Hoping to popularize his research abroad and eager to escape the wearing and increasingly worrisome realities of Soviet life, Pavlov determined from the earliest days of 1929 to attend two international conferences scheduled for the United States in August and September: the Physiological Congress at Harvard University and the Psychological Congress at Yale. Walter Cannon was, as always, eager to help, and informed him in January that the two congresses would each subsidize Pavlov’s trip with a stipend of $400. In March, Pavlov formally appealed through the Academy of Sciences for permission to travel to the United States with his son and for 3,000 gold rubles (that is, hard currency) for expenses. Although, in protest against the rigged elections, he was now demonstratively absent from all faculty meetings there, the Academy supported his request, observing that at the congresses he would occupy “a place of special honor, testifying to the great scientific achievements of our Union.” The Soviet of Peoples Commissars (SNK) approved his request in mid-April.1
The authorities, however, worried that he might not return. Well informed of his frequent political comments in the lab, at the Wednesday conferences, and even in presumably private settings, they knew that he was furious about the Bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences and railing against Communist rule. Typical of the comments that no doubt reached their ears was Pavlov’s remark to Horsley Gantt in April 1929 that conditions in the country were scandalous. “The biggest country in the world, but there is no meat and no bread. The Communist[s] say they are doing big things.... But the only big thing they have done is [establish] a big tyranny of thought where everybody is afraid to say a word for fear he will be put in prison.”2
According to Gantt, Pavlov now wanted to leave the USSR and emigrate to the United States. He may well have considered this option, if only fleetingly. His personal papers contain what might be evidence of a crash course in English at about this time, and the highest state circles had clearly heard worrisome reports. In a letter of May 1929, Efim Voronov, assistant head of the Division of Scientific Institutions within the SNK, informed high Party circles (including Stalin’s personal secretary) of this danger and of measures to ensure the physiologist’s return. “Knowing Pavlov and not doubting the reception that he will encounter in America, one might suggest that, despite his directness, Pavlov might incline to the idea of remaining overseas.” The authorities could not deny him this foreign trip, as that would elicit “demonstrative antics on his part” and unfavorable publicity in the West. So Voronov suggested that they speak frankly with Vladimir before he and his father departed, and forbid the rest of the family permission to travel to their dacha in Finland until the pair returned to Russia. 3
By July it was firmly decided that, with safeguards in place, Pavlov would be allowed to leave—and his relationship with the authorities took an intriguing turn. Pavlov now asked that three physiologists be added to the Soviet delegation, including his former assistant Fol’bort. Voronov observed that all three were politically “conservative.” The inclusion of Fol’bort, moreover, posed the danger that he, together with Pavlov and Orbeli, would “form a group within the delegation that is joined both by personal closeness and by their social-political mood, which hardly suits us.”
Yet Voronov also noticed a significant change in Pavlov’s language: “In the history of our relations with Pavlov he is addressing us for the first time with a request. Previously...he favored us not so much with his ‘fervent appeals’ as with heated scolding. This request should be evaluated as an open step, taken at his own initiative, toward rapprochement. To spurn him, of course, would be incorrect!” Voronov suggested that the authorities grant Pavlov’s request as a sign of goodwill. He had sounded out Fol’bort and concluded that he would behave himself abroad: he was an “intelligent man, who in his own interests will not want to allow himself anything disloyal.” Pavlov was allowed to choose one of the three physiologists he had requested. He chose Fol’bort, so, at the last moment, when Pavlov had already left for the Congress, Voronov pressed a key Ukrainian official to quickly provide a visa for the politically suspect physiologist.4
Pavlov and Vladimir, meanwhile, had made their way to Helsinki, from there to Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia) on a steamship (“an entire four hours of nausea” that almost convinced Pavlov to turn back), then on to London, where they boarded the steamship Minnekhada with other delegates to the physiology congress from some twenty-two countries.5 Arriving in Boston on August 18, they settled in at Cannon’s home.
