2025 Volume 8 Issue 4 (Published 28 October 2025)

 

Dear colleagues,

I will start with the platitudes: how quickly time flies and how we fail to keep up with its rapid movement. On the other hand, we are not a newspaper; we are a respectable, academic, growing scientific journal. We should not rush to say something, like ephemera. Some smirked at the word "respectable", others sighed at the word "academic," and as for "scientific," everyone thought it is, well, yes, but... And there are still a lot of "but": quartiles, colored lists—these are all temporal. But the adjective "growing" is undeniable. Our Journal is growing, little by little.

Among the events that passed during this time, I will try to link three: the 10^th Bakeev Conference "Molecular Nanoobjects and Polymer Composites," which INEOS kindly hosted; the defense of a doctoral dissertation by Anton Anisimov; and the completion of work on the book "The Unknown Nesmeyanov," which has been submitted for processing for further printing.

At first glance, it seems: what do these events have to do with each other? They just happened to coincide on the calendar. Of course, it was just a coincidence; no one connected them, and yet this is precisely the case when a pattern can be discerned in a set of random events.

Let's start with the book. I had to stop mid-sentence, as the study of Nesmeyanov's legacy could go on forever. It is like in science: if you suddenly feel that a problem is beyond your capabilities, you should stop, take a look around, and choose one of the correct options. For example, describe the significance of this problem in such a way that crowds of colleagues will rush to solve it, and you will join the ranks. Our book is a case in point. Our attempt to understand not "what" (which has been described many times), but "how" he did it, referring to his 10 years at the helm of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, ended in total fiasco. The hope for "working in the archives and finding something..." only convinced that the experts, who had tried to dissuade us from this complex task, were right. We were convinced: archival science is a science with its own rules and approaches, requiring preparation, patience, and, dare I say it, talent. So our book is more of an introduction to the problem than a solution.

I hope we have managed to draw attention to the legacy and to see our museum in a new light. It certainly cannot compete with the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but it also contains many artifacts and works of Nesmeyanov, which for some reason no one bothers to study. Meanwhile, his memoirs contain numerous direct references to these works. What a treasure trove for graduate student essays. It is all a matter of organization.

It is also impossible to say that we have not achieved or discovered anything. Firstly, we have completely convinced ourselves that Nesmeyanov was undoubtedly a Genius. Now, to be convinced of this, it is enough to read our book. Secondly, we are convinced that the Academy of Sciences under the guidance of Nesmeyanov—exactly 10 years—was the most unique, effective, and cutting-edge instrument of scientific cognition. We are convinced that, if we set such a goal and gathered the necessary evidence, we could record this fact in the Guinness World Records (if anyone cares). In my opinion, it would not hurt, why not? However, studying the archival documents of the consistently successful Presidents of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union would be very important for us today. After all, the history of the Academy of Sciences since 1917 is a gaping hole that has never been systematically studied.

Even under Stalin, an editorial group was created to write a three-volume history of the Academy, chaired by the full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union K. V. Ostrovityanov. Two volumes have been published, but the third one… The street named after Ostrovityanov already exists, but there is still no third volume. Either after Stalin's death, understanding the history of the Academy of Sciences ceased to be relevant, or the directives ceased to be forthcoming, but the fact remains: there is no historiography of the Academy for more than the last hundred years. Our attempt to bring this topic to the Nesmeyanov Seminar failed to find a response in the relevant Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences. On the one hand, the academician-secretary, in his article dedicated to the 300^th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences, emphasized the relevance of studying the history of the Academy itself in finding paths for development [N. A. Makarov, Studying the History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Year of Its 300^th Anniversary, Herald Russ. Acad. Sci., 2024, 94 (5), 405–407, DOI: 10.31857/S0869587324050016]. On the other hand, he declined to participate in the Seminar to discuss this pressing topic under a specious excuse. His position is understandable: we would not want to discuss current challenges in chemistry at a seminar at the institute of history either. On the other hand, all the problems of the history of the Academy of Sciences concern all of us; we share a common history, but our understanding of it differs. For example, I cannot understand how it is possible that the Archives of the Academy are under the control of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. By the way, as well as our institutes. The promotional trailer for "The Unknown Nesmeyanov" ends on this sad question. Stay tuned for the ad.

