The Soviet Ordeal Ep. 7 Follow the Science: Mind Control

You’ve heard the phrase “follow the science” or “science is real” over the past several years. Having “science” on one’s side seems to make a viewpoint authoritative if not infallible. The Soviet Union believed this wholeheartedly. Not only that but they believed their whole system of government itself was BASED on science. This was the “Scientific Socialism” of Marx and Engels put into practice on a grand scale. Science or the idea of it permeated every aspect of Soviet life to an extent that we in the West have never known. Socialism was supposed to be hypermodern. It would sweep away all  the social and cultural baggage that had accumulated over the millenia and usher in an era of pure reason and progress. This would be accomplished through the power of science. Through science the Soviets sought to reprogram the individualistic human mind and make it communist to the very core. From the very beginning Lenin was fascinated with the work of Ivan Pavlov. He believed that this physiologist who so expertly conditioned dogs to respond to the stimuli of his choosing held the key to shaping the collective psyche of the entire Russian people. They would be fashioned into obedient Communists through the power of science. A decade later the world got its first glimpse of what these Soviet scientists were up to. During Stalin’s show trials high ranking defendants admitted to fantastic crimes that they had no way of actually committing. Moreover, they pledged absolute fealty to a system and a man they knew would soon destroy them. Had the Soviets discovered a new method of dark persuasion unknown to the west? Even the Nazis were unnerved by the idea. Soon an obsession with Pavlovian “brainwashing” would overwhelm the free world. It was discussed in universities, newspapers, films and even on the floor of the United States Congress. Meanwhile, within the Soviet Union, the scientific optimism and ambition of the 1920’s would give way to repression and fear. Any scientist that dared to question the state approved Pavlovian doctrine would find himself out of a job, in prison camp or worse. The Soviets came to believe the human mind was simply a series of reflexes that could be manipulated to the will of the state. There was no room for any other opinion. In the 1950’s a sinister new figure would come to dominate the field of Soviet Psychology: Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky. Under his rule, the state devised a new diagnosis for individuals who dared to question the absolute superiority of the Soviet system: “Sluggish Schizophrenia.” Now, if you spoke out against the regime you could find yourself locked in a mental asylum indefinitely with no right of appeal and no correspondence with the outside world. These “patients” were often heavily drugged and made to undergo tortures that many compared with what Jewish prisoners experienced at the hands of Nazi doctors decades earlier. How did a science that promised such a bright and limitless future devolve into a dystopian tool of oppression? Maybe that’s just what happens when politics and science become one and the same under a system that demands absolute conformity.     

Transcript

Over the past couple years we have heard the phrase “follow the science” or “science is real.” Its all over the place. Its so commonplace that we often don't think about it. Yeah.. sure.. Of course it is. Who would doubt that? Its a little condescending actually because anyone saying it is essentially saying “Hey I believe in truth! I believe in reality! What you don't believe in reality.. You dum dum!!”  Science is by its very nature based on objective reality. If it was not.. Well it couldn’t be called science. Its the 

“systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” 

According to dictionary.com. Saying that you believe in science is sort of tantamount to saying you have the right answer a priori. If you have it on your side you are by definition correct. Its like a royal flush in any argument. We like to think that its somehow incorruptible. We are taught that scientists have these traits “the scientific attitude”... maybe you remember fro back in high school…. You know,,,,  curiosity, skepticism, and humility. Thats what puts scientists on a  different moral plane from the rest of us… Not just an intellectual one They follow the facts. We are tossed about by our personal biases, emotions and superstitions. Thus we have no choice but to follow them. Right? They have that objectivity in their corner that allows them to see reality better than us mortals. That may be true..  But maybe not. 

When I was a kid my parents sent me to a Christian school that was pretty conservative. Actually, all of my siblings were enrolled at the same time. They worried about the influences we were experiencing in the local public schools and they wanted a school that would teach more traditional values. I’m the oldest of 5 children so I had 5 years of experience in public school before starting there. The school put Biblical literalism. Every last word of the Bible was true. It was God’s word. End of story. I remember my 7th grade science teacher teaching us about the Solar System and the Universe… Eventually the question would come up “How did it begin?” “Was there a big bang?” Some of the kids were interested in space. Most little kids are. You see Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking on PBS.. Yeah I’m not even sure we had cable back then. Some of the questions were good. Like “Isn’t it true that the universe is expanding? And if they know how fast its going then cant they figure out when it started?’ Bunch of other questions. I think most of us knew almost all scientists thought it was billions of years old but the details were fuzzy. To every one of these queries she simply answered “In the beginning God created.” Right out of the Book of Genesis…. Every time.. Like clockwork.. To the point where its like.. Are you stonewalling us? Over the years I thought about it. It seemed sort of defensive or maybe irrational at the time but later I came to grasp the rationale. We all have a sort of hierarchy of truth in our minds. We receive contradictory information all the time in our lives and we are forced to accept one version of reality over another based on that. Happens all the time. Some of us are credulous, some are skeptical… doesn’t matter. We all do it. For the Teachers and many.. Maybe most of the students in that school the Bible (in its entirety) was the ultimate truth. It had to be accepted at face value… whole cloth. Once you started writing off certain parts as potentially false or “allegorical.” A word that made them cringe. Then what was to stop you from questioning everything else? Other sources of knowledge were fine. All truth is God’s truth… but if they contradicted scripture then they had to be rejected. Bible says the World was created in 7 days. Well so it was. If you add up all the lifespans of the patriarchs and the Kings of Israel and Judah you arrived at 6000 years. Well.. world is 6.000 years old. That's it. There was no way around it. If you asked them what was absolute reality… What was “scientific.” They wouldn't bat an eye while explaining to you how that version of reality was completely true and moreover verifiable. They would defend it. When you look at the Soviet Union you get a similar phenomenon… but what if your ultimate reality is that of marxism leninism? What if those ideas are so exalted that they are viewed at “scientific reality?” Today very few people will look at the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital and say… this is absolute truth on par with newton’s laws of motion but when you look at the Soviet Union right down to its collapse thats exactly what you are looking at.  It touched everything…. It was literally the lens through which they viewed the entire world. There were more scientists per capita in the soviet union than in any state in the history of the world. They respected science for the very same reasons we do. They say America was a sort of social experiment. Certainly the framers of the Constitution felt that way. However they never believed that they could change human nature. They didn't feel they could change they way people think. The Soviet Union was an experiment far more ambitious than ours. That’s exactly what they wanted to do. Thats what they had to do. If they didn't it would prove an abysmal failure. But they were undaunted. Why? They had science on their side. Its mind control. This time on savage continent.

