THE ACADEMY REORGANIZED

The R&D Role of the Soviet Academy of Sciences

Since 1961

Stephen Fortescue

Occasional Paper No. 17 Department of Political Science

Research School of Social Science Australian National University

Canberra 1983

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THE ACADEMY REORGANIZED

The R&fD Role of the Soviet Academy of Sciences

Since 1961

Stephen Fortescue

Occasional Paper Mo. 17 Department of Political Science

Research School of Social Science Australian national University

Canberra, 1983

Printed and Published in Australia at The Australian National University

(c) 1983 Stephen Fortescue

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CONTENTS

Page

P re face V

I n t r o d u c t i o n 1

One The R e o rg a n iz a t io n s o f 1961 and 1963 7

Two The Keldysh Years 27

Three The A le ksan d rov Years 47

Four The Cost to the Academy o f an A p p l ie d Research Role

62

C o nc lu s io n 89

V

PREFACE

The Soviet Academy of Sciences has long been recognized as an institution with members of sufficient independence of opinion and opportunity for expressing that opinion that a study of its politics - in the sense of how policy issues are formulated, debated and decided - becomes feasible. Particular advantage has been taken of this feature of the Academy in studying the organizational debate of the late 1950s, leading to the reorganizations of 1961 and 1963.

Since then, while the clarity of the issues involved has hardly diminished, the firmness of the political divisions and the degree to which they are publicly expressed have been reduced. Nevertheless, it has proved possible to follow many of the policy issues that have faced the Academy and the party leadership since the early 1960s.This monograph will be concerned primarily with what I see to be the most important one - what is the proper role of the Academy in Soviet science. Should it be an elite organization devoted purely to fundamental research, or should it be an organization wielding authority and influence and operationally involved in all areas of Soviet R&D, including applied research?

A general scientific coordinating role and involvement in applied research tend to go hand in hand. If the Academy has a coordinating role it becomes responsible for the success of all that it is coordinating. It therefore feels compelled to take over and do the applied research on which such success in the eyes of the Soviet leadership depends. Conversely, if the Academy is pushed into applied research, it wants then to get coordinating powers in order to gain some control over the restrictive aspects of an involvement in applied research - subjection to planning, performance evaluation and self-financing. Nevertheless, the Academy is attracted to applied research because it finds there greater access to funds, to say nothing of power. At the same time the party leadership is forced by the weakness of the non-Academy scientific institutions to rely on the Academy. The question then becomes what effect does this have on the state of fundamental research in the Soviet Union and the status of the Academy as an elite research organization.

This monograph begins by examining how the general coordinating and applied roles of the Academy have developed since the early 1960s, and concludes by looking at the consequences for the Academy and its fundamental research. The approach is essentially chronological, with the Introduction as an exception. It provides a very brief summary of the structure of the Soviet science network for those with no previous knowledge. The monograph proper then begins with Chapter One, in which the aim is to establish the place of the Academy in the Soviet R&D system at the completion of the reorganizations of 1961 and 1963. To meet this aim it will be necessary to look at the lead-up to the

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reorganizations, to establish who was responsible for pushing them through and what their motives were.

Chapter Two describes events during the term of Mstislav Keldysh as president of the Academy. It was a period of the cautious rebuilding of the Academy's power and prestige following the setbacks of the early 1960s. In 1975 A.P. Aleksandrov took over as president and, as described in Chapter Three, the process of strengthening the role of the Academy in the overall management of F&D and the concomitant direct involvement in applied research accelerated.

Chapter Four reveals the problems which such developments produce for the Academy. An increased involvement in applied research, an apparently inevitable consequence of a greater role in overall F&D coordination and management, forces the Academy to submit to an ever greater degree to centralized planning of its research effort and to formalized systems of performance evaluation. Funding becomes tied to performance in the applied sphere, through increases in the proportion of work being done under contract compared to work being funded by government grants.

The Conclusion speculates on the future of the Academy, allowing for the possible different policies and styles of three potential successors to Aleksandrov as president. The Conclusion is necessarily incomplete, since only one of the major issues facing the Academy in the last twenty years has been dealt with. Such important questions as the extent, form and possibly changing character of party control of the Academy's activities are mentioned only in passing, while ideological matters - the impact of the final fall of Lysenko in 1964; the timing of and reasons for the crackdown on dissident scientists in 1967 and 1968, and the purges in the social sciences, particularly sociology, in the early 1970s; the virtual disappearance since the late 1960s of the movement for the democratization of institute and Academy life, such an important aspect of the Academy debates of the 1950s - are virtually ignored. Usually the small details of factional politicking and organizational changes in the Academy are sacrificed for the broader sweep.

These are blank spots to be filled in with further study. But even with them left blank we get a picture from this monograph of an organization which has long been and will probably long remain the premier scientific institution in the Soviet Union.

Acknowledgements are due to Drs T.H. Figby and F.F. Miller for comments and suggestions, and to Mr Grigory Topchian for assistance in collecting references, information and data.

Canberra, April 1983

INTRODUCTION

Soviet science has what is described by Soviet writers as a 'three-link' structure, that is research is undertaken in three different groups of institutions. Firstly and of most interest to us, is the Academy of Sciences. Then there is the ministerial or 'branch' system. Each ministry has its own network of institutes, engaged primarily, although not exclusively, in applied research. Research done in factories also comes in this category. Since they are subordinate to ministries, the so-called 'branch' Academies, primarily the Academies of Agricultural Sciences, Medical Sciences and Pedagogical Sciences, are part of the ministerial system. They should therefore be distinguished from the Academy of Sciences and will not feature in this monograph. During the period 1957 to 1964 the ministries were abolished and replaced by regional economic management bodies, the sovnarkhozy. During this period the branch research institutes were allocated either to the sovnarkhozy or the State Committees which were left at the centre to supervise some of the most important branches. (These State Committees were industry-based, and should not be confused with today's functionally-based State Committees, to be described later in this Introduction.)

The third 'link' is vuz research (vuz being the Russian abbreviation for 'higher educational institution'). While university research is not as important in the Soviet Union as it is in Western countries, the major universities have the personnel available to do some impressive research. The same applies to the major teaching institutes.

Military research is so pervasive throughout the whole Soviet R&D system that it should have a separate overarching category of its own. However, since officially designated military research institutes are subordinate to the Ministry of Defence and some other major ministries, this research is included by Soviet commentators in the branch system. Military R&D will receive no special attention in this monograph.

In terms of personnel the three 'links' can be divided up roughly as follows: Academy 10%; branch 61%; vuz 28%. In terms of fundingthe percentages are: 8%, 82%, 9%.(1)

When established by Peter I and indeed up to the Bolshevik Revolution, the Academy of Sciences had a virtual monopoly of scientific research in Russia.(2) The original monopoly counted for very little - the Academy originally consisted of 17 imported German and French academicians. The cost of the monopoly was complete subordination to the demands of the state authority. The Academy essentially maintained its monopoly under the Tsars, but as its prestige and status as a scientific institution increased, so did its

2

independence, both moral and legal, from state authority. Its moral prestige was strengthened by the political opposition of many of its members to the declining autocracy. This prestige survived to some extent after the Revolution, although the utility value of individual scientists and the Academy as an institution was probably a more important reason for the survival of dissenting or uncommitted academicians.

While it is inappropriate to speak of the independence of the Academy from party and state control under communist rule, particularly since the 1929 Academy election so well documented by Loren Graham,(3) individual academicians have shown themselves willing to defend scientific, political and moral values to a degree unusual in the Soviet Union. Similarly, while the growth of vast ministerial research networks and various non-Academy scientific coordinating bodies have taken away the Academy's scientific monopoly, the weakness of these non-Academy institutions and the Academy's own expertise have made it possible for it to defend its position of preeminence in Soviet science with a success that entirely belies its meagre bureaucratic and material resources.

The geographical structure of the Soviet Academy of Sciences reflects the federal structure of the Soviet Union. The All-Union Academy, based in Moscow, formally covers the whole country. However, like the Soviet Communist Party which has no RSFSR-level (Russian republic) organization, there is no Russian Academy; the All-Union Academy, at least in terms of its institute network, is essentially limited to the RSFSR. The other fourteen union republics all have their own Academies. Customarily the All-Union Academy has supervisory control over the republican Academies, although at the beginning of the period to be examined in this monograph that power was taken away. It was quickly restored and has been retained to this day.

Approximately equivalent to the republican Academies in terms of status and prestige is the Siberian department of the All-Union Academy, based in Novosibirsk. Its formal status, as reflected in its nomenclature 'department', is unusual - although a geographical unit, it is organizationally equivalent to the discipline-based departments to be described below.

Within the All-Union Academy, its Siberian department and the republican Academies are the so-called 'filials'. They are now usually situated at autonomous republic level, for example, the Kazan 'filial' of the All-Union Academy in the Tatar ASSR. Confusingly, in recent years a number of what were previously known as filials have been renamed Scientific Centres, for example, the Urals Scientific Centre based on the old Sverdlovsk filial. These centres appear to be structural units of the Academy, whereas other Scientific Centres, not based on old Academy filials, appear to be more-or-less voluntary associations of Academy and non-Academy institutions. Although the

3

Academy plays a supervisory role, these centres are not structural units of the Academy. The Western Scientific Centre in the Ukraine, which will be discussed in some detail in this monograph, is an example of such a centre.

The organizational structure of the All-Union Academy is mirrored in each of the republican Academies. It is important to realize that there are two sides to the Academy's structure. Firstly, the Academy is a collection of full and corresponding members. These are eminent scientists elected to the Academy by its existing members. They need not work within the Academy's research network, but can just as easily work in a vuz, a branch institute or a factory (or be a politician). The members are elected to departments based on disciplines, for example, the Department of General Physics and Astronomy or the Department of Language and Literature. At present there are fifteen departments, if we exclude the anomolous Siberian department. As the number of departments increased in the 1960s, a new intermediate administrative level became necessary, and in 1963 three sectors, for social sciences, physics and mathematics, and chemistry and biology were set up. The Earth Sciences Sector was added in 1968.

The formal decision-making organ of the Academy is the general meeting of all members. They meet twice a year. The Academy's executive organ and actual centre of power is the presidium. It has 28 members, plus the heads of the departments. The chairman of the presidium is the president of the Academy. Considerable attention will be devoted in this monograph to the importance of the character, style and policy inclinations of the president in determining the role of the Academy in Soviet science.

In charge of the day-to-day administration of the Academy is the chief scientific secretary (glavny nauchny sekretar'). Although a full or corresponding member of the Academy, his responsibilities are essentially administrative, but no less important for that. Each sector, department, institute and indeed any scientific institution has its own scientific secretary, usually a junior scientist of apparently administrative bent. This post is not to be confused with the academician secretary (akademik sekretar') of the sectors and departments. The academician secretary is a senior scientist who occupies in the sectors or departments the equivalent position to the president in the Academy as a whole.

It should again be emphasized that this entire structure is populated by scientists whose research need not be done within the Academy. Indeed, A.P. Aleksandrov, the present president of the Academy, retains his directorship of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, a non-Academy institute. Thus the general membership, the sectors, departments and presidium are no more than a collection of prestigious scientists. But of course there is more to the Academy than that. As well as disposing of enormous prestige and informal influence, it does have some legal powers in the general coodination

4

of Soviet scientific research. It also has under its control substantial, although by no means unlimited, funds, and is able to use these funds for the furthering of research in its own network of research institutes. The All-Union Academy has 244 scientific institutions, most of them institutes, while there is a total of 378 in the republican Academies.(4) The institutes are under the direct supervision of the presidium. The institute director, although not necessarily an elected member of the Academy, is in effect an employee of the Academy. He runs the institute with the assistance of the scientific secretary, in administrative matters, and the academic council (ucheny sovet), a collegial body of selected institute researchers, in scientific matters.

The academic councils are not to be confused with the scientific councils (nauchnye sovety) of the Academy. These are appointed bodies of prestigious scientists, from within and outside the Academy, under the supervision of the presidium, or sometimes a department. They usually deal with quite narrow areas of research, for example, the Scientific Council for the physio-chemical principles of the extraction of new heat resistant inorganic materials. Although their powers are purely recommendatory their influence can apparently be substantial.

The structure of the party apparatus, particularly as it concerns science, will now be described very briefly. There are the central decision-making bodies of the party, the Central Committee and the Politburo. These bodies are served by a central apparatus, which collects information, prepares position papers and draft resolutions, and supervises the fulfilment of decisions. The apparatus contains a Department of Science and Higher Education, which is responsible for the Academy. Presumably the 'branch' departments of the apparatus, for example, that for heavy industry, are involved when scientific issues in their particular area arise.

The party then has a territorially based structure covering the whole country, with bureaus, committees and apparatuses in every territorial division. Each republic, region, city or district with any research institutions at all will have a party official responsible for science.

The lowest level of the party structure is the primary party organization. All party members of any working collective, research institutes included, belong to that collective's primary party organization. The party organization, and more specifically its secretary, have extensive supervisory powers not only over political or ideological matters, but also over scientific and particularly personnel questions. The so-called 'right of control', granted to the party organizations of Academy institutes in 1971, guarantees the party organization access to all documents and information and the right to make recommendations to management that 'must be taken into account'.(5) Party control of the Academy will receive only passing attention in this monograph.

5

Finally, one of the most important science bodies in the Soviet Union is the State Committee for Science and Technology (as it is presently called). There are a large number of State Committees in the Soviet state administrative structure. They tend to be functionally based, rather than organized around single branches of the economy, as the ministries are. Thus, with names such as State Committee for Wages, the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), etc, the Committees could be said to play a 'staff' role for the 'line' ministries. The State Committee for Science and Technology has important responsibilities in setting guidelines for scientific and technological development throughout the USSR, and has access to significant funds for furthering its goals. However, it has virtually no research capacity of its own. It will play an important part in this monograph.

6

FOOTNOTES

1 There is a very small 'others' category, made up of museums,libraries, theatres, etc. A.I. Shcherbakov: Effektivnost'nauchnoi deiatel1nosti v SSSR, 'Ekonomika', Moscow, 1982, p. 30.

2 For more detailed general accounts of the Academy in English, seeE. Zaleski et al: Science Policy in the USSR, OECD, Paris, 1969;A. Vucinich: The Soviet Academy of Sciences, Hoover InstituteStudies, Series E: Institutions, No. 3, Stanford U.P., Stanford,January 1956; P.K. Urban and A.I. Lebed (eds): Soviet Science,1917-70: Part I, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Scarecrow,Metuchen, N.J., 1971.

3 L.R. Graham: The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the CommunistParty, 1927-1932, Princeton U.P., Princeton, N.J., 1967.

4 Shcherbakov, op.cit., p. 21.

5 See S. Fortescue: 'Research institute party organizations and theright of control', Soviet Studies, April 1983.

7

CHAPTER ONE

The Reorganizations of 1961 and 1963

The reorganizations of the Academy of Sciences that occurred in the early 1960s, particularly those of 1961 and 1963, have attracted considerable attention from Western observers. The status of the Academy of Sciences as by far the most important Soviet scientific institution is alone sufficient reason for some attention, but students of Soviet politics have been attracted to the reorganizations for another reason. They were preceded by a long and at times bitter debate between different factions of the Academy establishment. The debate was quite public by Soviet standards, and appeared to influence to an important extent the decisions eventually made by the political leadership on how the Academy should work. Thus the reorganizations have been used as a case study of Soviet political activity, particularly of pressure group activity.(1)

In this paper neither the reorganizations nor the debate leading up to them will be examined exhaustively. Readers are referred to other sources for such details.(2) However they will be taken as a starting point for an examination of developments that have occurred in the Academy since the early 1960s. The terms of the debate were essentially whether the Academy should be a purely theoretical research organization, or whether it should devote a significant part of its resources to research with immediate practical applications. The theoretical scientists in the Academy are generally seen as having been most effectively represented by Nikolai Semenov, the Nobel prize winning chemist, although the president of the Academy, Aleksandr Nesmeianov, was also an important source of support. This group was unhappy with the ever increasing importance within the Academy of the Department of Technical Sciences and the applied industrial research for which it was responsible. They claimed that theoretical research was being starved of funds and facilities, leading to an increasing amount of such research being done in institutes outside the Academy network. They demanded changes in the Academy's structure and functions that would free it of applied research and the institutes carrying it out. These demands, plus their simultaneous demands for a democratization of Academy procedures, led them to be known as the reform group within the Academy.

It has been generally assumed that, since the reorganizations of 1961 and 1963 entailed the transfer out of the Academy of institutes engaged primarily in applied research and the closing down of the Department of Technical Sciences, the reorganizations were a victory for the reform faction. But a continuing mystery has been why then did Nesmeianov, no less a champion of fundamental

8

research than Semenov, lose his post as president within a few weeks of the reorganization, the moment of his apparent victory? Furthermore, he was replaced by Mstislav Keldysh, who had made his career not in the Academy but rather in those most applied of all areas, the aircraft industry, nuclear energy and missiles and the Soviet space programme.

It is worth considering these historical mysteries in some more detail. The departure of Nesmeianov and arrival of Keldysh, accompanied by apparently major changes in the functions of the Academy, are an excellent starting point for our study of developments since that time. But it is excellent only if we know exactly what the starting point is - a weakened Academy or a strengthened one; a fundamental research institution or one still expected or keen to devote a considerable proportion of its resources to applied research and direct production needs.

The reorganization of 1961 was clearly a response to many of the demands of the Nesmeianov-Semenov anti-applied research faction of the Academy, in that provisions were made for the bulk of the Academy's applied research institutes to be transferred from it to the branch networks of the State Committees and the sovnarkhozy, with the Department of Technical Sciences being reduced to a rump of three of its previous 12 institutes. But there was much about the reorganization to indicate that it was not entirely a victory for the reform faction, nor entirely a response to its demands. It shows many signs of being a Khrushchev initiative, and one designed as an attack on the Academy, including the reforming element, as much as a reward.

Khrushchev was not as sure of his own abilities in the field of science as he was in agriculture, and showed some degree of respect towards scientists. His memoirs give the impression that he enjoyed being in the company of leading scientists,(3) and his leadership was on the whole characterized by a strong emphasis on the importance of scientific development. It was in Khrushchev's Party Programme of 1961 that it was declared that science was now becoming a direct productive force, an event which indicated the greatly improved status science now enjoyed in the Soviet system.(4) But in this area, as in most others, Khrushchev had very strong prejudices. The essential feature of these prejudices was 'a crude, if complex, type of anti-intellectualism which took the form of depreciating the importance of theoretical expertise divorced from direct production activity'.(5) There is no hint in the criticisms of Kapitsa and Sakharov in his memoirs that he objected to the theoretical nature of their work. But he does show a very strong preference for scientists, even theoretical scientists like Kurchatov and Lavrent'ev, who are prepared, most importantly to devote themselves to applied, preferably military matters, but also have the symbolic advantage of a practical earthiness as exemplified by Lavrent'ev's habit of 'walking around

9

in crude leather boots'.(6) There is nothing about this to suggest that Khrushchev would have any natural sympathy for 'science for science's sake' or untramelled theoretical research offering no more than the hope of some practical return perhaps turning up sometime in the future. One suspects that his angry outburst directed against the Academy in 1964, after membership applications of the Lysenkoists Pemeslo and Nuzhdin had been rejected, in which he threatened to destroy the Academy's historical prestige and independence by transforming it into a simple 'Committee on Science', was an indication of an inbuilt suspicion of and irritation by ivory towers.(7)

In the crucial period at the beginning of the 1960s Khrushchev's greatest concern was, as always, with practical matters. There is a curious symbolism in the fact that the decree ordering the 1961 reorganization was published on 12 April, the same day as the Soviet Union's greatest technological achievement, the manned spaceflight of Iury Gagarin. The Academy of Sciences, while undoubtedly involved, did not have overall responsibility for the research programme that led up to that success. Similarly the Academy was not the the lead organization in the Soviet Union's development of nuclear energy, whether for military or peaceful purposes. Thus the Academy could not claim the credit for these major successes. When Khrushchev looked at those major areas of R&D for which the Academy was largely responsible - chemicals, genetics, geology and industrial engineering, the successes were less spectacular. Indeed Khrushchev was seemingly dissatisfied with the applied work being done in the Academy. According to Zhores Medvedev he considered it impossible that the Academy's industrial research institutes, springing up all over Moscow in the 1950s, could contribute much to the problems of industrial enterprises, which were mostly situated in the industrial regions of the Soviet Union far from Moscow.(8) This seems to have been a major motive for shifting the applied institutes out of the Academy. The problem as Khrushchev saw it was that these institutes were not working well as part of the Academy, not that their presence was spoiling the Academy's theoretical work. Thus his main concern as expressed at the June 1959 Central Committee plenum at which he gave his firm support to the reorganization of the Academy was to get research into the factories and workshops.(9)

The point can be taken further. It would appear that one of Khrushchev's major concerns was the poor coordination of R&D in the Soviet Union. Again he probably looked at the tight, goal-oriented planning of the space and nuclear programmes, and found the situation in other areas disastrous in comparison. Khrushchev's first involvement in the reorganization debate, back at the 20th Party Congress, was essentially an attack on the lack of coordination in science administration.(10) This remained the focus of his criticisms of the Soviet R&D system in general, and the

10

Academy of Sciences in particular. At the June 1959 Central Committee plenum he commented primarily on the impossibility of even such a good scientist and communist as Comrade Nesmeianov being able to keep control of an Academy containing such a huge variety of organizations and institutions.(11 )

The leaders of the Academy also engaged in considerable self-criticism over their performance in the area of coordination. Nevertheless there were major differences between the positions of Khrushchev and the Academy reformers. Khrushchev had no particular complaint about the state of theoretical research in the Academy, but he had a natural suspicion of anything not practically oriented, and was unlikely to be sympathetic to the arguments of those who wanted the Academy reorganized in order to leave thetheoreticians in peace. His concern was that the Academy seemedunable to do what for him was its main job - the conduct and coordination of major research programmes of vital importance for the economy.

The nature of the 1961 reorganizaton shows that it reflected the concerns of Khrushchev more than those of the Academyreformers. The latter's main demand had been the removal of theapplied institutes from the Academy. Khrushchev was prepared to go along with them - they had not been working well under Academy auspices, and would do better when subordinated to his brainchild, the sovnarkhozy, particularly as that would bring them closer to the control of the regional party apparatus.(12) However, his motive was not to give the theoreticians their independence but to get more control over the applied institutes.

But for Khrushchev perhaps the most important aspect of the reorganization was that it established a new body for scientific coordination. The setting up of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research and the granting to it of extensive powers in the coordination of R&D, including the direct control by its republican organizations of the Academy's filials and the union republic Academies, had never been part of the demands of the Academy reformers.(13 ) Presumably the radical theoreticians, those who wanted to divorce the Academy entirely from any involvement in science coordination or management beyond the funding of pure research, would not have been too upset about the new committee, as long as it did not try to dictate to them what work they should do. But the reformers among the Academy's management, such as Nesmeianov and Topchiev, could well have been very unhappy. Certainly this aspect of the reorganization is more a response to Khrushchev's concerns than theirs, which suggests that the initiative for the reorganization could well have been his.

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It could be said that the apparent lack of thought and preparation put into the reorganization is a sign of Khrushchev's involvement, being something typical of his style. The confusion over which institutes were transferred continues to this day, at least among Western commentators. Institutes were transferred not only administratively, but also geographically, closer to the industries they were meant to serve. In moving to their new locations the institutes were left without facilities and equipment, as well as without the many personnel who resigned rather than leave Moscow. The transfers, like so many of Khrushchev's ideas, could have had a positive benefit if planned properly, but the way they were carried out ensured that many branches of applied Soviet science suffered long-term damage.(14) But the greatest confusion was in establishing the new administrative and coordination arrangements. This can be seen in the article written on the reorganization by Topchiev (by this time a vice-president of the Academy) in August 1961. He states that special attention must now, i.e. well and truly after the event, be given to defining the responsibilities of the new State Committee, the Academy, the branch State Committees and other agencies. Moreover he describes in rather qualified terms what he sees as the probable responsibilities of these different organizations.(15)

This impression of confusion is strengthened by the total implausibility of some of the administrative arrangements. The sovnarkhozy were already bringing havoc to Soviet industrial management, but Khrushchev's commitment to them was still presumably too great for him to understand that subordinating research institutes to them would have an even more disastrous effect on Soviet R&D, especially on the coordination about which he was so worried. The State Committee was no doubt a worthy concept, but its successors still face today the problem that should have been evident in April 1961, namely the lack of an institutional base, so that it must always rely on other bodies to have any of its policies or decisions implemented. This problem became most immediately and strikingly evident in the republican State Committees. They were clearly inadequate for the tasks expected of them . (16)

A final example of the administrative uncertainties of the reorganization is the anachronistic survival of the Department of Technical Sciences. Up to its abolition in 1963 it showed all the signs of an institution searching for a reason for its existence.(17)

Most of these criticisms could be said to have been answered by the further reorganizations of 1962, when research institutes were taken from the sovnarkhozy and subordinated to the branch State Committees, and of 1963, when the Department of Technical Sciences was abolished, the State Committee was reduced in status,

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and the Academy was given back some of its powers of coordination, particularly over its filials and the republican Academies. But these changes, while of undoubted importance, were fairly typical of Khrushchev's virtually ad hoc approach to administrative change - a poorly thought-out reform could be eventually put right by continual tinkering.

It is not surprising that major changes which Khrushchev considered to be of great importance should bear some of the hallmarks of the highly idiosyncratic Khrushchev style. But the point needs to be pursued further, that the reorganization should be seen as a response to Khrushchev's concerns about Soviet R&D and therefore as by no means a success for the reforming faction of the Academy. While some aspects of the reorganization did correspond to the reformers' wishes, in general it was not intended to provide them with a victory.(18) It would seem to be a rather typical reform of the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev heeded the complaints of a particular group, in this case the theoreticians of the Academy, but in his usual impetuous enthusiasm took over the reform himself. One can imagine him, exasperated by the persistent badgering of Nesmeianov and dissatisfied with the work of the Academy, finally deciding to give the reform faction what it wanted, and more.

