Encyclopedia of Russian History

Catherine II relied on the Academie Francaise as a model for the Imperial Russian Academy founded in 1783 with the primary task of improving the Russian literary language and preparing a Russian grammar and dictionary. Close relations between the two institutions were facilitated by the fact that a large number of the country’s leading scholars belonged to both academies. At this time, the Academy of Sciences increased appreciably the volume of its publications presented in the Russian language.

In the eighteenth century, all presidents of the Academy of Sciences were aristocrats with close ties to the royal family but no interest in scholarship. In 1803, Alexander I granted the Academy a new charter that limited the choice of candidates for presidency to individuals with proven affinity with scientific scholarship. It also granted the Academy extended autonomy in administering its work and choosing individual and group research topics. Despite the unceasing threats to academic autonomy during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855), the Academy recorded substantial progress in contributions to science. Among the most eminent academicians were Karl von Baer, the founder of modern embryology; Frederick G. W. Struve, who not only founded the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory but made it one of the world’s leading institutions of its kind; and Mikhail Vasilievich Ostrogradsky, who was credited by James Clerk Maxwell with contributing to the mathematical apparatus of electromagnetic theory.

For a long time, the foreign members of the Academy formed a community isolated from Russia’s social and cultural dynamics. By the 1830s they manifested concrete and multiple signs of expanding and intensifying their Russian connections. Now they contributed articles on scientific themes to popular journals, gave lectures to organized groups, and took part in founding such naturalist societies as the Russian Geographical Society, fashioned on the model of similar organizations in the West. The publications of the Min-eralogical Society and the Russian Geographical Society added to the list of scientific journals appealing to the growing public interest in science.

In 1841 the Academy underwent a drastic organizational change: It absorbed the Imperial Russian Academy and made it one of its three departments. This move not only broadened the scholarly concerns of the Academy of Sciences but also strengthened the Russian share of membership. The Natural Science Departments continued to be dominated by foreign members.

The era of Nicholas I ended on a sour note: Overreacting to the revolutionary waves in Western Europe in 1848, the government made it illegal for young Russians to attend Western universities in search of advanced scientific training. The Academy, which traditionally supervised the selection for foreign training, lost one of its prized functions. The government also abrogated Paragraph 33 of the 1836 charter, which stipulated that “scholarly books and journals, subscribed to by the Academy or full members of the Academy are not subject to censorship.”

Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War in 1855 and 1856 created an atmosphere favoring liberal reforms of a large magnitude in both the political system and social relations. The emancipation of the serfs topped the list of changes that earned the 1860s the title of “The Epoch of Great Reforms.”

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ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Scientists monitor the control desk at the Academy of Sciences Atomic Electric Station. © HULTON ARCHIVE The restive intelligentsia viewed science and its critical spirit as the safest path to lifting Russia on the scale of social, political, and economic progress.

Among the new members of the Academy were several Russians whose scholarly reputations were firmly established in and outside Russia. The mathematician Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev’s contributions to number and probability theories made a strong impression on the Paris Academy of Sciences, which elected him an associ? ?tranger. In addition to his many other contributions to chemistry, Nikolai Nikolayevich Zinin reduced aniline from nitrobenzene; this introduced the industrial production of paints. The historian Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev, elected a member of the Academy in 1871, was deeply involved in writing his multivolume History of Russia since Ancient Times, a grand synthesis of the nation’s political, social, and cultural developments.