With the Great Break, the Communists in Pavlov’s lab became more numerous and, implementing the Party’s new line, more aggressive about confronting the chief’s political and philosophical positions. They no longer sought merely to conciliate Pavlov—to win his confidence as coworkers, put an appealing human face on the Party, and participate in the development of a famously materialist doctrine. Now, during Stalin’s cultural revolution, the proletarian cadres nurtured in the 1920s were enjoined to criticize and replace the bourgeois specialists who still held commanding positions in industry and academia. There was, of course, no question of replacing Pavlov. Instead, his Communists now frequently challenged the chief’s political utterances and attempted to push lab doctrine away from his mechanistic positions (for which he had come under attack at the Congress on Behavior of 1930) and toward the more dialectical concepts now in favor.1
During the 1930s, about nine Communists worked regularly in Pavlov’s labs.2 Like their comrades in other branches of the economy, they met in cells organized by institution: one for Communists in the biological institutions of the Academy of Sciences (which included Pavlov’s Physiological Institute), another at the IEM, and a third at Pavlov’s new facility at Koltushi.
Pavlov’s Communists would have made Lenin proud. They represented the new generation of Soviet scientists that he had hoped to create in the first decade of Soviet power, a generation dedicated to socialist construction and possessing the skills to replace their bourgeois predecessors. Of modest social origin, they had fought for the Bolsheviks during the civil war and taken advantage of expanding educational opportunities in the 1920s to study science while working through the Party to build a new Russia. They were all dedicated and competent young scientists who earned Pavlov’s trust in the lab, and some were what the chief called “thinking people” who contributed novel perspectives to his research. While Kremlin leaders were only vaguely acquainted with the outlines of Pavlov’s work—like the media and most scientists, they, too, had their iconic Pavlov—by the 1930s Pavlov’s Communists had mastered the difficult lexicon and procedures of CR research and so were prepared, in the spirit of the Great Break, to nudge Pavlov’s work beyond the confines of what they saw as his bourgeois mechanistic views. In this, they achieved some success.
They were, however, operating within a predatory Stalinist culture that increasingly turned the long-standing ruthlessness of Bolshevik practices on the Party itself, valued loyalty to Stalin above all else, treated all disagreements as class struggle, and turned life within the Party into an unprincipled struggle for survival. So, even as they sought, in the language of the day, to “conquer the commanding heights” of scientific institutions and exercised unprecedented influence on Pavlov, Pavlov’s Communists also postured and fought among themselves.
* * *
A Communist scientist, philosopher, and propagandist who worked with Pavlov from 1925 to 1936, Fedor Maiorov developed a detailed Marxist analysis of research on conditional reflexes. He proposed to his comrades in the lab specific areas of research through which they could push Pavlovian doctrine away from its author’s mechanistic conceptions and toward the dialectical style of Soviet Marxism during the Great Break. Maiorov himself made an important contribution toward that goal—a contribution that was highly praised by Pavlov himself.
Born to the family of a Muscovite cobbler, Maiorov had joined the Red Army in 1919, applied for membership in the Communist Party in 1921, and become a full member four years later. After studying the social sciences at Moscow University, in 1923 he joined the great wave of Red Army veterans who flooded Petrograd’s Military-Medical Academy. Pavlov quit the Academy shortly thereafter, but Maiorov began working in his lab at the IEM while still a medical student.
Upon graduation in 1927, Maiorov accepted Pavlov’s offer of a paid assistantship in the IEM lab. The following year, Pavlov assigned him also to the fledgling biological station at Koltushi. As only the second coworker assigned to Koltushi, he was responsible for the organization of the physiology lab there and, together with Koltushi’s director Stanislav Vyrzhikovskii, conducted the first sustained CR research in that rural facility. That research developed an important component of Maiorov’s program to bring Pavlov’s doctrine closer to Marxism by demonstrating experimentally to the chief’s satisfaction the important role of environment in determining a dog’s nervous type. Maiorov then worked closely with Pavlov to establish a typology of dogs for use in the chief’s plan to breed a “higher nervous type.” In 1932 he returned to the IEM lab and played an active role in the organization of Pavlov’s nervous and psychiatric clinics there.
As a Communist scientist and militant, Maiorov helped organize Party education at the Military-Medical Academy, played a leading role in his Party cell at the IEM, and engaged in anti-religious agitation among the broader population. By virtue of his experience in Pavlov’s lab and his Party cell’s assessment that he was “an active Party comrade well prepared in Marxism,” he was accepted in August 1929 for graduate study at Leningrad’s Communist Academy. For entrance into the Academy’s division of philosophy, he collaborated with his fellow Military-Medical Academy graduate Nikolai Nikitin on an essay titled The Theory of Conditional Reflexes and Dialectical Materialism. From 1929 to 1932 Maiorov continued his lab and political work while studying the history of philosophy, theories of knowledge, and problems of genetics, variability, and evolution—all with an eye toward Pavlovian practice and doctrine.
He completed his studies by writing two reports: Physiology and Psychology and A Critique of the Methodological Foundations of the Pavlov School. These were circulated among Maiorov’s comrades in Pavlov’s labs, serving as basic documents for discussions among them and, probably, at the seminars on scientific methodology that he conducted at the IEM and for the Communist Party faction of the Leningrad Society of Physiologists.3
Composed under the supervision of Communist Party instructors charged with preparing new proletarian cadres to revolutionize science in a Marxist spirit, Maiorov’s Critique offered a systematic analysis of Pavlovian research and a program of action for Pavlov’s Communists during the Great Break. It is interesting both for its content—his analysis of Pavlov’s views on key subjects was quite perspicacious—and because Pavlov’s Communists would, in fact, concentrate upon precisely those research subjects that Maiorov found most promising for moving Pavlov’s doctrine from mechanical to dialectical materialism.
