Behaviorism is the philosophical position that says that psychology, to be a science, must focus its attentions on what is observable -- the environment and behavior -- rather than what is only available to the individual -- perceptions, thoughts, images, feelings....  The latter are subjective and immune to measurement, and therefore can never lead to an objective science.

The first behaviorists were Russian.  The very first was Ivan M. Sechenov (1829 to 1905).  He was a physiologist who had studied at the University of Berlin with famous people like Müller, Du Bois-Reymond, and Helmholtz.  Devoted to a rigorous blend of associationism and materialism, he concluded that all behavior is caused by stimulation.

In 1863, he wrote Reflexes of the Brain.  In this landmark book, he introduced the idea that there are not only excitatory processes in the central nervous system, but inhibitory ones as well.

Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857 to 1927) is another early Russian behaviorist.  He graduated in 1878 from the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, one year before Pavlov arrived there.  He received his MD in 1881 at the tender age of 24, then went to study with the likes of Du Bois-Reymond and Wundt in Berlin, and Charcot in France.

He established the first psychology lab in Russia at the university of Kazan in 1885, then returned to the Military Medical Academy in 1893.  In 1904, he published a paper entitled "Objective Psychology," which he later expanded into three volumes.

He called his field reflexology, and defined it as the objective study of stimulus-response connections.  Only the environment and behavior were to be discussed!  And he discovered what he called the association reflex -- what Pavlov would call the conditioned reflex.