Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Around the same time, a report landed on Lenin’s desk, revealing that Pavlov’s sob stories had drifted hardly at all from reality: his lab really was closed down and frozen through; of his staff of twenty-five, only two die-hards remained; and a hundred valuable lab dogs had died of poisoning after eating refuse from a local artificial bread factory.

  There was no point procrastinating. On 24 January 1921 the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree ‘On Conditions Facilitating the Scientific Work of Academician I. P. Pavlov and His Co-workers’, tasking a special commission (headed, naturally enough, by Maxim Gorky) with creating ‘the most propitious conditions’ for Pavlov’s scientific work. A ‘luxurious edition’ of Pavlov’s works was announced, the proceeds from its sale to go to his laboratory. His living quarters, as well as his main laboratory, were to be furnished ‘with all possible conveniences’. Pavlov balked at the offer of a double food ration until the authorities agreed to extend the offer to his staff.

  Pavlov’s wife Serafima summed up what this all meant: ‘Give Ivan Petrovich everything that he wants, but under no circumstances allow him to go abroad.’15

  *

  Pavlov’s attempt to explain higher nervous functions in terms of reflexes was fraught with difficulty. ‘Psychology almost entirely overshadows physiology,’ he complained, as he struggled to devise lab experiments that could handle mental operations. But that, of course, is the problem: laboratory work is all about spotting the repeatable effect, while mental operations are, by their very nature, notoriously changeable. (It wouldn’t be much of a brain that couldn’t change its mind.)

  Pavlov was reaching the end of his useful working life and like many an ageing scientist, before and since, he inclined to philosophy. He had no worked-out methods for studying people and no data at all on human reflexes, but he was quite happy to extrapolate from dogs to people. Pavlov tried to prove that all levels of animal behaviour are made up of chains of conditioned reflexes. If a dog salivates to a light that precedes a bell that precedes feeding, then it follows that when a man goes off to the shops, he is responding to a longer, more complicated, but still recognisable chain of conditioned stimuli.

  That anyway was the idea, but it didn’t work. Pavlov’s dogs hardly ever salivated to the light that preceded the buzzer, and not a single dog ever salivated to the electric shock that preceded the light that preceded the buzzer. Chains of reflexes proved impossible to establish. By then, however, Pavlov, once the great and honest experimentalist, had ceased to care about his own data.

  Pavlov was not the first great scientist to publish, in his dotage, what we might charitably dub ‘twilight’ works. In 1935, readers of ‘General Types of the Higher Nervous Activity of Animals and Men’ had to wait until the last couple of pages to read anything about people, and then what Pavlov had to say was wholly speculative. Such very late work ought to have been charitably forgotten, but the more vapid the old man’s handwaving became, the more his writings came to resemble what was fast becoming a scriptural document of the Bolshevik project – Lenin’s dismal Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

  As far as the Bolsheviks understood it, science was supposed to be easy to understand. Science was difficult only because capitalism had shattered it into elitist, self-serving specialties. As these specialties fused, they were bound to become more straightforward, until, with the advent of Marx’s one science, everything became explainable in the terms of everything else.

  The Bolsheviks considered the brutal simplicity of Lenin’s first philosophical work to be a strength, not a weakness – and now Pavlov’s late studies were revealing by experiment how right Lenin had been in saying that the material brain reflected, without flaw, the world as it was!

  To Bolshevik eyes, Pavlov wasn’t old, or tired or out of ideas. In his last years, and through his last works, Pavlov was proving them right.

  *

  Even into the 1930s, it was still possible to disagree with Pavlov. Nikolai Bernstein had been disagreeing with Pavlov since 1924, when he gave a talk at Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour, arguing that Pavlov’s theory could not explain human skills. Skills are acquired and practised with a purpose in mind. They are not dumbly reactive. They are intentional – an aspect Pavlov’s theories did not address.

