What began as a gleam in Pavlov’s eye during his summer excursion in 1924 to the dog nursery in the sleepy village of Koltushi became the great passion of the last years of his life. Here the Soviet state erected to his specifications a science village that combined two of his great loves, scientific research and rural dacha life. This Institute of Experimental Genetics of Higher Nervous Activity housed a grand project to study the relationship of heredity and environment to constitution and temperament, and, eventually, to turn this knowledge to practical use in the upbringing of children and the breeding of an improved human type “for the use and glory first and foremost of my homeland.” Construction of this science village, however, proved agonizingly slow, and that research barely began before Pavlov’s death.
Yet he visited frequently—every summer beginning in 1929, and every Friday from mid-1933. While he awaited completion of his new facility, he occupied himself there with gardening, swimming, gorodki, and, beginning in summer 1933, with his chimps Roza and Rafael.
So, as it turned out, the great significance of Koltushi for Pavlov and his state sponsors resided not in the much-vaunted “experimental genetics of higher nervous activity,” but rather in its anthropoid inhabitants, its role as a beloved country home and a showcase for Soviet science, and its contribution to his increasingly positive attitude toward the Bolsheviks in his last years.
Pavlov’s excitement about Koltushi was evident in his letter to Fedorov in October 1929, informing him that he wanted to spend the SNK’s entire 100,000-ruble birthday gift on the construction of his new biological station, which would address an “especially significant” subject: “the influence of conditions of upbringing, on the one hand, and of heredity (the passing to offspring), on the other, upon types of nervous constitution.”
As in his other labs, Koltushi would employ the conditional-reflex method, but with the important difference that, rather than obtaining dogs of murky pedigree from various sources, “pups will be brought up here, and the gradual development and composition of their nervous activity under various conditions will be observed, along with the inheritance during interbreeding of dogs with various types of nervous system, as well as the investigation of social reflexes.” Koltushi’s first director, Stanislav Vyrzhikovskii, noted in 1932 that the fulfillment of these tasks required “investigations of (genetically) pure types,” which the biological station would breed on its grounds.
By this time the standard description of Koltushi’s mission also included a practical dimension: by testing the influence of various elements of the dogs’ upbringing on different nervous types, this research would permit “investigation both of methods of upbringing themselves and of their usefulness for various types.” In a letter to Molotov in 1932—and in extensive Soviet press coverage beginning that year—another, perhaps always implicit, practical goal was added: “to determine experimentally on animals the conditions for acquiring, by means of selective breeding, a greatly improved nervous system.” As Pavlov explained to a correspondent for Izvestiia in August 1933, “The results of our work should lead to the success of eugenics—the science of the development of a better human type.”1
His grand vision, then, was to identify the nervous type of dogs, to use interbreeding and selection to produce genetically pure specimens of each type, to determine the influence of various conditions upon their development, and to use selective breeding and scientifically informed upbringing to produce dogs—and eventually, Russians—with optimal nervous characteristics. This vision flowed from his decades of research on nervous types, his lifelong commitment to putting his science to practical use, and his longstanding concerns about the “Russian type.”
There was nothing sinister about Pavlov’s interest in eugenics, which was indeed (in the Greek meaning of its name) a “well-born” science with an intellectual lineage that stretched back to Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who coined the term in 1883 to denote the science of the biological improvement of humans. For the great majority of geneticists in the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics was the logical practical extension of their discipline, and for thinkers of almost every ideological stripe it was a rational application of modern science for the improvement of medicine and society. That was the spirit of Pavlov’s short note in his calendar book for 1927: “Fate, the social struggle with it. Practice. Eugenics.”2
Rabid elitism and racism certainly characterized much eugenic thinking, but these were hardly synonymous with eugenics itself, which had developed into an international scientific, medical, and social movement with various tendencies. In Russia, with a well-developed community of geneticists and a Communist state determined to use science for its own ends, eugenics flourished in the 1920s. The first president of the Russian Eugenics Society was Pavlov’s acquaintance and eminent geneticist Nikolai Kol’tsov. Neuropathologist and medical geneticist Sergei Davidenkov, who directed Pavlov’s Nervous Clinic at the IEM, was also an avid proponent. Russian Marxists argued vigorously among themselves about eugenics: for some, it was a reactionary bourgeois doctrine that falsely sanctioned social hierarchies as the result of heredity; for others, a “proletarian eugenics” free of racism and elitism offered a tool for socialist construction. These discussions ended with Stalin’s Great Break and the denunciation of all “mechanist, reductionist” attempts to link the biological and social realms. Eugenics was pronounced a bourgeois or even fascist doctrine in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1931, and the rise of official Nazi eugenics served to confirm that judgment. It speaks volumes about Pavlov’s special status (and about the selective applicability of all ideological prescriptions in Stalinist science) that in the very years that eugenics was proscribed in the Soviet Union his own eugenics project received massive state support.3
The original plan for Koltushi, approved in April 1930, mandated the construction of an electrical station, a kennel, and a two-story brick building that would house three experimental chambers, a two-room surgical complex, and living quarters for Pavlov and several coworkers. Yet construction was plagued by problems typical during Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. Supplies proved difficult to obtain, as did even shoes for the workers. In October 1930, Fedorov complained on Pavlov’s behalf about the slow and “abnormal course of construction work.”
