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" STALIN AND THE USES OF PSYCHOLOGY


By ROBERT C. TUCKER


THE influence of ideological conceptions upon the men who make Soviet policy has been frequently and rightly emphasized. Some observers are so deeply impressed by this influence that they tend to regard the Soviet system as a kind of ideocracy. It is undeniable that ideology has been one powerful factor in the shaping of Soviet policies and actions from the time of the October Revolution to the present.

But one must not lose sight of the fact that,in Soviet Russia,the relationship between ideology and policy is one of mutual interaction. It is a two-way process in which theoretical conceptions affect the making of policy and practical considerations affect the content of the ideology.

The ideological system is not a completely static thing. It has evolved over the years, and the realities of Soviet politics have been the driving force behind this evolution.

We may regard the Soviet ideology as consisting of two parts: a hard core of basic principles which has persisted more or less unchanged from the beginning of the Soviet period, and several surrounding layers of doctrine which have been subject to modification or accretion in accordance with the dictates of Soviet policy. There is no hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two parts, yet the division between them is something which demonstrably exists.

The immediate purpose of this paper is to investigate certain Soviet ideological trends of recent years in their relation to the regime's policy in internal affairs. These trends center around the militant revival in Soviet psychology of Pavlov's teachings on the conditioned reflex. The Pavlovian revival, which began in I949, will be examined in connection with various developments in biology, political economy, and other fields,and the entire ideological complex will be related to a central policy moti- vation to which I have given the name "transformism."

HM: Kyse EI ollut mistään pavlovilaisuuden "PALAUTTAMISESTA" eikä "ELVYTTÄ-MISESTÄ" (revival),sillä se oli ollut johtava tieteellinen ihmiskuva Venäjällä jo tsaarin ajalta, jolloin sitä kutsuttiin ´nervismiksi´. V.I. Lenin oli pavlovisti överiksi asti jo ennen kasvatustieteilijä Lev Vygotskin kielellistä ajatteluteoriaakin,kuten käy ilmi hänen (virheellisestä) ´aksooman´ määritelmästään: "V. I. Lenin wrote that “man’s practical activity had to lead man’s consciousness billions of times to the repetition of various logical figures,so that these figures could attain the significance of an axiom” (Filoso-fian vihot vuodelta 1914).Lenin kirjasi akateemikko Pavlovin ja hänen koulukuntansa asemen ja toimintaedellytysten turvaamisen asetuksella 11.2.1921 Neuvosto-Venä-jän lakiinkin, jossa se pysyi vuoteen 1991 asti. Marxilaiseen psykologiaan kuuluu edelleen Lev Vygotskin kielellinen ajatteluteoria,jonka Pavlov yhdisti omaan oppiinsa teorialla 2. singnaalisysteemistä vuonna 1931. Kielellinen ajatteluteoria oli perin peräisin uskonnollisesta psykologiasta kuten René Descartesin alun perin luoma refleksioppikin. Mutta myös Marx sanoi kielen olevan "ihmisen todellinen tajunta".


" The final part of the study will consider various indications of a post-Stalin retreat from "transformism" and from the ideology associated with it.

The study can then serve as a basis for a tentative interpretation of some of the changes in Soviet internal policy since Stalin's death that have aroused interest and speculation in foreign circles.

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I. THE WILL TO TRANSFORM

A prominent tendency of Soviet thought during the last years of Stalin's reign was the quest for formulas by which reality could be transformed and remolded to the dictates of the Soviet regime. The idea of transforming things in accordance with a formula was not in itself new; the notion of a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society is as old as Marxism and is rooted particularly deeply in the ways of thought characteristic of Russian Bolshevism. But in recent years this "transformist" concept seemed to acquire an obsessive hold upon the regime, and along with it went a mania for bigness and a tendency to apply the various formulas with a dogmatic and indiscriminate rigidity.

During the postwar period, "transformism" became the regime's reaction whenever it was confronted with a genuinely difficult domestic situation which clearly called for remedial measures of some kind.

Instead of using the materials at hand and adapting its conduct to the realities pre-sent in the situation, it habitually responded with a grandiose project of transforma-tion. In I949 it came out with the so-called "Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Na-ture," an immense and costly undertaking of irrigation and afforestation which was to convert rural Russia into a fertile, blooming garden. Closely linked with this was the scheme for transforming the industrial landscape of the country by a series of giant "construction projects of communism"-canals,dams,and hydroelectric power stations which, it was boasted, would eclipsem the best and biggest accomplishments along this line in the United States or any other country.To cite a further example,the Soviet regime,faced with an acute shortage of housing and office space in Moscow, respon- ded with a plan for "transforming the face of the capital". This was to be accomp-lished by the erection of an ensemble of skyscrapers which would rival those of New York, although, unlike New York, Moscow had abundant space for less ambitious structures which would have resolved the problem more quickly and economically.

This kind of transformist thinking was reflected in the "biological discussion" of I948, at which the Michurin-Lysenko doctrines on heredity were accepted officially,with the full authority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and of Stalin himself. "Michurinism," as these doctrines were called, was a perfect model of transformist thinking. Their founder, the Russian naturalist I.V.Michurin (the "Great Transformer of Nature"),had,it was said,taken a "gigantic step forward" in the further development of Darwinism.

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Darwin had merely explained the evolutionary process,while "I.V.Michurin made evo- lution."' Michurin, it was said,had discovered laws and methods by which it would be possible to "mold organic forms."

The Michurin-Lysenko teachings are commonly associated with the Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

This was the practical crux of the matter. However, the biological issue was only one aspect of an ideological problem.Underlying the controversy over the inheritance of acquired characteristics was a clash between two radically different conceptions of the relationship between the organism and its environment. The Soviet geneticists whose work was based upon the Mendelian school postulated "autogenesis" -evo-lution under the influence of certain hereditary forces inherent in the organism itself. In this view, the so-called "internal factors of development" assume primary impor-tance, and the role of external environmental conditions in the evolutionary process is reduced to either a "starting mechanism" or a limiting factor. It was essentially this "autogenetic" conception of the organism that Lysenko and his followers, backed by the full authority of the Soviet state, denied and attempted to expunge from Soviet biological thought.

Lysenko was led to this standpoint not by the weight of carefully sifted scientific evidence but by the imperatives of transformist ideology.

Transformist thinking is fundamentally opposed to any conception which endows the object which is to be transformed (in this case, the organism) with developmental autonomy; it must not have spontaneous internal forces for growth or change which the transformer has to reckon with and respect, because that would impose unwan-ted limits upon the extent to which the object could be transformed from without.

The Michurinist doctrine arose out of this need to conceive the active factor of evolu-tionary change as residing not in the organism but in controllable conditions of the environment. For Transformism, the role of these conditions must be decisive.

Accordingly, Michurinism proclaims the "unity of the organism with the environment," a conception which holds that the organism has no separate existence apart from the particular configuration of environmental conditions which sustain it.

In other words, the organism and its environment constitute an adaptational system in which the forces for change reside exclusively with the environment. Changing environmental conditions make the unity of the organism with the environment a "contradictory unity," and the organism then resolves the contradiction by successive adaptations which become hereditary.

1 The Situation in Biological Science, Moscow, 1948, p. 274.

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Or else it cannot change in accordance with the changed conditions of life do not survive, leave no progeny." 2 The Darwinian concept of a natural selection of chance variations of organisms engaged in a struggle for existence is thrown overboard. Michurinism rules out both chance variations and an intra-species struggle for exis-tence. The struggle for existence takes place between the individual organism and its environment. Variations are the organism's strictly determined responses to envi- ronmental change. They are its weapons in the struggle to survive when the external conditions change. The law of evolution is: Change or die.

