Building Mathematics Without Moscow?

Building Mathematics Without Moscow describes the institutional fragmentation of Soviet mathematical research after the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, a process by which Moscow's authority over institutes, journals, and graduate training dissolved into a system of competing republican academies and regional research councils.

Under Soviet rule, mathematics had been concentrated in a handful of elite Moscow institutions — the Steklov Institute, the School of Applied Mathematics at the Academy of Sciences, and the mathematics faculty of Moscow State University. These centres controlled the training of specialists across all republics, determined publication standards, and set the national research agenda. Funding flowed through Moscow. Personnel rotations cycled through the capital. The structure was deliberate: in a command economy, mathematical talent, like other forms of expertise, was a resource to be marshalled from the centre.

The August Emergency and the eighteen months of renegotiation that followed collapsed that hierarchy. As the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords devolved economic authority to the republics, institutions within those republics began to detach from Moscow oversight. The process was not revolutionary — no assembly voted to sever ties — but incremental, driven by the simple fact that Moscow's budget allocations no longer covered the full cost of maintaining institutes. Republics that could fund their own research began to do so. Those that could not faced a choice: align with Moscow and remain impoverished, or seek alternative sponsors.

By 1993, the Kazakh Sovereign Republic had begun recruiting Moscow-trained mathematicians with salaries and resources Moscow could no longer match. The Siberian republics, flush with oil revenues after the fiscal reforms that followed the Compromise of Sochi, founded the Novosibirsk Centre for Discrete Mathematics in 1994, explicitly positioning it as an alternative to Moscow's Steklov Institute. The Uzbek Academy of Sciences, always semi-autonomous within the old Soviet structure, was now formally independent and able to direct resources to its own institutes. The Ukrainian mathematicians who had remained in the Union — a diminishing cohort after Ukraine's departure in 1995 — reorganized their institutes under Kiev's direct authority rather than sharing facilities with Moscow.

The fragmentation accelerated after 1998. The Union Rouble crisis stripped Moscow's central budget to a fraction of its former size. Institutes that had relied on steady Moscow funding faced a choice: find local sponsors, merge with wealthier republican academies, or close. Some of the most accomplished researchers simply left, accepting positions at universities in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Others migrated internally, moving to Almaty, Novosibirsk, or Tashkent where funding was more reliable. By 2005, the Steklov Institute was a shell of its former size, its staff reduced by half and its international standing diminished.

The institutional splintering had concrete consequences for the discipline. Where once a gifted student from any republic could aspire to advanced training in Moscow, the system now required either wealth, local patronage, or rare talent sufficient to attract a republican institute's recruitment. Collaboration across republics became harder; researchers worked increasingly within their own republic's networks. Publication standards diverged. The old system of Soviet mathematical journals — which had provided a unified standard and audience — fragmented into competing republican and regional journals, many of them duplicative and of varying quality.

The Kazakh mathematician Zharkimbayev exemplified this remaking of opportunity. Born in Karaganda during the old Soviet order, he would have traveled to Moscow for advanced study as a matter of course. Instead, by the time he completed his undergraduate degree in 1993, the University of Almaty was offering competitive positions and funding. The Kazakh Sovereign Republic, under Nursultan Nazarbayev, had begun deliberately building research capacity in the capital Nur-Sultan. Zharkimbayev became part of that cohort — talented mathematicians who would have gone to Moscow a decade earlier but who now built their careers in the republics.

By 2010, mathematical research in the Union had become genuinely polycentric for the first time in Soviet history. The Steklov Institute remained prestigious, but it was one centre among several, and no longer the sole authority. Collaboration with Western institutions, once mediated through Moscow, now happened directly from republican academies. The Blagoveshchensk Framework had made Chinese universities attractive partners; the Siberian republics in particular began sending students to Chinese universities, creating networks that bypassed Moscow entirely.

Some observers at the time mourned this as a loss of standards and coordination. The Fundamentals of Union Economic Planning documents from the late 1990s and early 2000s show Union planners expressing concern that the fragmentation weakened Soviet mathematics as a unified discipline. But others saw it as the inevitable cost of confederalism — that republics would build their own capacities, compete for talent, and develop distinct mathematical traditions. By 2015, when a Moscow institute organized an inter-republican conference on combinatorics, researchers from Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Uzbekistan arrived not as provincial colleagues but as delegates from distinct mathematical communities.