Documents / FOIA release
This CIA-held JPRS report (JPRS-USP-89-007) is an English translation of an interview with academician Roald Sagdeyev. The interview ran in the Soviet magazine PRIRODA in January 1989. Sagdeyev talks about space research achievements, the Interbol project, and the Phobos mission to Mars, including the loss of contact with Phobos 1 in September 1988. He also covers competing designs for Mars 94, manned flight to Mars and democratizing Soviet science. He mentions UFOs only once, recalling a Gosplan lecture where every audience question was about flying saucers.
“National Academy of Sciences”2 pages
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 1 of 3 such an institute, an attempt is made during the regular elections to the academy to 'correct' the situation. Moreover, influence on the scientific policy is achieved through the USSR Academy of Sciences' Sections, Departments and Problems Councils, which are headed up by academicians. As a result, thousands of first-rate scientists--doctors and candidates of sciences, those who, because of an unfortunate twist of fate, did not manage to become members of the academy (and there are many such cases)--have, to a large extent, have been excluded from the actual process of conducting scientific policy. 79. Therefore, democratization in science, first and foremost, should liberate the gigantic creative potential of the main group of people who create science. 80. [Correspondent] What, specifically, do you suggest be done? 81. Possible measures are being discussed rather widely and the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, G. I. Marchuk, has repeatedly spoken out about this, particularly in the press. There was talk about greater and greater autonomy for the departments and about transferring authority from the level of the presidium and the sections to the level of the departments. This idea immediately received support, but it became clear rather quickly that, if the departments concentrate all the absolute authority in their own hands, then, in the final analysis, it will be a restoration of the ministerial main administrations which are being condemned currently. 82. At the present time, the process of revitalizing the institutes is going on; they should receive greater autonomy. Therefore, in my opinion, the next step is the institutes' use of the obtained rights and genuine democratization inside the institutes. Many different measures exist for bringing this about. First of all, elections of the institute's director and the members of the academic council. It should be said right off that I am against these elections being turned into an uncontrolled veche [ancient Russian public assembly]. Because then the opinions of people who are not competent and who are somewhere on the periphery of science are, in essence, equal to the opinions of the specialists, and, as a result, the election process (just like any other) becomes uncontrolled. But, of course, the voice of each scientific associate must be heard. 83. Furthermore, I feel that the democratization of the institute's scientific affairs should include the further transfer of authority (including financial and economic) to the laboratories, which should become the basic unit in the scientific community. It is necessary to conduct a search for new forms for financing the scientific collectives on competitive bases and to develop competitiveness
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 21 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.