The last days of 1929 found Pavlov preparing another public blast at the country’s Communist rulers. The election campaign at the Academy of Sciences had proven but an early sign of things to come. Stalin’s Great Break from 1929 to 1932 launched a Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization, forcible collectivization of agriculture, and a cultural revolution that targeted values, intellectual traditions, and groups rooted in prerevolutionary society while advancing to leading positions the proletarian cadres (vydvizhentsy) nurtured in the 1920s. During these years, the Party established tight control over civil society, and the secret police carried out extensive, often seemingly random arrests.
December 1929 marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ivan Sechenov, who was now celebrated as the Father of Russian Physiology. The Society of Russian Physiologists organized a celebration of the jubilee and asked Pavlov to deliver some introductory remarks. He began composing them upon his return from the United States, asking Sechenov’s former student Mikhail Shaternikov for information on the physiologist’s intimate life at the time he wrote Reflexes of the Brain (1863). Rumor had it that the radical Nikolai Chernyshevskii had based his account of the two lovers in his novel What Is to Be Done? upon Sechenov’s relationship with Maria Bokova, and Pavlov was intrigued by the possibility that Sechenov’s passion for her had provided the creative energy (excitation) for his bold attempt to explain volitional acts as chains of reflexes. Shaternikov confirmed that Sechenov had indeed been passionately in love with Bokova while writing Reflexes of the Brain, and provided some details. Pavlov promised to be discreet; he would mention only that the great physiologist had been “enveloped in the emotion of love” at the time.1
Pavlov’s own context encouraged him to incorporate this reflection on the relationship of love to creativity within a broader, pointed statement about the relationship between dostoinstvo (moral obligations and dignity) and science. The Academy of Sciences had been subjected to crushing political pressure and an escalating witch hunt. Sergei Ol’denburg, the Academy’s longtime permanent secretary, who had implored academicians to bow to Communist pressures in order to save the institution, had been forced out and now languished in a state of nervous exhaustion. In October 1929, the presence of various “reactionary” archival documents in the library of the Academy of Sciences—including the formal renunciation of the throne by Nicholas II and his brother Mikhail and the papers of the Socialist Revolutionary and Kadet parties—had become the pretext for an increasingly menacing campaign against historians and other humanists at the Academy and beyond. As Pavlov composed his remarks, a commission from the Communist Party’s Control Commission was interrogating the Academy’s workers and academicians about their beliefs and past activities.
Daily revelations in the press prepared the public for the arrest of conspirators who, directed by reactionary historians, plotted the restoration of tsarism. In November, those arrests began with some of the Academy’s administrators, archivists, and librarians; in December, historian and corresponding member of the Academy Sergei Rozhdestvenskii was arrested. This campaign accelerated into the New Year with the arrest in January of Pavlov’s fellow academicians, historians Nikolai Likhachev, Sergei Platonov, and Evgenii Tarle. The young historian Natal’ia Shtakel’berg, who lived in the apartment directly above the Pavlovs, was also arrested. The wife of academician-entomologist Alexander Shtakel’berg, she had hosted gatherings of her peers, where they combined informal reports on their research with dancing parties. That dancing on the wooden floor above the Pavlov apartment had once led Serafima to complain about the noise; now it was exposed as part of the monarchist conspiracy supposedly led by Shtakel’berg’s mentor Platonov.2
In the months after his return from the United States, Pavlov also received a memo from the Academy’s new Communist permanent secretary, Viacheslav Volgin, announcing the formal introduction of surveillance. He objected in a note of December 2, 1929, that since the Pavlovian Wednesdays would “now come under constant surveillance, in defense of the honor of science I have no choice but to end these meetings.” It was a principled protest, but Pavlov needed these meetings to coordinate lab research and he did not terminate them.3
This, then, was the setting in the early evening of December 26, when Pavlov arrived at the auditorium of Leningrad’s Medical Institute to deliver his introductory remarks to the large audience that gathered to honor Ivan Sechenov. His theme was the relationship between Sechenov’s moral qualities and his Reflexes of the Brain. That landmark essay, Pavlov explained, reflected the limitations of the “vulgar materialism” of the time and relied upon the scant experimental material then available to physiologists for dealing with the subjective world. It also resulted from Sechenov’s love affair with “a humanistic woman.” That love had led him to abandon engineering for the science of life, physiology; and the grand humanistic mission and creative power of Reflexes of the Brain owed much to Sechenov’s life “side by side with the object of his passion” in a harmonious communal family that united the scientist’s great mind with that family’s exalted moral order.4
His words about Sechenov’s times and moral character pointedly evoked the plight of Russian scientists in 1929: Sechenov had resigned from the Military-Medical Academy because new faculty members there were chosen not for their merit but because of their personal and political alliances. Alluding to his own boycott of meetings at the Academy of Sciences, Pavlov observed that Sechenov had “found it impossible to remain any longer in a collegium that valued so little the honor of its institution.” Some might consider such gestures unimportant, but they reflected a moral integrity that was in fact “fundamental to life in general and to our real scientific activity.”5
He then strode dramatically toward the large portrait of Sechenov that hung over the stage and addressed it:
Oh noble and stern apparition! How you would have suffered if in living human form you still remained among us! We live under the rule of the cruel principle that the state and authority are everything; that the person, the citizen, is nothing. Life, freedom, dignity, convictions, beliefs, habits, the possibility of studying, means for life, food, housing, clothing—everything is in the hands of the government. For the average citizen, there is only unquestioning obedience. Naturally, gentlemen, the entire citizenry is transformed into a quivering, slavish mass from which—and this only infrequently—can be heard the cry: ‘I have lost my sense of my own dignity, I am ashamed of myself!’ On such a basis, gentlemen, not only can no civilized state be built, but no state at all can long survive.