  Bernstein’s disagreement with Pavlov rumbled on until Pavlov’s death in 1936. He never came under any pressure to change or muffle his views, and even wrote a book, Contemporary Studies on the Physiology of the Neural Process, which was strongly critical of Pavlov’s theory. The book was never published in his lifetime, but the reason had nothing to do with politics. Pavlov died just a couple of months before the book was due to be published, and Bernstein withdrew it rather than be seen to attack a recently deceased colleague. This act of personal decency cost the field of psychology dear. By the time Bernstein got back to taking Pavlov’s theory apart, after the Second World War, the political climate was far more hostile: it resulted in his forced early retirement.

  Bernstein and Bekhterev and other sincere critics of Pavlov were able to make their case, but Pavlov’s adoption by Bolshevik leaders and commentators had a huge influence on the way their field was organised, and what kinds of research received funding and support.

  The Shchukina Institute of Psychology of Moscow Imperial University (later called the Moscow Institute of Psychology) was officially opened in 1914 by its founder and director, Georgy Chelpanov. Chelpanov resisted Marx’s psychological ideas, and had very little time for materialist explanations of mind. This brought him no trouble until 1923, when the government forced hundreds of ‘idealist’ intellectuals into exile. Almost immediately Chelpanov, who had managed to preserve the institute’s building, equipment and staff through years of ruin and famine, came under attack by an ambitious colleague and former student, Konstantin Nikolaevich Kornilov.

  Politically, Kornilov’s background could not have suited the times better. He had come from nothing. His father, a provincial bookkeeper, had died, probably from drink, when Konstantin was six, so that he never acquired more than a very basic primary education. At nineteen, he was a provincial schoolteacher. In his mid-forties, accomplished and undoubtedly talented, he fitted the role of director of a Soviet institution far better than an élite professor like Chelpanov.

  Chelpanov tried to argue back but Kornilov had mastered the ever more rigorous and precise rhetoric of the commissariats on whom everyone relied for funding. ‘For fruitful development,’ he declared, ‘this discipline needs a materialist and Marxist approach.’ This speech, delivered in Moscow at the First Russian Congress on Psychoneurology in 1923, was published in the main official newspaper, Izvestiia. Chelpanov could only respond in brochures paid for out of his own pocket. Chelpanov complained that if psychology was reduced to the study of reflexes, it would disappear, absorbed by physiology – and he wasn’t wrong.

  In December 1922, the Association of Research Institutes of Moscow University closed the Moscow Institute of Psychology and made its staff redundant. Under cover of administrative reform, Chelpanov was not returned as director.16 That job fell to Kornilov.

  Alexander Luria, later a world-renowned psychologist, was one of Kornilov’s new intake:

  It was suggested that our institute should transform the whole of psychology, abandon Chelpanov’s old idealism and create a new, materialist science, or a Marxist psychology, as Kornilov used to say. Meanwhile the transformation of psychology took two different forms: first, renaming; second, moving. As far as I remember, we renamed perception as receiving reaction signal, memory as storing and reproducing reactions, and emotions as emotional reactions. In one word, everywhere we could, we used the term ‘reaction’ and sincerely believed that we were doing important and serious business. At the same time, we shifted furniture from one laboratory to the other, and I very well remember that, while dragging tables on the staircase, I was totally convinced that in this way we would reorganise the work and lay out a foundation for Sov
iet psychology.17

  In fact, very little changed. Kornilov’s rhetoric was always more show than substance, and once he was in post he more or less copied Chelpanov’s tolerant and eclectic approach to the field. So long as his junior staff used Pavlovian terminology, they were free to do what they wanted.

  For Alexander Luria, this was all the licence he needed to explore any number of exotic ideas.