Indeed there was little for the Academy to be pleased about in the immediate aftermath of the 1961 reorganization. One of the theoreticians' complaints about the Technical Department was the amount of Academy funds that its institutes ate up on non-theoretical projects. Presumably they hoped that once these institutes had gone their funds would be dramatically increased.Of course that is not the style of government funding in any country. The Academy reorganization came at a time of severe restrictions on the growth of the Academy, and the transfer of applied institutes in 1961 brought no financial benefit to the remaining institutes. As John Lowenhardt's figures show, the Academy's budgetary allocation fell drastically between 1960 and 1961, and even adjusting the figures to allow for the departure of so many institutes, the increase in funds for the remaining institutes was considerably lower than in previous years.(19)

Further, there are no signs that the reorganization left the theoreticians free to pursue their research shut off from the demands of production and planning. While there was apparently some reorientation of Academy institutes' research plans towards more theoretical research,(20) there continued to be considerable stress on the importance of even this theoretical research being tied to practical aims. A Pravda editorial of the time saw the purpose of the reorganization as making possible the Academy's concentration on major applied projects, not the minor development issues it had been involved with previously.(21) Even Nikolai Semenov had to chide those scientists who mistakenly interpreted the reorganization as meaning that they could now consider

13

themselves free of all practical concerns. In referring to the November 1962 Central Committee plenum, Semenov accurately sums up at least the intentions of the reform:

Here there is the unity of earlier instructions about the responsibility of the Academies for the development of fundamental research in physics, mathematics and chemistry, and the present decree of the plenum on the need to concentrate the research strength of the Academies on the solution of scientific issues directly connected with production.(22)

The twin stress on theoretical research and practical goals was well established by this time, and reached its clearest expression in the 1963 reorganization.(23) There probably was a significant change in the focus of the Academy's work, away from short-term development work towards longer-term major research programmes, but theoretical research was not seen as by any means supreme. Certainly complaints continued to be heard from academicians that their work was still too closely tied to the demands of production.(24)

There is also no sign of victory for the reformers in avoiding the demands of the planners and the coordinators. Firstly, there was the disaster of the establishment of a coordinating body completely outside the Academy. Although the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research was entrusted primarily with the coordination of applied research, in the context of the continuing stress on the Academy's responsibility to make its research relevant to production there is no doubt that the Committee was also expected to keep an eye on Academy research. The original April 1961 decree stated bluntly that the State Committee was to provide 'the necessary coordination of the activity of the country's research institutes, the improvement of the planning of research and the vnedrenie (application to production) of the achievements of science and technology in the economy, as well as the removal of unnecessary duplication in the performance of scientific work'. There was no attempt to limit these functions or to separate the Academy from them, and the Committee was to be given wide powers and rights for their fulfilment.(25)

The fact that the republican State Committees were given control of republican Academies and Academy filials, and even such symbolic facts that K.P. Rudnev, the chairman of the State Committee, opened the Conference of Scientific Workers in 1961, indicated that the Committee was being pushed as the more important organization.(26)

Nevertheless, the uncertainty of the Committee's position meant that the Academy was quickly able to establish the idea that the Committee's coordination functions were limited to applied research projects, and even then only those of an interbranch nature. The implication was that the coordination of theoretical research, no matter what institution was undertaking it, was to be left to the

14

Academy,(27) a supposition in fact formalized by the 1963 reorganization, when the Academy was recognized as the coordinator of fundamental research. Its control of the republican Academies was also restored.(28)

But even the reassertion of the Academy's coordination role would have done little to please the theoreticians. They were sceptical that such coordination, certainly if it entailed their subordination to research plans, was desirable, no matter who was responsible for it. However, given that one of the major reasons the reforms went ahead was Khrushchev's dissatisfaction with coordination and planning in the Academy, it is not surprising that the reorganization was accompanied by an increased, not decreased concern with such matters. While there was no great innovation in the area of research planning at the individual or institute level, and it seems probable that institute plans were still essentially the accumulations of the more or less self-determined research projects of individual scientists that they had long been, reminders were given that Academy researchers should not consider that the reorganization in any way freed them from the demands of planning.(29)

It seems probable that the post-reorganization demands on the Academy - that it devote its fundamental research to the needs of the economy and that it seek new or more effective means of planning and coordinating its work - were in fact demands made by the Academy leadership of itself, as a form of defence through attack. The 1961 reorganization suggested a reduced role for the Academy, as reflected in its reduced funding. The response of the Academy leadership, with Keldysh and Topchiev now being its main spokesmen, was to reassert its willingness and ability to play a major role in Soviet science as a whole, not just self-centred theoretical research. Thus its constant belittling of the role of the State Committee, leaving to it the minor R&D coordination that had been taken from the Academy, while the Academy asserted its role in the major long-term research projects that would put it at the centre of research decision-making and resource allocation for years to come. Thus too the Academy's determined efforts to be involved in science through its newly activated scientific councils. These were committees of representatives of all the major institutions involved in the solving of a particular research problem. It was hoped that their problem-oriented nature would allow them to cut across institutional and branch boundaries. Their lack of formal power made this a rather forlorn hope, although in the hands of a particularly forceful, powerful and prestigious chairman they could have a role to play. Certainly the Academy leadership seemed to take them up with enthusiasm, as a way of ensuring Academy involvement in the major research problems of the time. It set up its own councils in all major areas of research.(30) Despite the explanation in the Academy's journal of the differences between Academy and State Committee councils, using energy as an example,(31) it seems probable that there was considerable duplication of effort between the councils of the

15

Academy and those of the State Committee.(32) Stress was also laid on the fact that members of the Academy chaired even the non-Academy councils.(33)

The Academy's campaign to boost its role, presumably helped by the inability of the State Committee and particularly its republican branches to do the job, bore fruit in 1963 when, as we have seen, the Academy took a giant step toward reestablishing its dominant place in Soviet science.

This was done, however, without President Nesmeianov. There is some mystery about his departure in May 1961. An extraordinary meeting of the Academy was called for 19 May 1961, at which Nesmeianov announced that his ten year term as president had expired in February 1961. Consequently he asked to be relieved of his post and suggested that Mstislav Keldysh be elected in his place. His request and suggestion were both accepted unanimously.(34) However, while it is true that Nesmeianov was originally elected president in February 1951, he was elected for a five year term. On 30 October 1956 he was elected for another five year term.(35) Thus, rather than his ten year term expiring in February in fact a five year term expired in October. Perhaps the five month gap between May and October is not particularly significant, but it does seem odd that an extraodinary meeting should be needed in May to do what could have been done in the regular way at the usual General Meeeting in November, or if we accept Nesmeianov's reasoning, had not been done at the usual General Meeting in February. We have no way of knowing whether he intended resigning in November. There was no age or health reason for doing so - he was still only sixty-one years old and continued his research career for many years thereafter with apparent energy and enthusiasm. But the fact that Keldysh had been elected a vice-president of the Academy the year before could be a sign that he was already being groomed for the position.

Khrushchev's version is that Nesmeianov offered his resignation after being criticized in the Council of Ministers, with the resignation eventually being accepted. Khrushchev did not state at what session of the Council of Ministers the criticism was made or what the subject of it was.(36) But the proximity of the election,19 May, to the Academy reorganization, 3 April, and establishment of the State Committee, 8 April, makes it probable that Nesmeianov's departure was connected with the previous month's changes, whether it was his protest against Khrushchev's reorganization, as P. P. Gill suggests,(37) or Khrushchev's exasperation with Nesmeianov.

For all the reasons already discussed, Nesmeianov had little reason to be pleased with the reorganization. It was a reflection on the Academy as it had operated under his command, and as Gill says, 'while Nesmeyanov succeeded in freeing the Academy of most of the specialized research institutes formerly under its control , he did so only at the cost of the loss of much power to Rudnev's committee, and

16

without achieving his main aim, which was to reestablish the priority of "pure research"'.(38) There seems little doubt that Nesmeianov's departure was connected with more than the expiry of his term, and it can be taken as a further sign that the 1961 reorganization was a defeat for the Academy reformers.(39 )

Khrushchev states that Nesmeianov himself suggested Keldysh as president. Keldysh had been on the Academy's presidium since 1953 and vice-president for the last year, so although Keldysh was not an Academy researcher the two men would have known each other well. Nevertheless, they appear to have had very little in common, and there would be no reason to believe Khrushchev, exept that at the election meeting Nesmeianov said:

In the years of working with him in the presidium of the Academy, I became convinced and further strengthened in my long-standing conviction that M.V. Keldysh was an excellent candidate for the post of president. (40 )

There was no need in the circumstances to describe his conviction as long-standing, and we might be justified in taking his words at face value.

However it can hardly be said that Keldysh followed in Nesmeianov's footsteps, either in his scientific career or his leadership of the Academy. Nesmeianov was very much a typical academic scientist. He did his undergraduate degree in the chemistry faculty of Moscow State University, graduating in 1922, and remained there until 1951, working his way through the hierarchy to become in 1947 rector of the university.(41) In 1951 he left the university to become president of the Academy.(42) He was a theoretical chemist and synthesist, being the leading researcher in the Soviet Union and indeed the world in such fields as metalloorganic chemistry, elementary compounds, the mechanisms of chemical reactions, the link between the structure and reactivity of organic compounds, the theory of organic synthesis and stereochemistry. While his biographers are no doubt correct in claiming that 'his work laid the theoretical foundations for the manufacture of new products essential for the national economy'(43), the 'essential product' for which he is best known is synthetic caviar.(44) Not unusually among Soviet scientists, he was an administrator of considerable experience and ability. But he was essentially a theoretical scientist, described by Lowenhardt as owing his loyalty more to science than the party and the demands of the economy.(45) The effect this had on his view of how the Academy of Sciences should work can be seen in his championing of the reform movement during the 1950s.

About the only thing he had in common with Keldysh is that they were both graduates of Moscow State University. But Keldysh went straight from studying mathematics there to the highly prestigious

17

Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), where he applied his enormous mathematical talents to the solution of such major aerodynamic problems of the day as 'flutter' and 'shimmy'. His talents in finding mathematical shortcuts for the most complex mechanical and design problems were then successively applied to each of the main areas of Soviet research. In 1943, when Soviet development of the atomic bomb began in earnest, Keldysh left TsAGI and began work on the combination of mechanics and physics needed to design an effective bomb. It was at this time that he began to work for the development of Soviet computing science, as the calculations and modelling required became too much even for someone of his intellectual brilliance. Although not directly involved in computer research, he was such a major user of computer techniques that he had a great influence on the development of the computer sciences in the Soviet Union. He directed this work primarily from the Steklov Mathematics Institute and the Academy's Institute of Applied Mathematics, the director of which he became in 1953.

He worked primarily on nuclear energy, for military and peaceful uses, until the mid-1950s, when he turned his attention back to aerodynamics and aeromechanics, but this time in the space and missile programmes. While he could still prove his worth in helping to solve practical design problems,(46) he was now as much an organiser as a researcher. He was the chief coordinator of all the research institutes and design bureaus involved in the Soviet space programme.

While he was known as the Chief Theoretician of the programme (S.P. Korolev was the Chief Designer), his was the theory of applied mathematics, not pure mathematics, and even his most abstruse mathematical work (a doctoral dissertation on 'The representation of complex variable functions and harmonics as polynomial series' and such works as 'The theory of complex variable functions' and 'The theory of partially derived equations') always had practical applications.(47)

One wonders why a man of such talents and experience was brought in as Academy president in May 1951. It must have been a sign that the Academy was expected to maintain a close involvement in applied research and technical development. At his election Petr Fedoseev, an ideologist and vice-president of the Academy, remarked that Keldysh was well placed to link the Academy's research to production.(48) His commitment to R&D in the Academy was most clearly expressed in his early support for the doomed Department of Technical Sciences. At his election the engineer academician A.Iu. Ishlinsky noted pointedly that Keldysh had originally been elected to the Academy by the Department of Technical Sciences.(49) Keldysh presumably retained some loyalty to it, because on many occasions he reiterated his belief that the Department should be retained and indeed strengthened. In his election acceptance speech he stated that 'in strengthening the link between science and industry the role of the Department of Technical Sciences will become even greater'.(50) At the General Meeting in

18

November 1961 he declared that the abolition of the Department, as spoken of by some, was undesirable. He saw the Department as having a big role as a forum for the linking of the natural and technical sciences, and in preparing recommendations for the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research. He considered that the Department needed some more institutes of a general technical profile in addition to the three left to it after the reorganization.(51) By February 1962 he seems to have had some slight success since by then what had previously been a Laboratory for Information Transferral Systems was now described as an Institute. But Keldysh wanted more, in the fields of mechanics, heat physics, automatic control systems (avtomatika) and cybernetics.(52) In the Academy elections of that year six of the 13 new academicians were elected to the Department of Technical Sciences, and at the election meeting Keldysh again called for an increase in the number of the Department's institutes. By now he recognised that the increase could not be brought about immediately, but stated his determination to hold strongly to that course.(53) Keldysh apparently saw the Department as part of a strategy to reestablish the Academy's involvement in major research development, which necessarily meant a major engineering element, and to give the State Committee as little room for manoeuvre as possible - thus his view that the Department of Technical Sciences should be able to make recommendations to the State Committee.(54) In 1963, however, the Department was abolished, although in one of those cases, for Keldysh, of losing the battle but winning the war.

However, the general consensus is that Keldysh's election was not so much to do with his attitude to pure and applied research or the natural versus technical sciences, but rather his organizational capabilities. Nicholas DeWitt wrote in June 1961:

Keldysh's appointment to the Presidency was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that in addition to his scientific competence he had had wide organizational experience with the large-scale research and development effort outside the Academy. It is this research-management experience which is needed in the institutional reorganization and streamlining of the Academy's research functions that are presently underway.(55)

Greenberg expresses a similar opinion:

The Academy's party group seemed to prefer Keldysh for the Presidency because of his experience and his wide ranging competence in several scientific and technical fields. (56)

Soviet sources do not disagree. Nesmeianov described him at his election as a 'wonderful organizer',(57) and other academician colleagues write that his election and fourteen years as president

19

were 'not only a recognition of the personal qualities of M.V. Keldysh and his very great authority as a scientist, but above all a recognition of the talent of an organizer, the recognition of his methods of leadership and the significance of the results which have been achieved by their use'.(58)

One of his organizational capabilities was the ability to stretch resources a long way. Too little is known of the funding of the Soviet space programme to know if such an approach was needed there. But he came to the presidency of the Academy at a time when there appeared to be strict ceilings on expenditure and expansion. After an initial enthusiasm for expansion, unsuccessful in the case of the Department of Technical Sciences, successful in the case of the 'science cities' around Moscow, he became remarkably stingy. Keldysh regularly expressed his dissatisfaction with academics demanding new institutes and facilities. He was particularly hard on astronomers,(59) but even the engineers came to earn his displeasure.(60)

The Dorofeevs write at some length in their syrupy style about his admirable trebovatel'nost' (demandingness) and ability to reduce lesser mortals to shuddering wrecks.(61) A reading of the reports of general meetings of the Academy and the meetings of its presidium quickly show that he was indeed a stern chairman. (62 ) Combined with a decision making style that allowed it to be said:

Why waste time on arguments and the exchange of opinions, when everything is clear and the question can be resolved in a business like way,(63)

it is not surprising that, as Khrushchev reports, Keldysh was not popular with some scientists.(64)

The full significance of Keldysh's style and policies will become more evident as this paper proceeds. But it would appear that he was brought in to the Academy as a relative outsider(65) with a stern approach to science management. He had sufficient background in theoretical science to understand and respect its importance within the Academy, but was hardly likely to let such research proceed free of the discipline of financial control and practical demands. Despite the Academy's loss of status immediately before his accession to power he appeared to come to the post with a brief or the personal belief that his role was to reestablish the Academy as the preeminent science body of the Soviet Union.

By 1963 the Academy was already taking on the sort of appearance he might have wanted. It had reestablished its right to coordinate basic research, within and outside its own institutions, and it was well placed to play a major role in the most important scientific developments of the future. The 1961 reorganization had had an enormous effect on the Academy, one which continues to this day. It

20

was freed of the burdens of minor industrial R&D, and theoretical research was established as a legitimate activity about which there was no need to be ashamed. However it was also established in 1961 that science was going to be the major source of future development in the Soviet Union, that that science would have to be planned and coordinated, and that the Academy would have to involve itself in that planning and coordination system if it were to be a relevant factor. These latter two elements continue to be controversial to this day, and a continuing source of tension within the Academy and in its relations with the nation's leadership and other scientific and economic organizations. Indeed, the main theme of the rest of the paper will be the continuing dispute over the role of applied versus theoretical science in the Academy, and the place of the Academy in the planning and coordination of the Soviet research effort.

FOOTNOTES

1 The best example of such an approach to the reorganizations isfound in J. Lowenhardt: Decision Making in Soviet Politics,Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1981.

2 On the debate, see Lowenhardt, ibid; L.L. Greenberg:'Policy-making in the USSR Academy of Sciences', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 8, no. 4, October, 1973, pp. 67-80;L.R. Graham: 'Reorganization of the USSR Academy of Sciences’ inP.H. Juviler and H.W. Morton (eds): Soviet Policy-Making, studiesof communism in transition, Pall Mall, London, 1967, pp. 133-161.On the reorganizations, see D.A. Senior: 'The organisation ofscientific research', Survey, No.52, July 1964, pp. 19-35;J.D. Swanson: 'Reorganisation: 1963', Survey, No.52, July 1964,pp. 36-40; N. DeWitt: 'Reorganization of science and research inthe USSR', Science, vol. 133, no. 3469, 23 June 1961, pp. 1981-1991. See also R.R. Gill: 'Decision-making in Soviet science policy', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4, April 1968, pp. 15-19; N. DeWitt: 'Soviet science: the institutionaldebate', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 16, no. 6, 1960,pp. 208-211.

3 They also suggest that he was as willing in this area as any other to develop enthusiasms for particular scientists who were then pushed as the panacea for all problems. Lysenko is the best-known case, but see his memoirs for his championing of the ideas of Mikhailov on prefabricated reinforced concrete. Khrushchev Remembers. The last testament, tr. and ed. Strobe Talbot, Deutsch, London, 1974, pp. 96-97.

4 For a discussion of the significance of this declaration, seeR.F. Miller: 'Soviet policy on science and technology andEast-West relations', World Review, vol. 19, no. 2, June 1980, p. 65; Lowenhardt, op.cit., pp. 180-182.

5 R.F. Miller: 'Khrushchevism and the Soviet economy: management byre-organization', paper presented to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association, Australian National University, Canberra, 1981, p. 5. This paper provides an excellent outline of Khrushchev's attitudes towards science and scientists.

6 Khrushchev Remembers. The last testament, op.cit., pp. 58-71. Forsome examples of Khrushchev's rough handling of researchers who in his opinion were contributing too little of immediate practical benefit, specifically the theoretical economists in 1956 and agricultural researchers in 1961, see R.F. Miller: 'Thescientific-technical revolution and the Soviet administrative debate' in P. Cocks, R.V. Daniels and N.W. Heer (eds): TheDynamics of Soviet Politics, Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1976, p. 144.

22

7 For an account of this incident, see Z.A. Medvedev: The Rise andFall of T.D. Lysenko, Columbia U.P., N.Y. and London, 1969,pp. 214-218.

8 Z.A. Medvedev: Soviet Science, Oxford U.P., London, 1979, p. 71.

9 Plenum TsK KPSS. 24-29 iiunia 1959 goda. Stenografichesky otchet, Politizdat, Moscow, 1959, p. 466.

10 Pravda, 15 February 1956, p. 8.

11 Plenum TsK KPSS. 24-29 iiunia 1959 goda, op cit., pp. 465-466.

12 Lowenhardt, op.cit., pp. 137-138. Greenberg's argument thatKhrushchev also had in mind to curb the power of the defence scientists in the Academy by bringing their institutes under the control of the regionally organized sovnarkhozy and thus nearer the control of the party apparatus, is plausible. Khrushchev was later to show himself willing to take on the military, and such members of the military establishment as Blagonravov did suffer from the reorganization. Greenberg, 1973, op.cit., pp. 76-77. It should be pointed out that most Western commentators on the reorganization have failed to differentiate the very different views that existed in the 'engineering' faction. While someone like Chinakal was always prepared to push applied research, with claims that an overemphasis on theoretical research was a danger to the technological development of the country, Blagonravov, although an 'engineer', was far more concerned to concentrate the Academy's activities on theoretical research. Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR (VAN), 4/60, pp. 92-96; 3/61, p. 43. Many saw it as a danger ofthe 1961 reorganization that even theoretical research in the technical sciences would be conducted outside the Academy. VAN, 9/61, p. 110; Pravda, 20 November 1962, p. 3; 26 November 1962,pp. 2-3.

13 Topchiev, the Academy's chief scientific secretary, had said in 1956 that it should not be thought that the Academy would always be in the best position to coordinate branch and university research, even if it usually would be. VAN, 3/56, p. 35. But even this qualified admission of Academy inadequacies was not to be repeated. See the Armenian newspaper Kommunist of 1 October 1961 for an example of the establishment of a republican State Committee.

14 Medvedev, 1979, op.cit., p. 73.

15 VAN 8/61, pp. 19-20.

16 One suspects that in fact the Academy retained effective control of its filials. An article by P.I. Abroskin, the chairman of the RSFSR State Committee, suggests considerable reliance on the Academy. VAN, 5/62, pp. 60-64. Keldysh provides a postmortem on

23

the republican State Committees in VAN, 6/63, p. 12. See also Ambartsumian in Izvestiia, 16 December 1962, p. 2. For examples of other highly critical articles, see Kazakhstanskaia pravda,17 March 1963, pp. 1,4; Bakinsky rabochy, 6 October 1964, pp. 2-3.

17 Blagonravov reported at the 1962 Annual General Meeting of the Department of Technical Sciences that discussions were continuing on the precise situation of the Department and its primary tasks. VAN, 4/62, p. 70.

18 Korol describes the reactions of the scientists to the reorganization of 1961 as cautious, and full of expressions of hope that solutions will be found sometime in the future for continuing problems. A.G. Korol; Soviet Research and Development. Its organization, personnel and funds, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, p. 35.

19 Lowenhardt, op.cit., pp. 179-180. Nesmeianov hinted that cuts werecoming at the 1959 Annual General Meeting when he stated: 'In thepast, right up to very recent times, we have devoted great effort to the quantitative growth of the Academy, the development of its strengths and the corresponding fulfilment of its material needs. That concern will continue in the future. But now, when the Academy has grown so large, the main task is to sharply increase the returns to the country from science'. VAN, 4/59, p. 9. A policy was established not to open any more institutes in Moscow, and the difficulties Keldysh had in getting the 'science cities’ built outside Moscow and Lavrent'ev in having another Akademgorodok in the Far East indicate a general shortage of funds. VAN, 8/62, p. 9; 6/63, p. 12; Khrushchev Remembers. The last testament,op.cit., p. 63. Khrushchev made it clear at the November 1962 Central Committee plenum that he wanted no new institutes in the Academy network. VAN, 12/62, p. 6.

20 Keldysh at the 22nd Party Congress. Pravda, 22 October 1961, p. 4.

21 Pravda, 23 July 1961, p. 1.

22 Pravda, 26 November 1962, pp. 2-3.

23 Pravda, 7 February 1964, p. 1.

24 See A. Korotkov in Izvestiia, 24 November 1961, p. 3.

25 VAN, 4/61, p. 3.

26 It is interesting that neither of the two chairmen of the State Committee, Khrunichev and Rudnev, unlike the chairmen of the later State Committee for Science and Technology, had any links with the Academy. Both came from senior positions in the defence industry.

24

27 See Keldysh at the Conference of Scientific Workers and Topchiev ina later article. VAN, 7/61, pp. 23-24; 8/61, pp. 19-20.

28 Keldysh later claimed that the joint Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree setting out the reorganization was adopted on the initiative of the Academy. VAN, 2/65, p. 45. At the same time the State Committee was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Council of the National Economy from direct subordination to the Council of Ministers. This put it one rung lower on the administrative ladder than the Academy, which had always been under the Council of Ministers. L.L. Greenberg; 'Soviet science policy and the scientific establishment', Survey, vol. 17, no. 4(81), Autumn 1971, pp. 52-53.

29 See A.P. Aleksandrov in VAN, 12/61, pp. 51-52.

30 For a list of Academy councils in the mid-1960s, see Zaleski op.cit., pp. 285-287.

31 VAN, 2/62, pp. 4-5.

32 Compare the above list with that of the State Committee's councils. Zaleski, op.cit., p. 127.

33 For example, VAN, 3/62, p. 10.

34 VAN, 6/61, pp. 3-13.

35 Not without some difficulty. See VAN, 11/56, pp. 3-9.

36 Khrushchev says modestly, considering it was almost certainly he himself who did the criticizing, that the criticism 'was pretty restrained in character', something about which we can be sceptical. Khrushchev Remembers. The last testament, op.cit.,p. 61 .

37 Gill, op.cit., p. 16. See also Lowenhardt, op.cit., p. 169.

38 Gill, op.cit., p. 16.

39 Mark Adams suggests the possibility that Nesmeianov, like Dubinin and Engel'gardt in 1959, was removed from his post for hispro-genetics leanings. But as Adams himself admits, Keldysh also did as much as he could to further genetics research. The explanation seems improbable. M.B. Adams: 'Science, ideology, andstructure' in L.L. Lubrano and S.Gross Solomon (eds): The SocialContext of Soviet Science, Westview, Boulder, 1980, p. 196. He puts his hypothesis in more perspective, and therefore makes it more plausible, in M.B.Adams: 'Biology after Stalin: a casestudy', Survey, vol. 23, no. 1(102), Winter 1977-78, pp. 75-76.

