Akademgorodok

Akademgorodok: Lavrentyev Institute of Hydrodynamics

Akademgorodok, (Russian: “Academic Town”) scientific research city located near Novosibirsk at the northeast corner of the Novosibirsk Reservoir, south-central Russia. Akademgorodok is home to numerous research institutes and is the seat of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is, after Moscow and St. Petersburg, the third most important research and educational centre in Russia.

Akademgorodok was established by the government of the U.S.S.R. in 1958. With the support of leading officials of the Communist Party and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the city’s founding fathers—the mathematicians Mikhail Lavrentyev and Sergey Sobolev, the geologist Andrey Trofimuk, and others—succeeded within seven years in creating 20 institutes covering major fields of science and technology, including chemistry, physics, automation, hydrodynamics, genetics, and cytology, as well as the humanities and social sciences. The city also became the site of Novosibirsk State University (1959), a regional library, a botanical garden, and experimental agricultural plots.

During its first 10 years of existence, Akademgorodok was noted for its pioneering work in several fields and also for its political and cultural distance from the central Academy of Sciences and Communist Party in Moscow. Almost 1,800 miles (3,000 km) away from the Soviet capital, scientists were able to form social clubs where they engaged in discussions of literature, art, and music that were unheard of elsewhere in the U.S.S.R. Crucial to the scientific successes of the city was the gathering of leading scholars who left Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to pursue alternative approaches. They included Gersh Budker in high-energy physics, Nikolay Dubinin in genetics, Abel Aganbegyan in economics, and Tatyana Zaslavskaya in sociology. In 1968, as part of growing Soviet political conservatism, government authorities closed down the social clubs and ended the open political environment of the city. Nevertheless, through funding provided to develop the extensive natural resources of Siberia in the 1970s and ’80s, scientists managed to maintain leading research programs in many fields.

Akademgorodok was planned for 50,000 residents but reached a maximum of 100,000 persons in 1991. Its population declined in the 1990s owing to economic uncertainties following the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the late 1990s the city accommodated at least 40 different research organizations.