Without [Sechenovs], with their sense of their own honor and responsibility, any state is doomed to perish from within.... Because a state must consist, not of machines, not of bees and ants, but of representatives of the highest form in the animal kingdom, Homo sapiens.6
These were rare words indeed for a public gathering in 1929, and their effect was stunning. Pavlov further disoriented his audience by asking immediately that all rise in honor of this “outstanding Russian person with a rare combination of great intellect, rare purity, and high morality.” To stand or not to stand? As one member of the audience, Natal’ia Trautgott, recalled sixty years later, “Everybody was terribly afraid to stand, but at the same time one had to stand.” Hesitantly and unevenly, the audience rose, everybody looking about nervously. Many Communists stood in Sechenov’s honor and then walked out to protest Pavlov’s political statement. Such was the atmosphere in Stalinist Russia that Traugott, an equally shocked and confused Rait-Kovaleva, and other Pavlov coworkers were afraid to share their impressions of the spectacle in which they had all just participated.7
The authorities would not again grant Pavlov a public stage until August 1935. Yet in individual conversations and correspondence, gatherings with coworkers, and letters to Communist leaders, he continued sharply to criticize political arrests, suppression of free speech, the enforcement of official dogma, the persecution of religion, and the state’s failure to provide adequate food, housing, and medical treatment.8
The wave of arrests soon spread to the IEM. In 1930, Dmitrii Prianishnikov, professor of plant physiology in Moscow and member of the Academy of Sciences, and Alexander Vladimirov, a microbiologist who for decades had been Pavlov’s colleague at the IEM, were both arrested. Vladimirov was caught up in a sweep of physicians and microbiologists accused of plotting with domestic and foreign enemies. His arrest was especially unsettling because his colleagues considered him utterly apolitical, and it proved only the first of several at the IEM in 1930–1931. Overwhelmed and under the same intense political pressures that had consumed Sergei Ol’denburg at the Academy of Sciences, the director of the IEM, Sergei Salazkin, resigned in 1931, paving the way for Lev Fedorov to become the first Communist in that position.
In an August 1930 letter to the SNK, Pavlov denounced the arrests in general and defended Prianishnikov and Vladimirov in particular:
Devoted to my homeland, I consider it my duty to turn the state’s attention to the following. Unrelenting and innumerable arrests make our life very strange. I don’t know their purpose (whether it be the boundless zealous search for enemies of the regime or a means of terrorizing, or something else), but there is no doubt that there is not the slightest basis—that is, real guilt—in the overwhelming number of cases of arrest. But the vital consequences of the fact of indiscriminate arrests are entirely obvious. Everybody’s life is made entirely random, entirely unstable. And so there inevitably disappears vital energy, interest in life. Would any normal government desire this [?]....
I am stunned by the recent arrests in Moscow of Professor Prianishnikov and in Leningrad (at the Institute of Experimental Medicine) of Prof. Vladimirov. The former, insofar as I know, has never been a political activist and is a scholarly type (and a great, outstanding one) wholly devoted to his own task. And the latter...is entirely incapable of any opposition to the current regime, not only in deed but even in any free criticism of it in a private conversation. As for the former’s sometimes sharp declarations, I think that these are immeasurably less harmful (if they are harmful rather than useful) than a servile ‘How may I please you?’—which is an evil and the downfall of rulers.9
Other influential figures also vouched for their loyalty, and the pair was soon released.
In a letter to a confidante at this time, Serafima described one plea for help she had received from a persecuted relative and added that she was deluged with such requests: “Help is necessary and I must again ask Iv[an] Petrovich!...If you only knew how many, not requests but wails for help I receive. God, life is so hard now.” Her husband blew off steam in his lab notebook: “My God! When will the wild idea depart from our life that those who created cultured Russia should somehow disappear, be eliminated.”10
The official campaign against religion accelerated in 1932 with the announcement of a five-year plan to rid the population of religious beliefs by 1937 and to destroy or convert to practical use the nation’s places of worship. (By mid-1936, about half of Russia’s pre-1917 religious buildings had been closed or converted.) Stalin ordered the destruction of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in December 1931 to make way for a grand Palace of the Soviets and to eliminate the city’s most visible symbol of Russian Orthodoxy. Leningrad’s Party and state apparatus followed Stalin’s lead, immediately closing almost all the city’s active churches and destroying many of them. When they shuttered the historic Church of the Trinity in August 1933, rumors circulated that it was slated for demolition. Pavlov drafted another letter to the SNK:
I turn to the government, probably not alone, as there must still remain (however silent) honorable people in my homeland. I am, after all, Russian—everything that I am has been ingrained in me by my Russian setting, its history, its great people. To destroy anything Russian tortures me...How could the destruction of the great monument to the majestic year 1812, the Cathedral of the Savior, not be painful to the Russian heart? And now I have just heard that they are preparing to destroy the Trinity Church in Leningrad, the humble wooden church in which Peter the Great, an extraordinary Russian personality, prayed.... It is difficult, unbearably difficult, to live in my homeland—especially for a Russian by nationality.11
Trinity Church was demolished in October 1933.
By this time, an effective diplomat for the Communist Party had succeeded in gaining Pavlov’s trust. Nikolai Bukharin was in political free fall after his unsuccessful opposition to Stalin’s Great Break. Expelled from the Politburo in 1929 as a “right deviationist,” he had also been stripped of his editorship of Pravda and leadership of the Communist International. Recanting his errors and publicly embracing Stalin’s policies (although his wife later recalled that he wept in 1930 after surveying the mass starvation in the countryside), he dropped out of high politics from 1930 to 1933, biding his time and hoping for a comeback. Despite his opposition to Stalin’s policies, he remained a committed Bolshevik, with faith in the ultimate triumph of its mission. Especially with the rise of Japanese militarism and German fascism—from 1933, he viewed war with Germany as inevitable—he viewed Party unity as essential. Stalin knew, however, that Bukharin’s public praise for his leadership was insincere. The NKVD kept him well informed of Bukharin’s occasional meetings with other former oppositionists and of the incautious moments of candor during which, for example, he referred fearfully to the Great Leader as Genghis Khan. Stalin, too, bided his time, using Bukharin for second-tier tasks suited to his abilities as writer, intellectual, and bridge to the prerevolutionary intelligentsia.12
He had first approached Pavlov during the election campaign at the Academy of Sciences in the fall of 1928. The only known accounts of their first encounter are secondhand reports originating with Bukharin. According to these, Bukharin overcame Pavlov’s initially frosty reception by impressing the physiologist with his erudition. He spoke of ancient philosophy, Kant, and Hegel, that is, about “subjects demonstrating to him my education, and about which he was in a position to judge on the basis of his own education.” It was butterflies that finally did the trick. Bukharin had long been interested in natural science and as a youth had won a wager by memorizing the Latin names of 300 butterflies. He now regaled Pavlov with a complete recitation. “Only then did Ivan Petrovich [Pavlov], it seems, first look at me with interest.” When this performance was over, Pavlov informed Bukharin frankly that he opposed the Communist’s election to the Academy of Sciences. With this, “the ice was broken.”13
In late October 1928, Pavlov openly expressed his respect for Bukharin and invited him home for tea. Shortly thereafter Pavlov reportedly accepted an invitation to Bukharin’s home in the Kremlin and was further impressed by his host’s interest in biology (Bukharin kept there an ornithological collection and a pet fox). Pavlov would also have noticed that Bukharin was a fellow art lover—the walls of his Kremlin apartment were covered with paintings.14
Bukharin championed a conciliatory approach toward Pavlov. As in his approach to the peasantry, he believed that, through patient cultivation of common ground, the Party could win the cooperation and even the active support of many “centrist elements.” Pavlov’s scientism, patriotism, and deep connection to the progressive traditions of the 1860s made him a good case in point. As Bukharin had insisted in his note to Kuibyshev, the physiologist certainly did not “sing the Internationale” but he “was raised on Pisarev [and] continues Sechenov’s mission.” Pavlov would almost certainly never embrace Bolshevism, but he could perhaps be convinced that the advantages of Communist policies outweighed their disadvantages. At the very least, he could be persuaded to acquiesce and cooperate on common goals.