25

40 VAN, 6/61, p. 3.41 He was reputedly proud of his role in having the largest of the as

yet unbuilt Stalinist skyscrapers allocated to the university.V. and V. Dorofeev: Vremia, uchenye, sversheniia, Politizdat,Moscow, 1975, pp. 215-216.

42 This was not his introduction to the Academy. In the usual Soviet way, he combined a chair at Moscow University with appointments, first in 1935 as laboratory head and eventually, in 1939, as director of the Academy's Institute of Organic Chemistry. In 1954, when already president, he organized and became director of the Academy's Institute of Elementary Organic Compounds, a post he retained until his death in 1980.

43 VAN, 12/79, p. 126.44 VAN, 6/69, p. 130. More kindly, he had a long interest in the

synthesis and preparation for human consumption of protein. For a recent article on artificial food, see Pravda, 2 June 1982, p. 6. The article suggests that the programme has struck medical and financial problems. John Turkevich stresses Nesmeianov's theoretical achievements and puts their practical benefit in perspective by describing their application to the development of combustion engine anti-knock additives and agricultural insecticides and fungicides. J. Turkevich: 'Chemistry. TowardsBolshaya Khimiya', Survey, No. 52, July 1964, p. 86.

45 Lowenhardt, op.cit., p. 135.46 Dorofeev, op.cit., p. 229.47 For biographical details on Keldysh, see ibid, pp. 226-235; VAN,

2/71, pp. 74-79; 2/81, pp. 41-62; 10/81, pp. 104-115; Nauka vSSSR, 1/80, pp. 33-47; and his obituary in VAN, 8/78, pp. 39-45.

48 VAN, 6/61, p. 9.49 VAN, 6/61, p. 9.50 VAN, 6/61, p. 13.51 VAN, 12/61, pp». 1352 VAN, 3/62, p. 7.53 VAN, 8/62, pp. 8-9

26

54 Plus his expression of the importance of having academician members of the Department chairing the State Committee's scientific councils. VAN, 12/61, pp. 15-16. See also Topchiev, in VAN, 3/62,p. 10.

55 DeWitt, 1961, op.cit., p. 1988.

56 Greenberg, 1973, op.cit., p. 77.

57 VAN, 6/61, p. 3.

58 Nauka v SSSR, 1/80, p. 44.

59 For example, VAN, 4/64, p. 82.

60 VAN, 5/68, pp. 39-40.

61 Dorofeev, op.cit., pp. 233-234.

62 For example, at the presidium's examination of the work of the Department of General and Applied Physics in 1964. VAN, 2/65, pp. 3-46.

63 Dorofeev, op.cit., pp. 233-234.

64 Khrushchev defends him with the words: 'To my mind, if certainindividuals are expressing their momentary displeasure with him, it probably means Comrade Keldysh has run the Academy with a firm hand'. Khrushchev Remembers. The last testament, op.cit., p. 61.

65 He had been elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 1943 and full member in 1946, at the precocious age of 35. He had been the director of an Academy institute and a member of the presidium since 1953. But the major achievements of his career were made outside the Academy.

27

CHAPTER TWO

The Keldysh Years

The last year and a half of Khrushchev's rule, from the April 1963 reorganization to October 1964, was a time of relative peace for the Academy of Sciences. The shuffling around of institutes was virtually complete by the end of 1963, and indeed from then the number of institutes in the Academy began to increase, at first slowly but eventually at a quickening pace. The Academy's role in the control of theoretical science was guaranteed, it had regained its control of the republican Academies, and it was in by no means a weak position vis-a-vis the State Committee for Coordination.

Indeed during 1964 the State Committee found itself subject to considerable pressure. At the February 1964 Central Committee plenum Khrushchev declared that the Soviet Union needed a new organization which would concern itself with major scientific and economic problems, which can be taken as little else but criticism of the State Committee.(1) A number of senior scientists, including Nikolai Chinakal, the engineer who had been one of the strongest opponents of the 1961 reorganization, took up Khrushchev's suggestion and developed it. Chinakal, in an article co-authored by Anatoly Rzhanov, a semi-conductor physicist, stated that although it might seem that there were enough science coordinating bodies, Khrushchev's proposal nevertheless deserved support. He wanted a sort of Supreme Council of science, made up of 50 to 75 members, who would be senior researchers, industrial executives and party leaders. Although it should be as unbureaucratic an organization as possible, the council should have executive powers to direct research in the required directions. He saw the council as working like the General Staff of an army.(2) The chemist Valentin Kargin clearly had a similar organization in mind.His would be made up of senior researchers and would be concerned with the planning of major research projects, would have the financial powers which according to him were so incompetently exercised by the Ministry of Finance, and would have the right to 'interfere in the every-day life of scientific institutions and people', including changing research plans and closing down unproductive laboratories and institutes.(3)

While such an organization could only replace or compete with the State Committee, the proposals were not intended as encouragement for the Academy. Chinakal by this stage presumably had a low opinion of the Academy, and his reference to the General Staff could well have been a deliberate slight. The Academy has always been described as the 'staff headquarters of Soviet science', a title which Chinakal was perhaps suggesting the Academy no longer deserved. Both his and Kargin's articles were published in Izvestiia, while Khrushchev's proposal received no mention in Vestnik Akademii nauk, an indication

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that little was thought of it within the Academy. Except for Khrushchev's angry suggestion that the Academy be transformed into a 'committee on science' following the rejection of Nuzhdin for Academy membership in June 1964,(4) nothing more was heard of any such proposal, and no further reorganization of Soviet science occurred under Khrushchev.

The new party leadership that came to power in October 1964 began its rule with a characteristically cautious approach to economic matters. It was not tin til September 1965 that the sovnarkhoz system was abolished and replaced by the traditional ministerial system. At the same time relatively radical measures, at least in conception if not in application, for the decentralization of economic management were introduced. The full reestablishment of the branch ministerial system had the effect of rendering the branch R&D system more powerful institutionally, in that once again branch research and production facilities were combined in an organization more powerful than either the old state committees or sovnarkhozy.(5 ) However one would also expect that as a result of the change the demands made on branch research to devote its attention to immediate production needs would increase. There is no strong evidence that the state committees had entirely avoided the traditional Soviet R&D shortcoming of devoting research capacity to the solving of minor production-line problems and actual production itself. But the resubordination of research institutes to the ministries responsible for the fulfilment above all of short-term production plans could only accentuate the tendency.The consequent failure of the branch institutes to undertake applied research of a more serious and long-term nature would produce a vacuum into which the Academy was likely to find itself pulled.

Late 1964 had seen one of those occasional public flare-ups of the perennial debate over fundamental versus applied research. This debate, on the occasion of the presidium's examination of the work of the Department of General and Applied Physics, was a particularly bitter one.(6) Lev Artsimovich, the academician secretary of the Department, started off on the wrong foot by demanding more money for astronomy and criticizing the semi-conductor research being done in the Academy. Keldysh had on many occasions expressed his impatience with the endless demands for more money from the astronomers,(7) and he did not waste the opportunity on this occasion. He disagreed that astronomy was the most important branch of the physics of the future, putting his money instead on the physics of the micro-world; he caricatured the approach of the experimental astronomers as wanting to do exactly as they did in the West but on a slightly larger scale; and in his summing-up speech at the end of the session he again attacked the astronomers for endlessly demanding more money after their allocations had already been finalized.(8)

However the substance of Artsimovich's speech was more than a demand for more money for telescopes. He recalled the debate of the 1950s by attacking the applied orientation of the Academy and

29

demanding more institute freedom. He was of the opinion that the reorganization of the Academy in 1961 and 1963 had in fact increased the attention paid to applied research. He stated:

It is very important that we organize our work so that in any area we maintain highly qualified research workers who could whenever necessary quickly raise the level of Soviet science (as used to happen previously).For this it is essential that primacy be given to fundamental research, and not to narrow 'production'(vnedrencheskie) projects. This must be one of the principles of the Academy, one which we must protect.

But the most heated discussions in the presidium usually concern questions of the technical applications of science. The attention given to these questions has increased sharply since the reorganization of the Academy. One gets the feeling that in abolishing the Department of Technical Sciences we have turned the whole Academy into a Department of Technical Sciences.

He could see no reason why the Academy should be concerned with telling industry what scientific discoveries and developments should be put into production, and particularly why the Academy should be required to do the minor problem-solving work needed to get them into production. He concluded his opening speech by declaring that since the reorganization the Academy had quickly changed from being a consultative body to being a 'Ministry of Science'.

The speech aroused great interest in the Academy and was followed by two days of discussion. On the whole the participants in the discussion did not disagree with Artsimovich's characterization of the industrial role of the Academy, but only with his evaluation of this as a bad thing. It is interesting that one of those who spoke against Artsimovich was Nikolai Semenov, who claimed that the purpose of the reorganization was to bring theoretical physics and chemistry closer to the technical disciplines. That is a rather different emphasis from that with which he is credited before the 1961 reorganization.(9 ) Artsimovich's strongest critic was A.P. Aleksandrov, the future president of the Academy and at this stage the director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy (a non-Academy institute), who declared he wanted to be publicly disassociated from Artsimovich's speech, and introduced a rather nasty tone by reminding the audience that the pseudo-sciences that had appeared in the Soviet Union in the past had arisen from the separation of theoretical research and the needs of the economy (surely, as a criticism of the theoretician Artsimovich, a perverse interpretation of the origins of Lysenkoism). But the most detailed criticism was left to Keldysh. He agreed that long-term theoretical research was the main function of the Academy, but declared that it could not be restricted to pure theory. He stated that if everything was left to branch research the

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technological development of the country would lag. He stressed the Academy's role in showing industrial managers the latest areas of scientific advance, and cited American experience as demonstrating the value of combining theoretical and applied research. He was more defensive over the preponderance of technical subjects in the presidium, claiming that if this was so, it was the fault of the departments for putting such matters on the agenda. Similarly, it was not the presidium that concerned itself with minor research, but the departments.

Keldysh concluded by saying that virtually all the participants in the discussion had opposed Artsimovich's point of view, and, like Aleksandrov, introduced a slightly ominous tone by announcing that nevertheless the fact that all disagreed with Artsimovich would not be recorded in the presidium's final resolution. In fact the resolution was very short and bland, essentially finding the performance of the department satisfactory, although directing it to work more to increase its role in technical development and the application of research to production. In general the debate indicated the seriousness with which the Academy's senior management looked on any attempt to devalue or criticize its role in applied research. The discussion suggested that this role had not been substantially reduced by the reorganization and that this suited the Academy's leadership very well. At the time the Academy's management clearly expected a role for the Academy in determining the future direction of applied research and technical progress, but without being made responsible for carrying out the detailed engineering R&D. Both Keldysh and Sisakian (chief scientific secretary of the Academy at the time) on many occasions stated the importance of the Academy showing the branch ministries the way forward,(10) but without suggesting that anyone but the ministries should be responsible for the work involved.Artsimovich attacked this role in the 1964 debate, claiming that the branch ministries were perfectly capable of deciding what R&D to undertake themselves, a view strongly criticized by Keldysh.

The role of the Academy in determining the future directions of technological progress had little legislative basis. However the Academy had been described by Central Committee decree as the coordinator of theoretical research, while the weaknesses of the State Committee for Coordination left a vacuum that the Academy presumably hoped to fill. But the government was clearly not confident of the Academy's capacity to do so, since in 1965 it established a new threat to its authority.

In October 1965, as part of the industrial reorganization called for by the September 1965 Central Committee plenum, the old State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research Work was replaced by a new State Committee for Science and Technology.(11) One Western commentator has suggested that the dropping of the word 'coordination' from the State Committee's title suggested a reduction in its role.(12) However the general Western view has been that the

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new State Committee was intended to be more powerful than both its predecessor and the Academy of Sciences.(13) Its direct subordination to the Council of Ministers and the designation of its chairman as a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and his election to full membership of the party's Central Committee certainly suggest the intention to give it considerable administrative clout. K.T. Mazurov in his speech opening the meeting of the Supreme Soviet which voted the industrial reorganization into law interprets the removal of the word 'coordination' differently from Gill:

It is well known that today science plays a major role in the development of productive forces. It is now impossible to concern ourselves solely with the coordination of scientific research. It is essential not only to coordinate but also to direct (napravliat') scientific research, to choose the most valuable scientific discoveries for use in production.(14)

This was to be the task of the new State Committee. However as set out in the Law passed by the Supreme Soviet, the committee's tasks were relatively modest:

Article 8. To reorganize the USSR State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research work as the All-Union State Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers for Science and Technology, entrusting it with the preparation together with the USSR Academy of Sciences of suggestions on the basic directions for the development of science and technology in the country, the organization of the development of interbranch scientific and technical problems, the provision of scientific and technical information, the control of the application of the achievements of science and technology in the national economy, as well as establishing links with foreign countries on questions of scientific and technical cooperation.(15)

Its first chairman, V.A. Kirillin, in a December 1965 Pravda article described the State Committee's tasks in the same terms as the Law.(16) Like its predecessor it was expected to work with the Academy of Sciences in determining science policy; its direct organizational responsibilities were limited to interbranch projects; and the accent of its tasks was on applied research and vnedrenie. Despite various changes in emphasis, particularly the increasing importance of interbranch scientific planning and organization, these limits to the State Committee's responsibilities have not changed - which is not to deny their very considerable importance. However, the State Committee was not described then or later as the overall coordinator of all research in the Soviet Union. That is, it has never been presented as the country's supreme scientific organization.

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Kirillin's article made no mention of powers to back up these tasks. However over the years the State Committee has built up a formidable collection of powers. It is directly involved in the drawing 15) of long-term scientific plans and programmes, and in determining priority projects. Its responsibility for interbranch research means that it has executive authority in cases of jurisdictional conflict between ministries, while State Committee approval has to be obtained for any cooperation in technological matters across branch boundaries.(17) It has its own scientific councils for major areas of applied research, as well as supervisory powers over all scientific councils.(18) Finally, it has a reserve fund of about two to three per cent of the science budget which it is free to allocate for specific projects as it thinks fit and regardless of the administrative subordination of the research institutions involved (it also has the power to withdraw this funding from projects not living up to their original promise).(19)

However there have always been some inherent weaknesses in the power of the State Committee for Science and Technology. Firstly, none of its plans, whether long term or interbranch, are necessarily part of the all important and obligatory state production plans. Its long-term plans are to be submitted to the Council of Ministers in good time for the first stages to be included in the next Five Year Plan, but without instructions from higher authorities neither Gosplan nor ministries are obliged to include these or any part of these long-term programmes in their production plans. While the ministries' science and technology plans are vetted by the State Committee, these plans are separate from and in practice less important than production plans. While the State Committee has its own scientific councils, these councils are purely consultative bodies with no binding and administrative authority. In fact the State Committee has very limited research and production capacity of its own.(20) Thus the State Committee relies on other organizations to do the work for which it is responsible, but without any powers of obligation over those organizations. Of course, the funds it has at its disposal will help here - it is usually easier to buy cooperation than to demand it. However two to three per cent of the science budget will not always be enough to buy the powerful and well endowed industrial ministries.

The State Committee is not even very well off in terms of the resources to fulfil its staff functions. Loren Graham states that it has a staff of about 600 people,(21) puny by Soviet standards of bureaucratic inflation. There is no reason to doubt the competence of the staff,(22) but they hardly have the scientific prestige of many of the research leaders over whom they are are supposed to be exercising some sort of control. In fact it appears that outsiders, influential academicians and other scientific executives, as well as sitting on an advisory board to advise the decision-making collegium and being coopted as the chairmen and members of its scientific councils, also provide a lot of informal and consultative input to its work.

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V.P. Rassokhin criticizes the branch structure of the State Committee. With a small number of staff in departments mirroring the branch ministerial network, it is inevitable that the State Committee's departments often defend, rather than control, the interests of the ministries for which they are responsible. Rassokhin considers that the State Committee should be organized on a project basis, so that a particular department will be responsible for technological development in one area which might cover a number of ministries.(23)

Finally, the State Committee has no union republic network. This leaves the door wide open for republican Gosplans to assume a large role in science coordination at the republican level. Such documents as the 1976 joint decree of the Belorussian Central Committee and Council of Ministers on science planning make no mention of the State Committee and give all the powers one would expect it to have to the republican Gosplan.(24)

Thus the State Committee is far from all-powerful. Nevertheless Western commentators suggest that its powers are sufficient to irritate the Academy of Sciences and even to relegate the Academy to a relatively minor role.(25) It seems to this author not only that such a view is incorrect in that it underestimates the continuing power of the Academy,(26) but also in that it puts the emphasis on competition and conflict between the Academy and the State Committee, when in fact a case could be made that their relations are characterized more by cooperation and alliance.

As a first sign of this there are the links of the two chairmen of the State Committee since its formation in 1965 with the Academy. Most of the chairmen of the various predecessors to the State Committee were senior administrators from the armaments and nuclear energy industries. For example, the first chairman of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research Work, Mikhail Khrunichev, was a specialist in industrial management who had been a senior bureaucrat in the armaments, aircraft and nuclear power industries. During the late 1950s he had held senior economic management posts as deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, deputy head of the State Economic Commission, and deputy chairman of Gosplan. His successor, Konstanin Rudnev, was also from the defence industry. He was a mechanical engineer by training who had worked his way up from engineering jobs in defence factories to eventually become in 1958 the first chairman of the State Committee on Armaments Engineering. Neither of them were members of or had ever studied or worked in the Academy.

The first chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology, V.A. Kirillin, was not exactly a life-long member of the Academy establishment. He had begun work in 1929 as a fitter, but then got into the Moscow Energy Institute as a research assistant and graduate student. After military service he had a mixed

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research-teaching-party career until his appointment in 1954 as deputy Minister of Higher Education. In 1955 he was appointed head of the Science Department of the Central Committee. However, he combined this with a post as director of the Academy's High Temperature Laboratory. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 1953, and a full member in 1962. He was a full-time vice president from 1963 to his appointment as State Committee chairman in 1965.While he had been a supporter of the existence of and increased power for the old State Committee for Coordination,(27) there is no record of his opposition to a major role for the Academy. Since his removal from power he has been treated very kindly by the Academy. In a recent speech vice-president Kotel'nikov, in describing the work of various past editors of Vestnik Akademii nauk, singled Kirillin out for mention as still being an active member of the editorial board, while he was chosen to write an article for that journal on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the birth of Mstislav Keldysh.(28)

His successor, Gury Marchuk, is even more a case of cooption from the Academy. He is an applied mathematician who went to Siberia in 1963 as the director of the computing centre of the Siberian department of the Academy. He then became deputy to the chairman of the Siberian department, Mikhail Lavrent'ev, in 1969 and on Lavrent'ev's retirement in 1975 took over the chairmanship. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 1962 and full member in 1968. Marchuk had been an enthusiastic supporter and organizer of the 'R&D belt’ around Novosibirsk, involving the Academy directly in applied research and the supervision of branch R&D design institutes.

Both these men not only came from Academy backgrounds, but both had been involved in the championing, in their own different ways, of particular views of the way the Academy should work. Old loyalties can be very quickly forgotten on appointment to a new organization, but there is no reason to believe that either Kirillin or Marchuk would have gone out of his way to set the State Committee up in competition to the Academy.

For the Academy, one of the most powerful reasons for entering a coalition with the State Committee is to get access to the Committee's funds. While the industrial ministries might be rich enough to ignore the State Committee's few per cent of the science budget, the Academy has always done remarkably poorly in budget allocations, with its share of the research budget usually being about four per cent. (29) There is evidence that the Academy welcomes the extra source of funding. In the first few months of the Committee's existence, Keldysh expressed the hope that it would pay close attention to helping provide the 'material base' for research.(30 ) In late 1967 Loren Graham was told that the State Committee is quite important to the institutes of the Academy of Science as a place of appeal for extra research funds.(31)

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Given the difficulty the Academy has in getting its research accepted for development and mass production by branch ministries, the State Committee can be a very useful ally either for getting its research into branch research production plans, or to provide the financing for the Academy to do the development work itself.Conversely, the Academy can provide the scientific resources for the State Committee which might be withheld by the ministries.

It is noticeable that both the Academy and the State Committee reserve their most biting criticism for the branch R&D network. With the Academy claiming that more often than not the ministries see it as a competitor rather than collaborator,(32) and the State Committee finding the narrow interests of the branches almost impossible to overcome, the two would seem to make natural allies. One of the strongest public demands for a greatly increased role for the State Committee was made by V.P. Rassokhin in a book published in 1980 under the editorship of academician V.A. Trapeznikov, the retired first deputy chairman of the State Committee. He demanded the setting up of a 'fourth system' of scientific research in the Soviet Union, in addition to the Academies, universities and branches, under the control of the State Committee. This system must be established on a legal basis, not on the basis of interbranch compromises. Major science policies should be decided by the State Committee, Academy and Gosplan, with overall control of the fulfilment of decisions to be given to the State Committee. The ministries must not be given the right of approval, since they would use this to assert their own interests. Priority projects should be decided by the State Committee and the Academy, who should then be able to issue an obligatory order for the completion of these projects. Finally, the State Committee should have the right to apply penal clauses to any institute found performing poorly by an independent commission, including moving it to a lower classification (which affects pay rates), removing bonuses and imposing fines, and even closing the institute down. (The first to go, the author states, would be the small branchinstitutes.)(33) Despite some demands that would appear to adversely affect the Academy, the Academy was obviously sufficiently pleased by the anti-branch tone of the article that a virtually identical one was published in Vestnik Akademii nauk.(34)

Concrete examples of cooperation can be found. In 1975 D.G. Zhimerin, first deputy chairman of the State Committee, praised the cooperation between the Academy's Department of Economics and the Committee (the relations between the Academy's economists and Gosplan are notoriously poor);(35) the Academy and State Committee have worked together on the biotechnology programme;(36) Bruce Parrott cites the case of the two organizations working out a compromise agreement on greater rights for institute directors which they successfully sponsored as the Council of Ministers decree of March 1967, despite the coolness of the ministries;(37) in 1970 the president of the Kirgiz Academy praised the State Committee for the assistance it provided in the vnedrenie of its research, despite the obstacles put up by the branch ministries.(38)

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It will be noticed that all these examples of cooperation came during Keldysh's presidency of the Academy. After his first year or so as president, when he felt the need to reestablish the Academy's authority, Keldysh did not pursue a particularly expansionist policy. The first chapter told of how up until 1963 he had pushed hard for the strengthening of the Department of Technical Sciences. After his failure there he became loath to push for the expansion of the Academy's institute network, despite pressure from some academicians. He was working in the context of the ending in about 1963-64 of the virtually unlimited funding for science that had been operative since about 1957.(39) The Academy had already begun to feel the chill in 1962, when even with the transfer of so many of its institutes taken into account it still suffered a reduction in the growth of its budgetary allocations. During the 1950s the bulk of the expansion of the science budget in general and the Academy's in particular had gone to expanding the network of institutes and particularly the number of research workers.(40) So in fact at a time of major funding increases the Academy found itself undercapitalized, with expenditure on equipment in particular making up only 9 per cent of total expenditure in 1955.(41) Throughout the 1950s wages were taking an excessive proportion of the Academy's budget, and so when budgetary restrictions became evident a serious attack had to be made on the wages bill.Even after allowing for the reduction in personnel directly related to the 1961 and 1963 reorganizations,(42) there began at that time a further and long-term reduction in the rate of recruitment.(43)

Thus from the end of 1963 we see Keldysh's reluctance to agree to an expansion of the Academy's network. On occasions he agreed that some institutes that had been transferred from the Academy should be returned to it.(44) He agreed with the president of the Armenian Academy in 1965 that some of its transferred institutes, and those in other republics as well, appeared to have been abandoned and their return to the Academies should be considered.(45) He was more cautious in his reply to A.Iu.Ishlinsky's 1971 request that some engineering institutes be returned to the Academy. He did agree that some problems could be adequately solved only in the Academy, and that it might be useful if some of its former engineering institutes were returned to it. However, he warned that one must be careful, that often the ministries presently in charge of these institutes have greater resources than the Academy, and that the Academy should not take on too many functions.(46) The warning is typical of Keldysh's approach, as we can see from his reply to Bruevich in 1968, and his exasperation with the continual demands for the opening of new institutes in the republican Academies and filials.(47)

To some extent he had the same attitude to equipment, that one should make do with what one has. We have already seen his attitude towards astronomy, and he once expressed the same opinion about synchrotrons.(48) However on the whole his time as president was marked by a great increase in expenditure on equipment. The early years in particular saw a strong emphasis on the building and capital

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construction programme and a major campaign for an improvement in instrument-making by and for the Academy. Between 1965 and 1971, while the value of the Academy's general assets doubled, the value of equipment and apparatus obtained in that time increased by 250%.(49) By 1976 22 per cent of the Academy's expenditure went on purchases of equipment.(50)

It seems that Keldysh knew and accepted the financial limits within which he was working, and he was not prepared to expand the Academy's institute network beyond what its finances could bear. He was intolerant of theoretical scientists demanding ever more money for the hardwear of 'big science', but was equally cautious of demands for the opening of new engineering institutes. He was just as cautious about extending the functions of the Academy as expanding its institutes. His speech at the October 1970 presidium meeting on Academy-production links was fairly typical of his view. He declared:

I want to stress above all that the USSR Academy of Sciences is most actively involved in establishing the scientific foundations of technical progress, by means of research in the basic directions of fundamental science...The working out of major scientific problems brings us to new production processes, and then we put before the leading organs, right up to the Council of Ministers, the question of the establishment of new branches of industry.(51)

Keldysh saw the Academy as having a role in the development of major new branches of science, right up to the mass production stage, as can be seen in his acceptance of the need for the Academy to have a better engineering capacity, both in terms of personnel and facilities.(52) However, he insisted that these facilities be used for major development projects, not for the ordinary development of even Academy discoveries, and certainly not for engineering research that the ministries had cast off as being too hard.

