Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union
The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union nearly rejected the Communist Party outright in January 1929. Its academicians voted down three party-backed candidates for membership: Vladimir Fritsche, Nikolai Lukin and Abram Deborin. Weeks later, under what the record describes as extreme pressure, the same academicians reversed themselves and admitted all three. This was the Soviet Union's highest scientific institution. It operated from 1925 to 1991, answering directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. How did a body of the country's most credentialed scientists come to overturn its own vote within a month? And what became of this scientific institution once the state that created it collapsed?
On the 27th of July 1925, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars signed the resolution that formed the academy. It was rebuilt from the Russian Academy of Sciences, previously named the Imperial Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences before the February Revolution. In the earliest years of Soviet Russia, officials viewed the academy's institute with suspicion, seeing a closed and elite establishment. Cooperation began in 1918, once negotiators met the academy's leadership, already renamed from Imperial to Russian. The People's Commissariat for Education and the Central Commission for the Improvement of the Life of Scientists took over its financing. In 1925, the academy marked its 200th anniversary with a solemn celebration and adopted a new charter for the occasion.
Alexander Karpinsky, a geologist who had already led the Russian Academy of Sciences, became the first president of its Soviet successor.
In 1925, the same year the academy was founded, it was placed under the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union. Three years later, in 1928, officials pushed a slate of new Communist members onto its rolls.
In 1929, a government commission led by Yuri Petrovich Figatner arrived in Leningrad with orders to cleanse the academy. Between June and December that year, the commission dismissed 128 of the academy's 960 full-time employees and 520 of its 830 supernumerary staff. Sergey Oldenburg, the permanent secretary who had defended the academy's independence, was removed from his post at the end of October 1929. Party-state bodies now held full control, and a new Presidium took shape.
On the 25th of February 1929, the Politburo had already decided the academy's leadership in advance. Alexander Karpinsky would remain president, with Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Nikolai Marr and Vladimir Komarov serving as vice-presidents and Vyacheslav Volgin as permanent secretary. The General Assembly then rubber-stamped the party's choices automatically, a pattern that became the academy's standing precedent.
Between December 1929 and December 1930, more than 100 people were arrested under what became known as the Academic Case. Most were humanities specialists, chiefly historians.
Officials drafted a new charter for the academy between February and April 1930. The Committee for the Management of Scientists and Educational Institutions of the Central Executive Committee appointed the drafting commission, chaired by Vyacheslav Volgin. The commission held its first meeting on the 28th of February 1930. The academy reviewed and approved the draft charter at a session running from the 31st of March to the 5th of April 1930. That same session approved the academy's first work plan, covering 1931 and 1932. The General Assembly adopted the finished charter on the 4th of April 1930.
A government reorganization in 1930 shifted the academy to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union. A further decree, dated the 14th of December 1933, moved it to the Council of People's Commissars instead.
The following year, the government would decide the academy no longer belonged in Leningrad.
In 1934, the academy's Presidium and fourteen scientific institutes left Leningrad for Moscow. Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Council of People's Commissars' decree ordering the move on the 25th of April 1934.
The historian Felix Perchenok called the relocation "one of the most important steps towards turning it into the headquarters of Soviet science." He added that the move itself "was carried out in a fire order."
Vyacheslav Volgin, the academy's permanent secretary, would soon ask to be released from the job entirely.
In 1935, Vyacheslav Volgin wrote directly to Joseph Stalin asking to be released from his post as permanent secretary. He told Stalin he alone carried out the demanding daily work of the position, while other party-group members merely "threw out ideas," some useful, some fantastic. Five years in the job, he wrote, had left him unable to continue his own scientific work or even read books in his specialty.
"Meanwhile," he added, "I was considered in the well-known narrow field as the best expert on the subject." "I'm already 56 years old," Volgin continued, "and there is not much time left for science." "A few more years," he warned, "and I will not be able to return to science." He also told Stalin that his party group no longer held him in the same regard it once had.
