The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

The father of modern psychology, Ivan Pavlov, was eighty-five years old on December 21, 1934. His experiments in behaviorism had earned him the Nobel Prize, and his international scientific reputation made him virtually untouchable. Following the mass arrests in Leningrad, Pavlov had written an angry letter to the USSR Council of People’s Commissars: “You believe in vain in the all-world revolution . . . You disperse not revolution, but fascism with great success throughout the world . . . Fascism did not exist before your revolution . . . You are terror and violence . . . We are living now in the atmosphere of terror and violence . . . Am I alone in thinking and feeling this way? Have pity on the Motherland and us.” When Ivan Pavlov died two years later, the NKVD had collected five volumes of informers’ denunciations against the figurehead of Soviet science.8