The Lenta.ru article below is a month old. At the moment, the situation with the laboratory of Professor Blatov has changed a little: the leadership of the "Samara University" (read - SSAU) "allowed" the eminent scientist from SamSU to continue the work of his center within the walls of the "united university". However, many have drawn the following conclusions: if such an attitude towards a world-famous scientist, then how do they treat the rest? And the attitude, according to numerous sources, is outrageous: in fact, the SSAU is destroying scientific schools, departments and teams of the former state university, SamSU. Should teachers, staff, students, graduates of the "gos" put up with this situation? We invite you to comment on this topic. Isn't it time to take stock of the "unification of universities" promoted by Merkushkin and implemented by Shakhmatov? Where is the "Polytech" that managed to "fight off" from the merger under SSAU, and where is the state university? What did SSAU gain from the takeover of SamSU? What's next? Isn't it time to raise the issue of restoring SamSU and SAGAU as independent universities? Speak up.

Vladislav Blatov, Professor, Director of the Interuniversity Research Center for Theoretical Materials Science at Samara University, became one of the most cited scientists in Russia and became a laureate of an international competition. He and his colleague from New York State received the award in chemistry.

We play with one goal

Marina Kutsina, AIF-Samara: Are young Samara residents willing to go into science today?

Vladislav Blatov: Yes, if we compare 10-15 years ago and now. If in the 90s they were thinking mainly about how to earn more on their future work, now young people have also become interested in theoretical scientific activity. It is somewhat more difficult for us theorists. What we do is not always so well visualized and understandable to the layman. However, everything starts with fundamental science. A good theory explains a lot and allows you to predict the outcome. There is nothing more applied than a good theory.

People who feel in themselves the strength to achieve significant results in science try to leave for metropolitan centers or abroad. All over the world, young people are traveling around the world, changing laboratories in order to maximize their potential and learn something. It's not bad that people leave, it's bad that they usually don't come back. Secondly, scientists from other countries rarely come to our city to work here. to us to work here. This is a normal scientific exchange.

- Where are more conditions created for young scientists?

- IN USA. It's not just Silicon Valley. At any American university you can find a job to your liking. Europe is in second place, but it is more difficult to adapt there - Europeans are more conservative. China is beginning to gain more and more attraction. By the way, I am a professor at Xi'an Polytechnic University. China is still learning, but they have very big ambitions. It will take another 10 years, and they will begin to teach us.

-It turns out that abroad the "locomotives" of science are universities. We have the Academy of Sciences. Which way is more promising?

You cannot blindly copy the American way of organizing science. We actually suffer from this. Although we actively criticize Western education and lifestyle, on the other hand we try to take an example from them, formally copying what is there. We need to develop laboratories at universities and research institutes in various areas of research. A striking example is China. There is the Academy of Sciences, created in the time of Mao Zedong in the image and likeness of the Soviet Academy. But there, universities today have a very large autonomy and develop independently. I think we also need to combine both.

Vladislav Blatov was born in Kuibyshev on July 2, 1965. He studied chemistry at the Samara State University. Doctor of Chemical Sciences, Professor, Director of the Interuniversity Research Center for Theoretical Materials Science. Married, has a son and a daughter.

Keep up with time

- You once said that there is not enough lithium in the world today. What else is the industry in dire need of?

In practice, the same batteries do not use pure lithium, but in the form of a chemical compound. These are solid electrolytes that are used in batteries. We predicted a number of substances from this class - lithium, sodium, potassium. Our experimental colleagues from Moscow State University, from the Freiburg Mining Academy (Germany) are engaged in the synthesis of these substances. This is a rather lengthy process. Now new materials are being developed for 10-20 years. The use of forecasting methods will reduce this time to 2-3 years.

If we talk about the real applications of our forecasts, this is microelectronics, where organic crystals are used as substrates. You need to get a very even, smooth substrate in order to apply the chip. We are calculating how to make it so smooth without additional processing, literally “out of the tube”.

Last year, together with scientists from the UK, Norway, Australia and Italy, we developed a special technique for mathematical modeling of crystal growth in order to obtain them in the desired shape and with the required properties. This is a world discovery. The work was accepted for publication in the journal "Nature" - the most authoritative in the scientific world. Even on a national scale, the publication of Russian scientists in this publication becomes an event. This is the best evidence that Samara is involved in works that are considered a world-class discovery.

