Pawlow’s Legacy Crumbles Under Erosion of History

Pawlow's Legacy Crumbles Under Erosion of History

In Kiev, a monument to Russian and Soviet scientist, physiologist and Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov was dismantled, according to a public announcement by the Kiev City Council’s Department of Territorial Control on Tuesday.

The monument to the scientist, who gained international recognition with his experiments on dogs, in which he demonstrated the existence of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, stood in front of a hospital in the Kiev district of Pechersk until last week. Photographs and video footage on social media show the sculpture being transported away, with Pavlov in the picture.

Following the victory of the nationalist and “pro-European” Euromaidan in February 2014, Ukraine has seen a series of waves of erasure of shared Russian-Ukrainian history, including the renaming of streets and places and the removal of monuments.

In the initial phase, monuments to Soviet history were targeted and since 2022, the “de-Russification” policy has also included the removal of monuments to world-renowned writers, musicians and other figures, even if they have a biographical connection to Ukraine. This policy has already claimed the monuments to poet Alexander Pushkin and writer Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as the monument to the city’s founder, Catherine the Great, in Odessa.

Monuments and memorial plaques to Soviet soldiers and generals who fought against Hitler’s Germany from 1941 to 1945 are also being dismantled, while collaborators of Hitler, such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, have been honored with street names and monuments.

Born in Ryazan, Russia, in 1849, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov studied physiology and medicine in St. Petersburg, Breslau and Leipzig. From 1891, he led the new Physiology Laboratory at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg, which he later directed until his death in 1936, with interruptions. He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1904 for his work on the digestive glands of humans. He is, however, most famous for the research that built upon his work, including the discovery of conditioned reflexes and the theory of conditioned reflexes he established around 1900. He also laid the foundations for the study of behavior and established a basis for behavioral learning theories, with the most well-known example being the “Pavlov’s dog” on which he demonstrated classical conditioning.