The Politburo took up his request on the 8th of August 1935, proposing to release him from the post. On the 20th of November 1935, the academy's general meeting thanked Volgin for his service and freed him from his duties. Nikolai Gorbunov, previously the affairs manager of the Council of People's Commissars, took his place. By decree of the Presidium on the 26th of June 1937, the position of permanent secretary was abolished altogether, and administrative officers carried out its duties from then on.
Even as leadership churned in Moscow, the academy was quietly building outposts across the Soviet Union's furthest regions.
The academy opened its first regional branches in 1932: the Ural and the Far East. That same year, it established research bases in Kazakh and Tajik territory.
In 1933, it created the Transcaucasian branch, with sub-branches in Armenia and Azerbaijan. A year later, in 1934, came the Kola Research Base.
Azerbaijan's branch broke away from the Transcaucasian branch to stand independently in 1935. Armenia's did the same in 1936, the same year the Northern Base was founded. The Uzbek Base followed in 1939. In 1941, just before the Soviet Union entered the Great Patriotic War, the academy added a Turkmen branch.
By the end of 1941, the academy counted seven branches: Azerbaijan, Armenian, Kazakh, Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek and Ural. It also ran two research bases, Kola and North, plus a single mountain taiga station. Together, these outposts employed about 1,500 scientific and technical workers. Among them were 12 academicians, 11 corresponding members, 126 doctors, 284 candidates of science, and 610 researchers without an advanced degree.
Those regional numbers were only a fragment of the workforce the academy would eventually command.
On the 1st of January 1937, the academy counted 88 full members, its academicians. By the 1st of October that same year, it employed 4,108 scientific and scientific-technical staff.
Between 1945 and 1970, the ranks of Soviet researchers, counting higher-education faculty and research staff together, grew more than sevenfold. The total rose from 130,000 people to 950,000. The economist Lev Gatovsky led the academy's Institute of Economics from 1965 to 1971 during this expansion.
By 1980, the country's total research workforce reached 1.4 million; by 1985, it reached 1.5 million. The number of scientific, pedagogical and design organizations across the Soviet Union climbed steadily too: 1,700 in 1945, 5,300 in 1970, and 5,100 in 1985.
By 1985, the academy itself had grown to 274 full members and 542 corresponding members. It ran roughly 330 scientific institutions, employing 57,000 scientists and researchers out of 217,000 staff overall. The state awarded the academy the Order of Lenin twice, in 1969 and in 1974.
Membership figures from other years fill out the picture: on the 1st of January 1936, the academy had 98 active members. By 1989, that had grown to 323 active members, 586 corresponding members and 138 foreign members.
None of that growth answered a simpler question: what the academy actually existed to do.
The academy defined its mission as promoting scientific advances in the service of communist construction across the Soviet Union. It also aimed to identify and develop the most important and fundamental fields of science. Coordination ran through regional offices and the republican academies of sciences. Its research took place across a network of institutes, laboratories and observatories, totaling 295 scientific institutions. The academy also ran its own publishing house, a research fleet, and a network of libraries.
The academy's highest honor was the Gold Medal named after Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov. It went out each year to one Soviet and one foreign scientist for achievements in the natural and social sciences. The Leonhard Euler Gold Medal recognized outstanding results in mathematics and physics. The Karl Marx Gold Medal was awarded once every three years for outstanding work in the social sciences. Separate gold medals honored Vernadsky for earth sciences, Vavilov for physics, and Mendeleev for chemistry. Further medals went to Keldysh for applied mathematics and mechanics, and to Pavlov for work on the physiology of higher nervous activity. An Andronov Prize rewarded outstanding work in classical mechanics and control theory.
The academy's presidency changed hands six times after 1936. Vladimir Komarov led until 1945. Sergey Vavilov followed, serving until 1951. Alexander Nesmeyanov held the post until 1961. Mstislav Keldysh led until 1975. Anatoly Alexandrov followed until 1986. Gury Marchuk served last, through the academy's final year.