Maiorov argued that Pavlov’s great service was developing a new branch of physiology that dealt a “fatal blow” to spiritualist views and revealed experimentally the material foundations of psychic activity. The theory and methodology of Pavlov’s research, however, were limited by his mechanistic convictions: by his belief that the same laws governed all natural phenomena, that the organism was but a complex machine, and that good scientific explanations rested upon reducing the complex to its simplest elements. Pavlov largely eschewed philosophical discussions—insisting naively upon a division between philosophy and science—but his mechanistic convictions shaped his scientific methodology and interpretations.
Pavlov had of course never studied dialectical materialism, but he responded to every mention of it with “fierce criticism,” dismissing as “animism and dualism” the anti-reductionist conviction that different laws governed different levels of the organization of matter (for example, the physical, the chemical, the biological, the psychological, and the social). Pavlov’s mechanistic views were the product of his biography—his worldview had developed when mechanical materialism constituted the great alternative to vitalism, and he had imbibed the convictions of Pisarev, Sechenov, Ludwig, and other leading mechanists of his day. His stubborn unwillingness to even consider the insights of dialectical materialism reflected his political rejection of “our October Revolution.” When, at a Wednesday discussion of the chief’s draft of his “Response of a Physiologist to Psychologists” (1932), Communist coworkers had challenged his mechanistic formulations, Pavlov had responded “angrily to the Bolsheviks by writing several times [in the article] that ‘man is a machine.’”4
Yet reality itself—the “spontaneous dialectics of facts”—constantly challenged Pavlov’s convictions. So, for example, Pavlov’s mechanistic notion of “struggle and balance” between the opposed processes of excitation and inhibition had yielded increasingly to the dialectical view of that relationship as a “unity and struggle of opposites”—as revealed by Fursikov’s convincing interpretation of experimental data through his principle of mutual induction.5
Marxist critics who rejected Pavlov’s doctrine wholesale were not familiar with this historical tendency. They easily found objectionable citations in the chief’s work and used these to dismiss it as bourgeois mechanism. The history of this research, however, demonstrated its great achievements and possibilities—and its refusal to respect the confines of Pavlov’s own thinking. The “crisis of the Pavlov School” did not, as its critics believed, signal a “dead end”; rather, it was a “crisis of further development”—a crisis rooted in the contradiction between the spontaneous dialectics of experimental facts and the chief’s mechanistic conceptions. It was, then, an “urgent Party task” to infuse Pavlovian methodology and theory with dialectical materialism.6
Maiorov identified three decisive arenas in the struggle to do so: the relationships between physiological and social phenomena, between the objective and subjective realms, and between analysis and synthesis. Regarding the first, he noted the “physiological imperialism” of Pavlov and a number of his coworkers—that is, their reductionist, biological analysis of social phenomena. This tendency had justifiably attracted the fire of Marxist critics. Pavlov was more restrained than some of his coworkers—especially Savich, the author of the “accursed book” Foundations of Human Behavior (1924, 1927)—but he denied any qualitative distinction between dogs and humans; regularly reduced human psychological and social phenomena to supposedly physiological reflexes of goal, slavery, and freedom; and, similarly, characterized education and moral upbringing as the development of CRs. In his public address of 1924, Pavlov had employed such reasoning “to explain social phenomena and to reach several reactionary political conclusions.” According to dialectical materialism, of course, biological regularities did not cease to exist at the level of such social phenomena, but were subsumed within other laws.7
The second decisive issue—the relationship between physiological and psychological phenomena—was central to Soviet Marxist discussions of the time. Here Maiorov found Pavlov’s views flawed, but free of two errors common among his coworkers. In his essay on Physiology and Psychology, Maiorov had developed the basic dialectical materialist view that the objective and subjective realms (i.e., the physiological and psychological) represented a “dialectical unity.” Each was real, and each represented one dimension of the same unitary process. Pavlov, he noted, basically agreed with this position, but understood this unity mechanistically, thought naively that his CR methodology would fully explain its nature, and sought to avoid a philosophical commitment to materialism. Unlike some of his coworkers, Pavlov did not deny or discount the subjective realm, understanding, as he had put it at a Wednesday meeting, that “the subjective world exists and that it is the task of science not to ignore this subjective world, but to learn how to explain it.” He also recognized the highly developed cortex in man as the main feature separating humans from other animals. So, although he believed that the same basic laws applied to both, he was more careful than many of his coworkers in extending to humans the results of experiments on dogs. (He was not, in fact, nearly as careful as Maiorov claimed.) Maiorov noted that Pavlov had recently rebuked a coworker, psychiatrist Ivanov-Smolenskii, for discounting the subjective world and for failing to take advantage of the fact that he was working on humans by asking his subjects to describe their subjective experiences during experiments. “One must not treat a human during an experiment like a dog, pointlessly narrowing the circle of one’s investigation,” Pavlov had insisted. For him, these two realms should be studied in parallel, which would culminate (according to his mechanistic convictions) in establishing the “absolute identity” of processes in each.8
The third fundamental problem concerned “analysis and synthesis” both in scientific inquiry and in the cortex itself. For the dialectical materialist, Maiorov observed, scientific investigation needed to move both from the simple to the complex (analysis) and from the complex to the simple (synthesis). That is, the understanding of any complex whole required knowledge both of its parts and of the whole (which had its own dynamics and was not the simple sum of its elements). As a mechanist, Pavlov had pursued an almost entirely analytical path of research—breaking down the higher nervous activity of animals into its component parts (individual URs and CRs) and attempting to build up from these to an understanding of the whole (higher nervous activity).
