, on the other hand, worked closely with Pudovkin—and Fursikov even makes a cameo appearance. While lauding Pavlov as a great scientist and the father figure of CRs, the film portrayed experiments conducted not just in Pavlov’s labs, but also at Fursikov’s Institute, the Institute of the Brain (originally created under the Commissariat of Health Protection for the study of Lenin’s brain), and—in what seems to be a reprise of Fursikov’s and Rait-Kovaleva’s experiments on primates—at the Leningrad zoo.
Mechanics of the Brain thus includes many experiments that Pavlov did not—and in some cases would not—conduct: Krasnogorskii’s experiments on children (Fursikov had coauthored an article on that subject) and on an “idiot,” and another on the formation of a CR to the operations preceding the injection of morphine into a dog (such studies were part of Fursikov’s plan of work for his Institute).28
One moment in that film reinforced a common misconception about Pavlov. To demonstrate a dog’s unconditional reflex (UR) to a sudden sound, the film recorded its startled reaction to the ringing of a bell. That episode was almost certainly not recorded in Pavlov’s lab, and its purpose was to demonstrate the simple phenomenon of an UR rather than to illuminate Pavlov’s use of CRs as a method. The use of a bell was probably dictated by the need in a silent film to use a stimulus that was visually striking. Pressing on a buzzer just would not do. For English-language viewers conditioned by the common mistranslation of the Russian word zvonok (buzzer), behaviorist references, and popular accounts in the mass media—here again was that “Pavlovian bell.”
By 1928, Fursikov was very ill. His friends and colleagues urged him to rest and undergo treatment at the Yalta Tuberculosis Institute, but he instead traveled to the primate colony at Sukhumi, in Abkhazia, on the Black Sea. “One cannot explain all behavior by conditional reflexes alone,” he told his comrades at the Institute shortly before his death. “Working with primates, we have often ended up in a blind alley. Something else remains hidden from the gaze of scientists.”29
Seven years later, having by this time himself observed and considered the behavior of primates, Fursikov’s former chief and scientific “father,” also in the last months of his life, would reach a surprisingly similar conclusion.