Welcome back to Savage Continent. I’m your host Stephen Eck. You can find me on Twitter at Stephen@savagecontinent. We are also on Facebook. Just look up Savage Continent. Once again… If you like the show. Please mash one of the star buttons for me… better yet.. Leave a review. 

From the very beginning Marx and Engles used “science” or the idea of it to set their vision of socialism apart from all the others. Remember, you have lots of people the saw the economic state of affairs in the 18th and 19th century. Some of them wanted a top down takeover of the state in a violent revolution that would redistribute wealth to the masses, others thought it was best to go totally off the grid and build socialism in peaceful communes. There were countless other ideas that fell in between. Marx and Engels however have this idea is that theirs in the only vision of Socialism that really builds a complete vision of where humanity is coming and where it will eventually going. It’s teleological… History is heading in a certain direction. From the primitive communism of hunter gatherers we went to the slave economies of antiquity to feudalism which was surpassed by capitalism. Capitalism as you remember Marx viewed as doomed to implode sooner or later. Basically the wealthy industrialists would compete themselves to death and the workers would overthrow the whole system and introduce Socialism… a kind of benign totalitarianism where workers would run the state. If all went according to plan people would become so accustomed to it that the state would no longer be necessary. All the class  antagonisms that plagued society in ages past would dissipate over time until they would be a vague fairy tale. Communism would be the final goal. We’d be right back where we started in the primeval past… just with all the wonderful technology that capitalism created for us. To them this was based on reason… not emotion… like the “utopian” socialist experiments that had been tried before. It was so logical they called it “scientific.” Did they invent the term “scientific socialism?” No. They actually borrowed the term from an anarchist by the name of Pierre Joseph Prudon who first used the term in his book “What is Property.” He thought it was theft by the way. Marx and Engels were influenced by the biology of Darwin. They saw their own evolutionary theory of economy as a cousin to the one that involved living organisms. That’s pretty ambitious. Perhaps arrogant? Most of Their contemporaries would have thought so. Fredrich Engels coined the term “Dialectical Materialism” to wrap all the sciences together. 

Ings, Simon  Stalin and the Scientists: p. 28-9

So this idea of dialectical materialism holds that everything is in a constant state of flux. There are no absolutes because nothing is the same as it was a year ago, a month ago, last week or even a second ago. There aren't absolute truths.. There cant be… at least not in any respect outside of hard scientific facts. Ideas are constantly battling out with other ideas and out of that new ideas are formed…. Constantly… over and over… but don't be fooled. Ideas can never be concrete like science. Science must be the foundation. The rock upon which all is built. Its based on the material world.. And nothing exists aside from the material world. This sounds like postmodernism but guess what… thats where all of these ideas started. 

Closer to our story, the individuals that would drive the Russian Revolution simply ate this stuff up. One influential thinker was Alexander Bogdonov.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists:  p. 29-30

This is science for the masses. He wants to put the actual science into scientific socialism. He believed that if socialism is scientific then it should be understandable. The fact that it wasn't understandable wasnt that it was complicated but that capitalism had just made it too difficult to understand. Science needed to be made into a tool for the proletariat. This popular science would thus bring about socialism. Pretty quirky idea eh? Any serious academic would have brushed this off as nonsense.. Or at least eye rolled.  At the time people were not ready for it… Because its bonkers

This guy had a huge influence on no less that Vladmir Lenin. They even hid out for a time when the latter was on the run in Finland. Lenin loved the idea that science was the key to understanding the world. That by understanding science and sort of taking it to the max you could understand everything… Of course this was naive. Right at this time people like Marie Curie and a little bit later Albert Einstein were proving that things were actually much more complex than what could be comprehended by intuition alone. Something like quantum physics makes no sense when thought of in terms of simple observation. Theory of relativity??? Yikes. Still… Lenin plowed ahead. He wrote a book.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p.36-7

In the next decade Lenin and his little ragtag band of revolutionaries would go from being a tiny collection of frightening nobodies to masters of the largest state on earth. As we have seen in previous episodes everything was up in the air. They were trying something no one had ever tried before. Still, still armed with this new Marxist science they felt they would be destined for success. But how do you make it work? Socialism is hugely problematic. Sure capitalism is dysfunctional.. But at least everyone involved is driven by self interest. Building socialism requires sacrifice. People aren't working for immediate reward. The end goal is distant and obscure. What does “communism” even mean to most people. For some regular worker or farmer its just an abstract concept. Its not going to help me right here and now. For all the thousands upon thousands of pages that Marx and Engles write about Capitalism they give precious little space to how to get everyone on board. This socialist revolution is just supposed to happen. Everything.. The financial system, the factories, the farms… the proletariat is just supposed to take the wheel and turn the car towards capitalism. There is this idea of “class consciousness.” At some point a critical mass of working people realize that socialism is in their best interest and conspire to overthrow the system of capitalism. But the ideas need to spread. Either from the top down (like the marxists) or bottom up(like the anarchists). Either way the process of “educating’ requires some heavy lifting. Of course in Russia this never had the time to occur. This is a nation of 100 million mostly illiterate peasants. Just a couple million peasants. There are dozens of political factions vying for power at the time of the October Revolution. The Marxist Leninists are just another party. But the Revolution happened. Lenin and Trotsky found themselves in charge. They win the Civil War but at a staggering cost. By the early 1920’s the economy was shattered. Over 10 million people have starved to death. Cholera, typhoid and dysentery were rampant. Half the woman ceased to menstruate. Cities like Petrograd lost an incredible 3/4ths of their original population.  Things are as awful as they could possibly be. Is this thing going to work at all. Well… we know that the Soviet system did survive but only just barely. Lenin’s New Economic Policy involved a lot of compromises with capitalism. Free markets were reintroduced… especially in the countryside. Still.. Communism was the goal. But How to get there. How do you get all of these seemingly skeptical people on board with something that would require them to make immense sacrifices for a distant, somewhat vague goal?  Science was the answer.

