Open letter

Open letter
Deputy Head of the Science Council under the Ministry of Education and Science, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Askold Ivanchik to Dmitry Livanov

To the Minister of Education and Science
Russian Federation
D.V. Livanov

Dear Dmitry Viktorovich!

I have always considered election to the Russian Academy of Sciences to be the highest recognition of a scientist’s merits in our country. When I was elected a corresponding member in 2003, I could hardly believe in this success, especially since I was only 38 years old and I was (and still remain) the youngest member of the department of historical and philological sciences and one of the youngest in the entire Academy.

It would be a great honor for me to be elected as a full member of the RAS. Until last week, I had no doubt that there was only one way to become an academician: election in elections held in accordance with the current charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

However, now you, Deputy Prime Minister Golodets and Prime Minister Medvedev are offering me and other corresponding members a different path: to be promoted in rank by order of the authorities, as in the army, with a double (or even quadruple) increase in pay.

There is only one condition: to submit an application meaning consent to the destruction of the Academy to which I was elected, in which I worked all the years after graduating from the University, and in which my parents worked all their lives.

I consider the very fact of such a proposal offensive both for myself personally and for other members of the Academy. Of course, I will not submit such a statement.

The liquidation of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the creation in its place of a certain imitation, the “Russian Academy of Sciences,” the name of which its creators rightly decided to put in quotation marks, I consider illegal both in essence and in the decision-making procedure.

This opinion of mine will not change if the relevant law is adopted by parliament and approved by the president.

No one can deprive me of the title of elected lifelong corresponding member of the real Russian Academy of Sciences, even after its illegal destruction, and I will continue to wear it with pride.

A.I. Ivanchik,
Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dr. ist. Sciences, scientific director of the Department of Comparative Study of Ancient Civilizations, chief researcher at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, editor-in-chief of the journal “Bulletin of Ancient History”, chairman of the Russian Association of Classical Scholars, deputy. Chairman of the Science Council of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation