“Something is not right with me,” Pavlov complained to Maria Petrova in spring 1926. Eating left him dizzy and feverish with abdominal pain and diarrhea. His self-diagnosis was “either cancer or an ulcer.” Petrova suspected a gallstone. After examining him, surgeons S. P. Fedorov and I. I. Grekov confided that they would ordinarily advise surgery, but that this would be dangerous for a man of seventy-eight, so instead they prescribed rest, diet, waters, and hot compresses.1
During what proved a full year of illness, it fell to Serafima to nurse the irascible patient. She explained to Babkin in a letter of February 1927 that since the previous June her husband had been suffering stomach pains after dinner and suffering through the evening hours with a high temperature and only a water bottle as palliative. He had “lost much weight, has weakened, but he works, goes about as he used to.” The attacks worsened in January and February, turning the patient yellow, but “Ivan Petrovich won’t listen to anybody.” He continued to spend long days at the lab and to work at home during the evening, when he experienced “some kind of unusual elevation of spiritual forces” and spoke with special, poetic eloquence about his research. In late April, she reported that he was “sick, getting weak and losing weight.” Upset that the scale continually showed weight loss, he had stopped consulting it, “so we don’t know where things stand.”2
Saddled with an extremely uncomfortable, even depressed, husband who responded irritably to any reference to his ailment, Serafima arranged for their old friend David Kamenskii, former coworker and professor of pediatrics Nikolai Krasnogorskii, and the family’s physician Nikolai Viazhlinskii to reestablish the prerevolutionary tradition of Sunday evening games of the card game durachki. Under Pavlov’s direction, the get-together developed quickly into a highly systematized and competitive affair. Every Sunday at precisely 9:00, the guests would knock at the door (if they arrived early, they would wait until the clock struck 9, because their host was invariably waiting just inside and took great pleasure in admitting them at the precise moment). They drank tea until precisely 10:00, at which time Pavlov would announce “mobilization” and everybody would bring their assigned object (a chair, the cards, etc.) to their appointed places at the table.
Pavlov was, of course, the president of the gathering, and he drew up a “Constitution of the Academy of Duraks” (literally “fools,” jocularly used for “players of durachki”). This constitution established a precise point system by which a player rose or fell between rankings—the lowest being a graduate student, followed by doctor, professor, and academician. (In other words, the players themselves were implicitly ranked from the lowest—Serafima, with no professional position—up through the physician Viazhlinskii, professors Kamenskii and Krasnogorskii, and, at the summit, their academician-host.) When all were gathered at the table, Pavlov would pull out his records—which he kept in the calendar books distributed each year by the Academy of Sciences to its members—and inform players of their rank and any looming possibility of demotion or promotion. As in gorodki, he enjoyed peppering sessions with observations on people’s play, and developed such specialized terms as “to do a Kerensky”—that is, to descend precipitously from a high rank to a low one. Pavlov played “with good humor,” Kamenskii later recalled, but he played to win, and with sufficient concentration to impress one admiring visitor with “the powerful machinelike working of Pavlov’s mind; it was as if I watched a great logic mill for digesting facts and turning out a finished product.” The game ended when the clock struck midnight, at which signal Pavlov recorded the results and the company dispersed.3
Hot compresses did not help, leading Petrova to consult former court physician Iosif Bertenson, who insisted that surgery was the patient’s only hope. In late May 1927, five of Russia’s leading surgeons—all in Leningrad for their annual congress—convened in the Pavlovs’ dining room along with Petrova and Speranskii to discuss the case. They agreed that an operation was necessary, but nobody wanted to perform it. Expressing qualms about operating upon an acquaintance, they were no doubt also nervous about the prognosis for the aged patient. Therefore, they decided that Speranskii would telegraph Berlin and request the services of a noted German surgeon. Serafima warned them that, from patriotic pride, her husband would never agree to this, and she proved correct. Martynov was persuaded to operate and Grekov to assist. The operation was scheduled for the next day at Leningrad’s Obukhovskaia Hospital.