Recently, however, Pavlov had himself recognized the limitations of this approach and the need to investigate more fully the synthetic qualities of the cortex. The influence upon him of the “spontaneous dialectics of the facts” was clear, for example, in the emergence of the concept of “systematicity.” If, for example, a series of CRs was established (say, the buzzer as a CS, a flashing light as a CI, the metronome as a CI, and electrical shock as a CS), any variation in the order of those exciters changed the response to each exciter. The dog, in other words, responded not just to single stimuli but to the system of stimuli as a whole. This holistic moment resulted from the interaction of the individual stimuli and constituted “one of the essential qualities of cortical activity.” Pavlovian research had thus already revealed “much that is new and of fundamental importance” about the synthetic dimension of cortical activity, but progress was limited by the chief’s analytical cast of mind.9
Attention to this synthetic dimension was the great contribution of modern Gestalt theory and, especially, Wolfgang Köhler, who insisted that the intelligence displayed by his chimps could not be explained by simple reflexive mechanisms. For Maiorov, Köhler’s one-sided preoccupation with synthesis mirrored Pavlov’s one-sided preoccupation with analysis. Marxists should attempt to unite the two on a materialist foundation, a task that required both a broader interpretive framework and a more expansive investigative methodology than Pavlov’s. Experiments on the CRs of dogs could move research only so far; other methods and other model organisms—both “below” and, especially, “above” the dog—were necessary.10
Maiorov observed that, with the growth of Soviet science, Pavlov’s coworkers no longer represented “a single monolithic school thinking as its teacher thinks.” They now were divided into three subgroups: physiological imperialists, experimentalist-empiricists, and dialectical materialists. The “urgent Party task” of that third group was to struggle against and educate the first two while expanding investigations beyond the bounds of Pavlov’s ideological and methodological imagination.
What, then, was to be done? Maiorov suggested three principal courses of action for Pavlov’s Communists. First, to develop systematic investigations of higher nervous activity “below and above the classical dog; that is, to develop in all possible ways the comparative physiology of higher nervous activity of animals on the basis of materialist dialectics.” Second, to concentrate their efforts on the biological station at Koltushi, where the research agenda was conducive to pitting the “Marxist-Leninist worldview against the mechanistic conception of Pavlov.” Koltushi’s focus on the genetics of higher nervous activity of animals brought to the fore issues related to heredity and the influence of the environment that “will lead the Pavlovian school far beyond the boundaries of physiology to the sphere of broad biological questions.” Communist leadership was especially necessary there to resist the “great danger of the mechanical transfer to man of conclusions acquired in experiments and observations on dogs.” Finally, Communists should push investigations of higher nervous activity in humans, which would “inevitably involve a rejection of outmoded Pavlovian methodology.” This process, indeed, had already begun in “the Division of Pathophysiology of the Higher Nervous Activity of Man organized by us, the work of which is built upon dialectical materialist methodology.”11
Maiorov’s agenda boiled down to this: an emphasis on the “systematic” dimension of cortical activity and on the role of heredity and environment in the formation of nervous type, the development of a comparative physiology of higher nervous activity with an emphasis on anthropoids and humans, and an aggressive campaign to use these and other lines of research to push coworkers and Pavlov himself away from mechanistic, reductionist positions.
In their scientific research, Pavlov’s Communists pursued precisely this agenda. It was the Communist coworker Petr Denisov who first brought the chimpanzees Roza and Rafael to Koltushi and began research on them, and of the seven or eight coworkers who researched anthropoids during Pavlov’s lifetime, at least four were Communists. It is more difficult to quantify the Communist concentration on systematicity and synthetic reflexes, but the comrades clearly clustered in that area of research as well.12
The career of one Communist coworker, Alexander Dolin, nicely illustrates their research interests. Having joined the Bolsheviks before their seizure of power, Dolin had met Pavlov when he was assigned by the Party to convince the physiologist to flee besieged Petrograd (Pavlov refused), and in the spring of 1921 participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors’ rebellion against the regime. After the civil war, he studied medicine in Moscow and then participated in public health campaigns in Mongolia. Upon his return to Moscow, he concentrated on nervous diseases, and in 1928 began graduate studies at the Communist Academy’s Institute of Higher Nervous Activity. There he studied primates with three of Pavlov’s former coworkers; investigated the influence of caffeine, bromides, and alcohol upon CRs; and corresponded with Pavlov about these subjects of mutual interest.
In 1931, Pavlov and Fedorov invited Dolin to serve as senior assistant in Pavlov’s new clinic in the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, where Dolin helped extend Pavlov’s analyses to human neuroses and psychoses. Here, too, he organized a lab devoted to the higher nervous activity of humans—this was the facility to which Maiorov referred in his Critique as a Communist initiative, “organized by us”—and attempted to develop new methodologies for research on CRs in humans (a main desideratum in Maiorov’s Critique). In experiments conducted in Pavlov’s physiology division, Dolin concentrated upon synthetic reflexes (another of Maiorov’s priorities). With Pavlov’s support, Dolin was also appointed head of the Division of Physiology of Higher Nervous Activity at Leningrad’s Institute on the Study of the Brain, where he continued the research on comparative physiology (yet another of Maiorov’s priorities) that he had begun at the Sukhumi Primatological Center and the Communist Academy. He also served as Petrova’s assistant in her department at Leningrad’s Institute for the Improvement of Physicians, where he and his coworkers studied the etiology and treatment of nervous pathology in humans. In all this research, Dolin sought to elaborate the principles of cortical systematicity that separated dogs from higher primates and so to develop a dialectical materialist correction to Pavlov’s mechanistic interpretations.13
The arrival of the chimps Roza and Rafael at Koltushi in the summer of 1933, which led to Pavlov’s first sustained contact with a model organism other than the dog, also expressed the Communist agenda for Pavlovian research, and it resulted from an initiative by his Communist coworker Petr Denisov.