How does the Bakeev Conference relate to the Nesmeyanov topic and the history of the Academy? It turns out, quite directly. Discovering that the anniversary Conference was approaching, we reviewed its history and established that, when it was founded, N. F. Bakeev clearly defined its goals and objectives, which we have tried to align with our current research. "We should be primarily interested not in improving the properties of composites, but in changing the nature of the interaction between a polymer molecule and a filler due to drastic changes in the scale ratios of the composite components. Only after solving this problem, we will be able to return to predicting the properties instead of empirically selecting the components." This may not be a literal quote, but it is close to the text. And so, by the 10^th Conference, we discovered that we were beginning to understand the essence of the phenomenon. Our advances in observable macromolecule-particle transitions, as well as our understanding of some old, well-known polymeric systems as molecular composites, in which the polymer matrix, macromolecular colloidal filler, and plasticizer can be separated, allow us to control the properties of such composites over a wide range and transfer this understanding to classical polymer composites. It seemed to us it is possible to say that the era of heuristic and exploratory approaches is ending, and we are ready to formulate a relevant direction for fundamental research for inclusion in the Program of Fundamental Scientific Research. Oh, how!

Suddenly we wanted to convey this to the Program editors, and quite unexpectedly, we discovered that there is a whole toolkit for passing it on to the higher-ups. It includes formulating a conference resolution and approving it at the final meeting, passing this decision as a report to the conference organizers, the main one of which is the specialized Scientific Council for High-Molecular Compounds of the Department of Chemistry and Materials Science of the RAS. The basic function of the latter is precisely to determine urgent directions for the development of the area of knowledge under its control and to convey proposals for the inclusion of the hot topics in the Program of Fundamental Scientific Research.

Where did such a mechanism, which was beginning to fade away due to lack of demand, come from? It all came from Nesmeyanov's reform of the Academy's management... Unexpected, right?

Whether it was due to the newly clear goals and objectives of the Conference, or the transformation of the amount of experimental material on this topic into a new quality of understanding, or the successful choice of the applied day's topic that included the materials for the production and storage of energy, or most likely due to synergy, the Conference proceeded in a single breath, simply and naturally concluding with a powerful impetus for young researchers in choosing relevant directions for scientific research.

And finally, about the brilliant defense of a doctoral dissertation by Anton Anisimov. In the closing remark during the discussion of the work, the Chairman of the Dissertation Council gave a speech approximately like this: "Summarizing the discussion of the work, I would like to note three important points. Firstly, the work combines three fundamental areas developed at INEOS RAS, which have been its calling card for many years: the chemistry of carboranes, their functional derivatives and polymers based on them (the names of L. I. Zakharkin, V. N. Kalinin, V. I. Bregadze and their colleagues emerge and light vibrantly in the memory); polyhedral metallosiloxanes (associated with the names of A. A. Zhdanov, O. I. Shchegolikhina); ladder polyphenylsilsesquioxanes (associated with the names of K. A. Andrianov, N. N. Makarova, and V. S. Papkov) imbue them with a new quality and elevate their development to a new level. Secondly, to further develop these fields, the dissertation author created a new, original approach to the polymerization–polycondensation processes for synthesizing siloxanes in liquid ammonia. Thirdly, the work not only examines original approaches to the synthesis of new structures and polymeric systems but also thoroughly explores the processing of the resulting polymer forms into feedstock. This demonstrated a fully closed cycle of modern fundamental research, in Nesmeyanov's understanding of fundamental research as the basis for widespread practical application." My speech at the defense was significantly shorter, but there is no doubt that these and many other prominent names came to mind in the audience.