Pavlov received a hero’s welcome at both the physiology congress (August 19–23) and the psychology congress (September 1–8), but his was the triumph of an iconic figure, a symbol, rather than the discoverer of specific facts or the bearer of a scientific approach that was transforming Western physiology and psychology. What he said at these gatherings was clearly much less important than who he was and what he had come to symbolize. Describing Pavlov’s appearances at two successive congresses, the Oxford University physiologist K. J. Franklin put it this way: “He was as well and as full of vitality [in Italy] as he had been at Boston. To be sure, he was no more comprehensible, but that doesn’t particularly matter. He filled an immense amphitheatre and there were many standing.”6
Physiologists and psychologists certainly respected his scientific achievements, but very few understood his esoteric terminology, fewer still had examined the details of his experiments and conclusions, and only a small handful had adopted his experimental approach. The consistently enthralled accounts of his appearances were notable for their lack of comment about scientific content. They dwelled, rather, upon the great liveliness and energy of this great old man of physiology, this passionate, gray-bearded Russian who had survived so much adversity, defied his country’s Communist rulers, and come to symbolize the possibility that experimental biology might explain and control human nature.
In this they mirrored H. G. Wells’s widely read cover story about Pavlov in a November 1927 issue of the New York Times Magazine. That essay had been occasioned by the appearance of Pavlov’s monograph, which, Wells conceded, was “not an easy book to read.” The reviewer did not dwell upon the details of irradiation, concentration, or mutual induction; nor, for that matter, did he attempt to explain the Russian’s methodologies or main conclusions. Rather, he emphasized Pavlov’s “vastly heroic” stature as a man of science (which he contrasted sharply with his polemical target, George Bernard Shaw). Having persevered through “flood, famine, war and revolution,” Pavlov had produced “the broad beginnings of a clear conception of the working of...the convoluted gray matter of the brain,” which was “very reassuring...for those whose hopes for the future of mankind are bound up with the steadfast growth of scientific knowledge.”7
Pavlov, then, was applauded by writers, journalists, and adoring colleagues who knew (and often cared) little about his actual goals, procedures, and results. He found himself in a bittersweet position that Petrova summarized quite aptly: he “was pronounced the greatest physiologist of his time and, nevertheless, in an international setting, he remained to some degree alone.”8
At the physiology congress in Boston, as Harvard surgeon Harvey Cushing observed: “It was inevitable that Pavlov should unconsciously step into the position (to which he is entitled) of being the most notable figure in this huge assembly.” His every appearance attracted rapt attention, and when he strode onto the stage for the opening ceremony “everyone got up spontaneously and applauded.” Yale physiologist John Fulton dwelled on his unselfconscious passion for his science, his “fiery gesticulations” when speaking of his research and his invocation of physiologists’ grand mission. “The wildest applause followed, every one rising to their feet, and Pavlov, in making his low bows, once more almost fell from the platform. Professor Samojoff, the chairman, growing anxious, pulled him back by the coattails, much to the delight of the audience.”9
During a break from the Congress, Cushing demonstrated a complex operation for Pavlov, removing a large tumor from a patient’s brain. The operation went very well and Pavlov was especially intrigued by Cushing’s electro-surgical apparatus, so, the surgeon later recalled, “I got a piece of meat which he variously incised and finally wrote his name on the piece of meat with the needle.” (That souvenir of Pavlov’s visit is still preserved at Yale.) Observing Pavlov through all this, Fulton noted that: “Though lame, he is as lively and fiery as a cricket and moves with all the energy of a youth of fifteen.”10
Aside from his scheduled talk, Pavlov described his latest research in a private presentation to a select invited audience. Cushing described the scene breathlessly (and, again, without reference to scientific content): “We had Pavlov serving up his latest ideas of inhibition in relation to neuroses, hot from the griddle. Vivid, alert, gesticulating, the old man poured out his phrases, like a mitrailleuse never missing fire.... You could have heard a pin drop.”11 In a letter to Petrova, Pavlov professed himself “stunned by my reception. Clearly I have very many scientific friends and admirers.”12
This triumphant appearance, however, was marred by what Pavlov perceived as the heavy hand of state surveillance in the person of his fellow Soviet delegate to the Congress, Lina Shtern. An immigrant to the USSR, Shtern was, he suspected, monitoring the behavior of her compatriots—and did so in a most transparent manner. Several years later, Pavlov, still furious, recalled that Walter Cannon’s wife had returned from a local reception for the Congress’s female physiologists “very upset at the behavior of Shtern, who all the time pestered her with questions about what my son and I were saying about our life and about our government; that is, she was openly spying. A fine scientific colleague.”13
After the congress, the Pavlovs traveled with the Cannons to their home in New Hampshire, and then continued north to visit the Babkins in Montreal before going to New Haven for the psychology congress. Like the physiology congress, this was the first of its kind convened in the United States, which now boasted fully half of the world’s psychologists.
