Money, Keith. (1982). Pavlova: Her Art and Life. New York: Knopf.
(1849-1936), Russian physiologist and Nobel Prize winner.
Ivan Pavlov was born in Ryazan. His father, a local priest, wanted him to attend the theological seminary, but Pavlov’s interest in natural sciences led him to enroll in St. Petersburg University in 1870. In 1883 he completed his doctoral dissertation and in 1890 became professor and head of the physiology division of the St. Petersburg Institute of Experimental Medicine, where he remained until 1925. Pavlov’s work on the functioning of the digestive system earned him the Nobel Prize in 1904. His originality lay in his approach to physiology, which considered the coordinated functioning of the organism as a whole, as well as his innovative surgical technique, which allowed him to observe digestion in live animals.
Pavlov’s most well known research involved the study of conditioned reflexes. In his famous experiment, he placed a dog in a room free of all distractions. He found that the dog, accustomed to hearing a bell ring when being fed, would eventually salivate at the sound of the bell alone. Pavlov also applied his findings to the human nervous system. His work advanced the understanding of physiology and influenced international developments in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy.
Pavlov did not support the Bolshevik Revolution and in 1920 asked for permission to leave with his family. Vladimir Lenin, aware of the international prestige Pavlov brought to science in the Soviet Union, personally intervened to guarantee the resources for Pavlov to continue his research. In 1935, the International Congress of Physiologists awarded Pavlov the distinction of world senior physiologist. He died of pneumonia in Leningrad at the age of eighty-seven. See also: EDUCATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Joravsky, David. (1989). Russian Psychology: A Critical History. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Porter, Roy, ed. (1994). The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
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(1937-2003), prime minister.
Valentin Sergeyevich Pavlov was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s minister of finance when per-estroika was in full swing during the 1980s and the last prime minister of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics before its collapse. Discharged on August 22, 1991 by President Gorbachev’s decree for his role in the coup attempt that month, Pavlov was arrested a week later, imprisoned for sixteen months, and finally amnestied in May 1994. He died on March 30, 2003, at the age of sixty-five.
For most of his career, Pavlov occupied positions in the Russian SFSR and USSR related to finance. Having joined the Communist Party in 1962, he headed the Finance Department in the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) in 1979. After working briefly as first deputy finance minister in Nikolai Ryzhkov’s government in 1986, Pavlov became chairman of the State Committee for Prices from August 1986 to June 1989. With approval of the party leadership, Pavlov reformed prices, withdrawing high-denomination notes from circulation overnight. This act caused a financial crisis and a great measure of unpopularity for him. Frustrated by his inability to maintain a grip on the ruble’s value, while allowing the Soviet economy some small exposure to the free market, Pavlov blamed a plot by western banks for his decision to withdraw the bank notes. As the Soviet economy grew increasingly unstable and inflation skyrocketed, Pavlov tried other unpopular economic measures, but soon realized that the political and economic crisis was out of his control. The contradictions between Gorbachev’s desire to reform the Soviet Union and keep it intact came to a head in August 1991. While the president was resting on the Black Sea, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov formed the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” and placed Gorbachev under house arrest.
Along with eleven other men, Pavlov joined the emergency committee on August 19, 1991. This was no doubt Pavlov’s least distinguished moment. Rather than conducting himself as a viable substitute for the supposedly ill president, Pavlov stayed in bed, claiming that he was too sick. His co-conspirators later said that he spent much of the three days of the attempted coup drunk. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; PERESTROIKA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Copson, Raymond W. (1991). Soviet Coup Attempt: Background and Implications. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service. Goldman, Marshall I. (1987). Gorbachev’s Challenge: Economic Reform in the Age of High Technology. New York: Norton. Matlock, Jack F. (1995). Autopsy on an Empire: the American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House.
The term peasant economy refers to modes of rural economic activity with certain defined characteristics. The first characteristic is that the basic unit of production is the household; therefore, the demographic composition of the household was of paramount importance in determining the volume of output, the percentage of output consumed by the household, and, thus, the net remainder to be used for investment or savings. Second, the majority of household income is derived from agricultural production, that is, the household is dependent upon its own labor. Third, because the household depended upon agricultural production for survival, peasant households were assumed to be conservative and resistant to changes that would threaten their survival. In particular, a school of thought called the “moral economy” arose, which argued that peasant households would resist the commercialization of agriculture because it violated their values and beliefs-their moral economy-and attempted to replace the patterns of interaction among personal networks in the villages with impersonal transactions based on market principles.
Perhaps the greatest theorist of the peasant economy was a Russian economist named Alexander Chayanov, who lived from 1888 to 1939. Chayanov published a book entitled Peasant Farm Organization, which postulated a theory of peasant economy with application for peasant economies beyond Russia. He argued that the laws of classical economics do not fit the peasant economy; in other words, production in a household was not based upon the profit motive or the ownership of the means of production, but rather by calculations made by households as consumers and workers. In modern terminology, the family satisfied rather than maximized profit.
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According to Chayanov, the basic principle for understanding the peasant economy was the balance between the household member as a laborer and as a consumer. Peasant households and their members could either increase the number of hours they worked, or work more intensively, or sometimes both. The calculation made by households whether to work more or not was subjective, based upon an estimate of how much production was needed for survival (consumption) and how much was desired for investment to increase the family’s productive potential. Those estimates were balanced against the unattractiveness of agricultural labor. Households sought to reach an equilibrium between production increases and the disutility of increased labor. In short, households increased their production as long as production gains outweighed the negative aspects of increased labor. This principle of labor production in the peasant economy led Chayanov to argue that the optimal size of the agricultural production unit varied according to the sector of production at a time the official policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was pushing for large collective farms. As a result of this disagreement with Marxist economists and the Party line, Chayanov was arrested in 1930 and executed in 1939.
Josef Stalin’s collectivization, begun in 1929, fundamentally changed the basis of the Russian peasant economy by forcibly incorporating households into large farms, the latter becoming the basic production unit of Soviet agriculture. Moreover, production decisions were removed from the household and were no longer based upon the demographic composition of the household.
Even during the Stalin period, however, peasant resistance to mass collectivization and food shortages forced a compromise that allowed continued small-scale agricultural production by households in kitchen gardens or so-
