For two days, Pavlov’s casket was displayed for public viewing at the Tauride Palace, site of his great triumph at the physiological congress six months earlier. An estimated 100,000 mourners filed past bearing flowers and wreaths. “Old people, young children, scientists, students, children and more children,” reported Izvestiia. Representatives of the Soviet state and Communist Party, the nation’s scientific and educational institutions, and workers’ and peasants’ organizations paid homage to the departed scientist, both at the Tauride and in innumerable memorial ceremonies across the country. On March 1, following a civil ceremony, the funeral procession bore Pavlov’s body south through the streets of Leningrad to the Volkovo Cemetery and a burial that had been meticulously planned by a state committee. Among the graveside speakers were two of Pavlov’s most prominent former coworkers, Lev Orbeli and Alexander Speranskii; vice president of the Academy of Sciences Vladimir Komarov; and Minister of Health Protection Grigorii Kaminskii.1
Chopin’s funeral dirge expressed the genuine grief of many at the occasion, and the Internationale both marked the passing of a national hero and expressed the authorities’ newfound freedom to portray the deceased as they pleased. Kaminskii recalled at graveside the “profound excitement and respect” with which Pavlov in his final months had spoken of Stalin. (Dolin did him one better at a memorial ceremony for coworkers, claiming that an admiring Pavlov had longed to meet the Great Helmsman.) Komarov recalled a recent conversation about socialist construction in which Pavlov, “his eyes gleaming with brilliant light,” had exclaimed, “You know—the experiment has succeeded!” Stalin did not permit Bukharin the spotlight afforded by the graveside, but, in a sentimental and triumphant obituary for Izvestiia, Bukharin claimed him for the revolution. Pavlov was “entirely ours,” he wrote, by virtue of his philosophical materialism and his ultimate embrace, after “doubts and vacillations,” of the great historical mission of the Communist Party.2
For the next fifty years, Soviet historiography followed Bukharin’s lead, telling the simple and exemplary tale of the great scientist and patriotic Russian who, true to his standards of objectivity, overcame his prejudices to recognize the success of the Soviet experiment. Pavlov’s ideas were canonized as “Pavlovism”—though opinions differed about the relative importance of various dimensions of his legacy and about how best to develop them—and his brain joined those of Lenin and other luminaries at the Institute of the Brain in Moscow.
The International Congress of Psychology scheduled for Madrid in 1936—the venue where Pavlov had planned to launch an assault on Gestalt psychology and propose his own synthesis of analytical and synthetic approaches to associations—was canceled with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Lev Orbeli replaced Pavlov at the Physiological Institute of the Academy of Sciences and at Koltushi (which became the Institute of Evolutionary Physiology). At his request, geneticist Nikolai Kol’tsov evaluated Pavlov’s breeding and genetics project—and reluctantly reported that it was so naively framed as to be useless. Kol’tsov suggested that the research begin anew and focus instead on analyzing differences between different breeds of dog.3
The hopes for a positive evolution of Soviet policies outlived Pavlov by only months, and many of his closest contacts in the Communist Party survived him by only a few years. The contradictory tendencies of Pavlov’s final years, it turned out, presaged, not, as he had expressed it, the “swallows of spring,” but high Stalinism.4
Two weeks before Pavlov’s death, Pravda criticized Bukharin for the first time in several years. In August 1936, Bukharin was implicated by “testimony” in the first spectacular show trial of “Old Bolsheviks,” which culminated in the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev for leading a terrorist organization that had assassinated Kirov and plotted to murder Stalin and other Communist leaders. Stalin toyed with Bukharin for months before having him arrested in February 1937, subjected to a show trial, and shot in March 1938.
At the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee, Grigorii Kaminskii—the former Commissar of Health Protection who had organized the completion of Koltushi, monitored Pavlov’s sickbed, exchanged letters with him about Soviet policies, and claimed him for the revolution at graveside—denounced the untrammeled power of the NKVD and its arrest of many good Communists. He was seized before leaving the building, imprisoned, and executed.
