Jerzy Konorski - World War II and Stalin

World War II and Stalin

The Department of Neurophysiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw, Poland was created for him but this was destroyed in the first days of the invasion of Poland in 1939. He failed to get to England to join his brother who lived there. Konorski managed to escape to the Soviet Union where he was appointed the head of the primate laboratory at Sukhumi on the Black Sea in Georgia. Due to German invasion of Soviet Union, the laboratory was relocated to Tbilisi. He spent much of World War II at Sukhumi treating traumatic injuries of the central nervous system. After the war he returned to Nencki Institute as head of the Department of Neurophysiology. In 1948 Cambridge University Press published his "Conditioned reflexes and neuron organization". Then in 1949, during the peak of Stalinism, at a conference in Leningrad commemorating the 100th anniversary of Pavlov's birth, his book was condemned and rejected. In 1951, at a conference organized in Krynica in support of him, this was shown in a 40 minutes period of continuous clapping and applause. With Stalin's death his prosecution ended.

Later Konorski became a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences. Since his death his influence has grown considerably and now recognized as the first to systematically investigate the mechanisms underlying instrumental conditioning. Many consider him among the most important of theoretical neurobiologists.