Abstract
Understanding the effects of politics on the development of higher education in Russia is one key to understanding the development of organic chemistry in that nation. Since secular education in Russia went from high levels of autonomy to rigid central control as the monarch and policies changed, it behooves us to briefly look at the political events of the nineteenth century, and to see how these events affected the growth of the universities in Russia. As we shall see, this centralization of power in education tended to swing wildly from being very beneficial to the universities, permitting the innovations that would facilitate to the development of organic chemistry, to being a major impediment to innovation.
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Notes
- 1.
Sergei Semënovich Uvarov (Сергей Семёнович Уваров, 1786–1855) was a classical scholar who rose to become an important advisor to Tsar Nicholas I. He was well connected with the royal family: his godmother was Catherine the Great. From 1811 to 1822, he was Curator of the St. Petersburg educational district, and in 1832 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Education. The following year, he succeeded his father-in-law, Count Razumovskii, as minister. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1811, and was its President from 1818 until his death.
- 2.
Speransky was the son of a village priest, and educated at the St. Petersburg ecclesiastical seminary, where he rose to become Professor of Mathematics and Physics. Speransky was soon seconded into imperial service, and by 1808 had become an important advisor to Tsar Alexander I. He was a clear-headed, liberal thinker, and his plans for reform in Russia were far-reaching. Despite this, he fell out of favor with the Tsar in 1812, on the eve of war with Napoleon. He was restored to the imperial service in 1816 under Nicholas I, Alexander's successor, and was made Count shortly before his death, in 1839.
- 3.
Karazin was born into the nobility, and received a good education, including military training in the prestigious Semyonovskii Regiment (Семёновский лейб-гвардии полк), and at the school of mines in St. Petersburg, which had been founded by an edict of Catherine II at the urging of Lomonosov, and had become a premier educational institution in the imperial capital. In his position in the Ministry of Education, Karazin was instrumental in establishing Khar'kov University, but he lost his position before the university was opened. Karazin was forced to return to his village, but did not give up on education: he founded a school for local children. Karazin was a Ukrainian nationalist, and was a strong proponent of a constitutional monarchy; his political views led to his arrest on more than one occasion. The university that he worked to hard to establish is know named V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.
References
Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and so names must be transliterated to the Roman alphabet. The exact transliteration used depends on the language into which the transliteration occurs, and even this is not a constant within the same language. A good example of this is provided by the name of N. N. Sokolov, which is transliterated into German as Socoloff by Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, and as Sokoloff by Erdmans Journal für Praktische Chemie. Throughout this book, the BGN/PCGN romanization system for Russian is used as the most intuitive for English speakers. The consonants ж, ц, ч, ш, and щ are transliterated as zh, ts, ch, sh, and shch, respectively. The vowels й, ы, э, ю, and я are transliterated as i, y, e, yu, and ya, respectively. The vowel е at the beginnings of words is transliterated as ye. The soft sign (ь) is rendered as ‘, and the hard sign (ъ) is rendered as “. In 1918, the Soviets consolidated the orthography of Russian alphabet, eliminating three letters, and dramatically reducing the use of the hard sign at the end of words; the Russian spelling of titles of articles has been modernized prior to transliteration. In citations of articles in western journals, names are given as transliterated by the journals.
Hosking G (1998). Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p. 146.
It is one of the joys for anyone involved in historical research about Russian universities that most have excellent official web sites. It is the author’s intention to cite these web sites throughout this chapter. The web site for the history of Lomonosov Moscow State University can be found at: http://www.msu.ru/en/ [accessed October 12, 2011].
Evans CT (1991). Count Sergei Stroganov and the Development of Moscow University, 1835-1847. PhD Diss, University of Virginia.
Luyendijk-Elshout AM Medicine. In Rüegg W (2004). Universities in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries (1800-1945). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ch 14, pp 543-590.
Considerable information about this and other institutions of higher education in St. Petersburg can be found at the site for the St Petersburg Encyclopedia: http://www.encspb.ru/en/ [accessed October 12, 2011]. Information specific to the Medical-Surgical Academy can be found at http://www.encspb.ru/en/article.php?kod=2804015556 [accessed October 12, 2011], and at http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Военно-медицинская_академия_им._С._М._Кирова (in Russian).
(a) Cited by Flynn JT (1988). The University Reform of Tsar Alexander I, 1802-1835. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, p. ix. (b) Dohnt P (2008) Ambiguous Loyalty to the Russian Tsar. The Universities of Dorpat and Helsinki as Nation Building Institutions. Hist. Social Res. 33:99-126.
The history of Tartu University, written by Sirje Tamul, of the Department of History, may be found at: http://www.ut.ee/en/university/general/history [accesses November 10, 2011]
For a brief history of the university at its official website, see: http://www.vu.lt/en/about-us/history [acessed November 10, 2011]
An official history of the university can be found at its website, managed by Maksim A. Folomieiev: http://www.univer.kharkov.ua/en/general/our_university/history [accessed November 10, 2011]
Seton-Watson H (1967). The Russian Empire, 1801-1917. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 35-36.
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The university has an excellent website. For the general history of the university, see: http://www.ksu.ru/eng/general/history.htm [accessed November 10, 2011]. The museum of the History of Kazan University (S. V. Pisareva, Director) has an official website at: http://www.ksu.ru/miku/eng/index.htm [accessed November 10, 2011]. The chemical museum at Kazan (Kand. T. D. Sorokhina, Director) also has an excellent website: http://www.ksu.ru/chmku/eng/ [accessed November 10, 2011].
It is more difficult to find information about the history of St. Petersburg State University from its website, http://eng.spbu.ru/ [accessed November 10, 2011; it is suggested that one search the site under “history,” which brings up a number of hits, including the sites of several museums.
The index page for the history of Warsaw University can be found on its official website at: http://www.uw.edu.pl/en/page.php/about_uw/history.html [accessed November 10, 2011]. This site has links to several pages discussing the university through history.
The history of the university can be found at the official website, http://www.univ.kiev.ua/en/geninf/history [accessed November 10, 2011]
The history of the Institute can be found at its official website, at: http://www.spbtechnologicaluniversity.com/Lists/History%20of%20the%20Institute/Foundation%20and%20Formation%20of%20the%20Institute%20as%20an%20Institution%20of%20Higher%20Education.aspx [accessed November 10, 2011].
The history of Odessa national University named for I. L. Mechnikov is found at: http://onu.edu.ua/en/geninfo/history [accessed November 10, 2011].
The history of Tomsk State University can be found on its official website at: http://www.tsu.ru/WebDesign/TSU/coreen.nsf/structurl/history_doc1 [accessed November 10, 2011]
The history of the polytechnicum can be found at the official website of Riga Technical University: http://www.rtu.lv/en/content/view/1464/1168/lang,en/ [accessed November 10, 2011].
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Lewis, D.E. (2012). The Evolution of Higher Education in Russia. In: Early Russian Organic Chemists and Their Legacy. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(), vol 4. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28219-5_1
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