Secretary of the USSR’s Central Executive Committee Ivan Akulov and Chair of the Communist Party’s Science Section Karl Bauman—who had toured the IEM with Pavlov on the eve of the Physiological Congress and played key roles in that event—were both arrested and shot in 1937.
Petr Denisov, the Communist coworker who brought Roza and Rafael to Koltushi and collaborated with Pavlov on anthropoid experiments there—and whom Pavlov had saved from the gulag in 1935—was arrested again in 1936, and saved by Orbeli. In 1937 he was arrested for a third time and shot. The films of his experiments were destroyed, and another coworker took the credit for much of his research. Denisov’s article on these chimp studies would appear posthumously during de-Stalinization in 1958.
Nikolai Nikitin, Pavlov’s strident commissar, became head of the Laboratory of Special Psychophysiology at the IEM. After learning in 1937 that he was about to be arrested, he committed suicide (according to one account, by jumping from his office window at the IEM). His coworkers were all arrested. Fedor Maiorov, who had advanced during the Great Break a dialectical materialist critique of Pavlov’s research and a scientific-political program for Pavlov’s Communists, was arrested and imprisoned, but returned to continue his scientific career.
Lev Fedorov, Ivan Maiskii, and Viacheslav Molotov survived the purges. Molotov died in 1986 during perestroika, an unrepentant Stalinist.
Stanislav Vyrzhikovskii, the first director of Koltushi, who had been arrested and saved from the gulag by Pavlov in 1935, was arrested again in September 1937. Convicted of being an enemy of the people and a member of a counterrevolutionary group, he was sentenced to ten years in prison “without the right to correspondence.” As that phrase usually denoted, he was shot immediately. Evgenii Kreps, Pavlov’s former student and coworker at the Military-Medical Academy, was arrested in September 1937 with Vyrzhikovskii. After three years in the Kolyma gulag, he was released. A leader in evolutionary physiology, he conducted experiments in the 1950s that convinced him that acquired reflexes in mice were not inherited.
Dmitrii Pletnev, the distinguished Muscovite heart specialist who directed the medical team at Pavlov’s sickbed in 1935 and 1936, was implicated in the 1938 show trial of the “Bukharinite-Trotskyite bloc.” Accused of poisoning Gorky’s son and Valerian Kuibyshev, the chair of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (who had died of a heart attack in 1935), he was first sentenced to twenty-five years and then retried and shot in 1941.
Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 and subjected Leningrad to a murderous siege for 900 days. According to oral lore, the notebooks kept for every dog in the IEM lab from the 1890s through 1936 were burned for fuel during the harsh winters by blockaded Leningraders.
Serafima Pavlova, Vera, and Vladimir and his family were removed from the besieged city. Carefully selected abstracts of Serafima’s memoirs were published in 1946 (her memoirs and letters also informed Babkin’s biography of Pavlov in 1949). She died in 1947 at age eighty-eight, having lived two years longer than her famously hardy husband. Vera continued to live in the Pavlov apartment on the 7th Line, became the first curator of the I. P. Pavlov Apartment-Museum there, published articles on CRs, and died of pancreatic cancer in 1964. Vladimir survived the purges, during which some of his good friends in the physics community were arrested. He died in 1954.
Maria Petrova was transferred to the Physiological Institute at the Academy of Sciences to work under Orbeli, whom she described in her memoirs as the third member—along with Pavlov and Stalin—of her triumvirate of most-admired men. She remained in Leningrad during the siege, continued to publish prolifically, and was much celebrated in the press as Pavlov’s star pupil—receiving the prestigious and lucrative Stalin Prize in 1946 for her articles on nervous types, hypnotic states, and experimental phobias in castrated dogs. Shortly before her death in 1948, she loyally sent her memoirs to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which ordered them kept under lock and key until Gorbachev’s glasnost.
The chimp Roza died of dysentery in 1936. When Leningrad was evacuated, Rafael was shipped to Kazan, where coworkers planned to continue experiments on him. Those coworkers apparently gave Rafael’s special ration to starving children and he perished of hunger.
