by Acad. Valery KULESHOV, director; Sergei KAZANTSEV, Dr. Sc. (Econ.), deputy director; Zemphira KALUGINA, Dr. Sc. (Sociol.), department head; Lyudmila SERGEYEVA, Cand. Sc. (Econ.), academic secretary; Institute of Economics and Industrial Management Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS) The Institute of Economics and Industrial Management (SB RAS) is well-known in this country and abroad for its breakthrough ideas, unique research techniques, nontrivial results and topnotch personnel. All that is a real feather in its cap. How did it all happen? Outlooks for the future? BEGINNING The very idea was incubated by Acad. Vassily Nemchinov who proposed to set up an Institute of Economics and Statistics at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Although he wished to head the new-founded research center in person, he could not move from Moscow to the city of Novosibirsk in Siberia, the SB RAS seat, for reasons of poor health. Therefore Dr. Hermann Prudensky (elected to the national Academy of Sciences as corresponding member) was appointed the Institute's first director. And he suggested the name for it-Institute of Economics and Industrial Management. But why in Siberia? As Acad. Abel Aganbegian (elected to the Science Academy in 1974) explained much later, Hermann Prudensky had invited him as deputy. "The point is that the Academy's humanities division was headed by a political economist, Acad. Konstantin Ostrovityanov [Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences then. - Ed.], a man with a revolutionary past and consistent Marxist views, who, as it was said, had a keen nose for all that was new. Any new trend rubbed him the wrong way as undermining Marxism, a teaching as much as a hundred years old then." Upon Prudensky's death (1967) Abel Aganbegian stepped into his shoes as director, at that time corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Little by little he molded the Institute to its present ... Read more