Short answers, pulled from the story.
Peter the Great founded the Russian Academy of Sciences, then called the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, in January 1724. A Senate decree on the 8th of February 1724 implemented the academy, with guidance from the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz.
As of the 2nd of January 2026, the Russian Academy of Sciences had 1,960 living Russian members, including 841 full academicians and 1,119 corresponding members. There are also about 445 foreign members and 797 scientists holding the honorary rank of RAS Professor.
On the 28th of June 2013, the Russian government announced a draft law to dissolve the RAS and merge it with the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. A new agency, FASO, headed by Mikhail Kotyukov, took control of academy property and research institutes. The law was approved on the 27th of September 2013 after protests from scientists including Pierre Deligne, Michael Atiyah, and Mumford.
Nobel Prize laureates affiliated with the academy include Ivan Pavlov in medicine (1904), Lev Landau in physics (1962), Andrei Sakharov in peace (1975), Zhores Alferov in physics (2000), and Andre Geim in physics (2010), among others spanning medicine, chemistry, literature, and economics.
The Russian Academy of Sciences is headquartered in Moscow at the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, a building constructed between 1967 and 1990. Prior to the 20th century, the academy was based in St. Petersburg, initially at the Kunstkammer and later in the purpose-built St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Building from 1789.
The economic crisis of the 1990s sharply reduced state support for science, forcing many researchers to emigrate to Europe, Israel, or the United States. The academy effectively lost a generation of scientists born from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and total research and development spending in 2013 remained about 40% below 1990 levels.