Keldysh consistently maintained this attitude throughout his presidency.(53) On the whole, it was an attitude that suited the Soviet leadership, which seemed to be generally satisfied with the Academy's performance. Thus, Kosygin, at the 24th Party Congress, had only very mild criticism to make of the Academy.(54) The Academy General Meeting following the Congress recognised the criticism as justified, but conducted its business in a general atmosphere of satisfaction, and certainly took no radical measures to change the form of Academy involvement in Soviet research.(55) In early 1975 the acting chief scientific secretary Skriabin reported to the Annual General Meeting that a special commission directed to examine the Academy's fulfilment of the demands of the September 1968 joint Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree on improving the effectiveness of research organizations and vnedrenie had found the situation generally satisfactory.(56) While there were dissenting

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voices, some demanding more theoretical science, some more engineering science, there was a general consensus within the Academy on its role, best summed up in Keldysh's speech to the May 1971 General Meeting:

The most important guarantee of the success of the work of the USSR Academy of Sciences is the correct distribution of effort between long-term research into the fundamentals of the construction of the world and questions of social development, on the one hand, and work on the problems of today which are raised by technical progress and economic and social development, on the other hand.(57)

The general feeling was that the correct balance had been found.

One change that took place in 1971 which might have appeared threatening to the Academy leadership was the granting of the right of control to the primary party organizations of the Academy's institutes, along with those of educational, governmental and cultural institutions. Keldysh's reaction to this development seems to have been less than enthusiastic. At the May 1971 General Meeting he could only 'hope' that the new right of control would improve research. The resolution passed by the meeting was slightly more positive, 'considering that the changes to the Party Rules...will play an important role in raising the effectiveness of scientific institutions'.(58)

The change was not directed specifically against the Academy - many other institutions were also affected. To a large extent it was a reflection of larger changes in relationships at the top level of the Soviet leadership, specifically the growing power of Brezhnev and his party apparatus. Nevertheless, the new right of control did register an increase in primary party organizations' activities from about 1967 and signalled a significant further increase dating from 1971. The emphasis above all else on personnel indicates the importance of the need for ideological and political control since the dissident days of the 1960s. However party organizations were also given an increasingly important role in the control of the direction and effectiveness of research itself. While the nature of the Academy primary party organizations is such that they find it difficult to assert their independence of institute management,(59) the new role of the party organizations was something that must have been on the minds of the Academy leadership.

Other Western commentators see further signs of increasing party interference in the affairs of the Academy in this period. Greenberg has stressed the appointment in 1966 of Ia.V. Peive as chief scientific secretary, he having been, in her opinion, less involved in research and the holder of higher party and state posts than his predecessors.(60) As a full member of the All-Union Central Committee (a position he lost at the next election in 1971), a former member of

39

the Latvian Politburo and chairman of the Latvian Council of Ministers, and chairman of the Council of the Chamber of Nationalities of the USSR's Supreme Soviet, the latter is certainly true. However, he was an agronomist with some research to his credit, and he had been rector of the Latvian Agricultural Academy and scientific secretary and president of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, none of his predecessors were exactly leading researchers - the job is essentially an administrative one. But the major difficulty in attaching particular significance to Peive's appointment is the assumption that has to be made that the chief scientific secretary is 'the CPSU's key representative in the Academy system'.(61) This author has made no special investigation of the functions of the chief scientific secretary or of the scientific secretary network in general. Nevertheless, no evidence for such an assumption has ever been presented by Western commentators, including Vucinich, its apparent originator.(62) Both Soviet and emigre sources suggest that the chief scientific secretary has no more than admittedly important secretarial and administrative functions, that he is no closer to the party leadership and apparatus than the Academy's president, and that the scientific secretaries in the departments and institutes are no more than relatively junior scientists doing a purely administrative job.(63) It should further be said about Peive that, like his immediate predecessors Sisakian and Fedorov, but unlike Topchiev, he was never really able to impress his mark on the Academy's affairs.(64)

A further difficulty with the thesis of the political significance of the chief scientific secretary is that Peive's successor, G.K. Skriabin, although appointed at a time of undoubtedly increasing party involvement in science, had no strong party background. Born in 1917, the son of one of the grand old men of Soviet science, the helminthologist K.I. Skriabin, he is a protein biologist.(65) From the mid-1960s he had a meteoric career, being appointed director of the Institute of the Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms in 1967 and director of the scientific centre for biological research in Pushchino in the same year. He was appointed acting chief scientific secretary in 1971. He was made acting secretary because he was still only a corresponding member of the Academy (elected only in 1968), and according to the Academy's statute only a full academician could be secretary. This problem had arisen before - E.K. Fedorov had been acting secretary for a couple of months until his election to full membership of the Academy at the next election, Peive was elected to full membership at a regular election just before his appointment as secretary, while Topchiev was elected at an extraordinary meeting called for just that purpose. (Indeed his was the only election to full membership made between 1946 and 1953). However, with Skriabin something went wrong. He was not elected to full membership at the next election, and indeed he was still a corresponding member and acting secretary in 1977, when drastic action was taken - the Academy Statute was changed to allow a corresponding member to be chief scientific secretary.(66)

40

Chief scientific secretaries tend not to be appointed from among the Academy establishment, and the case of Skriabin suggests that this is something the Academy might resent. Clearly there is room for further study of their role. However there would not seem to be sufficient evidence at this stage to suggest that the secretary is the representative of the party in the Academy leadership, or to attach any particular significance to the appointment of Peive.

J.R. Thomas and U.N. Kruse-Vaucienne see political significance in the deferral of the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Academy, which were due to be held in May 1974. The original excuse given was that there was no time to organize a celebration with the run up to the Supreme Soviet elections of June 1974 coming at the same time. Elections are a regular and mechanical enough feature of Soviet life that the excuse is palpably ridiculous. A new excuse was then provided - the illness of Keldysh. There is no doubt that Keldysh was seriously ill at the time, and it might have seemed undesirable to hold the celebrations with the Academy's president possibly absent.Of course, when the celebrations were eventually held in October 1975 Keldysh had resigned and no new president had been chosen, so an acting president had to officiate anyway.

Thomas and Kruse-Vaucienne characterize the deferral as symbolic of the Academy's subservience to the party, and see two reasons for it. Firstly, the party did not want foreign scientists who would attend the celebrations to be exposed to the 'unresolved organizational and substantive issues within the Academy and between the Academy and other elements of the Soviet system'.(67)Unfortunately they give no clues as to what these unresolved issues were. My reading suggests that this was a period of relative calm in the permanently turbulent Academy, and certainly no less peaceful than the period when the celebrations eventually took place. In fact, to the extent that Keldysh would still have been president if the celebrations had been held as scheduled, whereas when they eventually took place the presidency was vacant with the unseemly jockeying for positions among hopeful candidates which that might imply, the delay would seem to have increased the chances of embarrassing faction fighting in front of foreign guests. Thomas and Kruse-Vaucienne also mention the possibility that the authorities were worried about foreign contacts with dissident scientists, and make the interesting point that the celebrations were held on schedule in provincial centres where foreigners would not be in attendance. It is true that scientist 'refuseniks' had planned to invite Western guests to an unofficial international seminar during the celebration.(68) But the years 1974 and 1975 were a time of great political sensitivity for the Soviet Union - with the negotiations over Soviet-American trade at a sensitive stage and the Helsinki conference in progress - so the period following the postponement was not marked by a crackdown against dissidents.

41

The official history of the Academy devotes many pages to the 250th anniversary, but makes no specific mention of the postponement. It reports without explanation such anomalies as the Academy receiving its Order of Lenin in February 1974, the celebrations in the union republics taking place in May 1974, and the reopening of the display on the Academy at the Exhibition of National Achievements in 1975 after its original showing in early 1974. It refers to the March 1975 decree of the Central Committee which set the eventual date for the celebration of October 1975, and states that 'after the new decree of the Central Committee work on the programme of celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was strengthened'.(69) The impression could be gained from this that preparations simply were not far enough advanced in 1974. Perhaps the illness of Keldysh (and even the death in May 1975 of vice-president Millionshchikov) had lead to an administrative breakdown in the organizing committee. This would fit in with the view of one of the Western guests at the celebration with whom the author has been in contact, that although all went smoothly the celebrations appear to have been organized in a great hurry.

It is a curious episode and one that is not sufficiently explained. The fact that it required Suslov to announce to the Academy that its 'request* that the celebrations be delayed (somewhat after the event, in May 1975) had been approved by the Central Committee,(70) might suggest some element of party pressure.

42

FOOTNOTES

1 Plenum TsK KPSS. 10-15 fevralia 1964 goda. Stenografichesky otchet, Politizdat, Moscow, 1964, p. 461.

2 Izvestiia, 5 April 1964, p. 3.

3 Izvestiia, 15 March 1964, p. 2.

4 Medvedev, 1969, op.cit., pp. 214-218.

5 See the Prayda editorial of 15 October 1965, and the article by E. Unskov in Pravda, 25 November 1965, p. 2.

6 The debate is reported in VAN, 2/65. pp. 3-46.

7 For an earlier example, see VAN, 4/64, p. 82.

8 Keldysh's mood might not have been improved by the fact that his nephew, L.V. Keldysh, is one of the leading Soviet researchers in semi-conductor physics.

9 Artsimovich appears not to have figured in the 1950s debate. He is not listed by Lowenhardt as a member of the theoretical science coalition. Lowenhardt, op.cit., pp. 156-157.

10 For example, Keldysh at the February 1964 General Meeting andSisakian at the February 1965 Annual General Meeting. See also Keldysh writing in Pravda in October 1965. VAN, 3/64, p. 6; 3/65,p. 12; Pravda, 10 October 1965, pp. 2-3.

11 In his keynote speech to the plenum, Kosygin had briefly foreshadowed the change. Pravda, 28 September 1965, p. 4.

12 Gill, op.cit., p. 16.

13 Greenberg, 1971, op.cit., p. 52; L.R. Graham: 'The role of theAcademy of Sciences', Survey, vol. 23, no. 1(102), Winter 1977-78, pp. 118-120, 130; J.R. Thomas and U.M. Kruse-Vaucienne: 'Sovietscience and technology: an introduction', ibid, p. 4.

14 Pravda, 2 October 1965, p. 2.

15 Pravda, 3 October 1965, p. 1. It is interesting that Mazurov did not include the phrase 'together with the USSR Academy of Sciences’ in his speech.

16 Pravda, 31 December 1965, p. 3.

43

17 Something that leads to complaints from some commentators defending the interests of the branch ministries. Pravda, 12 November 1972, p. 2.

18 Greenberg, 1971, op.cit., p. 54.

19 J. Turkevich: 'How science policy is formed', Survey, vol. 23,no. 1(102), Winter 1977-78, p. 97.

20 The CIA lists seven institutes subordinate to the State Committee.Most are involved in the management and information sciences. Only one, the Central Institute for Corrosion and the Protection of Metals, is in the natural or technical sciences. No more details are given, and the institute is not a well-known one. Directory of Soviet Officials. Volume 4: Science and Education, NationalForeign Assessment Center, Washington, D.C., CR80-13202, July 1980, p. 14.

21 Graham, 1977-78, op.cit., p. 119.

22 The 1980 CIA list of staff members shows a fair sprinkling ofgraduate degree holders, including doctors of science. Directory of Soviet Officials, op.cit., pp. 3-16. One must ask how many of these staff are in fact KGB and GRU intelligence officers. Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU agent who worked for British intelligence, was a staff member of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research Work. For his account of the Committee's intelligence work, see O. Penkovsky: The Penkovsky Papers, Avon,N.Y., 1965, pp. 178-199. Although the non-military background of the chairmen of the latest Committee might suggest some change, it seems probable that KGB and GRU influence remains strong. Four of the 31 KGB and GRU officers Penkovsky lists as working in the State Committee for Coordination were still working for its successor in the late 1960s and 1970s. (One of Penkovsky's KGB men had gone on to the Foreign Department of the Academy of Sciences.) Ibid; Directory of Soviet Officials, op.cit.

23 VAN, 11/81, p. 58.

24 Sovetskaia Belorussiia, 25 December 1976, p. 1.

25 Thomas and Kruse-Vaucienne, op.cit., p. 4; Graham, 1977-78, op.cit., p. 130.

26 Even E.I. Skliarov, a deputy chairman of the State Committee, was reluctant to agree with Loren Graham that the Academy had gone into decline as a result of the formation of his committee. Graham, 1977-78, op.cit., p. 130.

27 Izvestiia, 19 December 1963, p. 5. Lowenhardt claims that he had taken an active interest in the 1950s reform debate, and approved

44

of the form of the 1961 reorganization. Lowenhardt, op.cit., pp. 145-147.

28 VAN, 2/81 , pp,. 57-59; 10/81, p. 27.

29 VAN, 9/76, P- 42. See Paton's complaints about Academy funding inVAN, 6/77, P- 65.

30 VAN, 3/66, P- 13.

31 Graham, 1977-78, op.cit., p. 119. For a Soviet reference to suchfunding and a call for more of the same, see VAN, 9/76, pp. 21,32,50.

32 A.P. Aleksandrov was particularly critical of the branch ministries in 1976, when he declared that 'after all, it is no secret that often when the time comes that the results of some work are ready to be put into production, then at that time there appears a rival development from a branch institute, and then each tries to show with every available fact or lie that its work is better. This, of course, hinders the vnedrenie process'. VAN, 5/76, p. 13. For one of the latest examples, see Skriabin at the 1982 Annual General Meeting of the Academy. Prayda, 4 March 1982, p. 2.

33 V.A. Trapeznikov (ed.): Upravlenie razvitiem nauki i tekhniki,'Ekonomika', Moscow, 1980, pp. 58-68.

34 VAN 11/79, pp. 43-53. Rassokhin has repeated these demands more recently, again in the Academy journal. VAN, 11/81, pp. 53-61.For references to similar calls, see Graham, 1977-78, op.cit.,p. 120.

35 VAN, 3/75, p. 7.

36 VAN, 5/75, p. 22.

37 B. Parrott: 'The organizational environment of Soviet appliedresearch' in Lubrano and Solomon, op.cit,, pp. 79-82.

38 Pravda, 18 August 1970, p. 3. The newest deputy chairman of the State Committee, V. Kudinov, is a former researcher and indeed party secretary of the Paton Institute of Electrical Welding, regarded as the paragon of Academy institutes in its integration of theoretical and applied research.

39 R. Hutchings: Soviet Science, Technology, Design. Interaction andconvergence, Oxford U.P., London, 1976, p. 79.

40 Ibid, p. 33.

41 VAN, 3/56, p. 10.

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42 In 1963 the scientific and technical staff of the Academy wasreduced by 5 to 7 per cent, following a 7.2 per cent increase in 1962. VAN, 3/63, p. 23; 7/63, p. 9; 3/64, p. 84.

43 In 1969 Keldysh reported that in recent years the proportion of Academy expenditure on wages had dropped, while the amount spent on each worker had risen. He saw this beneficial state of affairs as justifying the recent policy, of presumably reduced recruitment. VAN, 4/69, p. 15.

44 Some were transferred back very early, for example, the Baikov Institute of Metallurgy in 1965. VAN, 8/67, pp. 10-14. Other requests, for example regarding the Dokuchaev Institute of Soil Science, the Energy Institute and the Institute ofElectromechanics, were not met. VAN, 3/65, p. 107; 3/66, p. 135.

45 VAN, 6/65, p. 26.

46 VAN, 7/71, p. 41.

47 He said to Bruevich, who had suggested a number of new areas ofmachine science that should be studied in the Academy: 'It cannotbe the case that every time the development of science brings forward some problem we must open a new institute in the system of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. We must not take on those problems which should be solved by branch institutes; otherwise, resources will be diverted from the development of fundamental research'. VAN, 5/68, pp. 39-40; 4/75, p. 8.

48 VAN, 5/74, p. 39.

49 Shcherbakov, op.cit., p. 166.

50 VAN, 5/76. p. 39.

51 VAN, 1/71, p. 4.

52 VAN, 3/66, pp. 149-150.

53 It is interesting to speculate how much the illness that dogged Keldysh in the later years of his presidency might have affected his aggressiveness in pushing the interests of the Academy. Presumably fearing to share the fate of his colleague Korolev, he engaged an American specialist, Michael DeBakey, to carry out surgery in April 1972, January 1973 and again in April 1973. DeBakey was rewarded with election as a foreign member to the Academy of Medical Sciences. New York Times, 9 January 1973,p. 45; 9 April 1973, p. 35; 2 March 1974, p. 25. Fedoseevmentions Keldysh's health problems in VAN, 2/81, p. 56.

54 Pravda, 7 April 1971, p. 3.

46

55 VAN, 7/71, pp. 3-47.

56 VAN, 5/75, p. 22.

57 VAN, 7/71, p. 6.

58 VAN, 7/71, pp. 22-23. Keldysh had used the same words in a Pravda article published a little after the General Meeting. Pravda,22 May 1971, pp. 2-3. See M.L. Harvey et al: Science andTechnology as an Instrument of Soviet Policy, Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, Miami, 1972, pp. 84-85.

59 See S. Fortescue: 'The Party Secretaries of Soviet researchinstitutes: divided loyalties?' Politics (Australia), May 1983.

60 Greenberg, 1971, op.cit., p. 59.

61 Greenberg, 1973, op.cit., p. 69.

62 Vucinich, op.cit., p. 53.

63 Making clear the distinction in the departments between the academician secretary and scientific secretary, the former being a far more prestigious and powerful figure.

64 He was not even able to outdo Sisakian in the length of hisspeeches to the Academy's General Meetings and the exasperation they produced among the assembled academicians. However he was able to attract some negative comments on the length and banality of his speech to the 1968 Annual General Meeting. VAN, 5/68, p. 38.

65 A.E. Humphrey states that Skriabin won a Lenin Prize for work onthe synthesis of protein from hydrocarbons. He also implies that the award came before Skriabin's appointment to the secretaryship. In fact he won a State Prize in 1971. A.E. Humphrey: 'Soviettechnology: the case of single cell protein', Survey, vol. 23,no. 1(102), Winter 1977-78, p. 83? Pravda, 7 November 1971, p. 3.

66 VAN, 6/77, p. 9. The academicians who had been blocking his election then gave up, and he got his full membership in 1979.

67 Thomas and Kruse-Vaucienne, op.cit., p. 2.

68 New York Times, 10 May 1974, p. 3.

69 G.D. Komkov, B.V. Levshin, S.K. Semenov: Akademiia nauk SSSR.Kratky istorichesky ocherk, 'Nauka', Moscow, 1977, 2nd edition, vol. 2, pp. 413-427.

70 VAN, 7/75, p. 4.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Aleksandrov Years

At the same general meeting of the Academy at which he officially announced the postponement of the anniversary celebrations, Suslov also announced the resignation of Keldysh. He stated that for several months Keldysh had been trying to resign for health reasons, but that the Central Committee had up until now persuaded him to stay on. But now that the life of the present presidium had come to an end (although Keldysh's term as president had another year to run), he refused to accept nomination for reelection. It had therefore been decided to accept his resignation. Suslov suggested, on behalf of the Central Committee, that since the anniversary celebrations were to be postponed until October, and since the present presidium was already working on the next Five Year Plan, it would be a good idea to extend the term of the presidium and retain the acting president until after the celebrations. Keldysh had a history of medical problems, and it is clear from the speeches at the meeting that he was at the time in hospital. There is no reason to believe his resignation was anything but genuine.(1)

The election of the new presidium, and more importantly, president was held in November 1975. Robert Toth, writing in The Guardian before the election, had suggested four likely candidates, the Nobel Prize winning physicist N.G. Basov, the engineer Boris Paton, the acting president Kotel'nikov, and the young biologist Iury Ovchinnikov. Toth suggested reasons why each of these would be found unsuitable (respectively, too outspoken, not sufficiently distinguished, too old and too young),(2) and was proved correct, with Suslov announcing to the election meeting:

Being guided by the advice of scientists, considering and carefully weighing up their wishes, we [the Central Committee] arrived at the common opinion that a worthy candidate is Anatoly Petrovich Aleksandrov.(3)

Suslov's presence and involvement in the election of the president was unusual. Keldysh's nomination had been put forward by the outgoing president, Nesmeianov;(4) Nesmeianov, in turn, had been nominated by vice-president Bardin speaking on behalf of the presidium, with the presidency being vacant following the death in office of S. Vavilov. Aleksandrov was not truly of the Academy establishment, and it is quite probable that he was the party's candidate rather than the Academy's. It is interesting that his election was not declared to have been unanimous. The previous presidential elections were announced to have been so, so the emission this time could be significant.

48

The new president was similar in many ways to his predecessor Keldysh, being a theoretical scientist of considerable ability who had made his career in the high priority and essentially non-Academy fields of defence and nuclear energy. Born in 1903, he started his working life in a more humble way than Keldysh, as a seventeen year old electrician. From 1922 to 1930 he taught physics in a secondary school. During this period he completed a degree at Kiev State University, presumably part-time, in physics and mathematics, and then began research in Ioffe's Leningrad Physics-Technical Institute.There he made a name for himself in the study of the electrical properties of dialectrics, the theory of electrical and mechanical relaxation in high polymer materials, and the theory of the elasticity of polymers. During the war he worked in the Crimea on the demagnetization of ships, a process designed to protect them from magnetic mines. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin had paid heed to those who denied the practicality of nuclear physics and stressed the ideological uncertainties of many of its basic tenets. The nuclear programme in Ioffe's institute was closed down, and the leader of the programme, Ivan Kurchatov, went to work with Aleksandrov. However by the end of 1942 Stalin was sufficiently convinced by what had been learnt of German and Anglo-American work on the atomic bomb that suddenly nuclear research was given top priority. Kurchatov went to Moscow to head the work, and Aleksandrov went with him. In 1946 Aleksandrov was appointed director of the Academy's Institute of Physical Problems, taking over from Kapitsa, who had been dismissed by Stalin. He also headed various more secret research groups which did so much in the mid and late 1940s to give the Soviet Union the bomb. He then turned the greater part of his attention to the more peaceful uses of nuclear power. In 1960 he became director of the Institute of Atomic Energy, on the death of Ivan Kurchatov, and became the head of the Soviet nuclear energy programme.

He had been elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 1943 and a full member in 1953. He was elected to the presidium in 1960. Usually in his speeches in the presidium or at general meetings he limited himself to his field of nuclear energy. However, in his comments on more general subjects two themes stand out. Firstly, we notice his strong belief in the importance of very direct and very close links between theoretical and applied research and production.He once stated, with probably considerable sincerity, that he was very thankful that he worked in a field, nuclear science and technology, where the centralization of decision-making and the link between research and technical vnedrenie had been organic from the very beginning.(5) He clearly had little time for 'science for science's sake', being one of the strongest critics of Artsimovich at the famous 1964 presidium meeting on the Department of Physics.(6) The Dorofeevs write:

On Physics Day in the Institute of Atomic Energy, in the exhibition hall along with various humorous slogans without fail there hangs a placard with a quote from

49

the director: 'Theory without practice is nothing.Practice without theory also'. Since his first steps in science Aleksandrov has had the desire to take the results of laboratory research to their practical and technical conclusion.(7)

Combined with this insistence on the value of theoretical research is the hint of a distrust of the Academy. In 1961, at the meeting of the Academy which replaced President Nesmeianov,Aleksandrov declared:

The situation of science in our country has changed greatly in recent years. In the past, fifteen or twenty years ago, all scientific activity was concentrated primarily in Academy institutions; now the development of science depends on major research institutions outside the USSR Academy of Sciences. It is these institutes which are occupied with the development of new, rapidly developing branches of technology. Such a situation seems to us to be entirely sensible.(8)

Even at his acceptance speech following his election as president, he recalled with approval the 1961 reorganization of the Academy, which coming from someone as firmly committed as he was to the organic link between theory and practice can only be taken as implied doubt over the capacity of the Academy at that time to handle major research proj ects.(9)

The features of his management style which attracted most favourable comment at his election were the same as those that had recommended Keldysh, essentially a toughness in the use of resources that would ensure the best possible return from investments in science. The engineer V.V. Struminsky, speaking in favour of Aleksandrov's election as president, stated that in R&D projects in which he was involved, even when the majority of specialists had agreed work was complete and that mass production could begin, Aleksandrov would often insist that further feasibility studies be carried out. As a result serious problems would be found, the project would be stopped and considerable money and resources would be saved . (10 )

Along with his no-nonsense approach went an obvious impatience with demands for scientific autonomy. In 1961 he declared that scientists could not be allowed the luxury of taking on any research project that seemed of interest to them, and that planning was an essential and integral part of scientific development.(11 ) He was also impatient with the 'liberalism' of some scientific councils which appeared unable to apply sufficiently strict criteria of practical utility.(12)

50

L ik e K e ld y sh , A le k sa n d r o v was a r e l a t i v e o u t s id e r t o th e Academy, and t h e r e f o r e n o t a s i n t e n s e l y in v o lv e d in th e d i s p u t e s among th e a c a d e m ic ia n s o v e r th e A cadem y's p r o p e r r o l e ; a n d , a lth o u g h a r e s e a r c h s c i e n t i s t o f some r e p u t e , he was e s s e n t i a l l y a s c i e n c e m anager w ith th e a d m in is t r a t iv e a b i l i t i e s r e q u ir e d t o c o o r d in a t e s c i e n t i s t s ar.d t e c h n i c i a n s from many d i f f e r e n t d i s c i p l i n e s in th e im p le m e n ta tio n o f m a s s iv e p r o j e c t s and program m es, and a l l w i t h in a b u d g e t . The a p p o in tm en t o f su ch a p e r so n a s p r e s id e n t was a good in d ic a t io n o f th e s o r t o f r o l e th e p a r t y a u t h o r i t i e s had in m ind f o r th e Academ y.