Frustrated and impatient, Pavlov turned five months later to the SNK. In response, Molotov released another 184,000 rubles from that body’s special funds with the directive that the lab building, kennel, and electrical generator must be completed by September 1931. Yet the pace of construction continued to be agonizingly slow and the quality of workmanship appallingly shoddy. In July 1932, Vyrzhikovskii reminded the SNK of the importance of Pavlov’s projected research at Koltushi and the desirability of completing construction by his eighty-fifth birthday, and especially before the arrival of the many foreign scientists who would descend upon Leningrad in August 1935 for the International Physiological Congress.4
One month later, a desperate Pavlov appealed to “Comrade Molotov,” and after another two weeks unburdened himself to him more completely. He reminded the Communist leader of Koltushi’s “exceptionally important task”—“to determine experimentally on animals the conditions for acquiring, by means of selective breeding, a greatly improved nervous system”—and of his own advancing age: “To begin the successful investigation of this subject, the laboratory requires my personal participation. And I have a great desire, in so far as my powers permit, to place this mission on a firm and fruitful basis for the use and glory first and foremost of my homeland.” 5
Molotov responded by designating Koltushi a “shock brigade project” to be completed in 1933. The central State Planning Agency (Gosplan) assumed responsibility for construction, and additional funds were released.6 By fall 1933, the central building was largely completed, with a small surgical complex and one of its three labs fully equipped, as well as seven rooms for coworkers and a larger apartment for Pavlov. Having summered there for years, Pavlov now incorporated Koltushi into his weekly schedule, traveling there in his Lincoln every Friday to oversee construction, join Denisov in observations of Roza and Rafael, and enjoy some gardening and gorodki. Over the next year, four of the original seven rooms for coworkers were united with Pavlov’s three-room abode, creating a spacious and comfortable apartment with a veranda from which he could enjoy the country air and survey his rural domain.
When Denisov unexpectedly brought Roza and Rafael to Koltushi in August 1933, they were housed temporarily in a small heated open-air cage close to the main entrance of the lab and residence. A trapdoor in the window allowed the chimps to move freely between that building and their cage, and their unexpected appearances became a feature of Koltushi life.
By this time, Pavlov and the state had agreed on a much grander “Big Koltushi”—an expansive science village costing more than 10.5 million rubles and equipped with its own electrical, heat, sewage, and water systems, as well as its own state farm. That village would include two labs—Pavlov’s existing facility and another for Ganike’s experiments on the inheritance of acquired characteristics in mice—along with an open-air field for experiments on groups of dogs (to study upbringing and the social reflex). Workers there would enjoy ten comfortable cottages and apartment houses, a club, a cafeteria, and a swimming pool. For the dogs, there would be three state-of-the-art kennels’ plus a nursery, veterinary station, and special baths. And the chief required that everything be set nicely within the lovely greenery of the area, with gardens aplenty.
This World Capital of Conditional Reflexes certainly had its scientific rationale, but it was much more than that. It became a symbol of the triumph of Soviet modernity over the backward countryside, the dynamism of socialism at a time when capitalism was mired in depression and infected by fascism, and the progress of Soviet science. Koltushi also proved a force for reconciliation between the anti-Communist scientist and his Communist patrons.
In mid-May 1933, Pavlov and several coworkers—including the facility’s former director, Stanislav Vyrzhikovskii, and his replacement, Viktor Rikman—met for two hours with artist, engineer, and architect Innokentii Bezpalov to review the plans for Big Koltushi.7 Bezpalov was working under strange circumstances, though these were hardly unique in Stalin times. The son of a wealthy entrepreneur, he had never concealed his dislike for the Soviet system. He had been arrested once in the 1920s and again in 1931, when, like many “bourgeois specialists” during the Great Break, he was convicted of “wrecking” (a building had collapsed, probably due to defective materials). Sentenced to five years’ labor in the distant Urals, he was instead co-opted along with other specialist-convicts into special service: to build the NKVD’s new “Big House” in Leningrad. That facility was quickly completed under the direction of F. T. Sadovskii, who was then assigned to oversee the construction of the new VIEM (which had not yet been moved to Moscow). Sadovskii assigned one of his prisoner-architects to the VIEM’s urban campus and another, Bezpalov, to its rural facility at Koltushi. Bezpalov traveled under armed guard throughout his labors. He would be freed (temporarily, as it turned out) one month before the Physiology Congress, when Pavlov informed the authorities that the foreign delegates who visited Koltushi might want to speak with its designer, and that armed guards would create a bad impression.8
Big Koltushi would include twenty structures in four sectors: the lab, the dog nursery, living quarters for the workforce, and an administrative center. Pavlov and a few coworkers lived in the main building; the rest of the much larger workforce that was now envisioned (more than 90 employees and their families, about 230 people) would be housed in new quarters. Pavlov decreed that these accommodations, while differing in quality according to the worker’s status, would all be very comfortable by Soviet standards. His scientific coworkers, for example, would have fifteen square meters of living space plus a study, and each apartment would have two entrances, a kitchen, bathroom, pantry, and veranda; other skilled workers would be housed in a two-room apartment of twelve square meters equipped with a kitchen, shower, and pantry. Shortly after these plans were adopted, Fedorov convinced Pavlov that, as director, he should eventually move from his apartment in the lab building to a cottage of his own. Tactful as always, he justified this proposal by the eventual need to expand the laboratory.
