Exhilarated and exhausted after the physiological congress, Pavlov rested at Koltushi during September 1935, enjoying Nesterov’s company and dacha life. Despite the lingering effects of his illness, he prepared confidently for what he characterized as an “even sharper turn toward the study of man” with a combative eye toward the International Congress of Psychology in April 1936. The past year had left him with a decidedly mixed but substantially more positive attitude toward the Bolsheviks, yet the entreaties from victims of Stalinism kept coming. He fixed upon those from persecuted clerics and began an essay on the nature of religion, both to organize his own thoughts and to convince Molotov to change Soviet policy.
Nesterov was delighted to be back, painting and enjoying Koltushi life. The village now had “a finished look,” he reported, and “the garden is beautified with busts of Descartes, Mendel, Sechenov. I am again in my little room. I am accustomed to it and always have flowers, of which there are many here, as the garden flourishes to Ivan Petrovich’s delight.” After all the “fuss and hubbub” of the past month, Pavlov had slipped gratefully into his Koltushi routine, including games of gorodki, in which he remained an active participant and heated “squabbler.” Visitors constantly dropped by; in one letter, Nesterov mentioned an English lord and his family. Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain whom Pavlov had befriended during his trip to London, spent four hours there with a beaming host, who showed him the grounds, the lab, and his “remarkable chimps” while talking constantly about his plans for the future. He was preparing “to do battle with the psychologists,” Pavlov confided. “They are confused and working on trivialities. What kind of psychology is this without physiology?”1
“When I become old,” he commented frequently, he would retire permanently to Koltushi to tend his garden and watch his beloved Biostation flourish. He still felt weak—his gait slow and feeble. “The damned grippe,” he wrote to Maiskii in October, “has shaken my certainty of living to one hundred. Its tail remains, though I still don’t permit changes in the schedule and scale of my activities.”2
Film director A. V. Vinnitskii, who was recording experiments with Roza and Rafael, later recalled a poignant encounter with Pavlov that revealed his preoccupation with his mortality. The two were discussing the prospects for extending the human life span when “Suddenly Pavlov asked ‘How much longer in your opinion will I live?’” Attempting awkwardly to reconcile tact with honesty, Vinnitskii responded “five years.” Pavlov, clearly disturbed, rejoined that, given his long-lived forebears and the progress of modern medicine, he thought he had fifteen years left—that he would live to one hundred. They then watched Vinnitskii’s recording of Roza and Rafael, which Pavlov enjoyed until he himself entered the screen. Shocked by his aged appearance, he departed wordlessly for his divan. In a conversation with Petrova at about the same time, he spoke enthusiastically of his plans before passing into a “melancholy mood and sadly repeating the phrase that he uttered more and more frequently: ‘Yes, you dream about this and that, and suddenly you die! It is a shame. I would want to live at least another five years in order to see the triumph of our common idea and the fate of my homeland.”3
Nesterov, dissatisfied with his first portrait of Pavlov, convinced him to sit for another. Pavlov posed on the glass veranda of his new house (which he had not yet occupied) against the background of the emerging village, which the artist used to dramatize his subject’s achievements. Hoping also to capture Pavlov’s distinctive conversational style, he persuaded Vera, “his twin by appearance and temperament,” to talk to her father during sittings. When she tired of this task, Rikman, the “calm, thoughtful” manager of the biological station, happily assumed that role. Every day after morning tea, Nesterov sketched as the pair conversed about science. “As time passed, the conversation became increasingly lively. During these conversations, Ivan Petrovich would frequently strike the table with his fists, which gave me the opportunity to sketch this characteristic gesture.” Pavlov was pleased with the result. Nesterov’s feelings were (perhaps inevitably) mixed, but the work enjoyed great critical success, eventually winning him a lucrative Stalin Prize and finding a home in Moscow’s Tret’iakov Gallery. The portrait was finished by mid-September, when Pavlov returned to Leningrad to resume his research.4
He now confronted the shocking revelation that Vsevolod was fatally ill.5 Vsevolod had suffered severe stomach pains during the Congress, but, not wanting to disturb his father, had waited until returning home from Riazan to consult a doctor. The examining physician concluded immediately that he needed surgery, but the surgeon, Bunge, refused to operate, thinking that Vsevolod suffered from an inoperable cancer of the pancreas. Nesterov accompanied Pavlov to visit the hospitalized Vsevolod on September 20. The physicians had concealed their diagnosis from the family, but, based on the symptoms and his reading of family hereditary history, Pavlov concluded immediately that his son had cancer. He forcefully contradicted Serafima when she voiced the same conclusion, however, and he did not share his diagnosis with Nesterov. After visiting Vsevolod, an emotional Pavlov accompanied the artist to the train station and “for the first time in the years of our acquaintance kissed me in the traditional way—directly on the mouth.” As Nesterov mounted the stairs to the platform, Pavlov called out hopefully, “Until next summer in Koltushi.”6