Aside from an eminent surgical team of his choosing, Pavlov benefited from the connections and diligence of his ever-watchful guardian Lev Fedorov. Due to the poor quality of Russian chloroform, many surgical patients died from the anesthetic itself, so Fedorov and Petrova set about searching for “good foreign chloroform,” which they finally obtained from the German Red Cross.4
During the operation Serafima prayed in a nearby room while Maria stood at the head of the operating table and watched Martynov (“pale as death”) operate as Grekov (“sweating constantly from anxiety”) assisted. They worried not just about their elderly patient’s ability to survive the operation, but also about cancer. Pavlov’s family history led him to fear the worst, and several members of the surgical team commented that his extremely emaciated look might well testify to a tumor. As was the convention at the time, they decided not to inform him if the news proved bad. They would tell him in any case that they had removed a stone—and brought one along to show him for this purpose. It proved unnecessary: Martynov removed from the bile duct a dark round stone the size of a large grape, eliciting gasps of relief and joyous hugging among the medical team. Careful exploration of the area revealed no tumor.
Two days later Serafima and Maria joined the surgeons to inform Pavlov of the good news. He clearly had his wits about him; Petrova noticed that as they entered the room, “He cast a lightning-quick glance at me and at his wife, and not seeing any discomfort (which would have been unavoidable had it come to deceiving him), but, rather, unusually content, happy faces, he grasped the stone handed him by I. I. Grekov and said ‘Ah, you damned thing—you brought me so much unpleasantness.’”5
He spent the next eighteen days in the hospital, much of it with a dangerous case of pneumonia. Petrova coordinated medical care during his convalescence. Pavlov tired of the daily compresses and cupping, which led to an interesting encounter between his wife and his lover. Having convinced Grekov and Martynov to discontinue the cupping, Pavlov snapped at Petrova when he learned that she had insisted that the treatment continue. She punished him for this by skipping the doctor’s bedside conference the next day, arriving only in late afternoon. There, she later recalled, she encountered Serafima, who confided that she had learned to endure her husband’s frequent outbursts in silence, trying not to take them personally. “I just break into tears and with this the episode ends.” Maria’s response—tactless at best—was that this had been “the first time I have heard such a tone in seventeen years; until now he has always restrained himself with me.”6 Pavlov apologized to Petrova obliquely, conceding that the continued cupping had proven surprisingly effective. Serafima’s response to the encounter went unrecorded.
Never passive, Pavlov actively diagnosed and treated his own postoperative symptoms. When his appetite failed to return after two weeks, he drew upon his knowledge of fluctuations in “appetite juice” among his lab dogs of the 1890s to diagnose the problem as dehydration. He began drinking large quantities of lemonade, developed a hearty appetite within days, and celebrated with Petrova this triumph of rational physiological thinking. Some months after his recovery, he noticed a periodic irregularity in his heartbeat. He and Petrova experimented upon this condition—at one point Pavlov treated himself with bromides—and, although they never diagnosed it to their satisfaction, she published a report entitled “Post-Operative Neurosis of the Heart, Analyzed in Part by the Patient Himself, Physiologist I. P. Pavlov.”7
The Soviet press carried reports on the great physiologist’s treatment and recovery, and his patriotic insistence upon a Russian surgeon became a staple of the Pavlov legend. His hospital room was swamped by visitors and flowers. In mid-June, after eighteen days in the hospital, he thanked the medical personnel “without whom I would be lying in the cemetery,” bowed deeply to them, and departed. Photographers abounded at the occasion, producing the only extant photo of (a manifestly uncomfortable) Pavlov with both his wife and intimate friend.
Serafima seems to have reconciled herself, temporarily and unhappily, to Ivan’s love affair—but her deeper sentiments are lost to us, since she does not mention Petrova in her memoirs and culled her own archive of most sensitive personal materials before her death. For her part, Petrova writes contentedly about the mid- to late 1920s that Serafima had “probably guessed about our relations long ago, but seeing that I brought no harm to the family and no bad influence upon I. P.—but, to the contrary, was fully prepared to do everything that I could for the family of my beloved man—she remained calm.... [and] related to me rather patiently and decorously.” Whatever her inner feelings, Serafima refused to acknowledge the situation (except, perhaps, to her closest friends). Her granddaughter Liudmila later recalled that in denying the rumors Serafima made much of the fact that her husband had agreed, indeed suggested, that Petrova serve as godmother to Vladimir’s children. Since Pavlov was the godfather and since by Eastern Orthodox tradition the sanctity of these roles would be violated by sexual intimacy between godfather and godmother, Serafima insisted, her husband would never act so disrespectfully toward religious tradition and her own religious faith. For whatever reason, he did just that.
