The velvet leash

When do people fight for their freedom?

Ksenia Petrova (Carlos Perez, X)

You’ve probably read the news: A Harvard scientist and Russian citizen named Ksenia Petrova was detained on Feb. 16 at Boston’s Logan Airport while returning from a vacation in Europe, stripped of her visa and held for four months at a barracks-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility.

All that just for bringing frog spawn from Paris in her backpack. Under federal regulations, frog derivatives are not considered a biohazard so don’t need to be declared: Frogs don’t carry human pathogens. Moreover, these eggs were dead, fixed in preserving liquid. Initially, border agents disputed that and held Petrova for not declaring the material.

But since her arrest, things have gone from bad to worse for Petrova. Last month, after a third unsuccessful bail hearing, she was moved to a federal jail, now accused of felony smuggling. The Justice Department is seeking up to 20 years in prison or, possibly, deportation to Russia, where she would almost certainly face prosecution over her objections to the war against Ukraine.

“I am afraid the Russian Federation will kill me for protesting against them,” she told The New York Times.

Hearings in her case continue.

Having grown up in the Soviet Union and recently fled President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russia, I found my attention drawn to the apparent lack of resistance on the part of Harvard University and Petrova’s academic colleagues. That came as a surprise because, like many others, I regard Harvard as a bastion of academic and political freedom.

I was further shocked to read a piece on an academic-freedom website called T-Invariant in which a top National Institutes of Health professor was interviewed about the actions of President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Speaking on condition of anonymity, he described an attitude of fear and surrender among NIH’s top scientists as the government methodically shut down some of the world’s most prominent medical research programs.

Asked about the mood at NIH, the laboratory director said: “Of course there is anxiety, worry. Some people in temporary positions have understandably and justifiably accelerated their job search.”

But I’m familiar with that kind of passivity from my own experience. In Russia, we explain such behavior through the lens of learned helplessness, a concept that emerged from a famous experiment on dogs in the 1960s in which some were taught to push a button in order to avoid a mild electric shock. When those dogs were released from their harnesses and able to avoid the shocks, they did so quickly.

Another group wasn’t given access to the button. Those dogs grew used to the predicament in which they could do nothing to prevent the shocks. Even when released from the harnesses, they failed to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.

The concept of learned helplessness remains compelling: Entire societies live like that. When the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it came with a harsh political crackdown in Russia. Just calling the Kremlin’s so-called special military operation a “war” can land you in prison for seven years. As I prepared to leave the country, some who were staying told each other that since we’d never learn the whole truth about the invasion perhaps there were valid reasons. It became a justification for the morally dubious position of remaining passive.

One might assume that Western democracies are more resilient thanks to learned agency—that is, life in free societies surely must condition citizens to believe their actions bear results, prompting them to be more active in defense of their freedoms.

But maybe dogs have more to tell us.

Shortly before I left Russia in February 2022, I adopted Chloe, a French bulldog. I’d had a 30-years hiatus from dogs. Back in the 1990s, I trained my schnauzer with old-school methods, believing that the harsher you are, the more the dog will obey. But with Chloe, I discovered the world had changed—and so had the science of dog training.

It turns out it’s far more effective to use only positive reinforcement. No punishment. Once Chloe became accustomed to a constant flow of rewards, her behavior became remarkably easy to shape. It was enough to briefly withhold a treat to make her more cooperative.

Many experiments have shown that punishment doesn’t reliably eliminate unwanted behavior because it creates anxiety, fear and resistance. Positive reinforcement, by contrast, moulds willing participants. The animal doesn’t just submit—it’s engaged, learning and attentive. A dog trained this way wants to figure out which behavior earns rewards.

Soon after I left Russia, I found myself being lectured by an elderly gentleman in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

“Go back to Russia,” he said. “Fight your Putin out of office.”

I wasn’t in the mood for such nonsense.