At th e 2 5 th P a r ty C o n g r e s s , so o n a f t e r A le k s a n d r o v 's e l e c t i o n , B r e z h n e v , w ith one sm a ll p h r a s e , p ro d u ced a m ajor ch a n g e in th e r e l a t i o n s b etw een th e v a r io u s S o v ie t s c i e n c e c o o r d in a t in g b o d ie s and s i g n a l l e d a s i g n i f i c a n t l y in c r e a s e d r o l e f o r th e Academ y. He s t a t e d , in t a l k i n g o f th e Academy:

T here i s c o n c e n tr a te d th e f lo w e r o f our s c i e n c e - th e fo u n d e r s o f s c i e n t i f i c s c h o o l s and d i s c i p l i n e s , w is e w ith e x p e r i e n c e , a s w e l l a s th e m ost t a l e n t e d young s c i e n t i s t s , b la z in g new t r a i l s t o th e p ea k s o f s c i e n c e .The P a r ty v a lu e s h i g h ly th e work o f t h e Academy and w i l l r a i s e i t s r o l e a s t h e c e n t r e o f t h e o r e t i c a l r e s e a r c h and th e c o o r d in a t o r o f a l l r e s e a r c h work in th e c o u n t r y . ( 1 3 )

T h is i s one o c c a s io n when one r e g r e t s th e a b se n c e o f d e f i n i t e and i n d e f i n i t e a r t i c l e s in R u s s ia n . D id B rezhn ev d e s c r ib e th e Academy a s ' t h e c o o r d in a to r o f a l l r e s e a r c h in th e c o u n tr y ' or 'a c o o r d in a t o r '? L i n g u i s t i c a l l y s p e a k in g , th e form er seem s m ost p r o b a b le . W hichever w ay, th e p h r a s e , d e s c r ib e d a s b e in g f o l lo w e d by th e a p p la u se o f th e d e l e g a t e s , was a new o n e ; f u r t h e r , th e s ta te m e n t ta k e n l i t e r a l l y c o n s id e r a b ly expand ed th e A cadem y's a r e a o f o p e r a t io n , p r e v io u s l y l im i t e d t o th e fu n d a m en ta l and s o c i a l s c i e n c e s . I t was im m e d ia te ly ta k e n up by th e Academy a s an im p o r ta n t and new f u n c t io n - by A le k sa n d r o v a t th e 1976 m e e tin g o f th e C o u n c il f o r th e C o o r d in a t io n o f R e se a rc h in R e p u b lica n A c a d e m ies , v i c e - p r e s i d e n t F ed o se ev a t th e m id - 1976 G en era l M e e t in g , and v a r io u s o th e r l e s s e rf i g u r e s . ( 1 4 ) B r e z h n e v 's s ta te m e n t was c o n firm e d by C e n tr a l C om m ittee s e c r e t a r y M.V. Z im ia n in a t a c o n fe r e n c e in l a t e 1 9 7 6 .(1 5 )

V era R ich w r i t e s in N a tu re t h a t th e s ta te m e n t c a u se d c o n s id e r a b le c o n f u s io n in t h a t , w ith o u t e x p la n a t io n , i t r a d i c a l l y in c r e a s e d th e A cadem y's a r ea o f c o n c e r n (1 6 ) - c e r t a i n l y , so o n a f t e r th e C o n g re ss A le k sa n d r o v s t a t e d t h a t B rezhn ev had g iv e n th e Academy a new and v e r y im p o r ta n t f u n c t io n and t h a t ' i t i s n e c e s s a r y t o t h in k a b o u t how t o f u l f i l i t ' . ( 1 7 ) I f V . P . R a sso k h in can be b e l i e v e d , th e t h in k in g c o u ld n o t have had much r e s u l t , s i n c e in 1980 he s t i l l foun d i t n e c e s s a r y t o s t a t e t h a t d e s p i t e th e more th an 800 l e g a l docum ents now c o v e r in g s c i e n c e and t e c h n o lo g y , t h e r e was s t i l l no d e f i n i t i o n o f th e p ow ers o f t h e Academy a s c o o r d in a t o r o f a l l s c i e n c e in th e c o u n t r y . (1 8 )

51

One wonders on whose initiative the change was made. Despite the apparent confusion, Brezhnev surely consulted with someone before making his speech. It is precisely what one imagines Aleksandrov would have wanted to hear, and it seems possible that Brezhnev's statement was not unconnected with Aleksandrov's replacement of Keldysh as president not long before. As we have seen, Keldysh was cautious about overextending the Academy's functions.

One of the few people to try to explain the meaning of Brezhnev's statement is Fedoseev. He states that it should remind us of two things. Firstly, that there is no inherent opposition between fundamental and applied research; secondly, the goal-oriented planning which was also called for by Brezhnev provides the link between fundamental and applied science. While fundamental research is still the main task of the Academy and the main measure of its work, applied research cannot be ignored.(19) Fedoseev described as measures taken as part of this new function the combined meetings of the Academy with the Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Ministry of Agriculture in December 1978, with the Academy of Medical Sciences in November 1980, and the December 1979 special General Meeting of the Academy.(20)

These measures are hardly dramatic, and fall considerably short of what a literal reading of Brezhnev's words would seem to allow. However in the following couple of years many strong moves were made to increase the role of the Academy of Sciences in the applied sciences. From 1977 there was a marked increase in the attention given to vnedrenie in the Academy's presidium, general meetings and journal. Particular attention was devoted to the organizational innovations in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences under the presidency of Boris Paton and the approving eye of party secretary Shcherbitsky. At a General Meeting in March 1977 a number of changes were made to the Statute of the Academy, to reflect the changes in its status. The technical sciences were included as within the Academy's competence in articles 2 and 4, while article 2 now also for the first time recognized the supradepartmental (nadvedomstvenny) character of the Academy.(21)

In January the next year Aleksandrov made a well publicized visit to Ivanovo, the centre of the Soviet textile industry outside Moscow. The visit was made at the invitation of the Ivanovo obkom (regional party committee), and Aleksandrov met a number of times with the obkom first secretary. The purpose of the visit was to discuss the problems of the textile industry, and ways the Academy could help. It was recommended that a scientific centre be set up in Ivanovo based on an Academy institute specializing in the textile industry.(22)

There are two striking features of Aleksandrov's interest in Ivanovo: firstly, the very applied nature of the research activityinvolved, to a degree not seen since before the 1961 reorganization; secondly, the close involvement of the party apparatus. One of the

52

most striking developments in the Academy's operations in recent years has been the closeness with which it has worked with the regional party apparatus in a number of areas. This has been reflected since about 1977 in the participation of local party leaders in the presidium's examinations of the work of the Academy's filials and the union republican Academies. Cooperation with regional party bodies has been most noticeable in the Ukraine, with one of the strongest statements of the role of the party in regional science management coming recently from Boris Paton, the president of the Ukrainian Academy. In discussing the value of regional programmes he declared that the presidium of the Ukrainian Academy has signed contracts with all the party obkomy of the republic and the Kiev gorkom, and that 'these contracts cover scientific research work within the boundaries of the regions, which in the case of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, are served by six science centres. The point is that in conditions where many industrial enterprises and construction organizations are subordinate to union ministries, only action from the party makes it possible to overcome departmental barriers'.(23)

The best known of the science centres referred to by Paton is the Western Science Centre of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, based in Lvov. The system of scientific organization which has been in operation there since 1976 was examined in detail by the presidium of the All-Union Academy in late 1980.(24) The discussion, after recording that the work of the Ukrainian Academy had been praised by Brezhnev at the October 1976 and November 1979 Central Committee plenums and at the meeting of the presidents of the socialist Academies in 1977, concentrated on the interbranch scientific-production associations and complexes set up under the bureau of the Western Science Centre. These are complexes of research institutes, design and experimental production facilities, and industrial enterprises linked together on a contract basis. They are headed by a leading scientist, recommended by the bureau of the Western Science Centre and usually a member of the bureau. Planning is done on a regional level, while financing is organized by the Ukrainian Academy with the participation of the State Committee for Science and Technology. The discussion attracted considerable interest from leading members of the Academy, and following a concluding speech by Aleksandrov describing the experiment as a valuable one, a motion was passed that it be adopted by other scientific centres.

Such a combination of all the elements of the R&D process under the leadership of an Academy organization is clearly a practical form of the role of 'coordinator of all science in the country' given the Academy by Brezhnev. This alone makes the interbranch associations an interesting if as yet limited development. But equally interesting is the very large role given the regional party apparatus. It was claimed by Paton that the whole experiment was begun on the initative and operated with the constant participation of the obkom, while the deputy chairman of the Western Science Centre stated that the plans of

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the associations' work were drawn up under the general leadership of the obkom and that the management personnel of the associations were confirmed in their posts by the obkom. The head of the relevant obkom department was deputy head of each association. The first secretary of the Lvov obkom addressed the meeting of the presidium, while Aleksandrov in his concluding speech acknowledged that the direct involvement of the party was the driving force behind the experiment.

Soon after, in January 1981, a seminar was organized in Lvov by the All-Union and Ukrainian Academies, the Western Science Centre and the Lvov obkom, to share the experience of the Lvov system with other science managers and party officials.(25) In opening the seminar Kotel'nikov, vice-president of the All-Union Academy, declared that the Lvov system was not being put forward as a general recipe applicable to all regions of the Soviet Union. However, he believed the experience to be valuable, and to have revealed one general principle, that 'where the regional party apparatus is involved things go well'. The first secretary of the Lvov obkom addressed the seminar and revealed that in 1979 the Ukrainian Central Committee had issued a decree praising the Lvov system. (26)

Similar systems to the Lvov one have been adopted in other regions. One of the best documented is the Interbranch Coordinating Council of the Soviet North-West.(27) Although based in Leningrad, the Council covers R&D activities in a very large area, including Leningrad city, Leningrad oblast', Arkhangel, Vologda, Murmansk, Novgorod and Pskov oblasti and the Karelian and Komi ASSR.(28) The Council has 36 members (scientists, party officials and industrial managers) and directs the work of 14 specialized scientific councils. These councils draw up R&D programmes covering all work in the organizations involved, from the basic theoretical research to start-up in mass production. The programmes are fitted as far as possible as integrated units into the all-Union R&D programmes drawn up by the Academy of Sciences, the State Committee for Science and Technology and Gosplan. In the available source the North-Western Council is not specifically linked with the Academy of Sciences; indeed it is stated that it does not as yet have good enough links with the Academy and its scientific councils. However the chairman of the Council, I.A. Glebov, is the Academy's representative in Leningrad, and the Academy's influence can be assumed to be great.The role of the regional party apparatus also appears to be great. Eight of the 36 members of the Council are party officials, while programmes are worked out in cooperation with the advisory committees operating within the obkomy. With the Council for Energy and Electrical Power Machine Construction as an example, it is stated:

This Council uses an entirely new form of work, in which the power and authority of party leadership and the authority of leading energy researchers are organically combined...The participation in development and realization of relevant goal-oriented programmes of

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the party's raion committees and the industrial departments of the city and oblast' committees of the CPSU has meant that the managers of industrial enterprises can no longer allow themselves to play the role of bystanders in the preparation of research plans.(29 )

One should not exaggerate the importance of these developments. The regional science centres are as yet in their infancy and cover a minute fraction of Soviet R&D. In 1980 there were only 1,651 researchers working on the Lvov programme, not a large number even if a considerable increase over the 442 in 1976. The budget has increased more dramatically, from about 600,000 roubles in 1976 to 6.5 million in 1980, but the amount of money available is still small.(30)

Nevertheless, if the party apparatus is as closely involved as it seems, they could become more significant in the future. Further, it is interesting to speculate whether they indicate a general alliance between the party apparatus and the Academy of Sciences. It is presumably no coincidence that these regional systems began appearing, apparently on the initiative of the regional party apparatus, at the time that Brezhnev seemingly gave the Academy a significantly expanded role as coordinator of all research in the Soviet Union.

There have been indications since the 25th Party Congress of the party leadership's dissatisfaction with the other science coordinating body, the State Committee for Science and Technology. At the November 1979 Central Committee plenum, at which he made unusually strong, detailed and personal attacks on individual industrial administrators, Brezhnev appealed to the Academy, in relatively friendly terms, to assist in vital R&D tasks. He declared some dissatisfaction with the work of the State Committee (although, admittedly, in the context of the plenum, in very mild terms), and called on it to work in a more energetic manner.(31) Soon after, in January 1980, Kirillin, the chairman of the State Committee, was suddenly dismissed. There has been speculation in the West that his dismissal was connected either with a protest by him over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which had just taken place, or, more plausibly, a protest over the exile to Gorky of Andrei Sakharov, which occurred the very day his dismissal was announced. Kirillin has enjoyed a reputation as somewhat of a 'liberal', but dissatisfaction with his performance seems an equally plausible explanation. If his dismissal had been politically motivated one would not expect to find articles by him and references to him still appearing in the Soviet press.(32) He was replaced by Gury Marchuk, who while having a reputation as a hard-liner, had been the chairman of the Siberian department of the Academy of Sciences, and therefore not only a member of the Academy establishment but also a pioneer of the Siberian brand of Academy involvement in applied research.

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The Academy itself has not openly attacked the State Committee and continues to reserve its venom for the branch ministries.(33) However, the evidence does perhaps suggest that exasperation with the performance of the State Committee, particularly its inability to control the branch ministries, has led to a new alliance between the Academy and the party apparatus. If the Academy provides the applied research input, the party will ensure that the ministries cooperate.

This requires a considerable expansion of the Academy back into the applied and engineering areas which occupied so much of its time before the 1961 reorganization. One aspect of this is the effort of the Academy to develop its own machineshop, design, experimental and prototype-production facilities. It is clearly highly dissatisfied with the treatment its work gets at the hands of the branch design and development organizations, which, it is claimed, ignore Academy work in favour of the ideas put forward by their owninstitutes.(34) Attempts have been made to avoid the cost to the Academy of building its own facilities, by giving it greater control over branch organizations. In the Siberian department of the Academy a pioneering system of development facilities, built and financed by the branch ministries but tinder the scientific supervision of the Academy, has been in operation since the mid-1960s. It is claimed that despite major financial and organizational problems, deriving from the uncertain legal status of these arrangements, they have been a great success.(35)

Without acknowledgement to the Siberians, the other pioneering Academy, the Ukrainian, has also opened a number of branch-financed laboratories and experimental facilities within itsinstitutes.(36) However more publicity goes to the other approaches of the Ukrainian Academy. We have just seen the system developed in Lvov. But this form of Academy-branch cooperation seems to rely on party supervision for any degree of success it might have. The Ukrainians have also devoted considerable attention to building their own facilities directly within their institutes. The best example is the Paton Institute, with its own design bureau, experimental facilities and two prototype-production factories.(37) There have been calls for similar facilities to be established in other Academies, with Anatoly Rzhanov claiming that this need not be expensive since existing branch facilities could simply be handed over to the Academy.(38) One can imagine that the ministries would not agree to this willingly, in which case the problem becomes one of funding. This could well be the explanation for the relative lack of enthusiasm for both the Siberian and Ukrainian models in the other Academies. At the all-Union level the policy has been to limit the size of institutes' experimental facilities and centralize them as much as possible, rather than allowing each institute to have its own.(39) Other republican Academies are also reluctant to take on complex schemes, particularly those requiring expenditure of their own funds.(40) In the next chapter we will examine in more detail the

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funding problems of the Academy and the less than ideal solution which is being applied.

As part of the pressure on the Academy to become more involved in applied and engineering research in recent years, there have been demands for specific organizational changes within the Academy's administration. There was no apparent response to V.V. Struminsky' s 1976 call for the reestablishment of the Department of Technical Sciences,(41 ) but when at the 1979 Academy Annual General Meeting academician Ianshin (a geologist) called for this, plus the restoration to it of the Academy's old institutes, Aleksandrov replied with the announcement that such a reorganization was under examination, and then in his concluding speech to the meeting said:

The transfer in the past of some institutes from the USSR Academy of Sciences to various institutions has to a certain degree affected the development of fundamental science, as well as leading to the weakening of the influence of the Academy on various branches and production.

He gave machine building as an example of one of the affected branches, and announced that a decision had just been made to transfer the Institute of Machine Building back to the Academy.(42)

Nothing more has been heard of the reorganization mentioned by Aleksandrov, perhaps because a large part of the role played by the old Department of Technical Sciences has been taken over by the Department of Mechanics and Control Processes. In 1971 academician Dikushin announced that the Department of Mechanics was the link between the Academy and machine building.(43) In 1974, in response to a demand that the Academy set up a scientific council on machine building, Keldysh announced that this was unnecessary as its functions were already fulfilled by the Department of Mechanics. In referring to the Institute of Machine Science, one of the institutes that had been transferred out of the Academy, he said that 'the department must strengthen its work in the examination and confirmation of the plans of the Institute of Machine Science in keeping with the present regulation on the scientific-methodological leadership of this institute. The department must include in plans of other institutes research on other specific problems arising in machine science'.(44 )

It is interesting that this department, although not providing any of the top leadership of the Academy, has gained the numerical dominance that the Department of Technical Sciences previously enjoyed. Since its formation in 1963 it has dominated virtually every election of new members to the Academy, and has the highest percentage of new members elected between 1964 and 1981 (13.8%, followed by the Department of General Physics and Astronomy with 12.1%), and is outnumbered for new corresponding members only if we ignore the split of the old Earth Sciences Department before the 1970 elections. The

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election of seven new full members to the Department of Mechanics in 1981 made it the largest department in terms of membership, with 13.5% against the 12.8% of the Department of General Physics. A noteworthy feature of the department's membership is the high proportion of defence scientists. Recently elected full members include Iangel', Grushin and Makeev, all defence scientists with full membership of the party Central Committee. One wonders whether this numerical dominance of the Academy has or will lead to a domination of its decision-making and resource allocation procedures.

So far, however, despite the enormous emphasis on the applied role of the Academy, the engineers have not had everything their own way. Thus, despite the demands from the engineering members of the Academy that engineering institutes be transferred back to the Academy and new departments be set up, little appears to havehappened.(45) Similarly, nothing more has been heard of deputy chief scientific secretary Fokin's 1980 suggestion that a scientific council for vnedrenie be set up under the Academy's presidium.(46)

These rebuffs to the engineers have occured despite the fact that opposition within the Academy to any suggestion of a return to a strongly applied role for the Academy is now very muted. At the General Meeting in May-June 1976 to discuss the 25th Party Congress, the organic chemist V.F. Evstratov submitted a written statement:

In the discussion at the annual meeting of the Academy of the tasks and development of science in the 10th Five Year Plan, in some speeches there were expressed, in my view, incorrect descriptions of the role of the Academy as the coordinator of all scientific research work in the country, including applied research work.(47 )

If not a criticism of the words of Brezhnev this is at the very least a criticism of the interpretation of his words made by others. Evstratov states that with less then ten per cent of the total Soviet research budget the Academy cannot hope to cover all fundamental research, which is why a lot of such research is done outside the Academy. While it might be proper for the Academy to undertake the coordination of this research, it should not be concerned with the coordination of applied research, that being the function of the State Committee of Science and Technology.

Statements such as these used to be common in the 1960s and early 1970s, but have now become rare. Opposition to the applied research role of the Academy is now expressed more subtly, in criticisms of the negative phenomena which unavoidably come with such a role. These phenomena are submission to the plan and to the principle of payment according to the economic benefit derived from one's work, whether one is an organization or an individual. The next chapter will deal, therefore, with the planning of research, budgeting and accounting procedures, and the measuring of staff performance.

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FOOTNOTES

1 VAN, 7/75, pp. 3-6. See the stress on Keldysh's insistence on his resignation in later biographical articles. For example, VAN, 2/81, pp. 48,56.

2 R. Toth: 'The political chemistry of science', The Guardian,19 June 1975, p. 16.

3 VAN, 1/76, p. 4.

4 At Aleksandrov's election both Keldysh and Kotel'nikov, the acting president, were present and spoke in support of Aleksandrov's candidacy.

5 VAN, 7/61, p. 48.

6 VAN, 2/65, pp . 26-27.

7 Dorofeev, op. cit., p. 178

8 VAN, 6/61, p. 11.

9 VAN, 1/76, p. 10.

10 VAN, 1/76, p. 9.

11 VAN, 12/61, pp. 51-52.

12 VAN, 7/71, p. 24.

13 Pravda, 25 February 1976, p. 6.

14 VAN, 10/76, p.. 13? 9/76, p. 11. See also Emanuel' andB.S. Sokolov, VAN, 5/76, p. 47; 7/76, p. 85.

15 VAN, 1/77, p. 5.

16 Nature, 3 January 1980, p. 4.

17 VAN, 10/76, p. 13.

18 Trapeznikov, op.cit., p. 58

19 VAN, 9/76, pp. 11-12. See also Kommunist, 9/76, pp. 30-41.

20 VAN, 7/81, p. 18.

21 VAN, 6/77, pp. 8-9, 69-73. The alleged objectivity of the Academy of Sciences, derived from its lack of branch subordination, is an

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argument often used by those pushing for greater powers for it.See, for example, academicians Brekhovskikh and Styrikovich in VAN, 9/75, p. 14; 5/80, pp. 102-104.

22 VAN, 4/78, pp. 134-135; 10/78, pp. 59-64. In 1981 the Academy'sDepartment (Otdel) of the Chemistry of Non-aqueous Solutions in Ivanovo was reformed as a full institute. However it has not been possible to determine when the Department was established. VAN, 9/81, p. 140.

23 VAN, 12/81 / PP-. 38-39

24 VAN, 12/80, pp.. 17-27

25 VAN, 8/81 , pp. 35-62.

26 For another discussion by the Lvov obkom first secretary of R&D work in his region, see R.A. Belousov and G.B. Khromushin (eds); Partiinoe rukovodstvo ekonomikoi, 'Ekonomika', Moscow, 1981,pp. 53-73. Regionally based development seems to be a major trend in the Soviet economy at the moment, with the beginnings of the regional organization of industry as well as R&D. This is particularly so in the Eastern regions, where industrial development is often centred around a major source of power, for example, the 'technical-production complexes' based on the power stations on the Angara and Enisei Rivers. Nature, 9 April 1981, p. 439. A feature seems to be the major role given the party apparatus, since it is the only strong regionally based organization, able to attempt the coordination of all the various branch organizations in the area. It is interesting that in the article just cited the Lvov obkom first secretary complains of the lack of a regionally organized state coordination body, which leads to the excessively detailed and petty involvement of the party apparatus in the day-to-day running of the economy. Although dismissing the sovnarkhozy as no more than part of history, he calls for the establishment of some kind of clearly similar regional coordinating body. He presumably believes that while such a body would take the tedious detail away from the party it would not threaten its leading role in the region. Belousov and Khromushin, op.cit., p. 73.

27 VAN, 9/81, pp. 38-46.

This area has been listed as a single unit in Soviet statistics since about 1961, and during the early 1960s this and other such regions even had embryonic administrative staffs. It is intereting that again such regions are being given some degree of administrative status as an intermediate tier between republic and oblast', in view of the general interest at the moment in the regional management of the Soviet system. My thanks to Mr John Miller for this information.

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29 Ibid, p. 44. When the Academy presidium was considering the work of the Lvov system, the deputy chairman of the Western Science Centre was asked what happened when they tried to introduce new technology which was not profitable for production enterprises. He answered laconically that the party organs help. VAN, 12/80,p. 23. For accounts by senior officials of the Rostov and Novosibirsk obkomy of R&D developments in their regions, see Belousov and Khromushin, op.cit., pp. 21-49, 98-113.

30 VAN, 8/81, p. 40. The instrument-making complex of the Lvov system, which is one of four complexes and includes five scientific-production associations, had 890 people involved in its work in 1981, and had a budget of 2.5 million rubles. Partiinaia zhizn', 8/81, p . 51.

31 Partiinaia zhizn*, 23/79, p. 14.

32 VAN, 2/81, pp. 57-59; 10/81, p. 27.

33 See academician Fokin at the 1980 Annual General Meeting and Boris Paton at the 1981 meeting of the Council for the coordination of the research of the republican Academies. VAN, 6/80, p. 21;12/81, pp. 38-39.

34 For example, VAN, 5/76, p. 13; Pravda, 4 March 1982, p. 2.

35 VAN, 2/82, p. 46. For examples of legal problems, see Sovetskaia Rossiia, 18 August 1970, p. 2; Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 January 1972, p. 10. It would appear that all has not always been well in Novosibirsk. In 1972 Marchuk, then chairman of the Siberian department, complained of the drastic fall in the vnedrenie rate in the branch from 70-75% in the early 1960s to 60-65% by the end of the decade. VAN, 10/72, p. 16. Since then, according to Popovsky, isolation and poor social and consumer facilities have led to a flight of top scientists from Novosibirsk, while Marchuk's promotion to the State Committee in 1981 brought a relative unknown, Valentin Koptiug, to the chairmanship of the department.M. Popovsky; Upravliaemaia nauka, Overseas Publications Interchange, London, 1978, pp. 220-231. Certainly in recent years the Ukrainian Academy and its president, Boris Paton, have been getting all the publicity.

36 VAN, 3/77, p. 49; 8/81, p. 43.

37 Partiinaia zhizn1, 10/78, p. 41; Dorofeev, op.cit., pp. 253-254.In 1980, of the 75,000 people working in the Ukrainian Academy 34,000 worked in design and production organizations. VAN, 11/80, p. 56.

38 VAN, 2/82, pp. 45-47; Pravda, 6 February 1976, p. 3. The State Committee for Science and Technology seems to support the

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establishment of full R&D facilities in the Academy. See deputy chairman Kudinov in Pravda, 21 July 1982, p. 2. Kudinov is a former party secretary of the Paton Institute.

