Most scientists are deep in retirement by age seventy-five, but Pavlov was just hitting his stride. Between his seventy-fifth birthday in 1924 and his eightieth in 1929, he oversaw the renovation of his lab at the IEM, the completion of its Towers of Silence, and the replacement of his small lab at the Academy of Sciences by a grand Physiological Institute. By decade’s end, he was supervising the research of about fifty coworkers annually. During these years, he also envisioned and began to build a third great facility in the countryside outside Leningrad, the science village at Koltushi that would become world-famous in the 1930s as the “Capital of Conditional Reflexes.”
That rural facility began as a glimmer in Pavlov’s eye in the summer of 1924 during an outing for some rest and relaxation. His beloved Sillamiagi had been forever lost to him, and the idyllic summers of gardening, gorodki, bicycling, and swimming for three months with his family and friends were a distant memory. Dacha life had of course been unthinkable during the civil war years, and privileged summer enclaves would not reemerge among the Russian intelligentsia until the 1930s. In the mid-1920s, the Pavlovs periodically spent vacation time in Kellomäki, just across the border in Finland, but Pavlov was unenthusiastic about dacha life there.
So late June 1924 found him still in the city, fatigued and cranky about daily work in lab, meetings with coworkers, and the constant ringing of his home phone. Knowing his love for the countryside, longtime assistant Petr Kupalov and recent arrival Alexander Speranskii convinced him to join them for a few days in Koltushi. Pavlov would have recognized the name of this village twenty-two kilometers east of Leningrad because the dog nursery there was a small budget item for his lab at the IEM.
Like Sillamiagi, Koltushi had been conquered by Peter the Great in his war with Sweden. Catherine the Great had subsequently awarded it, together with a sizable portion of the surrounding countryside, to her lover Grigorii Potemkin. It had since passed through the hands of a succession of aristocrats, including, in the early nineteenth century, Aleksei Olenin, director of Petersburg’s public library and president of its Academy of the Arts, who entertained at his nearby estate such cultural luminaries as Pushkin, Krylov, and Glinka. In the nineteenth century, Koltushi’s various owners cultivated the land; built an ironworks, a sugar refinery, and the small stone Church of Peter and Paul; sponsored public strolls and traditional Russian group-against-group boxing matches; and campaigned against the heavy drinking of the local peasantry.
The Bolsheviks expropriated Koltushi from its last owner, Sergei de Carrière and distributed most of it to landless peasants and a new state farm, which was transferred to Pavlov’s physiology division at the IEM in May 1923 as a source of experimental animals. Pavlov’s assistants Fursikov and Bykov also thought Koltushi might prove a suitable place for the chief to spend his summers.1
The physiology division received about 140 acres just across the road from the old church, and the IEM contracted with peasants in the neighboring village of Kolbino to work the land. The property included thirteen old buildings situated around a large lake, some agricultural implements, and a few animals. Koltushi’s first manager, A. F. Vorob’ev, and three workers constructed there a nursery for dogs, two wooden kennels to house them, and another building for the mice and rabbits used by other divisions of the IEM.2
The trio set off from Leningrad’s Finland Station on Saturday morning, July 5. Standing by an open window on the crowded train, Pavlov reminisced as he watched the countryside go by, and spoke animatedly about his hunt for butterflies during a dacha stay some forty years earlier. The railway station closest to Koltushi was a good long walk away from the facility. Pavlov was delighted to discover that the road was marked by wooden posts set equidistantly along the way, and amused himself first by measuring his speed between them, then by increasing his pace, and finally by adjusting his tempo to reach the posts at the precise time he intended. As they approached Koltushi, the trio left the road, climbing a hill to an overgrown path through the fields. In excellent spirits, Pavlov mused about man’s spiritual connection to nature and delighted in his stamina and good health. “At my age, people usually fantasize about being a few decades younger. But I want only for everything to remain as it is now—both my health and my intellectual powers.”3
Upon their arrival, Pavlov recruited the head of the farm for a game of gorodki, teaming up with him for a match against Kupalov and Speranskii on the field by Koltushi’s stables. The chief played well, but was constantly hampered when a throw forced him to rely on the leg crippled by his fall in 1916. The rules were revised to compensate for this handicap, but Kupalov later recalled that Pavlov’s competitive posture remained unchanged: “During the game, Ivan Petrovich constantly tormented us, his opponents, trying to undermine our confidence...‘One must destroy the opponent by all means,’ he would say. He laughed at us, teased us, made caustic remarks at our every unsuccessful throw, intimidated us with gloomy predictions [about our next throw], trying, as he put it, to ‘depress our spirits.’” The disciplined Speranskii bore up well, but Kupalov reacted in kind to the baiting. Having permitted himself a few cutting remarks, he decided that there was no longer any need for restraint, since he had certainly destroyed his relationship with his boss. To his surprise, however, Pavlov greeted him after the game with a kind smile and gentle affection. “Our battle of words was forgotten, but was renewed with its previous ferocity during the next match.”4
After three days of fresh air, swimming, and gorodki, Pavlov felt relaxed and rested. As they prepared to return to Leningrad, the charming Speranskii knew precisely how best to memorialize the visit. On the door of Pavlov’s room in one dilapidated dwelling, he wrote in pencil the type of historical note that was increasingly prevalent on tablets attached to Russian buildings: “Here lived the world champion, Academician Ivan Pavlov, President of the Sillamiagi Gorodki Academy, having fought victoriously at the local hippodrome. 5–7 July 1924.”5
During this first stay in Koltushi, Pavlov raised the possibility of building there a laboratory for tasks that were best addressed outside the city.6 Systematic scientific research there would begin only years later, but he returned in the summer of 1925 and every year thereafter. In the late 1920s, before Koltushi’s great expansion, he spent many summer days in an apartment fitted with a veranda on the second floor of the two-story wooden building by the lake.
