The Towers of Silence

The Towers of Silence was the informal name for a foreboding annex in the grounds of the Institute. 
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The building was officially burdened with the title the laboratory for research on activity of the central nervous system of higher animals’. Its informal name was adopted because of one of the primary purposes of the building’s design: to eliminate vibration and extraneous sounds in the rooms where animal experiments take place’. In the 1920s, it became the location for a series of experiments designed to drive dogs mad.

Pavlov’s original plans for the Towers of Silence. Source: Pavlov on the Conditional Reflex: Papers, 1903–1936, Oxford University Press, 2023, translated by Olga Yokoyama. 
The windows in the laboratory room are not large, and are made of the heaviest one-piece cast glass. The doors from these rooms… will be double, metal, hermetically sealed, with sound-proof coverings.
Ivan Pavlov

Inside the Towers

At the heart of the Towers of Silence are eight sound proof chambers within laboratory rooms, where animal experiments took place. 

Outside looking in — another perspective on our version of the Towers of Silence. Photo: Ben Beasley 

William Horsley Gantt became one of the principal proponents of Pavlovian methodology in the U.S. He stayed at Pavlov’s laboratory in what was then Leningrad from 1925 to 1929. This is a photograph he took during this period. 

Inside the Towers. The experimenter is located outside of the chamber, the dog inside. In this photo the iron door is propped open. Source: A photograph by William Horsley Gantt, circa 1924. Source: Wellcome Collection. 
Gantt’s handwritten description of how the experimental chambers in the Towers worked. The text is reproduced below. Source: Wellcome Collection. 

The concrete suspended room, with door open and dog in position. The operator and the switchboard are on the outside of the concrete room. The building is surrounded by a moat 5ft deep filled with sawdust to prevent reverberation from the street. When the door is closed to the concrete room no external stimuli reach the dog except stimulation by the operator at the switchboard. The operator looks at the dog through a periscope but the dog can not see him. The flow of saliva is registered by a manometer (?) on the outside of the door. The dog can be fed as well as stimulated from the switchboards. The concrete room has double walls, and 1ft thick and separated by air cushion.

Experiments designed to break’ dogs

In the summer of 1922, alongside his assistant and lover Maria Petrova, Pavlov conducted a series of experiments with the intention of purposefully breaking’ two dogs – Postrel and Milord. This they did by subjecting the dogs to increasingly powerful electric shocks from which the dogs could not escape. Over three years of trials, the shocks were paired with food, or other already established stimuli, supposedly to create a clash’ in the dogs’ nervous system. Designed to support Pavlov and Petrova’s theory of psychological breakdown, the results of these experiments were later disregarded. 

Our reimagining of the building is an attempt to challenge representations of Pavlov’s experiments as benign and make more visible what happened to Milord and Postrel, and many other dogs. Postrel and Milord’s stories are explored in more detail in Other Observations.

A blood red Towers of Silence. Photo: Ben Beasley 
Hear more from inside the Towers of Silence 

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