Awards of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences

This article presents the results of the first-of-its-kind analysis of the history of the Russian Academy of Sciences awards and encouragements for scientists. Till present time, there have been no generalizing works in historiography covering the entire history of the Academy’s awarding practices. The article covers the period of the Academy’s existence in Saint Petersburg (1724-1934). The purpose of the article is to examine the stages of the formation of awarding practices for scientific activities, as well as their forms and features. To this end the author searched for the materials from the funds of the Russian State Historical Archive and the Saint Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Academy of Sciences that have not been introduced into scientific circulation. This article is the first of its kind to study a long-term process of creating the most significant nominal awards of the Academy of Sciences, the country’s highest scientific institution. The author demonstrates the formation of Russia’s scientific elite through the prism of establishing a scientific school as a functioning institution where outstanding academicians led the development of scientific domains and areas with the help of specific awards. The methodology of the research comprised modern historical methods (historico-genetic method, retrospective method, typological method, structural method, the method of archival heuristics, etc.), as well as the methods of the social history of science (the relationship between science and the state or between the science and other social institutions).