Conjoined twins: scientific cinema and Pavlovian physiology

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Conjoined twins: scientific cinema and Pavlovian physiology Nikolai Krementsov Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Victoria College, University of Toronto, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1K7

Through the lens of a 1957 documentary film, ‘‘Neural and humoral factors in the regulation of bodily functions (research on conjoined twins),’’ produced by the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, this essay traces the entwined histories of Soviet physiology, studies of conjoined twins and scientific cinema. It examines the role of Ivan Pavlov and his students, including Leonid Voskresenkii, Dmitrii Fursikov and Petr Anokhin, in the development of ‘‘scientific film’’ as a particular cinematographic genre in Soviet Russia and explores numerous puzzles hidden behind the film’s striking visuals. In the last few years, as part of a concerted effort to bring to light numerous ‘‘hidden treasures’’ kept in its vast storages,1 the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) initiated a program of digitizing moving images pertaining to the history of medicine and public health. The NLM audiovisual collection includes nearly 7000 titles from the Silent Era to the present, covering a broad range of topics from surgery to tropical medicine and from mental health to personal hygiene. Many of these films are quite rare and in certain cases the Library may have the only surviving copy. So far, nearly 200 motion pictures, cartoons and documentaries have been made freely accessible on the Library website, with many more planned to appear on line in the coming years.2 In the summer of 2013, the NLM also launched a special project titled ‘‘Medical Movies on the Web’’ – a separate portal to selected films from its digital collection curated by a team of well-known historians of medicine, David Cantor, Michael Sappol and Paul Theerman.3 The project intends to highlight certain films by supplementing the visuals with searchable transcripts of their contents, along with expert commentary that sets the films in historical contexts, a bibliography of relevant Corresponding author: Krementsov, N. ([email protected]). Keywords: Scientific cinematography; Soviet physiology; Ivan Pavlov; Petr Anokhin; Conjoined twins; US National Library of Medicine. Available online xxxxxx 1 See Michael Sappol, ed., Hidden Treasure. National Library of Medicine (U.S.). New York, N.Y.: Blast Books, 2012. An e-version of the book is free for perusal and download at http://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ext/pub/HIDDENTREASURE_ NLM_BlastBooks.pdf. 2 See http://collections.nlm.nih.gov/?f[drep2.format][]=Moving+image. 3 See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/collections/films/medicalmoviesontheweb/. The 1957 film is now accessible at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/collections/films/ medicalmoviesontheweb/conjoinedtwins.html. www.sciencedirect.com

publications and a variety of related materials from the collections of the Library and other repositories. Among various motion pictures selected to appear on the ‘‘Medical Movies on the Web’’ portal is a 40 min long documentary film titled ‘‘Nervous and Humoral Factors in the Regulation of Bodily Functions (Research on Conjoined Twins)’’ produced in 1957 by the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. This film offers a fascinating glimpse of the history of both Soviet physiology and Soviet ‘‘scientific cinema,’’ even though it was never intended to reach beyond a very narrow specialist audience. To an attentive viewer, it presents numerous puzzles, beginning with its very presence in the NLM collections: the Library has no records of its provenance. The film’s production stretched across some twenty years, from the times of Joseph Stalin’s ‘‘Great Terror’’ to Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign known as the ‘‘Thaw.’’ Its first frames were shot in 1937 with the birth of the first pair of the conjoined twins Ira and Galia and the last ones in 1957, depicting the seventh birthday of the second pair Masha and Dasha. In a sense, this film is the only available substantial record of the research conducted on these two pairs, for no sizeable scholarly publications documenting and analyzing its results ever appeared. Although the conjoined twins with a common blood circulation, but separate nervous systems presented a unique opportunity for studying a variety of extremely interesting questions, not only in physiology, but also psychology, genetics, immunology and embryology, the film focuses exclusively on the relative role of ‘‘neural and humoral factors in the regulation of bodily functions.’’ Indeed, the entire movie is nothing more than a cinematographic illustration to the views on this subject by Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), Russia’s first Nobelist and the doyen of Soviet physiology.4 Following the long-standing Russian tradition of ‘‘nervism,’’ Pavlov always emphasized the dominant role of the nervous system in the organism’s physiology and behavior and largely ignored the role of humoral factors, which nearly cost him his Nobel Prize.5 Yet, despite the fact that the film is thoroughly imbued with the Pavlovian lingo, inexplicably, Pavlov himself is 4 For a monumental biography of Pavlov, see Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov. A Russian Life in Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 5 For a detailed discussion of Pavlov’s nervism, see Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; on the Nobel Prize, see pp. 322–346.

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Figure 1. Ivan Pavlov’s portrait of 1932 published in Anokhin’s biography of his teacher and mentor. From Anokhin (1949).

completely absent from the film. No iconic portraits that graced every Soviet physiology textbook appear anywhere, nor his name is mentioned even once in the film’s running commentary (see Figure 1). This absence is even more puzzling given that the film’s ‘‘research director’’ (as he is identified in the credits) Petr Anokhin (1898–1974) was one of Pavlov’s students and prote´ge´s from the early 1920s on.6 Anokhin has actively contributed to the construction of Pavlov’s mythic image as a quintessentially ‘‘Soviet’’ scientist in numerous articles and a 400-page-long biography of his former teacher and patron.7 Why would he miss the opportunity to publicly emphasize (once again) his personal connections to the ‘‘founding father’’ of Soviet physiology? Anokhin makes only a cameo appearance in the film’s last few frames, but his twenty-second-long presence provides a clue to numerous puzzles in the entwined histories of Soviet physiology, studies of conjoined twins and ‘‘scientific cinema,’’ which lay hidden behind the film’s striking visuals. 6 No full-fledged biography of this talented man, often hailed as the founder of Soviet ‘‘neuro-cybernetics,’’ is available in any language. There are only a few largely hagiographic publications by his students and several obituaries in various periodicals. See Iu. A. Makarenko and K. V. Sudakov, P. K. Anokhin. Moscow: Meditsina, 1976; P. V. Simonov, ed. Petr Kuz’mich Anokhin. Vospominaniia sovremennikov, publitsistika. Moscow: Nauka, 1990. But his major works are available in English, see P. K. Anokhin, Biology and neurophysiology of the conditioned reflex and its role in adaptive behavior. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press, 1974. Indeed just a year ago, the book was reissued in the kindle format! 7 See P. K. Anokhin, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Zhizn’, deiatel’nost’ i nauchnaia shkola. Moscow-Leningrad: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1949.