Conversely, Pavlov identified Bukharin with his hope for the moderation of Communist policies. He also came to like him as a person, and spoke frequently of him with high regard. This was an “intelligent Communist,” learned and humane—but an unrealistic dreamer. “I’d like to have him in our dog’s stand for a few years,” he remarked to one coworker. “We would teach him to correctly reflect actual reality.” Another coworker recalled that Pavlov always spoke very warmly about Bukharin as “a typical philosophical intellectual” and an honest man. So, like Fedorov and a growing number of Pavlov’s coworkers, Bukharin put an appealing human face on the Party.15
Bukharin may indeed, as he later claimed, have “fallen in love” with Pavlov, but he never lost sight of his political agenda, striving constantly to charm him into political cooperation. There were two main points on that agenda in mid- and late 1931: to persuade Pavlov to submit an article to Socialist Reconstruction and Science, the journal that Bukharin edited for skilled workers in science, technology, and economics, and to convince him to remove from the new edition of Twenty Years of Experience the passage in its original preface that denounced revolution. In July 1931, Bukharin cajoled him on the first point: if Pavlov would agree to write the article, “I will catch for you some wonderful bugs and butterflies, will lose a game of gorodki to you, and so forth. Any theme of your choice (from your recent works).” In a December 1931 letter, he alluded to Pavlov’s agreement during a conversation at the physiologist’s home and pressed him to keep his promise—and also to refrain from republishing that provocative preface:
Dear Iv. Petrovich [Pavlov], don’t do this by all that’s holy!...Why do you want to create all kinds of friction? What for? They are prepared to take care of you in every way, all are prepared to welcome your every work, but you want desperately to stick a feather up the revolution’s ass. Don’t do this, for god’s sake! Don’t be angry with me for this intervention. We agreed about sincerity. So allow me to address you with this fervent request. Don’t quarrel with the revolution.16
Pavlov kept his pledge to submit an article to Bukharin’s journal, but he knew it to be unpublishable. An “original reflection upon a melancholy lab dog,” it expressed “my serious attitude to a subject that concerns both science and life.” Bukharin must publish “all or nothing. If I do you a good turn, I don’t want to violate myself by doing so.”
Titled The Law-Governedness of Mental Life and the Connection between the Scientific Laboratory and Life, the manuscript revolved around the analogy between a lab dog and Pavlov’s old friend from Seminary and University, Nikolai Bystrov. The “unbearable torment” of experimental tasks that proved too complex for the dog’s nervous system had elicited “barking and howling as if it were being cruelly tortured.” Deploying the concepts from his intensifying study of psychiatry, Pavlov suggested that this was a case of “so-called melancholia agitata, melancholy with excitation.” In precisely the same way, Bystrov, who had excelled at the humanities in seminary but proved frustratingly unable to master the complex principles and procedures of university science, had, as a result of those failures, suffered from “the difficult, tormented state of his hemispheres during their work, during the constantly repeated attempt and misfire, their inhibition—speaking in a physiological language, during the constant conflict of the excitatory and inhibitory processes.” Here, too, the result was an oppressive melancholy, and even several attempts at suicide.
Making an unpalatable political point, Pavlov added that it was, then, inevitable that the Soviet state’s drive to produce “fictitious specialists” by rushing unprepared proletarians through institutions of higher learning was causing an epidemic of neurasthenia. Protesting the suppression of dissident views and dismissing “our official obligatory philosophy,” he concluded with a sentence that spoke pointedly to Bukharin’s own experience. “And do we not hear and see the compulsory howling of recantation when anybody, whether a Party member or not, declares something that is concretely true but not in agreement with today’s politics or with the official philosophy?” Needless to say, the article never appeared in print.17
As for the preface to Twenty Years of Experience, Pavlov explained to Bukharin why he would not eliminate its denunciation of revolution:
Whether it’s in my blood or from a sixty-year habit in the laboratory, I would be ashamed of myself were I to be silent when it is necessary to speak, or if I did not say what I think. Therefore I cannot agree to remove from the old introduction the part about revolutions. For me, revolution is something truly terrible for its cruelty and violence, violence even against science; you know, your dialectical materialism, as it is currently formulated in [our] life, is not a bit different from the teleology and cosmogony of the Inquisition. You yourselves, of course, all know and see this, but justify yourselves by your faith that at this cost something immeasurably greater will be achieved. But I do not share this faith and, of course, it is not compulsory for anybody.
I am inspired by another belief, a belief in science, which will finally penetrate all corners of human nature and will teach man to seek true happiness, not only for himself alone, but necessarily also for others.
He added a plaintive postscript: “Why is it that I understand you, but you do not understand me?”18 The preface remained unchanged.
Their profound disagreements notwithstanding, Pavlov’s relationship to Bukharin contributed—as did the bureaucratic clout and daily interactions that flowed from his international status and scientific empire—to a certain insider status, a status independent of his political pronouncements. He could not change Communist policies, but he learned that he could save some of their individual victims. As Stalinist repression deepened, he was encouraged, then, to use his status for good ends—and this, in turn, contributed to a subtle change in his relationship to the authorities.
“If anything happens,” he once confided to a coworker, “I can turn to Bukharin.”19 He did so on several occasions in order to save arrested family members, coworkers, and acquaintances. The first documented case occurred in October 1932, when Serafima’s niece was arrested by the secret police in Rostov. Agitated, angry, and eloquent, Pavlov asked Bukharin to help. He explained that Serafima’s sisters Evgeniia and Raisa, both elderly widows, had lost their property in the revolution and until recently had supported themselves by mending clothes and giving music lessons. Now in their eighties, they were dependent upon Pavlov’s help and upon Evgeniia’s two daughters, who “work to exhaustion in order to feed themselves and their elders under current conditions.” They now faced starvation because one of those daughters, Natal’ia El’sh, had been arrested by the political police. “Why? For nothing. I’ll stake my life on it—let them arrest me if I turn out to be incorrect. Either the lowly denunciation of some self-seeker or the current state extortion of valuables, which in this case simply don’t exist.” Asking Bukharin to help, he concluded, “My God, how hard it is now for any honorable person to live in Your Socialist Paradise.” Bukharin intervened and El’sh was released. 20
Despite Pavlov’s privileged status, the grim and frightening “quiet terror” of early Stalin times permeated every aspect of his life. He lived in comfort and safety in his spacious apartment on the 7th Line, but suffered from the knowledge that others were hungry and fearful. His immediate family members were secure, but they were painfully aware that only Pavlov’s stature protected them and that he would not live forever—and they were sharply divided in their attitudes about how best to deal with that situation. They also differed in their attitude toward Petrova, who herself, as the daughter and former wife of elite priests, lived in constant fear and encouraged her protector to cooperate with the authorities. Pavlov’s underground iconic status as a principled dissident and (often, and falsely) a religious believer attracted letters from the victimized and oppressed, who also approached members of his circle in the hope of gaining a hearing and some help. His scientific enterprise flourished as never before—and his investigations expanded toward genetics and eugenics, psychology and psychiatry, and primate studies—but in his labs at the Academy of Sciences and the IEM he confronted daily the Stalinization of Russian institutions. He knew well that even at Koltushi, where his science village took shape according to his own plans and values, he and his coworkers were under constant surveillance. Pavlov was sheltered from arrest and could speak freely, but those who surrounded him—members of his extended family, colleagues, coworkers, and neighbors—hardly enjoyed those privileges.