Denisov’s father, an alcoholic deacon, had abandoned the family, leaving his wife to support it as a seamstress. He himself graduated from the Samara Theological Seminary and taught there until February 1919, when he joined the Red Army. He was captured two months later, tortured, and sent on the Whites’ notorious “death train” to prison in Irkutsk. Suffering from typhus, he escaped from the prison hospital. According to the autobiographical sketch for his Party dossier, he then joined an underground group of left Socialist Revolutionaries to fight Kolchak in Siberia until the arrival of the Red Army. Elected a member of the Irkutsk Soviet, he joined the Reds when they arrived and became a Party member in February 1920, serving as political commissar in a local hospital and then in the Red Army.
In the 1920s, Denisov studied medicine and veterinary science in Kazan before entering graduate studies at the Institute of Experimental Veterinary near Moscow. There he wrote several articles on the nervous system and CRs in various animals. From March 1930 to May 1932, as a graduate student in the newly Bolshevized Academy of Sciences, he conducted research in Pavlov’s Physiological Institute and played a leading role in the Communist cell for the Academy’s biological institutions. As a “qualified Party specialist,” he was recalled to the Experimental Veterinary Institute to head its physiology lab after its former director, N. A. Popov, was arrested in October 1931 “in connection with the liquidation of a group of wreckers composed of professors and assistants.” Popov had coauthored two articles with Denisov, so his arrest doubtless made the Communist scientist uncomfortable in more ways than one.14
Because of their evolutionary proximity to humans, anthropoids became scientifically, medically, and ideologically fashionable in the late 1920s and 1930s, and Denisov twice traveled abroad to study them. In 1930, the Commissariat of Agriculture sponsored his trip to Serge Voronoff’s primate colony on France’s Côte d’Azur to study Voronoff’s celebrated technique for rejuvenating humans by surgically implanting the testicles of anthropoids. Two years later, Denisov asked the Academy of Sciences to fund a return trip at Voronoff’s invitation, explaining that he intended to study the salivary CRs of primates and to participate in experiments on the hybridization of humans with anthropoids. This latter task resonated with the Communist emphasis on the evolutionary origins of humans and therefore with antireligious propaganda, and had been pursued with considerable state support.
Denisov, however, emphasized another aspect of his trip: because they more closely resembled humans than did dogs, primates offered extremely useful experimental material for the investigation of higher nervous activity in man. Pavlov supported Denisov’s request for an overseas trip, but, significantly, his letter of recommendation did not even mention primate studies. For Pavlov, rather, the great benefit of Denisov’s stay would be the opportunity to proselytize for CR research in France.15
As it turned out, Denisov’s trip fundamentally changed the scientific practices not of the French, but of Pavlov himself. After acquiring two chimpanzees from Voronoff as a gift, Denisov brought them to Koltushi in summer 1933. Christened Roza and Rafael, they fulfilled the longstanding desire of Pavlov’s Communist coworkers to broaden the chief’s horizons by exposing him to the synthetic talents of primates.16
Left to his own devices, Pavlov almost certainly would not have studied chimps. He was fully comfortable with his own model organism, the dog, and with a method—salivary CRs—that seemed impracticable on anthropoids. Furthermore, Pavlov was philosophically committed to the view that the same basic higher nervous processes governed the dog, the chimp, and humans, and believed that the greater complexity of these processes in higher organisms made them less fruitful experimental subjects. In 1923, due to some combination of his meeting with Yerkes in the United States and the initiative of Dmitrii Fursikov, Pavlov had assigned three coworkers to experiment with monkeys in the Petrograd zoo.17 Yet he had shown little interest in their research and made no effort to continue it after Fursikov’s departure.
The establishment in 1927 of the Sukhumi Primate Station in Abkhazia (on the Black Sea coast of Soviet Georgia) attracted a number of Pavlov’s coworkers, but not the chief himself. This “monkey reserve” appealed to various commissariats and agendas. Primates could be used to investigate the “qualities, possibilities, and needs of human nature,” to pursue the hybridization of humans and monkeys and the transplantation of monkey glands into humans, and for studies of genetics, endocrinology, pathology, physiology, psychology, and evolution. In 1929, the SNK signaled its special interest in the station by giving it 100,000 rubles from its reserve fund and dispatching Lenin’s successor as premier, Aleksei Rykov, to inspect it in person.
Pavlov’s physiology division at the IEM participated formally in the work of the station, supporting a lab there on the physiology and pathology of higher nervous activity. The assistant director of Sukhumi responsible for the facility’s scientific research from 1928 until August 1931 was Leonid Voskresenskii, a former coworker of Pavlov’s who had subsequently served as Fursikov’s assistant director at the Communist Academy. In at least two reports to Pavlov, Voskresenskii described enthusiastically and in detail the experiments conducted at Sukhumi on baboons, hamadryads, chimps, and orangutans. He mentioned plans to attempt the implantation of a salivary fistula in his experimental subjects (although this presented special difficulties in view of monkeys’ great dexterity), but for the time being was using movement reflexes. He reminded Pavlov that Yerkes had identified “ideation” and Köhler “signs of rational action” in their experiments with anthropoid apes. However one explained it, Voskresenskii testified to “the remarkable ability of anthropoids to use their setting and several tools” such as sticks and boxes to attain their goals, and sent Pavlov films of his experiments. At Pavlov’s request, the responses of various species had been compared; the anthropoids showed themselves clearly superior, while the baboons, with their lesser brain, proved much less adept at using tools. As with dogs, different individuals of the same species demonstrated varying abilities. As of December 1930, Voskresenskii planned to build standard chambers for CR experiments and to tackle the special methodological problems posed by Pavlovian research on primates.