Ivan Pavlov and scientific films ‘‘Research on conjoined twins’’ is a fine exemplar of a particular cinematographic genre – ‘‘scientific film,’’ as it was called at the time – that had a long and distinguished history in Soviet Russia.8 Following the rebirth of the Russian movie industry after the end of the bloody civil war that had erupted in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, this genre took a prominent place in the industry’s production and distribution efforts.9 Practically all movie studios, both state- and privatelyowned, made scientific films, while the industry’s distribution wing bought hundreds of such films abroad for showing around the country. In just a few years, by the end of 1926, the total number of scientific films in circulation had reached 746 (though only 118 had been produced locally).10 Their subjects ranged from the prevention of venereal diseases to the electrification of the country and from the development of the human organism to the manufacturing of cloth from the cotton. Some of the films were short, just under 5 min long. Others run longer than 2 h. Some were addressed to specialists, others to general audiences. Some were mere recordings of certain scientific experiments, medical procedures and biological or technological processes. Still others were elaborate productions based on specially written scripts and involving professional actors and film directors. These films became part and parcel of huge education and propaganda campaigns to popularize science and undermine religion waged by the country’s new rulers, the Bolsheviks. But cinematography also attracted the attention of scientists who began to employ this new tool in their own research. Physiology figured prominently among the subjects of Soviet scientific films, of both propaganda and research varieties. Physiologists were among the first to utilize the new possibilities offered by cinematography to both record their research and popularize it. One of the first Soviet-made full-length scientific films was produced by Leonid Voskresenkii, Pavlov’s former student, at the time a professor of physiology at the Tver Pedagogical Institute. But this motion picture had nothing to do with Pavlovian physiology. Beginning in 1923, Voskresenskii was deeply involved with studies of ‘‘rejuvenation’’ inspired by the extraordinarily popular works of the Austrian physiologist Eugene Steinach and the French surgeon of Russian extraction Serge Voronoff.11 Voskresenskii’s research aimed at replicating Steinach’s and Voronoff’s experiments with vasectomy and sex glands transplantations. Not to be outdone by his Western colleagues whose works had been recorded in several motion pictures, Voskresenskii also documented his experiments with ‘‘rejuvenating’’ animals and humans on film. He detailed his three-year-long 8 See a treatise on the subject by the foremost theoretician of the genre, L. M. Sukharebskii, Nauchnoe kino. Moscow: Kinopechat’, 1926. 9 For a detailed overview of the early Russian/Soviet cinematography, see N. A. Lebedev, Ocherki istorii kino SSSR. Nemoe kino: 1918–1934 gody. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965, 2-nd expanded edition. 10 See Nauchnye fil’my. Opisanie fondov nauchnykh fil’m. Moscow: Teakinopechat’, 1927. 11 For a detailed analysis of the ‘‘rejuvenation craze’’ in 1920s Russia and Voskresenskii’s work, see Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 127–158.

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Figure 2. A screenshot from The Mechanics of the Brain (1926), demonstrating the basic scheme of conditional reflex.

studies in several scholarly publications.12 But their most important result was a full-length (7 reels, 1885 m) motion picture, titled ‘‘Who needs to be rejuvenated.’’ After its opening in Moscow in the early fall of 1925, accompanied by lectures on rejuvenation and press interviews by its producer, the film made a triumphant show all over the country and remained in the repertoire of Soviet movie theaters for many years.13 Perhaps it was the success of this motion picture that made Voskresenskii an enthusiast of scientific cinema. A year later, he wrote a screen-script for a full-length film ‘‘The Issue of Nutrition’’ (1927) that illustrated the basic facts of human digestion and nutrition. He got deeply engaged in both producing scientific films and proselytizing the value of cinematography as a research tool among his fellow-physiologists. Voskresenskii’s crown achievement in the field of scientific cinema was a film about research of his former teacher Ivan Pavlov. He was instrumental in the production of the most famous Soviet scientific film of the 1920s, ‘‘The Mechanics of the Brain’’ (1926). This film intended to introduce to general audiences the basic elements of Pavlov’s concept of conditional reflexes as the foundation of animal and human behavior (see Figure 2).14 As the prospectus issued by Amkino, the agency representing the Soviet movie industry in the United States, described the movie, it ‘‘attempts to present with the limits of a six reel motion picture twenty-seven years of uninterrupted 12 See ‘‘Kogo nado omolazhivat’,’’ Vecherniaia Moskva, 3 September 1925, 3; ‘‘Kogo nuzhno omolozhivat’,’’ Vecherniaia Moskva, 29 October 1925, 3. Alas, I was unable to find a copy of this film in the archives. 13 See L. N. Voskresenskii, ‘‘Opyty nabliudeniia nad ‘omolozheniem’ liudei i krupnykh sel’skokhoziastvennykh zhivotnykh.’’ In Omolozhenie v Rossii. Leningrad: Meditsina, 1924, 98–126; ‘‘Ne omolozhenie, a osvezhenie,’’ Vecherniaia Moskva, 4 March 1924, 2. 14 A copy of the movie with English subtitles is available at http://vimeo.com/ 20583313. This copy is not complete (containing only about two thirds of the original) and was heavily edited during its restoration in the 1960s at the Wayne State University, with rearrangement of several parts and additions that had been absent in the original.