If, as this doctrine holds, environmental change is the sole active agent of the evolu-tionary process, then man's power of control over the environmental conditions of plants and animals enables him to direct their evolution according to his needs and purposes. He can then,as the participants of the 1948 session declared in their mes-sage to Stalin,"govern the nature of organisms by creating man-controlled conditions of life for plants, animals, micro-organisms." The relationship of this trend of thought to the transformist motivation of the Stalin regime becomes transparently clear. The Michurinist agrobiology, said the final resolution of the session, is "a powerful instru-ment for the active and planned transformation of living nature." The validity of this claim is more than debatable. The recent attacks on Lysenko in the controlled Soviet press suggest that the post-Stalin regime in Russia found his theory fallible. But, in the period from 1948 to 1953, Lysenko's theory was an integral component of Stalinism. It provided a rationalization in the biological sphere for Stalinism's effort to impose its dictates upon the world, to transform reality according to its wishes.

II. THE CULT OF NECESSITY

But while reality can be transformed, the "scientific" laws that govern the transformation are themselves fixed, necessary, and immutable.

The will to transform reality was coupled with a vehement denial that there was any-thing arbitrary, subjective, or risky and unpredictable about the various schemes for transformation which the regime put forward. In this respect, Stalinism made a break with a deep-seated tradition of Bolshevism. The characteristic Bolshevist belief in determinism, its general "denial of accidents," had always previously co-existed with belief in an "indeterminist tendency" with respect to the details of the future with an allowance for the future's "partial unpredictability." 3

2 Ibid., p. 37
3 Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, Glencoe, Ill., 1953, pp. 67, 84.

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In 1948, this tempered view gave way to an absolutely rigid and all-embracing deter-minism.All the processes of nature and society began to be viewed as working them. selves out with an iron necessity; they were seen as perfectly predictable provided one could grasp their "regularities." Nothing whatever was left to chance.

Lysenko's oft-quoted slogan, "Chance is the enemy of science," formulated the new attitude.Mendelian genetics,resting as it does upon the concept of chance mutations, was derided by Lysenko for having to "resort to the theory of probability" and for reducing biological science in this way to "mere statistics." 4 Michurinism, on the other hand, not only posed the far-reaching goal of transforming organic nature, but guaranteed the attainment of the goal by absolutely predictable scientific means. It had worked out the "laws and methods" of obtaining directed variations and of perpetuating them in the species concerned.It was all based upon the discovery of "necessary relationships" in organic nature.

And so, promised Lysenko, "We will expel fortuities from biological science." 5

The mounting obsession with necessity, determinism, and the expulsion of chance from every area of Soviet policy came to a climax in Stalin's last work, Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., published in October I952. Until its appea-rance, it had been an accepted practice for Soviet theorists to maintain that the all-powerful Soviet state, owing to its control over every aspect of the economic life of the country, could repeal or transform the laws governing its economic operations and create new ones in their stead. But in I952 Stalin protested vehemently against this idea of the transforming of laws. Those who had spoken in such terms were denounced as economic adventurists whose disdain of "objective regularities" was fraught with great danger.

For what would it lead to if the Soviet state should regard itself as competent to cre-ate or transform economic laws? It would lead, said Stalin, to "our falling into a realm of chaos and fortuities; we would find ourselves in slavish dependence upon these fortuities; we would deprive ourselves of the possibility not only of understanding but even of finding our way around in this chaos of fortuities."

Therefore, he insisted, the Soviet state must base its economic policy upon "scienti-fic laws." Scientific laws, in turn, were reflections of "objective processes in nature or society, taking place independently of the will of human beings."

4 The Situation in Biological Science, pp. 614-15.
5 Ibid., p. 6I5.

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But Stalin simultaneously protetsts against fetizizing" of laws: "It is said that Econo-mical laws bear an elementary character, that the effects of these laws are inexo-rable, that society is powerless before them.This is untrue. This is fetishizing of laws, the surrender of oneself into slavery to laws. It has been shown that society is not powerless in the face of laws, that society, by perceiving economic laws and relying upon them,can restrict their sphere of action,use them in the interests of society, and 'saddle' them, as happens with reference to the forces of nature and their laws." 6

There is thus a contradiction present in Stalin's new doctrine about scientific laws.On the one hand,he insists that Soviet policy must conform with "objective processes taking place independently of the will of human beings." This would eliminate choice and spontaneity from Soviet economic development, which would now be subordina-ted completely to the dictates of economic necessity. On the other hand, he cannot endure the thought of slavery to laws. He must regard his regime (or himself) as somehow superior to them, able to "saddle" them, subdue them, or "attain mastery over them," as one saddles and subdues the elemental forces of nature. He endea-vors to resolve this conflict through the medium of the knowing mind. The function of the mind, he says, is to discover, grasp, study, and apply scientific laws.

This intervention of the knowing mind enables him to feel that subordination to objective regularities is different from slavery to them.

To settle this point, he cites the statement of Engels (derived from Hegel) equating freedom with "apprehended necessity."

Why was it that Stalin,while dead set on saddling,subduing,or attaining mastery over the supposedly objective laws of social-economic development, found utterly intole-rable the thought of creating, repealing, or transforming them? What explains the enormous importance which this quasi-verbal distinction evidently had for him? The answer, I suggest, can be discovered in the psychological concept of "externaliza-tion",a process by which a person may experience his own thoughts, drives, or stan-dards as operative in the external environment. In Stalin's case this tendency even-tually found expression in a legislative attitude toward reality. In other words, what he referred to as "objective scientific laws" were an externalization of his inner policy dictates; they were a projection upon future Soviet history of the formulas for social-economic development generated in his own mind. 

6 J. V. Stalin, "Ekonomicheskie Problemy Sotsializma v SSSR" ("Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR"), Voprosy filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), No. 5 (1952), pp. 6, 8, 47

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His own ideas appeared to him as natural necessities governing the development of society. This process of externalization performed for Stalin a double psychological function. First, it stilled any gnawing uncertainty in his own mind about the validity of the formulas and directives which he evolved;there could be nothing arbitrary or cap- ricious about formulas which represented "objective processes taking place indepen-dently of the will of human beings." Subjective considerations entered only in the sense that his mind was the first to discover them, as Newton had been the first to discover the law of gravity. Secondly, this mental operation shut off all possible argu-ment. It is reasonable to question a proposition about Soviet policy, even if its author be Stalin, but to question a law of nature is pure impertinence. With this in mind, we can understand how irritated Stalin became at the idea of creating, repealing, or transforming the objective laws of nature and society; such an attitude toward laws was a potential threat to his infallibility,a challenge to his externalized policy dictates. His heavy-handed insistence on the objectivity of all scientific laws, on their indepen-dence of the will of human beings,was a means of backing up his own claim to legis- late the future course of nature and society. On the other hand, he could easily admit the possibility of "saddling" or "subduing" the laws, because this did not in any way affect their validity but only the manner in which society reacted to the discovery of them. It was his role as Supreme Architect of Communism to discover the laws, and it was the business of Soviet society to study them and put them into effect, and thus to "attain mastery" over them.

These considerations make it plain that the frantic preoccupation with causality, ob-jectivity, and scientific laws which emerged in Soviet theoretical writings and the po-pular press during I952 did not signify a retreat into a more empirical and pragmatic temper. Far from implying adoption of a scientific outlook, in the proper sense of the term, this tendency was part and parcel of the drift of the regime (no doubt under the commanding influence of the dictator himself) into the realm of political fantasy and wish-fulfillment. The extreme and at times almost hysterical emphasis upon necessi-ty, iron regularities, objective scientific laws,etc., apparently expressed an imperative need to cover up the arbitrary and willful character of the decisions to transform things to suit the dreams and dictates of the autocracy. The further Stalin went in his schemes for the transformation of nature and society, the more he needed the reassurance that everything was proceeding in accordance with objective laws.