He implored Pavlov to “come visit us at the Nursery for one or two months in order to acquaint yourself more closely with the life of anthropoid apes.” Observing them in both natural and experimental settings would surely provide Pavlov with “the richest material for comparison with the results of your thirty years of experiments on dogs.” In his second letter—no doubt sensing that Pavlov was not interested—Voskresenskii suggested that his daughter Vera, as an experienced CR researcher, might make the trip. Neither ever did, nor, apparently, did Pavlov even watch Voskresenkii’s film.18
Five of Pavlov’s coworkers did travel to Sukhumi (three were Communists): Dolin, Maiorov, and Podkopaev in the summer of 1930, Maiorov and Galperin the following summer, and Vladimir Fedorov in summer 1931. They worked on new techniques for studying CRs in primates, compared the attributes of lower primates to anthropoids, confirmed Voskresenskii’s claims about the striking qualities of the latter, and reported to the chief about their results and the great possibilities of primate research. Podkopaev wrote that his experiments with chimpanzees had forced him to “really think” about CRs, and he tried to convince Pavlov to come to Sukhumi: “The nursery could become a real ‘gold mine’ for conditional reflex researchers, because here lots of questions and themes arise, and the setting is entirely propitious. And all this against the background of subtropical vegetation and a warm blue ocean in which it is so pleasant to swim.” Discussing the various reports from Sukhumi with coworkers in St. Petersburg, Pavlov evinced mild interest but reaffirmed his own preference for studying the dog. The plans for his science village at Koltushi that were finalized in May 1933 included no facilities for primate studies.19
He was, then, hardly preparing to launch a new line of investigation on chimps when Denisov brought Roza and Rafael to Koltushi in the summer of 1933. Muhammad had not gone to the mountain, so Denisov brought the mountain to Muhammad. His timing proved quite fortuitous. Pavlov was increasingly attached to Koltushi, but its construction was proceeding slowly, so there was little research conducted there when the chimps arrived. They immediately engaged his curiosity, and he devoted many hours to observing, directing, and pondering Denisov’s experiments upon them. In this context, he would, as his Communist coworkers had hoped, engage Gestalt, pay more attention to the synthetic dimension of higher nervous activity, and reconsider some fundamental axioms of his research.20
Unlike Maiorov, Dolin, and Denisov, Nikolai Nikitin entered Pavlov’s lab with very weak scientific credentials. A Communist Party propagandist, he had played an active public role in the Bolshevization of the Military-Medical Academy and the Academy of Sciences—a political record that could hardly have endeared him to Pavlov. Furthermore, Nikitin voiced a much more uncompromising “left” critique of Pavlov’s doctrine than did his other Communist coworkers, pressing Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism into the chief’s hands and claiming to have himself “dealt a fatal blow” to Pavlov’s mechanistic views. Pavlov dismissed Nikitin’s ideas as “total fantasy,” but related warmly to him as a man and a sincere intellectual.21
The son of a stonemason, Nikitin had enlisted in the Red Army in 1919, serving as divisional political commissar in the battle against Wrangel’s army. He joined the Communist Party in 1920 and three years later entered the Military-Medical Academy. There he helped organize the growing Party presence, contributing frequently to the Academy’s Party journal Our Spark, debating Party politics, and polemicizing against bourgeois attitudes among students and faculty. Selected as a representative to Lenin’s funeral in 1924, he became propaganda chief for the Party’s Leningrad Regional Committee, which brought him into close contact with Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov. In that capacity, he organized the intimidating press campaign during the transformative “elections” at the Academy of Sciences.22
To prepare for his role as a Communist militant in the sciences, Nikitin, like Maiorov, began graduate studies in philosophy at Leningrad’s Communist Academy in 1929, hoping to “master methods of dialectical materialism for work in the sphere of physiology and pathology of nervous activity.” The strident Nikitin, one instructor noted, was overly attached to his own erroneous views (for example, his opinion that social influences could not alter biological phenomena), and his comments in seminars were “as self-confident as they were weak in evidence and methodological grounding.” By 1930, however, he was judged ready to teach dialectical materialism. While at the Academy, Nikitin sought to deepen his knowledge of biology by attending physiologist Aleksei Ukhtomskii’s lectures at Leningrad University and conducting research in the IEM’s Pathology Division and then, as a graduate student, in Pavlov’s Physiology Division.23
In October 1929, Nikitin became Fedorov’s assistant director, taking charge of the “ideological front” at the IEM during the Great Break. As an ideological overseer of Soviet science, he served also on the Organizational Bureau of the Congress on Behavioral Science in 1930 and on the Political Commission for the International Physiological Congress that was held in the USSR in 1935.24
Diligently fulfilling Pavlov’s assignments to study the influence of alcohol on inhibition and the dynamics of the law of strength, Nikitin also criticized the chief’s political and ideological weaknesses. In a letter of February 1932, he objected to Pavlov’s comments at a recent Wednesday gathering about his article for Bukharin’s journal Socialist Reconstruction and Science. “In the name of science, in the name of the reflex theory, you have the temerity to advise our Party and our youthful students” and to warn of the “damaging” tempo of socialist construction. “You said that you will write this article with the freedom that you consider necessary—and by ‘freedom,’ Ivan Petrovich, as everybody knows, you mean the freedom to openly pronounce malicious slander about Soviet power, about our Party.” Nikitin also scolded Pavlov for endorsing a recent call by one philosopher for “science without dialectics” (science could never, in fact, escape a relationship to philosophy) and for insisting during a recent discussion with Bukharin that, as a scientist, he was “neither a materialist nor an idealist” (no middle ground existed).25