Some weeks later, at Pavlov’s insistence, Bunge performed an exploratory operation on the patient, finding a fist-sized cancer that had spread throughout the pancreas and stomach. The situation was hopeless. Vsevolod suffered for three more days before dying on October 30.7 The grief-stricken father secured permission from the authorities to bury his son in the prestigious Literary Bridges sector of Volkovo Cemetery, where the Pavlovs’ family plot would join the graves of such leading figures in Russian cultural history as Pisarev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Turgenev, and Mendeleev. Izvestiia covered the brief ceremony, at which Pavlov expressed his grief in a vow about science and medicine: “Vsevolod! I give you my word that the torturous end of your broken and prematurely terminated life will not be in vain. I have some voice among people. With this voice I will tell your fatal story. It will yet again turn people’s attention to one of the greatest scientific truths—Mendel’s law of heredity. Once implemented, having become a vital rule, this truth will free man from the burden of grief and will provide him a healthy and joyful existence.”8
The impersonal scientific language concealed his guilt feelings. By Pavlov’s interpretation of his family history, he confided to Petrova, he should never have had children, since they were “inevitably doomed to a torturous death.” His mother had died of stomach cancer, his maternal aunt of pancreatic cancer, and his uncle Ivan of tuberculosis. As recessive Mendelian traits, he believed, these diseases had skipped his own generation, in which all the children were healthy, but then had recombined fatally in one-half of his own progeny: Vsevolod had been afflicted with cancer, and Vera, judging by her constant physical ailments, was destined to perish painfully from tuberculosis. Serafima, too, sensed that he blamed himself for Vsevolod’s death.9
In an interview with Izvestiia the evening of Vsevolod’s funeral, Pavlov cast his family tragedy as a broader lesson: “Genetic truths have been sufficiently investigated to begin to practice them intensively.” Physicians should master the laws of heredity in order to “eliminate at the root the transmission to the next generation of the sources of illnesses, of pathological genes.” No doubt in response to a direct question, Pavlov added that he “sharply censures the fascist practice of mandatory sterilization of the population” and “considers that in our country the struggle for a healthy generation should be conducted by means of a broad knowledge of the laws of heredity and through the voluntary, conscious refusal of married couples with unhealthy heredity to reproduce.”10
He also began an essay on this subject, titling it “On One Important Obligation of the Contemporary Physician.” Here he adopted the common eugenic theme that humans should pay the same attention to their own breeding as they did to that of domesticated animals. Many positive and negative characteristics were inherited—talents, illnesses, and resistance to external pathological agents—although “the entire affair, of course, is in many respects extraordinarily complex.” Neither the limited knowledge of contemporary science nor “the sensitivity of cultured man” justified the “German means of state sterilization.” Rather, physicians must master and popularize genetics, and potential parents must consider carefully the hereditary legacy that they would pass on to their children.11
While her husband expressed himself in the language of science, Serafima drew strength from her religious faith, as she had when suffering the deaths of her firstborn Mirchuk more than fifty years earlier and Viktor during the civil war. Even in her grief, she attempted to maintain her composure for her family’s sake: “Yes, we have been struck by a bolt from the blue!” she wrote to the Babkins in December. “It has long been time for me to lie down in my grave, but to take Vsevolod? I believe, firmly believe, that God does everything for our best, that we cannot understand his designs with our feeble minds, so I pray to Him who suffered human torments.... I have aged so, but must restrain myself and do not dare even to cry for the sake of Iv. Petr., who is suffering this loss so painfully, for the sake of Vera, who is seriously ill, and, finally, for Vsevolod’s widow, who is living with us.” The couple now spent their evenings sitting quietly at home, often discussing Serafima’s memoirs. Pavlov was now also pondering his essay on religion, and his thoughts about the relative efficacy of science and religion in dealing with life’s unexpected blows drew upon his and his wife’s responses to Vsevolod’s death.12
He had continued to work during Vsevolod’s illness, preoccupied with his turn toward human psychology and psychiatry. He selected schizophrenic patients for the trials with sleep therapy that would begin in January; ruminated about the similarities and differences between dogs, chimps, and humans; and began his manuscript Psychology as a Science. Having resumed the Wednesday meetings on October 2, he skipped only two sessions before the Christmas holiday—one on the day of Vsevolod’s death, and the other to give a speech honoring one of Petrova’s institutional homes, the State Institute for Improvement of Physicians.
