| Summary: | This thesis examines relations between the Bolshevik regime and those scholars who were already full members of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the time of the October Revolution. By examining the post-revolutionary careers of these 'old Russian academicians,' the work seeks answers to the following questions: how did the status of members of the academy change after the revolution; what factors helped the 'old academicians' to adjust to post-revolutionary conditions; on what grounds did the academicians justify their cooperation with the Bolsheviks; . and, finally, what was the ideological basis of the regime's policy towards 'old academicians.' This work treats the subject not as an example of relations between a revolutionary regime and a pre-revolutionary institution, but focuses instead on the reaction of individual academicians to the situation in which they found themselves after October 1917. The work shows that many members of the academy were more politically active than earlier studies of the Academy of Sciences have tended to portray them. It finds that factors ranging from fields of specialization to personal character influenced the academicians' ability to adjust to the new conditions. Biographies of individual academicians show a striking continuity between their pre- and post-revolutionary behavior. In other words, the sharpest critics of the tsarist regime became the sharpest critics of the Bolsheviks, while those who had been time-servers before October 1917 also displayed more willingness to cooperate with the new regime.
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