39 VAN, 3/77, p. 57; 11/80, pp. 62-63.

40 For example, Zaria Vostoka, 15 December 1981, p. 2; 5 June 1982,p. 3; VAN 6/77, p. 64.

41 Pravda, 23 February 1976, p. 4.

42 VAN, 6/79, pp.. 24-26,31

43 VAN, 7/71, P- 33.

44 VAN, 6/74, P- 56.

45 See Ishlinsky in particular. VAN, 7/71, pp. 35-36; 9/76, p. 63.

46 VAN, 6/80, pp.21-22.

47 VAN, 9/76, p. 71.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Cost to the Academy of an Applied Research Role

Soviet science, like the rest of the Soviet system, is highly centralized, with planning long a dominant feature. The pressure 01

the Academy to plan its research comprehensively first reached a significant level in the 1920s, as preparations were made for the first Five Year Plan. The Academy's new Statute, passed in 1927, allowed for the submission of plans of the Academy's work to the Council of People's Commissars, and in 1930 a Planning-Organizatior Commission was set up within the presidium. The first plan coverirg all the activities of the Academy was approved by the December 193C session of the Academy. However, it was only a yearly plan and there was no Academy five year plan to match the first national Five Year Plan. But by the beginning of the second Five Year Plan a five year plan for the Academy had been prepared.(l) Throughout this earlier period at the institute level there was a continuing opportunity fcr non-planned research, in the so-called intra-institute plans. But these plans were continually attacked by the authorities for their lack of relevance to the needs of the national economy, and in 195( the presidium declared that all types of intra-institute planning nust come to an end.(2) Since that time all research projects in Acadeny institutes must be included in institute and Academy plans. Thus -.he Academy's 1950 annual plan was 2400 printed pages long and the 1964 plan ran to several volumes containing tens of thousands of projects.(3) The development of planning in the Academy since 193) is summed up by Vucinich:

During this period one can readily recognize three complementary trends in the planning of scientific pursuits. In the first place, planning gradually became more systematic, all-embracing, and functional.In the second place, it became more firmly integrated into the current Five-Year Plans. This tendency was expressed in the growing emphasis on applied science and the crusade against so-called pure science. In the third place, the scholars lost the right to assign values to planned projects and to pursue personal projects uncalled for by the plan.(4)

Together with this centralized planning goes traditionally highly centralized funding and financial systems. Academy science has always been funded by grants from the state budget. The largest item in the science budget, seemingly around 40 per cent, is wages,(5) one of the most highly controlled of all Soviet economic categories, with numbers, ranks and wages of personnel rigidly determined by the central authorities. The other major items - allocations of equipment, capital construction, and current research - are tied to

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the plans of the Academy and its institutes and the projects contained ■within them.

However, despite the immense labour and detail involved in drawing up research plans, whether for the individual scientist, the institute or the Academy,(6) which would at first glance appear to establish the iron control of the centre over all scientific research, there is in fact a considerable degree of de facto decentralisation in the planning process. A Soviet writer in Pravda gives one of the best descriptions of how the process works. A laboratory head draws up a draft laboratory plan, usually made up of the plans his researchers are already working on (and indeed, on occasions, have already completed) or wish to work on in the future. The draft might be considered by various specialists in the institute and then passed on for examination by a special commission and the Academic Council, although this is usually done in a superficial way. The institute's scientific and technical department, which is usually understaffed, adds all the laboratory plans together into the institute's draft plan, with no specialised agency being available to put all the institute's activities into a coordinated context.(7)

There is evidence that the plans drawn up by the Academy and its departments are no less simple compilations of proposals sent up from below than are the institute plans. Thus the strange case of the Institute of Experimental Biology of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. It was criticized in Pravda in 1974 for failing to devote its attention to molecular biology, for the study of which it had been established in 1966, and instead concentrating its attention on areas better left to other institutes. Five years later, it was criticized again in the presidium of the Academy for exactly the same reason.(8) The implication is that the Academy does not have either the ability or the will to impose its planning policies on its member institutes. One suspects, therefore, that just as an institute's plans, being a collection of laboratory plans, tends to be determined by the laboratory structure of the institute rather than vice versa,(9) so the Academy's plan reflects its network of institutes and their interests.(10)

Soviet authorities see this de facto decentralization of the planning process as essentially a bad thing, leading to the wide scale duplication of research, a concern with an excessive number of minor projects, and a general ability on the part of researchers to escape their responsiblity to work for the benefit of the national economy.

Despite this decentralization of planning there appears to be less room for any de facto decentralization of the funding and financial processes. The ability of laboratories and institutes to construct plans to suit themselves give management at these levels some influence over funding allocations.(11) However once allocated, funds cannot be moved around, whether from one type of expenditure to another, for example cutting down equipment purchases to finance new

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research positions, or, less rigidly, from one research project to another. This inflexibility gives the institute management very little room or incentive to improve the work of the institute as a whole or of individual researchers. The authorities have seen the lack of financial initiatives available to management as a bad thing, because it encourages a lack of financial discipline at institute level - something that is important given the opportunities for manipulation of the planning process - and makes it difficult to provide researchers with material incentives, i.e. financial pressure, to improve productivity.

The reaction to these traditional planning and funding systems was, in Soviet science as in the rest of the economy, the introduction of a mixed bag of centralizing and decentralizing measures, dating from the mid-1960s. Efforts were made to further centralize planning and to have each research unit more organically involved in a fully coordinated research effort, while some degree of financial decentralization was introduced, to increase the financial discipline of management and to give the opportunity to increase incentives for individuals.

One of the more interesting developments in the planning area in recent years has been the introduction of 'programme - goal methods'(programmno-tselevye metody, or PTsM). Essentially, 'goal' means project funding based on the US model, that is, funding is given to a particular research project rather than to an institution. This means that research can be more closely controlled by the funding authorities - with institutional funding the institution inevitably has some independence in the choice of work it will undertake. 'Programme' takes this aspect of goal funding further, by tying as many R&D units as possible into a coordinated attack on a particular project, with the programme covering all stages of development from basic research to introduction into mass production. The approach, derived from the Soviets' studies of Western methods and the experiences of their own military R&D network, is intended to avoid the traditional Soviet problem of vnedrenie by insuring that prototype and series production organizations are involved from the beginning, to ensure that all projects of national significance receive the attention they require, to reduce the opportunities for individual researchers and institutes to indulge in non-centrally planned and uncontrolled research, and to move away from research planning and implementation based on inflexible institutional structures.

Some of the elements of PTsM were evident in science organization from the mid-1960s. The immediate post-Khrushchev economic reform entailed a great emphasis on long-term plans and forecasts (prognozy), planning coordination by the State Committee for Science and Technology and Gosplan, the integration of research and production institutions in single administrative units, a new concentration on head institutes, and in particular the introduction in 1968 of 'coordination plans for the solution of fundamental scientific and

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technical problems'. These, while not as detailed and all-encompassing as the subsequent programme-goal plans are professed to be, were very much a step in that direction.(12) However it was not until 1976 that the new approach was specifically adopted. The 25th Party Congress in that year called for the introduction of national goal-oriented research programmes with priority access to funding, personnel and material resources.(13) In the 1976-80 Five Year Plan the Ministries of Electrotechnical Industry and Chemical Industry introduced on an experimental basis PTsM into science and technology plans.(14)

The 'initiatives' of the 25th Party Congress were taken up apparently enthusiastically by the Academy of Sciences. At the March 1976 Annual General Meeting Aleksandrov stressed the need for programme planning and expressed confidence in the Academy's ability to maintain its current excellent relations with the Ministry of Chemical Industry in proceeding with such work.(15) At the June General Meeting Fedoseev linked the new approach to planning with the Academy's new role as coordinator of all research in the country. He argued that PTsM imply the organic unity of applied and theoretical research and therefore the involvement of the Academy in all aspects of coordination. The resolution coming out of this meeting contained the following point:

To consider as one of the basic forms of the organization of scientific research conducted under the leadership of the USSR Academy of Sciences the transfer to programme-goal planning of research of the most important scientific developments and problems, with the granting of priority in the supply to them of research personnel, funding and material resources.(16)

It would be easy to describe the Academy's acceptance of the new methods as a simple response to a party directive. However there is some evidence that the Academy's position had changed independently of the directives of the 25th Party Congress. Aleksandrov had declared at his election as president in November 1975, before the Party Congress, that the time had come to introduce PTsM into Academy planning,(17) while the former president, Keldysh, at the June 1976 Annual General Meeting of the Academy expressed his opposition to goal-oriented programmes, seeing them as a symptom of excessive 'practicism' in the approach to the functions of theAcademy.(18) Keldysh had often indicated at least some understanding of if not sympathy with research scientists who objected to the central planning of their work, and certainly appeared to work for the separation of Academy research plans, particularly for theoretical research, from branch and other central research programmes.(19) Aleksandrov had shown himself less tolerant of scientists' concern to maintain their independence, as can be seen in his speech at the November 1961 General Meeting.(20)

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A case could perhaps be made that Aleksandrov's replacement of Keldysh produced a far more positive attitude towards programme-goal methods of planning, and that the 25th Party Congress's adoption of these methods was not unrelated to the support that the party leadership could expect from the Academy in the introduction of such methods. The explicit tying together of PTsM and the newly expanded role of the Academy by Fedoseev could support this supposition. As we have seen earlier, Aleksandrov generally holds a more expansionist view of the role of the Academy than Keldysh did, and he presumably sees Academy involvement in programme-goal planning as essential if the Academy is to have a role to play in the major research projects of the future. His statement at the March 1976 Annual General Meeting which accepted PTsM as Academy policy was aggressive. He saw plans in which branch and production people were involved from the very beginning as bringing to an end the practice of industries refusing to accept Academy research and substituting work done in their own institutes.(21) In Aleksandrov's view the degree of loss of independence implied in PTsM was more than offset by the opportunities provided for Academy involvement and protection of its interests at the top levels of scientific decision making.

There has been a steadily increasing emphasis on PTsM in Soviet science planning since 1976. The July 1979 joint Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree on improving planning and the economic mechanism contained directives on the use of programme planning of research and technical development,(22) and was followed by the discussion of the matter at the Central Committee plenum in November.(23)

The plenum in turn was followed by a special general meeting of the Academy in December. Aleksandrov opened the meeting by stating that at the Central Committee plenum the Academy had been directed to involve itself in improving the planning system. Perhaps as a form of defence, the chairman of Gosplan, Nikolai Baibakov, followed with an attack on the Academy, together with the State Committee for Science and Technology, for the vagueness of proposals they give Gosplan for long-term scientific planning. This suggests that Turkevich is correct in surmising that Gosplan has taken the major role in long-term scientific planning.(24) Aleksandrov could well take this as a setback, and indeed Fedoseev followed Baibakov with only a qualified endorsement of PTsM.(25)

Nevertheless the emphasis on PTsM from the government has continued. They were raised again at the 26th Party Congress,(26) and indeed according to one article in Pravda:

The 26th Party Congress gave the character of a party directive to the directives of the 1979 Central Committee plenum on the development of the programme-goal method as the major determinant in the planning of the economy.(27)

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It is doubtful that the decision of a Party Congress would add any more weight to that already possessed by the directives of a Central Committee plenum, particularly one as vehement as that of 1979.However Skriabin did report at the 1982 Annual General Meeting of the Academy that the presidium had paid close attention to the Congress's decisions, and since the Congress the Academy's involvement in PTsM had greatly increased.(28)

There appears to be some degree of political commitment to PTsM from both the Soviet government and the Academy leadership. What, however, has been the practical result? Articles have been written describing the use of PTsM in practice - the first issue of Vestnik Akademii nauk for 1981, for example, contains three articles on PTsM at the institute, Academy department, and republican Academy levels. (29) However even Soviet commentators are forced to admit that there are fundamental problems involved, the solution of which lies very much in the future. As the review of the three articles just mentioned states:

The development of science and the high potential effectiveness of programme-goal methods have aroused great interest in the use of these methods in the work of academic institutions. However the first practical steps in this direction have revealed a number of significant difficulties standing in the way of the implementation of PTsM in the planning and organization of scientific research. Therefore it would be more accurate to speak here of the potential high effectiveness of PTsM which will be achieved in practice only if all the necessary conditions and elements which make up the essence of these methods are realized.(30)

The essential problem seems to be that although the new methods might have led to a more rational approach to the determination of the most desirable and fruitful research projects - and this is the essence of the articles describing PTsM at institute and department levels - there have in fact been no changes in research structures or financing derived from the new methods. While it is claimed that projects listed in a goal-oriented programme must be provided with funding, personnel and material resources on a priority basis, they in fact depend for the provision of all these resources on their inclusion in the regular yearly plans of the institutes responsible for them. One natural consequence of this is that institute managements simply contrive to have their usual projects renamed programmes or parts of programmes to gain access to priority resource allocations. The interest of institutes, and higher levels of management, in leaving open this possibility and the presumably continuing inter-hierarchical jealousy endemic to the Soviet Union have led to a tendency for PTsM not to cover the whole of a major research problem from theory to vnedrenie, but to be split up into

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various stages with only a limited degree of inter-hierarchical cooperation. In Belorussia only 14 per cent of projects included in programmes are worked on jointly by more than a single institute, and only 11 per cent involve interbranch cooperation. Further, programmes are divided into three types: research, scientific-technical, andvnedrenie programmes. Overwhelmingly the first type is the province of the Academy of Sciences and universities, while the latter two are left to the branch ministries.(31) The protestations of those involved that theoretical research is something which cannot truly be planned leads one to suspect that there is resistance to the complete integration of the different types of programme into a fully comprehensive one.(32)

The lead institutes and scientific councils in charge of the management of the programmes have not been given any additional legal or financial powers, meaning that, as in the past, they rely for their effectiveness on consultative and recommendatory powers. Even within one's own hierarchy this is unlikely to be enough; where interbranch cooperation is required such powers will more often than not be entirely inadequate.

It should not be forgotten that the Soviet Union has always had PTsM of a sort, in that projects of special national significance have always been attacked using a goal-oriented approach, with funding and resource allocation cutting across hierarchical and institutional boundaries. Fedoseev made just this point at the December 1979 Academy General Meeting, citing as examples Lenin's Goelro project, industrialization in the 1930s, the Virgin Lands scheme and the present BAM railway.(33) It is not claimed by Soviet commentators that PTsM should be applied to all research,(34) which suggests that PTsM could be taken as no more than a reaffirmation and formalization of traditional 'crash programme' methods. If so it is not surprising that Aleksandrov supports them - he comes from such a background himself. One could even expect them to have some successes, just as 'crash programmes' have succeeded in the past.(35) The Ministry of Electrical Industry claims its use of PTsM as a reason for its success in recent years.(36) But this will have little positive effect on the bulk of Soviet research. Indeed the effect could well be negative, if resources are further sucked away from less glamorous and less obviously useful research.

There is much about PTsM that is typical of reform in the Brezhnev era - a fashionable concept for which great potential is claimed, but which because of the leadership's pathological aversion to Khrushchev's 'hare-brained schemes' is approached both in concept and application with a degree of caution that borders on half-heartedness. This caution ensures that there is never any chance of a new approach producing much that is new, and particularly anything that threatens the interests of the established centres of power.(37) PTsM, if they were applied with anything like enthusiasm, would threaten such interests, by strongly centralizing decision

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making and cutting across established hierarchical boundaries. The Academy of Sciences would appear to be included within these threatened centres of power. Indeed there is muted opposition to the new methods from elements of the Academy, but being in terms of the difficulties involved in applying planning controls of any sort to fundamental research, this is little more than the academic scientists' traditional opposition to planning. The Academy leadership, however, has accepted PTsM, because it sees in these methods the opportunity to gain for itself a major role in a more highly centralized research system, with easier access to priority resource allocation. Its major role in biotechnology, the latest subject of the 'crash programme' approach, suggests that despite the apparent leading role given to Gosplan in PTsM matters, the Academy has had some success in using the new methods for its own benefit. There is certainly little about the new planning methods to suggest that the Academy has lost anything through them, or that they have been one of the costs of the Academy's increasing role in applied research.

Whereas the economic management strategy of the Brezhnev government was towards the greater centralization of planning controls, in the area of financial controls some efforts at decentralization were made. As far as scientific research is concerned there were three major decrees. The 1967 Council of Ministers decree 'On changes in the procedure for planning expenditures on scientific research work and for examining the rights of managers of scientific research organizations' granted institute directors greater independence in determining the organization of work and the distribution of funds, with only total expenditure and the wages fund set by the planning authorities. Within these limits the director was given the freedom to fix the number of personnel, the average wage of his staff (although not wage scales), and expenditure on individual items within the limits of the total budget.(38) The decree also formally established the right of institutes to use profits from contract work on improving their infrastructures - previously such improvements were legal only if included in the institutes' plans.(39)

The joint Central Committee and Council of Ministers' decree of September 1968 allowed research institutes to undertake contract work exceeding in value the funds set aside in their plans for research work, while branch ministries were allowed to transfer funds to institutes for the wages of extra staff employed in research work (institutes have never been given the right to use their own resources to employ extra staff); it was established that research institutes would be entitled to payments representing a proportion of the economic benefit accruing to the economy as a result of that institute's research being put into production; and institutes were permitted to manufacture equipment and apparatus for their own use without first obtaining the permission of higher authorities. Greater freedoms brought with them greater responsibilities, with institutes

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being made legally and materially responsible for the non-fulfilment of the terms of contracts.(40)

Finally, in 1970 in a briefly worded Council of Ministers decree research institutes were formally granted all the rights and responsibilities that had been granted to production enterprises in 1965.(41) Branch institute directors would be using these powers within the framework of the full khozraschet system on which they had been placed in 1961. This meant that they were taken off the state budget, and were expected to balance their budgets through income received from contracts signed with other institutes and production enterprises.(42)

For academic institutes it was generally recognised that full khozraschet was inapplicable. No one would expect that institutes doing fundamental research could be fully self-financing. However the decrees were a sign of greater emphasis on an increased degree of self-financing and contract relations in academic institutes.Contract work had long been done in Academy institutes - in the early 1930s the Academy was already concluding financial contracts directly with the People's Commissariats.(43) In 1961, the decree putting branch institutes on full khozraschet stipulated that by 1963 five per cent of academic institutes' income should come fromcontracts.(44) Some institutes have a product to sell that includes advanced research. They can therefore combine commercial and basic research in such a way that the standards of the institute do not suffer. Some of these have made good use of contract work to build up their R&D facilities, the best example being the Paton Institute of Electrical Welding of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. When Boris Paton took over as director on the death of his father in 1953, the institute had 123 research workers on its payroll. By 1975 it was a giant with almost 6,000 workers.(45) A large part of that growth was financed by contract work - for example, in 1962 contracts provided 54 per cent of the institute's total budget.(46)

It is not surprising, therefore, that Paton is a keen supporter of contract relations in academic institutions. Others, however, have been less enthusiastic. It is felt that institutes wanting, or needing, to supplement their state funding with contract-derived funds would have to turn to applied work, all too often of a minor nature and better left to the specialized branch institutes.(47) It has also been claimed that state budget allocations are reduced whenever incomes from contract sources increase.(48)

The decrees produced an apparent increase in contract relations and khozraschet organizations in the Academy. While full khozraschet for institutes has as a whole never appeared likely to be introduced, many Academy institutes have set up fully self-financing laboratories and subdivisions. These subdivisions are very often involved in design or prototype building and testing work, and are therefore in a position to provide some sort of finished product for production

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enterprises. They have been used to particularly good effect in the Siberian department of the Academy and the Ukrainian Academy.(49)

The Academy leadership seems to have realized that such self-financing laboratories provide the only sure means for the Academy to obtain the equipment needed for the testing and development of its discoveries. With a general lack of cooperation from the branch ministries, the Academy has increasingly had to do its development work for itself. However the central authorities have been reluctant to finance this work from the state budget. Thus in 1969 Keldysh described the khozraschet organizations already in the Academy, and, although without any great enthusiasm, called for their expansion. However he stipulated that their income should not be used to justify reductions in state budget allocations.(50)

Some scattered data indicate the growing importance of contract work for academic institutes. In 1965 six per cent of the research work done in the Siberian department of the Academy was financed by contracts, having risen from 0.5 per cent in 1962. By 1970 the percentage had risen to twenty five, according to one source, while another puts the percentage for 1971 at 18.1. The second source then gives figures for 1975 and 1979 of 21.9% and 33.2%. In the ninth Five Year Plan contract work was worth 121.5 million rubles.(51) In the Azerbaidzhan Academy contract work had increased in value from 555,000 rubles in 1966 to 1.05 million rubles in 1967 and a planned 1.649 million in 1968.(52) In the Ukraine such financing for academic institutes was worth 3.7 million rubles in 1959, 5.7 million in 1960,12.2 million in 1962 (16 per cent of total budget), while it reached28.3 per cent in 1966. Between 1965 and 1975 contract funds increased 4.5 times, while budget financing had not quite doubled.(53) To take the case of a single institute, the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Tomsk centre of the Siberian Academy, with its best seller being metereological laser locaters, increased contract sales from700.000 rubles in 1970 to more than 3 million in 1972.(54) In the Siberian Academy the Institute of Mining raised the percentage of its work done on a contract basis from 21.8 to 50.7 in the years 1971 to 1979. The value of contract work increased from 182,000 roubles to1.120.000 roubles over that period. The equivalent figures for the Institute of Semiconductor Physics were 21.9 to 65.7%, and 1,785,000 roubles to 5,418,000. In the four years up to 1971 the Institute of the Problems of Mechanics of the All-Union Academy did contract work worth 6 million rubles, with the profits going to build new experimental facilities.(55) A.I. Shcherbakov shows the positive effect of contract financing not only on the institutes' capacity to purchase new equipment, but also on the wage levels of research scientists.(56) There has been so much money available for contract work that ceilings have been imposed. According to Zaleski, the ceilings, imposed for the Academies as a whole by Gosplan, range, in the case of the Ukrainian Academy, between twenty and thirty per cent. The Academy then fixes ceilings for individual institutes. Zaleski states that 'the limit is evidently regarded by the Academy and

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institutes as a sensible arrangement in order to prevent too ir.uch of the effort of the Academy network being diverted from fundamental long-term work to short-term projects with more narrow application'.(57)

Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence of continuing concern over the effect contract work has on fundamental research. In 1981 K.M. Sytkin, the vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, one of the most successful centres of academic contract research, declared bluntly that the Academy had been forced into increasing its contract work by a lack of funds, but that it had required great care to ensure this did not adversely affect fundamental research. Similar fears were expressed in the same year by Aleksandr Prokhorov, the Nobel prize winning physicist and academician secretary of the Department of General Physics and Astronomy of the All-Union Academy.(58) The secretary of the party committee of the Paton Institute, writing in 1978 about the khozraschet subdivisions in that institute, states that 'it has been necessary to overcome many barriers. It is no secret that today not everybody accepts this approach, considering that it has a negative effect on the level of fundamental research'.(59) Iu.K. Pozhela, the vice-president of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, in whose institutes often half the budget comes from contract work, complains that contract demands tend to force the institutes away from the work for which they were established.(60) Complaints continue that contract work tends to be of a minor repetitive nature, often limited to neighbouring enterprises.(61) It was mentioned above that in 1968 an official from the Siberian department of the Academy was complaining that the percentage of the department's income to be derived from contract research had been set at an unreasonably high 14.5 per cent. By 1970 the realized figure was 25 per cent. Further, the 1981/82 data given in the next paragraph indicate considerably higher levels of contract work than allowed for by the ceilings described by Zaleski in 1969 and cited above.

In recent years the traditional, legally binding 'economic contracts' (khoziaistvennye dogovory) have been supplemented to some extent by the so-called 'contracts for cooperation' (dogovory sotrudnichestva). One sign of the latter's importance is that in 1978 47 of the 97 contracts in which the Paton Institute was involved were of this type.(62) They are not legally binding and are designed to bring some extra flexibility that could not be provided by the bureaucratically stifling 'economic contracts' to the relations between research institutes and production enterprises. They tend to cover a much broader and often vaguer range of operation than the highly specific economic contracts, in fact often being little more than agreements to exchange information and laboratory techniques and to share expensive apparatus.(63) However the contracts can also cover a sharing of, and cooperation in work on, research projects.(64) There are very few details available on the financial aspects of their operations, so it is difficult to say how important

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they are as sources of funds for institutes. The impression could be gained that the monetary aspect is less important than in economic contracts,(65) which could mean that they are a sign of a move away from the contract funding of academic research. However, economic contracts clearly remain a major source of funds. Recent data indicate that such contracts provide over 52 per cent of the funding of the Belorussian Academy, about 50 per cent in the Ukraine, and over 30 per cent in Lithuania and Moldavia.(66)

It seems probable that the central authorities encouraged the development of khozraschet and contract relations in research institutes more out of a desire to ease the burden of scientific research on the state budget than to provide institute directors with meaningful financial and administrative independence. Indeed the independence has been strictly limited, in the case of the economic contracts by the continuing stifling bureaucratic regulations, in the case of the 'cooperation contracts' by the supervisory role of the regional party apparatus. While some institutes seem to have made good use of contracts, both in improving their financial situation and making a positive contribution to Soviet R&D, their general effect appears likely to have been negative, by forcing research into relatively minor industrial R&D. The increasing popularity of the 'contracts of cooperation', which seem in particular to be the type of contract used in central and regional goal-oriented programmes, might be a sign of a reaction against this. Nevertheless, some sort of economically based links between institutes and production enterprises seem to be an inescapable cost of the Academy's increasing involvement in applied research and R&D.

A development parallel to khozraschet and contract relations in research institutes has been that of an increased accent on the measurement and stimulation in economic terms of the work of individual researchers. Attestation, material incentive and socialist competition are all separate but interrelated phenomena in this area. Attestation here means a periodic review of one's appointment (not the attestation of academic degrees by the Higher Attestation Commission); material incentive covers various schemes providing bonuses or variable wages for measured degrees of success at work; while socialist competition likewise measures one's success at work but the rewards tend to be 'moral' rather than material. All three have in common the need to measure the performance of individual researchers.