Weary and ailing in her mid- and late seventies, Serafima managed the Pavlov household with the assistance of her housekeeper Maria. Vera and Vladimir’s family still resided there. Serafima had suffered from heart problems since Viktor’s death and now also from glaucoma and gout. Materially, the Pavlovs lived a privileged existence, but during the First Five-Year Plan food was scarce and, for those fortunate enough to afford market prices at peasant stalls or special state stores, very expensive. “I can’t even consider buying any luxury item,” wrote Serafima in October 1929, “when I need flour, a warm coat for winter, and boots.” Yet she acknowledged their comparative good fortune. “We are living, as you see, under Iv[an] Pet[rovich]’s wing,” she informed a relative who asked her to send food, “and thanks to him can do a little something for you.” Responding to another request in May 1931, she wrote, “We never have enough sugar, butter, or milk,” although they were able to obtain some scarce foodstuffs at commercial prices. The family did not have the great personal resources that others assumed they did: “All this creates a very oppressive atmosphere, since there are so many needy people and nothing with which to help them.”21
She felt both physically and spiritually weary but took comfort from her regular attendance at the nearby Saint Andrew’s Cathedral (which remained open until 1938), daily religious rituals, and constant religious reflection. “Christ has arisen!” she greeted the Babkins in a letter during Easter 1931. “For me, in these words resides our entire Orthodox faith, which became infinitely dear to me after my instructive conversations with Dostoevsky.... How he understood the human soul and penetrated the dark, unconscious depths.” Though blind in one eye, she read constantly, mostly Russian literature, history, and theology. Weary from age, infirmity, and two decades of constant strain and upheaval, she was “so ready to go ‘Home,’” she confided in 1933, “but must be needed here for something [since] the Lord has not taken me.”22
Her husband, on the other hand, was defying advancing age, constantly increasing the range and intensity of his activities. When he was home, he doted on his granddaughters—both of whom he cheerfully diagnosed as “strong types,” one a phlegmatic, the other a sanguinic—regaling them with the stories of Russian life captured in his paintings and leafing with them through the pages of National Geographic, which he received courtesy of his hard currency allotment for foreign subscriptions. He was busier than ever with his research; even his granddaughters understood that “95 percent of his life was work.” Home remained essentially a supportive base of operations—a place for his favorite semolina porridge and vinegret salad (diced root vegetables and onions, with pickles), for lying on the divan and drinking in his paintings, for evenings writing in his study, and for his Sunday evening card games. Now in his eighties, he would still become so infuriated at losing a game that he would throw the cards across the room.
While Pavlov remained full of energy, his daughter Vera, now in her forties, shared his choleric temperament but was otherwise, in Serafima’s words, “his complete opposite.” She seemed mired permanently in a state of poor health, “nervousness and dissatisfaction.” She frequently worked in her father’s lab and developed an expertise in the esoteric language and practice of CRs. In November 1930, Serafima wrote of intense dinnertime discussions between father and daughter about their laboratory research—conversations scarcely intelligible to other family members. Yet her father never considered Vera’s scientific activities much more than a hobby. In the 1930s, official positions at his lab bench became scarce and precious—so, unmoved by his daughter’s interest, he deprived Vera of her paid position and replaced her in January 1933 with the promising young Communist physiologist Ezras Asratian. But Vera apparently continued her research, unpaid, in the IEM lab, attended the Wednesday meetings, and eventually published five articles on CRs.23
Vladimir had settled into an unexceptional career as professor of physics at the Leningrad Technical Institute, made a good second marriage, and, although privately skeptical about Soviet power, had earned the trust of the authorities. Beginning in the 1920s, he served as unofficial conduit between Fedorov and Pavlov. During that decade, he regularly traveled with his parents to Kellomäki, just across the border in Finland, where he spent his summers and met his future wife, the daughter of a wealthy Finn. In the 1930s, his father bought him a home there, where Vladimir’s wife and children lived most of the year; Vladimir joined them during summers. For a Soviet citizen to maintain a second home abroad was, to say the least, unusual. His regular trips to Kellomäki each required a visa and vetting by the secret police, which reported that it had “no compromising material” on him (nor on Serafima and Vera). In 1935, when Pavlov requested that Vladimir accompany him to another international gathering, the Politburo checked with Commissar of Health Protection Grigorii Kaminskii, who cited Fedorov’s confident assessment that “one can entirely rely on Vladimir’s loyalty.”24
The pragmatic, fearful, and diplomatic Vladimir was of course attempting to protect himself, his family, and even his father from the dangers of Stalin times. As his daughter Liudmila later put it, he “tried to steer Ivan Petrovich away from ‘sharp corners’” and successfully cultivated “close connections with the organs of power.” He was also contemplating a future after his father’s death. Vladimir’s conciliatory attitude toward the regime allied him with Fedorov and Petrova. As the daughter and ex-wife of priests, Petrova had especially good reason to cultivate official favor at a time when many people with that background were being arrested or banished from large cities. As he had in the 1920s, Vladimir enjoyed warm relations with her; his children spent many hours at their godmother’s apartment, and many decades later still remembered the exotic gifts and chocolates that she dispensed during holidays.25
Vsevolod’s White Army background, his long years of exile, and his unconcealed anti-Communism rendered him unemployable (indeed, hardly viable) outside his father’s domain. Pavlov appointed him his unofficial personal secretary and editor of his in-house journal, paying the very modest sum of twenty rubles per month from his own funds (and this, according to Vsevolod’s wife, irregularly) until Fedorov—as always, eager to please—intervened to formalize the position and its place on the state payroll. As Pavlov’s secretary, Vsevolod handled his father’s routine correspondence, served sometimes as liaison with Fedorov and Bukharin, and managed various miscellaneous tasks. The SNK also consented to Pavlov’s request that Vsevolod, “as my personal secretary,” accompany him to scientific conferences in Bern (1931) and Rome (1932).26
Unlike Vladimir, Vsevolod constantly counseled his father to defy the authorities. Pavlov and his circle were under intensive police surveillance—at home, in the lab, and on the street—so Vsevolod’s “anti-Soviet attitudes,” as NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda put it, were well known. One year later, Kaminskii also reported, on the basis of Fedorov’s testimony, that Vladimir’s loyalty contrasted sharply with Vsevolod’s defiance.27 The brothers’ very different attitudes amid the great stress of Stalin times contributed to frosty relations between them.