There are indications that, beginning in November 1935, the Stalinist leadership may have been preparing an attack upon Pavlov. The politically crucial Physiological Congress was over, the wave of arrests was building toward the first spectacular show trial of mid-1936 and the Great Terror of 1937, the Great Break had ended Lenin’s conciliatory policy toward “bourgeois intellectuals” for all but a privileged few, and Stalin had always bridled at Pavlov’s political criticisms. As he had reminded the Politburo in September 1934, the physiologist was “not ours.” In late November 1935, the SNK directed the Academy of Sciences to dispatch Bukharin and two other academicians—Party philosopher A. M. Deborin and pro-Communist biologist V. L. Komarov—to inspect Pavlov’s labs and ask him to report about his work at the January session of the Academy of Sciences. If judged by the much-trumpeted (but highly flexible) Soviet standard of the time, their contribution to “practice,” Pavlov’s scientific achievements might well have been judged unsatisfactorily meager. At about this same time, according to an unsourced but well-researched and generally reliable work, Molotov directed leading Soviet journalist Mikhail Kol’tsov to prepare a high-profile critique of Pavlov’s political views.
Pavlov declined to speak in January—he was still exhausted. Wanting to report with appropriate energy and enthusiasm on “the mission of my scientific life,” he secured a postponement until after the summer holiday. He indeed worried, according to Petrova, that the state might not consider his results sufficient justification for its lavish financial support. Her counsel regarding the SNK’s request and Pavlov’s anxieties included, as always, soothing words about the regime’s high regard and personal concern for him. Perhaps she went a bit overboard, as he reportedly responded, “Perhaps you’ll join the Party?” By her account, she explained that she had not done so because a Communist’s obligations were onerous, she cherished her free time, and she feared she would not make a good Party member. “A non-Party person can also be a useful member of the state,” she added—and clearly with some justification.13
Engrossed in his work, yet grieving, fatigued, and feeling poorly, he spent the Christmas holiday alone with Serafima at Koltushi. “The weather was unusually wonderful,” she recalled. “Evenings were especially good—quiet, full of some secret charm. Before going to bed we always went out to stroll along the garden paths that had been cleared of deep snow especially for Ivan Petrovich.” Vera noticed that her parents had both aged markedly after Vsevolod’s death, but that Koltushi life was agreeing with them. Both looked more energetic now, and they refused to give in to their grief. “Papa does not surrender even a drop with his work,” she reported to the Babkins, and, having finally shaken off the grippe, “has again begun to walk very quickly.”14
As an icon of Soviet science, its grand old man, he received frequent greetings from mass organizations, and his warm responses were immediately printed in the Soviet press. Here he related from personal experience to some basic Soviet policies and values: the national effort to modernize, personal and national discipline, veneration of hard work, the combination of physical and mental labor. These were values that he himself had imbibed long ago—in his childhood from his father, who had combined work in his orchard with a passion for good books, and from the godfather who had restored him from his bad fall with a vigorous combination of physical labor and mandatory reading, and in his adolescence from one of his favorite authors, Samuel Smiles. As an adult, he had placed these values at the center of his life and had preached them to others, crediting them with his own achievements and bitterly lamenting their absence in the “Russian type.” These, then, were official Soviet values truly close to his heart.
He was especially pleased—and not simply from personal egotism—when representatives of workers and peasants turned to him, a scientist, as this expressed the unprecedented status of science in the new Russia. Riazan’s farmers followed up on his visit by sending him a crate of apples as a symbol of the prosperity of their collective farm. Pavlov thanked them for a gift that “reminds me of my love for work in our garden together with my father. This love for work on the land remained with me throughout my life, and I think it is the main reason for my longevity. I fervently hope that this [love of labor] will remain in collective agricultural work as it was in individual labor. Collective work of course has its own great advantage compared with individual labor. If only our Russian nature will withstand it!”15
In late December 1935, he also responded warmly to a request that he send greetings to a meeting of Stakhanovite miners in the town of Stalino. Stakhanovism was an official movement of workers pledged to dramatically increase their efficiency and output. Launched in 1935, the movement took its name from Aleksei Stakhanov, who had reportedly exceeded his work plan fourteen-fold by mining 102 tons of coal during a six-hour shift. Stakhanovite doctrine also stressed the importance of education, of the joining of head and hands so workers could take an active role in increasing the efficiency of production. “All my life,” Pavlov wrote to them, “I have loved mental and physical labor and, if you please, the latter even more. I feel especially satisfied when some good sense has been introduced into the latter—that is, when head and hands are united. You have taken that road. With all my soul I wish you further progress along this single road to human happiness.” In response, Stakhanov and his comrades wrote a note about their movement, which, composed of “people conducting physical labor, working under the leadership of our great Party,” was implementing “your profoundly correct comment about the gigantic usefulness for socialist construction when the working person unites theory with practice, or, as you expressed it ‘head with hands.’”16