Theory or practice?

- Did the merger of universities benefit your laboratory?

In 2015, I said that the unification of universities would benefit both universities, since SamSU had achievements in fundamental science, SSAU had extensive experience in the field of applied science. If we combine these two components, we could get something interesting. Now I regret to state that the hopes were not justified. The current leadership of the united university, apparently, believes that fundamental science is not needed at the university. The main goal of the new university is the development of the aerospace direction. Of course, some of the materials that we predict can be used in the aircraft industry, but this does not mean that we should deal only with them. Therefore, the question is already about what is the future of our laboratory. There is no certainty that our center will develop and be supported accordingly. Now we are forced to prove that the new university needs fundamental science no less than applied science.

- Are you, as a scientist, satisfied with the level of state support for science in general?

A lot of money is being spent on science these days. If they are reasonably distributed, they would be quite enough to raise our science to a high level. Another thing is that this money is spent irrationally, sometimes marble scientific buildings are built, in which, in fact, there are no employees. At the same time, people are paid meager salaries, young people are leaving. Our laboratory was created thanks to a mega-grant, which for five years should be funded in the amount of about 30 million rubles. in year. For a large laboratory (we employ 25 people), this is a small amount, considering that this is a world-class center. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a clear program for the development of science in Russia. As far as I know, there is no such program in the Samara region either. Therefore, such centers as ours are forced to develop according to their own understanding, based on their own considerations. Naturally, we are faced with the fact that we have to prove the validity of our choice.

I don't believe in the "chemistry of love"

Let's move from scientific questions to life. Chemistry has long and firmly entered our everyday life. Knowing the nature of inorganic chemistry from the inside, what detergents do you buy - marked "bio" or ordinary powders? And why?

I buy detergents from well-known companies that have proven themselves in the market. By itself, the prefix "bio" does not mean anything - even the same composition of two different powders, written on the package, does not mean that they will both wash the same way. It all depends on the optimal combination of all the components and on the production technology. Top manufacturers have been developing optimal formulations for decades and keep up with the technology. I do not advise buying an unknown brand, even if it is widely advertised.

Valentine's day is coming soon. Do you believe in the "chemistry of love"? Is falling in love just a combination of hormones?

Although I am a chemist, I do not believe in the chemistry of love. Love is something that is not subject to science, and thank God - otherwise life would be boring. I would say this: the whole world is divided into two parts - one you can understand with the help of science, reason, and the second - only with the help of love. These two parts do not intersect, and it is not known which one is larger.

At the disposal of Lenta.ru were materials testifying to the sabotage by the leadership of Samara University named after academician Korolev of the activities of the Interuniversity Research Center for Theoretical Materials Science, created with the funds of a mega-grant from the Russian government in the amount of 87 million rubles.

As the pro-government Russian Internet newspaper writes today, the investigation revealed very peculiar methods of work adopted in the former SSAU, which is also participating in the Project 5-100 program.

In April 2013, Samara State University (SamGU) became the first university in the region whose scientists won a mega-grant from the Russian government. The project received funding in the amount of 87 million rubles for three years. These funds were used to organize the work of the Interuniversity Research Center for Theoretical Materials Science (MNICTM), headed by Vladislav Blatov, Doctor of Chemistry, Professor of SamSU, and leading scientist, Professor of the University of Milan (Italy) Davide Proserpio. In November 2015, SamSU, a classical university, was liquidated in the form of a merger with Samara State Aerospace University (SSAU), a highly specialized university; The united university was named Samara University named after academician Sergei Korolev (SU).

“With the full support of SamSU, I managed to create a new laboratory of international status - the Samara Center for Theoretical Materials Science (MNICTM). The results achieved in the first three years were so important to the international community that we received a two-year extension of the grant (a goal that all mega-grant winners did not easily achieve). However, after SamSU joined SSAU, the situation changed dramatically for the worse, ”Proserpio, a world-famous scientist and extremely high citation index, tells Lente.ru.

“For more than a year that has passed since the reorganization of universities, we have not received any assistance (neither material nor organizational) from the leadership of Samara University. Moreover, our scientific activity met with all sorts of opposition from the university services responsible for supporting the MNICTM,” says Blatov, a graduate of Samara (formerly Kuibyshev) State University and the most cited scientist in the region.