Pavlov was again accorded an honored place, delivering the first plenary lecture. And again it was his affect and stature that commanded attention. Vladimir informed Babkin that “In New Haven, they hailed his paper, singling him out as they had in Boston, and his lecture was an enormous success.... Papa himself was very content with his encounter with the psychologists, who completely agree with him about many things.”14
In high spirits, Pavlov spent his remaining days in the United States posing for a bust in the apartment of émigré sculptor Sergei Konenkov. Deeply touched by the kindness and attention of Americans, he was nevertheless homesick. Konenkov found a temporary palliative in the local restaurant The Russian Bear, where his visitor ate familiar foods with gusto. 15
He sailed home on a wave of favorable Western publicity, with a much-enhanced aura of celebrity. Aside from scientific journals, Time magazine and the New York Times had reported extensively on the elderly, fiery scientist who charmed his peers, defied the Communists, and pursued the mysteries of human nature. That coverage had begun even before Pavlov’s arrival with a long article by Horsley Gantt for the New York Times: “A Man Who Speaks His Mind in Russia: Dr. Ivan Pavlov, Whose Researches Stir the Medical World, Criticizes the Soviet Government With Impunity.” From the Physiology Congress, the popular weekly Time reported that “Leningrad’s Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the most revered man at the Congress. Limping on his right foot he tried to avoid a crowd of learned admirers. They crowded about him and forced him to hold a sort of court. He liked the adoration.”16
Time’s précis of Pavlov’s contributions echoed the common American interpretation of the importance of conditioned reflexes to behaviorist psychology: “Behaviorists have taken up his theories and made them fairly common knowledge. His picture of mental activity is mechanistic. The brain acts according to habits. Certain repeated stimuli condition it (and the physical and physiological activities which it controls) so that the reappearance of a stimulus causes the old response.” Two weeks later, Time reported that Pavlov’s appearance at the psychology congress had proven “no anticlimax,” adding that the scientists’ enthusiasm far exceeded their understanding of his research: “The psychologists showed the old gentleman great respect. Though they knew of him only at second hand (through the Behaviorists), though he spoke in Russian and in highly technical terms...they applauded him tremendously before and after he spoke.”17
“Pavlov Hailed as Science Dean,” reported the New York Times from the Boston congress. At this gathering of more than 1,000 physiologists, Pavlov “was hailed as the greatest, both as a scientist and as a personality”; he was, in H. G. Wells’s words, “a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto unexplored.” Behaviorist psychologists viewed his research as the basis for their own, but Pavlov’s contributions to an understanding of the human mind promised far more—according to his admirers, he had pointed the way toward “the solution of the riddle of life.” From New Haven, the reporter added this about the visiting Russian “wizard”:
This little, wiry old man, whose life began and for many years continued in poverty and privation, has solved for himself the enigma of spirit and matter. To him, they are one, two parts of a single, monistic world, each dependent upon the other, bound indissolubly in the great heroic drama of life.
The Bolsheviki, ultra-materialists, see in him a support of their theory of determinism, believing that Pavlov is the Karl Marx of physiology. Pavlov repudiates this.
Of all the people in Soviet Russia, he is the only one who dares speak his mind. In this respect, he is regarded as the only free man in Russia.18
On the journey back to Europe aboard the SS Leviathan, Vladimir remarked on his father’s celebrity status: “The appearance of the portrait of Papa in the weekly Time caused a furor on the ship—everybody besieges him for a photograph, autographs, and scholarly and scientific conversations. Even the very frosty purser suddenly melted once he was shown this issue of the magazine, and asked to have his photo taken with us.”19
Pavlov returned to Russia in a good mood, but his personal triumph did not presage the emergence of an extensive international network of disciples who would develop his lines of research and so revolutionize physiology and psychology. For Pavlov, CRs were simultaneously a phenomenon, a doctrine, and a methodology. Most important for him, his “methodology of conditional reflexes,” as he commonly referred to it, constituted a new, objective method to study the brain, behavior, and the psyche. The physiologists and psychologists who hailed him, however, worked according to their own well-established scientific traditions, and very few abandoned them for Pavlov’s. Much more commonly, Westerners adopted the parts of Pavlov’s research that reinforced the research and conceptions to which they were already committed. With few exceptions, the American behaviorists of Pavlov’s day—for whom he held out so much hope—merely used his arguments about “conditioned reflexes” to buttress their own established program. For them, Pavlov provided an explanation of the nervous determinants of behavior and justified behaviorists’ abandonment of the problem of consciousness (although this actually separated them from him). Cornell psychologist H. S. Liddell, who was exceptional in his understanding and use of Pavlovian methodology, put it this way: “The conditioned reflex is to the behaviorist a verbal weapon for polemical writing while the actual prosecution of research by the conditioned reflex method languishes.” That polemical use of Pavlov was reflected in the media coverage and his reception at the international congresses, and embodied in the iconic image of the bearded Russian “training a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell.”20
For the rest of his life, Pavlov would tirelessly attempt to popularize his CR methodology abroad and constantly point to various straws in the wind—to scattered indications that foreign scientists might seriously adopt his approach to brain, behavior, and psychic phenomena—but he well knew that this simply was not happening. Sometimes he attributed this failure to a “rupture” between monist physiology and dualist psychology. In the former, he mused, CRs as a methodology was “too distant from the usual approaches and methods” (from studies of cells, synapses, and endocrines) and so remained only a textbook doctrine; in the latter, it confronted dualist prejudices. Sometimes, while conceding that in Western Europe “the method of conditional reflexes is ignored,” he looked hopefully at “the Americans, a more pragmatic people, [who] long ago came to our methods and undoubtedly are leaving Western Europe behind.”
In 1934, when Iosif Rozental’ was asked to write an article on “The Doctrine of Conditional Reflexes Abroad” for Izvestiia’s celebration of the chief’s eighty-fifth birthday, he could identify only a few scattered foreign disciples: Liddell at Cornell, Gantt at Johns Hopkins, Babkin (who was actually working on digestion) and one other scientist in Canada, Konorskii and Miller in Warsaw, two researchers in France, and one in Tokyo. Pavlov’s general influence was of course much broader than that list indicated, but the circle of foreigner researchers who actually understood and practiced his CR methodology—who constituted the real international Pavlov school of his dreams—was not. Petrova was quite correct, and probably was echoing Pavlov’s clear-eyed assessment: amid all the applause, “in an international setting, he remained to some degree alone.”21
As Pavlov returned to Russia on the eve of his eightieth birthday, his status as an international celebrity created a quandary for the Communist leadership. For almost nine years—since Lenin’s decree of January 1921—it had lavishly supported his scientific work, but, confronted with his openly White sympathies at the time of his seventieth birthday and stung by his public anti-Bolshevik speeches at the time of his seventy-fifth, had not seen fit to mark these jubilees with official decrees and celebratory articles in the press.
