Today's foremost Russian scientist is grouchy, white-whiskered, 86-year-old Ivan Petrovich Pavlov whose research on the salivary glands won him a Nobel Prize in Medicine (1904) even before his greater work on the conditioned reflex in dogs. Only Nobelist in the sciences Russia has had for three decades, old Dr. Pavlov does as he pleases, can bark with impunity: "I deplore the destruction of cultural values by illiterate Communists" A government of Communists gently pooh-poohs him, hands him an institute, a pension, endowments.
Yet the doings of a Pavlov and others like him who prefer...