“It all started in January 2016, when the entire team was fired and only after our great efforts was hired by engineers at the minimum rate. Only in the middle of the year, candidates of sciences were transferred from engineering positions to positions of research workers. They didn’t sign business trips for us, repeatedly “lost” the already completed documents, under various pretexts they didn’t register new employees for work, ”Blatov clarifies.

“What was most striking was that the university leadership showed complete disinterest in the development of international contacts. As part of the program for the development of international contacts of the 5-100 program, we proposed seven foreign PhD candidates with whom we cooperate. At first, they seemed to agree to be hired by the university, four of them came in the summer to conclude contracts, and they were told to their faces that now the university has no money, and they can only be accepted at the minimum rate, Blatov continues. - They left in complete bewilderment; we compensated their travel expenses from our salaries. Interestingly, a photograph of one of them, together with a student working in our center, taken at our conference, is shown on the slider of the main page of the university website! Three of the seven were hired, but then fired, although they had already begun to publish their work with the name of our university.”

The specialist reported by the MNICTM is Professor of Chemistry Eon Jean-Guillaume from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). “Indeed, a few years ago I began to develop an informal collaboration with Vladislav Blatov and Davide Proserpio, and we tried to consolidate it when they invited me to visit Samara University during the last summer (2016 - approx. "Lenta.ru"). But the official proposal of the university was completely inconsistent with what was discussed with the MNICTM, and was unacceptable for me, turning this cooperation into a dead end, - Jean-Guillaume told Lente.ru. “It is with great sadness that I see that almost four years of financial and human effort spent on the creation of the MNICTM, an important achievement of Russian science, can be jeopardized and simply lost without a clear motive.”

“We planned to organize a joint innovation center with the Northwestern Polytechnic University (Xi'an, China) - the university only needed to allocate a room. This has not been done so far; Chinese colleagues offered to organize a center with them, and we are now doing this, - says Blatov. - Our leading scientist Professor Davide Proserpio has been dismissed since November 2016 in violation of the contract, although he continues to work with us unofficially, coming at his own expense. I cannot explain to foreign scientists the reasons for such an attitude towards them, and I am ashamed that this can happen in my country.”

The leadership of Samara University met with the leading scientist only once, in September 2016, after his urgent request. At the same time, according to Blatov, the conversation at the meeting "was about where to get the money for 2017." "As if it were Proserpio's concern!" Blatov is indignant. After that, the Italian scientist repeatedly tried to meet with the leadership of the university, but his requests were ignored. In November, the lead scientist was fired. Lenta.ru asked the leadership of Samara University to comment on the reasons why the leading scientist Proserpio has not yet been employed at MNICTM.

“After the contract expired at the end of 2016, Samara University offered Mr. Proserpio to sign a new employment contract for 2017. This document clearly spelled out the requirements for the mandatory full-time presence of a scientist at the university for at least 4 months a year, corresponding to the conditions for the implementation of the mega-grant. However, until now, Davide Proserpio has not signed it. The discussion of the terms of the employment contract with the leading scientist is currently ongoing,” the former SSAU said. According to information available to Lenta.ru, Proserpio did not receive any letters or calls from Samara University.

As it turned out, not answering letters is a glorious tradition of the aerospace university. In mid-December 2016, a letter to the leadership of the university (Rector Yevgeny Shakhmatov, Vice-Rector Andrei Prokofiev and President Viktor Soifer) was written by Roald Hoffman, with whom Proserpio works intensively. The 1981 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry expressed his concern about the situation around the IRCTM. Shakhmatov's team ignored this letter.

“You might think that research of such a level and the education that bright young scientists receive at the center, as well as their opportunity to work in Europe, Russia and Japan, will meet with gratitude, support and understanding from the administration of Samara University. Instead, the exact opposite happened. The administration in every possible way hinders and interferes with the activities of the center, ”Hoffman tells Lente.ru. - They did not pay salaries, did not renew the appointment and work permit of Proserpio, which would allow him to obtain a visa, removed Blatov from the leadership of the center and forced young employees to move to other groups (thus the management of Samara University, according to available information, is trying to quickly close the work by megagrant - approx. "Tapes.ru")».

“This is still going on! It seems that the administration of Samara University intends to make it impossible for these hard-working and creative scientists to continue their good work. Instead of being encouraged and supported, this world-class team is being erased and persecuted at every step,” says Hoffman, who visited SamSU two years ago. The scientist believes that MNICTM "conducts world-class research" and "the center has greatly enriched the Samara scientific community."