Pavlov’s most constant companion continued to be Petrova. The pair collaborated in the 1930s on studies of nervous types and experimental pathology, pursuing their experiments Mondays through Thursdays at the IEM and Physiological Institute. On Fridays, Pavlov left for Koltushi, returning on Mondays to Petrova’s bench with flowers from his garden there. She also, of course, attended the Wednesday meetings. Just as in 1925 he had inscribed her gift copy of Twenty Years of Experience “to my dear soloist” (“from the conductor-author”), so did his inscription of 1930 describe her as “My truest and dearest partner in my latest scientific task.” When her name came up during family discussions, he minimized her scientific achievements, dismissing her as a pair of “skilled hands.” To the outside world, however, he credited her with important contributions to the study of nervous types and with almost single-handedly launching what he viewed as a very important branch of research on “the experimental pathology and therapeutics of higher nervous activity.”28
His continued regard and affection is evident, for example, in a short letter that he wrote while overseas for the Neurological Congress in Copenhagen and the Congress of Physiologists in Rome. Pronouncing his reports to both bodies “a complete success,” he added that his address in Copenhagen had been based entirely on her experiments on experimental neurosis. “Your [dog] Mirta was especially pleasant to the Scandinavian neurologists.” Even knowing that his letter would be read by the secret police, he could not resist closing with a one-word sentence, “Skuka” (“boredom”)—which here clearly meant “I miss you.”29An indefatigable researcher, Petrova also cultivated important allies and in the 1930s emerged as a scientific personage in her own right. Ever since 1912, she had combined research in Pavlov’s lab with clinical practice. When her finances grew tight in the late 1920s, Fedorov arranged for her to organize and head the scientific section of the country’s first polyclinic on digestive diseases, which was created in the expropriated home of Nicholas II’s former mistress, the ballerina Kshesinskaia. In 1932, the twentieth anniversary of Petrova’s initial research on CRs was marked with an official celebration (in the formal photo, she and Pavlov sat next to each other, surrounded appropriately by Fedorov and Speranskii). In 1935, Fedorov arranged for her to chair a new subdivision on experimental pathophysiology within Pavlov’s physiology division at the IEM. That same year, not twenty-four hours after telling Speranskii that she was weary of lecturing to medical students and would prefer to teach specialists, she was offered the directorship of a new department at Leningrad’s Institute for the Improvement of Physicians. Fedorov and Speranskii were powerful allies on their way up. Speranskii’s development of a comprehensive nervist theory of disease was trumpeted as “an entirely new chapter in medicine” destined to revolutionize medical theory and practice. In 1932, when Fedorov was director of the IEM and Speranskii head of its pathophysiology division, the two traveled to Moscow for a meeting at Gorky’s apartment with Stalin, Molotov, and others to develop plans for the All-Soviet Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM). Inspired by a vision first expressed by rationalist philosopher Bertrand Russell and then elaborated by Gorky, the VIEM was established in Moscow two years later and charged with creating a unified “science of man.” (The original IEM in Leningrad became a branch of this larger institution.) Fedorov became its first director and Speranskii the head of its division of general physiology. In her memoirs, Petrova wrote gratefully about the support of both patrons, mentioning that Fedorov even took the time to introduce her to the basics of dialectical materialism (“and in such an interesting, comprehensible, and enthusiastic way that I was enthralled”) and that the charismatic Speranskii was the only one of Pavlov’s coworkers with whom she could imagine falling in love. For Fedorov and Speranskii, of course, Petrova’s most endearing virtue was her intimacy with and influence upon Pavlov.30
Personal and political dynamics combined, then, to produce an alliance between Petrova, Fedorov, Speranskii, and Vladimir, on the one hand, and the Pavlov family “troika” (as Petrova put it) of Vsevolod, Serafima, and Vera, on the other. (In her memoirs, Petrova supplies the unsurprising revelation that Pavlov’s state-supplied chauffeur also sided with her group.) Serafima disliked Petrova for the obvious reason—and, given the great differences in their characters and values, no doubt for others as well—and Vera cooled noticeably toward her after Vsevolod’s return. Vsevolod was most aggressive in his efforts to undermine his father’s relationship with her, Fedorov, and the now openly pro-Communist Speranskii. This struggle left few archival traces, but—as is clear from some fortuitously discovered surveillance reports—when Pavlov faced difficult decisions regarding his relations with the authorities, these factions pulled him in different directions.
According to Petrova, her relationship with Pavlov’s family was “great” until Vsevolod returned in 1928 and began his campaign against her—playing upon his father’s wild jealousy by suggesting that she was having affairs with various men, hanging around the lab and Wednesday conferences (and so preventing his father from peacefully departing with her at the end of the day), disparaging her research, and even insistently replacing her in a labor of love that she had assumed in years past—trimming Pavlov’s beard. Vsevolod, she recalled, “tried in every way to turn I. P. against Soviet power, against the existing order and some of its personages.... [He] soon understood that his cards had been revealed and that he was thoroughly understood by Aleksei Dmitrievich Speranskii and Lev Nikolaevich Fedorov, and began to incite I. P. and his family against them. His echo in this regard was Vera Ivanovna. I myself witnessed her attacks upon them.”31
An NKVD surveillance report noted that Vsevolod destroyed Speranskii’s credibility by bringing to his father’s attention a pro-Soviet speech that Speranskii delivered to a writers’ conference in 1934. Pavlov was especially incensed by Speranskii’s assertion that “The October Revolution relieved Soviet scholars of the need to lie.” Scientists should speak the language of reality, he declared angrily, but “Speranskii has sold himself, he is servile, and after this I don’t want to meet him anymore.” Confronting Communist coworker Nikolai Nikitin in the lab, the NKVD informer reported, a furious Pavlov again launched into “the usual tirade with accusations that the press lied, that Speranskii was bought off, and so forth.” Petrova was present during Pavlov’s confrontation with Speranskii and recorded that, utterly unmoved by Speranskii’s defense that he had merely expressed his honest opinion, the chief was “absolutely beside himself” and broke completely with his former favorite. Some months later, when Pavlov was seriously ill, Speranskii appeared at his bedside and his banishment was lifted. Yet Pavlov confided to Petrova that his earlier warm feelings for the man had vanished. She pleaded his case, but Pavlov now seemed to believe the “false rumors” that his charming, intelligent, and high-flying coworker was an unprincipled informer.32
In his private life, then, Pavlov was caught in a web of conflicting feelings, interests, and agendas; he and his privileged family lived constantly under great strain. In a candid, desperate letter to the Babkins in July 1932—a letter written from Kelomiaki, Finland, and thus free from the prying eyes of Soviet surveillance—Serafima summarized her family’s circumstances:
First of all, forgive my chicken-scratching. I am going blind and must be careful with my only eye—I have glaucoma! Thank God that I am still not a burden for the family, that I do a little something for others and don’t make things difficult for anybody. I decided to write to you from here, where I came to rest for four weeks. For God’s sake, do not write to me or to anybody in the family about my bad mood. I’m turning to you with a first and last request, and if you promise to fulfill it then you will make my old age peaceful.
