ECONOMY
7. THE FUNDING OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
SOURCE. Irina Dezhina and Loren Graham, Russian Basic Science After Ten Years of Transition and Foreign Support. Working Papers No. 24, February 2002. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Full Text in PDF format at http://www.ceip.org/files/Publications/
Soviet science was organized in three institutional systems:
-- The Academy system (the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences). Most pure research was carried out in institutes belonging to this system.
-- The university system, largely devoted to teaching.
-- The military-industrial science complex, consisting of closed ence were preserved basically in forms inherited from the Soviet period. However, state funding fell precipitously, with federal government expenditure on civilian science declining by 80 per cent in the course of the 1990s. Institute directors were forced to resort to such expedients as renting out space in their buildings and encouraging researchers to stay while earning their living from outside activities.
In the early 1990s some Western-style foundations were created, allowing individual researchers to compete directly for funds on the basis of peer review. The two main foundations are the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Foundation for the Humanities. Nevertheless, these foundations receive only 7 per cent of government expenditure on civilian research. The Academy system remains in a predominant position.
In 1996 a program was initiated by the Ministry of Education and the Russian Academy of Sciences to strengthen links between the universities and Academy institutes. The two systems have cooperated in setting up Education and Research Centers, of which there are now 157.
Foreign funding also became increasingly important for Russian scientists. By 1995 about half of Russian basic science was being financed from foreign sources. In 1999 17 per cent of all research and development expenditure came from abroad.
Since 1999 there has been a modest recovery in the state funding of science. For the first time since 1991, the government is actually delivering the sums allocated to science in the budget. After years of steady decline, the number of researchers has leveled off and even increased slightly. The recovery has been especially marked in military research.
Another new development is the beginning of sponsorship of science education by Russian business. The Russian Credit Bank, the INTERROS foundation (supported by Vladimir Potanin), and the YUKOS oil company are providing stipends to higher education students in specialties of interest to them. At the end of 2000, the physicist Zhores Alferov devoted one third of the Nobel Prize he won that year ($75,000) to create a Foundation for the Support of Education and Science.
As the authors note in conclusion, the "death of Russian science" predicted by some has not after all occurred. "Science is not the tender flower it is often thought to be," but "more like a hardy weed." But in order to judge this one has to assess the quality and not just the quantity of Russian scientific work. What exactly happened in those areas of Soviet science that used to be most advanced? Did specific scientific schools which seemed to hold great promise survive? It is not reassuring to learn in passing that Alferov won his Nobel Prize for work he did twenty years ago.
Note
(1) The funding of the closed cities was discussed in RAS Issue 1 item 1. See also Issue 3 item 5.
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