Fourteen republican academies made up the structure from 1956 onward, though the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic never got one of its own. Three regional branches operated inside Russian territory instead: Siberian, founded in 1957; Far Eastern and Ural, both founded in 1987. The academy also organized itself into four sections, each covering a cluster of scientific departments. The Physical, Technical and Mathematical section covered mathematics, general physics and astronomy, nuclear physics, energy problems and mechanics. The Chemical, Technological and Biological section spanned general chemistry, physical chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and general biology. Earth Sciences covered geology, geophysics, geochemistry, oceanology, atmospheric physics and geography. Social Sciences covered history, philosophy, law, economy, literature and language.
The Transcaucasian Commission worked around Lake Sevan, one of several specialized commissions beneath the academy's sections. The Polar Commission focused its work on the island of Novaya Zemlya. Other commissions covered archaeography, nuclear research, expeditionary studies, the Caspian Sea, and the tribal composition of the population of the Soviet Union and neighboring countries.
Critics noted a persistent gap in all of this: despite its broad powers, the academy never produced a serious project for reforming Soviet science. That gap in reform would remain unresolved right up until the state that empowered the academy came apart.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the academy's institutions in the former republics passed to their new independent states. Each had belonged to a Union republic's own academy of sciences.
The Russian Federation was the only republic that had never had its own Academy of Sciences. Yet 98 percent of the academy's scientific institutions sat inside Russian territory. And 95 percent of its members lived and worked there. In practice, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union had effectively already been the Russian Academy of Sciences.
On the 21st of November 1991, Russian academicians pushed through a presidential decree creating the Russian Academy of Sciences. Every member of the old academy automatically became a member of the new one. This included members living in the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States. All the buildings, scientific instruments, vessels and equipment that academy institutions had used inside the Russian republic passed into the new academy's ownership.
Elections to the Russian Academy of Sciences followed in December 1991. Those newly elected scientists, together with the existing full members of the old Soviet academy, made up its membership. In 1992, the International Association of Academies of Sciences was established.
One trace of the academy survives on film: a 1974 documentary called "Country and Science." The Central Studio for Documentary Film produced it, running fifty minutes.
Common questions
When was the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union founded and dissolved?
The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union operated from 1925 to 1991, formed by a resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars on the 27th of July 1925. It was replaced by the Russian Academy of Sciences after the Soviet Union's collapse.
Who was the first president of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union?
Alexander Karpinsky, a geologist who had previously led the Russian Academy of Sciences, was the first president of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, serving until 1936.
Why was the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union relocated to Moscow?
The academy's Presidium and fourteen scientific institutes were transferred from Leningrad to Moscow in 1934, under a decree signed by Vyacheslav Molotov on the 25th of April 1934. The historian Felix Perchenok described the move as one of the most important steps toward making the academy the headquarters of Soviet science.
What was the Academic Case that affected the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union?
The Academic Case was a wave of arrests between December 1929 and December 1930 in which more than 100 people connected to the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union were detained, mostly humanities specialists and historians.
How large was the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union by 1985?
By 1985, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union had 274 full members, 542 corresponding members, about 330 scientific institutions, and 57,000 scientists and researchers among 217,000 total employees.
What replaced the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union after the Soviet Union collapsed?
The Russian Academy of Sciences replaced it, created by a presidential decree on the 21st of November 1991. All members of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, including those in the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States, automatically became members of the new body.
All sources
12 references cited across the entry
- 1BookAcademy of Sciences in the decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1922–1991 / 1922–1952Vladimir Yesakov — 2000
- 2BookAcademic affairs 1929–1930. Issue 1. The case on charges of Academician Sergey Platonov1993
- 3JournalThe case of the Academy of Sciences and the great turning point in Soviet scienceFelix Perchenok — 1995