Each dog was precious and so required special care. A “very attentive relationship” toward them was necessary, since “the loss of even one animal from the genetic compound or group would not only devalue the investigation but would also delay work for several years.” Careful medical monitoring was required, because illness would introduce an uncontrolled variable into the grand experiment. Each of eight scientific coworkers would begin work with eight dogs, so it was calculated that the biological station would soon house some 100 adult dogs and a constant stream of pups. Four heated kennels housing twenty-five adult dogs each and a special nursery for the offspring would provide “ideal conditions with regard to hygiene, microclimate, moisture, and lighting”; baths and a special kitchen would assure cleanliness and good nutrition, eight on-location apartments for caretakers would facilitate constant supervision and maintenance, and a veterinary station would deal immediately with any illness.9
Typical of the breathless Soviet press coverage was N. Baskakov’s series of articles for Red Gazette in March–October 1933. In his first installment, Baskakov explained that the state was spending a colossal sum on Koltushi and elicited from the head of construction, Sadovskii, a description of the facility. “But that is an entire scientific village!” Baskakov gushed. “‘Completely true,’ affirms Comrade Sadovskii,” who added that all twenty buildings would have hot water and electricity, and that everything was designed to create “the most propitious conditions for scientific work.... Suffice it to say that even the building for the dogs...will have central heating, ventilation, and a heated floor. To feed the experimental animals, it is proposed to build a mechanized kitchen.”10
In his second article, Baskakov described the cultural center at Koltushi and the scientific purpose of the venture. As one ascended the stairs of the workers’ club, one would pass, on the first floor, an aquarium full of fish; on the second, a glassed-in beehive “that will show the complex life of the bee kingdom”; and then, upon exiting onto the roof—which was to become the province of the Pulkovo Observatory—one would experience the “remarkable sight of an electrically illuminated Leningrad in the distance.” The biological station would seek to develop “a pure nervous type of animals.” These did not exist in nature, so physiologists would create them through experiment and breeding. “If a choleric, then a real choleric, a strong and excitable animal without even the smallest deviations; if a peaceful, solid sanguinic, then a real sanguinic, and so forth.”11
In his third installment, Baskakov extended his description of Koltushi’s scientific goals and alluded to its eugenic possibilities: “The plans include not only investigation of the hereditary transmission of nervous traits, but also introduction of an entirely new element: the upbringing of animals. Our physiologists are already investigating the influence of upbringing on the types of higher nervous activity. Who can say? Perhaps the time is not distant when science will make possible even the creation of a new nervous type of man.”
Yet all was not well at Koltushi. Construction lagged far behind schedule. “Academician I. P. Pavlov devotes much attention to the biological station in Koltushi—‘my offspring’ he says. But why is the academician disturbed every time he reports on the course of its construction? Because he considers that the builders are swindling him. One cannot but agree with him: here there is clear sabotage of state decisions.” Despite the millions of rubles lavished upon Koltushi by the Soviet state, Baskakov saw one empty site after another. As for the identity of the saboteurs, he used ominous bold type: “It would be tedious to enumerate everything that should have been provided to the biological station but that, by fault of the construction administration of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine it still does not have.”12
The word “sabotage” carried potentially deadly consequences, and the target may have been Fedorov, who was responsible for the administration of the VIEM and the construction of Koltushi. The problems there were also laid pointedly at the door of the VIEM construction brigade in an article in Izvestiia. From at least 1933 the head of the Communist Party committee at the Leningrad branch of the VIEM, Golovanov, had expressed doubts about Fedorov’s murky civil war credentials and his true political loyalties. In February 1935, Golovanov would report that a nest of 179 White Guardists and “foreign elements” had been rooted out at the VIEM and that Fedorov had perhaps knowingly tolerated their presence for fear that their prosecution might reveal his own counterrevolutionary history.13
Yet the sluggish tempo of construction continued throughout 1934. Pavlov continued to complain, but was now enjoying his science village immensely—living in his comfortable apartment, cultivating the gardens, supervising a growing number of coworkers in a functioning lab, and engrossed in experiments with Roza and Rafael.14
From the Party’s political perspective, however, this state of affairs was most unsatisfactory in view of the upcoming international Physiology Congress. Five months before it convened, Commissar of Health Protection Kaminskii arrived, charged by the Central Committee with taking decisive action. He saw not a triumph of socialist construction but a chaotic building site. Two cottages were completed, most were not; water pipes lay scattered alongside unsightly ditches; construction of the director’s cottage had barely begun; only one kennel was ready, and the new glass home for Roza and Rafael was but a shell. Viewing this through the eyes of prospective Western visitors, Kaminskii devised a “harsh plan” for completing the main lab building, the chimps’ home, at least two more cottages and three apartment houses, one more kennel and the dogs’ nursery and kitchen, roads, paths, greenery, flowers, and other decorative work (including the busts of Descartes, Sechenov, and Mendel that Pavlov had chosen for the walkway in front of the main lab). Kaminskii’s preoccupation with impressing foreign visitors was especially evident in one detail: he decreed that the outer structure and the first two floors of the director’s striking cottage be completed; the third floor and attic, where visitors were unlikely to venture, could wait. This was all to be accomplished by August 10, 1935 (five days before the first visitors arrived). Brigades of painters, plasterers, and other skilled workers were dispatched from Moscow with the necessary materials from Moscow’s MetroStroi (builder of the remarkable subway system in the capital). Teams of decorators and gardeners were summoned from Leningrad.15 The paint had barely dried when the first enthralled delegates arrived to marvel at Pavlov’s gleaming science village.