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The appeal to mechanical causality was a rationalization of rampant adventurism in Stalinist policy. We have noted Lysenko's expression of scorn for Mendelian genetics because it "resorts" to the theory of probability and relies on "mere statistics." In later years this attitude led to a conscious rejection of any concept of scientific method that ruled out the absolute character of scientific laws.The physicist Bohr,for example , was attacked in I1952 for attempting to transform the law of the preservation of energy from an absolute law of nature into a statistical law which only holds good on the average. The "indeterminacy principle" enunciated by Heisenberg in connection with the quantum theory proved highly bothersome to Soviet philosophers of science , who felt called upon to contend that beneath the superficial appearance of indeter-minacy the micro-particles of quantum theory must fully conform to a law of "deeper causal determination" of the micro-processes. 7

Especially strongly did they react against the speculation of Western quantum theo-rists to the effect that the electrons "choose their path," as it were, and thus (meta-phorically speaking) possess a certain amount of "free will"; in other words,that there are certain moments when "nature makes a choice." The emotional intensity with which such thoughts were flayed reflects the psycho-ideological motivation of the Stalinist position. To the Stalinist mind it was imperative that nature at all its levels, from the micro-processes to man, be governed by mechanical laws of causality. For only on that condition could it be regarded as infinitely manipulable. The behavior of every single object must be reducible to a rigid, hard-and-fast formula, discovery of which would make it possible to saddle or subdue the object, to gain complete mas-tery over it, to transform it at will. Therefore, autogenesis was unacceptable. Nothing can behave in spontaneous ways not completely reducible to its objective formula.

Everything "subjective" becomes suspect.The endowing of electrons with spontanei-ty was similar to the endowing of living organisms with developmental and mutatio-nal tendencies inherent in their genes. In either case the ideal of total control and transformability would be jeopardized. Here was an outlook which might fairly be described as the projection of totalitarianism upon Nature.

III. THE FORMULA FOR MAN

Inevitably, the postulates of transformism and mechanical causality penetrated the areas of Soviet thought concerned with the behavior of man.

7 B. M. Kedrov, "O materialisticheskom ponimanii zakonov prirody" ("On the Materialist Conception of Laws of Nature"), Voprosy filosofii, No. 6 (I952), pp.

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There were also special reasons for this.The most difficult problem faced by the Sta-lin regime in the postwar years was the profound passivity of the Soviet populace, its failure to respond positively to the goals set before it.Throughout all classes of So-viet society, the hopeful moods which had prevailed widely during the war years eva-porated as the regime's endeavors to mobilize them for fresh exertions in the post-war period got under way. The root of the matter was not the incapacity of people to endure another season of privation, but rather the meaninglessness of the sacrifices they were called upon to make, the pointlessness of Russia's being in eternal conflict with the rest of the world, the total lack of prospect for tranquility in their time.

The result was widespread apathy, resignation, spiritual disengagement from the goals of the Stalin government. Stalin evidently decided that the problem could be solved, or at least greatly alleviated, by a massive propaganda effort coupled with improved controls over an intermediate element-the artists and writers - whose work in the service of the goals of the state would in turn influence the public in the requi-red ways. This was the impulse behind "Zhdanovism," the drive which started in the summer of I946 to enlist and organize the creative intelligentsia of the Soviet Union as a corps of conscious instruments of state policy,as missionaries of patriotic enthu- siasm among the dispirited multitude of the Russian people. This attempt to elicit po-pular enthusiasm by means of a propaganda campaign continued through the post-war years, but with little apparent success. The whole undertaking was an example of Stalinism's characteristic overevaluation of the potentialities of propaganda.

As indicated earlier,the stock reaction of the Stalin regime to a situation in which certain forces in the environment were proving recalcitrant to its goals was not to re-examine the goals, but to search for a formula by which it could transform or remold the forces and thereby overcome their recalcitrance. If the material at hand was sho-wing itself perverse to the dictates of the regime, then some way had to be found to conquer its perversity. The dictates themselves were righteous and unalterable; their frustration only evoked redoubled insistence upon their realization. In the case in question, the regime was faced with persistent popular apathy and passive resis-tance to its control in various sections of Soviet society, especially the peasantry. People were not responding in the expected way to the techniques of political edu-cation and indoctrination. This led the Stalinist mind to find some magic formula for making people respond properly. If Russians were failing to respond to the goals set before them, then something was the matter with the Russians and with the means employed to elicit their response.

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Their minds had to be remolded to the point where inner acceptance of the Soviet ideology and all the behavior patterns it imposed would come as a matter of course. But for mind control to become a reality, it had to be based upon scientific bedrock. What was required was a formula for man.

By i949, when the need for a new formula in terms of which human nature could be scientifically explained and "saddled" had become more or less obvious, the Soviet leadership found in the Michurin-Lysenko doctrines a theory of the transformation of organisms on the biological level.Could it not draw in some fashion upon these doct- rines for the purpose of constructing a more perfect science of man? Stalin himself tended to employ the biological analogy in his sociological thinking.

In his essay on "Dialectical and Historical Materialism" published in I938 as a chap-ter of the new Short Course, he had written that the science of society "can become as precise a science as, let us say, biology, and capable of making use of the laws of development of society for practical purposes." 8

Lysenko, with Stalin's blessing, had become the reigning authority of a new biology which boasted of its ability to "expel fortuities" from this area of knowledge. If Michu-rinism could produce new species of plants and animals, might it not serve in the hands of the all-powerful Soviet state as a means of eventually creating a new species of "Soviet man"?

Actually, a "Michurinism for man" was germinating during the aftermath of the gene-tics controversy of I948, but it did not come forth as a Soviet version of eugenics. It was a transference to man not of the specific biological concepts and techniques of Michurinism but of its basic underlying ways of thought, of its general theory of the relationship between the organism and the environment.

In his search for a counterpart of Michurin in the field of psychology, for a Russian who could qualify as the "great transformer of human nature," Stalin rediscovered Pavlov. The formula for man was the conditioned reflex.

Stalin's rediscovery heralded a Pavlovian revolution in the Soviet behavioral scien-ces. The principle of the conditioned reflex was made the basis of a new Soviet con-cept of man.According to this concept,man is a reactive mechanism whose behavior, including all the higher mental processes, can be exhaustively understood through a knowledge of the laws of conditioning, and can be controlled through application of this knowledge.

8 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik): Short Course, Moscow, 1945, pp. 114-15.

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The new movement began in I949, and continuedwith ever-increasing momentum during 1950, 1951, and I952. From the fields of physiology and medicine where it took its rise, it radiated out into numerous adjacent areas of science, including psychiatry, pedagogy, and psychology.

It must be emphasized once again that the motivating springs of this movement were not scientific but political, not intellectual in the proper sense but psycho-ideological. That is, the neo-Pavlovian movement did not grow spontaneously out of the scientific investigations of Soviet physiologists, pathologists, and psychologists working independently at their respective problems. It was, on the contrary, imposed upon them from above by political authorities whose interest in the matter was non-scientific. According to Academician K. Bykov, who played a part in the Pavlovian revolution similar to that of Lysenko in genetics, the whole development took place "under the directing influence of the Party" and was inspired by Stalin personally:

"The initiator of the events which have elevated the teachings of Pavlov in our count-ry, the initiator of the creation of the most favorable conditions for the development of Soviet physiology for the benefit of the people is the brilliant architect of Soviet cul-ture - Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.We are indebted to Comrade Stalin for the victory of the Pavlovian cause in our country and for the creative upsurge which we now observe in the development of this most important field of contemporary natural science." 9 There appears to be no reason to doubt the testimony of Bykov on this crucial point.

IV. THE ENTHRONEMENT OF PAVLOV

The year I949 was the turning point in the official Soviet attitude toward Pavlov. Prior to that time, Pavlov's memory had been venerated in Soviet writings. But in the new phase, which began in I949, this gave way to a positive glorification of both the man and his teachings. As the potential practical use of these teachings dawned upon the Stalin regime, they began to receive official endorsement in a new spirit of dogmatic authority. A major development in Pavlov's rise was the nation-wide observance in September 1949 of the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Although the Pavlo-vian revolution was at that time still in its formative stages, some of the themes of the centenary materials were highly indicative of the direction in which the thought of the regime was moving. The mounting antipathy toward "subjectivism" was evident in the boast by Academician Bykov that Pavlov "drove the soul out forever from its last refuge - our minds". 10

9 Pravda, April i9, I952.
10 Ibid., September 23, 1949.

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The logic of facts, wrote Bykov, led Pavlov to the necessity of "putting an end forever to the conception of the soul" and Pravda in its anniversary editorial, said that Pavlov had invaded the sphere of spiritual phenomena, established the material basis of higher nervous activity and in this way had smashed for all time the "idealistic fables about the supernatural character of our minds."