Pavlov clearly devoted some time to philosophical discussions with the Communist militant. According to one letter, in the summer of 1931 he perused Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism (apparently a gift from Nikitin), and the two spent an entire day at Koltushi discussing Lenin’s philosophy of science. Yet, despite Nikitin’s explanations, Pavlov had refused to recognize Lenin’s genius: “Forgive me, but you were inattentive,” he later complained. Citing Pavlov’s frequent pronouncement that “for the remainder of your life you are interested only in two things: how the reflex theory will develop and what will come of the Bolsheviks,” Nikitin reminded him that generous Soviet support for his research linked those interests profoundly. He closed by thanking Pavlov for “both the positive and the negative that I have witnessed in your laboratory”—which captured “with such mathematical precision the light and the darkness in all contemporary science”—and for Pavlov’s “sincerely good attitude toward me.”26
Lab interpretations were infused with often ideologically sensitive metaphorical conceptions, so it is not surprising that Nikitin challenged Pavlov in this arena as well. In spring 1931, he began experimenting on an exceptionally aggressive bulldog, Serko. Intrigued, Pavlov spent some forty to fifty hours alongside Nikitin at the bench. According to Pavlov, Serko “constantly terrifies all the attendants and even the experimenter himself.” This aggressiveness was clearly “a sign of a strong nervous system,” but, paradoxically, the dog performed like a “weak type” in the stand. For example, when an established CS was repeated and reinforced eight times in a row, Serko’s salivary response declined. Pavlov’s explanation of this contradiction evolved over time. Initially, he characterized Serko as “a strong dog accustomed to freedom.” Restrained in the experimental stand, Pavlov reasoned, the animal therefore rapidly fell into a hypnotic state, and this in turn skewed its reflexive responses. Eventually, however, he concluded that Serko was an “extraordinarily weak dog” mired in a chronic “ultra-paradoxical state.”27
Nikitin, however, developed his own interpretation, drawing upon Leningrad University physiologist Aleksei Ukhtomskii’s notion of the “dominant,” the research of Ukhtomskii’s mentor Nikolai Vvedenskii, and his own concept of a “functional field” to develop what he considered a more Leninist view. For him, inhibition was but a special form of excitation—these basic processes represented a “unity of opposites”—and the very nature of the ultra-paradoxical state needed to be reconceptualized accordingly.
At a Wednesday gathering, Pavlov berated Nikitin for abandoning “the province of facts” and indulging in “various theoretical considerations.” As a novice physiologist, he should learn simply to observe and “synthesize observations” while avoiding empty philosophizing and leaving ambitious interpretations to more experienced scientists. “My young coworker reproaches me all the time for unending contradictions. How do you like that?” Lecturing Nikitin on the correct meaning of Vvedenskii’s concepts and the true nature of excitation, inhibition, and the ultra-paradoxical state, Pavlov conceded that “One can disagree. Nobody knows what the truth is here.” But he forbade publication of Nikitin’s article in his in-house journal.28
Nikitin’s comments about the chief were much less respectful and more militant in discussions with other Party members. In two undated drafts of letters, Nikitin turned to Stalin, asking him to review his critique of Pavlov’s reflex theory:
Your comments have decisive significance for me, since in my critique I set out from Lenin’s propositions. The essence is as follows: 1) An experiment I conducted is not explicable by any of the facts and theories accumulated by the Pavlov school; 2) This gives me the right to assert not only that the mechanical model of thought and the psyche in general is impossible, but also that attempts to find it are scientifically reactionary; and 3) Consequently, matter has two qualities: the quality of motion and of reflection. The latter proposition, in my view, has fundamental significance for an understanding of the innovation that Lenin introduced into the philosophy of Marxism.29
Pledging to struggle relentlessly against Pavlovian mechanists, idealist- psychologists, and wooden, uncreative Marxists, Nikitin informed Stalin in another letter that he had succeeded in turning a “weak dog” into a “dog that works tolerably well” in only one week. This achievement and its theoretical underpinnings would allow Nikitin to “directly kill” Pavlov should the chief engage him in debate. “I have posed the question very sharply: Lenin or Pavlov? And I am happy that I have resolved it not only for myself but also for all of science.”30 Nikitin’s comrades, however, did not appreciate his theoretical efforts. In a letter to Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov, he targeted their opportunism: “The most terrible enemies of the reflection theory are epigones with Party cards.” In his notes, he portrayed his comrades as gutless hacks unwilling to press the class struggle against their famous chief: Fedorov “fawns, as always,” insisting that Pavlov could not be refuted by a single fact and dismissing Nikitin’s critique as “tendentious”; Maiorov was incapable of criticizing Pavlov, thinking his authority untouchable; and Galperin, “a careerist who dreams about earthly rewards,” opportunistically remarked that “Lenin is an authority for us, but not for world science, while Pavlov is an international scientist.” For their part, Nikitin’s comrades found him so “disturbed and emotional” when discussing his Leninist revision of Pavlov’s ideas that they worried about his suffering a nervous breakdown and urged him to rest.31
Yet Nikitin’s responsibilities continued to expand. In 1934, he acquired his own psycho-physiological division at the IEM, where he apparently intended to pursue his Leninist resolution of the mind-body problem. In January 1936, when Fedorov departed for Moscow to direct the new All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM), Nikitin succeeded him as director of its Leningrad branch (that is, the former IEM). The times being what they were, however, his tenure would prove short-lived.
