A Guide to the Russian Academy of Sciences - University of Texas ...

The Scientific Nomenklatura: Without question, the best known scientists in the
Russia include the academicians and corresponding members of the Moscow
academy's subject-matter and geographic Departments. They numbered some 984
scientists in 1989. To them must be added, however, the scientists in the other
elements included in the former Republic Academies--1672--totaling some 2656 scientists.
These scientists constitute a scientific management hierarchy. A
preponderance of them were members of the communist party and a large number, if
not a majority of them, were directors, associate or assistant directors of research
institutes under the iurisdiction of the Presidia of the various academies and under
governmental committees and ministries. They constituted the top level of the
scientific managers within the USSR Under the reorganized Russian Academy of
Sciences most of these scientists remain in place.
Change: In the mid-1980s, several major changes began to occur. Several of the older scientists
were retired to the status of advisers to the Presidium of the Russian, and, as
Vice President Khalatnikov observed in an interview given in Rome in October of
1988, a restructuring of the size of some of the larger scientific research institutes
would increase efficiency and improve the availability of support equipment such as
computers, copying machines, and other such items. These institutes included the
Lebedev Physics Institute, the Semenov Physical Chemistry Institute, both of which
employ hundreds of scientists. In future, he believed, these institutes and others
would contain no more than 200 people. In his interview he observed that academic
science was underfunded in the USSR because of its concentration upon basic
research. Ministerial (Sectorial) science--the industrial laboratories received some 80
percent of research funding because they include the institutes responsible for
turning scientific discoveries into technological realities. The SRIs of the AN SSSR
received five percent and higher educational institutions received some 15 percent of
funds appropriated for research. In an effort to mitigate stagnation, the academy's
Presidium had earlier decided that in future supervisory personnel in the various
research institutes would serve in such capacities for a limit of 10 years. While
change of assignment may be observed in the laboratories and departments of the
academy historically, stability of assignment has been the general rule.
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Institutional Linkages of Members of the Academy: The officers, the Presidium of
the AN SSSR, and the members of the 18 subject-matter departments of the
academy were linked by membership to the geographic departments of the academy,
to the institutes of the Ministries of the Soviet Union, to the institutes of the State
Committees, to universities, and to the other republic academies. 10
Connections with Subordinate Geographic Departments: The effort to expand
scientific research throughout the former Soviet Union resulted in the kind of
leapfrogging development of centers established long distances from Moscow, that,
in turn, as the critical mass of scientists, laboratories, and equipment became
available, moved them into a different category more on a level of equality with their
parent body and often they received more support and autonomy in this process of
evolution. 11
10 V. G. Shubin, "Problems of the Development of Regional Organizational Forms of the
Intersectorial Management of Scientific and Technical Progress," Izvestiya Akademii Nauk
SSSR. Seriya Ekonomicheskaia, No. 1, 1986, 73-81. JPRS-UST-86-021, 12 September 1986,
pp.56-69.
11 Kushlin, V., "The Unified Scientific and Technical Policy of the Party," Politicheskoye
samoobeayo-vaniye, No.4, April 1984, 33-40. This is an important article dealing with the
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