This is because Bekhterev performed a medical diagnosis of Stalin shortly before his death which was considered to be politically damaging to the position of the Soviet dictator.

[3] Vladimir Bekhterev was born in Sorali, a village in the Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.

[4] V. M. Bekhterev's father – Mikhail Pavlovich – was a district police officer; his mother, Maria Mikhailovna – was a daughter of a titular councilor, was educated at a boarding school which also provided lessons of music and the French language.

While his childhood was not simple, Bekhterev did have the opportunity to attend Vyatka gymnasium in 1867, one of the oldest schools in Russia, as well as the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1873.

While attending school, Bekhterev worked as a junior doctor in the clinic of mental and nervous diseases at the Institutes of Medic’s Improvement.

[5] After graduating, Bekhterev worked at the Psychiatric Clinic in St. Petersburg, where he was inspired to begin studying the anatomy and physiology of the brain, the area in which he would later make some of his most notable contributions.

[6] Bekhterev's scholarship lasted until September 1885, after which, he returned to Russia and worked as the head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Kazan until 1893.

As a result of his groundbreaking research, in 1891, Bekhterev was granted permission by the Kazan government to open and become the chairman of the Neurology Science Society.

[5] In 1893, Bekhterev left the University of Kazan to return to St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy to become the head to the Department of Nervous and Mental Diseases where he worked with Alexandre Dogiel.

Here he continued his contribution to neurological research by organizing the first Russian neurosurgical operating room to specialize in neurosurgery.

While Bekhterev never performed any surgeries himself, he was highly involved in the diagnostics of neurological diseases, eventually earning him the Full State Chancellor Title in 1894.

He completed between 14 and 24 scientific works per year and founded Nevrologicheski Vestnik (Neurology Bulletin) in 1893,[10] the first Russian journal on nervous disease.

[5] Eventually, his work earned him the Baire’s Prize, awarded in December 1900, for the two volumes of his writing “Pathways of brain and bone marrow” in which he noted the role that the hippocampus plays in memory.

This idea contrasted the more subjective views of psychology such as structuralism, which allowed for the use of tools such as introspection to study inner thoughts about personal experiences.

Bekhterev’s beliefs about how to best conduct research contributed to the rise of Soviet sociolinguistics from the ashes of völkerpsychologie and the Journal of the History of the behavioral Sciences.

He was reinstated in 1918 following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and became the chairperson for the Department of Psychology and Reflexology at the University of Petrograd in St. Petersburg as well as established the Institute of Studying Brain Mental Activities.

He was critical of Taylorism arguing that "The ultimate ideal of the labour problem is not in it, but is in such organisation of the labour process that would yield a maximum of efficiency coupled with a minimum of health hazards, absence of fatigue and a guarantee of the sound health and all round personal development of the working people.

"[12] During his time away from teaching, Bekhterev worked to open an orphanage, complete with both a kindergarten and school, for refugee children from the western regions of Russia.

[13] Both Ivan Pavlov and Bekhterev independently developed a theory of conditioned reflexes which describe automatic responses to the environment.

For instance, his research on the hippocampus allowed for the understanding of one of the most central portions of the brain vital to the function of memory.