The list of delegates of the Congress on the Foundation of the Siberia Research Institute in Tomsk

In this article, the list of delegates of the Congress on the foundation of the Siberia Research Institute is analyzed using archive materials and documentary publications. The idea of founding a unified research organization that would work on the systematic and dedicated study of Siberia was first expressed in late October 1917, in the report of B.P. Weinberg, Professor of Tomsk Institute of Technology, at the First Siberian Regional Meteorological Congress in Irkutsk. The delegates were planning to found the organization to carry out a comprehensive research in the scope of the entire Siberia in basic scientific directions. The organization was planned to be democratic in its structure, comprising representatives from various federal, economic, and research groups, without which it would be impossible to get by in the times of the Civil War devastation. After the Meteorological Congress, an organizational meeting took place where members of the Executive Bureau were elected. The Executive Bureau was established to handle the founding of the institute with its centre in Irkutsk. The Bureau began to establish contacts with various Siberian scientific organizations, social and economic organizations and government offices. It is emphasized that while non-governmental organizations were eager to respond, governments were not. To regard this issue, B.P. Veinberg wrote to the Minister of Education, V.V. Sapozhnikov, asking him to make the upcoming Congress official and delegate officials from various ministries there. It was decided for the Congress to take place in Tomsk. Due to some developments in politics, the Congress on the foundation of the Siberia Research Institute was postponed until January 1919. Cold weather and the transport crisis precluded a lot of delegates from reaching the place of the meeting. There is information on the list of the delegates to the Congress. It consisted of 241 delegates, 169 of which represented Tomsk, 17 represented Petrograd, 15 represented Kazan, 13 represented Omsk, 6 represented Krasnoyarsk, and 4 represented Irkutsk. There were also delegates from Barnaul, Khabarovsk, Uzhur, Blagoveshchensk and Samara; each of these cities had 2 representatives. Achinsk, Yekaterinburg, Semipalatinsk, Yakutsk, Petropavlovsk, Minusinsk and Sudzhensk Kopi had one representative each. Apart from general sessions, the Congress was held in 9 sections. The participants were not evenly spread across those sections; 61 delegates were in the geodesy and geophysics section, 40 in the geology and mining section, 31 in the agriculture section, 30 in the chemistry and chemical technology section, 25 in the history, archeology and ethnography section, 17 in the botany and pedology section, 11 in the zoology section. The balneotherapy and recreation section and the statistics and economics section consisted of 20 delegates each. Therefore, we can conclude that the Congress on the foundation of the Siberia Research Institute was representative in all respects.

Keywords

Authors

References