Abstract
By the very beginning of the 1930s the overt resistance of the old guard in the USSR Academy of Sciences towards its Sovietization was broken and the authorities, together with new figures appointed to important administrative posts within the academy, began to implement the new government’s science policy and further restructure the academy. In the process of restructuring the academy in the 1930s, the following developments were particularly significant: the preparation of the new scientific cadres; the introduction of planning in the work of the academy; the reorganization of existing research institutions and the creation of new ones; the broadening of the geography of academic institutions; and the rapid expansion of the role of Marxist scholars in the academy. Whereas in the previous chapter an attempt was made to give a general description of the situation of the academy in the 1920s, this chapter refrains from giving a detailed overview. It deals in details only with those aspects of the activities of the academy in which old academicians, who by the beginning of the 1930s ceased to be the main element of the body, still played a role.
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Notes
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On the introduction and development of the institution of aspiranty, see G.D. Komkov, O.M. Karpenko, B.V. Levshin, L.K. Semenov, Akademiya Nauk SSSR — shtab sovetskoi nauki (Moscow: Nauka, 1968) pp. 53–55.
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For more details, see Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions. V.I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) pp. 163–5.
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For the details of the campaign against Luzin, see Aleksey E. Levin, ‘Anatomy of a Public Campaign: ‘Academician Luzin’s Case’ in Soviet Political History,’ in Slavic Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 1990, 90–115.
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E.A. Belyaev et al. (eds), Organizatsiya nauchnoi deyatel’nosti (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 230–31.
See Vera Tolz, ‘The USSR Academy of Sciences in Crisis,’ Report on the USSR, vol. 2, no. 23, 1990, pp. 9–12.
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Tolz, V. (1997). The Academy of Sciences in the 1930s: Old Academicians in a Soviet Institution. 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_3
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