Georgii Zeliony

In Pavlov's lab

Beginning around 1905, Zeliony, along with colleagues in Pavlov’s laboratory, performed experiments on dogs (Zeliony 1906b: 80; Delabarre 1910: 85-86; Warden 1928: 507):

Experiments conducted by M. Pawlow and his pupils add confirmation to the view that “all physiological phenomena may be completely studied as if psychical phenomena had no existence.” Direct excitation of the mouth cavity of a dog produces an “unconditional” reflex secretion of the saliva. In case the exciting substance is something the dog eats, the secretion is thick; if it be one that the dog refuses, the secretion is more liquid. Any other excitant, acting on any sense whatever (or any combination of excitants), may provoke a “conditional” reflex secretion of either kind, provided it has previously acted on the animal conjointly with another excitant which has produced an unconditional reflex. The conditional reflexes are very instable and variable. But the exact conditions of their origin, their force and their disappearance can be stated in physiological terms. The so-called psychical excitants are identical with these conditional reflexes (Delabarre 1910: 85–86).

Pavlov, in his eighth lecture on conditioned reflexes, describes one of Zeliony's experiments:

A conditioned alimentary reflex was established to the simultaneous application of the tone of a pneumatic tuning-fork, which was considerably damped by being placed within a wooden box coated with wool, and of a visual stimulus of three electric lamps placed in front of the dog in the slightly shaded room (Pavlov 1927: 142–143 [Lecture VIII]).

Another of Zeliony's experiments was described by Pavlov as follows:

An alimentary reflex was established in a dog to a compound stimulus made up of the sound of a whistle and the sound of the tone d sharp of a pneumatic tuning-fork. Both these sounds appeared to the human ear to be of equal intensity, and both when tested separately elicited a secretion of 19 drops of saliva during one minute. In addition to this, another compound stimulus was established, made up of the same sound of the whistle plus the tone a of a tuning-fork of weaker intensity. When tested separately the whistle in this case elicited a secretion of seven drops of saliva during thirty seconds, and the tone only one drop (Pavlov 1927: 143 [Lecture VIII]).

Zeliony completed his doctorate in 1907, the same year in which Pavlov, his supervisor, was elected to the Academy of Russian Sciences.

The future sociophysiology

On March 19, 1909, Zeliony presented a paper before the Saint Petersburg Philosophical Society in which he called for a special natural science to study the physical side of human interrelations. He called this potential new science, "physiological sociology," or, using a term he attributed to A. I. Wedensky, "sociophysiology" (Zeliony 1912b: 405–406).

Zeliony's paper, later published in the July–August 1912 issue of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie [Archive for racial and social biology], was reviewed by Piéron (1913) and Ellwood (1916). Piéron (1913: 366) noted that Zeliony positively compared his approach to that of Emile Waxweiler and Ernest Solvay’s Institute of Sociology in Brussels, and also that Zeliony argued that

Sociology, in order to enter the ranks of the natural sciences, must be physiological. As it is with animals (bees, ants, etc.), there will likewise be a human socio-physiology studying the reciprocal interrelations among humans. (Piéron 1913: 365).

However, owing perhaps to the fact that the French review mistakenly titled Zeliony's paper, "Über die zukünftige Soziopsychologie" [On the future sociopsychology], rather than the correct "Über die zukünftige Soziophysiologie" [On the future sociophysiology], and also to the fact that the journal in which it was published later became a mouthpiece for eugenicist, anti-semitic, Nazi propaganda, Zeliony's future field floundered.

Half a century or more later, and often without remarking on Zeliony's preliminary sketch, scattered workers in diverse fields began to rediscover sociophysiology: clinical psychiatrists (e. g., Kaiser 1952; Boyd and Di Mascio 1954; Di Mascio et al. 1955; Lacroix 1955); sociologists and ethologists (e. g., Wickler 1976; Quddus 1980; Barchas 1984, 1986; Barchas and Mendoza 1984; Waid 1984); evolutionary psychiatrists (e. g., Gardner 1996, 1997, 2001; Gardner and Price 1999; Gardner and Wilson 2004); and medical doctors (e. g., Adler 2002; Mandel and Mandel 2003).

Revolution and disappearance

It appears that Zeliony continued to work and publish during the first two decades of Russia's Bolshevik and early Soviet regimes. In 1919, for instance, he became chair of the Department of Normal Physiology at the newly created Veterinarian Bacteriological Institute in Petrograd. Though Zeliony was still officially an employee of the state-run laboratory under Pavlov's leadership, in 1921, he attempted to found his own institute for the study of animal behaviour. Zeliony's proposal to secure funding for his project from the government was criticized by Pavlov and rejected (Todes 1998: 38–39).

Around the same time, Zeliony worked with P. A. Sorokin and other sociologists in both the Russian Sociological Society and the Circle for the Objective Study of Human Social and Individual Behaviour.

Later, under Stalin, it seems that Zeliony faded from view:

In 1932, before our Laboratory started on decorticate conditioning, Mettler had come across studies more recent than Zeliony’s 1911 report [i. e., Zeliony 1912a]. Using Bechterev’s shock-reinforcement technique with three dogs operated on in 1928, the objective was to determine the minimal essential functional cortex to establish conditioning (Poltyreff & Zeliony, 1929, 1930). The reports were imprecise and the animals were then still alive. At any rate, Mettler made serious attempts to communicate with Zeliony, but to no avail. According to him, “these two workers disappeared from the scene, and it was very difficult to communicate with specific people in Russia if they did not hold key positions” (Mettler, Note 1). Knowledgeable Soviet scholars have demonstrated that the period of the 1930s in the Stalin era was difficult and that many disappearances were not accidental. There is little question that the behavioral sciences had been politicized over the years since the 1917 Revolution (Girden 1983: 246).

However, in 1951, an article, by a certain G. P. Zelenyi, on methods of researching conditioned reflexes in animals, was published in a Soviet journal (Zelenyi 1951). Given the various other ways of transliterating his name, it could be the case that G. P. Zelenyi was indeed G. P. Zeliony.