On January 15, 1936, a correspondent from the Stakhanovite newspaper For Industrialization visited the Pavlovs’ apartment in Leningrad, showed Pavlov the issue in which his greeting and the Stakhanovites’ response appeared, and elicited another quotable quote: “Remarkable people, a remarkable movement. I am glad, very glad, that my thoughts were understood correctly. What can I say in reply? Put an end to loafers. Only labor! Mental and physical labor provides complete satisfaction to man. One must work harder. One must work better. One must know how to combine work with rest. That is why, for example, despite my years, I have preserved my capacity to work—only because I always combined mental and physical labor. I would wish that everything the miners write about in their letter would become established in life.”17
Asked to address Soviet youth on the occasion of the Tenth Congress of the Young Communist League in 1936, he contributed an eloquent statement on the demands of a life in science. “What would I wish for the youth of my homeland who have dedicated themselves to science?” he began. First and foremost, he wished them consistency. Discipline, patience, and chernaia rabota—a term that usually referred to backbreaking physical toil—were all critical to accumulating facts and avoiding seductive premature explanations. “Facts are the scientist’s air, without them you will never be able to take flight. Without them your ‘theories’ are empty vanities. But when investigating, experimenting, and observing, try not to remain on the surface of facts. Don’t turn into an antiquarian of facts. Try to penetrate into the mystery of their origins. Persistently seek the laws that govern them.” Next, he wished them humility. “Never think that you already know everything. And however highly others might value you, always have the courage to say to yourself, ‘I am ignorant.’” The scientist cannot afford pride, for it compromised one’s objectivity and ability to participate in a collective where “what is yours” and “what is mine” were dissolved in the general mission. Finally, he wished them passion. “Remember that science demands a person’s entire life. And if you were to have two lives, this, too, would be inadequate. Science demands great effort and great passion. Be passionate in your work and in your quests.”
He concluded with an homage to the Soviet state’s support for science, and with an expression of the moral obligation that this placed upon scientists themselves: “Our homeland is opening great vistas before scientists, and, to give due credit, they are introducing science generously into the life of our country. Extremely generously. What can one say about the situation of the young scientist in our country? Here, you know, it is quite clear. Of those to whom much is given, much is asked. And for the young, as for us, it is a question of honor—to justify the great hopes which our homeland has placed upon science.”18
Yet, as he basked in the warm afterglow of the physiological congress, letters from the victims of repression kept coming. Shortly after that gathering, Pavlov learned of the dire consequences for one Soviet citizen of a thoughtless action by his former American coworker Horsley Gantt. Serafima Kir’ianova had worked for Gantt as a secretary during his stay in the USSR and helped him translate Pavlov’s Twenty Years of Experience into English. In August 1929, while Gantt was departing hurriedly to attend the Physiological Congress in the United States, he had left his personal effects with Kir’ianova for safekeeping. Several months later he asked her to ship them to the States—sending her 900 rubles through the Norwegian consulate to cover expenses. Predictably, this attracted the attention of the secret police, who arrested her for possession of contraband and sent her to a Siberian prison camp. There she served out her term from January 1930 until September 1932. On returning to Leningrad, she learned that her criminal record prevented her from finding work or residing in the city. As of August 1935, when Gantt asked Pavlov to intervene on her behalf, Kir’ianova was working as a machinist on the Moscow-Volga canal. She hoped to have her record cleared and her passport returned so she could complete her higher education.19
Pavlov was particularly moved by pleas from those victimized by the campaign against religion. In early September 1935, he received letters from V. A. Gannushchenko and G. A. Bogomolov, both of whom, along with their families, were among the many who had been exiled and deprived of the right to a higher education and work because they were either former priests or the children of priests. Bogomolov wrote to Pavlov on behalf of Leningrad’s clergy:
At the recent Physiological Congress you said “Physiologists are obligated to teach how correctly to work, to think, to feel, to wish, and to resolve the most difficult questions, not in a beastly manner, but by strict observance of Justice.”
If this is the task of physiologists, then I, as a member of that same despised class into which you were born, turn to you, a world eminence, with the request that you petition the state for just relations to this class. In connection with the murder of S. M. Kirov, the clergy has been exiled from Leningrad merely because it serves the Religious Cult [the Stalinist term for the Eastern Orthodox Church], not for being guilty of anything else. Our children...have also been exiled, though they are guilty of nothing but their origins. During our arrest and interrogation, no accusations of counterrevolution were made—our sentence was merely pronounced: “exile to this or that town.”...In the name of Justice, we ask that you petition the state to treat us justly. You know, it is always easier for the strong to use violence, but, whatever its source, violence remains violence in a cultured country that “has adopted the goal of the elimination of social injustice.”...If religion is merely an opiate (lulling and deluding the people), then it will vanish without violence; if it is the power of the human spirit, then nothing in the world will eliminate it.20
Himself of peasant origin, Bogomolov supported “with all my soul the grandiose construction of socialism,” but as a Christian he rejected violence. “With great eagerness” he awaited Pavlov’s response as a physiologist and “Great World Intellect,” hoping it would bring some peace to “my tormented soul.”21
Such letters led him to protest this “current injustice that constantly depresses me” in a December 1935 letter to Molotov. “Aside from the fact that the servants of the church are themselves subjected to undeserved punishments, their children are deprived of general rights, for example, they are not admitted to institutions of higher learning.” Pavlov was himself from a priestly family, he reminded the Communist leader, and such families had produced some 50 percent of Russia’s prerevolutionary physicians, many of its scientists, and “our first teachers of vital truth and progress (he mentioned three members of Russia’s nineteenth-century progressive pantheon: Belinskii, Dobroliubov, and Chernyshevskii). “Why are they all included as members of some typologically exploitative class? I am a freethinker and rationalist of the first order and have never been any kind of exploiter, and as a product of my original environment I nevertheless recall my early life with a sense of gratitude both for the lessons of my childhood and for my schooling.”
After consulting with Stalin, Molotov invoked his greater expertise in such matters to dismiss Pavlov’s reference to the “many unjustly accused.” He assured him that “Soviet power avidly corrects its real mistakes,” but he knew from experience that people were often not so innocent as one might think on the basis of “usual life experience, old encounters, former acquaintanceships, and so forth.”
Yet he informed the scientist that change was coming. Restrictions on the children of the clergy had earlier been necessary, but now should be lifted. Here he was providing advance word of the Politburo’s impending decision to lift the prohibition against the children of various outcast groups receiving a higher education. Molotov’s words gladdened Pavlov—who saw the change as another hopeful indication that the regime was moderating—but, as he well knew, this hardly ended the repression of religion.22
For months Pavlov had told his family that he wanted to do something for religion, and he informed Molotov of his intention to send him a “principled and lengthy” statement about “our state atheism.” He worked on that essay while bedridden with the flu in late January and early February 1936. Dissatisfied with his lengthy unfinished draft—he deemed it “too unimaginative, dry, and skeletal”—he decided instead to write a letter, but he never completed that, either. 23
This draft represents Pavlov’s last recorded commentary on religion, Soviet Communism, and, implicitly, his own scientific quest. Fascinating and psychologically revealing, it expressed both the long arc of his life and thought and the immediate context in which he wrote it. Throughout his life, Pavlov frequently expressed contradictory sentiments as he struggled to make up his mind about difficult issues, and here he was trying to convince Molotov to halt the persecution of religion. The essay is especially interesting in view of his autobiographical habits when generalizing. When Pavlov wrote about “science,” he usually had in mind his own science, so his comments about science in this essay are, at least in large part, reflections and emotional reactions to the development and status of his own research.
He began on a positive note reflecting his belief—one he shared with many other observers—that a series of developments since 1933, for example, the rights to be enshrined in the new constitution, signaled a fundamental moderation of Soviet policies: “I must admit that the longer your regime exists, the further it departs from the extremes from which it began, making room for actual reality instead of theoretical constructions. The depersonalization of the human being in the extreme form of Communism and a despotic dictatorship is giving way subtly to a gradual recognition of the rights of the individual.”24 This positive interpretation of the contradictory tendencies of the time expressed both his native optimism and—as reflected in his reference to the Bolsheviks’ increasing appreciation of “actual reality”—his faith in the civilizing influence of reason and science.
A baleful exception to recent positive developments, he continued, was the state’s “barbaric” persecution of religion and religious believers. Freedom of religious belief, like freedom of scientific inquiry, Pavlov insisted, was a basic human right, a matter of individual conscience. Furthermore, religious belief played a positive cultural role by relieving the most painful dimension of life—the lack of control over one’s destiny that resulted from sluchainosti (accidents, chance, unforeseeable events).
Dismissing the view that religion originated in deception by self-interested exploiters, he attributed it rather to a purposeful, reflexive, adaptive response by “naive man” to the dawn of human self-consciousness and man’s juxtaposition of himself to the natural world. Religion was rooted in a fundamental psychological need: oppressed by the sluchainosti of his natural and social milieu, man “needed to believe in some law of nature, in some more or less constant connection between cause and effect” so he could assume some control over his own destiny and “depend in a human way upon his own activity.” This need was filled by the concept of a god who “held everything in his hands and who, if well disposed toward you, did not permit any evil sluchainosti.”25
Up to this point, Pavlov had denied the Party’s equation of religion with class exploitation, but had not departed from the common rationalist analysis of religion. He noted that, since science was revealing the real causal connections in nature, rationalists dismissed religion as a remnant of primitive, prerational thought. For them, science, the fruit of human reason, would “completely replace, eliminate religion.” That indeed had long been his own view (though he did not mention this in his essay), one that had played an important part in his decision, along with many other youth of his generation, to embark on a career in science. Now, however, although he remained a rationalist “to the marrow of my bones,” he found this claim unconvincing.
