Akademgorodok , is a part of the
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n city
NovosibirskNovosibirsk is Russia's third-largest city, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and the largest city of Siberia. It is the administrative center of Novosibirsk Oblast as well as of the Siberian Federal District...
, located 20 km south of the city center. It is the educational and scientific centre of
SiberiaSiberia , is the vast region constituting almost all of Northern Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the USSR from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the...
It is located in the center of
birchBirch is the name of any tree of the genus Betula , in the family Betulaceae, closely related to the beech/oak family, Fagaceae.-Description:...
and
pinePines are coniferous trees in the genus Pinus , in the family Pinaceae. They make up the monotypic subfamily Pinoideae. There are about 115 species of pine, although different authorities accept between 105 and 125 species.-Distribution:...
forest on the shore of the
Ob SeaNovosibirsk Reservoir or Novosibirskoye Reservoir , informally called the Ob Sea , is the largest artificial lake in Novosibirsk Oblast and Altai Krai created by a dam on the Ob River near Novosibirsk. The dam, built in 1956, is for generating hydroelectric power. The reservoir is 160 km long...
, a man-made reservoir on Siberian river
ObThe Ob River , also Obi, is a major river in western Siberia, Russia. It is the country's fourth longest. The Ob River also has the longest estuary in the world.-Names:...
. Formally it is a part of Novosibirsk city, and has never been a
closed cityA closed city or closed town is a settlement with travel and residency restrictions in the Soviet Union and some of its successor countries...
like, for example,
SeverskSeversk is a closed city in Tomsk Oblast, Russia, located northwest of Tomsk on the right bank of the Tom River. The population is Founded in 1949, it was known as Pyaty Pochtovy until 1954 and as Tomsk-7 until 1992. Town status was granted in 1956.The current Chair of the City Duma and...
.
Located within Akademgorodok is
Novosibirsk State UniversityNovosibirsk State University was founded in May 1959 in the USSR by Soviet academicians Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev, Sergei Lvovich Sobolev and Sergey Alekseyevich Khristianovich in a program of establishing a Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences...
(
NSU), 35 research institutes, an
agriculturalAgriculture is the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of human civilization, with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more densely populated and...
academy, medical academy, apartment buildings and houses, and a variety of community amenities including stores, hotels, hospitals, restaurants and cafes, cinemas, clubs and
librariesA library is a collection of sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed; it is organized for use and maintained by a public body, an institution, or a private individual. In the more traditional sense, a library is a collection of books. It can mean the collection,...
. The House of Scientists (
Dom Uchyonykh), a social center of Akademgorodok, hosts a library containing 100,000 volumes —
Russian classicsThis article is about literature from Russia. For the song by Maxïmo Park, see Our Earthly Pleasures. Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet...
, modern literature and also many
AmericanAmerican literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and Colonial America. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
,
BritishBritish literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands as well as to literature from England, Wales and Scotland prior to the formation of the United Kingdom....
,
FrenchFrench literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak other traditional non-French languages. Literature written by citizens of other nations such as...
,
GermanGerman literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language.This includes literature written in Germany itself as well as German-language Swiss and Austrian literature, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora....
,
PolishPolish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary...
books and magazines. The House of Scientists also includes a picture gallery, lecture halls and a concert hall.
History
The town, whose name would translate to English as
Academy Town, was founded in the 1950s by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Academician Mikhail Alexeyevich Lavrentyev, a physicist and mathematician, the first Chairman of the Siberian Division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, played a prominent role in establishing Akademgorodok. At its peak, Akademgorodok was home to 65,000 scientists and their families, and was a privileged area to live in.
During Soviet years (1961-1991), due to the peculiarity of the Soviet economic system, monetary rewards did not always translate into a higher standard of living. To offset this, a special compensation system was devised in Akademgorodok for its residents and leading scientists. For example, residents of Akademgorodok had access to special food ration distribution outlets (“stoly zakazov”) that provided, most of the time, an access to some basic subsidized foodstuffs, which were not always easily obtainable elsewhere. Politically conforming scientists who had obtained a doctorate (a post-Ph.D. degree under the Russian system)were rewarded by the authorities with the special food delivery service ("doktorskiy zakaz”), which provided access to a wider selection of groceries than available to the general population; some of the scientists, despite being eligible for this perquisite, refused it on moral grounds. Full and corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences had access to still higher level of service ("akademichiskii zakaz") and were eligible to live in cottages, considered luxurious by Soviet standards, as most of the population lived in apartments situated in nine- and four-story multi-apartment buildings.
