---
title: "Pavlovian session"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovian_session"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:19.379692+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In 1982, M.G. Yaroshevsky, criticizing the Pavlovian session, wrote that, in fact, Ivanov-Smolenskiy and his disciples did nothing but pervert the kernel of Pavlovian teaching, substituting for it a mechanistic view of the brain activity. These so-called scholars of Pavlov emasculated the ground of his theory and extremely damaged the prospects of Soviet science.
A precursor of later abuses in psychiatry in the Soviet Union and the most somber event in the history of Russian-Soviet psychiatry was the so-called 'Joint Session' of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Neurologic and Psychiatric Association, held in the name of Ivan Pavlov in October 1951, considered the matter of several leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists of the time (for example, Grunya Sukhareva, Vasily Gilyarovsky, Raisa Golant, Aleksandr Shmaryan, Mikhail Gurevich) who were charged with practicing 'anti-Pavlovian, anti-Marxist, idealistic, reactionary' science damaging to Soviet psychiatry. These talented psychiatrists had to admit publicly to their wrong beliefs and mistakes and promise to profess only Pavlov's teaching. During the Joint Session, scientists falsely acknowledged their 'wrongdoings' and gave up their beliefs, out of fear. But in the closing speech, the lead author of the policy report Andrei Snezhnevsky stated that they "have not disarmed themselves and continue to remain in the old anti-Pavlovian positions", thereby causing "grave damage to the Soviet scientific and practical psychiatry", and the vice president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences accused them that they "diligently fall down to the dirty source of American pseudo-science". The fear and less than noble ambitions of the accusers including Irina Strelchuk, Vasily Banshchikov, Oleg Kerbikov, and Andrei Snezhnevsky were also likely to make them serve in the role of inquisitors. Not surprisingly, many of them were advanced and appointed to leadership positions shortly after the session.
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. These scientists lost their laboratories, and some were subjected to tortures in prisons. The Moscow, Leningrad, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian schools of neuroscience and neurophysiology were damaged, at least for a while. The Joint Session ravaged productive research in neurosciences and psychiatry for years to come. It was pseudoscience that took over.
After the joint meeting of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the USSR Academy of Sciences (Pavlovian Session of 1950), pathophysiology of higher nervous activity was established as a new discipline mandatory for all of the USSR psychiatrists who underwent retraining in accordance with this concept. According to the postulates of pathophysiology of higher nervous activity, the development of all mental disorders was explained in terms of the changed relations between the excitation and inhibition, their interference and different phases of the inhibition. Psychological approaches during diagnosing, treating and explaining the mechanisms of mental disorders have been banned and virtually excluded from the practice of psychiatrists. This ban was based on the ideological concept of labeling all psychological theories of personality, especially psychoanalytic ones, as reactionary and idealistic.
After the joint session of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences on June 28 — July 4, 1950 and during the session of the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists on October 11–15, 1951, the leading role was given to Snezhnevky's school. The 1950 decision to give monopoly over psychiatry to the Pavlovian school of Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky was one of crucial factors of the onset of political psychiatry. The Soviet doctors, under the incentive of Snezhnevsky, devised 'Pavlovian theory of schizophrenia' on the strength of which they diagnosticated this illness in political oppositionists.

== See also ==
Suppressed research in the Soviet Union
Lysenkoism
Politicization of science

== References ==