Here his essay takes an unexpected and psychologically revealing turn as he dwells upon the horrors of uncertainty and the uncontrollable factors in human life. As so often when he addressed broader issues, the autobiographical dimension of his thinking is palpable as he slips constantly between writing in the first and third persons:
What is the most difficult, really terrible aspect of human life?
Sluchainosti and sluchainosti, sluchainosti of birth—inherited genes and in earlier times of social class; of environment, initial conditions, sluchainosti of death,...sluchainosti of illness, sluchainosti of every other misfortune and obstacle in life. When I am so constantly and terribly complexly dependent upon sluchainosti, can I peacefully and soberly calculate and fulfill my mission in life? One needs a regular, undisturbable course of life and certainty in it. But where can one obtain either?26
Rationalists replied that science provided an escape from sluchainosti, but (as life had taught him) this was not really the case for any individual. The main function of science was indeed to replace uncertainty with lawful, controllable regularity, and it had succeeded in doing so to a great degree—but it remained “almost powerless” as an agent of certainty in any individual human life.
However much I were to conduct myself consciously according to the rules of science, could I really be certain that some unexpected serious illness would not swoop down unexpectedly upon me with various consequences? Although I always walk on the pavements and am careful at all intersections...[can I really be certain] that a truck will not strike me or that a mass of concrete will not break off [and fall on me]? And my sense of peace is connected with the fate of my intimates, of my friends, and all such serious sluchainosti [concerning them] also shake my internal world. And the fate of my homeland? A mass of sluchainosti that have not even been considered by any science [threaten it], to say nothing, of course, about dangers that are rationally foreseeable.27
Here Pavlov voiced the preoccupation with certainty and control that had always resided at the heart of his life and his science, fusing his personal psychology and passions with his training in physiology and the scientific spirit of his age. And he was clearly reflecting on his own long life: on the many tragedies of the years of war and revolution, on the recent death of his son (a “bolt from the blue” in Serafima’s words, the “sluchainost’ of illness” in his own), on his constant distress about the repression of innocents and the “death of my homeland.” Perhaps he was also contemplating his mortality and the ultimate sluchainost’ of death (“You dream about this and that, and suddenly you die!”).
His uncharacteristically sober assessment of science’s ability to conquer uncertainty was perhaps also a tacit recognition that, for all his achievements over the past three decades, his own research had failed to confine the psyche within the comforting certainties of mechanistic law—and, indeed, seemed nowhere close to doing so. Pavlov had certainly not despaired of science. Having been its apostle for seventy years, he remained as committed as ever to its historic mission and to his own grand quest. He still believed firmly that science would gradually succeed in understanding, limiting, and perhaps finally eliminating uncertainty—but he saw no prospect of substantial success in the foreseeable future.
As it had since the emergence of human consciousness, religion continued to provide the comforting certainty of an omniscient and kind divinity, a necessary “lightning rod” against life’s bolts from the blue—not just (as he had put it previously) for “weak types,” but for the “great majority” of people. Granted that no god existed and no divinity really protected the believer from the “arbitrary power of unthinking and cruel sluchainosti” (which were governed by the “implacable laws of nature”), religious faith still cushioned the believer against life’s unexpected blows, against the terrible grief that might otherwise destroy a person’s energy and interest in life.28
Religion also contributed to certainty and control of one’s destiny by establishing moral ideals of behavior. He was no doubt thinking of Serafima and her response to the recent loss of Vsevolod, and perhaps he was recalling the spiritual comfort of life as a young believer in Riazan: “In order that an omnipotent God protect you from sluchainosti, you must please him,...aspire to resemble him in those qualities that you ascribe to him—that is, you must approach the ideal. And when you are afflicted by misfortune, this is either a test of your faith in god or a reminder that you are failing to fulfill his wishes and so must pull yourself together.” Religion thus replaced “the unrestrained arbitrariness of external forces” with “an ideal of behavior.”
That moral ideal was personified by Jesus, “the apex of humanity—who embodied the greatest of all human truths, the truth of the equality of all people, which provides the basis of the rights of the individual and a moral concept that divides all human history into two halves: the slavery era before Jesus and the era of cultural Christianity after Jesus.” What objection could any exact science, or any rational state, have to the moral teachings of this Christianity?29
Indeed, here resided a promising commonality between Christianity and Communism. Pavlov acknowledged the “undeniable service” of Communism’s moral core: its insistence upon “elimination of the distinction between the wealthy and the poor” based upon the recognition that useful labor should entitle a person to “respect and welfare in life.” By its commitment to “the greatest of all human truths, the truth of the equality of all people,” Communism shared considerable ground with Christian culture. This commonality might well have become a key subtheme of his essay had he completed it. As his draft lost structure toward the end, it became a series of scattered comments and partial thoughts—notes for further development. One of these read: “You are the successors to Jesus’s mission. There would be among you fervent and talented adherents from among the servants of the church.”30
This was not the first time that Pavlov had identified a fundamental unity between the missions of Jesus and the Communists. Two other recorded instances suggest that, for him, this commonality constituted an important positive dimension of Soviet power, an argument for state tolerance of religion, and a reason to consider the hopeful possibility that, despite its considerable crimes and blunders, Bolshevism might become a genuine Russian contribution to civilization.