For clear-eyed observers, the intimacy between Pavlov and Petrova was obvious. In his notes from November 1928, Horsley Gantt, for example, mentioned “riding home with Pavlov (who had just taken Dr. Petrova to her hospital)—she was nestled up to his side but he sat straight as an arrow.” Petrova enjoyed warm relations with Vladimir and his wife—who “knew everything” about her relationship with Pavlov—and with her godchildren Liudmila and Maria, who delighted at the fine chocolates and other exotic gifts that seemed always available in her apartment. Petrova was also friendly in these years with Vera, and Pavlov frequently turned to her for help with his troubled daughter. For three successive summers, from 1925 to 1927, Petrova accompanied Vera on a trip to take the waters at Kislovodsk, in the North Caucasus.8
Discharged from the hospital, Pavlov hungered to resume his daily routine, but his surgeons insisted that he replenish his strength at the Karlovy Vary (formerly Carlsbad) spa in Czechoslovakia. The prospect of a long vacation at this favored spot of the European cultural elite—its previous guests included Beethoven, Freud, Gogol, and Marx—enraged the impatient scientist, but, after considerable unpleasantness, he finally agreed to three weeks. He and Serafima left Leningrad on July 17 and, as it turned out, remained abroad for two months. Pavlov explained this change in plans, summarized his response to his medical ordeal, and attested to his continued vigor and enthusiasm for his work in a letter to Babkin from the road home:
My operation freed me marvelously from all signs of ill health: in two weeks I was completely well. This astonishing fact testifies once more to the correctness of the proposition that the organism is a machine! Precisely like a speck of dust in a watch: they removed the stone and the machine resumed its normal course. In fact, my comrade-doctors shipped me off to Carlsbad needlessly; there was nothing further to cure.
We remained in Carlsbad longer than we had intended because of Vsevolod. But he didn’t come there after all. Four days ago, we arrived in Berlin. Here, of course, it is more interesting both for me and for Sara Vasil’evna. We will wait here for Vsevolod until September 5 and then hasten to Petersburg, to the laboratory. With restored strength, I’m enthusiastic about work on the cerebral hemispheres. Thank God! It seems to me that at almost eighty years of age, while the brain is not as strong (it is hard to judge this myself, my short-term memory has become a bit tricky), my interest in my mission has not diminished in the least.9
Although he was energetic and upbeat by fall 1927, Pavlov’s long and frightening illness left him with an enduring intimation of mortality. At Karlovy Vary, he agreed enthusiastically to Serafima’s proposal that she write her memoirs. Over the next years, she consulted her husband regularly as she composed hundreds of pages that combined invaluable reminiscences with a thoroughly favorable portrait of her spouse. To free up her time, she hired their first Soviet-era domestic servant, Maria—a woman who endeared herself to Serafima immediately by crossing herself before the icon that hung in the Pavlov kitchen, and who became a fixture in their family life.
Returning eagerly to his life in science, Pavlov immersed himself in the ongoing experiments on cowardly dogs—Vinogradov’s Umnitsa, Vyrzhikovskii’s Zheltyi, and especially Ivanov-Smolenskii’s Garsik. This last, pivotal study began in September 1927, just as he returned to the lab, and three months later he presented a sweeping analysis of nervous types to Russia’s Pirogov Society.
His colleagues at the IEM greeted him with the announcement that they had voted to add the honorific “in the name of I. P. Pavlov” to the formal title of their hallowed institution—an honor that he graciously declined. Fedorov welcomed him back with a new red Lincoln. His entrepreneurial energies proved undiminished. On September 30, he wrote to the presidium of the Academy of Sciences urging further improvements to his Physiological Institute there, and some months later prevailed upon the authorities to move Lopukhinskaia Street further away from his lab to protect experiments from traffic noises and vibrations.10
His reception during a trip to England in late April and May 1928, where he represented the Soviet Union at the tercentenary celebration of William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood and delivered the prestigious Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society, reflected his emergence as a scientific celebrity. Conditioned Reflexes had just appeared to positive reviews in the scientific press, and, most importantly, a long rave review by H. G. Wells in the New York Times had cast Pavlov as the triumphant symbol of scientific rationality and progress.11
In England, as elsewhere outside of Russia, Pavlov had many admirers, but very few understood, let alone emulated, his scientific research. It was the iconic Pavlov—the aged, delightfully passionate Russian who had survived civil war and defied the Bolsheviks to bathe the mysteries of the human psyche in the light of objective science—that struck the broadest and deepest chord. His every appearance was greeted with special notice and spontaneous applause.