You may or may not know of Ivan Pavlov. I’ve mentioned him before. He was a Russian Physiologist that was best know for his experiments on dogs. In the 19th century there was this weird belief that indigestion in humans could be cured by (and this is pretty gross) the digestive juices of dogs. This stuff was added to medicines that people would take much as we take rolaids or tums today. The trouble is how to get the stuff. I mean sure you could just kill a dog and extract the stuff but thats not a very efficient way to get the job done now is it. Pavlov had a different approach. He would open up an incision or a fistula and actually drain it from the living creatures. Pretty gross and cruel by today’s standards but back then…. Well… different times I guess. However, in order to get the fluid the dogs had to anticipate being fed. He noticed that when he put a meat powder in front of them they would produce. He could then collect the fluid and that would be that. Pavlov however was interested. The psychological notion that food was on the way produced a physical response in the dogs. Curious, he decided to experiment. He introduced a different stimulus ahead of the powder. He used a sound (not the bell of legend) but usually a buzzer or a metronome sound. He found that in time the dogs would begin to salivate ahead of the meat powder. The sound itself was causing the reaction. He called this a conditioned stimulus. Because it would be understandable for a dog to have a physical reaction to the smell of food but for some random sound? That involved “conditioning.” He had trained the dogs to react to a stimulus that on its own had no value whatsoever. Pavlov became the father of what would become Behavioral Psychology… The idea that an organism can be conditioned by outside stimuli into exhibiting a behavior different than what might normally occur. Nature can be changed. What is important in environmental factors. Pavlov would go on to win a Nobel Prize. He was far and away the most famous scientist Russia had to offer. The Bolsheviks were interested.

Figes, Orlando A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution   p.  732-3

In 1924 Lenin would pay another visit to Pavlov. In September of that year there was a flood in Leningrad. It happened rather unexpectedly and the kennel that held Pavlov’s dogs (located near the Neva River) was inundated. The dogs were stuck in cages and only narrowly escaped due to the heroism of an assistant who saved the panicked dogs from their now floating cages. Apparently the dogs were never the same. Many of the aggressive ones became meek and vice versa. More curiously, most of them forgot all the complex training that they had undergone for virtually their entire lives. Pavlov took a great deal of interest and wrote about it for the rest of his life. How could a seminal experience undo a lifetime work of experience? The slate had been wiped clean and the dogs could be trained anew. The implications were too much for Lenin to pass on. Could this be engineered in human beings? What if it were controlled and used to the benefit of socialism?   

Dimsdale, Arthur: Dark Persuasion    p.18- 20

So this idea that the Soviet state was just a giant experiment in behavioral psychology? Yeah. That’s what it was at the very core. Pavlovian psychology is based around that human behavior is reflexes… if taken to its logical extension almost mechanical. This is extremely dark stuff. Im sure almost all of you have heard of the experiments with dogs.. But no no. Those experiments would soon be done on living people. In fact many times he performed the exact same experiments… He would take children from orphanages.

He conducted the same salivation experiment on the orphans as he did on his dogs, the only catch was orphans aren't as willing as dogs to receive food from strangers. So he strapped them down to a chair, taped their mouths open, inserted a device to measure their saliva, and proceeded to force feed them both sweets and bad tasting things. 

 Stalin went out of his way to protect Pavlov even more than Lenin had and  looked to be a total team player for the Soviets. Of course in reality things weren't so simple. Pavlov himself didnt really buy into it all but like everyone else in the Soviet Union he had his own reasons to go along with the program. For one there was the issue of his son Vsevolod serving for the white army during the civil war. He had returned home from exile but especially during Stalin’s time could be arrested as an “enemy of the people.” Then there was the fact that the Soviet regime literally bent over backwards to keep him happy. He was given just about every luxury and honor under the sun. He had his own Lincoln with a chauffeur. He had a town literally named after him!! When he complained that the noise of traffic was bothering his dogs they actually had an entire street moved. Still, he didn’t entirely buy into all the grandiose connections that were made to his work. In fact he would actually storm out of high level meetings when they annoyed him… Not something a normal person would do if they valued their life.  

Stalin really believed Pavlov’s science of mind was useful. The economy was destroyed by the 5 year plans. There was a brutal famine. A lot of people were unhappy with the way things were going. The leader was increasingly paranoid, believing that there were “wreckers” and “saboteurs” behind every rock and tree. 

Dimsdale, Arthur: Dark Persuasion p.20 -22

The trials were a shock to many outside observers. Depending on how you felt about the Soviet Union you either believed the defendants were guilty or maybe not. What surprised most people was the length to which people would willingly incriminate themselves on the stand and go to their deaths willingly… even when they had absolutely nothing to lose. They admitted to crimes that sometimes were just plain outlanding and they did it with absolute conviction. One defendant admitted to meeting Trosky at a hotel in copenhagen to plot the death of stalin. One problem… the hotel had been torn down 20 years prior. No one had ever seen anything like this. Not only that these were some of the most important, powerful people in the country. Sure  history has had its share of show trials and kangaroo courts but this was breathtaking. Many suspected that the Soviets had devised some sort of mind control technique previously unknown to science…. It was widely known that the nobel laureate Pavlov was very active and had connections that went straight to the top.  

Dimsdale, Arthur: Dark Persuasion 26-7, 28-29

Later, a sort of mania would sweep the west. “Communist Brainwashing.” A term invented by an American journalist named Edward Hunter. It comes from the CHinese word Xi Nao meaning “achieving change by washing or cleansing the heart through retreat from the world and meditation. He saw it as “The new and terrifying strategy to conquer the free world by destroying the mind.” Apparently he interviewed westerners and Chinese intellectuals who had recently been released from detention. They were not like normal prisoners from previous wars. Many of them had taken on the ideas of their oppressors. This was new.. You haven't seen this type of thing in WWII. You didn't get people converting to Nazism or believing in the Japanese emperor. This was different. These people had become “mindless, communitst automatons. A living puppet.” Prisoners had been starved.. Or fed depending on their cooperation. There were different schedules of reinforcement and punishment. They were encouraged to criticize themselves and their peers. They were made to write out long confessions. Words like “rebirth” and “reform” were used constantly. Hunter was convinced that what had happened was implementation of Pavlov’s behaviorism on a targeted human population. He called the officials running the camps ``mystic Pavlovians of high Communism.” He wrote numerous books. He testified before Congress… all the way up to the House Unamerican Activities Committee where he made a big splash. He wasnt the only one. Dutch Psychologist Joost Meerong described communist indoctrination techniques as a “rape of the mind.” He noted that while forced confessions were common in history the communist indoctrination techniques were methodical. He saw them as so powerful that anyone could be worn down by the process. He said that Pavlovian conditioning was facilitated by sensory isolation. 

“Pavlov discovered the conditioned reflex could be developed most easily in a quiet laboratory with a minimum of distracting stimuli. Every trainer of animals knows this from his own experience. Isolation and the persistent repetition of stimuli are required to tame wild animals. The totalitarians know they can condition their political victims quickly if they are kept in isolation.’

This becomes a big deal. Especially during the Korean War era.  You can still see some of the films made about it. Look it up. There’s one on Youtube narrated by none other than Ronald Reagan…. Yes that Ronald Reagan. It was a film directing how the Chinese government saw Americans as morally weak, soft,  self interested… willing to go along with the crowd. How they would be easy targets for communist indoctrination. There was even a major hollywood motion picture made about it. The “Manchurian Candidate.” In the movie the main character dr raymond shaw murders one of his fellow prisoners under the instruction of the evil Dr Yenlo who is portrayed as a graduate of Russia’s Pavlov Institute. 

Yenlo says at one point in the film: “We have trained this American to kill, and then having no memory of having killed, his brain not only has been washed, it has been dry cleaned.”

What's interesting is the tremendous amounts of American prisoners that were willing to collaborate during the war. As time went on the prisoners seem to collaborate at a higher rate until it peaks at 75%. They even wrote letters home denouncing imperialism, american racism or capitalism. To many it seemed like the communists were becoming more skilled at indoctrination as time went by. You might say well… maybe they were just poorly treated? Maybe.. But if that were true why don't we see US prisoners collaborating with the Japanese during world war II. A whopping 40% of those prisoners died in captivity and no dice. Then there is the fact that a number of Korean war prisoners, 21 to be exact elected to stay with the Chinese even after they were released. They did this despite mountains of letters.. Not just friends and family but from people higher up.  One from the governor of Maryland. That requires some explaining.

But what of Pavlov… the real Pavlov. What did he really think. Its not easy to say.

Of course the reality of Pavlov’s actual accomplishments and what was made of them are not one and the same. We know he sharply criticized the Soviet experiment but seemed to come around later on. Maybe that is fiction. Maybe not. There is a good case to be made that Pavlov had just “sold out.” And why shouldn't he? The Soviets had an image of what science should be… what purpose it could serve to the state. Maybe he succumbed to a sort of “mission creep” in which his own objectives changed with time. Maybe he got old and his judgment clouded. When you get put on such a pedestal… as a scientist… is it even possible to maintain the skepticism and humility that true science requires? 

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p. 94-5 

By the end of his life he fell right in line though. It all went right to his head. Whereas once he decried the regime. 

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p. 374-5

His funeral was a grandiose affair with over 100k mourners.  

Pravda wrote in his obituary: “To master nature, to achieve unlimited power over the work of the brain. Such was Pavlov’s ardent dream. He took the view that it is possible and feasible for man to intervene in nature… to remake her.” 

By the 1950’s Pavlovian Psychology or at least the idea of it would be the only game in town in the Soviet Union but we’ll hear about that later. 

There is this idea of “The New Soviet Man'' that gets mentioned all the time during this period. Remember. Marxism believes that people are essentially good but that humanity has been contaminated with class antagonisms. These “contradictions” are tantamount to the sin that entered the world at the garden of eden. However its not who people really are inside. They do not believe in a “human nature.” No… we are all products of our environment. Given the right environment the sky is the limit. And by sky… even outer space is not out of the question 

Figes, Orlando A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution   p. 734

Overy, Richard The Dictators p. 242

However no thinker from the period can really top Alexei Gastaev. More than anyone else he sort of romanticises what socialism could actually look like. He writes about an express train across Siberia that will pass a dense network of factories, tunnels and canals. There will be towers that go kilometers into the sky and also kilometers under the earth. There will be moving sidewalks. Volcanoes will be capped to collect geothermal energy. The north pole will even be melted so siberia can become the breadbasket of the world. Its bonkers. And this is crazy considering he’s writing in beginning of the 20th century. He sees giant mainframe computers doing most of the mental work that people once did. 

At times his work seems like the world will be some sort of steampunk paradise. 

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p. 74

People’s very way of thinking will be changed. In his book “Poetry on the Factory Floor” he writes.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p.74-5

On a more practical level he writes about biomechanics. 

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p.81

And others would follow the same line. Valentin Parnac would try and develop a system of “dance notation.” Nicholai Berstein would take this a step further and try to choreograph every last moment a worker made in a day and try to make it scientifically perfect.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p.83

But of course all of this was kind of impossible he noted that no matter what he did no two movements anyone made were exactly the same. You take the same guy with the same hammer and he never hits the nail just the same way every time. He actually devised a high speed camera. Pretty advanced for the day (a kymocyclograph) to record this phenomenon and the results were less than encouraging. Humans just weren’t machines. However the idea that society could be regulated by technology would come back. American mathematician Norman Weiner would coin a new termIt would be called cybernetics.

So all of this stuff is great theory but for it to really work there was a need to completely overhaul the education system. Before now everything was in the hands of the church. There was no “school system” in the way we would understand it. No more. Russian workers would need to be scientifically trained. Before people had been schooled in the culture of capitalism as he saw it. No longer. 

Figes 743-4

Now I don’t want to give the impression that everyone involved in this enterprise was a quack or went along with the quackery. Two psychologists in particular bear mentioning Alexander Luria and Ley Vygotsky both had their own ideas and both would be very influential down to this day.. But you know how this goes… this is the Soviet Union my friends!!! There is the party line and there is… the wrong line. As I mentioned before, if there is one message to take away from the story of Soviet science its that politics will always trump pure science. It always will from now until the day the Sun explodes. You can take that to the bank. So the criticism of this brand of psychology is that it is very reductive. It treats men like machines. Its only interested in outward behavior. This was the line the Soviets would take until their dying day. Needless to say it went to the very top. Stalin once said:

“There is nothing in the human being that cannot be verbalized. What a human being hides from himself he hides from society. There is nothing in Soviet society that cannot be expressed in words. There are no naked thoughts. There exists nothing at all except words.”

This notion flew squarely in the face of everything that was going on in the West coincidentally. The whole exploration of the subconscious mind.. Psycho analysis… all this was left off limits to Soviet psychology. Why? Politics

Overy, Richard: The Dictators p. 258

But Luria and Vygotsky were among a small number of scientists willing to buck the establishment. Luria was fascinated with the idea of the subconscious. He talked openly about “reorganizing” Soviet psychology. Freud himself referred to him in letters as “Dear Mr President.” Freud assumed he was conversing with a tenured professor (he was that good). While studying criminal patients he actually devised a lie detector test. He talked frankly about how he felt about where the field was going.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists:  p.100

Lev Vygotsky is a household name…. If you know anything about educational psychology. Hes the guy that came up with the “zone of proximal development’ concept. Kind of like the overlapping region of what can be taught and what can be learned. We still follow this guy… and he died of TB in the Soviet Union in his mid 30s. No mean feat there. But enough of that. Like Luria Vygotsky thought it was absurd to explaining something as complex as human consciousness in terms of simple reflexes… but he was a die hard Marxist. He specialized in language and the way it relates to meaning. He developed a theory of a psychological structure of beauty. But it is early childhood education where he really made his mark.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p.102

So Luria and Vygotsky make probably the most notable (if not creepy) “it takes a village to raise a child” attempts at education. It would be called the “White Nursery.” If there is one single attempt where the rubber meets the road when it comes to creating this “new soviet man.” Here it is. As you might imagine, this is an attempt by the Soviet state to fully usurp the role of parenting whole cloth and raise your children ``scientifically.” Another founding member of the school Sabina Spielrin had been a client (and lover) of Carl Jung, a protege of Freud and and analyst of Jean Piaget. In case you didn’t take a psych intro course thats like a psychology trifecta right there. You couldn’t pick 3 bigger names. Anyways, the school was created to deal with all of the millions of homeless orphans… You have a World War and a Civil War, a great Terror. Lots of kids were missing one or both parents in the USSR. They set up shot in one of these giant abandoned mansions in moscow and got to work. The idea behind the school was that children rely solely on the company of others to develop language and social skills. Nothing is hard wired. So… given the right environment, everyone of them should grow up to be good little socialists. They refrained from punishments but also excessive affection. They used redirection. One girl who had the habit of smearing herself with feces.. Not uncommon for an early childhood trauma survivor.. Was given paint and paint brushes instead… and wouldn't you know it? She switched to the paint. So this place becomes famous. Visitors from all over the world. 

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p. 104-5

Still though, Luria and Vygotsky used the data they collected to rework psychology. They tried to view it as a series of human development, instead of a collection of reflexes like Pavlov would have it. But the problem was that Pavlov by the early 1930’s had the full blessing of the state. It portrayed behavior as controllable. Luria and Vygotsky introduced too much nuance to the equation. It was a muddle compared to Pavlov and his dogs. Not only that but Leon Trotsky came out in favor of Freud’s Psychoanalytic work in 1927… and we all know what happened to Trotsky right?? These guys were accused of being Freud’s followers…. So by extension…. Yeah you guessed it. Canceled!!!!  At one point Pavlov himself stormed into Luria’s office, took out some of Freud’s work that he had disseminated, ripped it in half, threw it on the ground and stormed out… Mic Drop>

They would still do some groundbreaking work in language… much needed as there are hundreds of different nationalities and countless dialects in the Soviet Union. Still, once you get canceled its lights out. Vygotsky wrote to luria several weeks before his death from TB.

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p. 111      

Ludmila Hyman  - The Soviet Psychologists and the Path to International Psychology

“Whereas Soviet culture in the 1920s was characterized by boundless optimism and unbridled creativity and experimentation, the end of the decade brought increasing repression and state interference in scientific research. The early cosmopolitan outlook of the USSR yielded to inward-looking paranoia. Vygotsky and Luria’s cross-cultural studies were attacked on ideological grounds,30 Luria’s work in Uzbekistan was discontinued, with his results remaining unpublished until the 1970s. This empirical project, however, was crucial for the cultural-historical program, and the inability of the Soviet psychologists to continue cross-cultural work severely crippled their research.31 After 1936 Vygotsky’s work was banned for decades.”