In April 1926, Minister of Health Protection Semashko officially designated Koltushi as a biological station, and Pavlov appointed Stanislav Vyrzhikovskii its first director. A coworker in Pavlov’s lab at the Academy of Sciences, Vyrzhikovskii also had relevant experience at Leningrad’s regional experimental agricultural station. He and his wife moved to Koltushi in 1926, living in the same building that Pavlov occupied during the summer. Communist coworker Fedor Maiorov became Vyrzhikovskii’s assistant in 1927, and moved in as well.7
The official scientific goals of this new facility evolved over time. The original proposal approved by Semashko in 1926 defined its purpose as “the investigation of all possible physiological questions upon animals in their natural setting.”8 In his report for 1927, Pavlov expanded Koltushi’s goals considerably to include research on “social conditional reflexes” and “the investigation of heredity with the interbreeding of dogs with varying (opposite) types of nervous systems.”9
Here, indeed, were two subjects central to his research that could be better pursued in a rural setting. Pavlov’s interest in the social reflex was longstanding, dating at least from Bezbokaia’s experiments of 1912 on Kal’m’s aggressive response to Pavlov’s presence. The social exciter had also become central to explanations of dogs’ varying responses to isolation in the Towers of Silence and of Speranskii’s experiments on Avgust after the flood of 1924--and it ran like a red thread through discussions of nervous types in the 1920s. This investigative direction was also encouraged by Communist coworkers, who believed that Pavlovian research was distorted by reliance upon experiments on an isolated single animal bound to the stand.
Pavlov’s inclusion of research on the heritability of nervous qualities also reflected a long-standing interest that had gained increasing import as the decade wore on. The embarrassing fiasco with Studentsov’s study of the inheritance of CRs remained fresh in his mind. He was still fielding inquiries from around the world about the outcome of these trials and had quietly recanted his own enthusiastic claims during his recent tour of Europe and the United States. Yet he had never rejected the possibility that inherited characteristics might be passed on hereditarily, and his close associate Evgenii Ganike was still conducting his own experiments on this subject. That research would continue well into the 1930s. The chief had resolved, however, to leave mice to others and never again to abandon his trusty model organism, the dog. Breeding successive generations of dogs would of course be a lengthy process, but Koltushi was already producing its first cohort, and Pavlov fully expected to live long enough to study its progeny.
His interest in the heritability of nervous type also had another, practical dimension. In his notebook for 1927, Pavlov jotted a cryptic note: “Fate, the social struggle with it. Practice. Eugenics.” The eugenic goal of breeding an improved nervous type—and, eventually, “an improved human type”—would become central to Koltushi’s mission in the 1930s.10
Another dimension of this growing interest in heredity emerged in Pavlov’s report on Koltushi in 1928: the biological station, he explained, was devoted to the investigation of the higher nervous activity of animals, “but with one particularity: that puppies are raised here, and there is observed in them the gradual development and constitution of their nervous activity when they are maintained under various conditions.”11 This, too, reflected his preoccupation with the problem of nervous types—and in particular with the results of Ivanov-Smolenskii’s experiments on Garsik. By demonstrating that Garsik behaved in a cowardly manner despite having an innately strong nervous system, these experiments had complicated Pavlov’s ideas about typology and raised the question of the relationship between nature and nurture.
