West-Siberian scientific and educational complex (last quarter of the 19th - the middle of the 20th centuries)

The actualization of the problem considered in the present paper is caused, at least, by two factors: on the one hand, one of the main drawbacks of the two-decade long reform of the higher school is not accounting for the regional specificity, on the other - strengthening of the processes of globalization and transregional interaction dictates a necessity of not only generalizations of all available experiences of science construction, but also search and revealing new senses there with the view of maintaining the national and cultural identity. In the given context the phenomenon of the Siberian scientific-educational platform is especially attractive for its genesis and evolution are directly connected with the course of modernization processes, which have changed both the shape of the Western Siberia region and the country as a whole. Now the historiography of the object of research does not lack works mentioning the problems of the so-called ''domestic'' history of the West-Siberian scientific and educational complex (structural and functional evolution, formation and development of local schools of thought and directions, scientific biographies of prominent figures in the academic society, etc.). The problematics of our research is located on the joint of two directions - science and higher education history and social history. It is necessary to notice that if the former has always been equally popular among both Western and domestic historians, the latter has been interesting for our, first of all, European and American colleagues. Nevertheless, today the domestic historical thought has had certain experience in researching topics common for history and sociology. There have been attempts to integrate the directions in one research field - social history of science. The majority of researchers, as a rule, are focused on the Soviet period. Thus, domestic historiography is uncertain in defining the given direction: some authors are engaged in the analysis and interpretation of mutual relations of academic intelligentsia and the power, others describe the financial and household circumstances of the academic staff in different periods of time, reconstructing the system of horizontal and vertical communications in the Soviet society. In other words, modern historiography of social history of domestic science is a big problem field. In this paper the authors did not try to reach the maximum coverage of the key problems, concentrating on the focal points in the history of the West-Siberian scientific-educational complex and basic tendencies of its development. The results of the analysis were compared with the general trajectories of modernization processes of the first half of the 20th century.

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