That really says something. As someone that works in the field I can tell you that when it comes to Soviet era psychologists, there is Pavlov, there is Vygosky and there is everyone else. The fact that one of them gets turned into a tool for the state and the other one gets literally canceled outright really speaks volumes. But then if you look at it another way.. That science itself… for its own sake is unacceptable… That the needs of the regime come first.. That everything else exists only to serve that need. Then it all makes sense.

Probably the biggest thing that Pavlov did for Soviet science was set down the idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is something that he really didn’t buy into while he was alive but you have to remember that everything we know about his life has been highly curated by the Soviet government. These guys really wanted to believe that if a generation of people did things a certain way then the next generation would inherit those acquired characteristics. Sure they started off with a “blank slate” but at the same time they didn’t want to believe that all their tireless work would be eradicated by death. No. they are reshaping mankind. So say you are a skinny weakling… But you  lift weights all you life. Under this thinking your kids.. Will actually have altered DNA… not the DNA actually in your gene pool. They have skinny weakling DNA. This flies in the face of how we understand genetic inheritance but its something the Soviets wanted to believe. They wanted to believe that they could transform mankind on every level and do it within several generations. It was politically acceptable. So all of the conditioning done in the life of a person would not be lost… it would continue in his children. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of the story. Genetics is the part of Soviet science that would be the most twisted and the most costly in terms of human lives… big time. That will we cover a little further down the line but I just don't have the space for it today,

As far as psychology goes things almost remain in a sort of stasis. It was allowed to develop on a completely separate track to the west. They refused to give currency to the idea that human consciousness might not reflect the world as it is… which affirms marx and Lenin.  Lenin asserted that individual psychology and behavior was the product of social experience, and that “true cognition is an adequate reflection of reality, and social practice is the criterion of truth.”[9] Thus, a mentally healthy citizen was one whose behavior reflected the truth of the Soviet reality.  

That was all there was to it. They completely rejected the idea of the unconscious mind. The very idea that people might act out of impulses outside of their own cognition. Those ideas were considered “a reactionary mythology calculated to deceive the workers.” 

Remember Marx and Engels were strict materialists. The idea that man might be more than the sum of his parts… well that hinted at the possibility of a soul. Hocus Pocus… ooooh!!! The goal of psychiatry and all science for that matter was to further the agenda of the state. Thats it. This of course is just a slavish devotion to marxist dogma, no different from people running a fundimentaist bible school insisting on a literal reading of the book of Genesis…. And people knew it. Sure there were true believers but people understood that the rest of the world was moving in an entirely different direction. And this was especially true of other Socialists. Working off of marxian concepts such as “false consciousness” socialist academics were making their peace with Freud and trying to integrate his ideas into socialism. The benchmark concept of neo marxism is that proletarians in capitalist countries had been unwittingly duped by capitalism that had become so ingrained in society it was imperceptible. They culture itself along with its institutions would have to be undermined before any sort of revolution was possible. This idea starts with Max Horheimer and Antonio Gramsci and would evolve from there to the critical race, gender, fat studies… and about a dozen other marxian critical theories of the present day. All of them use the tools that Horkeimer laid down to “criticize” or “deconstruct” modern society to find the bourgeois and proletarian elements. The people who hold the capital… or what came to be known as the “privilege.” Rather than pushing for Communism, the word “democracy” is commonly used. In the west Marxism moved in a different, more dynamic direction. 

But the Soviet Union was nothing if not monolithic though. There would be no “Protestant Reformation” in Soviet thought. There was Geraldmo Bruno that was willing to go to the pyre for his beliefs. There was no socialist Martin Luther willing to speak truth to power. This is understandable. Maybe the scientists themselves had been “conditioned” better than any of Pavlov’s dogs had ever been. Why, though? Aren’t scientists suppose to seek truth whatever the cost? Please…these are human beings at the end of the day.  It's just easier to stay with the pack than run into a political buzzsaw. There are a lot of explanations out there for why this might be the case but the simplest one has to be the fact that by the late 1940’s and 50’s the system was populated with people that had grown up under a totalitarian regime. There was simply no one left with any experience of academic freedom left in this closed society. One by one they had been picked off. The rest… at least outwardly had been largely “brainwashed.” Well… almost. 

1950 is a sort of cut off date for the Soviet scientific community. The infamous Pavlovian Session. One might call it the ultimate victory of politics over actual science. In the decade after his death a few of Pavlov’s contemporaries were increasingly upset that his work was being buried under marxist dogma. They even went to Stalin himself. So in June of that year a major conference is convened in Moscow. It basically did the opposite of what the liberals had hoped it would. Pavlov (or the idea of him) was deified and a mechanistic theory of brain activity was accepted. Anyone who rejected that “truth” was forced to recant their beliefs or face loss of career or worse. And some of these people were no slouches. 

The Joint Session also affected neuroscience in such a way that the best neuroscientists of the time, such as academicians Pyotr Anokhin, Aleksey Speransky, Lina Stern, Ivan Beritashvili, and Leon Orbeli, who headed various scientific directions at that time, were labeled as anti-Pavlov, anti-materialist and reactionaries, and discharged from their positions.[12]: 540  These scientists lost their laboratories, and some were subjected to tortures in prisons.

You’d think once Stalin was out of the picture things would sort of mellow out. While this was true in many respects its simply not the case in the field of psychology. The reason: While the network of prison camps that over 18 million people had passed through between 1928 and 1955 were being phased out… the mental hospitals were being built. 