When the Lord summons Ivan Petrovich (and our life now mercilessly wears out the nerves), promise me that you will raise a clamor in America and wherever you can to have our family with its belongings permitted to leave for abroad. Think about it: here life is made increasingly difficult, one is forbidden to instruct children at home and must surrender them to terrible schools where they teach godlessness and eliminate parental authority!!
All life here is under [state] control, and now added to this is malnutrition. While Ivan Petrovich lives we are full and they don’t touch us—as the authorities put it, “they are spoiling him”—but all his coworkers are angry at Ivan Petrovich, and my friends constantly tell me: “You and your children will pay for all I. P.’s free speech.” Just write that you will fulfill my request and nothing more. I will remain here until August 12–15.33
This letter clearly expresses her depression and desperation, and her insistence that the Babkins not write “to me or to anybody in the family about my bad mood” conveys more subtly her isolation and relationship to her husband. She was, as always, primarily concerned with being a dutiful and supportive wife and mother—with facilitating her husband’s scientific work and, now, with protecting their offspring. One doubts if she ever fully shared with him her despair and fear for the future. In any case, although he, like Serafima, was much anguished by the horrors of Stalin times, he was also—as she acknowledged in that same letter—energetic and healthy, traveling freely abroad to spread the gospel of CRs, and enjoying a thriving scientific enterprise, especially at Koltushi, where exciting scientific perspectives were taking shape.
Yet Pavlov’s labs were also part of a Soviet science system that was being transformed by Stalin’s Great Break. The number of scientists and scientific institutions increased substantially, and they came under strict centralized control. Stalinist science featured planning, an emphasis on placing science at the service of practical tasks, tight controls over personnel, and a commitment to “sharpen the class struggle” in scientific institutions. The class nature of science required campaigns against bourgeois specialists in all fields, both by replacing prerevolutionary elites with new proletarian specialists and by struggling against bourgeois ideology in the content of science itself. The replacement generation of vydvizhentsy—young professionals from the peasantry and proletariat who had been educated and recruited to science and, frequently, to the Party in the 1920s—now flowed into expanded graduate programs that prepared them to take the helm from their bourgeois elders.
The campaign against bourgeois ideology in science was launched under the official slogan of the “struggle against Menshevizing idealism and mechanistic materialism.” The targeting of “mechanistic materialism” reflected Stalin’s rhetorical connection between “rightist” political deviations from the Party line (particularly Bukharin’s opposition to the Great Break) and the philosophical tendency to emphasize the materialist rather than dialectical aspect of dialectical materialism. The heroic, activist transformation of society by Stalin’s policies required, rather, less emphasis upon the material constraints on human freedom than upon the ability of humans to remake their reality, less emphasis upon the undeniable continuities between man and beast than upon the psychological and social qualities that made man special.34
Pavlov’s lab enterprise was caught up in the general realities of Stalinist science, but with particularities that reflected his special status. He partook fully in the expanded resources for science—indeed, he received a disproportionate share. But Pavlov was in a position to resist the assertion of centralized control, ideological conformity, and the elevation of new cadres that accompanied these resources in almost every Soviet institution. Unlike the vast majority of “bourgeois scientists,” he could not be intimidated, removed, or arrested. Rather, the Party simultaneously attempted to court him, to influence him through pressure upon his circle, to undermine his authority, to criticize the ideological limitations of his scientific approach, and to prepare a Communist cadre of replacements for the day when he passed from the scene.
The First Five-Year Plan poured resources into scientific institutions in general and Pavlov’s in particular. IEM director Salazkin reported in October 1929 that the plan entailed “significant improvement of the material base of the Institute,” where the physical plant was expanded and renovated and the number of personnel greatly increased. Kupalov and Rozental’ helped Pavlov manage about twenty-five coworkers in his lab there, with twelve now occupying paid positions. In addition, his special discretionary fund from the SNK was greatly expanded in 1931, enabling him to compensate worthy coworkers as he saw fit. (As construction on Koltushi proceeded, he was also able to secure free housing for some there.) In line with the Party’s drive to place science at the service of practical tasks, the Five-Year Plan for the IEM also included a hefty commitment to an expanded gastric juice factory, which by 1932 was to employ thirty-five dogs and several lab workers. An ad in Red Gazette touted the “natural gastric juice by the method of Academician I. P. Pavlov,” which put science to the service of better digestion and nutrition.
