Action Comrade Pavlov


Pavlov’s status
We created Action Comrade Pavlov to reflect Pavlov’s enduring legacy and popular appeal since his death – in Soviet culture especially, but also in the history of Psychology in the West.

Despite some initial hostility, Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, lavishly supported Pavlov from the 1920s onwards, championing him as one of the figureheads of a Soviet commitment to scientific progress that could compete with the West.

By the time Pavlov died in 1936, he was a national hero. Newsreel from the time shows a grand and sombre funeral procession through the centre of Leningrad (the new name adopted for St Petersburg after Lenin’s death), complete with streets draped in black, thousands of onlookers, a military gun salute, and Pavlov’s body on public display in an open casket.

Pavlov’s global reputation was assured, with all major national newspapers and medical journals in the West publishing celebratory obituaries. This one is from the British Medical Journal.
Electroshock edition

Behind the bright packaging of Action Comrade Pavlov, something more sinister lurks. The ‘electroshock edition’ includes various experimenter accessories, including a machine that administers shocks.
Such machines really were key pieces of experimental kit, capable of delivering severe shocks. They were regularly deployed in The Towers of Silence to electrocute dogs as part of an experiment. You can spot versions of the machine throughout the exhibition and discover more about how and why they were used.
Pavlov’s legacy
Josef Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union in 1924, until his death in 1953. After Pavlov’s death, Stalin advanced a version of ‘Pavlovianism’ as the only acceptable psychological and scientific doctrine. Few dared to question Stalin, so his support helped firmly cement Pavlov’s reputation, at least in public.
For the most part, Pavlov’s legacy has remained intact, his accomplishments heralded in Psychology as a major contribution to the establishment of the discipline as a science. Even today, however, we rarely stop to look at the detail, including the role of the thousands of dogs involved. In that sense, the simplified figure of an unblemished, intrepid ‘great man of science’ has been frozen in time, like a slightly absurd action hero from an earlier era.