Stories
The physiology of Nickolai Bernstein
Evolution of
the brain
and social behavior
Learning languages
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As AIM disintegrated along with the rest of the New Left in the beginning of the 1970's, I looked for some way to continue its revolutionary optimism and fervor. The most effective people I had met had called themselves socialists and communists, so I decided I must go to live in a socialist or communist country to see what it was really like. After all, I came from Missouri, the "Show-Me State." I had to see socialism with my own eyes to believe it.
I can remember where I made the decision (and there are notes in the Italian leather-bound diary from that time). It was a sunny day in 1972, and I had hiked up to the top of West Rock and was looking out over the city of New Haven and Long Island Sound beyond. I would have liked to go to China, which I had heard was the purest communism, but in those years there was no possibility to go there. Second choice was Cuba. I would try to go there.
I shared my thoughts with Nina, but she was not very interested. This was ironic, because I had fallen in love with her when she told me about having gone to Cuba for Venceremos when she was just out of high school in New York. And she had been the first person I met who actually knew and appreciated communists. So it is that couples change over the course of time - and marriage. In fact, many years after our divorce she confided that my going to the Soviet Union was so difficult for her that it started her thinking that she had to go beyond our marriage.
We had bought a house at that time with our "comrades" from AIM, Rick Wolff and Harriet Fraad, and Rick had met the Cuban ambassador Ricardo Alarcon. So I would have him help me get to Cuba.
Alas, Rick was so anti-communist that he was forcing my friend Joelle Fishman out of Modern Times, and our relations were souring. There was no response from Cuba, and I came to believe that Rick had black-balled my application.
There was another possibility: the Soviet Union. Comrades in the American New Left said that the Soviet Union was not really socialist but "state capitalist," but I would go to see for myself. I found the names of scientists in the Soviet Union who were doing brain research similar to me, and I began to correspond with them and to arrange to see them on a trip. Nina agreed to go, and in 1973, we took a trip to Moscow and Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, (with a side-trip for me to Estonia) and met with a number of scientists, including:
The visit with Pyotr Anokhin was especially memorable, because he was especially gracious and charming. He had been a kazakh horseman and revolutionary when young and had become a great scientist, emphazing the role of motor activity in the determination of brain function at a time when many were still conceiving of the brain as a passive receiver of sensory information. And it was especially poignant because he died soon after.
In Tbilisi, I fell in love with the rich, macho Georgian culture, drinking wine and dancing with the dashing Jason Badridze. At that time he still spoke fluent English, but by the time I next saw him he had lost his English after falling a thousand feet while mountain climbing in the Caucasus, a fall that killed his climbing companion.
The stage was set for me to return and live in the Soviet Union. I applied for money from various US agencies, fully expecting to be funded because the US was greatly expanding scientific cooperation with the USSR at that time. In the summer of 1975 I took an intensive Russian course at Yale which I enjoyed very much.
Eventually I received two fellowships, one from the National Institutes of Health to work under the Ministry of Health with Sudakov (see his photo with Neal Miller) who had succeeded Anokhin as head of the First Moscow Medical Institute, the other from the National Academy of Sciences to work with Oniani at the Georgian Institute of Physiology. I would go during my sabbatical from Wesleyan in 1976.
But there was a price: my marriage. Nina complained that I had withdrawn from her emotionally. She would continue her studies in nursing, going on to graduate work at Yale, and she did not intend to come with me to Moscow. Only later, did she did come over for a month to do her nursing thesis on Soviet health care. But in any case, it was true that I was withdrawing and that our marriage was in jeopardy. Nina had been seeing a psychotherapist for many years. Now I went to see one as well.
There were other costs as well. For the second straight year, in the fall of 1975, I was denied tenure at Wesleyan. The chairman of my department told me, "I know that you worked with the Black Panthers. So you won't get tenure unless it's over my dead body." And with all the stress I developed a bad case of shingles on one side of my face, even threatening my sight in that eye, and in order to deal with the intense pain I was doped up with codeine. It was the first time I had really crashed since my suicidal days as a teenager, although it would not be the last time either. As far as I know, I am the only person in Wesleyan history to be denied tenure twice and still get it on the third time around.
With hindsight one can see that one of the most useful aspects of the great development of the scientific establishment in those years was its ability to break down international barriers of communication, and in particular, to make possible communication across what was called the "iron curtain" between East and West which was maintained by both sides for political reasons.
At about the same time as I went to the Soviet Union, so did Bernard Lown, also on the program to exchange cardiovascular physiologists. We had a brief correspondance in 1980 when the scientific exchanges were jeopardized. Lown wrote to me then,
Lown's initiative became the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War which went on to win the Nobel Prize for Peace and which, according to Gorbachev's book Perestroika, had a major influence on the Soviets' decision to pursue nuclear disarmament even when it was done in such a way to disadvantage them. We later corresponded with regard to the Peoples Appeal for Peace in 1985 and 1986.
Although in many ways science has been corrupted, and even dangerous, its basic universality remains a hope for mankind.
Vladimir Poshivalov, First Leningrad Medical Institute
B.F. Tolkunov, A.I. Karamyan and T.N. Sollertinskaya, Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology, Leningrad
Pavel Simonov, Institute of Higher Nervous Activity, Moscow
Pyotr Anokhin and K.V. Sudakov, Sechenov Institute of Physiology, Moscow
Tengiz Oniani and Jason Badridze, Georgian Institute of Physiology, Tbilisi
Lembit Allikmets, Tartu State University, Estonia
Vladimir Khayutin, Institute of Normal and Pathological Physiology, Moscow
Nina and I with Georgian colleagues in the Caucasus
Click on photo to enlaarge
"the present policy of chilling all relations with the USR including scientific is deplorable. It has been a painful, slow process to build the bridges of communication, which Carter and Brezhinsky are now dynamiting. Our Health Exchange has not been disrupted - one of the few scientific avenues still open. But driving is only permitted at night and without headlights. In fact, the NIH has advised that this area may continue if it has but minimal visibility ... My growing concern has been the threat of thermonuclear war. At the moment I am in the process of organizing a Pugwash-like conference among Soviet, USA and Japanese physicians."
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme