M. A. Shishkin

For many years, the Paleontology Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences struggled for the right to remain in the Academy’s Biology Division, in defiance of attempts to transfer it to the Division of Earth Sciences. Such a transfer would have meant revising the Institute’s research program toward applied tasks and destroying basic research activities related to the development of theoretical and evolutionary biology. The necessity of warding off this acute danger first arose during the war years, during the tenure of the Institute’s first director, academician A.A. Borisiak. Shortly thereafter, the burden lay on the shoulders of his successor, academician Yu.A. Orlov, who had to resist the threatened reorientation of the Institute right up until 1960, when the question finally disappeared from the agenda. Documents connected to this history graphically illustrate the separation between bureaucratic mechanisms of administration and the real interests of science, or even simply the demands of common sense.