“Small” Troubles of “Big” Movement: The Housing Issue During the Transfer of the USSR Academy of Sciences from Leningrad to Moscow

Abstract

The article explores the economic and housing support in the transfer of the USSR Academy of Sciences from Leningrad to Moscow in the 1930s. The relocation of the institutions of the Academy and affiliated groups was an important vector of changes in the geography of the Soviet scientific and technological map in a key period for its formation and development. Taking into account differences in the economic support of various groups (academicians, researchers, stuff, the young scientists), inequality in the distribution of apartments is an interesting facet of the social history of the Soviet scholarly community. It demonstrates its “material world”, internal differentiation, and interaction with power in the context of “big projects”. This story also demonstrates the disciplinary differences through variation in support for institutions of the USSR Academy of Sciences (geological, biological, chemical and physical and mathematical sciences) via apartments in Moscow, through the transfer of non-academic humanitarian scientific institutions to Leningrad. This story is also interesting from the perspective of architectural history: the project of building the Academy of Sciences was a part of the general plan for the reconstruction of Moscow (1930–1950) and contributed to the formation of its architectural look as a “scientific capital”. The study was prepared on the materials from the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the State Archives of the Russian Federation.