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thinking concerning the nature of animal and human behavior, and is, in fact, an animated photographic record of the experiments and studies of a single individual, Professor Pavlov.’’15 Pavlov himself, however, was not involved in the film’s production at all and, according to his biographer Daniel P. Todes, he ‘‘did not – and in some cases would not – conduct’’ many of the experiments recorded in the film.16 According to the film’s credits, it was scripted and directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, a rising star of Soviet cinematography, and produced by the joint-stock SovietGerman movie company ‘‘Mezhrabpom-Rus’.’’17 Undoubtedly, Pudovkin directed and carefully edited his first fulllength motion picture.18 But his ability to write a script for this quite sophisticated representation of contemporary Soviet research on ‘‘higher nervous activity,’’ as Pavlov himself had defined the subject of his studies, is highly problematic.19 The film’s credits, however, identify two individuals who had all the requisite knowledge to do the job: Dmitrii Fursikov and Leonid Voskresenskii are listed as ‘‘scientific consultants.’’ Both were Pavlov’s former students and collaborators (see Figure 3).20 Both were deeply involved in research on conditional reflexes and higher nervous activity. Indeed at the time the film went into production, Fursikov was director and Voskresenskii deputy-director of a brand new Institute for the Studies of Higher Nervous Activity, just established under the auspices of the Communist Academy, a Bolshevik counterpart to the ‘‘bourgeois’’ Russian Academy of Sciences. And both had conducted the kinds of experiments, which Pavlov himself did not and would not do! Furthermore, it seems likely that the very idea of producing the film had first emerged within the walls of the Communist Academy.21 With a huge success of his film on rejuvenation under his belt, Voskresenskii is a likely candidate for originating the idea and ‘‘selling’’ it to his longtime friend Fursikov. Who in turn might well have sold it to his patrons in the governing body of the Communist Academy, its Presidium, composed of high-level Bolsheviks. Two members of the Presidium would likely have taken a special interest in the idea. The first was Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik Party’s leading theoretician and member of its highest council, the Politburo, who had two years earlier published a sixty-page critical essay on Pavlov’s scientific work and his ‘‘unscientific’’ attitude 15 Mordaunt Hall, ‘‘The Screen: A Scientific Study,’’ New York Times, November 20, 1928, 38. 16 Todes, Ivan Pavlov, 492. 17 On the history of this very interesting studio, see Viacheslav Rebrov, ‘‘I snova o ‘Rusi’,’’ Iskusstvo kino, 1999, no. 4; available at http://kinoart.ru/archive/1999/04/ n4-article15. 18 On Pudovkin and his career as a movie director, including extensive discussions of ‘‘The Mechanics of the Brain,’’ see Amy Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001; Panayiota Mini, Pudovkin’s Cinema of the 1920s. Unpublished PhD diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002; and Margarete Vo¨hringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik. Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der fru¨hen Sowjetunion. Go¨ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007. 19 The existing analyses of the movie uncritically attribute to Pudovkin the film’s sophisticated scientific underpinnings, for instance, inferring his intimate knowledge of Pavlov’s unpublished works and contemporary heated debates on the import of Pavlovian physiology for the materialist understanding of human behavior. 20 On Fursikov and his role in Pavlov’s research, see Todes, Ivan Pavlov. 21 Alas, I did not have an opportunity to test this hypothesis in the Russian archives. But certain circumstantial evidence presented below is highly suggestive.

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Figure 3. Pavlov and Fursikov, c. 1924. Courtesy of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

toward the Bolshevik Revolution and who remained keenly interested in Pavlov’s research.22 The second was Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment in the Soviet government, whose movie-script ‘‘Bear’s Wedding’’ was at that very time in production at the MezhrabpomRus’ studio. Either one (or both) of them could have suggested that the studio undertake the production of a film about Pavlov’s research. Whatever the case, the studio did take up the project. And although Pudovkin was undeniably responsible for the film’s cinematographic techniques and artistic qualities, its actual contents make it clear that it was Fursikov and Voskresenskii who defined and shaped the film’s scientific substance and ideological message. The film was not a commercial success, though the studio did recover its costs of about 30,000 rubles. But it served its propaganda function quite well. Opened in Moscow in November 1926, in the subsequent years the film was regularly shown in selected theaters throughout the country and was still in the repertoire as late as the mid-1930s. It reached not just domestic but also foreign audiences. In March 1928, it was shown at a special meeting of the New York Society of Clinical Psychiatry, held at the New York Academy of Medicine. The viewing was accompanied by a lecture delivered by Howard Scott Liddell, an Assistant Professor of Cornell University, who had visited Pavlov’s laboratory in Leningrad just two years prior.23 Two months later, the film was shown at the New York City Town Hall, this time accompanied by a commentary provided by the ‘‘father’’ of behaviorism John B. Watson.24 In the next few months the film had regular showings in several movie theaters across the city. 22 23 24

On Bukharin’s relations with Pavlov, see Todes, Ivan Pavlov. See ‘‘Film Shows Brains All Operate Alike,’’ New York Times, March 9, 1928, p. 8. See ‘‘Reviews Studies in Human Behavior,’’ New York Times, May 24, 1928, p. 35.