By 1935, Pavlov’s enterprise at the IEM had expanded to include a number of affiliated divisions and subdivisions. Most important was his science village at Koltushi, the Institute of Experimental Genetics of Higher Nervous Activity. His enterprise at the IEM also included his long-standing lab there (with its Towers of Silence), Ganike’s Physico-Physiological Division, Petrova’s subdivision of Experimental Pathophysiology of Higher Nervous Activity, and two clinics established in 1931 to further his studies of psychiatry: Davidenkov’s Nervous Clinic and Ivanov-Smolenskii’s Psychiatric Clinic. Moreover, the Division of General Physiology was headed by Pavlov’s coworker Bykov. Pavlov’s coworkers at the IEM included the Institute’s director, Fedorov, and, when Fedorov left to head the VIEM in Moscow, Fedorov’s successor and fellow Communist Nikolai Nikitin.35
Pavlov’s Physiological Institute at the Academy of Sciences also expanded in the 1930s, and in 1935 it was formally renamed the Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Higher Nervous Activity. Here Podkopaev helped the chief manage the daily activities of ten to fifteen coworkers. When the Academy of Sciences moved to Moscow in 1934, Pavlov acquired for his Institute a number of the vacated buildings and finally triumphed in his long-running battle with the neighboring Institute of External Trade, whose noisy club had long rankled him. His letter to a Kremlin official about this club reflects the sense of entitlement that often characterized his official correspondence about his labs, revealing a much different dimension of his relationship to the authorities than do his political missives to Bukharin and Molotov. Pavlov groused that he had complained about the club several times, but that the situation remained “very grave” and “laboratory work is constantly ruined.” He concluded haughtily: “I don’t doubt that you will consider it necessary to show the necessary energy and will finally find a path toward the decisive liquidation of this problem.”36
By 1935–1936, about fifty scientific coworkers worked directly under Pavlov’s supervision, divided more or less evenly among his main lab at the VIEM, his VIEM-affiliated facility at Koltushi, and his Physiological Institute at the Academy of Sciences. Koltushi also employed about 135 nonscientific personnel. Another ten scientists conducted research in Petrova’s and Ganike’s subdivisions, and Pavlov’s two clinics employed about fifty scientists, clinicians, and supporting personnel. The scientists in his enterprise moved fluidly across institutional divisions and were occasionally joined by foreign visitors.37
By the 1930s, the great majority of Pavlov’s coworkers had matured, received their education, and first entered his lab during the Soviet era. Many were vydvizhentsy. A substantial number were members of what the NKVD termed “the group of Soviet scientists (the group of Prof. Speranskii),” and about ten were members of the Communist Party.38 A number of old-timers remained close to Pavlov and important to his operation: Podkopaev assisted at the Academy lab and Rozental’ at the IEM, Ganike directed the Physico-Physiological Division, Rikman assumed a managerial role at Koltushi—and of course there was Petrova. Another longtime colleague, Savich, who now directed the IEM’s Pharmacology Division, also maintained close contact with his former chief. Aside from the Communists, the political attitudes of these different cohorts are impossible to determine. Clearly, though, many of the old-timers—Petrova here was an important exception—shared Pavlov’s prerevolutionary loyalties and attitudes. The secret police and Communist coworkers identified Rikman, Podkopaev, and Rozental’ as political reactionaries and impediments to their courtship of their chief (Rozental’ adapted a more conciliatory posture as the 1930s wore on). Everybody in the labs knew that some in their midst were informers. Communist coworkers needed to demonstrate their militancy; the others sought to keep their heads down—to avoid situations and utterances that might attract the attention of the secret police. Petrova always fell silent when an even remotely political subject was raised in a group setting. People were frightened, but arrests among Pavlov’s coworkers would begin only with the new wave of terror that followed the assassination of Leningrad’s Communist leader Sergei Kirov in December 1934. In the early 1930s, the authorities compiled information, identified friends and enemies, used that information in their efforts to influence Pavlov, and intervened in the lives of his coworkers in milder ways.
For example, in 1933 the Rockefeller Foundation offered Pavlov the opportunity to send a coworker to the United States for one year. He chose Alexander Lindberg, an assistant at the IEM, whom he wanted to dispatch to John Fulton’s lab at Yale. There, Pavlov explained, the talented Lindberg would have the opportunity to work with leading neurologists while also serving as “an instrument for the transmission of our doctrine of conditional reflexes” to a country where “there is enormous interest and attention to this doctrine, but where we have never had an entirely competent person capable of entirely (in the laboratory) planting it in American soil.” Lindberg, however, had been identified by the NKVD as a member of an anti-Soviet group that included Vsevolod, Rikman, Podkopaev, and Pavlov’s first manager at Koltushi, Stanislav Vyrzhikovskii. His request for a stay in the United States was refused.39
In Serafima’s frank letter of July 1932 to the Babkins, when discussing the possible dire consequences of Pavlov’s “free speech” for his family, she mentioned also that “all his coworkers are angry at Ivan Petrovich.”40 Unlike the chief, they were not immune from arrest, and by the early 1930s their very presence during his political commentaries no doubt made them nervous. Frequently during the informal gatherings around Rikman’s table at the Academy of Sciences lab and at the weekly Wednesday meetings, Pavlov, agitated by something he had heard or read, would openly criticize the regime. When he did so at the Wednesday meetings, his comments were often recorded by stenographers. These were excised from the transcript published after his death, but some have been preserved in memoirs, interviews, and archival documents.
Two sources relate Pavlov’s acerbic remarks at a Wednesday gathering about the proud press reports of the achievements of Soviet rocketry. These were well and good, he commented—but the state ought to concentrate on improving the earthly existence of its citizens. “They say we are way up in the stratosphere, but we still cannot heat a building as is necessary.” Although the press did not report it, the populace suffered from epidemics of typhus and malaria. “I can’t sleep because medicine for malaria is for sale only in the Torgsin [the special hard currency stores].” When Communist coworker Asratian countered loyally that other palliatives for malaria were available to the general public, he exploded in rage.41
At a session of February 1934, Pavlov observed that the recent Seventeenth Communist Party Congress illustrated the “reworking of a normal consciousness into a servile one.” Since Stalin was the leader of the ruling Party, it was perhaps to be expected that “nobody will say anything” contrary to his speech at the Congress, but even non-Party scholars were now claiming that “Every scholar in every sphere of scientific work will find entirely concrete and indispensable instructions in Stalin’s speech.” He taunted his Communist coworkers: “One must think that our Communist colleagues study Stalin’s words with special care, so I would ask them to tell us what this ‘concrete and indispensable’ is in our work, since we are doing science and not fairy tales. I would be very interested in that. But they can hardly show me anything. Of course they cannot. So I draw the following conclusion: in twentieth-century Europe, rather than practicing this strict censorship of scholarship and natural science it would be more appropriate to censor servile rhetoric. One must not accustom people to such unpardonable shamelessness.”42
He indignantly resisted every attempt to extend Stalinist controls to his domain. In 1928, he dismissed a directive to tighten “labor discipline” in his lab at the Academy of Sciences in line with Party priorities for all workplaces: “A scientific laboratory is not a factory, and I am not an overseer. We are all successfully pursuing our scientific mission, and that’s all there is to it; one can’t treat intellectual labor entirely according to the stereotype of physical [labor].” Year after year, he responded to the demand for a plan of work by explaining that this contradicted the very nature of scientific inquiry. Such a plan was “impossible,” he responded in 1929, “since the course of work is determined by questions arising during the work itself.” He replied more expansively in 1930 that he planned “to investigate the higher nervous activity in dogs by the conditional reflexes method. I cannot say anything more detailed.... The actual flow of free scientific work is determined by that which is encountered on the investigative path—and I cannot predict this. These unforeseen, unexpected turns of investigation also comprise the main force, joy, and charm of scientific activity.”43