Three of his Communist coworkers—Lev Fedorov, Nikolai Nikitin, and Fedor Maiorov—now strongly recommended that the Party do just that. Despite his advancing age, Pavlov was conducting “very intensive and extraordinarily fruitful work.... and we suggest that such a rare jubilee should unquestionably be marked by the state.” Pavlov himself had refused any public celebration of his birthday (as he had in the years before 1917), but his coworkers suggested ways for the state to mark the occasion: an official telegram from Chair of the SNK Aleksei Rykov or President Mikhail Kalinin, the awarding of “some sort of honorary rank,” improvements to Pavlov’s facilities, and, especially, dramatically enhanced funding for his biological station at Koltushi. Not only was that rural facility central to Pavlov’s plans to pursue “extremely interesting questions” about the role of heredity and environment in shaping nervous type, it was also close to his heart as a potential country home. As Bukharin pointed out, Pavlov had no use for any honorary rank, but otherwise this letter bore the distinct mark of Fedorov’s acute sense that the best way to Pavlov’s heart was through his labs.
The Communist Pavlovians sent their letter to either Bukharin or Voronov, who collaborated on a proposal to the Politburo for implementation by the SNK. Pavlov had confronted Bukharin twice: in 1923 Pavlov had criticized his Proletarian Revolution and Culture in his inaugural lecture at the Military-Medical Academy, drawing a sharp response from its author, and in 1929 Pavlov had bitterly opposed Bukharin’s candidacy for membership in the Academy of Sciences. Yet Bukharin was committed to détente with the bourgeois intelligentsia, thought that Pavlov could be won over, and had already begun with some success to cultivate him.
One day before Pavlov’s birthday, Voronov presented Bukharin with a draft of a suitable decree, noting: “Pavlov returned yesterday from the Congress in Boston, where he conducted himself almost entirely properly. He was greeted there by ovations. There won’t be any celebration of the jubilee (he doesn’t want one), but I don’t understand why we should not ourselves make a pretty and politically correct gesture.... Such a gesture would bring Pavlov closer to us.” Rykov, however, opposed the proposal; would Bukharin try to convince him?
Rykov and Valerian Kuibyshev, head of the economic and planning apparatus, both agreed to additional support for Pavlov’s labs, but opposed any more demonstrative gesture. As Kuibyshev put it: “Pavlov spits on the Soviets, declares himself an open enemy, yet Soviet power would for some reason honor him.” In an oral exchange, Kuibyshev likened Pavlov’s political views to those of the Black Hundreds (the ultranationalist thugs who terrorized the opposition during the last years of tsarism). “Help him we must, but not honor him.” Rykov agreed.22
In his written response to Kuibyshev, Bukharin summarized succinctly his rationale for cultivating the anti-Communist physiologist: “I know that he does not sing the ‘Internationale.’ But all the same he was raised on Pisarev, continues Sechenov’s mission, and his anti-Bolshevik tendencies—essentially—are rather of a bourgeois democratic character. And he is the leading physiologist in the world, a materialist and, despite all his grumbling, ideologically (in his works, not in his speeches) he is working for us.”23
Bukharin’s arguments carried the day, and the Politburo approved a suitable decree. Printed in both Izvestiia and Pravda, the decree honored Pavlov’s “more than half-century of extraordinarily significant scientific activity” by mandating improvements to his lab at the IEM, ordering the Leningrad Soviet to reroute Lopukhinskaia St. to assuage Pavlov’s long-standing complaint about disruptive traffic noise, and allotting an extra 100,000 rubles to the IEM lab and Koltushi for the 1929–1930 financial year.