Although Pavlov did not take any part in the production of the movie, he apparently was quite pleased with the results. In the summer of 1932, he brought a copy to Rome to the Fourteenth International Congress of Physiological Sciences. Reportedly, he even supplemented its viewing by congress participants with his personal commentary. He left the copy to his Italian host Carlo Foa`, chairman of the department of human physiology at the University of Milan Medical School, who reportedly used it in his courses in the subsequent years.25 Despite the success of ‘‘The Mechanics of the Brain,’’ Pavlov himself never employed cinematography in his own research. But some of his co-workers did. Voskresenskii actively promoted the use of film in the studies of primate behavior undertaken under his supervision at the Sukhumi primate-breeding station during 1928–1930 (see Figure 4). Voskresenskii tried to interest his teacher in studying higher nervous activity in primates, but Pavlov remained faithful to his favorite subject – dogs. Yet, some of his co-workers did take up the challenge. In the early 1930s such research was begun in Koltushi, a ‘‘science village’’ built for Pavlov’s studies on the outskirts of Leningrad, where several of his collaborators did record their experiments with the behavior of chimps on film. In the next few years, however, the dual function of scientific cinema as a tool for both propaganda and research got ‘‘institutionally’’ separated. In the late 1920searly 1930s, the country was plunged into a new revolution – the ‘‘revolution from above.’’26 Stalin began to consolidate his personal power over the Bolshevik party and that of the party apparatus over the nation and to implement the plan of crash industrialization, the forced collectivization of the peasantry and extensive militarization. The ‘‘Great Break,’’ as Stalin named it, inaugurated drastic changes in all facets of life. Private initiative and the market were suppressed and a total state monopoly over resources, production and distribution introduced, leading to the emergence of a system of strict centralized controls, administrative fiat and greatly diminished local autonomy, accompanied by the creation of gigantic bureaucratic and repressive (secret-police) apparatuses. Both science and the movie industry were profoundly affected by the radical reorganizations of the new revolution. The abolishment of all private enterprise spelled the end to privately own movie companies and theaters. The production and distribution of all films was concentrated in a few remaining state studios, administered by a special agency, Soiuzkino, created in 1930. The state expanded the manufacturing of the necessary equipment and materials for the movie industry, but strictly controlled both the production of new films and the repertoire of movie theaters. The new institutional structures and ideological strictures stimulated further the production of scientific films for educational and propaganda purposes. And Pavlovian physiology offered a perfect opportunity for both. During the first half of the decade, several educational films for use in both high schools and universities depicted 25 It was this copy that ended up in the Wayne State University and was restored during the 1960s. 26 See Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928– 1941. New York: Norton, 1990.

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within VIEM. Similar departments were established within the rapidly growing USSR Academy of Sciences and in Moscow and Leningrad universities. During the 1930s, then, cinematography became a standard research tool in many fields of biomedical science. And it was at this very time that the first pair of the conjoined twins Ira and Galia was born and Petr Anokhin began his experiments in early 1937.

Figure 4. Leonid Voskresenskii (in the center) and two technicians holding young chimpanzees at the Sukhumi monkey breeding station, 1929. Courtesy of the Historical Museum of the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy.

Pavlovian-style experiments with conditional and unconditional reflexes. But of course, the educational films reached only limited audiences. In contrast, propaganda films reached nearly everyone. In the summer of 1935, at Pavlov’s invitation, the Fifteenth International Congress of Physiological Sciences met in the Soviet Union. The congress became a focus of concerted efforts to showcase the ‘‘advances of Soviet science’’ both domestically and internationally in numerous news reels. The highlights included the greetings by Soviet officials and the opening speech by the congress’s president Pavlov, as well as the banquet at the Kremlin and various excursions organized for foreign participants. Pavlov’s death the next summer occasioned the production of a special documentary, titled ‘‘Academician Ivan Pavlov,’’ with the footage of Pavlov at work in his lab, with his students and family, with H. G. Wells, and, of course, delivering speeches at the congress. The film also had extensive coverage of Pavlov’s state funeral attended by the luminaries of the Soviet state and Soviet science.27 At the same time, the importance of scientific and especially technological advances to the new socioeconomic programs led the Soviet government to greatly enlarge its support for science, vastly expanding the network of scientific institutions and their personnel, while simultaneously limiting the considerable autonomy enjoyed by the scientific community in the previous decade.28 The centralization of scientific activities led to the creation in 1932 of the AllUnion Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM) that in the next few years absorbed nearly all research institutions in biomedical fields and established branches in various cities throughout the country. As part of this gigantic enterprise (run by one of Pavlov’s collaborators) a special ‘‘department of scientific photo- and cinematography’’ was created 27

A copy of this film is available at http://www.net-film.ru/film-31036/ ?search=p231jv1&order=m1. 28 For details, see Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Petr Anokhin and conjoined twins If the image of Ivan Pavlov as a quintessentially ‘‘Soviet’’ scientist – constructed among many others by Petr Anokhin – was fully fictitious, Anokhin could have rightfully claimed that mantle for himself.29 He belonged to that cohort, born circa 1900, who came of age during the first years of the Soviet regime and was profoundly shaped by it. Born in 1898 to the family of a railroad worker in Tsaritsyn (today’s Volgograd) in the south of the Russian Empire, Petr began his education at a ‘‘real school’’ (an analog of the German Realschulle) in his home town. In 1915 he entered an agricultural college in Novocherkask, the capital of the Don Region. Perhaps his ambition was to become an agronomist or a land prospector – the two specializations offered by the college – but the Bolshevik Revolution dramatically changed the life of his homeland and opened unexpected opportunities for the worker son. The civil war that came on the tails of the Revolution raged with particular fury in the Don Region, a stronghold of the ‘‘White Guard’’ fighting against the Bolshevik ‘‘Red Army.’’ Petr joined the Bolsheviks and fought on the front lines. By the end of the civil war in 1920 he had become a member of the Novocherkask City Soviet, the press and finance commissar of the Don Republic, and the editor-inchief of its main newspaper, ‘‘Red Don.’’ In early 1921, Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment in Lenin’s government, visited Novocherkask and met with the young Bolshevik. Reportedly, Petr shared with Lunacharskii his dream of studying human psyche. The chance encounter proved truly fateful. At Lunacharskii’s directive, that fall Petr Anokhin was sent to Petrograd (renamed Leningrad after Lenin’s death in 1924) to become a student at the State Institute of Medical Knowledge created and run under the aegis of the Commissariat of Enlightenment by Vladimir Bekhterev, Russia’s foremost neurologist and psychiatrist. Petr proved to be a quick study. The next year, along with his training at Bekhterev’s institute, he began research on the mechanisms of internal inhibition in Pavlov’s laboratory. By the time he graduated from the Institute in 1926, Anokhin had published several articles on Pavlov’s work in popular-science magazines and delivered a report on his own research to the Second All-Union Physiology Congress. The same year, on Pavlov’s recommendation, he got the position of a lecturer in physiology at the Leningrad Zoothechnical Institute. For the next few years, along with his teaching duties, he continued research in Pavlov’s 29 Unfortunately, during the last four years, the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences that houses a large collection of Anokhin’s personal papers (fond 36) has been (and remains) inaccessible. Thus I did not have a chance to examine this collection that might have documents pertaining to Anokhin’s work on conjoined twins and to the production of the film.