This new stage of research began in 1928, when Maiorov moved to Koltushi in order to collaborate with Koltushi’s director, Vyrzhikovskii, in experiments on a generation of puppies born in Koltushi. Having attained “working age” in July 1928, the pups were equipped with salivary fistulas and divided into two groups, one to be raised in cages and the other in a field. Kennels for the prisoners and living quarters in the field for those enjoying freedom had already been constructed, as had Koltushi’s first soundproof chamber for experiments on the CRs of these two groups.12
Pavlov’s vision for Koltushi expanded constantly, but his budget for the facility was initially small. Longtime Communist coworker and apparatchik Lev Fedorov proved an important resource. At Pavlov’s suggestion, S. S. Salazkin had been convinced in 1927 to become director of the IEM on the condition that the administratively savvy and energetic Fedorov would become his assistant director. Fedorov assumed this position while continuing to serve as Pavlov’s coworker and assistant. (When Rozental’ was unavailable, Fedorov also signed administrative documents on Pavlov’s behalf.) Pavlov’s judgment that the well-connected Fedorov would be an effective advocate for the IEM’s needs was immediately confirmed in 1927 by a sizeable infusion of new funds to renovate its facilities. Pavlov received his usual lion’s share, including 600 of the 2,000 precious gold rubles.13 He was permitted to allocate these funds between his lab in the city and Koltushi as he saw fit. Fedorov understood perfectly Pavlov’s visceral affection for Koltushi and his excitement about its possibilities for his science and life in general. The commissar would soon take the initiative in having the SNK mark Pavlov’s eightieth jubilee with a most substantial birthday present: an avalanche of money to convert the sleepy facility into a modern science center and rural second home.14
Fedorov also arranged another gift for Pavlov in 1927: the use of a Lincoln automobile for easy travel between home and labs.15 The authorities had learned years earlier, when providing Pavlov with a special food ration, that some tact was necessary to convince him to accept such extraordinary personal privileges. A delegation was dispatched to present the gift—emphasizing, no doubt, its usefulness for saving time and so facilitating his scientific work—but received the expected rebuff: “Nonsense! Nonsense!” Pavlov reportedly exclaimed. “I can and will walk, and have no need whatsoever for a car.” One member of that delegation later recounted what followed: On the next morning, as Pavlov left home for the lab, the Lincoln awaited. Glancing at it defiantly, he set out by foot along the Neva embankment to the Physiological Institute. The Lincoln followed. Several hours later, Pavlov emerged, again saw the Lincoln waiting for him, and again walked on his appointed rounds (now, to the IEM). This continued for several days before the authorities decided to change their tactics and act through Serafima, who was always solicitous of her husband’s welfare and appreciative of life’s comforts. On some pretext, she began to accompany her husband as he left the apartment. As they walked, she would then plead fatigue and suggest that they rest in the car. The first few times, he responded angrily —“If you’re tired, take a seat and ride, but I will walk.”—but one day Serafima finally cajoled him inside the car—and he was hooked.
Pavlov quickly became accustomed to this convenience, internalizing his privileged status and raging at red lights and other delays. Traffic problems were solved simply, as for other members of the Soviet elite: the Lincoln was fitted with an official horn to clear the vehicles in Pavlov’s path. He quickly became attached to the automobile, characterizing it defensively as “the only privilege that I have enjoyed from them specially for myself.” The sound of its horn now announced Pavlov’s arrival at the gates of the IEM, always on the same days at the same time. “One could set one’s watch” by it, recalled one coworker.16
At that facility, the centerpiece of Pavlov’s enterprise since 1891, the Towers of Silence were finally completed and fully equipped in 1926. The basic work of the division remained “the study of the higher nervous activity of animals by the method of conditional reflexes.” Secondary themes, such as “the question of the transmission of conditional reflexes by heredity,” also sometimes appeared in the yearly reports.17 In the late 1920s, Kupalov, Fedorov, and Rozental’ shared managerial duties in the physiology division, where about thirty coworkers and ninety dogs labored annually. Here, too, production in the small gastric juice factory increased constantly, supplying extra appetite juice for Soviet sufferers from dyspepsia. In 1929, its “factory dogs” produced 4,500 liters (22,500 flagons), surpassing by 50 percent the operation’s peak prewar level.18 As in earlier years, Pavlov’s annual budget included not only about 40 percent of the hard currency allotment for the entire IEM, but also a substantial sum for “supplementary awards” that he distributed among coworkers at his discretion.19
By 1927, he also managed a second large lab at his new Physiological Institute of the Academy of Sciences. He had earlier insisted that his lab at the Academy was hopelessly outdated, and after its inundation by the flood of 1924 pronounced it “entirely dangerous.” Unless a new one was constructed, he warned, his research at the Academy would be “halted or limited.” In January 1925, the Academy of Sciences moved Pavlov’s lab to a new home on the Tuchkov (now Makarov) Embankment. Throughout that year, Pavlov and his assistant Podkopaev bombarded the Academy’s administration with urgent requests regarding soundproof rooms, electrical equipment, a new kennel, and the “extraordinarily large and noisy” herd of rats that scurried throughout the building, disrupting their work.20 Yet space remained cramped, and Pavlov complained that he could not accommodate many aspiring coworkers.