Moreover, this editorial revealed vividly the relationship of the new official interest in Pavlov to the transformist trend of thought: "To master nature,to subjugate her to the interests of man, to achieve unlimited power over the most intricate type of motion of matter - the work of the brain - such was Pavlov's ardent dream. Like another great Russian scientist, I. V. Michurin, Pavlov did not wish to await 'favors' from nature, but took the view that it is possible and feasible for man himself to take these 'favors,' actively to intervene in nature, to remake her." 11 The coupling of the names of Pavlov and Michurin was far more than a casual rhetorical flourish.

The tendencies toward an official enthronement of Pavlov came to fruition in June i950, shortly after the publication of Stalin's papers on linguistics; this was an event, as we shall see presently,with which the Pavlovian revolution was closely connected. On June 22, I950, Pravda announced that there was to be held a joint scientific ses-sion of the Academy of Science of the USSR and the Academy of Medical Sciences to discuss problems of the physiological theories of Pavlov.

The session opened in Moscow on June 28. There were two keynote reports, given by Academician K. M. Bykov and Professor A. G. Ivanov-Smolensky. Seventy-five others followed. The theme of the occasion was struck by Vavilov, President of the Academy of Sciences, in the opening speech. The development of Soviet physiology since Pavlov's death, he said, had diverged from the "direct paths laid down by the great Russian scientist" into secondary bypaths. The center of gravity had shifted considerably from the "Pavlov line." The present session would be a turning point beyond which Soviet physiology would develop squarely in the Pavlovian heritage. This basic theme was developed by Bykov. It was a mistake, he stated, to think of Pavlov's teaching as a mere addition to physiology or a new chapter in its develop-ment. It would be more correct to divide all physiology, and all psychology as well, into two phases: the pre-Pavlov phase and the Pavlov phase.

11 Ibid., September 27, 1949.

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Bykov and Ivanov-Smolensky attacked the leaders of all the "deviationist" tenden-cies in Soviet physiology and medicine. Academician Orbeli, who until I948 had directed the main Pavlovian institutes in the USSR, and had been recognized as the principal custodian of the Pavlovian heritage, was the foremost target. He was criti-cized primarily for his view that the principles of the conditioned reflex can explain only the more elementary forms of behavior, and that the existence of a "subjective world" must be reckoned with at the human level.

Orbeli had written in I947 that "in those temporary connections which Ivan Petrovich [Pavlov] studied, we have only the most elementary process of higher nervous acti-vity." And he had called attention to the phenomenon in man of resistance to the for-mation of conditioned reflexes. Both of these propositions were now totally unaccep-table. The conditioned reflex was to be regarded as a universal formula for all higher nervous activity, and no exceptions could be allowed, even at the human level, to the principle of total determination by conditioning. "Also incomprehensible," added Iva-nov-Smolensky, "is Academician L. A. Orbeli's assertion that a qualitative singularity of man is the rise in him of a 'subjective world.' " 12

The relationship of the Pavlovian doctrine to the transformist goals of the Soviet regime and to the Michurinist ideology was made explicit by Bykov and Ivanov-Smo-lensky. Pavlov, declared the latter, had aspired not only to study but also to master the phenomena being studied, to direct them, command them, change them in the required directions. Through a knowledge of the laws of conditioning combined with control over the environment, behavior could be conditioned in whatever ways were considered desirable.In addition,the conditioned connections, repeated for a number of generations, could "by heredity turn into unconditioned ones." The organic rela-tionship between Michurinism and Pavlovianism in the minds of the Soviet propo-nents of these doctrines was reflected in the later appearance in Soviet writings of a new hyphenate expression: the "Michurin-Pavlov biology."

According to this conception, the common basic principle of the two doctrines was the "law of the unity of organism and environment." The difference between them re-lated only to the spheres of application of the basic principle. Michurinism applied it to agriculture, while Pavlovianism applied it to physiology, psychology, and medicine.

A notable detail of the Pavlov session was the frequent reference to hypertension, or high blood pressure, as foremost among the diseases which would prove amenable to therapeutic methods derived from the Pavlovian arsenal.

12 Ibid., July I, I950

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This is interesting in view of the fact that Stalin himself apparently suffered from hypertension in a chronic form; according to the official announcement of March 4, I953, the brain stroke from which he died resulted from his condition of hypertension.

Whether or not the clinical interests of Soviet medicine were guided in part by Sta-lin's personal medical needs, the fact remains that the participants in the Pavlov ses-sion of i950 devoted a remarkable amount of attention to the problem of hyperten-sion. Both of the leading speakers, in particular, laid special stress upon a Pavlovian approach to the cure of this complaint. The Pavlovian view,as they developed it, was that this, like other internal diseases such as ulcers, is ultimately caused by a disor-dered state of the cerebral cortex. In technical Pavlovian terms, employed by A. L. Myasnikov in his speech at the session,hypertension is based upon "disorders of the first and second signal systems," i.e.,the non-linguistic and linguistic systems of con- ditioned reflexes. This being so, therapy should concentrate upon bringing influence to bear upon the patient via the central nervous system. Ivanov-Smolensky mentio-ned sleep treatment, hypnosis, and suggestion as three specific techniques for pos-sible use in this connection. Bykov alluded to some sort of linguistic therapy, saying that "speech can cause deep changes in the whole organism." Can it be that Stalin was in effect mobilizing the Soviet medical profession to discover a Pavlovian miracle treatment for his high blood pressure? The answer to this question must remain for the time being one of the intriguing mysteries of Stalin's reign. However, in view of what is known about the sustained efforts of Soviet specialists to satisfy Stalin's interest in pushing back the frontiers of human longevity, an affirmative answer to the question must be regarded as entirely possible.

Although problems of physiology and medicine largely dominated the deliberations of the Pavlov session, its momentous implications for Soviet psychology did not es-cape the minds of those present. A "reconstruction of psychology on scientific prin-ciples" was one of the tasks which the session's decree laid down for the specialists in this department of knowledge. Among those who addressed the session were two of the most prominent Soviet psychologists, B.M.Teplov and S.L.Rubinstein. Teplov's speech was a piece of abject self-criticism on behalf of Soviet psychology as a whole. The task of constructing a system of psychology based upon the teachings of Pavlov had not, he said, been fulfilled.13 All of the existing textbooks and treatises on psychology were "utterly unsatisfactory."

13 For understandable reasons, Teplov failed to add that this task had also not
previously been set.

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Soviet psychologists had suffered from "a fear of the simplicity and clarity of the Pav-lovian teaching",a fear which reflected in part the regrettable influence on Soviet psy- chologists of certain fashionable foreign schools in psychology. Now,however, Soviet psychology was entering upon a new stage of its development,the Pavlovian stage. 14

There is abundant evidence to show that during the early postwar years the profes-sional psychologists of the USSR were quite oblivious of the impending revolutionary reorientation of their science on the basis of the reflex principle. Reflexology in all its forms was viewed as an aberration of the I920's, as a stage which had been traver-sed and transcended once and for all. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that the majority of psychologists regretted this. Reflexological concepts do not appear to be particularly congenial to their ways of thought.

In any event, the irrelevance of the reflex concept to an understanding of the higher forms of human experience was taken more or less for granted. Teplov, for example, had written in I947: "The explanation of all the phenomena of psychic life by the prin-ciple of the formation of associative or conditioned-reflex connections is, of course, utterly wrong.. .. By itself the theory of conditioned reflexes is not even adequate for understanding the physiological foundation of human behavior."' 15

At the time it was made, this statement merely expressed a view which had come to be accepted with the force of dogma by all the leading figures of Soviet psychology.