After World War II, Pavlov became one of the icons of high Stalinist science. With the triumph of Lysenkoism and the suppression of genetics in 1948, his initial enthusiasm for Studentsov’s experiments on the inheritance of CRs was deployed to cast him as a supporter of the new doctrine. The statue of Mendel at Koltushi was removed. Less cynically, but erroneously, Lysenko’s opponents claimed that Pavlov had ultimately rejected the very possibility of such inheritance.
So-called “Pavlovian sessions” established political orthodoxy in physiology (1950), psychiatry (1951), and psychology (1952) and completed the enshrinement of Pavlov and his doctrine in the image of official late Stalinist dialectical materialism. Attacked with special fervor by Pavlov’s former coworkers Asratian, Biriukov, Bykov, and Ivanov-Smolenskii, Orbeli lost his administrative posts to Bykov. (Among other things, Orbeli was attacked for failing to pursue Pavlov’s research program and his alleged proto-Lysenskoist convictions at Koltushi.)5
After returning from the gulag, Maiorov wrote an exhaustive chronology of The History of the Doctrine of Conditional Reflexes. In its 1948 first edition, he repeated his earlier analysis of Pavlov’s mechanistic errors. The now-iconic Pavlov, however, was beyond criticism, and Maiorov was compelled to recant in a second edition of 1954 that emphasized Pavlov’s internalization of “the spontaneous dialectical materialism of facts.”6
The first head of the Pavlov Documentary Commission established after the chief’s death was his Communist coworker Vasilii Stroganov. In keeping with the official imagery that Pavlov had embraced Bolshevism in his final years, Stroganov removed all discordant statements from the transcript of the Pavlovian Wednesdays that was published in 1949. Bykov and Maiorov assumed those same responsibilities for the Pavlovian Clinical Wednesdays (1954–1955).
For three decades after Stalin’s death in 1953, alongside the official iconic Pavlov, some Russians attempted honestly and effectively to gather material and develop an understanding of this historical figure who had acquired great cultural significance. Released after Stalin’s death, one of Nikitin’s arrested coworkers, Vasilii Merkulov, collaborated on the first systematic use of archival documents to document Pavlov’s life through 1917. Chronicle of the Life and Activity of Academician I. P. Pavlov was published in a politically edited version in 1969. Merkulov gathered and studied even more extensive archival materials for his volume on Pavlov’s life after 1917, but this was long unpublishable for political reasons. It exists only in manuscript to this day.
The membership of the Pavlov Documentary Commission—originally established to enforce Stalinist iconography—included many former coworkers and members of Pavlov’s circle who swapped stories informally and gathered material. One member, archivist Iurii Vinogradov, began in the late 1960s to tape interviews with at least thirty members of Pavlov’s now-aging extended circle, eliciting invaluable (and unpublishable) reminiscences. Others collected memoirs that, equally unpublishable, remained for decades in a special, generally inaccessible section of Pavlov’s papers at the Archive of the Academy of Sciences.7
With the advent of glasnost in the late 1980s, Russian scholars took the lead in locating and publishing archival documents about Pavlov’s protests against Stalinist policies. (Some had been permitted to view these documents years earlier, but were forbidden to publish their findings.) With the fall of Communism in 1991, the Soviet iconic image was inverted. Pavlov remained a national hero, but now as a champion of the democratic movement and the Soviet Union’s “first dissident.” The publication of Pavlov’s protests against the suppression of religion, together with the religious revival in 1990s Russia, reenergized the old rumor that he was himself a believer.