An attempt was made to organize an attestation system in the Academy in the 1950s, but it was not successful and seems to have fizzled out by about 1963.(67) The system was reintroduced in 1968, in section 22 of the September 1968 Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree on science. According to the decree, every three years a commission of highly qualified specialists and party and trade union representatives, designated by institute management, will examine the work of each research worker on the basis of 'objective criteria of the evaluation of the activities of workers'. A decision

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will then be made as to whether each researcher will be dismissed, demoted, simply reappointed or promoted.(68)

It seems probable that the attestation scheme was seen as part of the whole new science management package set out in the 1968 decree, and that it was not specifically linked with the ideological crackdown of the time. However it was immediately put to use for the purging of ideologically unreliable researchers ,(69) and has been used for the same purpose ever since.(70) But there are clearly other motives for the system. Anatoly Fedoseev describes it as being essentially designed to force people to work harder, not to control them ideologically. He makes the point that many capable and honest people welcomed the system in the hope that it would improve the work done in institutes and serve as a weapon against the multitude of professional idlers in Soviet research. He claims that although the system has succeeded in frightening people, it has not led to any improvement in research productivity.(71) However the process, except when used for political purposes, cannot be too frightening. A commission established to examine the Academy's fulfilment of the 1968 decree reported that between 1962 and 1972, only 0.3 per cent of those undergoing attestation had not been reappointed, with the figure for 1970-72 being 0.7 per cent.(72) Such low figures were seen as a failure not only because they were not high enough to frighten people, but also because they indicated that attestation was failing to achieve another of its objectives, to increase staff turnover in research institutes and thus bring about a reduction in the average age of researchers.(73)

However, the figures given by the commission are slightly misleading, since they refer only to people dismissed as a result of failing an attestation review. A further refinement of the system has led to increased turnover without the unpleasantness of dismissals. Greater flexibility has been built into the system in some institutes, the aim being to remove the emphasis on such basic considerations as dismissal or reappointment by introducing various gradations of financial reward for work well done. The pioneering example of such a development is the Karpov Institute of Physical Chemistry. The Karpov Institute is a branch institute, not part of the Academy network, but it is a very important institute which combines fundamental and applied research in a way that makes it very similar to many Academy institutes. Certainly its system, introduced in 1968, has attracted much attention in Academy circles. Salaries of all research workers were notionally reduced 25 to 30 per cent, with the institute director then being given the right to fix each individual's actual pay anywhere between that reduced level and a maximum of 40 per cent (for those without advanced degrees) and 25 per cent (for those with advanced degrees) above the original salary. Thus a researcher previously earning 300 rubles a month was now guaranteed a minimum of 225 rubles with a maximum possible salary of 375 rubles. The director made his decision on the basis of the recommendation of an attestation committee like those described above. In making its decision it took

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into account such criteria as the theoretical and experimental qualities of the researcher's work, the degree of initiative and independence he displayed, the scientific and practical value of his output, and the level of his involvement in the vnedrenie of research work into production. At the first attestation 483 researchers were examined, of whom 256 retained their former level of pay. In 126 cases pay rates were raised, while 71 people, mainly highly paid and qualified, received reductions in pay. In the following two attestations the percentage of those having their pay reduced declined, eventually to 6.8 per cent.

Those running the scheme claimed it to be a success, leading to a great increase in creative work in the institute.(74) The scheme required no extra budget allocations, since the institute was given the right to retain any funds saved from the wages fund, which was kept constant at its 1968 level despite reductions in staff. The director of the institute relates with some evident satisfaction that within three years of the beginning of the experiment 50 of the 71 researchers whose work had been found to be of poor quality had left the institute.(75) Under such a system unwanted workers did not have to be dismissed; they could simply be encouraged to leave by having their pay reduced. It seems probable that the 5 per cent departure rate attributed to attestation by G.K. Skriabin in 1976 refers to resignations, not dismissals.(76)

There have been criticisms of the Karpov system for its lack of objectivity, in that the system leans very heavily on the expert opinion of attestation commissions. The director of the institute states that although the criteria mentioned above have an important role, they are not the deciding factors;

We were always against excessively formalized evaluation with the use of a defined group of indicators. The specific character of scientific research does not permit the use of such methods without serious damage to creative work. Therefore, in our experiment the deciding role is given to expert evaluation by highly qualified scientists who are well acquainted with the relevant field of science and the specifics of scientific research in the institute.(77)

In this he resolutely opposes those who claim that such a subjective system will lead to management manipulation and therefore a lack of trust among the collective in both the management and the system.These critics demand a more complex system of rigid and weighted indicators.(78) Such systems, which as yet appear to be primarily theoretical or applied to the financially less important socialist competition, have increased the indignation of those already concerned about the effect on scientific research of Karpov-type systems.

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One of the most outspoken critics of any such system of public evaluation and comparison of performance of research workers is S.G. Kara-Murza. He writes:

At present the flood of suggested systems has greatly increased, and the bravest of the enthusiasts for the introduction of formalized systems of evaluation go so far as to demand that on a union-wide scale the management of all research institutes be obliged to work out and apply such systems, giving them the character of official norms. It is essential that this enthusiasm be offset by a detailed critical analysis, from the point of view that an organized evaluative interference in the work of a scientist has a serious effect on the collective. It is necessary that to the maximum possible degree potential negative side effects of such interference are foreseen and neutralized.(79)

Like the proponents of the highly formalized schemes he sees the danger of the subjective factor in the Karpov system, but also believes that even the most mathematical of systems will fail to remove the subjective factor. In the final analysis there is always some management figure who will determine the indicators and the weights attached to them, and Kara-Murza clearly does not have confidence in the sense of fairness of managers in setting these indicators or measuring their fulfilment. In language unusual for a Soviet publication, he reacts to the claims of the champions of the system that few people complain about their lack of fairness with the statement that 'everyone understands perfectly well that to complain about the unfairness of an evaluation requires special personal qualities'. But even given the total objectivity of the administrators of the system, Kara-Murza doubts both their efficacy and their desirability. He finds it difficult to accept that any system of indicators and points, with even the most elaborate weighting system, can measure in any meaningful and consistent way tie scientific contribution of research projects and researchers, and strongly attacks the weightings put forward by various authors and tie artificial results they produce in research output.(80) He claims that the systems ignore or work against the type of people that might not publish a great deal but who are essential to a well run creative collective - those who excel in personal communication; those who have brilliant and original ideas but are not good at developing then; and those who specialize in constructive criticism of others.(81) He then goes further by claiming that the public evaluation and comparison of individual researchers, as well as underestimating the self-motivation of researchers and overestimating their interest in material benefits,(82) also spoils relations and destroys team spirit within institutes by placing too much emphasis on odious and almost certainly unreliable comparisons.(83) Kara-Murza is supported by other writers. S.B. Gurvich puts the stress on the value systems of scientists, claiming that material incentive schemes and the general

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application of management systems derived from industry ignore and indeed suppress one of the most important sources of scientific advance, the brilliant individual who needs freedom and even disorder to work at his creative best and is unlikely to be motivated by financial rewards and punishments.(84) G.A. Lakhtin criticises the Karpov system specifically for not being a system of material incentives but a system of 'fear of demotion', and goes on to make the point that one cannot expect too much from the material stimulation of individual researchers when they have so little control over their work.(85) In a more recent article he speaks of the Karpov system in the past tense, and criticizes it for increasing the pay of low level workers at the expense of the highly qualified, thereby reducing the incentive to strive for promotion and improved qualifications.(86)

The debate is clearly an emotive one, being concerned with more than the technicalities of management systems, with both sides claiming to have moral right on their side (the proponents of points systems because they are 'objective', the opponents because they see public comparison of individuals as odious), and with major questions of management-staff relations and the organization of working time being involved.

An effort to find a less emotive approach has been made by the Academy's Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO). One of the problems that all the systems have been attacking is the rigidity of the Soviet wage structure. In the research sphere, all institutes are placed in one of three categories, with academic institutes usually being in that attracting the highest pay rates.For research workers there are then essentially two levels, junior research worker and senior research worker, with minor increases in pay coming with appointments to management positions, significant increases on election to the Academy, but with the major means of obtaining a dramatic increase in salary being the gaining of an academic degree. Gaining a candidate's degree means an immediate doubling of salary.(87) Such a system means firstly that excessive importance is given to advanced degrees and the dissertations they entail,(88) and secondly there is very little room for varying pay rates to suit the varying levels of performance and experience, other than by turning to the controversial Karpov-type systems. The IMEMO system is less radical, in that its essential feature is a great increase in the number of grades of appointment, giving far more scope for regular promotion. The institute has five grades, junior research worker, research worker, senior research worker, leading researcher, chief researcher-group leader. Each lower rank receives respectively 30 per cent, 45 per cent, 60 per cent and 85 per cent of the salary of a chief researcher. The system also includes a Karpov element, by having six pay levels for each grade. Which level a researcher finds himself on depends on the same type of attestation scheme that exists in the Karpov Institute. Institute management clearly see it as an advantage of the attestation aspect of the system that it has led to the departure of disgruntled people, so that over the years of its

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operation the average age of the institute's staff has been reduced.(89)

Other institutes do not appear to have received permission to adopt IMEMO's system, while Kara-Murza's fears of the obligatory universal application of Karpov-type systems have not been realized.In fact such systems appear to have received very limited application, particularly in academic institutes.

The most common form of material incentive in branch institutes is the monthly, quarterly or yearly bonus. The 1968 decree devoted considerable attention to bonus schemes, and set up an elaborate experimental system in the Ministry of Electrotechnical industry, as well as self-financing bonus funds in all branchinstitutes.(90) However academic institutes were not included since as a rule they do not have the financial resources to establish self-financing bonus funds. With the spread of khozraschet relations to academic institutes there would appear to be greater scope for bonus schemes. However even such giants as the Paton Institute, it is claimed, have insufficient funds for an effective bonus system.(91) Nevertheless the evidence suggests that in khozraschet-based laboratories and bureaus in academic institutes, bonus systems do operate.(92) One would expect them to be bedevilled by the same problems that affect bonus systems in other branches of the economy - finding a level of bonus that is not so low that it has no incentive effect or so high that to refuse to pay it would cause real hardship and therefore counterproductive resentment,(93) and resisting the temptation to pay all researchers the same rate of bonus.

Because socialist competition is directed more towards so called 'moral' rewards - the granting of honorific titles and places on honour boards, etc - and therefore does not make as great a call on the institites' financial resources, it is more applicable to academic institutes. However until the 1970s socialist competition was virtually unknown in the Academy.(94) But during the 1970s socialist competition schemes were introduced on an inter-institute basis, and in 1976 the Academy was included in a general union-wide scientific-technical socialist competition.(95) It is in socialist competition that the quantifiers have really been given their head, and measuring and weighting systems of staggering complexity abound. Note the reassuring tone used by the deviser of one mathematical scheme:

This system of equations is perhaps not always of the most simple 'schoolboy' type. However if you manage to solve it once, you should then be able to use it without any great effort.(96)

One wonders if the management and party organization of the average institute would have the capability, to say nothing of the desire, to

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involve themselves in such complexity. One might further be sceptical of the influence of socialist competition on individual researchers and institute managers, who might not be particularly impressed by 'moral' rewards.(97) One interesting indication that socialist competition may be of greater significance than we might expect is the discussion by the secretary of the party committee of the Paton Institute. He makes the point that socialist competition includes such important indicators as economic return (effekt) which are not included in regular state plan fulfilment requirements. This makes the 'social control’ exercised over such important indicators through socialist competition particularly important.(98) Given the strong party involvement in socialist competition and the increasing role of party organizations in science management since the early 1970s, this could conceivably be of some importance.

Nevertheless, the general impression is that socialist competition is not a major factor in the life of Academy institutes, and that they have in fact been generally spared the rigours of material incentive and work evaluation schemes, with the exception of periodic job attestation. This is the one area where the Academy leadership has publicly involved itself to any degree at all, with Keldysh admitting at the 24th Party Congress in 1971 that the Academy still had a long way to go to fulfil the requirements of the 1968 decree as far as attestation was concerned,(99) a point which he repeated at the post-Congress General Meeting of the Academy.(100) However the same conclusion, that as yet attestation had not succeeded in weeding out ineffective researchers, was arrived at in 1975 by the commission appointed by the presidium to examine fulfilment of the 1968 decree. The commission suggested that institute management was to blame, and that in future the implementation of attestation would have to be taken into account in measuring the performance of leading personnel ininstitutes.(101) Since then, however, there has been little mention of attestation in the press, and indeed in 1976 the view was expressed that attestation had failed, at least in its aim of increasing turnover of staff in the institutes, and that other means would have to be found.(102) The increased emphasis since then on forcing people out of institutes by Karpov-type systems of material incentive might suggest that attestation is seen as a failure and has become less important in recent years.

Thus there are three features of the post-Khrushchev approach to economic management that have been seen by many as relevant to Academy research, and by some as the cost of increased Academy involvement in general science coordination and management - increasingly centralized planning, khozraschet and contract financing, and work evaluation and incentive schemes. However none would appear to be seen by the Academy's leadership or a significant proportion of its membership as involving an unacceptable cost. Centralized planning has been accepted and indeed promoted by the Academy as a means of ensuring its involvement in major scientific decision making, while the traditional

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de facto decentralization in the compilation of institute plans is still sufficient to keep institute management happy.(103) Khozraschet has been applied in the Academy only in those areas where it can make a positive contribution. However, one suspects that the spread of contract relations is causing some serious misgivings. Some institutes seem able to make good and balanced use of the financial advantages contract relations bring, but others, forced into contract work through lack of funding, probably feel that such work is threatening the basic integrity of the research for which they are primarily responsible. Work evaluation and incentive schemes continue to be the subject of intense but essentially theoretical debate. In practice such schemes seem to have had little application, probably due to the realization that the schemes suggested would not work, and in fact probably have a negative effect. In conclusion, it seems unlikely that Academy management sees any of the developments discussed in this chapter as being sufficiently negative in their consequences to make a greater applied research role undesirable.

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FOOTNOTES

1 For details on planning in this period, see VAN, 8/71, pp. 130-139.

2 Vucinich, op.cit., p. 82.3 Ibid; VAN, 3/64, p. 18.4 Vucinich, op.cit., p. 81.5 Zaleski, op.cit., p. 106.6 Some idea of the process can be gained from ibid, pp. 71-88;

Vucinich, op.cit., pp. 82-84.7 Prayda, 28 January 1969, p. 2. Raymond Hutchings writes of the

planning process in the All-Union Research Institute for the Technology of Aesthetics, an institute under joint Academy-State Committee supervision: 'VNIITE is apparently its own master in thechoice of projects to be included in its plan. If that is so, the word "plan" in a Soviet context even is a misnomer. Rather, VNIITE is drawing up its programme of work for the coming year, as any Western business firm would do.’ Hutchings, op.cit., p. 167.

8 Pravda, 11 February 1974, p. 2; VAN, 2/79, p. 9. Gustafson describes the ability of a new director to change radically the direction of research in an institute. T. Gustafson: 'Why doesn't Soviet science do better than it does?' in Lubrano and Solomon, op.cit., pp. 39-40.

9 Izvestiia, 26 September 1964, p. 3; Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, No. 2, January 1966, p. 32.

10 Another decentralizing aspect of the Soviet planning system is the apparent ease with which 'binding' plans can be changed during the period of fulfilment. Zaleski records a Soviet report that 25 per cent of planned research projects in the RSFSR have been changed in the course of a year. These changes are apparently instigated both by higher authorities, discovering new priorities, and the institutes themselves, making sometimes public-spirited, sometimes self-interested adjustments. Zaleski, op.cit., p. 470.

11 The Soviet practice of funding institutes rather than individual projects gives research administrators a great deal of influence compared to project leaders, which has the further effect of pushing leading researchers into administrative positions. Gustafson, op.cit., p. 36.

12 Most of these developments are most clearly set out in the September 1968 joint Central Committee and Council of Ministers

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decree 'On measures for raising the effectiveness of the work of scientific organizations and accelerating the use in the national economy of the achievements of science and technology'.Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 9, Politizdat, Moscow, 1969, pp. 257-283.

13 Pravda, 2 March 1976, p. 4. This call had a knock-on effect in the union republics. Thus, for example, late in 1976 the Belorussian Central Committee and Council of Ministers issued a joint decree on scientific planning that recognized the need for programme planning. Sovetskaia Belorussiia, 25 December 1976, p. 1.

14 VAN, 1/81, P- 55.

15 VAN, 5/76, P- 13.

16 VAN, 9/76, pp. 0017 VAN, 1/76, pp.. 11-12.

18 VAN, 9/76, P* 42.

19 For example, in June 1961, soon after his accession to the presidency, he declared that the planning of theoretical research belongs in a separate category of its own; that it is a particularly difficult and delicate form of planning; and that it is the task of the Academy to carry it out. VAN, 7/61, pp. 21-22. At the February 1964 General Meeting of the Academy Keldysh recognized the dissatisfaction of many scientists with the existing system of planning, and stated that it was up to the leadership itself to establish more rational methods of planning. No five year plan should reduce the initiative of scientists, and room should always be left for adjustments made necessary by unforeseen developments. VAN, 3/64, pp. 7-8.

20 VAN, 12/61, pp. 51-52.21 VAN, 5/76, p. 13.22 Partiinaia zhizn', 15/79, pp. 6-7.23 The brief published account of the plenum, a summary of Brezhnev's

speech, makes no mention of PTsM. Partiinaia zhizn', 23/79,pp. 6-16. However subsequent newspaper articles refer to the plenum's directives on the subject. Pravda, 11 December 1981,p. 2.

24 Turkevich, 1977-78, op.cit., p. 99. See the leading role given to the Belorussian Gosplan in the joint Belorussian Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree of December 1976. Sovetskaia Belorussiia, 25 December 1976, p. 1.

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25 For a report of the special meeting of the Academy, see VAN, 5/80, pp. 6-43.

26 Pravda, 28 February 1981, p. 3.27 Pravda, 11 December 1981, p. 2.28 Pravda, 4 March 1982, p. 2.

29 VAN, 1/81, pp. 55-81. In this case the republican Academy described is the Belorussian. For an account of PTsM in the Estonian Academy, see Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, No. 44, October 1979, p. 15.

30 VAN, 1/81, P- 77.

31 VAN, 1/81, P- 72. See a recent article by Anatoly Rzhanov on thedifficulties in ensuring that the major aims of goal-oriented programmes are not swamped by narrow interests. He puts most of the blame on the fact that the contracts on which the programmes are based are signed not by top-level science management bodies, but by individual institutes with their own narrow interests. VAN, 2/82, pp. 43-44.

32 One article states: 'Of course, many important aspects ofprogramme planning which are incompatible with the accepted system of organization of fundamental research require considerable development', the implication being that PTsM will have to change, not the accepted system. VAN, 1/81, pp. 66-67.

33 VAN, 5/80, P- 2934 VAN, 1/81, P- 7835 For a useful summary of this line of argument, see Nature,

3 January 1980, p. 4.36 R.F. Miller and T.H. Rigby: Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU in

Current Political Perspective, Occasional Paper No. 16, Department of Political Science, RSSS, Australian National University, Canberra, 1982, p. 34; VAN, 1/81, p. 55.

37 It is too early to say whether the new leadership will adopt a more adventurous and committed approach to economic and administrative reform. Andropov's speeches so far are not promising. However Shcherbitsky, one of the leading proponents of the programme approach, continues to describe it with enthusiasm. See his speech at the November 1982 Ukrainian Central Committee plenum. Pravda Ukrainy, 29 November 1982, p. 2.

38 Zaleski, op.cit., p. 223.

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39 Ch.N. Azimov: Dogovornye otnosheniia v oblastinauchno-tekhnicheskogo progressa, 'Vishcha shkola', Kharkov, 1981, p. 14. For the text of the decree, see Resheniia partii i pravitel'stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam. 1917-67 gg., vol. 6, 1966- June 1968, Politizdat, Moscow, 1968, pp. 363-365.

40 Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 9, op.cit., pp. 530-557.

41 Resheniia partii i pravitel'stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. 8, 1970-72, Politizdat, Moscow, 1972, p. 54.

42 With the important qualification that theoretical research and research of 'general state significance' could still be financed from the state budget. This meant that in 1965 57.2 per cent of the total expenditure on research in the institutes of industrial ministries still came from the state budget. Zaleski, op.cit., pp. 465-467. For the text of the decree, see Resheniia partii i pravitel'stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam. 1917-67 gg., vol. 4, 1953-61, Politizdat, Moscow, 1968, pp. 726-730.

43 Dorofeev, op.cit., p. 103.

44 Zaleski, op.cit., p. 465. It would seem that this figure can be set at a higher level by the planning authorities. See the complaint in 1968 by the head of the Planning and Financial Administration of the Siberian department of the Academy that the percentage had been set for the department at 14.5 per cent by the Ministry of Finance and the State Committee for Science and Technology, a figure he considered to be unreasonably high. Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, No. 24, June 1968, p. 13.

45 Dorofeev, op.cit., p. 253.

46 VAN, 1/63, p. 49; Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 21 July 1962, pp. 3-4.

47 Even such engineers as Blagonravov, working in applied research, were aware of these dangers. VAN, 3/61, p. 43.

48 Izvestiia, 12 June 1964, p. 3. Some of the opposition has had a clearly ideological content. See the attacks by Tigran Khachaturov on khozraschet and theories of economic self-regulation put forward by Yugoslav, Czech (specifically Ota Sik), some Hungarian and 'even a few Soviet economists'. VAN, 12/68, p. 20.

49 In 1965 the Ukrainian Academy had 16 khozraschet subdivisions doing work worth 12 million rubles per annum. By 1975 the work of 54 subdivisions was valued at 100 million rubles. In 1980 34,000 of the 75,000 people working in the Ukrainian Academy worked in khozraschet laboratories and bureaus. Pravda, 3 August 1976;p. 2; VAN, 11/80, p. 56. For a brief description of the Siberian system, see VAN, 10/72, pp. 11-17. See also VAN, 9/77, pp. 25-27, for details on khozraschet laboratories in the Lithuanian Academy.

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50 VAN, 4/69, pp. 14-15.51 A.V. Bakunin: Deiatel1nost1 KPSS po uskoreniiu

nauchno-tekhnicheskogo progressa, 'Vysshaia shkola', Moscow, 1980, p. 173; Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, No. 24, June 1968, p. 13; Shcherbakov, op.cit., p. 75.

52 VAN, 5/68, p. 33.53 VAN, 1/63, p. 48; 3/77, p. 44; Zaleski, op.cit., p. 467.54 Pravda, 19 February 1972, p. 3.55 Shcherbakov, op.cit., pp. 75,81; VAN, 5/71, p. 40.56 Shcherbakov, op.cit., pp. 81-82.57 Zaleski, op.cit., p. 467.

58 VAN, 8/81, p. 45; Kommunist, 17/81, pp. 51-52.59 Partiinaia zhizn', 10/78, p. 43.60 VAN, 9/77, p. 25.61 Belousov and Khromushin, op.cit., pp. 64-65; Pravda, 6 February

1976, p. 3; Nature, 3 May 1979, p. 5.62 Partiinaia zhizn', 10/78, p. 43.63 However research institutes do not have the one resource - abundant

student labour power - that makes the 'contracts for cooperation' so valuable for educational institutions. For example, the Moscow Engineering-Economics Institute signed a contract for cooperation with the 20th Moscow Construction Trust which entailed the trust building as a matter of priority a new building for the institute, while the institute provided students for 'on-the-job' training as construction workers. N. Samsonov: Partkom vuza, 'Moskovskyrabochy', Moscow, 1972, pp. 6-8.

64 Partiinaia zhizn', 9/77, p. 35; 21/78, p. 41; VAN, 11/79, p. 52;5/81, pp. 62-67; Bakunin, op.cit., p. 169. One interesting feature of the 'contracts for cooperation' is that regional party bodies take a particular interest in them. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 3/79, p. 200; Partiinaia zhizn', 21/79, p. 32; Belousov and Khromushin, op.cit., p. 27.

65 See Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, No. 40, September 1972, p. 14.

66 VAN, 12/81, p. 23.

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67 VAN, 8/56, p. 82; 4/59, p. 29; 12/61, pp. 42-43; 7/62, pp. 7-8;Komkov, op.cit., pp. 259-260.

68 Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 9, op.cit., pp. 272-273.

69 For example, see the purge in the Central Steam Turbine Institute in Leningrad, which led to the transfer to other work following attestation of about 100 people. Kommunist, 18/68, p. 43.

70 The best documented case is the failure of Igor Mel'chuk to be reappointed to his post in the Academy's Institute of Linguistics. Survey, vol. 23, no. 2(103), Spring 1977-78, pp. 126-141. It has been suggested that applicants to emigrate from the Soviet Union are prevented from having their work published, and are then dismissed for lack of sufficient scientific output at their next attestation. 'Zaiavlenie Vladimira Magarika', Radio Svoboda, RS48/82, 24 March 1982, Annotations, p. 3.

71 A. Fedoseev; Zapadnia. Chelovek i sotsializm, Posev, Frankfurt/Main, 1976, pp. 174-176.

72 VAN, 5/75, p. 41.

73 In 1976 academician Tuchkevich complained that attestation was not increasing the excessively low 2 to 3 per cent turnover rate in Academy institutes. VAN, 9/76, p. 51. See also VAN, 1/82, p. 44.

74 In 1974 it was reported that the Karpov system was being used in 43 institutes. Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, No. 20, May 1974, p. 14.

75 For details of the Karpov system, see Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v neproizvodstvennoi sfere, Profizdat, Moscow, 1975, pp. 101-102; Partiinaia zhizn', 6/76, pp. 48-51; Kommunist,10/73, pp. 106-107; VAN, 12/75, pp. 76-83.

76 VAN, 5/76, p. 38.

77 VAN, 12/75, p. 79.

78 VAN, 6/76, pp. 69-75; 12/76, pp. 69-72.

79 VAN, 11/75, p. 16.

80 He cites one institute whose average yearly output of articles had been in the range 110 to 115. With the introduction of a points system weighted in favour of the publication of articles output immediately leapt to over 300. He doubted that this was to the benefit of Soviet science.

