The organisation of the West Siberian Branch of USSR Academy of Sciences: From the Elaboration of the Concept to Its Implementation (March 1943 - January 1944)

The paper is devoted to the mechanism of elaboration, decision making and starting phase of implementation of the concept of the West-Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the years of the Great Patriotic War. The interaction of different groups of scientists from various backgrounds (universities,branch institutes, academic science representatives) , their tactics, conflicts of interest, and ways of resolving those during the organisation of the first academic and scientific centre in Siberia are dealt with. The setting-up of the branch had a ten-year history of its ownin the course of which some projects were put forward by the groups of academic scientists of USSR Academy of Sciences (1932, 1936) as well as by university professors (1939-1940). The failure of pre-war initiatives became the result of the Academy of Sciences lacking the potential to actively develop its peripherial network, the departmental barriers being in place between different sectors of science and limited capabilities of scientists to lobby their interests among the top echelons of power. The Great Patriotic War led to the strengthening of prescriptive methods of management revomed principal obstacles and thus paved the way for the creation of the branch. The competition during the elaboration of the branch's structure and lines of activities which manifested itself in the initiatives of groups of academic and university scientists, as well as the necessity to choose the future location of the branch between Novosibirsk and Tomsk required the development of mechanisms for the harmonization of corporate groups interests. Here, regional authorities and senior management of the Academy of Sciences acted as moderators to facilitate interactions . The ultimate decision implemented proved to be an optimal combination of regional potentials of academic, university and branch sectors of science. The priority of accelerated development of industrial and other related sectors of regional economy required intensive scientific support and the settingup of institutes of resource studieswithin the branch in such fields as mining and geology, chemistry and metallurgy, transport and energy, medicine and biology, with an emphasize put on applied research. The herein presented research identifies the dynamics of activity on the part of actors of the submitted projects when Tomsk scientists (V.D. Kuznetsov, B.P. Tokin and others) initially had the lead and the Tomsk Committee of Scientists established during the War was an institutional platform for the development. In the second half of 1943 the lead in design was taken by a group of mining scientists (A.A. Skochinskiy, L. D. Sheviakov and N.A. Chinakal) and the so called V.L. Koma-rovCommission (USSR AS Commission on Mobilisation of Resources of the Urals, West Siberia and Kazakhstan for the Needs of Defence) constituted the institutional basis for the work from then on. The top management of the West-Siberian branch included experienced managers from all sectors of science.

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