Koltushi had already moved to the very center of Pavlov’s emotional life—as a scientific center, a year-round dacha, and the repository of dreams for his remaining years. It also became a powerful symbol for him of the great support he enjoyed from the Soviet state. For this man with a deeply felt sense of honor and moral responsibility, his science village thus elicited another sentiment, which grew into a preoccupation. It was first recorded in his report on Koltushi’s budget for the 1935–1936 academic year: “I am inspired by the hope that our work will justify these expenditures of the State.”16 This sense of indebtedness to the Soviet state—the feeling that of one to whom much is given, much is demanded—had not only personal but also political significance.
In the years before completion of his apartment, Pavlov spent summers with Koltushi’s first coworkers in the old building on the lake. Accommodations were crude, but he loved it. Pooling food supplies with Vyrzhikovskii and his wife Gedde, Lev Zeval’d, and Fedor Maiorov, he swam daily and dragooned his employees into games of gorodki. Vsevolod and his wife Evgeniia rented a modest house on the grounds in 1929, which much pleased Pavlov, who wanted his family to share his enthusiasm for Koltushi. Serafima and Vladimir’s family began summering there in 1933 when more comfortable quarters were available.17 His grandchildren Liudmila and Maria developed the same warm feelings for Koltushi as had their parents and grandparents for Sillamiagi. Reminiscing decades later, they recalled the lovely surroundings and fresh air; the kindly Finnish woman who cooked for them, and her husband, who supervised the dog kennel (a man of “repulsive appearance,” recalled filmmaker A. V. Vinnitskii, “to whom Pavlov related as an informal acquaintance”); and the Christmas tree that stood in the family quarters.
Both also recounted tales of the “terrifying” male chimp Rafael, who frequently escaped his handlers. During his first summer at Koltushi, Rafael found his way into the children’s room and leapt on Liudmila and then on their nanny—whom he bit badly before jumping out the window. He also caused a local scandal by scalping a child in a visiting group of kindergarteners. Pavlov, however, was amused by the chimps’ unexpected appearances, once confiding to his grandchildren—who were frightened by the entrance of an anthropoid guest for breakfast—that he was comparing the chimps to them. A visiting artist found Rafael “solid” and Roza “flirtatious”—and noted, in an implicit comparison with many Soviet citizens, that they were quite well fed, enjoying “plenty of milk, oranges, chocolate, and even vegetables.”18
Pavlov soon established the same regimented summer routine as he had during the halcyon days at Sillamiagi: swimming before breakfast in the lake (a pier with a small wooden cabana allowed him to dress and undress in privacy at the water’s edge), bicycling, and spending hours in the gardens. He played gorodki when he could, but, now in his eighties, he was no longer the acknowledged champion. Nor were teammates easy to find, as word was out that, as one insider put it, it was “pure torment; only martyrs agreed to play gorodki with Pavlov.”19
Internationally acclaimed long before its completion, the science village attracted many tourists. Among the visitors before its great unveiling at the Physiological Congress were writer H. G. Wells, physicist Niels Bohr, and artist Mikhail Nesterov.
Nesterov was a deeply religious and conservative man who sought to combine the realism of Pavlov’s beloved Travelers with spiritual themes and religious genres. A favorite of the tsarist court, he had been compelled after 1917 to abandon religious subjects and support himself through portraiture. His portraits of Pavlov in 1930 and 1935, as it turned out, signaled a turn in his work. Having earlier portrayed “the moral ideal and its bearers” through those who quietly performed good deeds and sought a sinless life, beginning with Pavlov he did so through those engaged in creative work.
The artist had initially resisted his friends’ suggestion that he paint Pavlov’s portrait, finding nothing particularly interesting in the famous face he knew from portraits and photos. In spring 1930, however, a mutual acquaintance, zoologist Alexander Severtsov, facilitated the collaboration. Pavlov owned a number of Nesterov’s works, two of which, The Great Vow and Sacred Russia, were among his favorites. He happily agreed to pose, a prospect made sweeter by his invitation to Nesterov to join him in Koltushi. That stay proved so mutually enjoyable that the artist returned for three more summers.
Nesterov was immediately taken with his host. “Despite his eighty-one years and grey hair and beard, he was the very picture of health, very youthful; his speech, gestures...the very sound of his voice, the surprising clarity and youthfulness of his ideas—which were often not in agreement with mine, but so convincing—all this attracted me. It seemed as if I was beginning to see `’my Pavlov,’ who was completely different than the person I had imagined before our meeting.” The scientist, he wrote to a friend in July 1930, “stunned me with his vitality.” For all his many years, “he is young—he swims every morning in any weather, is unceasingly cheerful, works much, and during his rest hours plays gorodki with his young physicians and is often victorious!” Simple, direct, unpretentious, and passionate, Pavlov “was in everything a completed man.”20
The ease and amenities of Koltushi life reminded the artist of bygone days. “The company of the brilliant old man was pleasant,” he wrote upon his departure one summer, “to say nothing of the change in circumstances, the comfort that surrounds Pavlov, long forgotten by us, and it was pleasant again to see, to live as people once lived.” His letters from Koltushi referred frequently to the spiritual qualities of his hosts, but also to the tasty, filling meals, to his “marvelous room” in the Pavlovs’ apartment, to the lovely gardens, and to the “wonderful Lincoln” that transported him between Leningrad and Koltushi. The two-story building in which they lived was “simple, architecturally pleasant, excellently appointed, with a marvelous glass terrace and balconies that face the distant horizon.... Everything is pleasant, comfortable, and clean.” In August 1933, Nesterov lamented his impending departure from “wonderful Koltushi, the brilliant old man and his kindly old woman.... I lived here as I have never lived in any vacation home. I really rested soul and body.”21
Koltushi time, he observed, was marked not just by days but by minutes. At 7 a.m., Pavlov would limp down the stairs for his morning swim; at precisely 8 a.m., tea was served, after which his host worked for two hours in the garden; at noon the family gathered for a “filling breakfast,” at 5:00 for supper, and at 8:00 for tea. At 10:00, everybody retired to their rooms. In the intervening hours, Nesterov sketched and painted, strolled the grounds, read, chatted with Pavlov, and enjoyed the company of his family.
For his portrait in 1930, Nesterov had Pavlov reading on the small balcony of his apartment in the old building by the lake. The artist initially considered it a “remarkable likeness,” and the Pavlovs came to share that view. Over time, however, Nesterov grew dissatisfied and would paint a second one in 1935 that, he thought, better captured the scientist’s dynamism and historical stature. In 1933, at Pavlov’s request, he also painted Serafima’s portrait, emphasizing her kindliness and spirituality. He frequently accompanied Serafima, “an intelligent, tactful old lady of seventy-five,” to services at Koltushi’s Peter and Paul Church, and they conversed frequently about religious themes.
He also discussed religion with Pavlov, whose views Nesterov later summarized succinctly: he was “a materialist, an atheist, but not a crude, rabid one. In any case, he was not an enemy of Christianity or even of our church.”22 According to testimony gathered in the 1990s from surviving parishioners of the local Peter and Paul Church, the Pavlovs were regular attendees at Easter and Christmas services and important supporters—helping the church pay its taxes and donating 8,000 rubles annually. These same sources claim that in 1934 Pavlov prevailed upon Sergei Kirov to reverse an earlier decision to close Peter and Paul during the campaign against religion. In that same year, when the state deprived the psalm reader of his work and ration cards, Pavlov sent him a crate of oranges and used his influence to have the cards renewed. His concern for the beleaguered church was evident to the Cannons when they visited in 1935, and the New York Times later reported that he “was said to have given funds assigned to him for a laboratory to repair his village church.” Deeply offended by the Soviet campaign against religion, he repeatedly commented to his daughter that “I want to do something for religion before I die.”23
* * *
Research on the “experimental genetics of higher nervous activity” began in September 1928 with Vyrzhikovskii and Maiorov’s study of the influence of environment upon nervous type. The experimental design was simple. They divided two litters of four puppies each into two groups, “imprisoned” and “free” dogs. After two months, the former were kept always in the kennel, while the latter spent their days running freely in a field and consorting with nature, other animals, and people. After more than a year, their behavior and responses to CR experiments were compared.
For Pavlov, the sharp differences in the performance of the two groups confirmed that—as he had hypothesized when analyzing the dogs Mampus and Garsik—life experience complicated the relationship between inborn qualities and adult nature. There was an important difference between a dog’s inherited, genotypic type (for psychologists, temperament) and the phenotypic constitution (for psychologists, character) that resulted, in part, from life experience.