That was how matters stood when the command was issued in i950 for Soviet psy-chology to be radically reconstructed on the basis of the reflex principle. Implying as it did that this discipline had been on the wrong track for the past twenty years, the command came as a shock to those on the receiving end. It forced the psychologists to raise again the most fundamental problems concerning the concepts and methods of psychology.The pessimism and perplexity which this prospect aroused among the psychologists were reflected in an incident which occurred some time after the Pav-lov session. A number of psychologists wrote a collective note to Ivanov-Smolensky, inquiring,

"What is the subject of psychology and what are its tasks?" The note was signed: "Group of Psychologists Seeking the Subject of Their Science".16 There is no record that they received a reply.

14 Pravda, July 2, I950.
15 B. M. Teplov, Sovetskaya Psikhologicheskaya Nauka za 30 Let (Thirty Years of Soviet Psychological Science), Moscow, I947, p. I4.
16 N. P. Antonov, "Dialekticheskii materialism-teoreticheskaya osnova psikhologii" ("Dialectical Materialism - The Theoretical Foundation of Psychology"), Voprosy filosofii, No. i (1953), p. 195.

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According to a Soviet source,in the aftermath of the Pavlov session many of the psychologists were "at a loss" in the face of the necessity it had proclaimed for a reconstruction of their science. This found expression "either in liquidator attitudes toward the subject-matter of psychological science or else in efforts somehow to cut themselves off from the Pavlovian teaching, to stand aside and wait it out until the reconstruction had taken place." 17

The next major development was a conference on psychology held in Moscow in July I952 and attended by over 400 psychologists from all parts of the country. Its task was to take stock of the results already achieved in the Pavlovian revolution and to chart its future directions.

The conference admitted in its final resolution that the reconstruction of psychology was proceeding at an "inadmissibly slow" pace, and urged that the task be approa-ched more boldly and resolutely. Professor A.A. Smirnov, the main speaker, decla-red that the reconstruction had to be fundamental and decisive. It had to extend to "the entire content of psychology." The psychological concepts had to be radically recast, purged of "all elements of idealism, subjectivism, introspectionism."' 18

However, this did not mean, according to Smirnov, the reduction of psychology to physiology, the dissolving of psychological concepts into physiological ones. The concept of consciousness, for example, was not to be discarded, as some psycho-logists had proposed in this aftermath of the Pavlov session. Instead, it was to be so reinterpreted that all the phenomena of conscious experience could be strictly corre-lated, on the basis of the reflex principle, with their environmental determinants. Far from facing liquidation, psychology was destined to occupy a position of crucial importance among the sciences. By employing the theory of Pavlov,it would open up the subjective world of man to objective study and thereby to regulation.

V. THE PAVLOVIAN MODEL OF PERSONALITY

The leading Soviet psychologies of the I920'S were characterized by their exclusive interest in overt behavior and by their emphasis on environmental influence. But in the new model of personality which emerged in the i930's, the center of gravity shif-ted to the subjective side. The individual recovered his psyche.

17A. V. Petrovsky, "K itogam soveshchaniya po psikhologii" ("On the Results of the Psychological Conference"), Voprosy filosofli, No. 5 0953), p. 26i.
18 A.A. Smirnov,"Sostoyanie psikhologii i ee perestroika na osnove ucheniya I.P.Pavlova" ("The State of Psychology and Its Reconstruction on the Basis of the Teaching of I. P. Pavlov"), Sovetskaya Pedagogika (Soviet Pedagogy), No. 8 (1952), p. 76

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His overt behavior was now seen as a product of processes taking place inside him as shaped by his previous experience and the educational efforts of the Soviet state. While the principle of causality was not abandoned,there was a significant shift away from exclusive stress on environment. Soviet man was accorded in psychological theory a capacity for self-determination, for consciously regulating his conduct by norms and ideals which, though assimilated from the "socialist environment," were a genuine part of him and hence, supposedly, commanded his sincere and  sponta-neous allegiance. 19 This was in essence an optimistic conception. It presupposed that people growing up in the Soviet social order and subject to the formative influen-ces which the state could bring to bear upon them through the family, the school, the press, and all the other channels of control would, in the vast majority of instances, develop true "Soviet selves." Once formed in this manner, the personality system would become an autonomous force in the individual's life, ensuring his loyalty to the regime, his conformity to its doctrines, and his allegiance to its goals.

Seen in this perspective, the Pavlovian revolution of the early i950's marks an event of historical significance: the breakdown of the optimistic conception of man with which the Stalin regime had officially been operating for nearly two decades. It was a reflection of the quiet resistance of the majority of Russians to the Sovietization of their real selves, a resistance which had proved relatively immune to the massive propaganda pressures of the postwar years. The fact was that Soviet society, with all its controls and its immense resources for indoctrination of the citizenry, was not pro-ducing a generation of New Men. The optimistic model of personality endowed the individual person with a capacity of spiritual self-determination,but the results did not bear out the confident prediction of the I930's. And there was nothing in the working model which would point the way toward the attainment of better results. Naturally, these implications were not openly acknowledged in the writings of the early i950's that centered around the teaching of Pavlov. But they were omnipresent below the surface of these writings, and occasionally showed through unmistakably.

The attempted reconstruction of Soviet psychology was far more, of course, than a confession of the bankruptcy of the optimistic model of personality.

19 In this brief summary of earlier trends, I have followed the interpretation set forth by Raymond A. Bauer in his important study, The New Man in Soviet Psychology, Cambridge, Mass., 1952.

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It was also an expression of Stalin's iron determination to elaborate a new model which would answer the needs of his regime, a truly workable model based upon a perfected technique of soul-forming which would leave nothing to chance and, if pro-perly mastered, could not fail to achieve the goal. In his address to the psychological conference of I952, Professor Smirnov formulated the goal rather candidly: "Soviet psychologists are confronted in all definiteness with the problem of the formation of the personality of man, the formation of it in the concrete social-historical conditions of people, in the conditions of our socialist reality, under the influence of the educa-tional work of the school" (italics added). 20

Since the master-formula for the attain-ment of the goal was to be the conditioned reflex, the model of personality had to be revolutionized. Man had to be understood as a being whose character and conduct are controlled at every step by the conditio-ning process, whose every psychic act is a reflex. As Smirnov put it, "I. P. Pavlov's teaching on temporary connections is a firm basis for understanding all the conscious activity of man."' 21

Thus the reflex mechanism was seen as an all-inclusive key to the workings of the mind. The basic premise of the new Pavlovian model of personality is that there is nothing in man that transcends in principle the conditioned salivary responses of Pavlov's dog. 22

From this starting point,Soviet psychology inevitably moved back into a rigid environ- mental determinism. The leading spokesmen of the neo-Pavlovian movement never tired of pointing out that the Pavlovian model of personality is deterministic. The psy-che's existence is not denied, but all causal determination is shifted to the external environment, natural and social."The causes of psychological facts," says Smirnov in a typical formulation, "are influences emanating from without, primarily influences of a social character."23 According to another authority, "Determinate agents of the external world are the cause, the impetus,of determinate activity of the organism." 24

20 Smirnov, op.cit., p. 78. 21 Ibid., p. 76.
22 For the sake of historical accuracy,it should be recorded that one N.P. Antonov, a psychologist from the town of Ivanovo,raised a lone and ineffectual voice of protest against this basic premise. In an article contributed to Voprosy filosofii (No. II953], p.I97), he wrote: "By attempting to reduce the whole psyche to reflexes,to temporary connections, we are thereby equating the salivation of a dog at the sound of a metronome with the most intricate phenomena of the spiritual life of man, with the conscious activity of people, with the brilliant creations of human intelligence in poetry, art, science, social and political life." Antonov's article immediately became the object of severe and concerted attack on the part of the other psychologists. But the quoted statement is valuable as an acknowledgment from a Soviet source of the full implications of the neo-Pavlovian trend.
23 Smirnov, op.cit., p. 67.
24 V. P. Yagunkova, "Ob osnovnykh printsipakh reflektornoi teorii Akademika I. P. Pavlova" ("On the Fundamental Principles of the Reflex Theory of Academician I. P. Pavlov"), Voprosy filosofii, No. 3 (953), p. I

STALIN AND THE USES OF PSYCHOLOGY 473

In taking this position the Soviet psychologists saw themselves as applying to psy- chology the principle of the unity of organism and environment which the Michurinist doctrine had applied to biology. Just as Michurinism denied the existence of autoge-netic forces in animals and plants, so neo-Pavlovianism denies the existence of psy-chogenetic forces in man.The result is to deprive the human being of all spontaneity, all inner sources of activity. He is jerked into motion,tugged this way and that, by "de- terminate agents of the external world" in which all causal efficacy resides. This is a view which might have been summed up in the slogan: Overboard with self-determi-nation! It marked a clean break with the conception of the New Man. Employing the terminology of the American sociologist Riesman, the transition from the New Man to the Pavlovian model of personality can be described as a shift from an "inner-direc-ted" type, whose character operates as an autonomous determining force in his life, to an "other-directed" type, whose behavior is guided by signals received from out-side. In the Soviet version, however, the sole source of the signals to which the "other-directed" person responds is the State.