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laboratory on a variety of subjects, ranging from the particularities of blood circulation in the brain to the neural mechanisms of inhibition. He published his results in leading Russian and German physiology journals and reported them to various conferences. In 1930, again on Pavlov’s recommendation, Anokhin was appointed professor and chairman of the physiology department at a new medical school created in Nizhnii Novgorod, a large industrial center in the Volga Region. He proved to be not only a talented researcher, but also a capable administrator. In just a few years, Anokhin built from scratch one of the best physiology laboratories in the country and in 1933 he managed to make it a branch of the rapidly expanding VIEM. It was in Nizhnii Novgorod that Anokhin began to develop his concept of ‘‘functional system’’ as the basic principle in the organization of brain activity. In this concept he for the first time formulated the principle of a neural back-loop (‘‘return afferentation,’’ as he named it at the time) and articulated its key role in the formation of purposeful and adaptive behavior.30 In the summer of 1935, he presented the outlines of his concept to the Fifteenth International Congress of Physiological Sciences. Shortly after the congress, Anokhin was transferred to Moscow and appointed head of a new ‘‘department of neurophysiology’’ created in VIEM for his research. Among the numerous subjects Anokhin had pursued over the years was the interaction of humoral and neural mechanisms in various physiological processes, particularly in sleep. So, when in early 1937, he learned of the birth in one of the Moscow hospitals of the conjoined twins Ira and Galia, he immediately realized what a unique opportunity the pair presented. Ira and Galia shared a blood system, but their nervous systems were completely separate, thus giving Anokhin an extremely rare ‘‘natural tool’’ for studying the interplay between neural and humoral factors. Anokhin quickly organized a cross-institutional research group and put Tatiana Alekseeva, one of his first graduate students in Nizhnii Novgorod and long-term collaborator, in charge (see Figure 5).31 Fully understanding the uniqueness of this research, Anokhin arranged for a film crew from the VIEM department of scientific photo- and cinematography to record it (some of the footage of the 1937– 1938 experiments could be seen in the 1957 film). Alekseeva developed a broad research program aimed at investigating the role of neural and humoral factors in various physiological processes, including appetite, pain, temperature regulation and sleep. Alas, the twins survived for only sixteen months and the program was not completed. Available materials do not allow one to discover how much Anokhin personally contributed to this research. Nevertheless, in late 1938 he published in a

30 See Galina G. Egiazaryan and Konstantin V. Sudakov, ‘‘Theory of Functional Systems in the Scientific School of P. K. Anokhin,’’ Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2007, 16:194–205. 31 Alekseeva appears in the 1957 film several times, for instance, in Part 2: 20:00. Alas, I was unable to locate her personal papers in the Russian archives. 32 See P. K. Anokhin, ‘‘Problema sna i srosshiesia bliznetsy,’’ Nauka i zhizn’, 1938, 11–12: 26–34. A short, unsigned article on this research accompanied with several photographs also appeared in the Life Magazine, see ‘‘A two-headed baby gives scientists new evidence on the nature of sleep,’’ Life Magazine, September 26, 1938, p. 28.

Figure 5. Petr Anokhin (center) with his graduate students at the Nizhnii Novgorod Medical School, 1933. On his left is Tatiana Alekseeva. From P. V. Simonov (1990).

popular-science magazine a long article on one facet of the program, namely – the study of sleep.32 Anokhin opened his article with a thorough overview of the main competing theories of sleep, neural and humoral. The neural theory assigned the leading role in the development of sleep to the central nervous system, though its adherents disagreed on the exact localization of the ‘‘sleep centers.’’ Pavlov argued that the brain cortex was primarily responsible and that sleep was merely a particular manifestation of the basic neural process of inhibition (which he and his collaborators, including Anokhin, had investigated in various experiments). Other physiologists thought that the ‘‘sleep centers’’ were located in subcortical areas (thalamus and hypothalamus were prime suspects). In contrast, the humoral theory assigned the leading role in the development of sleep to the accumulation in the blood of certain metabolic products, named ‘‘hypnotoxins.’’ Developed in the 1910s by French physiologists Rene Legendre and Henri Pieron, by the time of Anokhin’s publication this theory had found many supporters. The conjoined twins with a shared blood circulation, but completely separate nervous systems presented a unique ‘‘natural’’ experiment for investigating the relative validity of the two competing theories. Numerous observations of Masha and Dasha’s sleep patterns demonstrated that each of the twins could remain awake while the other was asleep (see Figure 6). These observations seemingly undermined the hypnotoxin theory. This is exactly how they were interpreted in the 1957 film: ‘‘The simultaneous existence of both states – sleep and wakefulness – <. . .> is direct proof of the crucial role of the nervous system in sleep occurrence, which speaks against the humoral theory of sleep.’’33 Yet in contrast to the rigid, uncompromising formulation of these facts in the film, in his 1938 article Anokhin offered a much more nuanced, ‘‘dialectical’’ interpretation: ‘‘It would be wrong to think that our data obtained in research on conjoined twins, completely negates the influence of certain blood components on the 33

Part I. 25:06.