By their behavior, the free dogs resembled most lab dogs—they “ran enthusiastically out of their cages, were affectionate with their experimenter, and strained against the leash.” The prisoners, on the other hand, were in a “pathetic state.” They refused to leave their cages, and when dragged out forcibly and coaxed to walk, they did so “with great cowardice,” reacting to any change in their surroundings by pressing themselves to the ground, huddling, and urinating. Free dogs responded to a novel stimulus with an investigative (or orientational) reflex—the “what is that?” reflex; prisoners responded with the same immobilizing passive-defensive reflex as did puppies. Incarcerated in the kennel, they had never “entered into the struggle for their existence with external agents of any type, had never experienced their defensive powers”—so they had never exchanged a purely defensive posture toward the external world for one of curiosity.
Contrary to expectation, prisoners performed better in CR experiments than did their free counterparts. This, the researchers concluded, resulted from the fact that a day on the experimental stand resembled the familiar life of the prisoners, while it required an adjustment for free dogs. That privileged group often responded to this restraint by falling into a hypnotic state that altered their responses to stimuli. The prisoners formed CRs more quickly, and their salivary responses to exciters were generally higher. Free dogs, however, more quickly formed differentiations. Such exercises of inhibition were apparently more challenging for prisoners; the experimenters noticed that two of them closed their eyes from the effort.24
Pavlov frequently referred to these experiments as evidence of the “enormous advantages” that knowledge of a dog’s parentage and upbringing would confer upon investigations. He easily equated their dogs with people: the prisoners, he remarked in December 1934, had turned into “pathetic cowards,” while the free dogs “were courageous to various degrees.” Confined to their cages, even prisoners of a strong nervous type had been unable to outgrow their “natural reflex of caution” and replace it with an investigative reflex. Among people, too, “a hothouse setting” could lead even an individual with a strong nervous system to remain for all his life “a pathetic coward.”25
He now awaited the completion of Koltushi’s special kennels to launch his research on the malleability and heritability of temperament and character—and then on the creation of optimal nervous types. Even after the kennels were constructed, he knew he would be in for a long wait during the slow process of breeding successive generations of dogs. He was also acutely aware that two fundamental scientific problems—each crucial to launching his experimental genetics of higher nervous activity—remained unresolved.
The most pressing unresolved difficulty was identifying the nervous type of his dogs. By the late 1920s, Pavlov’s typology was in dire straits; the need for a workable typology in order to pursue the breeding project at Koltushi transformed this longstanding problem into a pressing crisis and the constant subject of Wednesday gatherings.“We have arrived at a certain classification of types, but to chase reality into boundaries is difficult,” he conceded at one meeting in February 1934.26
The bewilderingly varied responses of dogs to experiments had far outstripped his ability to systematize and contain these variations within the Hippocratic typology. The growing number of coworkers, dogs, and experiments only exacerbated the problem, as did the increasing complexity of Pavlov’s schema of higher nervous processes and the development of new tests to assess the dogs’ various nervous qualities. Typological thinking was much in vogue in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, and Pavlov turned to various medical authorities—particularly to psychologists and psychiatrists such as Pierre Janet, Carl Jung, Emil Kraepelin, and Ernst Kretschmer—in his search for a typology that might better contain his data, but he always returned hopefully to the Hippocratic types as the best reflection of accumulated medical wisdom and human experience. In public—and even sometimes during his Wednesday conferences—he asserted that the Hippocratic typology had “found confirmation in our experiments,” yet he emphasized to coworkers that they must constantly keep in mind the innumerable possible “intermediate types.”27
The difficulties with typology also reflected other problems with his research. The ever-increasing avalanche of experimental data was constantly complicating established verities (such as the law of strength), and typological tests based on those verities generated disconcertingly paradoxical results.28 Pavlov also suffered from captivity to his own metaphors, which were constantly colliding with one another. For example, he used the terms “strong” and “weak” metaphorically to link the results of his CR experiments to general behavioral and psychological attributes. A dog was “strong” in two senses that Pavlov assumed were causally connected: it had plentiful functional material in its nerve cells—and so responded with healthy excitation to a CS, and could do so over many trials—and it behaved aggressively (or at least with some dignity). So, it seemed paradoxical that Nikitin’s bulldog Serko, much feared in the lab for his aggressiveness, performed in experiments like an “extraordinarily weak type” (that is, he was unable to develop stable CRs). Conversely, Burka performed well in experiments, but “incongruously, is a terrible coward. It would seem that this is a contradiction, that this strong [dog] should be brave.” Reflecting upon another such case, Pavlov mused that perhaps “there can be such cowardice also in very strong types.” Here, both his anthropomorphism and his subjective notions about bravery and cowardice played a fundamental role in his thinking. And these mental habits were inherent to his research since the attempt to identify the results of CR experiments with the psychological qualities evident in the daily life of dogs and humans lay at the very heart of his quest.29
Clinging to the Hippocratic typology as his (increasingly distant) explanatory target in the 1930s, Pavlov tinkered with it constantly. Each modification was driven by the need to explain baffling results with particular dogs, and invariably generated difficulties with others. In the 1920s he had finally arrived at a definition of the four types based upon the predominance of excitation and inhibition: cholerics were characterized by a strong imbalance toward excitation, sanguinics were basically balanced but leaned toward excitation, phlegmatics were basically balanced but leaned toward inhibition, and melancholics were defined by the extreme dominance of inhibition. In November 1930, he announced to his coworkers that he had been mistaken to think that “excitable types are specialists at excitation but bad at inhibition, and inhibitory types the reverse.” For example, Postrel—who had earlier exemplified the excitable type—had since demonstrated his ability, with sufficient training, to “develop very strong inhibition.”
