Abstract
The case of the Russian physiologist Academician Ivan Petrovich Pavlov represents one of the most peculiar examples of the relationship between scientists and the Soviet government. Among Russian/Soviet scientists and scholars, Pavlov was the sharpest and the most persistent critic of the Bolshevik regime. According to the widely accepted view, by the end of his life Pavlov had abandoned his adamant opposition to the October Revolution. Pavlov’s letters to the Soviet government, published in the Russian press in the late 1980s, seem to suggest, however, that this was not the case and that the physiologist in fact always remained firm in his critical view of Stalin’s policy. And yet, his approach to physiology, proclaimed materialistic by Soviet ideologists, and the world fame his theories acquired, impressed the Bolsheviks and served Pavlov well as protection. Moreover, in the 1930s, Pavlov ‘was officially proclaimed…the discoverer of the dialectical materialist way to an understanding of the psyche’.1
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Notes
David Joravsky, ‘The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche,’ in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978) p. 128.
Quoted in B.P. Babkin, Pavlov, A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1951) p. 5.
Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (Columbia University Press: New York, 1987) p. 162
LP. Pavlov, Dvadtsatiletnii opyt ob’ektivnogo izucheniya vysshei nervnoi deyatel’nosti (povedeniya) zhivotnykh (Moscow and Leningrad; Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1938), p. 16.
V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition (Moscow: Politizdat, 1965) vol. 51, p. 222.
Pavlov in Psikhiatricheskaya gazeta, no. 8, 1917, quoted in Joravsky, ‘The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche,’ p. 276 (footnote, 88). On the paradoxical elements in the Bolsheviks’ attitude towards Pavlov, see also David Joravsky, ‘Cultural Revolution and the Fortress Mentality,’ in Abbott Gleason et al. (eds), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) pp. 101–107.
I.P. Pavlov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (Moscow: Medizdat, 1952).
Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniya i tekhniki, no. 3, 1988, pp. 129–41. On the round table, see also ibid., no. 4, 1988, and no. 1, 1989. On the Pavlovian session, see also E.M. Kreps, O prozhitom i perezhitom (Moscow: Nauka, 1989) pp. 143–50.
Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind. Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (New York, London: Praeger, 1963) pp. 91–121.
see also Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism. A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1958) pp. 469–88.
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© 1997 Vera Tolz
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Tolz, V. (1997). Ivan Petrovich Pavlov: Bolshevism’s Sharpest Critic. In: Russian Academicians and the Revolution. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25840-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25840-6_6
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