As he had during his trip to England fifteen years earlier, Pavlov addressed the student body at Cambridge University—and this time, too, that appearance provided the emotional highlight of his visit. During that first visit, he had been surprised when a group of students lowered a toy dog festooned with fistulas into his arms as he was leaving the auditorium. His spontaneous, delighted reaction had thrilled his audience. Spectators now witnessed an incident that captured the visiting Russian’s boundless, unselfconscious passion for his science. Speaking to an overflowing auditorium, he began, as planned, delivering his talk in three-minute segments of rapid-fire Russian, each followed by Anrep’s translation. After alternating with Anrep several times in this manner, physiologist Joseph Barcroft later recalled, he became “so engrossed in his subject as quite to forget that his audience did not understand what he was saying. On and on he went for perhaps five minutes—then it dawned upon him. He wrung his hands, he burst into peals of laughter, the whole audience rocked—Pavlov had completely won the undergraduate heart.”12
Returning to Russia in high spirits in late May 1928, he immediately confronted two crises—one personal, one reflecting the political storm brewing in his homeland. For years the Pavlovs had used émigré contacts in Paris to monitor Vsevolod’s sorry existence in Constantinople. When Pavlov returned from England, a letter awaited him from one of these contacts, Sergei Metal’nikov. His report was most disturbing:
I want to inform you of what I have learned about Vsevolod Ivanovich. The worst is that he can’t find any work and has become addicted to cards. And the cards have gradually tightened a noose around his neck from which it is difficult to escape. He has had to live off of credit. But in the end there won’t be anybody to borrow from, since the majority of Russians are compelled to leave Constantinople. This is why it is necessary to drag him out of this swamp. One must hope that [in that event] he will quickly recover, since he is still capable of working. I am told that he doesn’t drink and that generally people relate to him very well there.13
The alarmed father now took decisive action to bring Vsevolod home. Acting through Fedorov, he used his influence in high party and state circles to acquire the necessary permissions. Clearly, the authorities decided that it was tactically advantageous in their complex game with Pavlov to allow his White Army officer son to return to Russia. Vladimir was dispatched to Constantinople and returned in June or July with his younger brother in tow.14
A few months later, Vsevolod participated in a “coming out” party—a game of gorodki at Koltushi on Sunday, September 16, to celebrate his father’s seventy-ninth birthday. Pavlov, his two sons, and a last-minute recruit, coworker Dmitrii Biriukov, squared off against Fedorov, Speranskii, Bykov, and Rozental’. Biriukov, who was new to the game, had been warned about the chief: “If you play badly for his team—he will scold you; if you play well against him—he’ll attack you.”15 Pavlov performed true to form—taunting and teasing his adversaries, and angrily scolding his partners. His team was well ahead when a downpour ended the match. “The Sillamiagi Academy has triumphed, the family came through!” remarked the game’s most enthusiastic and senior player, trying to invoke some continuity with the halcyon days at Sillamiagi.16 The Pavlov men were reunited, again enjoying good sport and defeating all comers.
Yet, of course, much had changed. Vsevolod was no longer the golden youth on his way to a brilliant career in the service of the tsar, but a middle-aged man broken by war and ten sordid years in exile. A bitter veteran of the White resistance, he had returned from the militantly anti-Bolshevik émigré milieu in Constantinople to find his homeland transformed and his father surrounded by Communists like Fedorov and sympathizers (or, at least, avid cooperators) like Petrova and Speranskii. Petrova’s alliance with Fedorov and Speranskii could only have exacerbated Vsevolod’s disdain for his father’s intimate friend. She claimed that Vsevolod’s antipathy toward her was rooted in shame, for he knew that she was privy to a decade of correspondence about his disreputable life in exile. In any case, Vsevolod’s hostility toward Petrova ended the “peaceful” and correct relations that she had established with Serafima and Vera. Furthermore, with Vsevolod counseling defiance to the regime while Vladimir (and Petrova) urged reconciliation, familial relations in the nerve-racking Stalinist years to come were constantly complicated by political dynamics and alliances.
Pavlov appointed Vsevolod his personal secretary and editor of his in-house journal Works of the Laboratories of Academician I. P. Pavlov. Essentially unemployable in Soviet Russia outside of his father’s enterprise, he never found his sea legs there. He proved, at best, a disengaged editor, and Works appeared tardily and irregularly throughout his tenure. His unabashed hatred of the regime made him persona non grata with the authorities, and his clashes with them foiled his father’s attempts to broaden his younger son’s sphere of responsibility. Vsevolod’s education, on the other hand, enabled him to facilitate his father’s “foreign relations”—to handle correspondence with Western colleagues and to serve as translator during two overseas trips. He married in 1929, living with his wife at her parents’ home and summering at Koltushi.
Vsevolod’s repatriation coincided with Stalin’s decisive move away from Lenin’s NEP toward the “Great Break”—the policy of rapid industrialization, forced collectivization of agriculture, “cultural revolution,” and accelerating arrests. Several months after Vsevolod’s return, an early episode in the Great Break—the Communists’ drive to end the relative autonomy of the hallowed Academy of Sciences and to install their own choices as academicians—embroiled his father in a bitter confrontation with the authorities.
Stalin’s rise to supreme power had been marked by two intraparty struggles. First, in 1926, in alliance with Bukharin, his faction defeated Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the remnants of Trotsky’s disciples. The losers were expelled first from the Politburo and then from the party; Zinoviev was replaced as Leningrad’s party boss by Stalin’s protégé, Sergei Kirov. (Pavlov may well have welcomed that development, having been appalled by Zinoviev’s undemocratic practices and windy demagogic speeches, one of which he had been compelled to endure at the 1925 bicentennial celebration of the Academy of Sciences.) Then, in winter 1927–1928, when unfavorable market conditions led the peasantry to withhold much of their harvest—precipitating, in turn, a grain crisis that threatened the export income necessary to finance industrialization—Stalin responded with the forcible seizure of grain supplies. Bukharin now joined a United Opposition that supported the continuation of NEP policies, but Stalin easily won this battle as well. In October 1928, the victorious Stalinists unveiled a Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization and collectivization. Although wildly unrealistic, this plan would be discarded six months later as too conservative and replaced by radically more ambitious targets.
Another aspect of emerging Stalinist policies struck closer to home for Pavlov: an increasingly militant, antagonistic policy toward the intelligentsia inherited from the old regime. In March 1928, Pravda announced the indictment of fifty-three mining engineers on charges of sabotaging industry; one month later Stalin denounced the accused for practicing a “new form of counterrevolution.” The highly publicized Shakhty trial signaled a sharp break with the Bolsheviks’ earlier conciliatory policy toward bourgeois specialists. Eleven of the accused were condemned to death, six to life imprisonment, and the others to shorter terms. If earlier the Bolshevik attitude toward the intelligentsia had been “If you are not against us, you are for us,” now it was clearly “If you are not for us, you are against us.” The Shakhty trial made clear that specialized expertise—whether in science, medicine, or technology—provided no refuge from the party’s authority. Bukharin and the United Opposition opposed this sharp change in policy, but were easily defeated and compelled to recant.
Throughout the 1920s, Soviet science policy had moved purposively along two parallel tracks. The state had supported, generally quite generously, scientific institutions that were dominated by the prerevolutionary intelligentsia while at the same time creating a parallel set of specifically Communist academies, research institutes, and universities. Organized according to Bolshevik principles and imbued with a Communist ethos, these new institutions, according to the Leninist vision, would produce highly qualified proletarian cadres to replace the bourgeois specialists inherited from the old order. At the apex of these parallel scientific systems stood the Academy of Sciences and its proletarian twin the Communist Academy of Sciences (with the former housing, for example, Pavlov’s Physiological Institute, and the latter Fursikov’s explicitly Marxist Institute for the Study of Higher Nervous Processes). By decade’s end, however, the number of Communist, or even nominally Marxist, scientists and engineers was still quite small, and the new “proletarian” institutes remained comparatively weak. Stalin’s Great Break featured a new turn—the radical transformation of the longstanding “bourgeois” institutions and eventual liquidation of their separate Communist counterparts. The venerable Academy of Sciences, for example, would be Bolshevized, and the Communist Academy eliminated.17
Plans to transform the Academy of Sciences had matured during the second half of the 1920s. In 1925, the Academy of Sciences was formally recognized as the highest scientific institution in the USSR and placed under the direct supervision of the SNK. A Kremlin commission formulated a new charter that emphasized the Academy’s duty to nurture the practical applications of science, allowed for the exclusion of any member whose “activity is clearly directed to the detriment of the USSR,” and increased the number of academicians from forty-five to seventy. To strengthen the influence of Soviet values on the Academy, the right to nominate and discuss new academicians was expanded beyond the Academy itself. “Discussion” of this new charter coincided with a loud public campaign against particular, politically incorrect academicians and against the elitist nature of the Academy of Sciences. In 1928, the party apparatus prepared a list of desirable new members for the expanded Academy, and in May of that year a secret party directive outlined the battle plan for the upcoming electoral campaign. The Shakhty trial reached its preordained conclusion in the midst of that campaign, which accelerated from May 1928 toward its climax with the election of new academicians in early 1929.18
The Academy’s main representative in negotiations with the Party leadership was its longtime permanent secretary, the distinguished Orientalist Sergei Ol’denburg. A former member of the Provisional Government, Ol’denburg had in 1918 put the Academy on the path to cooperation with the country’s new authorities. Now, convinced that the Academy must adapt if it was to survive (the Communist Academy of Sciences was always waiting in the wings to replace it), he negotiated with Party leaders about candidates in the upcoming elections.
The Communist slate included many candidates, such as Party leader and theorist Nikolai Bukharin and Lenin’s old comrade, engineer and creator of the nation’s vast electrification project Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, whom the academicians would have never, left to their own devices, considered worthy of membership—but three other nominees, all Marxists, were considered especially undistinguished, hackish, and objectionable: literary theorist and historian Vladimir Friche, historian of revolutionary movements Nikolai Lukin, and philosopher Abram Deborin.
The elections transpired in two phases. First, in early December 1928 a committee from each of the Academy’s divisions, physico-mathematical and humanities, screened the nominees. Then, in early January 1929, the general membership voted to accept or reject each. Candidates approved by two-thirds of the voting membership would become academicians.
As a member of the group that screened nominations in the biological sciences for the physico-mathematical division, Pavlov watched in disgust and anger as crude political pressure shaped elections to the country’s most exalted scholarly body. Repelled by the Academy leadership’s conciliatory tactics, he resigned from the nominating committee and sent a letter to the Academy leadership for inclusion in the official record:
For the first time in the history of our Academy, as far as I know, the state is making declarations before the elections about the desirability of specific candidates. All the organs of the state (the press, the current leadership of institutions of higher learning, and social institutions) insist threateningly upon its desires. It seems to me that this undermines the dignity of the Academy and will weigh heavily upon academicians. It would be more just for the state to itself directly appoint to the Academy those people who are best from its point of view.
And how the present manner of acting affects people! I will offer an example that took place three or four years ago. The then president of the Executive Committee of the City Soviet, Zinoviev, coerced those working in education with this procedure: “The resolution is proposed. Who is against? Silence. The resolution is adopted unanimously.” About this time I met one of my comrade-professors and expressed to him my indignation at this. I must add that this comrade had a reputation as an especially honorable person. His reply was the following: “What do you want? Don’t you know that now any objection is suicide?”
One cannot but acknowledge that our current situation carries with it great responsibility.19
The statesmanlike language concealed agitation and fury. Declining an invitation to speak at Leningrad University at about this time, he explained that he was too disturbed to do so. “You understand—they are bringing terrorists into this Academy.... Communists are entering for the first time.”20
Pavlov’s insistence that academicians resolutely defend their scholarly traditions and defy party pressure placed him in opposition to Ol’denburg and the majority of the Academy’s scholarly leadership, who feared the consequences of defiance both for the Academy and for themselves. In a meeting of influential academicians in November, Ol’denburg sought to formulate tactics toward the upcoming elections and rally his colleagues behind them. Tempers flared:
When [biogeochemist] V. I. Vernadsky proposed to accept the Communist Party insistence that they vote on candidates not individually but as a slate, Pavlov exploded “This is lackeyism that you are proposing!” Attempts to calm him failed miserably: Pavlov was almost screaming that we need to show ourselves to the Bolsheviks, that there is nothing to fear from them, that no preliminary deals are needed, that everyone should and must act individually, and so forth. Sergei [Ol’denburg] told him vehemently that he, Iv. Pav[lov], can, and is permitted to, say what he likes, they will not touch him, since he is in a privileged position, since he is, as all know and as the Bolsheviks themselves say, the ideological leader of their party. Pavlov boiled over again. It was terrible!21
Ol’denburg’s angry remark about Pavlov’s status as the “ideological leader” of the Bolsheviks was, of course, a reference to the view of many Communist thinkers that his scientific research supported their dialectical materialist philosophy. This encounter also dramatized the complexity of Pavlov’s position as a “prosperous dissident.” His objections to Communist policies were no less sincere for his special status and privileges, but these did separate him from his colleagues and inevitably reduced his moral authority among them