The big name to remember in this later period… from the late 1940’s on is Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky. The session gave him a virtual monopoly over Soviet psychology much in the same way Trofim Lycenko became a virtual dictator in genetics This guy was an ideological purist to say the least. His writing is full of political statements about “class enemies, the scientific purity of the discipline, the unmasking of the capitalist anti national essence of neuropathology and psychiatry in the capitalist countries… etc.” 

Ings, Simon Stalin and the Scientists: p. 427-9

If you disagree with us.. If you doubt the absolute truth of Marxist Leninism.. Then you simply must be insane. The term “philosophical intoxication” was used.. Like as a legit diagnosis. Or "Dissemination of fabrications known to be false, which defame the Soviet political and social system."  And dont think that this was just some plot by a few careerist quacks that managed to take over a medical field. No… this came right from the top

In a speech published in the Pravda daily newspaper on 24 May 1959, Khrushchev said:

A crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in a Communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offenses, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal.[39]

Let that sink in for a second… Can you imagine the president of the United States stating publicly that people who are opposed to an American style democracy are by definition “mentally deranged?”..... But not only that… can you imagine a world where the United States government would take those people out of society to “cure” them??? We throw fits when someone gets kicked off of social media platforms or possibly hit with a defamation suit… but even then (we hope) there is some sort of a process. No. Not in the Soviet Union. They had a ready made solution for people like that. One that I find even more scary than the kangaroo courts of the 1930’s. There was no right of appeal. You couldn't choose what psychiatrist would evaluate you. You had no right to correspond with friends or relatives. 

These “patients” were often  diagnosed with something called “sluggish schizophrenia.” They were locked away in psychiatric wards and just left there indefinitely. Often the authorities would find this more convenient than going through a trial since the accused would never have the chance to defend themselves in court.

A carefully crafted description of sluggish schizophrenia established that psychotic symptoms were non-essential for the diagnosis, but symptoms of psychopathy, hypochondria, depersonalization or anxiety were central to it.[9] Symptoms referred to as part of the "negative axis" included pessimism, poor social adaptation, and conflict with authorities, and were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia with scanty symptoms."[9] According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as quasi sane yet manifest minimal but clinically relevant personality changes which could remain unnoticed to the untrained eye.[9

And while many of the people did have a genuine mental issue the diagnosis had nothing at all to do with the genuine condition. Someone suffering with substance abuse or bipolar is not the same as a schizophrenic. More often though it was nakedly political. Often, in the weeks prior to the annual May Day celebration or the anniversary of the October Revolution.... Times when protests were the most common mass arrests would occur and these hospitals would fill with new “patients” who were deemed “socially dangerous.”

Detractors took notice of what the Soviets were doing and spoke out.

“The incarceration of free thinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder, it is a variation of the gas chamber, even more cruel; the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten and those involved in them will be condemned for all time during their life and after their death."[51

Viktor Nekipelov another notable dissident, characterized the doctors as being "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."[

And if thats not enough for you then the numbers here speak for themselves:

In 1929, the USSR had 70 psychiatric hospitals and 21,103 psychiatric beds. By 1935, this had increased to 102 psychiatric hospitals and 33,772 psychiatric beds, and by 1955 there were 200 psychiatric hospitals and 116,000 psychiatric beds in the Soviet Union.[78] The Soviet authorities built psychiatric hospitals at a rapid pace and increased the quantity of beds for patients with nervous and mental illnesses: between 1962 and 1974, the number of beds for psychiatric patients increased from 222,600 to 390,000.[79]

To put that in perspective, the number of beds in current US Psychiatric facilities? 35,000

The reductiveness of the Soviet psychological system cannot be underestimated. If you have spent any time studying behavioral psychology you will notice how much time one spends studying the decision making capabilities of rats and pigeons. An ambitious behaviorist. Especially one in the Soviet mold could only believe that human beings would be no different. These types of experiments were done on people.. Although its sometimes hard to track down the hard evidence. Its one thing when you are trying brainwash a child into becoming a devout communist. They viewed children as blank slates for the most part although they did believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics as we have seen. Still, they thought they had the ability to break the will of anyone. If Pavlovian conditioning is all powerful then there is literally nothing that you cannot do. There is no belief system that you cannot disabuse a person of. 

Applebaum, Anne Red Famine:  p. 549 -50

By the 1980’s outside observers finally had a chance to visit these facilities and although the regime took great pains to prove nothing was amiss they couldn't hide the brutal reality

Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union and in China: Complexities and Controversies Richard J. Bonnie, LLB J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 30:136–44, 2002

