Ivan Pavlov did not do his best-known work in a lab in a big city. The Russian physiologist, who won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research on digestion and who became famous for the experiments on conditioned reflexes in dogs, spent his last years at Koltushi, a village on the low hills east of St Petersburg. Here, from the early 1930s, the Soviet state built him a whole scientific town, with laboratories, kennels, a monkey station and housing for his staff, in the hope that he would turn out a physiology of the mind. Pavlov, who lived from 1849 to 1936, said he wanted a place where animals and people could be studied in healthy conditions and surrounded by nature, and Koltushi was it.
The institute still stands, and the village has kept its name in the history of science. Pavlov was a difficult man, an old-fashioned Russian intellectual who disliked the Bolsheviks and said so, yet he was allowed to carry on, and the place became a kind of scientific island. There is a memorial and a small museum devoted to him and the work done here.
Koltushi lies on the road to Lake Ladoga, and the connection is not coincidental. In the siege of Leningrad in 1941-44, the only route that kept the city supplied was the Road of Life, an ice road across Ladoga in winter and a ferry line in summer, and the villages east of the city, like this one, were the staging posts. Memorials line the route, with stone markers numbered by kilometre. The landscape is flat and wooded, with birch and pine forest, marshes and farm clearings, a typical north Russian plain, and the light in early summer, with its long white nights, is soft and gold.
I should add a plain note on the practical side. Travel in Russia for riders from Europe and many other countries has become complicated, with visa rules, insurance problems and restrictions on foreign vehicles, as well as official travel warnings, so check the current position well before planning anything. In normal times the roads around St Petersburg are busy and fast, with heavy trucks, a lot of roadworks and a rough surface in places. Koltushi and neighbouring Staraya have a few thousand people each, with fuel and shops available in the area, and the city itself is a short run away.