So he asked that this facility be expanded and transformed into a Physiological Institute for research, not only on higher nervous activity but also on other “important areas of contemporary physiology,” and as a place to train “highly qualified specialist-physiologists capable subsequently of facilitating the development of physiological science in the numerous physiological and biological laboratories and institutes of our country.” The Academy of Sciences approved this request in December 1925, and by 1927—when it expanded to the building’s second floor—the Institute had two divisions, one on Higher Nervous Activity and the other on General and Experimental Physiology, with about eighteen researchers and six technical assistants. Podkopaev had acquired the latest equipment in England, and Pavlov finally pronounced his new facility “entirely satisfactory.”21
The main floor of the new Institute consisted of a long, somewhat gloomy corridor with symmetrically placed experimental rooms on each side. Most of the rooms were divided into two parts so that the coworker could operate the controls in isolation from the animal. The controls for other rooms were located outside of the room, so coworkers manipulated them from the corridor, peering at their dogs through a glass window. Pavlov’s office was located at the end of the corridor, but he spent little time there. He preferred to participate in experiments or sit with his assistant Viktor Rikman at a table in the corridor. Here coworkers would gather spontaneously for conversations about both scientific and nonscientific subjects.22
The chief remained a most formidable presence. Georgii Konradi worked with him from 1923 to 1929 and observed that “Slackness in behavior was probably just as repulsive to him as was slackness of thought.” His managerial style remained virtually unchanged in all its details: Pavlov chose the themes for coworkers, drifted among them, chose one or more for his special attention, and talked constantly in each lab about the overall work of the collective. “Not one variation of the experiment was implemented without his sanction.” His “presence in the laboratory was felt immediately,” recalled coworker Dmitrii Biriukov. “Purposive in word and deed, mobile as a youth despite his limping, he really was the eyes and brain of the laboratory.... He was the direct and constant participant in everything that occurred around him, always in the very heart of things.” The chief complained that his memory had deteriorated, but Konradi found it quite impressive, recalling that Pavlov once recited precisely the amount of salivation elicited by the CSs Konradi had employed in two trials one week earlier—and then roundly scolded him for his own inability to do the same for the third.
As in earlier years, Pavlov was unconcerned with his coworkers’ general education in physiology, though he evinced interest when the more knowledgeable among them talked about discoveries in other areas of the discipline. (As for research on CRs, very little transpired at this time outside of Pavlov’s kingdom.) For Konradi, Pavlov’s supervisory style was remarkably effective: investigations succeeded regardless of the personal qualities of the coworker, but each coworker “felt himself truly a participant in a common mission and the acquirer of facts in a leading division of science.”23
Konradi was among many coworkers who genuinely adored Pavlov, learned to live with his authoritarian style and explosive temper, and viewed their work with him as the opportunity and privilege of a lifetime. Others, no doubt, found the demanding and irascible old man difficult to bear. Their reactions were never collected in volumes of reminiscences, and very few exist even in archival form.
One visitor, Alexander Chizhevskii, did leave a lively and less flattering report on Pavlov’s managerial style. A biophysicist, archaeologist, and poet, Chizhevskii had long been interested in animal development and behavior, and was a professor at Moscow’s Zoopsychology Laboratory in 1926 when he visited Pavlov’s lab at the IEM. “When I entered the building, I understood that it was the kingdom of dogs,” Chizhevskii later recalled. “The scents and sounds of dog were everywhere.” The kingdom’s master was “of goodly stature, wiry, with a white shaped beard, high forehead, a large bald spot, curved nose, and piercing eyes.” Conferring with the chief in his office, Chizhevskii found himself face to face with the large portrait of Prince Ol’denburgskii that hung there. Startled by this display of affection for a vanquished aristocrat, he noticed Pavlov gazing intently at him over his glasses. Pavlov then read Chizhevskii’s letter of introduction from their mutual acquaintance physiologist Alexander Leontovich, which elicited his undiplomatic comment that “No zoopsychology whatsoever exists. It is nothing but fiction, it is not serious.” Pavlov then guided Chizhevskii through the lab. His guest was struck by the chief’s “monopolism,” by the overbearing weight of “the powerful hand of the master,” for whom his assistants—though many were accomplished and well-known scientists—served only as his alter ego. As Pavlov moved through the lab, his coworkers scattered before him. “His word is sacred, like a commander’s order. And no objections: thus spoke Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. A cruel nature. Faraday was a soft, gentle, kind man. Ivan Petrovich is an egotist—everything in the name of science.”