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Figure 6. Conjoined twins Ira and Galia, c. 1937: (a) Ira (right) and Galia (left); (b) Galia is asleep; Ira is awake; (c) Ira is asleep, Galia is crying; (d) Ira is ‘sitting’, Galia is ‘laying down’. From Anokhin (1938).

entire process of sleep.’’34 Referring to research by various foreign and Soviet investigators (including his own studies on the influence of potassium bromide on sleep), Anokhin stated that, ‘‘along with the nervous mechanisms, certain humoral factors do play a role in the development of sleep.’’35 Why did Anokhin drop his ‘‘dialectical’’ approach to the interplay of nervous and humoral factors in 1957? The second pair of the conjoined twins Masha and Dasha was born in Moscow in January 1950. A dozen 34 35

Anokhin, ‘‘Problema sna,’’ 33–34. Ibid, 34.

years, which had passed since research on the first pair Ira and Galia had been finished, were arguably the most dramatic and traumatic in the life of the country and its people. Began in the midst of the Great Terror, it went through the horrors of World War II, the famine punctuated post-war years of rebuilding and restoration and ended with the rapidly growing Cold War between the former war-time Allies. Anokhin was fortunate to survive it all, and in the immediate postwar years, he made a meteoric administrative career. At the start of the war Anokhin joined a Moscow hospital as a neurosurgeon, specializing in the trauma to the

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peripheral nerves and developing novel techniques for the transplantation and regeneration of damaged nerves. With the hospital personnel he was evacuated from Moscow and spent several years in the rear, in Siberia. At the end of the war he returned to Moscow to become head of a major division, and a few years later director, of a large Institute of Physiology created under the auspices of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences that had been established in 1944 on the basis of VIEM. He became member of the Academy and its governing body, the Presidium. He came to head the Academy’s administrative apparatus, the Secretariat and the Planning Commission, a position of much influence and responsibility, which he cleverly used in an attempt to enhance even further his standing within the community of Soviet physiologists. After his death, Pavlov was enshrined as a ‘‘great Soviet scientist’’ and his doctrine of higher nervous activity canonized. Almost every Soviet physiologist claimed to be Pavlov’s pupil and a cultivator of ‘‘Pavlov’s legacy.’’ Various groups and individuals successfully used Pavlov’s name as a rhetorical umbrella to legitimate their own research not only in physiology, but also in psychology, psychiatry, neurology, pedagogy and even hygiene. Anokhin was no exception. In 1936–1941, he published several dozen articles in various venues about ‘‘the great Soviet scientist and patriot,’’ Pavlov’s ‘‘school,’’ and his own efforts to ‘‘develop further Pavlov’s legacy.’’ He tried to legitimize his novel concept of functional system as a direct continuation of Pavlov’s ideas and to position himself as the heir apparent to his teacher’s intellectual and institutional legacy. He succeeded in the first task, but not the second. After 1936, Leon Orbeli, Pavlov’s oldest and most respected pupil, became the official ‘‘guardian’’ of Pavlov’s legacy and the official spokesman for physiology in the party-state apparatus. He ‘‘inherited’’ Pavlov’s institutes in Koltushi and Leningrad, became member of the governing councils of both the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, and headed the Military Medical Academy, the country’s flagship medical school. Other students of Pavlov’s attempted to challenge Orbeli’s position and initiated various intrigues to get a piece of Pavlov’s legacy for themselves, but before and during the war their efforts proved futile. Yet after the war such attempts greatly intensified, especially within the Academy of Medical Sciences, with Anokhin as their main architect and instigator. In the fall of 1948, in the wake of Trofim Lysenko’s infamous campaign against genetics, Anokhin played a leading role in establishing ‘‘unbreakable links’’ between Lysenko’s so-called Michurinist biology and Pavlovian physiology. He used the newly created image of ‘‘Pavlov the Michurinist’’ as an effective tool to undermine Orbeli’s position.36 But, although proved quite damaging for Orbeli’s standing with the party-state apparatus, Anokhin’s efforts backfired. At a special ‘‘Pavlovian’’ session convened jointly by the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences in the summer of 1950, along with Orbeli, Anokhin himself was condemned for ‘‘perverting Pavlov’s legacy’’ and discharged from all his administrative 36

For details, see Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 260–275.

positions. He was ‘‘exiled’’ to Riazan (a large city located about one hundred miles south-east of Moscow; ironically, Riazan was Pavlov’s hometown) and appointed professor (later chairman) of physiology department at Riazan Medical School. And it was exactly at this time that research on the second pair of the conjoined twins Masha and Dasha began. Once again, Alekseeva assumed a leadership role and designed a program that in many ways simply recapped the research conducted on the first pair. The twins were placed in the Institute of Pediatrics of the Academy of Medical Sciences, where nearly all the experiments recorded in the 1957 film were conducted. In the atmosphere of strict orthodoxy established in the aftermath of the ‘‘Pavlovian session’’ and stringently enforced by a special watchdog body, the ‘‘Scientific Council on the Issues of the Physiological Doctrine of Academician I. P. Pavlov’’ (created jointly by the two academies in order to oversee all physiological research in the country), any deviation from the narrowly Pavlovian interpretations of experimental data was obviously out of the question. That is probably why in the film the interpretation of the twins’ sleep patterns became much more rigid and strictly ‘‘Pavlovian’’ compared to that in Anokhin’s 1938 article. This perhaps also explains the complete absence of Pavlov in the film. Apparently, for someone who like Anokhin had been repeatedly forced to publicly confess his ‘‘mistakes in the development of I.P. Pavlov’s teaching’’ and promise to find ‘‘ways of correcting them,’’37 using the images (or even the exact words) of the ‘‘Great Teacher’’ in his own work could be easily construed as ‘‘sacrilege’’ and entail further unpleasant repercussions. Anokhin clearly followed the Biblical dictum ‘‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’’ and sought to avoid provoking ‘‘Pavlov’s watch-dogs.’’ Furthermore, it was not just entire Soviet physiology that was thoroughly ‘‘Pavlovized,’’ all related disciplines were subjected to the same process, with special ‘‘Pavlovian’’ sessions held during 1950–1952 in psychiatry, pedagogy, neurology, linguistics and psychology.38 This situation explains why, despite the marked differences in the twins’ ‘‘higher nervous activity’’ occasionally noted in the film’s running commentary, no research was directed at comparing their cognitive abilities, attention span, emotions, language acquisition and many other psychological characteristics. Although the film ended with an indication of ‘‘the promising prospects in future studies for the assessment of neural and humoral factors in the mental life of the twins,’’ no further studies followed. On the basis of her experiments, Alekseeva prepared a dissertation for the degree of ‘‘Doctor of Medical Sciences.’’ But in 1959, she unexpectedly died and the materials she had collected 37 See, for instance, P. K. Anokhin, ‘‘O moikh oshibkakh v razrabotke ucheniia I. P. Pavlova i o putiakh ikh ispravleniia v dukhe ukazanii Ob’’edinennoi Pavlovskoi sessii AN SSSR i AMN SSSR,’’ Vestnik AMN SSSR, 1951, 2: 45–49; almost two years later Anokhin published yet another, much longer ‘‘confession’’ under a virtually identical title, see idem, ‘‘O printsipial’noi sushchnosti moikh oshibok v razvitii ucheniia I. P. Pavlova i o putiakh ikh preodoleniia,’’ Fiziologicheskii zhurnal SSSR, 1952, 38(6): 758–777. 38 For an analysis of this process, for instance, in psychiatry, see Benjamin Zajicek, ‘‘Scientific Psychiatry in Stalin’s Soviet Union: The Politics of Modern Medicine and the Struggle to Define ‘Pavlovian’ Psychiatry, 1939–1953.’’ PhD dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2009.

