Vo glave pervenstvuiushchego uchenogo sosloviia Rossii: Ocherki zhizni i deiatelnosti prezidentov Imperatorskoi Sankt-Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk, 1725-1917 gg., and: "Edinym vdokhnoveniem": Ocherki istorii universitetskogo obrazovaniia v Peterburge v kontse XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX v., and: Moskovskii universitet v obshchestvennoi i kulturnoi zhizni Rossii nachala XIX veka (review)

The most evident result of the modernization policies of Russian rulers was the success of higher education, going back to Peter the Great's plans for the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the 1755 opening of the University of Moscow. New universities in the 19th century matched their Western European counterparts in brilliance of faculty and the production of learned books and journals. It is no wonder that the imperial period saw an extensive literature on the history of the academyand the universities along with the publication of impressive record collections. Soviet scholars contributed to that tradition. It is refreshing that interest has continued in contemporary Russia, where scholars now are free from ideological constraints.

The authors of the books under review are much indebted to the printed documentation but they have also uncovered pertinent items from the archives. If many of the details are trivial, others deal with more fundamental issues. In the preface to the essays that compose the Kolchinskii survey, the "scientific editor," Vladimir Semenovich Sobolev, points out that all presidents of the Academy of Sciences throughout its history complained of lack of funding (9). Other European governments that sponsored similar academies faced this problem, but it must have been especially acute in relatively backward Russia, where, in the beginning, members of the academy had to be lured from Germany. Later in the 18th century unusually talented students, most notably the poet and scientist Mikhail Vasil´evich Lomonosov (1711?-65), would be sent to study in Western Europe, at government expense. In his chapter on Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, the last of the presidents in the imperial period, Sobolev observes that too small a part of the budget went to educational institutions in general (192). Sobolev gives highest marks to the grand duke, who, despite his position, was ready to turn to others for advice while using his own prominence to improve the academy's situation (193-96). O. V. Iodko's essay "Sergei Semenovich Uvarov" is a good summary of a most remarkable statesman, but the chapter loses some of its value with the assertion that Count Joseph de Maistre was a "Jesuit" (123). The essay would have been much strengthened with the utilization of Cynthia H. Whittaker's biography of Uvarov. ¹

In the original project for establishing the academy, that institution was to be a "university" where professors would give public lectures. Most of the students in the beginning were children of foreigners in the Russian service (I. V. Tunkina, "Lavrentii Lavrent´evich Bliumentrost´," 23). The academy "gymnasium" ceased to exist by 1805, when the few remaining pupils attended the provincial gymnasium (N. S. Prokhorenko, "Genrikh Liudvig Nikolai," 92). In 1819 the University of St. Petersburg replaced the former Pedagogical Institute of Catherine II's time. The ambiguity in the mission of the Academy of Sciences, formed to promote scientific discovery and at the same time educate students, was not altogether unlike the situation in Western Europe. Charles E. McClelland has pointed out that when the University of Berlin was founded in 1810 it was presumed that the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences could provide...