Russian academy of sciences weathers round of attacks

A power struggle in which the Russian government appeared poised to subjugate the Russian Academy of Sciences has relaxed, at least for now.

Founded in 1724 by Peter the Great, the academy has 400 or so institutes where the bulk of Russia’s fundamental research is carried out. The academy has about 1200 members and more than 100 000 researchers and support staff in its institutes. Its annual budget of around $2 billion comes largely from the federal government.

In recent years the Russian government has been insisting on reforms in the academy. Things came to a head after new laws went into effect late last year requiring the country’s president to approve the academy’s choice of president and its charter.

Opposing reforms

At a three-day general assembly at the end of March, academy members adopted a charter under which they accept that the academy president must be approved by Russia’s president. The academy has traditionally enjoyed independence. Even in Soviet times, says Vsevolod Gantmakher, who works in low-temperature physics at the Institute of Solid State Physics in Chernogolovka, near Moscow, “the academy was more democratic [than other organizations]—I think it was the only institution in the country where they elected their own leader, at least formally.” What’s new now, adds Isaak Khalatnikov, a founder and former director of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, “is that the academy is not completely independent. It has no right to finally elect its president.” Still, he says, “it’s difficult to imagine that a president elected by members of the academy would not satisfy the president of our state.”

Adopting the academy’s charter was seen as a victory because it meant that an alternate draft charter was rejected. The other draft charter, whose authors were anonymous but which was generally known to have come from the government, would have placed a board of trustees and a supervising council above the presidium, the group of academicians that runs the academy. The board, made up of government appointees and a minority of academy members, and the council, appointed by the government, would have controlled appointments to high-level academy positions, the directions of science to be pursued, and funding. The anonymous draft charter also included term and age limits for presidium members and managers in academy institutions and introduced government control of academy property.

“The government pays money and the government provides property to the academy, and of course it likes to control the scientific output and excellence,” says deputy minister for education and science Dmitry Livanov, perhaps the most vocal proponent of the reforms spelled out in the anonymous draft charter. “The Russian Academy of Sciences will undergo modernization which aims to raise salaries for researchers and at the same time make new mechanisms for financing research activities, based on competition and external expertise.”

Although academicians might agree that some of the reforms endorsed by Livanov sound good, they don’t trust him. Take, for example, the idea of competing for funding. “The main problem is, Who will decide?” says Boris Ioffe of Moscow’s Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, which is not an academy institute. “It must be people who have high achievements in science, and maybe experts from abroad, that decide what areas of science to support.” What Livanov has been trying to introduce for years, Ioffe adds, “is formal criteria. If it’s formal criteria, then any bureaucrat can distribute funds with his calculator, but this has nothing to do with real science.”

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Gantmakher, “everything changed in this country 15 years ago, except the academy. In a country that has changed so completely, something has to be changed in the academy also.” But, whether or not they are members of the academy, scientists who favor reforms say they are stuck between academy leaders who oppose change and government leaders who promote change for their own agendas of grabbing power and money.

For his part, Livanov says he is not surprised that the academy rejected the charter he supports. “It was just the start of the negotiations,” he says. “Without any doubts, this [academy] version will not be approved [by the government].” And, he adds, either the academy will come around and adopt the proposals from the other charter, or it will devolve into “a community of experts like [the National Academy of Sciences] in the US—the research institutions will be taken and financed directly by the government. If we don’t find a compromise in a reasonable time, this second scenario will be implemented.”

But the outlook for the academy may not be so grim. Immediately following the general assembly, Livanov left his ministry post. “I think Livanov was used to test public opinion,” says Khalatnikov, who like other academicians now expects the government to take a softer approach to negotiating and approving the academy’s charter. “If you forget about the crazy ideas about a supervising council, a governing board, and so on, which are absolutely unacceptable, it should be easy to find an agreement. The main problem will be finding a solution for how to maintain academy property.”

Science still threatened

Academy members let out a collective sigh of relief on fending off the government’s latest encroachments. But, says Ioffe, “while the focus for the moment is on the academy, the problem is much more general. The attacks on science are coming from various directions.”

Ioffe ticks off some of the problems facing science in Russia: The prestige of science has sunk. Equipment is old. Scientists’ salaries are low. Scientists in the age range of 30 to 60 have either left science or left the country. The government is neglecting basic science to focus on short-horizon applications—even though much of Russian industry is immature. And under these conditions, young people are not attracted to careers in science. “The situation is tragic,” says Ioffe. “Russian science is dying.”