So Pavlov abandoned his attempt to define the Hippocratic types on the basis of the relative strength of excitation and inhibition, and used instead the qualities of strength, balance, and lability. Nerve cells, he explained, have two basic qualities: the ability to perform work and lability (which he defined sometimes as the ability to respond to stimuli and other times as the ability to switch responses quickly—the opposite of inertia). A dog with strong excitatory processes might also have strong inhibitory processes; their relative balance and lability was another matter. In a March 1933 meeting, he presented this new version of the Hippocratic typology. Cholerics, sanguinics, and phlegmatics were strong; melancholics were weak. Cholerics were imbalanced, while sanguinics and phlegmatics were relatively well balanced; sanguinics manifested high lability, while phlegmatics possessed low lability. There remained, he conceded, many other possible subdivisions within these categories—which “undoubtedly should apply also to man.”30
With so many animals at his disposal—he and his coworkers discussed more than 145 different dogs in the Wednesday sessions from 1929 to 1936—Pavlov could easily choose a few exemplary types. Boy was “the ideal sanguinic and perhaps...the ideal nervous type in general.” Strong, balanced, and labile, “this is a most lively dog when free, curious about everything, testing everything and entering into relations with everybody—that is, lively to the utmost. He does not lose his liveliness when confined in the stand.” Zolotistyi was a typical phlegmatic: “peaceful, solid, with efficient movements and a good orientational reaction. He approaches new people trustingly, permits himself to be petted, doesn’t romp about and play. He becomes lively only if one begins to tease him with a sweet, in which case one can observe rather quick movements and even jumping. He pays no attention initially to temptations, shouts, or light blows...But if the teasing continues, he manifests an aggressive reaction: baring his teeth and growling.... He is indifferent to the dogs around him, but if they bully him he immediately enters the fight.” As one would expect from a strong and balanced dog, Zolotistyi showed true “artistry” on the experimental stand. Adjusting easily to the lab setting, he formed CRs and differentiations quickly, and manifested his “extraordinary cleverness” by sometimes reacting to the experimental situation more perceptively than his coworker. (The dog had ceased to respond with salivation to a periodically reinforced CS; only when the food bag was actually offered did he rise to eat. Zolotistyi had, it turned out, developed a CR to the sound of the food bag, ignoring the CS as less reliable.) Soon after this rave review, however, other experiments revealed Zolotistyi to be a “defective animal” with very weak lability—and unsuitable for lab work.
Such reclassification of previously exemplary specimens proved quite common. Umnitsa and Avgust, who had featured as model weak dogs in Pavlov’s 1927 monograph, were eventually recategorized as strong. Postrel, the unbalanced, overly excitable dog whose “break toward excitation” had provided an important early triumph for studies of experimental pathology, had since emerged as “the strongest of the balanced” and a “laboratory hero” by his ability to perform extremely difficult tasks (such as forming a delayed reflex to a very strong electrical shock). In all three cases, the discrepancy between earlier and later diagnoses was attributed to the salutary influence of training, which had revealed and developed the animals’ formerly unrecognized strengths. As Pavlov put it, the influence of experience upon character “unavoidably interferes in the behavior of the animal, making determination of type much more difficult.”31
Yet a reliable typology was a necessary precondition to Koltushi’s mission, so Pavlov announced at the meeting of September 27, 1933, that “the doctrine of types must be placed on firm foundations.” Wednesday gatherings would concentrate on a review that subject, and coworkers should be alert for any “vague spots.”32
During these discussions—which were most intense through May 1934, when completion of a kennel allowed the grand project to begin—Pavlov continually expressed his dissatisfaction with the diagnosis and classification of nervous types. Reflecting upon the baffling failure of two dogs to fit any of his categories, he admitted that the issue was “complex”: “One cannot consider that we understand the question of types absolutely clearly.” Two other cases elicited the admission that “Everywhere we are seized by hesitation about the type of nervous system of this or that dog,” and when writing in late 1934 his authoritative article on CRs for the Great Medical Encyclopedia, he confessed that the need to address typology made this “very unpleasant.”33
He searched in vain for a methodological solution. The various tests for strength, lability, and balance, he complained in November 1933, yielded frustratingly divergent results. Characteristically, he sought more data: “The more indicators, the better.” He and Maiorov devised twenty-one diagnostic tests for nervous type. Yet these additional indicators only multiplied the number of contradictory and baffling results. One test would often support the diagnosis of strong, while another indicated that the same dog was weak. Few tests yielded unambiguous results. A test of strength, for example, might easily be influenced by a dog’s lability, the often-unfathomable process of mutual induction, or the animal’s life experiences. Even when the diagnostic tests pointed to the same typological diagnosis, this frequently conflicted with the dog’s behavior and personality.34
Attempts to type the dog Satyr exemplified these difficulties. In daily life, the dog was “peaceful, asocial, and not at all cowardly;...completely indifferent, profoundly inattentive to everything, living in itself.” On the stand, he was “balanced, peaceful and strong.” Several diagnostic tests confirmed that strength—his response to bromides and his effortless formation of a CR to the metronome and even to a very strong exciter (the ratchet). Yet he failed to form a CR to other standard stimuli (indicating weak excitation) and to accomplish absolute differentiation (weak inhibition). “You cannot fully encompass [Satyr] in our system,” the chief concluded reluctantly. Perhaps the animal represented a “special variation of the excitable type with inertia of the excitatory process, as opposed to the lability of the unrestrained excitable type.” As Vera observed after her father’s death, such exceptions proved far more common than any rule.35
For all the difficulties with typology, a second, potentially even more intractable problem lay ahead. The task of breeding, selection, interbreeding, and subjecting dogs to various environments in order to produce “pure types” represented a plunge, for Pavlov, into the completely uncharted waters of genetics. He praised Mendel as the founder of genetics—and a statue of the Austrian monk would adorn Koltushi on its completion—but he had, at best, an educated layperson’s understanding of that rapidly developing science, admitting in June 1934 that he had read little on the subject. Kol’tsov recommended that he hire a good specialist, Leonid Krushinskii. Pavlov, however, declined, and consulted only with the physician-geneticists around him—with Sergei Davidenkov and N. A. Kryshova at his psychiatric clinic, and perhaps with Ekaterina Strogaia at Koltushi. These consultants, however, were familiar with the genetics of family histories and genealogical tables, not with the design and implementation of experiments on plants and animals. The reasoning that guided genetics at Koltushi was, then, rather crude and naive by the standards of the day.36
Kryshova later recalled that Pavlov was well aware that he had not developed a “precise approach.” For one thing, he knew that he needed to identify “the [hereditary] elements, to decide what is basic and what is derivative.” This, Pavlov conceded, was “difficult to say. Only time will tell.” In keeping with his lifelong scientific style, he hoped that by generating a sufficient number of facts he would be able to discern meaningful patterns, thus revealing which qualities were inherited and which were not, which were altered by various environmental regimes and which were immutable—and then to identify the underlying elements and mechanisms responsible for those patterns. As he put it in June 1934: “We are now working on indicators of the type of nervous system. Then we will acquire a series of generations and will see what comes of it.” In the meantime, he proceeded on the assumption that the qualities basic to his typology—strength, lability, and balance—were all basic, independently assorting hereditable traits.37
Pavlov’s style of genetic reasoning is clear in his enthusiastic account of experimental results with two puppies from the same litter, Lis and Zmei. These brothers had both resolved an extremely difficult task: each was exposed to a series of stimuli, some of which were reinforced with feeding to become CSs, while others were not, to become CIs. Scattered among that series were four flashes of light, only the third of which was reinforced with feeding. Alone among the dogs in the lab, both Lis and Zmei had differentiated successfully among the flashes, responding with significant salivation only to the third. Pavlov commented hopefully that their unique success in this diagnostic test for lability was a “triumph” for his approach: “Here it is very clear that these brothers by birth really turned out to have identical hereditarily conditioned lability.” The differences between the siblings testified to the independent inheritance of other traits: Lis had differentiated between the flashes only with great difficulty, barking and straining against the straps, while Zmei resolved it “peacefully to the end.” Thus, Lis combined lability with weak inhibition, Zmei with strong inhibition. The brothers were of good breeding age, so “We will use them as bearers of the quality of lability.”38
The power and prestige of the iconic Pavlov—and his intellectual ambitions—had here far outstripped his expertise and ability to produce scientific results. Showered with resources and press acclaim, his much-vaunted experimental genetics of higher nervous activity was actually in dire straits. He himself recognized that he lacked the essential precondition for it—a reliable typology of dogs. Furthermore, despite enthusiastic moments, he knew that his ability to identify “the basic hereditary elements” was questionable.
This lack of confidence no doubt contributed to the increasing frequency with which he voiced his concern that he would prove unable to justify the great support lavished upon him by the Soviet state. This was neither the false humility of a famous scientist nor simply an expression of gratitude. Pavlov knew that Koltushi was an expensive project in an impoverished land, and his sense of moral responsibility was quite powerful. Always publicly confident about his scientific research, he was privately well aware of its difficulties. Surveying the science village from his veranda, he had good reason for pride in his achievements, gratitude toward the Soviet state, and excitement about the future—but there, too, lurked his old Beast of Doubt.