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Figure 7. Screenshots from the 1957 film: (a) Masha (left) and Dasha (right), c. 1954; (b) Masha and Dasha, c. 1956; (c) Masha and Dasha with Tatiana Alekseeva, c. 1956.

remained unpublished,39 thus making the 1957 film the only available extensive record of her research (see Figure 7). Anokhin never again took any part in the studies of conjoined twins, even though in 1960 yet another pair of such twins was born in Moscow and studied extensively 39 Only a twenty-page abstract of her dissertation was published in a very limited print run. See, T. T. Alekseeva, O neirogumoral’noi reguliatsii funktsii v organizme cheloveka (issledovanie na nerazdelivshikhsia bliznetsakh). Avtoreferat diss. na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni doktora med. nauk. Moscow, 1959.

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at the Institute of Pediatrics (reportedly, these studies were also documented on film). He returned to his research on functional systems. In the wake of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign that culminated in his famous ‘‘secret’’ speech to the XX Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956, just before the last frames of the film were shot, the ‘‘Scientific Council on the Issues of the Physiological Doctrine of Academician I. P. Pavlov’’ had been dismantled. The label ‘‘deviationist’’ attached to Anokhin and his concept of functional system had been removed (which perhaps explains why he appears in the film’s last frames shot in early 1957, but not in any of the previous shots). Anokhin’s career took off again. But the debacle of the Pavlovian session had taught him a lesson: he avoided administrative intrigues and focused his considerable energies on research and teaching. By the time the film was finished, he had become professor and chairman of the physiology department at the First Moscow Medical Institute, the country’s premier medical school, and head of two large physiological laboratories at two separate institutes of the Academy of Medical Sciences (the Institute of Normal and Pathological Physiology and the Institute of Surgery). In 1961 he was awarded the highest civilian decoration, the ‘‘Order of the Labor Red Banner,’’ and a few years later elected to the USSR Academy of Sciences. Anokhin expanded his research on what was now called neuro-cybernetics, and got involved in the physiology of space flight. In 1968 the Academy of Sciences bestowed on him its highest honor in the field of physiology, a Pavlov Gold Medal, thus officially recognizing him as ‘‘Pavlov’s heir.’’ In 1972, for his monumental work ‘‘Biology and Neurophysiology of the Conditional Reflex’’ Anokhin was awarded the highest Soviet scientific honor, a Lenin Prize. He died two years later, just a few months before an English translation of his life work on functional systems would be issued by Pergamon Press. So, how did the 1957 film end up in the NLM collections? One of the major results of Khrushchev’s ‘‘Thaw’’ for the Soviet scientific community was a partial restoration of its international contacts, which had been completely severed after 1948. A decade later, in 1958 Anokhin played an important part in bringing to Moscow a conference of the International Federation of Electroencephalography (IFEEG), attended by scientists from all over the world, including Canada, China, Great Britain, Japan, India and the United States.40 During the conference, a group of Western and Soviet scientists, with Anokhin’s active involvement, discussed the idea of creating an International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). Two years later when the IBRO was formally instituted, Anokhin became member of its governing council. Perhaps, it was during the 1958 conference or subsequent meetings of the IBRO that Anokhin gave a copy of the film to one of his US colleagues, who turned it over to the NLM. Or maybe, in the early 1960s, when Anokhin’s research attracted the close attention of a number of eminent Western scientists, including Mary A. B. Brazier, Horace W. Magoun, Giuseppe Moruzzi, Wilder Penfield and 40 In the summer of 1956, Anokhin attended the Twentieth International Congress of Physiological Sciences in Brussels, where plans for a future IFEEG meeting were discussed.