Historians have only begun to explore the influence of Pavlov’s scientific work on physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists; and his afterlife in lay culture. The following are merely some impressions.8
Despite substantial criticisms of Pavlov’s digestive research by Popel’skii, Bayliss, and Starling—criticisms that cost him the Nobel Prize in 1903 and might well have done so altogether were it not for Tigerstedt’s and Johansson’s energetic advocacy—even William Bayliss acknowledged him as the father figure in the field. In his Principles of General Physiology (1915), Bayliss noted Pavlov’s many specific contributions, but emphasized that the Russian had established the basic framework for studies of the glands as a coordinated system. For decades thereafter, experimental physiologists continued to disagree about the relative importance of nerves, hormones, and the psyche in what became known as the “neuropsychoendocrinological complex.” The characteristic secretory curves so central to Pavlov’s The Work of the Main Digestive Glands dropped out of the scientific literature as organ physiology fell out of fashion.9
During the polarizing conflict between behaviorists and Gestaltists in the West, representatives of each falsely identified Pavlov as a behaviorist. He was presumed simply to have provided a physiological underpinning for behaviorism; the “conditioned reflex” was generally understood not as a method for understanding the psyche, but as the physiological explanation for “a dog salivating to the sound of a bell.” His attention to consciousness and personality and his attempt to combine analytical and synthetic approaches to cortical functions and the psyche were, in any case, largely buried in obscure Russian texts. When translated, they were much obscured by his esoteric technical language. The Cold War context no doubt also discouraged exploration of his legacy in the West.
Thus, after World War II, when Western psychologists again turned their attention to the behaviorists’ black box—toward the inner emotional and cognitive life of the animal—Pavlov seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. Yet his scientific practices now seem in many ways quite modern—quite compatible with contemporary scientists’ attention to personality types among animals, their attempts to divine the goings-on in the minds of dogs and dolphins, and the mechanical and anthropomorphic metaphors they employ to do so.
Pavlov’s attempt to integrate physiology, psychology, and psychiatry has not fared well amid modern hyperspecialization, and his beloved organ physiology has been almost totally abandoned with the reductionist drive of modern medical science. One rarely spots a mammal in a physiology lab these days. Yet this dimension of his legacy and symbolic value also appeals to many scientists—for example, to members of the Pavlovian Society in the United States, whose journal is entitled, very much in Pavlov’s spirit, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science.
Physiologists and psychologists today would view Pavlov’s map of higher nervous processes as hopelessly naive and oversimplified, and their use of error bars in curves codifies their abandonment of his notion of precise, mechanistic determinism. Few if any would agree that the psyche can be explained on the basis of nervous reflexes. Many scientists in both Russia and the West, however, have fruitfully employed variants of his conditional reflexes methodology in studies of simple learning; fear, anxiety, and stress; the regulation of blood pressure, body temperature, and the immunological system; drug and alcohol addiction; memory; and psychopathology.
Some current practitioners of “classical conditioning” have, in important ways, followed Pavlov’s lead. They do not share Pavlov’s goal of explaining the psyche as a chain of reflexes or a mosaic of associations, nor his broadly biological vision of the animal on the experimental stand as an organism in nature (or society), but they continue his careful attention to the dynamics of conditional reflexes in their attempt to integrate physiology and psychology, analysis and synthesis, the parts and the whole.10 Whereas Pavlov scrutinized saliva drops in his attempt to understand the psyche, we can all witness today the oxygenation of neurons on an fMRI as a monkey reaches for a banana or a person experiences love, hate, or fear. It is much more vivid in our high-tech age, but the problem of translation remains. Modern technology has provided various candidate replacements for Pavlov’s metaphors. Computers have displaced factories in the cultural consciousness, and the language of “feedback loops” and “hardware/software” seems more sophisticated to us than Pavlov’s simple mechanistic mapping of inhibition onto cowardice, trace reflexes onto memories, and changes in the dynamic stereotype onto feelings of unease. Yet the hard question of consciousness—the relationship between physiological and psychological processes—remains a mystery, perhaps awaiting interpretive models and metaphors beyond our current experience.
As in Pavlov’s day, science offers powerful and illuminating insights into our behaviors and moods, and many palliatives for our pains, but the challenges of uncertainty and the existential issues of “our consciousness and its torments” that animated his grand quest remain always with us.