“Why don’t you go to Iran,” I barked, “and try protesting against your ayatollah?” I wanted to stress that just as the Iranian leader wasn’t his, Putin isn’t mine. I didn’t choose him.

It felt like a convincing rebuttal.

Three months later, protests erupted in Iran over a young woman named Mahsa Amini, who was tortured and killed by police for refusing to wear a hijab in public. People took to the streets despite the very real risks, including hanging. They cared deeply. My retort faded into irrelevance.

Why did much-freer Russians stage no such protests? Could it have something to do with rewards-based control?

In the early 2000s, many of us in Moscow and other Russian big cities lived on a relative gravy train of material rewards. Nevertheless, Russia did see a wave of serious protests in 2011 when Putin decided to return for an unconstitutional third term as president. The state’s initial response to massive street demonstrations was a huge increase in fines for participating in unauthorized protests. I remember a Facebook post at the time by a friend who had been born into a family of hardcore Soviet-era dissidents:

“This is unbearably humiliating intimidation—precisely because it’s effective: Personal heroism doesn’t extend to the wallet,” she wrote. “No one will be praised for handing over 300,000 hard-earned rubles to the executioners and skipping their seaside holiday. But if it turns out that this is what they got us with—we’ll die of shame.”

The woman’s grandmother, Tatyana Velikanova, had served nine years in prison and exile for taking part in an underground anti-Soviet movement in the 1970s. I visited her at home in the early days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies in the 1980s when she had been freed and had become an internationally recognized hero. I was impressed by the extreme simplicity of the setting. My friend, along with her three siblings, had been raised by a single mother. Her family never caved, never followed any conventional Soviet career paths that would necessitate moral compromise.

So she continued her Facebook post in hope:

“Our parents didn’t travel abroad,” she wrote. “Sometimes they fed us just plain pasta. They took us to the hospital only in emergencies. They taught us at home and raised us to be good people. I’m writing this while terrified that tomorrow I [could get fined for protesting and] might not be able to afford my L’Occitane skin cream… We’re not like [our dissident parents] anymore. The fat years spoiled us so much that we’re no longer capable of living like that.”

She was right. The protests faded after just a few two-year prison sentences had been doled out. Then the government began branding people “foreign agents,” forcing them to openly show if they were ready to part with the material comforts that had insidiously become necessities.

Master-at-Arms 3rd Class Leslie Orand gives positive reinforcement to Amber, an explosive detector dog, after completing her obstacle training course (US Navy, Wikimedia Commons)

The post-invasion wave of emigration from Russia in 2022—around a million people—mostly consisted of middle-class city dwellers. Unlike the Iranian protesters the same year, we were people who wouldn’t risk our lifestyles to defend our freedoms.

So does relative prosperity make behavior easier to control? And does that mean American society might be even easier to control today simply because there’s even more to lose?

I contacted Harvard Medical School professor Leon Peshkin, who was Ksenia Petrova’s supervisor, to discuss these questions. I also wanted to know exactly how her story had unfolded.

Petrova was detained at a difficult time for the university: The Trump administration had recently stripped Columbia University of its federal grants and Harvard was feeling the pressure.

“For my first account of the university’s reaction [in The New York Times], I already got a pretty harsh scolding,” Peshkin told me. “For a second one, I might get an even harsher reprimand, maybe even a kick. Since at that time, not all [federal] Harvard grants had been revoked… they wanted no fuss. I was asked, above all, not to talk to the press.”

“When they found out that Petrova wasn’t on an official [Harvard] assignment in Paris, they breathed a sigh of relief and washed their hands of the matter,” he added. “The director of the international office gave me her cellphone number, expressed sympathy about how difficult all this was—and that was it.”

Still, Peshkin gathered signatures from Petrova’s colleagues for a petition urging that she be granted bail. Some refused to sign for fear of losing the visas that enabled them to remain in the United States. Even those who came from rich, democratic countries like Britain and Israel showed little willingness to resist.

In April, the administration froze Harvard’s federal grants. Peshkin’s lab was deprived of its funding and is being shut down. Those foreign scientists who didn’t stand up for Petrova will most likely have to go home anyway. So perhaps there are lessons in the positive-reinforcement strategy I learned with Chloe. Fear of losing one’s comforts seems to restrict people’s behavior.

But there’s another side to consider. The human propensity to cooperate.

Although apparently having given up on Petrova, Harvard still made the hard decision to push back against the government’s attack on its freedoms. At the same time, 17 Democratic senators signed a letter supporting Petrova, as did all US citizen colleagues from her lab. Thousands of people marched in 50 states on March 17 to defend science against DOGE.

In Russia, 8,500 scientists have signed an open letter condemning Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, likening it to fascist Germany’s aggression in Europe in 1939. It is a courageous gesture, since many of the signatories hold senior positions at their institutes.

How are such choices made? When do privileged people choose helplessness, and when do they choose agency?

Survival of the Friendliest, a 2020 book by the evolutionary psychologists Brian Hare and Vanessa Wood, offers another animal-related perspective. When I interviewed Hare on my podcast “Naked Mole Rat” a few years ago, he told me about an experiment he had carried out at a primate sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The researchers put a bowl of fruit on a platform out of reach of two chimpanzees. A rope was attached to the platform so that the two animals needed to cooperate closely to move the platform closer and secure the treat. The chimpanzees failed, however, because they fought and the rope quickly fell into the hands of the stronger competitor, who was unable to move the platform alone.

Bonobos, on the other hand, demonstrated a propensity to cooperate and easily mastered the task, moving the platform and sharing the reward.

The chimpanzees fought. The bonobos cooperated. Same fruit. Same stakes. Different wiring. The chimpanzees were motivated more powerfully by the need to establish individual dominance, while the bonobos have evolved a sense of common good and cooperative behavior. The reasons for this evolutionary divergence remain unclear.

Humans can be like bonobos. We did care about L’Occitaine cream at first, as my Facebook friend wrote, but we also came up with a system to help pay fines through crowdsourcing, and we liked doing it.

Comforts don’t necessarily kill agency but isolation does. And silence does. The silence, the moral numbing that we accept as the price of our comforts, turns them into a velvet leash. Comfort can make a society docile if it dulls people’s consciences. Although we are perhaps used to thinking of freedom as the ultimate expression of the individual, it’s relatively easily undermined unless a society is motivated to defend the freedoms of all.

Think of a dog that stops barking at an intruder who has conditioned it to accept treats from him. Or scientists who refuse to sign a petition against the unjust treatment of a colleague because they are afraid of jeopardizing their own funding. Or a middle-class would-be protester who chooses a seaside vacation over barricades, fines, prison. Sacrificing our agency and refusing to defend the common good in a quixotic bid to hold on to our own privileges is a perilous strategy.

I asked Peshkin if he thinks people in the United States understand that. He replied that the current situation didn’t start with Trump.

“For many years, I’ve been struck by how little social interaction there is among colleagues here,” he told me. “There’s a general sense that the political system and overall climate are changing rapidly, so it’s better to say nothing at all for fear that someone might take it the wrong way, someone might be offended. Better not to volunteer your opinion.”

The day I spoke to Peshkin, the authorities filed criminal charges against Petrova. A day later, sensing danger himself, he fled to France. As he boarded his flight in Boston, he was stopped at the gate and searched. His phone was seized and he was handed a subpoena to appear in court. But he was allowed to leave the United States.

Peshkin plans to apply for political asylum in France, which has declared it will accept some US-based scientists who are relocating abroad. But it remains unclear whether he will be among them.

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Ilya Kolmanovsky is a London-based zoologist-turned-science journalist who is best known as the host of the podcast “Naked Mole Rat,” where he explores scientific discovery with specialists in their fields.