  Luria came from a high-achieving medical family. His father, a gastroenterologist, taught medicine at the University of Kazan. His mother was a dentist and his sister eventually became a psychiatrist. In the chaos of the Civil War Luria, barely twenty, was already holding down a research position in one institution, doing graduate work in another, attending medical school part-time, and running tests on mentally ill patients (including Dostoyevsky’s granddaughter). He also started a journal, organised a commune for adolescents, published his own study of psychoanalysis and established the Kazan Psychoanalytical Society (complete with letterheaded paper in Russian and German). Sigmund Freud thought he was dealing with a tenured professor. Addressing Luria as ‘Dear Mr President’, he granted permission for the society to translate a minor essay into Russian, and accepted it into the International Psychoanalytic Association.18

  ‘I wanted a psychology that was relevant, that would give some substance to our discussions about building a new life,’ Luria wrote in his memoir.19 Invited to Kornilov’s Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1923, he set about developing a new physiological method for recording motor responses in psychologically disturbed patients. In one test, subjects were asked to respond to a word by a verbal association while simultaneously squeezing a small rubber bulb connected to a paper-and-ink recorder. Luria compared the (psychoanalytically assessed) verbal responses with the (physiologically assessed) motor reaction curves.

  In another test, subjects were hypnotised and told they would not be able to say certain words. Wakened, they were tested, and measurements were taken of the amount of trembling and aphasia they experienced when they were asked to repeat forbidden words.

  The results were promising, but the emotions Luria was able to elicit with his volunteer subjects were weak beer: he needed subjects who were altogether more charged-up. How about students facing a purge? (Rounds of expulsions were quite usual, for academic as well as ideological failings.) From there he went to actual or suspected criminals, studying them after their arrest, during interrogation and on the eve of trial. Fear, aggression and despair were real enough among these subjects, and Luria noticed something interesting: people who turned out to be innocent didn’t react with any especial force to words associated with the crimes for which they had been accused.

  Over several years, Luria and colleagues studied more than fifty subjects, asking them to respond to words both innocent and connected with the crime. Eventually they were able to pick actual criminals out of a field of suspects. Though the idea didn’t find any practical application for another fifty years (when Luria dug out his old papers and sent them to the Institute of Criminology) it is fair to say that Luria had just invented the lie detector.

  *

  The year after Alexander Luria’s arrival at the Moscow Institute, virtually its entire staff decamped briefly to Petrograd to attend the Second Russian Psychoneurological Congress, and launch a campaign for Marxist psychology.

  The state’s very visible public backing for Ivan Pavlov had not yet cast a pall, and what ‘Marxist psychology’ should look like was still a matter of open debate. Should psychology become a laboratory science, or should it, like psychoanalysis, become a much more social, cultural project? Luria neatly summed up the conundrum that faced (and still faces) the field: ‘One way will lead to a psychology which is scientific but artificial; the other will lead to a psychology which is natural but cannot be scientific, remaining in the end an art.’20

  Into this debate stepped a newcomer: Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. We do not know who invited him to Petrograd, or whether his controversial subject – the relationship between reflexes and thinking – was his own idea, or set as some kind of audition piece. We do not even have a transcript of his talk, though the impression he made was so vivid, so powerful, we can get the gist from other people’s letters and memoirs.

  Vygotsky’s point was that while it was absurd to try to explain consciousness in terms of simple reflexes, that wasn’t any reason to ignore the existence of consciousness. After all, what was thought but (according to the theories of the day) inhibited speech? What people said was as much a scientific datum as what they did. There was no reason why study of the mind should be any less scientific than any other study of human behaviour. Vygotsky argued that any psychology that ignores consciousness is not ‘scientific’: it is purblind.

  ‘Although he failed to convince everyone of the correctness of his view,’ Luria recalled, ‘it was clear that this man from a small provincial town in western Russia was an intellectual force who would have to be listened to.’21

  Once the speech was over, Luria edged to the front of the crowd gathering around Vygotsky, who appeared stunned by the fuss he had caused. He was still clutching his notes, and Luria angled himself to see what Vygotsky had written. The paper was blank. A mere prop. In that instant, Luria knew he was in the presence of genius.22

  Vygotsky was born late in 1896 into a highly educated family in the city of Gomel (in Belorussia), in western Russia’s pale of settlement for Jews. Vygotsky wanted to study philosophy and literature, but graduates of these subjects became teachers and Vygotsky, being a Jew, was banned from the profession. Law and medicine were the only options open to him.