Alongside the SNK decree, Pravda, as the official organ of the Communist Party, also published an article with a sharp ideological and political edge. On the one hand, Pravda’s columnist explained, Pavlov’s scientific methodology and doctrine epitomized the spontaneous emergence of dialectical materialist conceptions in the work of great scientists. Pavlov was a materialist in his rejection of metaphysical notions of the soul and his explanation of behavior in terms of the interaction of organism and environment; he was a dialectician in his attention to the interaction of opposites (excitation and inhibition, irradiation and concentration, analysis and synthesis). Whatever his own subjective beliefs, then, this was a great scientist whose work illustrated the laws of dialectical materialism in nature. For this reason, “Soviet power and the Communist Party have always supported I. P. Pavlov’s school, creating optimally propitious conditions for its work.” On the other hand, one needed always to distinguish between the objective meaning of a scientist’s work and the scientist’s own “subjective moods,” and Pavlov himself held “reactionary subjective views of social questions.” Everybody was familiar with his retrograde opinions: that Germany (rather than imperialism as a system) bore responsibility for World War I, that the Bolshevik Revolution constituted a “deplorable historical fact,” that the Communists were destroying Russian culture and Russian science, that their “class policy” toward higher education and the Academy of Sciences was unjustified and destructive, and so forth. These views lacked any scientific basis. They were, rather, “directed against the proletariat with its great socialist tasks, and are anti-cultural and obstruct the further development of science.”24
An avalanche of public congratulations, letters, and telegrams also greeted Pavlov on his birthday, including one from the Academy of Sciences that praised its dissenting member as a “great master of the scientific experiment,” “profound thinker on the basis of the monist worldview,” and “founder and creator of the new doctrine of higher nervous activity, so important for theory and so promising for the practice of medicine and psychology.” In his grateful reply, Pavlov sounded a deeply felt patriotic note: “Whatever I do, I think constantly that, so far as my powers permit, I am serving, most of all, my homeland, our Russian science. And this is the most powerful stimulus and most profound satisfaction.”25
As the Communist leadership anticipated, the Western press indeed marked Pavlov’s jubilee, highlighting his scientific achievements and opposition to Bolshevik rule. The New York Times headlined its story: “Pavlov, 80, Spurns Bolshevist Honors. Famous Physiologist Refuses to Sanction Soviet Offer of Official Reception. Passes Day in Private. Government Gives $50,000 to His Leningrad Laboratory to Aid Experiments.” Citing from the previous day’s Pravda Pavlov’s various anti-Soviet positions, the New York Times reporter added that Pavlov’s combination of materialism and anti-Communism made him a “terrible enigma for the intellectual Communists.” Time marked Pavlov’s birthday with a short item that emphasized his refusal of an official celebration and cited that same convenient summary of his dissident views provided by Pravda—adding a confused conflation of behaviorism and Marxism to explain Pavlov’s value to Russia’s rulers. “Physiologist Pavlov is no friend of Communism.... Mindful that upon his research rests the behavioristic ‘Science of Marxism’ and Marxian doctrine, the Soviet tolerates his slaps gently and without reproach, babies him.”26
Pavlov himself spent the day at Koltushi strolling and playing gorodki with Vsevolod and visiting coworkers. An extravagantly dressed Maria Petrova, with high heels and gorodki bat in hand, seized center stage in the day’s photographs.
Serafima, meanwhile, remained in Leningrad to deal with the avalanche of telegrams, flowers, and fruit while she prepared for a family dinner and the next day’s celebratory repast with twenty guests. It fell to her also to receive the unwanted well-wishers who dropped by, and to fend off the many “who think that the 100,000 [rubles] designated by the state for [Pavlov’s] laboratories were given to him personally, and who now shower us with requests for help and don’t want to believe that we received nothing and that [he] would never agree to take even a kopeck. All this creates a very oppressive atmosphere, since there are so many needy people and nothing with which to help them.”27
Her husband was not much for birthday festivities either, but impatiently awaited the results of the state’s largesse, particularly the exciting prospect of a science village at Koltushi, where he hoped to reproduce what he could of prerevolutionary dacha life at Sillamiagi and to explore and perhaps even manipulate the process by which heredity and environment gave rise to specific nervous types. He was also confronting the new ugly realities of Stalin Times, which had become increasingly immediate and palpable in the final months of 1929, and which thereafter would compete for his attention with the expanding horizons of his research.