Abstract
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Imperial Academy of Sciences, established by Peter the Great in St Petersburg in 1725 under the name of the St Petersburg Academy, had already undergone a considerable number of reforms that gradually turned this scientific body, dominated by foreign scientists for well over a century, into a Russian institution. It was already since the 1840s that in response to the demands of changing society the academy began to overcome its isolation.1 By the beginning of the twentieth century, a core of liberal members of the academy joined other Russian intellectuals in criticizing autocracy and demanding the introduction of elements of representative government in the country. It is these people and their continuing activities under the Bolsheviks that constitute the main focus of this study.
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Notes
Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge. The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917–1970) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p. 43.
Loren Graham, ‘The Development of Science Policy in the Soviet Union,’ in T. Dixon Long and Christopher Wright (eds), Science Policies of Industrial Nations. Case Studies of the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Sweden (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), p. 18.
Some studies of the academy erroneously cite the number of academicians in October 1917 as 41. See, for instance, Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, p. 115. This figure is given in G.D. Komkov et al., Akademiya nauk SSSR: Kratkii istorichesky ocherk (Moscow: Nauka, 1967).
Quoted by Rt. Hon. H.A.L. Fisher in his memoirs about Vinogradov in The Collected Papers of Paul Vinogradoff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928) p. 9.
Quoted in Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1861–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970) p. 3.
Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) p. 3.
V.N. Ipatieff, The Life of a Chemist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1946), pp. 133–4.
A description of prerevolutionary Russian engineers as a social group is given in Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 19–43.
Ipatieff, The Life of a Chemist, p. 141. A similar statement was made by Sergei Platonov, who was elected a corresponding member of the academy in 1909 and became a full member in 1920. See V.P. Leonov et al. (eds), Akademicheskoe delo 1929–1931 gg (St Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 1993) pp. 29
Richard Pipes, Struve. Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) pp. 218–219.
For Vernadsky’s position on political extremism, see the chapter on Vernadsky below. On the Kadets’ attitude toward extremism, see Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill:Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia 1894–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp. 207–22.
William McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1984) p. 12.
G.D. Komkov et al. (eds), Istoriya Akademii Nauk SSSR, Vol. I (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1964) p. 460.
C.D. Komkov et al., Akademiya nauk SSSR: Kratkii istorichesky ocherk (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), p. 277
Robert K. Merton and Jerry Gaston (eds), The Sociology of Science in Europe (London and Amsterdam: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977) p. 262.
See the chapter on Ol’denburg, footnote 38. V.I. Vernadsky, Ocherki i rechi, vol. 1, Moscow, 1922, pp. 26–31.
Alexei Kojevnikov, ‘Transformations and Survivals,’ Science, vol. 261, 3 September 1993, p. 1336.
See, for instance, Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932 (Princeton, NJ: Priceton University Press, 1967) p. 21
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commisariat of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 73.
Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 6–7
James C. McClelland, Autoctrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s statement in The Commissariat of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 73
Walter P. Metzger, ‘Academic Freedom and Scientific Freedom,’ Daedalus, Spring 1978, pp. 94–5.
This information was provided by academician D.S. Likhachev. See also the characteristics of Nikol’sky given by S.F. Platonov during his interrogation by the OGPU in January 1930, V.P. Leonov et al. (eds), Akademicheskoe delo 1929–1931 gg, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 1993) p. 39.
Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science:Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) p. 25.
S.L. Frank, ‘Etika nigilizma’ in Vekhi: Intelligentsia v Rossii (Sbornik statei 1909–1910) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1991) p. 207.
see Marc Raeff’s forward to Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (trans), Vekhi — Landmarsk: a Collection about the Russian Intelligentsia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
P.G. Vinogradov, ‘Politicheskie pis’ma,’ Russkie vedomosti, 5 August, 1905. See also Georgii Fedotov’s essay of 1925, ‘Tragediya russkoi intelligentsii’, published in E.M. Chekharin (ed.), O Rossii i russkoi filosofskoi kul’ture (Moscow: Nauka, 1990).
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© 1997 Vera Tolz
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Tolz, V. (1997). Academicians and the Academy of Sciences on the Eve of the Revolution: Growing Social Awareness. In: Russian Academicians and the Revolution. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25840-6_1
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