The first recorded trace of this sentiment is the recollection by biochemist N. N. Demin of Pavlov’s comment at a Wednesday gathering, probably in April 1934, after the Easter break that he maintained in defiance of Communist policy: “We are now gathered after Easter. We are beginning our work. Actually, one need not celebrate Easter. Jesus Christ was a man. I do not believe in god. Christ died in his agony. He could not be reborn. Therefore one need not celebrate Easter. But one must necessarily celebrate Christmas. Jesus Christ was a great man. He was the first Communist on earth. And look, you Communists sitting here, you should especially celebrate the birth of Christ, since Jesus Christ was the first Communist on earth.” Here, of course, Pavlov was goading the Bolsheviks by suggesting that rather than banning Christmas, they should be celebrating it with the same fervor as they did the birthdays of Marx and Lenin. Yet he was also making the same serious point that he developed in his later uncompleted essay.31
Pavlov touched upon this same theme when Alexander Chizhevskii visited his lab sometime between August 1935 and February 1936. The results of the Bolshevik experiment were unclear, he confided, and he himself did not endorse their policies. But he wanted to believe that Soviet socialism might constitute a genuinely Russian contribution to world civilization: “All this is the product of Russian hands; although there are many non-Russians, Jews, among them, this is but a thin stratum. At the basis of Bolshevism lies the striving of the Russian spirit toward perfection, justice, good, toward a great humanity. Karl Marx created this system, but the Russian spirit recast it in its own way. Marx was a Jew, but so was Christ, and Bolshevism is more multifaceted and complete than Christianity, but one must still await the results for decades, a half century at least.”32
This comment, and Pavlov’s evolving assessment over the years of Bolshevism and Jewish influence upon it, reflected both his identification with Russianness and his persistent anti-Semitism. He was clearly predisposed to attribute the negative dimensions of Bolshevism to Jewish influence. When excoriating the Bolsheviks in 1928, he had complained to Horsley Gantt that Jews occupied “high positions everywhere,” that it was “a shame that the Russians cannot be rulers of their own land.” Now, in 1935–1936, when he was expressing a more positive attitude toward the Bolsheviks, he minimized the Jewish presence in the Communist Party as a “thin stratum.” Gedde Vyrzhikovskaia later recalled a discussion at Koltushi during the “quiet terror” of 1934–1936 when Pavlov was “scolding the Jews,” giving her the distinct impression that he blamed them for the arrests in Leningrad. Upon learning later that one woman among his listeners was Jewish, he was embarrassed and ashamed: “Why didn’t anyone warn me?”33
According to Chizhevskii’s account of their conversation, Pavlov emphasized one basic reality: Russia’s fate hung in the balance, so “we must help our rulers.” This duty was especially incumbent upon Russian scientists. “Despite my age, I carry the burden of science—and not only for science, but also for the glory of Russia, even if it is Bolshevik, so that we will be respected in the world and not considered beasts who have violated everything human. Many think that the Bolsheviks are buying Pavlov—but don’t believe it. Pavlov is not for sale, but he has come to a logical conclusion: one must help the Bolsheviks in everything good about them.”34
Pavlov had become neither a believing Christian nor a convert to Communism. Yet he was groping hopefully toward his own grand reconciliation. He had abandoned religion for science and scientism, but now science, perhaps, was producing a more realistic, civilized, and humane Bolshevism that might become a genuine Russian contribution to the great historical era inaugurated by Jesus. His wife, proceeding from the other shore, shared those hopeful sentiments. Time, they agreed, would tell.35
* * *
On Tuesday, February 18, Pavlov arrived at his lab at the VIEM and, as usual, spent much of his time there at the bench with Petrova. He was pale and still did not feel completely well. Yet he presided over the next day’s Wednesday gathering, discussing Dolin’s experiments on a dog’s apprehension of rhythms, Petrova’s latest report on the castrated Mampus, and a schizophrenic patient who had awakened after sleep therapy. On Thursday, per his routine, he was at his Institute at the Academy of Sciences, where he participated energetically in discussions of results and future work. In the evening, he had a slight cough and scratchy throat—as it turned out, the entire family was coming down with the flu—but Serafima could not dissuade him from spending his usual Friday at Koltushi. At 9:15 a.m., he left his apartment and entered the waiting Lincoln for the trip.36
The weather had turned suddenly much colder overnight. Snow and ice covered the roads. Driving slowly and carefully, skidding but once along the way, the chauffeur reached the biological station in about an hour. Pavlov made the rounds there—observing experiments, conferring with individual coworkers (at greatest length with Maria Timofeeva, who was studying a hybrid generation of Koltushi-bred dogs), and approving a technical innovation that allowed an entire group of observers to watch a dog in the isolated experimental chamber. He spoke animatedly to coworkers about the positive results obtained with sleep therapy for schizophrenics and his intention to find a pharmacological concoction superior to the Cloetta mixture.