To the outsider who studies the materials of the neo-Pavlovian movement, nothing is more striking than its insistent endeavor to empty man of all inner springs of action, to visualize human nature as motivationally inert. Man is "hollow." He has no wishes, instincts, emotions, drives,or impulses,no reservoir of energies of his own. No motive is allowed to intervene between the stimulus emanating from the environment and the person's reflex response. Rubinstein, for example,protests vigorously against the notion that the individual has "inner impulses" (drives, instincts, tendencies, etc.) which underlie his reflexes and "guide the action of the reflex mechanisms in a direc-tion desirable to the organism".His new view is as follows:"The Pavlovian conception of reflex action does not require and does not allow for any 'motive,' drive or impulse lodged behind the reflex, in the depths of the organism, which by some means unknown to us sets the reflex mechanism in motion." 25

True, a person's responses are seen as influenced to some extent by his habits, but these in turn are a crystallization of past conditioning and consequently an integral part of the system of reflex mechanisms.

The linguistic orientation which Stalin imparted to the neo-Pavlovian movement has already been touched upon above.

25 S. L. Rubinstein, "Uchenie I. P. Pavlova i nekotorye voprosy perestroiki psikhologiii ("The Teaching of I. P. Pavlov and Certain Questions of the Reconstruction of Psychology"), Voprosy filosofli, No. 3 (I952), p. 203.

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In the reconstruction of Soviet psychology, the conception of the regulative function of language took on decisive importance. And it was at this point that Stalin's theore- tical interests impinged most directly upon the new movement in psychology. In em-phasizing the all-important role of language in conditioned-reflex behavior at the human level, the Soviet psychologists referred constantly to Stalin's Marxism and Questions of Linguistics,a series of papers which were published in the summer of I950. The first and longest of these papers appeared in Prawda only two days prior to the announcement of the forthcoming Pavlov session, and this close coincidence in time is probably an indication of the intimate relationship in Stalin's mind between the linguistic doctrines which he enunciated and the revival of Pavlovianism in phy-siology and psychology. Such a relationship was, at any rate, taken for granted by the psychologists themselves.

The passages of Stalin's work on linguistics which are quoted most frequently by the psychologists are those in which he stresses the enormous significance of language in all departments of social activity, and the inseparability of language and thought.

With reference to the first point, he writes that language is directly linked with every activity of man "in all areas of his work." It "embraces all the spheres of activity of man" and is "virtually unlimited."" Moreover, Stalin equates language with word-lan-guage,rejecting the notions about gesture-language and wordless thought which had been emphasized by the founder of Soviet linguistics, N. Ya. Marr. Thus, language to Stalin means word-language exclusively, it is inseparable from thought, and it penet-rates and pervades every aspect of the social behavior of man. These propositions formed a starting point for constructing the new Pavlovian model of personality,which pictures man as a creature whose behavior is controlled and regulated by verbal signals.

The concept of the "second signal system" provided a connecting link between Stalin's generalities about language on the one hand and the theory of conditioning on the other. This concept is one which Pavlov casually developed in some of his later writings and in conversations with his students.

The minor part which it played in his system can be judged from the fact that there are scarcely more than a dozen brief references to it in all his writings and recorded conversations. His idea seems to have been that word-language functions in the context of the individual human being's behavior as a system of verbal signals, higher-order conditioned stimuli which evoke indirectly the same responses as those conditioned to non-verbal stimuli.

26 J. V. Stalin, Marksizm i Voprosy Yazykoznanii (AMarxism and Questions of Linguistics), Moscow, i950, p. 39.

STALIN AND THE USES OF PSYCHOLOGY 475


One of the most striking features of the neo-Pavlovian movement is the disproportio-nately heavy emphasis which it places upon this minor appendage of the original Pavlovian system. Until i950, the concept of the second signal system had been generally ignored by Soviet psychologists.

Among the physiologists, the only two who gave it much attention were - significantly enough - Ivanov-Smolensky and Bykov. Then, however, it was lifted out of obscurity and erected as the central pillar of the new Stalin-Pavlov system of psychology. According to Rubinstein,"all the specifically human characteristics of the psyche" are revealed in the functioning of the second signal system.

The Pavlovian revolution placed great emphasis upon the semantic side of Pavlov's theory of conditioned reflexes.In fact,the Soviet neo-Pavlovianism of the early 1950's is essentially a theory of semantics constructed on a physiological basis. The foun-dation upon which the whole structure rests is,in the words of Bykov, the "principle of signalization." The concomitant of a stimulus,such as the sound of the metronome in Pavlov's well-known experiment with the dog, becomes a "signal" of the presence of the stimulus (in this instance,food) and evokes the reflex action appropriate to it. The totality of concomitants which in the natural life conditions of the organism take over the stimulus function and serve as signals constitute, in Pavlov's terminology, a "first signal system of reality." The first signal system is common to man and animals. But at the human level an "extraordinary addition" emerges in the form of speech. Speech is a system of signals of the second order - "signals of signals," in Pavlov's phrase. It forms in its totality a "second signal system of reality" which is peculiar to man and which, according to Pavlov, operates on the same fundamental laws as those that govern the conditioning process at the lower level.

Finally, the generalized verbal signals comprised in the second system are assigned a position of hegemony in the life of man; the second system takes precedence over the first in orienting the human being in his environment. This is the substance of Pavlov's "wonderful idea" of the second signal system,which,according to Bykov and others, had heretofore been mistakenly ignored by Soviet science.

In using the phrase "signals of signals," Pavlov apparently had in mind the view that the word is a generalized "substitute signal" of the object it denotes and, as such, evokes the behavioral reaction appropriate to the object in the same way that the sound of the metronome evokes in the experimental dog the behavioral reaction ap-propriate to the signalized food. Since this line of speculation was outside the direct purview of his scientific work, he did not pursue it further.

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However,  his present-day Soviet followers accepted it as literal truth and made it the cornerstone of the new psychological theory which they had been ordered to build on a Pavlovian basis. The theory rests squarely on Pavlov's surmise that verbal sub-stitute signals evoke behavioral tendencies or reactions in the same way that ordina-ry conditioned stimuli do. One writer, for example, illustrated the thesis as follows:

"By mastering the word, that is, by learning to pronounce the appropriate auditory complex and to relate this complex correctly to specific objects, the child masters the significance of the given word. After that the word can play the part of a signal of signals: the word 'apple' can signalize the very same stimuli as those evoked by a real apple." 27

If, in other words, the sight of an actual apple lying on the table will cause a hungry child's mouth to water, hearing the word "apple" will eventually, after the proper lan-guage training, evoke a similar reaction. The function of words is, then, to trigger be-havioral responses appropriate to the objects with which people have been trained to associate the words.


We may note here that this Pavlovian concept of the function of language is approp-riate to a hypothetical primitive condition of man in which speech was exclusively an instrument of social control and had not yet acquired an autonomous representative function. By treating words as second-order signals to action, it overlooks the acqui-red symbolic function of language. The distinction between words used as signals to action on the one hand and purely as symbols of their objects on the other is illustra-ted by an American semanticist in the following way: "A term which is used symboli-cally and not signally does not evoke action appropriate to the presence of its object. If I say: 'Napoleon´,you do not bow to the conqueror of Europe as though I had intro- duced him, but merely think of him. If I mention a Mr. Smith of our common acquain-tance, you may be led to tell me something about him 'behind his back' which you would not do in his presence.


. . . Symbols are not proxy for their objects, but are vehicles for the conception of objects." 28

The failure of the Soviet psychologists to recognize and take account of this crucial distinction is no mere accident. The practical importance which was discerned in the neo-Pavlovian movement, its electrifying educational implications to the Stalinist mind, depended entirely upon reducing language to its signal-function exclusively, upon regarding words as "proxy for their objects."


27 D. P. Gorsky, "O roli yazyka v poznanii ("On the Role of Language in Cognition"), Voprosy filosofli, No. 2 (I953), p. 82.
28 Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, New York, I948, pp. 48 - 49.



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The whole movement would have collapsed instantly had its initiator forced himself to consider the possibility that words can be employed purely symbolically as neutral vehicles for the conception of objects. The goal was to treat language as an instru-ment of social control. For this purpose it was imperative that words should always be signals which touch off responses appropriate to their meaning. Here was the needed link between semantics and politics. As Smirnov expressed it, the Pavlovian teaching reveals the conditions under which stimuli, including verbal stimuli, become
signals "and by virtue of this fact regulate the behavior of man" (italics added). 29 On this view of the function of language,a person hearing the word "Napoleon" should indeed make at least a mental bow to the conqueror of Europe, or whatever other gesture his earlier conditioning had linked with this verbal signal. Or,to take a familiar example from the Soviet context,on hearing the signal "warmonger" a properly Pav- lovianized Russian should respond with a shudder of fury. Granted the initial premise that the word is in every case primarily a call to action, linguistics logically takes its place at the head of the list of political sciences. Of all the monopolies enjoyed by the Soviet state, none would be so crucial as its monopoly on the definition of words.

The ultimate weapon of political control would be the dictionary.30 At this point it may be useful to summarize briefly the argument of the foregoing pages. I have sugges-ted that the movement initiated by Stalin to reconstruct Soviet psychology marked a decline of the optimistic conception of man which had officially prevailed in the USSR since the early 1930'S. This in turn was an indirect reflection of the fact that millions of Russians, especially under the impact of their experiences during and after World War II, showed tendencies to deviate radically from the norm of Soviet selfhood which, according to the optimistic conception, they should have naturally assimilated as a result of their education and spontaneous personality development. In the face of this disturbing fact, Stalin resorted to the peculiar mode of coming to terms with perverse situations which we have termed "transformism". In the Pavlo-vian model of personality he found a formula which seemed to place human nature in the arbitrary power of a state-controlled educational environment.


29 Smirnov, op.cit., p. 68.
30 It is of interest in this connection to note the extraordinarily intense activity, after 1950, in the writing and rewriting of dictionaries in the Soviet Union.


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Emptied of all inner springs of character and conduct,man appeared in this model as apassive plaything of determinating influences from without, particularly influences of a social character brought to bear through the medium of language.By mastering the "objective scientific laws of the language-conditioning process,the state could - theo- retically - bring about them"directed alteration of psychic processes," i.e., it could transform the minds of its citizens, mold them in the Soviet personality image. The crowning concept of this theoretical edifice was the second signal system. In the Stalin-Pavlov model of man,the second signal system is the mechanism of mentality.

Consciousness is the distinctive capacity of human beings to respond to and regu-late their behavior by verbal signals. Man is basically a signal-receiving animal. And since it is the state which calls the signals, an appropriate name for this theoretical
new species of Soviet humanity would be "state-directed man."

VI. THE COUNTER-TREND SINCE STALIN'S DEATH

The interpretation offered here of the neo-Pavlovian chapter of Soviet thought as-signs a crucially important place to Stalin. The evidence for such a view converges from a number of directions. First, there is the direct public testimony of Bykov, Ru-binstein, and others that Stalin initiated the back-to-Pavlov movement. Secondly, the neo-Pavlovian movement was in its way an outgrowth, an extension to man, of the Michurin-Lysenko line in biology, which enjoyed Stalin's personal patronage. Further, it was closely linked up with the ultra-deterministic conception of scientific law which he developed in his final work on political economy. Finally, in its medical aspect, the movement impinged upon an area in which Stalin had shown all along,and especial-ly toward the end, a most intense personal interest. These various indications of Sta-lin's role as the instigator and guiding spirit of the Pavlov revival lend special interest to the course which the movement has taken since Stalin died.

The Stalin-Pavlov line was not altered immediately after Stalin's death. As late as August I953, Bykov was quoted in a Soviet journal as saying: "We must preserve the purity of the Pavlov teaching, which has affected all major issues of contemporary natural science."'" But then subtle signs of a counter-trend began to appear. One of these was the move to topple Lysenkoism from its monopolistic position in biology. This emerged into the open in early I954. Later in that year, the counter-trend went further.

3l Sovetskaya Kniga (Soviet Book), No. 8 (I953), p. 33.


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A prominent physicist, S. L. Sobolev, was permitted to publish an article in Pravda stating that scientific progress "is always connected with the abandonment of pre-conceived points of view,with the bold breaking-down of old norms and conceptions."

Sobolev attacked the previous disparagement of Einstein's physical theories by physicists of the Moscow University. He coupled this with a caustic reference to the unmerited claims of certain Soviet scientists to monopoly of the truth, mentioning three names in this connection: Lysenko, Bykov, and Ivanov-Smolensky. 32 To the psychologists, the inference could only be that the twin dictators of Stalin's neo-Pav-lovian movement had fallen from the pedestal of official infallibility. The way was now opened for a reaction against this movement. The reaction came shortly afterward in an editorial summation in Problems of Philosophy of the whole discussion of recent years on psychology." 33

The editorial did not attack Pavlov or question the importance of his teachings for psychology. But in various significant ways it undermined the Stalin-Pavlov line. It redefined psychology in pre-1950 terms as "the science of the psychic activity of man." Next, it announced-with something of an air of discovery - that psychic activity is both real and subjective in nature: "The subjective-man's psyche - really exists." (!)

It reproached the 1952 conference on psychology for banning the introspective me-thod. It told the psychologists not to be afraid of describing the rediscovered subjec-tive world of man in terms of the traditional psychological categories: mind, feeling, will, imagination, etc. "This observation," it added, "we address to certain nihilistic tendencies in the matter of the so-called recasting or redefinition of the psychological terms and concepts on the basis of the Pavlovian physiology." The reader will recall that these "nihilistic tendencies" were part and parcel of the Stalin-Pavlov line. They expressed the very crux of what Stalin was directing the Soviet psychologists to do. Finally, the editorial referred in sharply negative terms to those who would "dogmati-cally apply to man" all the methods which Pavlov evolved in the study of animal be-havior. The effect of all this was, of course, to revise the whole orientation imposed on Soviet psychology from high political spheres in 1950.

The counter-trend is still no more than a trend at the time of this writing. It could not be classed as a counter-revolution. There is no suggestion of a rejection of Pavlov or a denial of the relevance of his ideas to psychology. What has apparently been discarded is, specifically, the Stalin idea of finding in Pavlov the scientific key to mind control.


32 Pravda, July 2, I954.
33 "O filosofskikh voprosakh psikhologii" ("On Philosophical Questions of Psychology"), Voprosy filosofii, No. 4 (I954).