Perhaps stung by Pavlov’s wholesale dismissal of zoopsychology, Chizhevskii cast a cold, perceptive eye on his host’s scientific approach, which he summarized brilliantly: “For decades he and his helpers count saliva drops, conduct arguments and discussions.... Iron logic conquers all. Saliva drops and logic—the two apparatuses animating the new world of higher nervous activity.”24
In the waning years of the 1920s, Pavlov turned those apparatuses to the pursuit of multiple lines of investigation, each of which addressed puzzling patterns—or, frequently, the apparent lack of pattern—in experimental results. More coworkers were assigned to the investigation of nervous types and experimental pathology than to any other lines of research. These investigations sought an explanation for the varied responses of different dogs to identical experiments. The fundamental importance of this research was reflected in an addition to standard experimental procedures in fall 1928: having acquired a new animal, a coworker’s first task was now to determine its nervous type.
The other leading lines of investigation also reflected the increasingly complex explanatory model through which Pavlov attempted to explain frequently baffling experimental results within a mechanistic, determinist framework. Coworkers addressed an increasing number of processes and relationships, and also their various phases—all of which constantly introduced new variables into the interpretation of experimental data. One central subject concerned excitation and inhibition, which were recognized as complex, phasic processes sensitive to various factors, such as the relative lability of a dog’s nervous system. Another was the relationship of the CR to the UR upon which it was based. For example, how did the amount of time during which the dog was exposed simultaneously to a US and CS influence the dynamics and strength of the resultant CR? Many coworkers addressed explored the “fundamental law” of mutual induction, according to which a CS elicited not just excitation but also, eventually, inhibition (negative induction); and, conversely, a CI elicited, not just inhibition but also, eventually, excitation (positive induction). According to the lab view by the late 1920s, this inductive process went through various phases that differed according to nervous type. Pavlov also assigned many coworkers to analyze hypnotic states. Hypnosis, too, was phasic, and its dynamics differed according to a dog’s nervous type. Finally, in addition to all these complexities in the dynamics of any single reflex, investigators discovered in the early 1920s that if the order of an established set of CSs and CIs was changed, the animal’s salivary response to each separate stimulus changed as well. This raised fundamental questions about the nature of cortical activity as a whole—about the relationship of each individual reflex to the entirety of the animal’s system of reflexes (and, of course, about the interpretation of any single experiment).
Other seemingly minor questions about experimental design also raised larger issues and problems. For example, in a standard experiment the coworker exposed the dog to a series of CSs and CIs. How long an interval should separate these various stimuli? Until 1928, the coworker made this decision on an ad hoc basis. Pavlov avoided establishing a standard interval for fear that, since dogs were demonstrably sensitive to the passage of time, the interval would itself become a CS—which, of course, would distort experimental results. But, this practice, too, raised a problem: according to lab doctrine, any stimulus affected the excitability of the cortex. Since this effect changed over time, the results of any single trial would be influenced by the time interval between stimuli. In fall 1928, Pavlov reversed course and mandated a standard interval between the application of successive stimuli. As for the neglected side of this contradiction—he consoled himself with the hypothesis that any response to the interval itself would be eliminated by negative induction.25 Just as the varied responses of dogs to confinement in the isolated chambers of the Towers of Silence confronted experimenters with the problem that there was no such thing as a neutral environment, so did this procedural conundrum reflect the difficulty (or impossibility) of neutralizing the animal’s response to the passage of time. Pavlov’s fundamental insight that animals were constantly responding to every feature of their environment—forming CRs to even its most minor and subtle attributes—meant that experimenters would constantly encounter such difficulties and were constantly compelled to control for them interpretively.
Pavlov’s prestige and the logic of his research turned all such tensions and conundrums into fuel for further investigations. Each failure to encompass the data increased the stock of available variables and enlarged the field of inquiry. Much of interest would be discovered in the new facilities put at Pavlov’s disposal in the late 1920s—in the Towers of Silence, the Physiological Institute of the Academy of Sciences, and Koltushi—but little if anything would be resolved. The Beast of Doubt continued to lurk, the horizon continued to recede, and, in the years that still remained to him, Pavlov’s institutional resources and explanatory reach continued to expand at an ever-increasing pace.