  Vygotsky managed to get one of the very few medical places reserved for Jews at Moscow University, took classes in history and philosophy at the Shaniavsky, and flung himself into the city’s literary life. He fell in with the ‘formalist’ school – young critics who were interested in the way language relates to meaning. Vygotsky submitted his study of Hamlet as his thesis in 1915.23

  Vygotsky’s central theme was something that had troubled Karl Marx when he contemplated the Greek classics: how can the beautiful works of a slave-owning society still be beautiful in a capitalist one, and show every sign of remaining just as beautiful under socialism? What aesthetic qualities persevere through such changes?

  Vygotsky was an enthusiastic Marxist. He had been studying Marx, Engels and Plekhanov long before the revolution, and by the time he was invited onto the junior scientific staff of the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1924, he knew more about Marxism than almost anyone outside the Kremlin.

  Hamlet, the Greek classics and other great works, Vygotsky argued, are timeless because they manipulate our sympathies and expectations at a structural, psychological level. They are not static ‘opinion pieces’.

  Later, Vygotsky began to piece together exactly what this ‘psychological structure’ might be that responded so strongly to beauty. Art was not a mere decorative cloth draped over human nature. It wasn’t even a vessel for human nature. It was human nature. Art offered glimpses of the inner lives of other people – the kinds of glimpses from which an individual’s sense of self is made. ‘Knowing others’ is the basis for ‘knowing myself’. More than that: ‘The social dimension of consciousness is primary in time and in fact. The individual dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary.’24

  Social exchanges, particularly between parents and children, gave children the tools with which to hold internal conversations with themselves. It was these internal conversations that generated a sense of self. The self did not exist until it was spoken and acted into being.

  Vygotsky’s best known example is that of a child pointing out objects to its mother. At first the child tries to grasp a distant object, and fails. That unsuccessful grasping manoeuvre, that gesture ‘in itself’, becomes a gesture ‘for others’, because the mother deliberately interprets it that way. The child is the last person to realise that it is gesturing for others. When it does, it
can finally internalise that gesture into a thought. So ‘all higher mental functions are internalised social relationships’.25

  Vygotsky’s fascination with the way children learn made him one of the era’s leading experts in child psychology. At that time there existed a sort of portmanteau discipline called ‘pedology’ (a term coined by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall), which embraced early learning, education and training, and developmental psychology. The Party had always taken its mental health responsibilities seriously, and even as the Civil War was decimating the country, it had promoted the study of child development and education. In 1922, there were over twenty pedagogical and psychological research institutions in Moscow alone. The commissariats of education, health, railways and heavy industry all had dedicated pedological departments. And they kept on multiplying: the Moscow Testing Association, the All-Russian Psychotechnical Association, the Soviet Pedological Association …

  Vygotsky’s reputation in this burgeoning field was second to none. When he ran consultation sessions, not only co-workers at the Institute, but also teachers, doctors, psychologists and students from all over the city turned up in the auditorium. In the summer they threw open the windows so people who could not fit inside the building could hear what was going on. Lev Zankov, a student of Vygotsky, remembered:

  Many observers were amazed how Vygotsky conversed with the child while examining him. Vygotsky was always able to establish an atmosphere of trust in his rapport with the children, he always talked with them as though they were equals, always paid attention to their answers. In turn, the children opened up to him in a way they never did with other examiners.26

  Consultations with individual children were valuable, but much more could be learned from children in groups. So Vygotsky, Luria and others found themselves drawn into the running of the White Nursery, founded in 1923 by Vera Shmidt, a talented psychologist and wife of the Bolshevik explorer, planner and bureaucrat Otto Shmidt.