He of course had no quarrel with the planning of scientific research, but was defending his authority to do that planning, as well as sticking his finger in the eye of the authorities. Having managed a large scientific enterprise for some forty years, he was in fact a master planner—defining key lines of investigation, matching available personnel and resources to them, and constantly adapting to unforeseen developments in the lab. Indeed, while Pavlov lectured the authorities about the incompatibility of planning and science, the delegation from the Worker and Peasant Inspection that scrutinized his physiology division in 1930 praised the “strictly planned character” of its work and the “lively supervision of coworkers and collective discussion of themes.” 44
Asked in 1931 to report on his research’s contribution to socialist construction and his use of the principles of “socialist competition,” he replied: “As for socialist construction, I must affirm that the research I lead has a general cultural—and not a narrow socialist—significance. As for competition: having dedicated my entire life to science, I of course have no need of it.” In any case, the state should concern itself only with the “financial side of things.” Even Pavlov, however, was not complete master in his own house. Despite his disdain for socialist competition, he did finally permit Podkopaev to arrange for the Institute to compete with the Academy of Science’s Zoological Museum regarding fulfillment of plan, work discipline, economical use of resources, and other priority values of the First Five-Year Plan.45
He rejected on principle the extension of the new Stalinist workweek to his labs. In September 1929, the Academy of Sciences announced that it would institute the same new work regime that governed other productive enterprises. “The slogan of individual creativity that characterized the activity of the Academy of Sciences in the preceding epoch brought with it a lack of organizational coordination.” Henceforth, scientists would work not according to their spontaneous desires, but from 9 to 5 in five-day shifts during an unbroken workweek. Facilities would thus be operational seven days a week (no need to observe such obscurantist traditions as the Sunday day of rest, Easter, or Christmas). Pavlov was notified on March 11, 1930, that he had four days to inform the city’s labor division about his compliance. He did not reply. A second notice elicited his defiant insistence that each coworker’s research had a distinctly “individual character” and the very nature of experiment made it impossible to break up a coworker’s workweek according to some predefined plan. “In view of this, I inform you that in order to avoid disturbance of the course of its specialized scientific-investigative work, the Physiological Institute of the Academy of Sciences must remain on a [traditional] seven-day week.” In a follow-up note to the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, he acquiesced to a standard 9–5 workday in his Institute only for nonscientific personnel. Scientists set their working hours according to the needs of their research: “In a scientific laboratory, no other order is conceivable.”46
Compelled eventually to accept the new order at the IEM (where six-day shifts were mandated), he forbade coworkers at the Academy of Sciences to work on Sundays and defiantly closed his labs and discontinued his Wednesday conferences during Easter and Christmas. He was therefore among the “reactionary” academicians targeted by Communists in the Academy for retrograde displays of “religiosity, observance of all rites and holidays.” At Koltushi, the Pavlovs always marked Christmas with a traditional tree and a masquerade party. The atheist physiologist and his religious wife also attended Easter services and actively supported the beleaguered parish there.47
Another aspect of Stalinist labor policies that drew Pavlov’s ire was the pressure on citizens to make the state a “voluntary loan” (zaem), usually of a month’s salary, as an investment in socialist construction. Pavlov himself refused to subscribe to the zaem and criticized it openly—but, in a characteristic kindness to his coworkers, he paid this added tax for each of them. Responding to a colleague’s query in May 1934, he characterized the zaem as hypocritical extortion by an unworthy state: “I don’t subscribe to the zaem for reasons of principle—because I consider the use of the zaem by the state to be incorrect. The first task of the state is protection of the people’s health, the provision of the basic conditions of existence to the population—but this does not exist (last year’s famine, which reached the point of cannibalism; a terrible nationwide typhus epidemic; the current mass malnutrition; the absence of sufficient fuel; crowding and filth; a shortage of the most common medicines, etc. etc.). Second, I protest against the false volunteerism of the zaem: the overwhelming majority subscribe to it with their heart in their hands, weeping, because they are afraid (with good reason) of the consequences if they don’t subscribe.”48
The conflict between an explosive Pavlov protective of his authority and various officials attempting to Stalinize his institutions provoked a memorable confrontation at the Physiological Institute at the Academy of Sciences when he literally kicked a meddling militant out of the building. In 1933, the Section of Scientific Workers resolved to purge Pavlov’s Institute of undesirables and dispatched a Leningrad University professor to make the initial inspection. Fedorov later described what followed: arriving at the lab in the morning, the professor showed his official orders from the Section to Pavlov, who, apparently confused about the purpose of the visit, obligingly escorted his guest around the facility, introducing him to coworkers and explaining their ongoing research. Finally, at noon, Pavlov bade him farewell and set off for his office to prepare tea. “But Ivan Petrovich, I have some business with you.” “What business? I just spent two hours with you,” said Pavlov, entering his study. The professor followed him in and Pavlov politely invited him to tea. Finally, he inquired about the purpose of his guest’s visit. “I am to conduct a purge in your Institute,” said the professor, again displaying his official document. “What? A purge? Purge me? They purge me sufficiently at international congresses,” Pavlov shouted. “Get out, bastard!” Grabbing the professor by the collar, he twisted him toward the exit and kneed him in the back. Coworkers saw the frightened militant running down the stairs from Pavlov’s study with the eighty-three-year-old scientist in hot pursuit, shouting, “Get him the hell out!” A few hours later, the chastened academic recounted his story (minus some embarrassing details) to an emergency meeting of the Section of Scientific Workers. All agreed that Pavlov’s behavior was intolerable—but what to do about it? A delegation was dispatched to Kirov. The head of Leningrad’s Communist Party heard them out, but, bearing in mind Pavlov’s special status, informed them bluntly, “I can’t help you.”49
The relationship between Pavlov and the regime was, then, complex and multilayered. It entailed mutual acrimony and outright combat, cooperation in their mutual goal of facilitating his scientific research, and attempts by each to win over the other. The Communists hoped to persuade Pavlov to be supportive—or, at least, cooperative—by lavishing support upon his enterprise, attending to his every material need, granting his requests when possible, and by personal diplomacy as exercised especially by Bukharin and Fedorov. Pavlov indeed appreciated the Communists’ support for science and the unprecedented prosperity of his own labs, and hoped that the regime would eventually prove equally wise by acceding to the demands of reason and personal liberty. He was prepared to recognize that somebody like Bukharin might be capable of doing so.
This was not, then, simply a battle of ideas and values. It involved the most varied types of interaction: political polemics and pronouncements, surveillance and veiled threats, Pavlov’s pleas on behalf of victimized individuals and the regime’s response to them, the daily normalizing business of cooperation between Pavlov’s enterprise and Party officialdom, tensions and struggles within Pavlov’s family and inner circle, and Pavlov’s continual, agonized appraisal of his own duty, of the requirements of his sense of honor.