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Hello Asiya, I love your research! I’ve been very interested in post-war theories of cybernetics, however your research really illuminates its pre-war or early 20th C. antecedents. I would love to talk to you more about Pavlov too, naturally!
Thank you, Kate, I really enjoyed your poster, too! I have been contemplating to look at the use of the word robot in the 1920s and 1930s. Čapek’s R.U.R. was published in Russian twice in 1924, in different translations. It would be so interesting to trace its reception within the pre-war period.
Thank you so much for putting the famous Pavlov’s dogs into a context! A really fascinating poster. I’d like to learn more about ethical dilemmas related to your research. What kind of ethical considerations were presented by the scientists you study and what kind of ethical challenges you as a scholar meet?
Dear Pirjo,
Thank you for your kind works and your questions. This is a new project and it is still at an early, budding, stage. I have had discussions with people working on animals studies in Russian contexts and, as I said in the comment below, we both found the absence of negative responses to these quite brutal experiments perplexing. I am mainly focusing on the first five years after the 1917 revolution, which were marked by extreme living conditions when people had to eat, for example, horses who died of starvation on the streets of Petersburg. A few days ago I came across a reference to “a butterfly soup” in Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem. As the reference to Pavlov’s quote about the limits of what he was going to do to animals in his experiments shows, there were some ethical concerns, but I am still to find out what they were.
When it comes to my personal research, your question really made me wonder if I should have trigger warnings about images of animal cruelty in my slides. Thank you for encouraging me to think about these issues. Personally, I was deeply affected by them when I first saw them and, it seems, have since grown a thicker skin…
Pavlov’s presence in the narrative is suggestive of the foregoing connections to a network of scientific and medical research across Europe and North America, particularly the allusion to a kind of ethical standard regarding animal experimentation, and the sanctity of the human that safeguarded people from invasive experimental research. This was well rehearsed in Germany, Britain and the US before the First World War. So, what are the processes and practices that bring about the erasure or suppression of this experience of experimental research in a broader context? How, practically, were the laboratory and the scientific self Bolshevized?
Thank you for your comment. I am very much interested in the ethical aspect of animal experimentation. As far as I could see, in Russia there were no negative responses to animal experiments. Even the photographs of people gathered around severed dog heads show how excited the audience was to see this “miracle” of life conquering death. Do you have example of negative responses to Pavlov’s experiments in the West?
The laboratories in question were State funded as part of newly institutionalised research centres. While they were subject to state support, they were also subject to neglect, just like larger populations. For example, during the famine of 1919-1921, Pavlov’s laboratory could no longer conduct experiments, since the data retrieved from malnourished dogs was unreliable. The laboratory adopted a new line of investigation examining the influence of extreme hunger – the results were carefully recorded as the dogs starved to death. At the same time, there are a lot of statistical reports and medical studies on the effects of famine on humans. In a sense, the Bolshevization reduced everyone to an experimental subject.
Dear Asiya Bulatova,
Thank you so much for sharing this intriguing look at revolutionary Russian experiences of agency! I’ve always been struck by the strange Taylorist biomechanics of Meyerhold, Gastev, etc. – and how these new poetics of human experience can seem so alienating to us today, but were heralded as incredibly emancipatory in the soviet 1920s.
I was wondering if you could perhaps spare a few words on how the category of class features in your research. While elite observers (both in Russia and abroad) lamented the October Revolution as a cataclysmic degradation of the human spirit, Marxist participants understood it through an entirely different (historical materialist) conception of agency.
I am thinking here, in particular, of L.D. Trotsky’s argument that the October Revolution was “a series of collective dramas which lifted millions of human beings out of non-existence” – i.e. a radical attempt to forge new relations of production and a new social life that would extend actual power to all those who had been materially disenfranchised under Imperial Russia’s reactionary autocracy and incipient capitalism (women, colonized subjects, the peasantry, and the Eurasian working class).
Taken all together, I guess I would like to ask – can the binary you propose between art and labor as vehicles of agency be applied as a stable category to the Russian revolutionary experience, or was the revolution itself something that aimed at a new articulation of this very binary, in both theory and practice? How might Bolshevik concepts of material, embedded, class-based agency be useful for our histories of the Russian revolutionary experience, or even within larger debates on the nature of agency today?
Thank you!
– Nick
Dear Nick,
Thank you for your comment and sorry about a tardy response. I have just watched your poster presentation and those prison memoirs are so fascinating! I have done work on Viktor Shklovsky’s memoirs of 1917-1922 A Sentimental Journey, which was written under extreme circumstances but never in prison.
To answer some of your questions, I sense that the attitude towards class were extremely diverse. For example, in press there were heated debates between different literary groups, with some people being attacked over their backgrounds. One can find things like, again, Shklovsky arguing against being called Mr (г-н.) in a polemical piece and insisting that he has been Comrade Shklovsky ever since the revolution. I have done some work on Soviet appropriation of Charlie Chaplin and there you can really see how important class was. The Soviet press completely re-invented his work, image and even biography, writing, for example that he comes from a family of Russian immigrants, who left to escape the “the burden of Romanov’s autocracy.”
As for your next point, the Bolshevik attempts to shift the locus of agency from an individual to a social body reserved a very particular place for art. Perhaps, art being displayed in communal dining cafeteria for workers is a telling example. Of course, some writers and theorists argued that this completely negated art’s capacity to be a vehicle of agency, as you put it. If it is at every corner, art consumers developed a sort of an “immunity” rendering art (and Soviet propaganda) invisible. I would say that this particular fantasy of art having a restorative effect on perception and the sense of body ownership/capacity for action was an example of post-revolutionary utopian wishful thinking. Perhaps, as was the early-Soviet research in labour which was adopted by avant-garde actor-training programs by Meyerhold, Forreger and other.
I hope this answers some of your points. Thank you very much for writing such a thoughtful response.
Hi Asiya, I was going to comment this in my response to you to on my poster but I realised you might not see it! I thought your poster was really fantastic and enlightening for me. As an undergraduate I briefly dabbled in animal studies and spent quite a lot of time thinking about animals as historical agents, or not. So my question is: Can you consider non-human animals in these experiments as agents?
I also found the lack of negative response to these experiments very interesting. What was the general status of non-human animals in society at that time? How were these animals understood differently from pets, for example? Thank you!
Amanda Gavin
12.3.2021 11:25