Russian Academy of Sciences

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Academy of Sciences was born from a letter. In the early 1720s, a German philosopher named Gottfried Leibniz began writing to Peter the Great, a tsar bent on dragging Russia into the Enlightenment. Leibniz had a specific vision: divide schools, universities, and academies into separate institutions, and staff a new arts and sciences body with leading foreign scholars. Peter listened. In January 1724, a year before he died, he founded the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. A Senate decree on the 8th of February 1724 made it official.

  Nearly three centuries later, the institution Leibniz helped design now employs about 125,000 people, of whom roughly 47,000 are scientific researchers. It spans 1,008 institutions and other units across the Russian Federation. Its members include Nobel Prize laureates in physics, chemistry, literature, medicine, economics, and peace.

  How did a foreign philosopher's correspondence with an autocrat become one of the world's largest scientific networks? And what happened when the Russian government tried to dissolve it in 2013? Those are the questions worth following.

• 2. Peter's Borrowed Blueprint

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  Peter the Great did not invent the academy concept on his own. His tours of Western Europe exposed him to the philosophical societies and centralized research bodies of France and Prussia. The Paris Academy was administered directly by the king, a model that appealed to Peter's instinct for control. He made himself the supreme head of the new St. Petersburg institution, though he left room for a president beneath him.

  The Berlin Academy of Sciences mattered too, and for a pointed reason: Leibniz had founded it. Peter was essentially asking Leibniz's intellectual heir to help replicate the philosopher's own creation on Russian soil. To staff the academy, Peter turned to Christian Wolff, a German philosopher who had corresponded with Leibniz. Peter offered Wolff the Vice-Presidency in the early 1720s. Wolff declined the role itself but agreed to recruit western scholars on the academy's behalf.

  The names Wolff assembled read like a roll call of 18th-century European science. Leonhard Euler, the Swiss mathematician born in 1707, came. So did the botanist Johann Georg Gmelin, the astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller, and Daniel Bernoulli, who arrived at age 25 in 1725. These were not ceremonial appointments. They were the intellectual engine of the early academy, tasked with teaching and conducting research simultaneously.

• 3. The Early Academy's Fragile Start

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  Peter did not live to see his academy open. His widow, Empress Catherine I, carried the work forward, opening the institution in December 1725. The founding structure had three departments: mathematics, physical sciences, and humanities. Attached to the academy were a university and a secondary school, making the building both a research center and an educational institution from day one.

  The first year's enrollment gives a sense of scale. In 1726, there were 112 students between the ages of 5 and 18; 76 were Russian and 36 were foreign. The 17 founding scholars were outnumbered by the 84 total staff, and they taught while also conducting research. Student assistants helped with both the scholars' work and the secondary school.

  Not everything ran smoothly. During the reign of Empress Anna, attendance collapsed. By 1744, only six students remained. Teaching had shifted into German, which directly contradicted Peter I's wishes. The academy's first official charter did not arrive until 1747, more than two decades after the founding. That charter changed the official languages to Russian and Latin, pushed to translate literature into Russian, and set out restrictive working hours. It also expressed the ambition that Russian-trained graduates would eventually replace all foreign scholars. One consequence of the charter's rules was gradual: the university component of the academy slowly deteriorated and finally closed by 1767.

• 4. Euler, Catherine, and Internal Conflict

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  By mid-century, the academy's faculty was divided along national lines. A running tension between German and Russian scholars threatened the institution's coherence. Catherine the Great, who enacted broader reforms to improve conditions for researchers, found a pointed solution. She persuaded Leonhard Euler to return to St. Petersburg in 1766 and head the academy. Euler stayed until he died in 1783, and his presence helped steady the fractured institution.

  Catherine also dismantled the bureaucratic leadership structure, replacing it with a commission of academy faculty to run the institution's affairs. Russian scholars grew in number among the faculty during the second half of the 18th century, fulfilling what the 1747 Charter had set as a long-term aim.

