"Even in his mid-eighties, Pavlov had not lost the capacity to expand his intellectual horizons..."

Pavlov’s parables

STEPHEN LOVELL

"Even in his mid-eighties, Pavlov had not lost the capacity to expand his intellectual horizons and to question his own assumptions, although he still exploded at others who dared to challenge him. If he had lived to be a hundred, as both he and the Soviet propaganda industry hoped, perhaps he would have become a Marxist, or at least the dialectical materialist that Pravda had claimed him to be on his eightieth birthday. It is certainly arguable that there was influence in the other direction: the Bolshevik ideal of remaking man through a variety of stimuli – from excitation (inspiration and incentives) to inhibition (terror) – was more than a little Pavlovian."