Like Nikitin’s, the mission of Pavlov’s Communists extended well beyond the lab. Like the Kremlin leadership, they needed both to struggle and cooperate with the chief. On the one hand, they sought to improve Pavlov’s impression of the Party by being conscientious coworkers and by using their influence to enhance his life and labors in various ways. Fedorov, Maiorov, and Nikitin’s suggestion to national leaders of the party initiated the discussions that culminated in the laudatory press coverage of Pavlov’s eightieth birthday in 1929 and massive new funding for his scientific enterprise. Fedorov constantly had an eye out for special privileges that might be appreciated by Pavlov and his family: increased wages and coupons for the special Torgsin stores, a Lincoln automobile, special permission for Vladimir to maintain a second home in Finland, and so forth. On the other hand, the Communist coworkers criticized Pavlov’s political pronouncements and spoke of him very harshly among themselves, sought to strengthen the Communist presence in his labs and their parent institutions, and, to the extent the chief’s institutional positions stood in their way, attempted to limit and circumvent his authority.
There had always been an iron fist within the velvet glove—constant surveillance, pressure on Pavlov’s circle, control over foreign travel, and various forms of political intimidation. Even with the Great Break, Pavlov remained a partial exception to the extension of political controls throughout Soviet science. His special status made his removal unthinkable despite his political views and ideological criticisms of his doctrine. He was one of an extremely small handful of Soviet citizens who could criticize the Stalin cult in public or literally kick out of his lab a representative of the Section of Scientific Workers. That special status required different tactics from the Communist coworkers who sought to extend the ethos of Stalinist science to Pavlov’s realm.
Their efforts to colonize his Physiological Institute by flooding it with Communist graduate students led to an ongoing conflict with the chief—and to one dramatic episode. The expansion of graduate programs for working-class students (vydvizhentsy) was central to Communists’ attempt to prepare a new Soviet scientific intelligentsia. These new specialists were especially important for the transformation of the Academy of Sciences, because the overwhelming majority of academicians were not sympathetic to Bolshevism.
Pavlov stood in their way. He dismissed these hurriedly trained scientists as “fictitious specialists” and jealously defended his right to choose his own coworkers. As Denisov complained at a meeting of his cell, six Communist graduate students were currently working at other institutions because “Pavlov does not want to take them in the Physiological Institute.” The problem was not that Pavlov did not want Communist students in his labs. He happily employed a goodly number of Party members and valued their contributions highly, and had enthusiastically accepted the Communist graduate students Denisov and Skipin. Yet he insisted upon choosing his own coworkers and did not want unqualified “fictitious specialists” wasting his limited lab space. The Communists and their allies, on the other hand, criticized Pavlov’s Institute for its “absence of work on the preparation of graduate students, insufficient connection with social organizations, and the inadequate social steadfastness of particular workers in its scientific apparatus.”32 (This latter phrase probably referred to the politically suspect trio that managed Pavlov’s Institute: his two assistants Podkopaev and Rikman, and Iliodor Prorokov, a physiologist who had worked in the lab since the early 1920s and helped with administrative matters there.)
The Communist cell proposed to circumvent Pavlov’s objections by expanding the scope of the Physiological Institute beyond CRs and creating a robust Division of General Physiology with “a series of independent labs in various [other] physiological spheres.” Communist students could then enter the Institute through this new division and begin, in Denisov’s words, “an open attack on the counterrevolutionary life of the Physiological Institute.” 33 Pavlov, however, recognized this danger to his authority and managed to block it.
The Communists now adopted another tactic. Working through the Academy’s Communist permanent secretary, Viacheslav Volgin, they arranged funding for two Communist graduate students who were then assigned to Pavlov’s lab—which was, after all, state property—without his approval. Anna Dolinskaia and A. S. Mikhailovich arrived at the lab on the first work day of 1932. Neither was particularly interested in CRs—they wanted, rather, to use the equipment in Pavlov’s lab for their own purposes (and, of course, to make a political point). When they arrived, Pavlov’s assistant, Rikman, informed them that the chief was still “reflecting on his deployment of personnel” and was unfortunately absent. Undeterred, Dolinskaia returned to the lab on the following day to begin work on a subject that she and her comrades had chosen. A second assistant, Prorokov, however, told her that she couldn’t work there. Labeling this an act of the “class enemy,” Dolinskaia asked to meet Pavlov, but Prorokov insisted that the chief didn’t want to see her. She then notified Denisov (the leader of her Communist cell at the Academy), and the pair went over Pavlov’s head to Volgin. Volgin wrote an official letter reminding Pavlov that these graduate students had been assigned to the Institute “by decree of the appropriate general organs of the Academy of Sciences.” He could refuse them only by demonstrating that their presence would “damage the work of the Institute.”34
Dolinskaia and Mikhailovich returned to the lab—and to a furious chief. They later reported: “Without offering his hand to shake, contrary to the habit that he observes strictly,” he bade them to his office for a tongue-lashing: he himself chose the workers in his lab, he refused to surrender his power over the Institute, and they had done him a “grave injustice” by appealing to the Academy’s leadership. When the pair replied that they were pursuing research mandated by their professional organizations and were not subject to Pavlov’s authority, he exploded at their “Party arrogance”: “The Communists have destroyed everything, smothered everybody; everybody fears them.” Yet he enjoyed great influence and powers of his own, so even the Academy’s authorities “in the person of its blowhard president [Karpinskii]—who was president in name only—and Volgin, whom he characterized with an obscene gesture” could not stand in his way. “You are antipathetic to me; I break every connection with you. I will not supervise your work; but since the laboratory and its equipment do not belong to me, you can walk about in the laboratory.... But I declare to you that I will take another look and see if this is convenient for me; and if this disturbs me in any way—and where there is no harmony I cannot think—then I can at any moment pose the question: I or they? And here I have some chances.”35
The Communist cell convened the following day to discuss a response to this outrage. With Denisov taking the lead, they adopted the militant stance appropriate to the Great Break. Volgin’s approach was much too conciliatory. This was not merely a matter of the ownership of state property; Pavlov’s actions were an “attack upon Soviet power,...an attack upon the Party as a whole” that posed the question kto kogo?—Lenin’s famous formulation meaning “who will defeat whom?” They agreed to mobilize social organizations to defeat Pavlov at the upcoming elections to the Academy and to thereby remove him from the directorship of the Physiological Institute, reducing him to “mere work in the laboratory.” They adopted a resolution to the Central Committee of the Party labeling Pavlov’s actions “the clear class act of a political enemy of Soviet society and the Party,” adding that Pavlov conducted “open counterrevolutionary propaganda at his seminars” and “his attacks on the Party, Soviet power, and the guiding policies cannot be tolerated any further.”36
Such decisions, however, were made at the highest levels, and were based upon far weightier considerations. Party policy toward Pavlov remained unchanged. Denisov and other Communist coworkers continued to work closely with him, and the two graduate students apparently remained in the lab for a short time, unsupervised by Pavlov or his assistants. Dolinskaia became a regular attendant at the Wednesdays and soon proved herself quite the treacherous Stalinist militant.