  The academy's scientific output during this period was substantial. From 1750 to 1777, it published 20 volumes of its academic journal, Novi Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae. Expeditions to explore remote parts of Russia carried academy scientists as leaders or key participants. Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition ran from 1733 to 1743. Academy scientists traveled to eight locations within the Russian Empire to observe the 1769 transit of Venus. Peter Simon Pallas, born in 1741, led expeditions to Siberia. These journeys produced an atlas of Russia and advances in astronomy, geography, and natural history. Meanwhile, the first Russian scholar members had emerged from the academy's own ranks: Stepan Krasheninnikov and Mikhail Lomonosov.

• 5. Soviet Science and Space

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  Shortly after the October Revolution, in December 1917, a leading ethnographer named Sergey Fedorovich Oldenburg met with Vladimir Lenin to negotiate the academy's future. The terms were practical: the academy would apply its expertise to questions of state construction; the Soviet government would provide financial and political support.

  The arrangement shaped the academy's direction for decades. In the 1920s, it investigated the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, surveyed minerals in the Kola Peninsula, and contributed to the GOELRO electrification plan. By 1925, the Soviet government recognized the academy as the highest all-Union scientific institution. In 1934, the headquarters moved from Leningrad to Moscow.

  The Stalin years brought rapid industrialization and, with it, a surge in technical research. They also brought repressions of scientists deemed ideologically suspect. During the Second World War, the academy contributed to the development of new T-34 tank variants, aircraft, and ship degaussing technology to counter naval mines. Its scientists also played a role in the Soviet atomic bomb project.

  The second half of the 20th century added another chapter. In 1957, the first satellite was launched. In 1961, Yury Gagarin became the first person in space. In 1971, the first space station, Salyut 1, began operation. The academy also helped establish national academies of sciences across Soviet republics, delegating prominent scientists to live and work in other republics in many cases. The Ukrainian academy, founded in 1918, was an exception, formed by local scientists before Soviet occupation.

• 6. Crisis, Brain Drain, and Reform

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  The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 hit the academy hard. A presidential decree on the 21st of November 1991 restored the name Russian Academy of Sciences, but the economic crisis of the 1990s gutted state support for science. Many researchers left Russia for Europe, Israel, or the United States. Promising graduates who might have become researchers turned instead to commerce.

  The academy's own accounting of the damage was specific. Scientists born from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s left in disproportionate numbers, and the academy essentially lost that generation. By 2013, total spending on research and development still hovered about 40% below 1990 levels. Decayed infrastructure and continuing brain drain compounded the funding shortfall.

  On the 28th of June 2013, the Russian government announced a draft law that would dissolve the RAS entirely, fusing it with the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences into a new public-governmental organization. A new government agency, known by the acronym FASO and headed by Mikhail Kotyukov, would take control of all academy property. All RAS research institutes would pass out of academy control, and FASO could evaluate and reorganize institutes by its own criteria.

  The reaction was fierce. A large group of RAS members announced they would refuse to join the reformed academy. Distinguished scientists including Pierre Deligne, Michael Atiyah, and Mumford wrote open letters calling the planned reform shocking and even criminal. The government softened some language and approved the law on the 27th of September 2013. In 2017, presidential elections within the academy were brought under government control, and in 2018 FASO was folded into Russia's new Ministry of Science and Higher Education, with Kotyukov named as its head.

• 7. The Academy Today

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  As of the 2nd of January 2026, the Russian Academy of Sciences had 1,960 living Russian members: 841 full academicians and 1,119 corresponding members. About 445 foreign members hold places alongside them. Full and corresponding members must be Russian citizens when elected, though some who were elected before the Soviet Union's collapse now hold citizenship in other countries.

  Since 2015, the academy has also awarded the rank of RAS Professor to top-level researchers with Russian citizenship. There are 797 scientists with this rank. The designation is not a membership category, but it functions as a feeder path: some professors have already become full members, and their titles reflect both designations.

  The Presidium of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow serves as the headquarters. That building was constructed between 1967 and 1990. The academy now comprises 13 specialized scientific divisions, four territorial branches, and 15 regional scientific centers. The Siberian Branch, established in 1957 with Mikhail Lavrentyev as founding chairman, employs over 12,500 scientific researchers across centers in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and other cities. Member institutions are linked via a dedicated network called the Russian Space Science Internet, which began with three members and has grown to 3,100, including 57 of the largest research institutions.

  The last elections to the renewed academy were organized on the 26th to the 30th of May 2025. The current president, Gennady Krasnikov, has held the position since September 2022.