Community of physicists and mathematicians in the context of the development of classical universities during the Soviet period: A regional case study
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Nekrylov Sergey A. , Stepnov Aleksey O. ,   National Research Tomsk State University, Gevorkyan Anush A. ,   National Research Tomsk State University
Published: December 2024

The changes in classical universities during the 20th century are studied in the context of high-profile political
and socio-economic events. At the same time, there are no studies of the internal resources and prerequisites for these
changes of the disciplinary communities that determined the trajectories of universities' development. The article, based
on materials from archival documents, personal sources and periodicals, examines the dynamics of changes of the role
and place of agglomeration physicists and mathematicians in the pedagogical staff and scientific life of one of the oldest
universities in Russia, Tomsk University, during the Revolutionary and Soviet periods. The identified data considered
in the all-Russian and all-Union context. Over the period from 1917 to the late 1940s, the Faculty of Physics and
Mathematics went from being not the most numerous and influential to one of the dominant structural divisions of
Tomsk University. The growth of the Faculty coincided with the renewal of the student and pedagogical staff, which
took place under the conditions of a policy of class selection. In the 1950s, there were practically no people left at the
Faculty who had received their education before 1917. The new generation, a significant part of which had a low social
origin, came to the University with a reprehensible perception of it as an elitist center. Largely thanks to the contribution
of the Physics and Mathematics Departments, Tomsk University in the 1940s–1970s was actually the main training
center for young Siberian universities, a source of personnel for industry and government agencies. The representatives
of the new generation of university physicists and mathematicians integrated into the system of the Academy of Sciences (AS) of the Soviet Union – the Tomsk Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the AS created with their
energetic participation. At the same time, they did not break their ties with the university. In the conditions of asymmetric competition between universities and the AS for scientific leadership, this strategy turned out to be advantageous, and the AS itself turned for the University from a dangerous competitor into a reliable ally. On the one hand,
these scientists, brought up already in the Soviet era and endowed with certain social prejudices, were clearly not
orthodox zealots of the traditions of classical universities. On the other hand, their participation in the scientific and
Некрылов С.А., Степнов А.О., Геворкян А.А. Физико-математическое сообщество и развитие классических университетов
173
pedagogical life of Tomsk University, paradoxically, largely determined the high competitiveness of the latter, the
preservation of its high status and continuity with the pre-revolutionary era at a time when the prerequisites for this
continuity were often insignificant.