Horsley Gantt visited several times in October and November 1928 and recorded some of Pavlov’s mordant observations about the Bolsheviks: “It is clear to me that they are only indolent fools,” he said. “When this government does fall, probably Finland, Estonia, and the other lost provinces will reunite with Russia.” “In other countries the theaters produce the comedies, but here the government acts the comedy.” “It is only the [country’s] subcortical centers that are working and not the cortex. The highest centers of the brain are overruled by the lower. Our country is in the hands of a bunch of [illegible] who cannot deal with reality, but only repeat what that fool Marx said.” The Jews occupied “high positions everywhere,” he complained, because they were “energetic,” while Russians were “lazy.” “What a shame that the Russians cannot be rulers of their own land.”22
Pavlov was hardly alone in noticing the disproportionate presence of Jews in the Communist Party (that was true also of the other main parties that had opposed tsarism from the left, such as the Kadets, the Mensheviks, and People’s Will). Comprising about 4.5 percent of the population and 7 percent of Bolshevik Party membership in 1917, Jews had been highly visible in Lenin’s ruling Politburo. To use the categories of the day: Lenin, Bukharin, and Lunacharskii were Russian; Stalin was Georgian; and Kamenev, Sverdlov, Trotsky, and Zinoviev were Jewish. In the late 1920s, however, Jews were entirely absent from Stalin’s leadership body: Sverdlov had died in 1919, and Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had been purged. Pavlov’s marked, if relatively mild, anti-Semitism would continually emerge in his evolving assessment of Bolshevism.
Having decided to boycott the final elections at the Academy of Sciences, he missed one of the most dramatic moments in its history. On January 12, 1929, a general meeting of academicians convened to vote on the nominees approved by the divisional committees. Fashioned by Ol’denburg in negotiations with party authorities under intense pressure, the slate of nominees seemed certain to be rubber-stamped by the membership. Only thirty of the thirty-nine academicians were present for what was by this time, according to historian F. F. Perchenok, one of only two occasions on which citizens of the USSR could vote by secret ballot (the other being elections to the Central Committee at national congresses of the Communist Party). Perhaps each quietly dissenting academician thought that he could cast an anonymous protest vote against the appalling circumstances in which they found themselves. In any case, the results proved shocking: leading Communists Bukharin and Krzhizhanovskii were elected by a scant one-vote margin, and three members of the slate were defeated: pro-Communist philosopher Deborin (with 18 yes votes and 12 no) and the Communists Lukin (16–14) and Friche (16–14) all failed to gain the required two-thirds.
Fearing catastrophe, a stunned Ol’denburg immediately summoned the Academy’s Presidium to petition the SNK for the unprecedented “right” to hold a second election in which the newly elected academicians would be allowed to participate. Five days later, on January 17, that proposal was put before a general meeting.
Pavlov spoke first—denouncing the proposal as an unprincipled capitulation to state coercion. How, Oldenburg had asked ingenuously, could academicians reject three candidates who had been approved unanimously by the nominating committees? Because, Pavlov explained (uttering the unspeakable truth that was well known to everybody), those nominees had been elected in an open ballot conducted under the crudest pressures—including the threat to expel dissenters for conduct unbefitting an academician!—while the final vote had been taken by secret ballot. Academicians had voted their conscience. In human affairs, “there is the danger that if you do something contrary to conscience it will then consume you. To do something wrong is easy, but then you will have no peace.”23
Pavlov was among nine of the forty-three academicians present to vote in open ballot against Ol’denburg’s resolution. He then walked out demonstratively, vowing never to return. Ol’denburg led a delegation to the Kremlin, where, after a heated discussion during which some leading Communists urged that the Academy be destroyed for its defiance, permission for a revote was granted. Subjected to a renewed, even uglier public campaign, academicians voted on February 13 to admit Deborin, Friche, and Lukin. A disgusted Pavlov absented himself from this meeting, at which three academicians silently persisted in voting against Lukin, and two against Deborin and Friche.24
A new era, Stalin times, had begun.