Akademgorodok in the post-Soviet Era
The collapse of the Soviet Union saw many scientists, including whole cadres of Russia's top minds in the physical and theoretical sciences, reduced to penury. Beginning in the mid-1990s, as economic reforms allowed private investment in Russia, Akademgorodok saw the beginnings of venture funding. In 1992, a software company called Novosoft was founded here, and its chief client was
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
. Around the same time CFT started, which specialize in banking and financial software. By 1997 private investment reached $10 million; by 2006 it was $150 million and climbing. Intel and
SchlumbergerSchlumberger Limited is a French-American-based oilfield services corporation with operations in approximately 80 countries. Currently based in Houston, Texas, Schlumberger was founded in 1926 by French brothers Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger. The company recorded the first-ever electrical...
have brought work to Akademgorodok, and other companies are following them into the area. Dr. Lavrentyev's son, also named Mikhail and also an accomplished mathematician in his own right, has been deeply involved in this renaissance. While still minuscule by the standards of other countries, the private venture effort in Akademgorodok has breathed new life into what was once one of the Soviet Union's premier scientific centers.
The area is called
Silicon Forest by some.
List of research and education facilities in Akademgorodok
- Kutateladze Institute of Thermal Physics
Thermal physics is the combined study of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and kinetic theory. This umbrella-subject is typically designed for physics students and functions to provide a general introduction to each of three core heat-related subjects...
- Institute of Inorganic Chemistry
Inorganic chemistry is the branch of chemistry concerned with the properties and behavior of inorganic compounds. This field covers all chemical compounds except the myriad organic compounds , which are the subjects of organic chemistry...
- United Institute of Catalysis
Catalysis is the process in which the rate of a chemical reaction is either increased or decreased by means of a chemical substance known as a catalyst. Unlike other reagents that participate in the chemical reaction, a catalyst is not consumed by the reaction itself. The catalyst may participate...
- Vorozhtsov Novosibirsk Institute of Organic Chemistry
Organic chemistry is a discipline within chemistry which involves the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of chemical compounds that contain carbon...
- Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics is one of the major centres of advanced study of nuclear physics in Russia. It is located in the Siberian town Akademgorodok, on Academician Lavrentiev Avenue....
- Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems
- Institute of Informatics and Mathematical Geophysics
- Novosibirsk Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine
- Institute of Cytology and Genetics
- Sobolev
Sobolev and Soboleva is a popular Russian surname and may refer to the following people:*Leonid Sobolev , Russian general*Sergei Lvovich Sobolev , Russian mathematician...
Institute of Mathematics
- United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy
- United Institute of Automation and Electrometry
- Institute of Semiconductors Physics
- Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
- Institute of Chemical Kinetics
Chemical kinetics, also known as reaction kinetics, is the study of rates of chemical processes. Chemical kinetics includes investigations of how different experimental conditions can influence the speed of a chemical reaction and yield information about the reaction's mechanism and transition...
and Combustion
- United Institute of Hydrodynamics
- United Institute of History
History is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
- Philology
Philology considers both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies.Classical philology is the philology of the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages...
and PhilosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
- Institute of Laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process called stimulated emission. Laser light is usually spatially coherent, which means that the light either is emitted in a narrow, low-divergence beam, or can be converted into one with the help of optical components such as lenses...
Physics
- Central Siberian Botanical Garden
Botanical gardens grow a wide variety of plants primarily to categorize and document for scientific purposes. Botanists and horticulturalists tend the flora and maintain the garden's library and herbarium of dried and documented plant material. Botanical gardens may also serve to entertain and...
- Institute of Solid State Chemistry and Mechanochemistry
Mechanochemistry is the coupling of the mechanical and the chemical on a molecular scale and includes mechanical breakage, chemical behaviour of mechanically-stressed solids, tribology, polymer degradation under shear, cavitation-related phenomena , shockwave chemistry and physics, and even the...
- Research Institute of Circulation Pathology
Pathology is the study and diagnosis of disease through examination of organs, tissues, bodily fluids, and whole bodies...
- Institute of Economics
Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
and Industrial EngineeringEngineering is the discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or inventions.The American Engineers' Council...
- Presidium of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
- House of Scientists
- Novosibirsk State University
Novosibirsk State University was founded in May 1959 in the USSR by Soviet academicians Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev, Sergei Lvovich Sobolev and Sergey Alekseyevich Khristianovich in a program of establishing a Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences...
Novosibirsk State University
- Specialized Educational Scientific Center on Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology of Novosibirsk State University
- Museum of Archæology and Ethnography
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology. It is a methodological strategy used to provide descriptions of human societies, which as a methodology does not prescribe any particular method , but instead prescribes the nature of the study Ethnography (Greek ethnos = folk/people and graphein =...
- Central Siberian Geological
Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed...
Museum
- Institute of Computational Technologies
External links
- Official website of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (in Russian
Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
and EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
)
- Alexandre Telnov's photographic history of Akademgorodok
- Akademgorodok on NovosibirskGuide.com
- http://foto.academ.org/Photographs of Akademgorodok (in Russian
Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
)]
- Silicon Forest: Magnum presents the center of Russia's science industry: photographs of Akademgorodok
- Academ.org one of local area network
A local area network is a computer network covering a small physical area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings, such as a school, or an airport...
s of Academgorodok - forum, photos
- Josephson, Paul R. (1997) New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-044454-6.
- Dispatches - Silicon Siberia Fortune April 2, 2007 pp 33-36