The investigation by the U.S. delegation provided unequivocal proof that the tools of coercive psychiatry had been used, even in the late 1980s, to hospitalize persons who were not mentally ill and whose only transgression had been the expression of political or religious dissent.1 Most of the patients interviewed by the delegation had been charged with political crimes such as “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” or “defaming the Soviet state.” Their offenses involved behavior such as writing and distributing anti-Soviet literature, political organizing, defending the rights of disabled groups, and furthering religious ideas. Under applicable laws of Russia and the other former Soviet Republics, a person charged with a crime could be subjected to “custodial measures of a medical nature” if the criminal act was proved and the person was found “non imputable” due to mental illness.7 Non Imputable offenders could be placed in maximum security hospitals (the notorious “special hospitals”) or in ordinary hospitals, depending on their social dangerousness. All the persons interviewed by the delegation had been found non imputable and socially dangerous and confined in special hospitals after criminal proceedings that deviated substantially from the general requirements specified in Soviet law. Typically, the patients reported that they had been arrested, taken to jail, taken to a hospital for forensic examination, and then taken to another hospital under a compulsory treatment order, without ever seeing an attorney or appearing in court.8 The delegation found that there was no clinical basis for the judicial finding of non imputability in 17 of these cases. In fact, the delegation found no evidence of mental disorder of any kind in 14 cases. It is likely that these individuals are representative of many hundreds of others who were found non imputable for crimes of political or religious dissent in the Soviet Union, mainly between 1970 and 1990. The delegation also found conditions in the special hospitals to be appallingly primitive and restrictive. Patients were denied basic rights, even to keep a diary or possess writing materials or books, and they were fearful of retaliation if they complained about their treatment, about abusive conduct by the staff, or about restrictive hospital rules or practices. No system existed for resolving patients’ grievances. Most disturbing, the delegation assembled compelling evidence that medication was used widely for punitive purposes. High doses of antipsychotic drugs were routinely administered by injection in a 10- to 15-day regimen to punish violators of hospital rules and to treat “delusions of reformism” and “antiSoviet thoughts.” In addition, medical records and interviews of patients also showed that Soviet psychiatrists used a highly aversive drug called sulfazine for the ostensible purpose of enhancing treatment responses to neuroleptic medication. In the view of the U.S. psychiatrists, however, the severe pain, immobility, fever, and muscle necrosis produced by this medication, as well as the documented pattern of its use in 10 of the interviewed patients, strongly suggested that it had been used for punitive purposes. Other treatments, including insulin coma, strict physical restraints, and atropine injections, had been used in patients in whom the delegation found no evidence of psychosis or other significant symptoms. Although the most punitive cases of Soviet psychiatric abuse involved criminal commitments to the notorious special hospitals, it is likely that many hundreds, if not thousands, of additional abuses were effected through the noncriminal procedure of urgent hospitalization, a process roughly equivalent to what is called civil commitment in this country. Although a criminal commitment must be based on a judicial order, urgent hospitalization has traditionally been within the exclusive control of psychiatrists, and until 1988, was regulated only by unpublished administrative guidelines.

In retrospect, repressive use of psychiatric power in the former Soviet Union seems to have been nearly inevitable. The practice of involuntary psychiatric treatment presents an unavoidable risk of mistake and abuse, even in a liberal, pluralistic society. This intrinsic risk was greatly magnified in the Soviet Union by the communist regime’s intolerance for dissent, including any form of political or religious deviance, and by the corrosive effects of corruption and intimidation in all spheres of social life. Psychiatrists were not immune from these pressures. It therefore seems likely that a small subset of Soviet psychiatrists, associated primarily with Moscow’s Serbski Institute for General and Forensic Psychiatry, knowingly collaborated with the KGB to subject mentally healthy dissidents to psychiatric punishment, in blatant violation of professional ethics and human rights. In this respect, abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union had less to do with psychiatry per se than with the repressiveness of the political regime of which the psychiatrists were a part. Fortunately, democratization seems to have brought the most blatant abuses to an end, and reformers are wisely attempting to establish counterforces to prevent renewed collaboration in the event that a repressive regime is reinstated.

As we know the Soviet Union finally broke up in 1991. Although this repression kind of died down at the end.. For one the political will was dying. More importantly, the state was no longer able to keep this vast network of psychiatric facilities running. Still… recent events show that perhaps something of this system still remains.

Last month a US marine named Trevor Reed was finally released from Russian captivity. He related that he had been kept in a mental hospital in retaliation for his repeated attempts to appeal his 9 year conviction for having been in an altercation with a Russian police officer in 2019. When he got out he did an interview with CNN.

"The psychiatric treatment facility, I was in there with seven other prisoners in a cell. They all had severe, psychological health issues -- most of 'em. So over 50% of them in that cell were in there for murder. Or, like, multiple murders, sexual assault and murder -- just really disturbed individuals," 

"And inside of that cell, you know, that was not a good place," he added.

"There was blood all over the walls there -- where prisoners had killed themselves, or killed other prisoners, or attempted to do that," Reed continued. "The toilet's just a hole in the floor. And there's, you know, crap everywhere, all over the floor, on the walls. There's people in there also that walk around that look like zombies."

”

Reed said he did not sleep for multiple days, adding he thought it was “a possibility” that people in his cell might kill him.

Maybe some things don’t change very easily. Unlike the statistics for the Gulags which were largely declassified during the Kruschev thaw its still very difficult to know for certain how many people were persecuted via the Soviet psychiatric system. Frankly, I can think of few more horrifying things than being locked away in a mental hospital, cut off from the outside world and placed on powerful psychotropic medications against my will to be kept in a sort of “living nightmare” state. 

Mind control is more than people being hypnotized into performing some action against their own interest. As we have seen it can be a lot of different things… from promising some sort of utopian future well beyond the realm of the possible to indoctrinating children in the absence of their parents.. To convincing people they are mentally unwell if they dont hold a specific worldview. Its very sinister when you think about it. If there is one place where each of us would like to believe we are secure from all else its in the realm of thought…. But then maybe each of us is guilty of a sort of self delusion in that respect. The Soviet regime was guilty of taking science… the very concept of it and using it as a tool for their advantage. They felt that it gave them an edge over every other state and society on earth. Instead what passed for science was slowly consumed by their marxist political ideals until only its shell remained.

“Yes you must give our barbarians one thing. they understand the value of science.” Ivan Pavlov 

The Soviet science of mind would take them to very very dark.. And this science strays into areas on interrogation, punishment, and of course “reeducation.”  We’ve touched upon it here but thats way to big a topic to cover fully here. That will definitely be another podcast. Now I had decided to cover all of Soviet Science in one episode but I quickly realized doing so would turn into an episode well… it would be many many more hours than this. I don't think I can do that right now… But we will be back soon with probably the most destructive part of Soviet science…When you look at the hard numbers some of these ideas would be more destructive in terms of human life in Socialist countries than the whims of dictators, wars or anything. 

Before we go I would like to thank you all for sticking with me for another episode. If you enjoyed it please hit a star button for me or kindly leave a review. Find me on Twitter.. stephen@savagecontinent or look up savage continent podcast on facebook. 

Next time we will meet the single deadliest scientist in the history of mankind… and this one is not even close… Trofim Lycenko. Lets follow the science one more.. Next time on Savage Continent.