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The new admission that "the psyche really exists" reflects some  quite crucial - the abandonment of total environmental determinism in the sense that was implied in the Stalin-Pavlov line. This was made explicit in early i955 in the first issue of a new Soviet journal,Problems of Psychology. The programmatic leading article was contri- buted by Rubinstein.In it he rejects the idea of determinism "as the theory of a cause which operates as an external impetus and directly determines the terminal effect of the external stimulus." This, as we have seen, is precisely the kind of determinism implicit in the model of the state-directed man.The verbal signals called by the state are supposed to determine directly his attitudes and acts. No intervention of the psy-che as an autonomous inner force in man is allowed; no self-determination, no spon-taneity, no motives are to be presupposed by psychology. Having formulated the de-terministic principle as implicit in this model,Rubinstein continues:"It is easy to under- stand the invalidity of such determinism. All the facts of science and everyday obser-vation testify against it. We may convince ourselves at every step that one and the same stimulus can evoke various different reactions in various different people. One and the same stimulus evokes different reactions in one and - the same individual under various different conditions of that person .... External causes operate through the medium of the internal conditions which represent the foundation of the develop-ment of phenomena." 34 Here the principle of "autogenesis," the idea that the perso- nality is to some extent an autonomous determining force in the person's life and behavior, is restored. The core of the Stalin-Pavlov line is cut away. The model of the state-directed man presupposes a one-to-one correspondence between the verbal propaganda stimulus and the individual's reflex response. It implies "direct" determi-nism in the sense here denied. Such determinism, concludes Rubinstein, "would signify the complete disintegration of personality and would lead to a defective me-chanistic conception holding that each influence on a person has its own 'separate' effect irrespective of the dynamic situation.... The central link here is the 'psychology of personality.' This is the point of departure and the point of arrival for an adequate theory of motivation" (italics added)." Not only does this statement slough off the model of the state-directed man on behalf of Soviet psychology. "

34 S. L. Rubinstein, "Voprosy psikhologicheskoi teorii" ("Questions of Psychological Theory"), Voprosy psikhologii, No. i (1955), pp. I4-I5. Ibid., P. I17.


STALIN AND THE USES OF PSYCHOLOGY 481


It admits by indirection that the Stalin-Pavlov line envisaged nothing less than the complete disintegration of human personality.

What are the policy implications of the counter-trend? The Stalin-Pavlov line, as shown earlier, was an expression of the Will to Transform which was operative in Stalin's postwar policies. It was a search for a sure formula of mind control which would yield techniques for the psychic transformation of human beings, rendering them plastically receptive to the official propaganda image of the world and of them-selves and their tasks in Soviet society. Underlying it was the idea that "propaganda can do anything" if only the psychic conditions of receptivity to it could be scientifical-ly set and controlled.This was a theory of environmentalism in which the state-opera- ted organs of education and indoctrination were seen as the sole active sector of the environment, the determining environmental force.The remainder of the environment , including the material living conditions of Soviet people, would not have to be ame-liorated in order to accomplish the transformist objective. The illusion of a happy life could be built up and maintained in Soviet minds no matter how miserable the actual living conditions might be.


If this aspect of transformism were subsiding in Soviet official thought, how might we recognize the shift? There would be some sign of recognition that propaganda, as it were, "cannot do everything," that actual living conditions would have to be improved in order to assure a better popular response to the regime and its goals. Policy, in other words, would be governed by a more pragmatic approach, one that combined continued heavy stress on indoctrination with some effort to ameliorate the real envi-ronment of the masses of Soviet citizens. The beginnings of such a shift in the policy orientation of the Soviet regime have, in fact, appeared. One of the most interesting manifestations of it is the recognition of the limitations of coercion and propaganda persuasion as means of controlling mass behavior.For example,the Central Commit- tee's journal, Party Life, has recently written that private commercial "speculation" (classed as a "survival of capitalism") cannot be combated by legal regulation and propaganda alone. It is also necessary "to show concern for the all-round develop-ment of Soviet trade, the improvement of supplies for the population,and the creation of an abundance of consumer goods. Only on this condition will all ground for specu-lation disappear."36 It is questionable whether "this condition" will soon or ever be realized under the Soviet economic system, but the statement itself is of real interest as an indication of the decline of transformism in the regime's official thinking.


36 Partiinaya zhizn, No. ii (June I955), pp. 39-40.



482 WORLD POLITICS


An even clearer indication comes in a direct criticism by the Soviet philosophical journal of the tendency to overvalue the potentialities of propaganda. Some,it states, have reasoned "as though the survivals of capitalism in the minds of people could be overcome solely by means of propaganda, by means of education, while neglecting the solution of economic tasks,the necessity of steadily developing social production, which creates objective conditions for improving the material position and cultural standard of the people" (italics added)."' But such reasoning,it contends, is mistaken.

A policy operating "solely by means of propaganda" will not do. The inference is that the new Soviet leadership recognizes direct mind control of the kind Stalin sought as , at the least, an impractical proposition. In other words, it recognizes the imperative need to combine indoctrination with improvement of "objective conditions" if Soviet popular attitudes and behavioral patterns are to be altered in its own favor.

No substantial shift of internal Soviet economic policy has resulted from such recog-nition, although the Malenkovist stress on the consumer and welfare goals seemed for a while to point in that direction.

The new sixth five-year plan is founded squarely on the traditional primacy of heavy industry. But within this framework there is still evident a cautious, pragmatic orientation toward economic meliorism.

This does not seem to have been basically affected by the various shifts in the top leadership during the post-Stalin years. For example, the policy of raising material incentives for the Soviet peasantry, initiated while Malenkov was premier, has conti-nued since his demotion. The recent reaction against Stalinist architectural extrava-gance is accompanied by a new stress on utilitarian modes of construction and "con-veniences for the population".As announced at the Twentieth Party Congress, reduc- tions of the 48-hour working week are planned. Tuition fees for schooling are to be eliminated in a return to the system that prevailed before 1940. Some particularly onerous regulations, such as the ban on abortion, have been repealed. Wages for the lowest categories of industrial workers are to be increased somewhat in the im-pending general reorganization of the system of remuneration for industrial labor. In these and other ways, the post-Stalin regime is making clear its renunciation of the idea that propaganda "can do everything."


The other expressions of Stalin's transformism reviewed in the early part of this study have suffered more or less the same fate as the Stalin-Pavlov line.

37 Voprosy filosofii, No. 2 (1955), p. 85.



STALIN AND THE USES OF PSYCHOLOGY 483


The accompanying cult of necessity has also shown a tendency to subside some-what,and the open criticism of Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R; from the rostrum of the Twentieth Party Congress may foreshadow a modification of Sta-lin's rigid view on "scientific laws." Michurin, like Pavlov,continues to hold a very high place of honor in Soviet official opinion. But Lysenko's dogmatic version of Michuri-nism, with its flashy promises to "make evolution," is no longer being pressed in the previous spirit of militant intolerance. The plan to "transform the face of the capital" by erecting huge skyscrapers has not only been dropped but openly attacked in So-viet writings. The "Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature" has faded away as a policy slogan, although many of the individual projects comprised under it are being carried out-some, such as the reforestation scheme, on a much reduced scale.

A Soviet academician has contributed to the Literary Gazette an interesting epitaph on the Stalinist Will to Transform. Answering a reader's question, "Can the weather be controlled?" he notes various advances in this direction, but cautions against expecting too much. It is wrong, he says, to believe, as some do, that the weather changes of recent years in Soviet Russia are connected with "the newly constructed reservoirs, hydroelectric power stations, canals and other such circumstances" (i.e., the "Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature"). "It must be borne in mind that fluctuations of this kind have taken place previously in the historical past. Thus, for example, temperatures which we experienced this summer [1954] in the central   zone were also experienced in these parts in i89i, i892, 1920, i936, and I938." 38 In other words, despite the colossal expenditure of effort to "transform nature" in Soviet Russia, the weather there is basically no different now from what it was in the reign of Czar Alexander III.

The effect of the academician's remarks is to explode the presumption upon which the Stalin scheme was based. His message is that the scheme was faulty in its un-derlying preconception that the climate is at the present stage of science controllable by man. In a deeper sense, he seems to be saying that, if unlimited control is not now an attainable objective, the drive to attain it is irrational.

To paraphrase an epigram, politics as practiced by Stalin in the final years of his reign was an art of the impossible. Under the regime of his successors, Soviet policy appears to be executing a strategic retreat into the realm of possibility.


38 Literaturnaya Gazeta, August I4, I954.