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Norbert Wiener, who visited his Moscow laboratories, one of them was given a copy. But, probably, Anokhin himself brought the film to the United States. In 1968, the Twenty-fifth International Congress of Physiological Sciences convened in Washington, DC. Anokhin was a member of the official Soviet delegation to the congress. Although his report to the congress had nothing to do with conjoined twins, it seems likely that, perhaps imitating his former mentor Pavlov, Anokhin brought with him to Washington the cinematographic record of his research and after the end of the congress left it to the congress organizers. Whatever the case, thanks to the efforts of the NLM staff, the film is now available to anyone interested in the histories of Soviet physiology, conjoined twins and scientific films, as well as the man who brought it all together, Petr Anokhin. Postscript Histories of Soviet physiology and scientific cinematography aside, the two ‘‘stars’’ who got the most screen time in Anokhin’s film – Masha and Dasha – have their own story. After the film was finished, Soviet scientists seem to have lost any interest in the sisters. Without access to archival materials, it is impossible to figure out why and how this happened. Perhaps, the death of Tatiana Alekseeva in 1959 played a role. Or maybe, some administrative body, such as the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences, decided to terminate the research for their own reasons. Whatever the case, I found no trace of any further research involving the twins. Although the 1957 film was likely accessible to interested biomedical specialists and perhaps shown to medical students, the Soviet public writ large was kept completely unaware of Masha and Dasha’s existence.41 Very little is known about the pair’s life not as subjects of physiological research, but as human beings.42 What is known is that sometime in the early 1960s, the twins’ third vestigial leg (clearly visible in several frames of the 1957 film) had been amputated. In 1964, the twins were sent to a special boarding school for disabled children in Novocherkask (the very city where Anokhin had begun his career as a Bolshevik).43 According to the twins’ recollections recorded 41 I did not find any publications about Masha and Dasha in the Soviet press prior to 1988. But, curiously, in 1966, an article on the twins, accompanied by several photographs, appeared in the Life Magazine, see ‘‘Masha and Dasha. Rare Study of Russia’s Siamese twins,’’ Life Magazine, April 8, 1966, pp. 67–69. Reportedly, this article has inspired Brian De Palma’s famous thriller Sisters (1973). 42 The only source of information on the twins’ actual life is their ‘‘autobiography’’ compiled by the British journalist Juliet Butler on the basis of numerous interviews with the pair conducted during the late 1990s, when Butler was stationed in Moscow. For some reasons Butler’s book was published only in German. See Juliet Butler, Masha und Dasha. Autobiographie eines siamesischen Zwillingspaares. Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf., GmbH & Co., 2003. Some information from this ‘‘autobiography’’ was used in an entry about the twins in Christine Quigley, Conjoined Twins: An Historical, Biological and Ethical Issues Encyclopedia. London: McFarland &Co., 2003. 43 Again, why this happened and why this happened at this precise moment remains a mystery. In August of that very year, the Seventh World Congress of Anthropology and Ethnology met in Moscow. Its proceedings included a special session on twins studies. But although a number of Soviet participants presented results of their physiological and psychological research on ‘‘normal’’ twins, they uttered not a word about Masha and Dasha. See, for instance, Averkieva Iu. P. and Sokolova V. K. VII Mezhdunarodnyi kongress antropologicheskikh i etnograficheskikh nauk. Moscow: Znanie, 1964; N. A. Kryshova and K. M. Shteingart, Sravnitel’naia kharakteristika rechevoi deiatel’nosti bliznetsov. Moscow: Nauka, 1964; Z. V. Beliaeva and M. A. Zhilinskaia, Issledovanie vysshei nervnoi deiatel’nosti i nekotorykh vegetativnykh reaktsii u bliznetsov. Moscow: Nauka, 1964.

Figure 8. Masha and Dasha sitting in their new wheelchair, with Vladimir Levy, one of those individuals who responded to journalists’ call for help, c. 1989. Courtesy of Vladimir Levy.

some thirty years later, the school turned to be a living hell. Their classmates shunned and bullied them. There Masha and Dasha took up drinking and smoking (Masha preferred the latter, Dasha the former). They run away from the school and came to Moscow in 1970, where they were given a small disability pension and placed in a ‘‘retirement home’’ on the capital’s outskirts. They kept to themselves to avoid the morbid curiosity and sordid proposals of nosy strangers. Alcohol became a constant accompaniment, giving the pair an escape from the misery, poverty, loneliness and sadness of their life. Only in the late 1980s, in the heydays of Michail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost’, did the Soviet public finally learn about the twins’ existence. Irina Krasnopol’skaia, a science correspondent of the popular daily Moscow Truth, took to heart Masha and Dasha’s plight and, together with several colleagues in the journalist corps, helped them obtain a better housing and financial assistance (see Figure 8).44 After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the rapidly ‘‘yellowing’’ Russian press made Masha and Dasha notorious. Tabloids alleged that their father had actually worked as a personal driver of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s most notorious executioner, and had a 44 See a series of her publications in Moskovskaia pravda, February 1; July 3; September 19, 1989. See also, V. Golubev, ‘‘Nemiloserdnoe miloserdie,’’ Meditsinskaia gazeta, February 17, 1989.

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field day with the stories of the twins’ alcoholism and sex life.45 In October 2000, Masha and Dasha were featured in a special episode devoted to conjoined twins on the BBC2 documentary series ‘‘Horizon.’’46 In April 2003, Masha died

of a cardiac infarction. Seventeen hours later, Dasha followed her sister.47 At the time of their death, Masha and Dasha were the longest (but obviously not the happiest) living conjoined twins in the world.

45 See, for instance, Anna Amel’kina, ‘‘Siamskie bliznetsy ishchut narkologa,’’ Komsomosl’skaia pravda, December 19, 1997; and Irina Bobrova, ‘‘Siamskie bliznetsy p’iut na dvoikh,’’ Moskovskii komsomolets, October 14, 1999, available at http://www.mk.ru/ editions/daily/article/1999/10/14/135011-siamskie-bliznetsyi-pyut-na-dvoih.html. 46 ‘‘Conjoined Twins.’’ BBC2. 9:00pm Thursday 19th October 2000; a transcript of the program is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/ conjoined_twins_transcript.shtml.

47 See Irina Bobrova, ‘‘Dve dushi, pokinuvshie odno telo,’’ Moskovskii komsomolets, April 16, 2003; available at http://www.mk.ru/editions/daily/article/2003/04/16/ 137815-dve-dushi-pokinuvshie-odno-telo.html.

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