At 12:30, he climbed the stairs to his apartment on the second floor, where he lunched on porridge, read the newspapers, and spoke animatedly to his coworker Alexander Lindeman about the challenge posed to the League of Nations by Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. He rested for an hour before heading for the chimps’ quarters to confer with Denisov and observe Roza and Rafael.
The architect Bezpalov joined him on his way out: “A cold, strong, biting wind was raging. Ivan Petrovich donned the spring jacket that he had brought from England and his hat with ears. The coat was not buttoned, and as we exited to the porch a blast of wind blew it half open. I moved to help him close it, but I. P. responded in a pedantic tone that one need not bundle up, that he had ceased catching cold from the time he had begun wearing this jacket instead of a fur coat.” Serafima thought that her husband had stopped taking care of himself after Vsevolod’s death, but he actually was implementing his hypothesis that, since he warmed his body and sweated profusely with his brisk gait, lighter garments were healthier. So he now wore a light summer jacket until December, when, as the moist and bitter Leningrad winter set in, he exchanged it for his new spring jacket.37
Denisov demonstrated for the chief a set of trials displaying Rafael’s acquisition of “scientific” knowledge. Pavlov watched with delight as the chimp solved a complex problem through a process that fit his interpretation that a period of chaotic trial and error led not to any sudden Köhlerian “insight,” but to the gradual association of associations. He was now fully prepared, he announced, to confront the psychologists at the International Congress in Madrid. He then convened a meeting with coworkers to discuss ongoing research, reviewed the plans for the Biostation with Rikman and Lindberg, and set off in the Lincoln for Leningrad.
Upon returning home, he confessed to Serafima that he was “chilled to the bone,” but was “happy, joking, and laughing” during a meal of blini. At 11:00, much too early by his unvarying routine, he asked her to prepare his bed, since he felt incapable of doing so himself. She was suddenly terrified, and prayer failed to calm her.38
He awoke Saturday morning with a raspy chest and elevated temperature. Serafima summoned Dr. Bok, the lung specialist who had been part of the team that had seen Pavlov through his near-fatal bout with flu in the spring. Diagnosing “deep bronchitis,” Bok cupped the patient and applied compresses. Pletnev, leader of the spring’s medical team, was summoned from Moscow. “Everyone was terrified,” Serafima later recalled. “The patient felt well and didn’t think of death. I had lost hope.” Kupalov informed Petrova that Pavlov was ill and wanted to see her. Vladimir offered to send a car, but she feared confrontation with Serafima and Vera, and, having herself fallen ill, did not want to be blamed if he died. Pavlov chatted during the day with his granddaughters and convened the regular Sunday evening game of durachki at his bedside. He was sufficiently spirited to grouse at his losing hands.
Pletnev began issuing medical bulletins on Monday morning. Pavlov, he announced, was suffering from bronchitis with some inflammation of the lungs. His condition was not “dangerous at the moment, [but] a definite conclusion about the future is impossible.” The infection spread, and the patient’s condition deteriorated relentlessly. By Wednesday it was “extremely grave.”
By this time, Speranskii and Rozental’ had joined the vigil at Pavlov’s bedside. According to Speranskii, Pavlov told his physicians on Wednesday morning that he “felt unusual, as never before, that he was forgetting some words and pronouncing others involuntarily. ‘It is the cortex, you know, the cortex—it is edema of the cortex.’” The attending physicians attempted to dissuade him, but he waved them off, “not interested in their opinion,” and demanded a neuropathologist. Professor M. P. Nikitin arrived and conferred with the patient, who then fell asleep.
Two hours later Pavlov awoke, and, Serafima recalled, “it became clear to all of us that we had lost him.” Delirious, he asked what time it was and tried to rise from his bed, throwing off his blanket and reaching his feet feebly for the floor. “What are you doing—you know it is already time. I must go, help me.”
Holding his hand in the early morning hours, Serafima asked him to give her a squeeze, which he did “so firmly that it was painful to me. This was his last sign of participating in our earthly life.”
Twelve minutes later, at 2:52 on the morning of February 27, he was gone.39