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81 Lev Artsimovich, one of the greats of Soviet science and a major protagonist in the 1964 debate on theoretical research (seepp. 28-30) published about 40 articles in his whole career. He was sceptical of those with outputs of 50 articles a year. Nesmeianov managed 30 in 1955, when president of the Academy. VAN, 1/79, p. 119; 11/56, p. 3.

82 Much sociological effort has gone into determining by survey workwhat motivates Soviet researchers more: the desire for creativeexpression or material reward. For some relevant articles see D.M. Gvishiani (ed.): Voprosy teorii i praktiki upravleniia iorganizatsiia truda, 'Nauka', Moscow, 1975, Chapter 16; VAN, 6/79, pp. 52-59; Pravda, 7 June 1969, p. 3; 1 September 1972, p. 2.

83 For another article by Kara-Murza expressing the same views, see Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 August 1980, p. 11. See also Nature, 25 September 1980, p. 267.

84 VAN, 6/79, pp. 52-59.85 VAN, 7/76, pp. 21-27.

86 Pravda, 29 June 1982, p. 3.87 Thus the famous radiation geneticist Timofeev-Resovsky, who was

unable to get his candidate's dissertation accepted for political reasons, received half the pay of a junior researcher with a candidate's degree, although he was head of a department.Zh.A. Medvedev: Mezhdunarodnoe sotrudnichestvo uchenykh inatsional'nye granitsy. Taina perepiski okhraniaetsia zakonom, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1972, p. 133.

88 Degrees and dissertations are the subject of recurring debate in the Soviet press. For the latest, see Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 March 1981, p. 13, and the subsequent discussion.

89 VAN, 12/76, pp. 73-79.90 Sections 24, 30 and 31 of the decree. Spravochnik partiinogo

rabotnika, vyp. 9, op.cit., pp. 278-280.91 Partiinaia zhizn', 10/78, p. 46.92 Literaturnaia gazeta, 10 June 1981, p. 10.

93 See Fedoseev, op.cit., p. 169, for the difficulties involved in withholding a bonus.

94 VAN, 12/78, p. 41.95 VAN, 11/78, p. 43. See VAN, 12/78, pp. 41-49, for a description of

socialist competition in the institutes of the Georgian Academy.

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96 VAN, 4/80, p. 107. For a sample of the type of methods employed,see D.B. Murauskaite and V.O. Simonian: Upravleniesotsialisticheskim sorevnovaniem v nauchnom kollektive,'Ekonomika', Moscow, 1981.

97 However there is evidence that the so-called ’moral' rewards canhave some material significance. One book on moral incentives included among its list of moral rewards such things as valuable prizes, trips to rest homes, tourist trips, subscriptions and tickets to theatres, etc. Moral1noe stimulirovanie truda v usloviiakh khoziaistvennoi reformy, Institute of Industrial Economics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Donetsk oblast' branch of Znanie, Donetsk, 1971, p. 14. Even such apparently non-material rewards as Diplomas of Honour, Red Banners and signatures in the work book appear to have a material significance not generally publicized. After one book gave some data on the relative popularity of various forms of moral reward, the statement was made that 'the least popular is the use of the work book as a means of encouragement, since this gives the employee practically no advantages with regard to transfers to other work, with regard to retirement onto a pension, or in the work process'. V.G. Smol'kov: Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie vneproizvodstvennoi sfere, Profizdat, Moscow, 1975, p. 132.

98 Partiinaia zhizn*, 10/78, p. 46. Another source indicates that long-term plan fulfilment, also not accorded high priority in measures of state plan fulfilment, is included in socialist competition. Partiinaia zhizn', 21/79, p. 33.

99 Pravda, 2 April 1971, p. 5.100 VAN, 7/71, p. 22.101 VAN, 5/75, pp. 41-42.102 Although L.F. Petrov, the head of the Academy's Legal Department,

still writes with hope in late 1981. VAN, 1/82, pp. 41-46.103 It is interesting that the question of the decentralization and

democratization of Academy procedures, which was such an important part of the reform debate of the 1950s, has since the reorganizations of the early 1960s virtually disappeared from the agenda. In the mid-1960s there was agitation for the granting to institute directors of the same rights that had been granted to industrial managers in 1965, and political demands, in the prevailing atmosphere of dissent, for greater scientific autonomy. But since the political clampdown of the late 1960s and the changes in the powers of directors described in this chapter, whatever their practical decentralizing significance, demands for decentralization and democratization have become rare.

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CONCLUSION

By way of conclusion, the lessons to be learned from the history of the Academy of Sciences, specifically in the period since 1961, can be used as the basis for some speculation on the possible future of the Academy.

The first lesson is that the Academy is subjected to a strong and probably inescapable pull towards applied research. Despite the strength and prestige of the 'pure science' lobby of the late 1950s, which included the top management of the Academy, it would appear that the Academy was never likely to be left to its own devices as a pure research organization. It appears unlikely that that was the aim of even the 1961 and certainly not the 1963 reorganization, and since then the movement of the Academy back towards applied research has been gathering ever increasing momentum. The Academy research network is too important a one, and compared with the rest of the R&D network too effective, to be allowed to slip out of applied research.Further, for the post-1961 Academy leadership applied research has been essential to justify the continuing role they have seen for the Academy as the 'staff headquarters' of Soviet science.

That leads us to the second lesson to be learned from the last twenty years - the extreme toughness of the Academy and its ability to protect its scientific and bureaucratic positions. It survived Khrushchev's onslaught, and since then has regained and consolidated its position as the leading institution of Soviet science. This is not to forget or ignore the major role of the State Committee for Science and Technology. There is unfortunately far less information available on this organization than on the Academy, but all the indications are that it has considerable formal administrative powers that are very likely used in practice. However the State Committee does have some fundamental weaknesses, which have led it to accept the need for an alliance with the Academy against the branch ministries.

Despite the greater aggressiveness of Aleksandrov compared with Keldysh in trying to expand the functions of the Academy, the alliance with the State Committee appears to be holding. Indeed there are signs that the State Committee is interested in strengthening it. An article published in Vestnik Akademii nauk in late 1981 by the well-known champion of the State Committee, V.P. Rassokhin, is essentially a restatement of the demands for greatly increased powers to be granted to the State Committee over the branch ministries which had been made in his earlier articles.(l) However on this occasion he opens the article with an extended argument for the greatly increased powers of the Academy as well. He states:

The documents of the 25th and 26th- Congresses of theCPSU emphasize the need to strengthen the influence of

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the Academy of Sciences - as coordinator of all scientific work in the country - not only at the level of scientific research, but also at the level of technological development carried out in the branches of the economy.

The Academy should be given the legal right to pass final judgement on the acceptability of branch technological developments and on the work of leading institutes working in the branches.

In a recent Pravda article V. Kudinov, deputy chairman of the State Committee, also called for the further development of existing, primarily Academy, forms of science-production integration, and the establishment of new forms, such as interbranch scientific-production associations under the Academy. This is after criticizing the majority of industrial ministries for the slowness of their work in this area. The greatest advocate of interbranch scientific-production associations is Boris Paton, Kudinov's former boss at the Paton Institute.(2)

It is interesting that Rassokhin, a State Committee partisan, repeats Brezhnev's phrase of the 25th Party Congress describing the Academy as 'coordinator of all research in the country', even though Brezhnev did not repeat the phrase at the 26th Party Congress. Here he said no more than that the role and responsibility of the Academy should be further increased, and indeed in saying that 'to formulate precisely the practical tasks which demand the maximum attention of scientists is the concern above all of the central planning and economic organs and the State Committee for Science and Technology', appeared to leave the Academy out of the top level of science policy making.(3) Despite this the Academy leadership has continued to refer to the 25th Party Congress statement as if it is still operative.(4) No public signals have been sent from the party authorities that this is an incorrect interpretation. Indeed, in recent years the Academy seems to have gained a new ally - the party apparatus, at the regional level at least. We have seen repeated statements that the regional apparatus supports the Academy in overcoming the barriers put before scientific development by the branch ministries. Indeed the vehemence of anti-ministry statements in recent times, the emphasis on regional economic development, and even calls by regional party leaders for the reestablishment of sovnarkhoz-type structures suggest that a major move against the ministries, far beyond the boundaries of just science management, is not impossible. But even if such extreme speculation is not justified, some sort of alliance between the Academy and the regional apparatus would appear to exist. Of course, the ministries - to say nothing of Gosplan - are formidable opponents. However it seems that the Academy is in a good position to maintain and even extend its positions in science management and coordination.

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With Aleksandrov retaining his control of the nuclear power programme, nuclear fusion research remaining as ever within the Academy, and Ovchinnikov in charge of biotechnology, the Academy has control of three major areas of R&D development. There has also been emphasis on the need for the Academy to increase its role in the machine and metallurgical sciences,(5) with the Department of Mechanics perhaps gaining enough strength to take on such a role - although whether it might eventually come to be an independent centre of power within the Academy, like the Department of Technical Sciences, remains to be seen.

However it is in the field of machine science that one can sense most strongly some of the problems the Academy is likely to face in the future. One of the benefits of the 1961 and 1963 reorganizations, and seemingly perceived by the Academy leadership as such, was the removal from the Academy of the capacity and need to do for itself all the minor repetitive work necessary for industrial R&D. Since then the Academy has worked hard to gain and maintain the right to manage and coordinate major research programmes, right through to the vnedrenie stage, but has nevertheless been happy to leave the detailed development work to branch institutes. But the more responsible the Academy becomes for the success of these major programmes, the more pressure there will be on it to change its approach. With some justification it is sceptical of the ability, and willingness, of the branch ministries to do work controlled by the Academy. With its continuing prestige and authority dependent on success, the temptation to take on all the research itself increases. This means the opening of new institutes concerned with increasingly applied research, for example, the Institute of the Chemistry of Non-aqueous Solutions in Ivanovo, and the extension of the experimental and design facilities of existing institutes.

But this leads to a drain on Academy resources, at a time of apparent budget restrictions. Although official figures show a picking up in the rate of growth of budgetary allocations to science in recent years, following very low rates in the mid-1970s (even negative in 1975), and although it is claimed that the Academy's share is increasing,(6) the long-term trend is still down, and the general impression is gained of a shortage of funds.(7) In such circumstances the expansion of the research network must mean a reduction in funds for existing institutes. One solution, as we have seen, is to make research work, particularly at the vnedrenie end of the R&D process, self-financing. Thus the great increase in the amount of contract work done in the Academy. But we have also seen the dangers of contract work, particulary when it is being done out of necessity - it usually leads to a neglect of unprofitable fundamental research, leading to a long-term decline in the scientific quality of the institute.

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In the past similar pressures on the Academy to undertake for itself all the work involved in the whole R&D process have had disastrous results. Funds were drawn away from fundamental research, which meant that a lot of major, top-priority research programmes were based outside the Academy, while the Academy found itself under fire from the government for not being able to do the applied work properly. The danger of similar difficulties arising in the future seem very real. However the Academy leadership shows itself willing to accept the risk.

Or at least the present leadership does. Another significant lesson to be learnt from this paper is the importance of the president of the Academy in setting the style and substance of its operations. Particularly compared with Nesmeianov, both Keldysh and Aleksandrov came from similar backgrounds and have tended to follow similar policies: an important role for the Academy of Sciences in themanagement and coordination of science at all levels, and an acceptance of the potential costs - subjection to planning, contract funding and strict work evaluation. But Aleksandrov has been far more aggressive than Keldysh in pursuing such policies. One can presume that Aleksandrov will be around for a few more years - although he has just celebrated his eightieth birthday he appears to be fit and active, and his term does not expire until 1986. But a replacement could well bring a new approach. Of course, presidents do not just happen - they are appointed by the party leadership, which presumably selects someone who is expected to pursue the policies which it wants. However the opportunity for each president to make his own individual mark on the Academy seems to be substantial.

Without a major change in party policy towards science and the Academy, one would expect the new president to have considerable experience in managing major research programmes, and therefore to have a commitment to applied research. The party is clearly prepared to look outside the Academy for such a person, which makes predicting a successor difficult. Although not exactly an Academy outsider, the favourite for the presidency at the moment is probably Boris Paton.He has proven organizational ability in the important but relatively neglected field of machine building, and is clearly a darling of the political leadership and the influential Ukrainian party boss Shcherbitsky. In recent years he has put considerable stress on the help the Ukrainian Academy gets from the party in its science management work. He is a full member of the Central Committee. His commitment to the strong involvement of the Academy in the integrated approach to R&D and concomitant subjection of the Academy to planning and contract work is clear. He is plainly no friend of the branch ministries,(8) and would presumably prefer to build up the Academy's own research and experimental facilities, as he has done in the Ukraine. However in many ways he shows signs of being more flexible than Aleksandrov. This is most noticeable in his attitude to technology imports - he was markedly conciliatory in replying to a rather provocative question on Western embargoes from a Komsomol'skaia

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pravda correspondent in a 1980 interview.(9) He is also willing to work closely with Gosplan, as well as the State Committee for Science and Technology, and stresses his flexibility with regard to the future of his Ukrainian science centres.(10) With Paton as president one might expect a change in style, and if anything a policy of even greater involvement of the Academy in applied, and in particular industrial research.

Another obvious candidate for the post is Iury Ovchinnikov. A Wunderkind of the Chemical Faculty of Moscow State University, Ovchinnikov went on to do his post-graduate degrees at and rise to be director of the Institute of the Chemistry of Natural Compounds, now the Shemiakin Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 1968 at the age of 34, and a full member two years later. He has been a vice-president of the Academy since 1974, and became a candidate member of the party Central Committee in 1981. His research has been concentrated primarily on decoding protein structures, and he therefore has some commitment to theoretical research not entirely subordinated to production demands.(11) However he has always been recognized as a talented organizer,(12) and is now in charge of the Soviet biotechnology programme. The latter fact will presumably be seen as his major qualification for the post as president. However, one might expect his theoretical background to affect his attitude to the role and nature of the operations of the Academy, although unfortunately he has not publicized his views on such questions. The closest we have to a policy programme from Ovchinnikov is a recent article on methodological seminars,(13) in which he does discuss some organizational questions. He acknowledges the importance of long-term goal-oriented research programmes, citing with approval the experience gained from GOELRO and the nuclear and space programmes.(14) He refers to the impossibility of talking in the modern world of a pure science independent of society and its needs. However, he seems to carefully avoid mention of the needs of the economy or production, which could be interpreted as reflecting a desire to retain for fundamental research some freedom from demands for immediate application. He also talks of the great complexities involved in applying socialist competition to fundamental science in a way that suggests scepticism that such complexities will ever be resolved. As for style, he is credited by the Dorofeevs with having those personality traits which appear to be considered positive in Soviet science - despotism, an unwillingness to discuss matters with his colleagues, and an ability to browbeat his subordinates into accepting his own preconceived ideas.(15) However, one might hope that his relatively close proximity to the difficulties of biology in the 1950s has left him with a sense of the dangers of an excessively dictatorial approach. In his Vestnik Akademii nauk article he criticizes (in most careful terms) the suppression of resonance theory in Soviet chemistry in the late 1940s, although much of the article is devoted to strong attacks on 'bourgeois ideologists' trying to•deny the existence or morality of the Soviet unity of partiinost' (party-mindedness) and

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nauchnost' (science-mindedness). In a recent speech, at a specialgeneral meeting of the Academy to discuss the Food Programme, he speaks in strongly ideological and anti-Westernterms.(16) Nevertheless, in his Vestnik article he stresses the importance of international scientific cooperation, something which it is hard to imagine Aleksandrov doing at the moment. New Scientist reports one extraordinarily liberal statement by Ovchinnikov, but without giving any source. When the biologist David Goldfarb was refused an exit visa on the grounds of 'state security', Ovchinnikov is said to have stated:

There is no objection to granting visas from theAcademy side and this viewpoint is made known to theauthorities dealing with the matter.(17)

Despite this, on balance it would be difficult to describe Ovchinnikov as a liberal.

In many ways Ovchinnikov is more like Nesmeianov than the latter's two successors, and a term with him as president could bring a very different approach to that which is evident at present.

A less well-known candidate is Evgeny Velikhov. Born in 1935, he is a specialist in plasma physics and magnetic hydrodynamics. He is deputy director of Aleksandrov's Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and leads the Soviet nuclear fusion research programme. Since 1977 he has been a vice-president of the Academy, with special responsibility for science and technology. He does not enjoy the party status of Paton and Ovchinnikov (he is, of course, a member of the party) but he seems to have the experience in large-scale science management and a background in theoretical science directed towards a practical application that attracts the party leadership. Although Hans-Otto Wüster, the director of JET, Western Europe's latest nuclear fusion research centre in Culham, Oxfordshire, is of the opinion that Soviet fusion research is lagging because it has no individual champion of sufficient clout to push through major funding,(18) if there is some break-through in nuclear fusion in the next few years to give him a lot of favourable publicity, Velikhov could well be a strong candidate. He seems to take most of his ideas on science from the Kurchatov Institute, where he has worked all his life and of which he seems extremely proud.(19) Although clearly no admirer of the branch ministries, he accepts them as a fact of life that must be fitted into the science system. He does not see the Academy as being the right organization to provide the overall coordination of all Soviet research, claiming it does not have the resources to do so. However he is a strong believer in the closest possible links between fundamental research, applied research and production, and like Aleksandrov could well come to believe that only the Academy could provide those links. He is already in favour of more experimental facilities in the Academy and speaks approvingly of the Ukrainian science centres and PTsM. He is a strong defender of the integrity of

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science, particularly theoretical science, and unlike Aleksandrov suggests that wide-ranging theoretical research, unplanned and motivated by simple curiosity, should be encouraged. Scientists should be trusted to work for the good of the country, while management techniques that do not recognise the many different forms of scientific creativity are counter-productive.(20) The Kurchatov Institute seems to have strong traditions, and these are evident in the similar approaches to science management of Aleksandrov and Velikhov. However Velikhov appears to have a less aggressive approach than Aleksandrov, particularly in his ideas on how scientists should be treated. This might suggest similar policies to those of Aleksandrov, but a different style.

These three possible candidates show what potential there is for different approaches even within the criteria set by the party and the tradition of the Soviet era. However, while someone like Ovchinnikov might be more aware of and more willing to resist the dangers of excessive involvement in applied research than Paton, the party,Soviet tradition and the desire of the Academy to maintain its place in the Soviet science system will ensure a continuing applied role. This is undoubtedly a good thing for Soviet R&D as a whole, and while it threatens some dangers for the fundamental side of the Academy's work, a combination of the prestige and authority of the Academy and the inability of the Soviet bureaucracy to control everything probably will ensure that the dangers will be kept at bay.

Clearly the prestige and authority of the Academy are important factors - they ensure that the finest minds of the Soviet Union go there to work and that they are then able to use their knowledge and abilities to defend an openness and political independence that is unusual by Soviet standards. This gives the Academy political resources that are far greater than its meagre material and bureaucratic resources. However, there are those in the West who suggest that the endless repression of dissident scientists and the packing of the Academy membership with ’careerists' has led or will lead to a breaking of the Academy's morale and the collapse of its prestige. Not only will it no longer be a source of political morality in the Soviet Union, but it will also lose its scientific stature, as the best minds no longer come to it and it no longer does its job better than everyone else.(21)

Is there in fact such a threat to the Academy's future? The problem with such an analysis is that it vastly overestimates the political purity of the Academy in the past. There were many saintly whitehaired professors from pre-revolutionary times left in the Academy in 1930, but that did not stop them caving in, not without a struggle it is true, to the demands of the party for the 'Red elections' of 1929, nor the regular votes for the expulsion from the Academy of politically unacceptable members.(22) Indeed, as Kenneth Bailes makes clear, some of the 'bourgeois specialists' of the 1920s and 1930s were quite prepared to curry favour with party leaders in

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the scramble for government research support.(23) There is little evidence now of the private and political campaigns conducted by Kapitsa, Kurchatov, Tamm and Sakharov in the 1950s, or the public dissidence of Artsimovich, Leontovich and again Sakharov in the 1960s, but equally the Lysenkos, Oparins and Lepeshinskaias have virtually disappeared. The latter were members of the Academy, whereas Sergei Trapeznikov, Iovchuk, Asratian and other neo-Stalinists are still waiting for election. Sakharov, of course, has not been expelled, unlike his colleagues of the 1930s. This is not to deny the significance of the party's influence over, one might even say control of, Academy elections, particularly in so far as it determines the list of candidates for election. However the final secret ballot is still a formidable barrier.

It is true that a majority of academicians and corresponding members of the Academy are now party members, but since party membership is virtually essential for an appointment even as laboratory head, it seems unfair to apply the pejorative label 'careerist' to all scientist party members. The Academy is no more politically compromised now than it has ever been in the past. In fact, its prestige and authority have never rested on any political independence, but on the scientific brilliance and integrity of members. That integrity is probably freer from political and ideological demands at present than for many years, while there is no evidence that the scientific brilliance is noticeably declining. In fact there are probably fewer frauds in the Academy now than for many years, and even the most glaring careerists are more than competent.It is this scientific brilliance and integrity that still makes the Academy the source of the freest and most open debates in the Soviet Union, usually on scientific matters but often with broader social significance. There are, unfortunately, no bastions of freedom in the Soviet Union. The Academy of Sciences has certainly never been one. But its prestige and authority are undiminished, and undoubtedly constitute a factor in its success in maintaining its position at the head of Soviet science.

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FOOTNOTES

1 Trapeznikov, op.eit-, pp. 58-68; VAN, 11/79, pp. 43-53; VAN,11/81, pp. 53-61. Rassokhin, also in 1981, apparently published an article on the same subject in the journal Ekonomika i organizatsiia promyshlennogo proizvodstva. On this occasion a discussion ensued. I do not have access to this journal, but see P. Hanson; 'Organisational changes for Soviet research and development', Radio Liberty Research, RL464/82, 10 November 1982.

2 Pravda, 21 July 1982, p. 2.3 XXVI s''ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza.

Stenografichesky otchet, Politizdat, Moscow, 1981, vol. 1,pp. 60-61.

4 For example, a Vestnik Akademii nauk editorial, 2/81, pp. 3-4; and Fedoseev in VAN, 7/81, p. 18.

5 The 1980 conference sponsored by the party Central Committee to discuss the joint Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree 'On a significant improvement in the technical level and competitiveness of metal working, casting and woodworking machinery and tools' was attended by Aleksandrov, with the Academy being assigned the task of working on the major problems of machine and materials science and in this giving assistance to branch institutes. Partiinaia zhizn', 6/80, pp. 7-11. In 1979 it was the Institute of Machine Building which was transferred back to the Academy. VAN, 6/79, p. 31.

6 Graham, 1977-78, op.cit., p. 130.7 A minor indication is that in 1980 there had been no increase in

the funding of the Academy's libraries since 1975. In that period acquisitions of foreign books were halved, and journal subscriptions were beginning to be cut. VAN, 6/80, pp. 28-29. See Aleksandrov on this problem at the 1982 Annual General Meeting.VAN, 6/82, p. 10. The head of the Planning and Financial Administration of the Academy speaks in early 1981 of 'conditions of limitations in the growth of expenditure in the sphere of science'. VAN, 1/81, p. 77.

8 VAN, 12/81, pp. 38-39.9 Komsomol*skaia pravda, 22 March 1980, pp. 1-3. Aleksandrov has

been the chief spokesman for the anti-technology imports lobby that has gained so much influence in the Soviet Union, particularly since the most recent Western embargoes. See VAN, 11/80, p. 63; Pravda, 26 February 1981, p. 3; S. Voronitsyn: 'The US embargoand the Soviet Union's technological dependence on the West', Radio Liberty Research, RL291/82, 19 July 1982.

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10 Komsomol'skaia pravda, 22 March 1980, pp. 1-3.

11 The Dorofeevs quote him as saying: 'A researcher should not relyon flashes of inspiration. Something else is needed. You should set yourself tasks which at the moment seem unreal, insane. In a few years time they will be just what is required'. Dorofeev, op.cit., p. 285.

12 Ibid, p. 280.

13 VAN, 2/82, pp. 48-56.

14 Paton, in the Komsomol'skaia pravda interview cited above, specifically distinguishes such massive projects from the more run-of-the-mill goal-oriented programmes. This is presumably an indication that Paton sees the goal-oriented approach as having a more general application, not just to a handful of the most important projects.

15 Dorofeev, op.cit., pp. 281-283.

16 Sovetskaia Rossiia, 23 September 1982.

17 New Scientist, 11 March 1982, p. 627.

18 New Scientist, 20 May 1982, p. 483.

19 In this he echoes Aleksandrov before his election to the presidency. VAN, 7/61, pp. 47-48.

20 For a summary of Velikhov's views, see Literaturnaia gazeta,10 June 1981, p. 10.

21 Toth, 1975, op.cit., p. 16; A. Katsenelinboigen: Soviet EconomicThought and Political Power in the Soviet Union, Pergamon, N.Y., 1980, p. 54; V. Turchin: The Inertia of Fear and the ScientificWorld View, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1981, p. 9.

22 I. Voznesensky: 'Names and fates: on the jubilee list of theAcademy of Sciences' in Pamiat'. Istorichesky sbornik, vyp. 1, •Khronika', N.Y., 1978, pp. 353-410.

23 K.E. Bailes: Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin.Origins of the Soviet technical intelligentsia. 1917-1941, Princeton U.P., Princeton, N.J., 1978, p. 55.

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2 The A.C.P.T.A.: A Study of White Collar Publio Servioe Unionism in the Conmonwealth of Australia, 1881-1922 (1966)

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8 A Handbook of Australian Trade Unions and Employees Associations, 2nd e d i t i o n (1973)

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13 The Premiers' Conference: An Essay in Federal State Interaction (1977)*

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15 A Handbook of Australian Trade Unions and Employees Associations, 4th edition (1980)*

16 26th Congress of the CPSU in Current Political Perspective (1982)*

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*Copies of these papers may be obtained from the Australiern National University Press, PO Box 4, Canberra, ACT 2600