The 1933 Party purge brought some very bad moments for Pavlov’s Communists, but no catastrophic ones. At a purge meeting of the Koltushi cell, Denisov denounced the Communist head of economic matters there, A. F. Vorob’ev, for having lost Pavlov’s confidence by failing to enforce good work discipline. Pavlov was frustrated by the slow pace of the construction of his biological station, and Vorob’ev had proven incapable of organizing work effectively and preventing the pilfering of supplies (especially of denatured alcohol, which the workers were stealing and drinking). He was removed from his position and expelled from the Party. (The Party cells frequently received denunciations of corrupt workers. A certain Blinkov, senior supervisor of the kennel at the Physiological Institute who also worked at Koltushi, was twice denounced for pocketing the food money for Pavlov’s dogs, for stealing their food and selling it on the black market, and for running the gastric juice factory during off-hours for his own profit. According to one denunciation, these depredations dated from at least 1919, when only Pavlov’s intervention had saved him from a three-year prison term.)37
That same 1933 purge revealed potentially serious problems for Denisov and Fedorov. The former was denounced as a Trotskyist by Anna Dolinskaia. He survived the accusation, but the experience was extremely unnerving. During the same session, the head of the IEM’s Party Committee, Golovanov, claimed to detect a suspicious nervousness on Fedorov’s part. “This concern by a senior member of the Party, who had passed through two purges already, was puzzling to us,” Golovanov later explained. He and another vigilant comrade launched an investigation of Fedorov’s record that later produced evidence that, contrary to his claims, he had served the Whites through 1920. Those findings would dovetail with criticisms of his performance of Party duties. But in 1933 Golovanov was not prepared to support his suspicions, and Fedorov enjoyed powerful friends.38
Another target of comradely criticism in 1933—some of which in another context might have been laughable—was Ezras Asratian. The son of an Armenian peasant family slaughtered during the massacres of 1915, Asratian had entered Pavlov’s Physiological Institute as a graduate student in 1930 and had gained the chief’s respect and affection. An exemplary vydvizhenets, he had labored diligently to master the Russian language in order to read and write scientific articles, and had developed also a working knowledge of English and German. When Asratian completed his graduate studies in 1931, Pavlov offered him a position at the Physiological Institute (dismissing his own daughter Vera to create the vacancy). One year later, he showered him with praise as “an outstanding beginning scientific worker who shows initiative and discipline of thought and who conducts scientific investigations with passionate engagement and a sensitive conscientiousness and precision.” Asratian sometimes provoked Pavlov’s ire—at least once by defending Party policies and once for breaking Pavlov’s rule against working at the Physiological Institute on Sundays and church holidays. In the latter case, Asratian boasted that he assuaged the chief’s anger by reminding him that, as a Communist, he had always opposed this policy openly and on principle, and by talking passionately about his research (on systematicity) and thus eliciting fond reminiscences from Pavlov about his own long hours in the lab when he was younger. Pavlov highly valued his young Communist coworker and confided that “I like him very much.”39
Asratian’s comrades repeatedly criticized him as an “irresolute Communist” more interested in science than his political duties. He had, for example, requested and received a note from Pavlov permitting him to remain in the lab rather than joining his comrades to help out at a collective farm, and he was roundly criticized by Denisov, Dolinskaia, Galperin, and others for chuckling at Pavlov’s anti-Soviet jokes.40
This, Asratian insisted, was slander. He frequently “argued (sometimes very hotly)” with Pavlov about politics, and at the Wednesday gatherings challenged “Pavlov’s mechanical conceptions” most aggressively. He did sometimes laugh at the chief’s “naive expressions”—for example, his insistence that “one must name a time frame for the world revolution or [his] attempt to refute the connection between mechanism and idealism by citing his own atheism”—but so did “all the Party people.” His comrades remained unmoved. As secretary of the cell, Denisov signed the official verdict that Asratian was guilty of a “partial break” with Party positions and insufficient vigilance regarding his Communist duties.41 Yet the dynamics of Stalinism had not yet reached the point where such comradely criticisms were a reason for real alarm.