“I have been informed that the director of the MNICTM, Professor Vladislav Blatov, has been fired from his position while he is in the US as a visiting lecturer at a prestigious research center. The new director is a specialist in chromatography, a field that does not concern theoretical materials science at all! It looks like a disgrace; naturally, I will not work with the new director,” Proserpio said.

(1875 )

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Blatov(-) - representative of Soviet accounting thought, professor. He created a model of value flows in the economy, called "Professor Blatov's square", which determines both the chart of accounts and their correspondence.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Blatov was born in April 1875 in St. Petersburg, into a peasant family. His father was a peasant in the Yaroslavl province of the Danilov region, worked as a painter and sculptor, and then, having received some education, he joined the Poluyaroslavl exchange artel and was an artel worker until the end of his life. Blatov's mother is a semi-literate bourgeois.

At the age of 14, Blatov graduated from the Rozhdestvensky City School, and at the age of 17 he entered the St.

In 1898 he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University, he was a volunteer at the university and combined his studies with teaching at the Gatchina City School.

In the autumn of 1898, N. A. Blatov moved to the city of Tiflis, began to teach at the Alexander Pedagogical Institute of the Tiflis Commercial School and Trade School.

Since 1902, Blatov began to study accounting, and in 1903 he passed the exam of the Special Qualification Commission at the educational department of the Ministry of Finance for the right to teach accounting and calculation in all educational institutions.

From 1907 to 1918 he worked as a teacher at the Petrovsky Commercial School, at the same time teaching at the Higher Courses of the Society for the Promotion of Commercial Education.

By the time of the revolution, Blatov was the father of his own family, a well-known teacher, and the author of applied books.

During the war, he was recruited to work in the bodies that supplied food to the army, and then to the civilian population. In the first years of Soviet power, he headed the certification commission of accountants at the labor exchange. At that time, the qualification of an accountant was determined at an interview. N. A. Blatov was a strict examiner, he practically did not allow women to work in accounting, as he believed that “Although they are non-drinking people, they talk a lot, which hinders the search for the necessary debit and credit.”

In June 1918, Blatov was delegated by the People's Commissariat of Food to Kiev as an expert with the delegation of the Russian Soviet Republic. In Kiev, he was a lecturer in commercial courses at the Arsenal at the Kiev People's University, and in 1920 he moved to Armavir, where he worked in the Armavir Economic Council as the head of the Financial and Accounting Department and taught at the Regional Accounting Courses. In 1921, Blatov returned to Petrograd and began teaching at the Petrograd Institute of National Economy, and at the end of 1922 he became a professor. In 1926, he was approved for the post of head of the Department of Industrial Accounting and Calculation of the Institute of the National Economy, which was transformed into the Leningrad Engineering and Economic Institute named after Comrade Molotov.

From November 1, 1930 to January 1, 1932, Blatov was the head of the Department of Industrial Accounting of the Research Sector of the Institute, here he did a great research work "Organization of accounting for production and costing at the Nevsky Machine-Building Plant named after Lenin." The Great Patriotic War found Blatov in Leningrad, only his eldest daughter managed to evacuate before the blockade. Nikolai Alexandrovich with his youngest daughter and grandson remained in Leningrad. Blatov did not survive the blockade, dying of starvation. He was buried in a common grave at the Piskarevsky cemetery in Leningrad.

Scientific achievements

Main works

• Blatov N.A. The balance sheet of an industrial enterprise and its analysis. - L., 1940.
• Blatov N.A. Balance science (General course). - L., 1930.
• Blatov N.A. Fundamentals of industrial accounting and costing. - M., 1939.
• Blatov N.A. Commercial Correspondence: A Guide for Business Schools and Self-Study. - St. Petersburg, 1912.

Other works:

• 1924 - "Peculiarities of bookkeeping in chervonnoe calculation";
• 1924 - “Accounting forms and organizations of the economy. Peculiarities of accounting of sole, partnership, joint-stock, cooperative, public and state farms, trusts, syndicates and various types of economic organization”;
• 1924 - "Accounting of joint-stock companies";
• 1924 - "Accounting of public farms";
• 1926 - "Fundamentals of general accounting in connection with commercial, industrial and budget accounting";
• 1928 - “Accounting of partnerships, joint-stock companies and trusts. (Accounting for capital and results)”;
• 1935 - "Fundamentals of industrial accounting";
• 1939 - "Fundamentals of industrial accounting and costing";

Notes

Categories:

• Personalities in alphabetical order
• Scientists alphabetically
• Born in 1875
• Deceased in 1942
• Accounting
• Accountants
• Economists of Russia
• Economists of the USSR

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .

• Blatov, Anatoly Ivanovich
• Blattopterosis

See what "Blatov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich" is in other dictionaries:

Blatov, Nikolai Alexandrovich- (1875 1942) representative of Russian (Soviet) accounting thought. A student of E. Sievers, a successor to his work, a supporter of learning from account to balance, and not from balance to account, as insisted on by representatives of the Moscow school. He claimed that... ...

Blatov Nikolai Alexandrovich (1875-1942)- Representative of Russian (Soviet) accounting thought. A student of E. Sievers, a successor to his work, a supporter of learning from account to balance, and not from balance to account, as insisted on by representatives of the Moscow school. He claimed that the double entry ... ... - See the list of Stalin Prize winners in the article Stalin Prize. Laureates of the State Prize of the USSR The list is complete. Contents 1 1967 2 1968 3 1969 4 1970 ... Wikipedia

Diplomatic missions and consular offices of the Russian Federation- Russia, due to its geopolitical position, as well as thanks to the success of Soviet diplomacy, has one of the largest networks of foreign diplomatic missions. Russian embassies and consulates operate in almost every country ... ... Wikipedia

JOURNAL "COMMERCIAL EDUCATION"- (1908 1916) a magazine intended for teachers and students of the commercial education system. Its editor was the greatest Russian accountant Evstafiy Evstafievich Sievers (1852-1917). Since 1913, his student Nikolai became co-editor ... ... Big accounting dictionary

magazine "Commercial Education"- magazine "Commercial education" (1908 1916) A magazine intended for teachers and students of the system of commercial education. Its editor was the greatest Russian accountant Evstafiy Evstafievich Sievers (1852-1917). Since 1913… … Technical Translator's Handbook

In April 2013, Samara State University (SamGU) became the first university in the region whose scientists won a mega-grant from the Russian government. The project received funding in the amount of 87 million rubles for three years. These funds were used to organize the work of the Interuniversity Research Center for Theoretical Materials Science (MNICTM), headed by Vladislav Blatov, Doctor of Chemistry, Professor of SamSU, and leading scientist, Professor of the University of Milan (Italy) Davide Proserpio. In November 2015, SamSU, a classical university, was liquidated in the form of a merger with Samara State Aerospace University (SSAU), a highly specialized university; The united university was named Samara University named after academician Sergei Korolev (SU). At the disposal of Lenta.ru, materials were received that testify to the sabotage by the leadership of the SSAU-SU of the activities of the Center, created with the funds of a mega-grant. The investigation uncovered very peculiar methods of work adopted in the former SSAU, which is also participating in the "Project 5-100" program.

“With the full support of SamSU, I managed to create a new laboratory of international status - the Samara Center for Theoretical Materials Science (MNITsTM - approx. "Lenta.ru"). The results achieved in the first three years were so important to the international community that we received a two-year extension of the grant (a goal that all mega-grant winners did not easily achieve). However, after joining SamSU to SSAU, the situation has changed dramatically for the worse,” says Proserpio, a world-famous scientist with an off-scale high citation index.

“For more than a year that has passed since the reorganization of universities, we have not received any assistance (neither material nor organizational) from the leadership of Samara University. Moreover, our scientific activity met with all sorts of opposition from the university services responsible for supporting the MNICTM,” says Blatov, a graduate of Samara (formerly Kuibyshev) State University and the most cited scientist in the region.

“It all started in January 2016, when the entire team was fired and only after our great efforts was hired by engineers at the minimum rate. Only in the middle of the year, candidates of sciences were transferred from engineering positions to positions of research workers. They didn’t sign business trips for us, repeatedly “lost” the already completed documents, under various pretexts they didn’t register new employees for work, ”Blatov clarifies.

“What was most striking was that the university leadership showed complete disinterest in the development of international contacts. As part of the program for the development of international contacts of the 5-100 program, we proposed seven foreign PhD candidates with whom we cooperate. At first, they seemed to agree to be hired by the university, four of them came in the summer to conclude contracts, and they were told to their faces that now the university has no money, and they can only be accepted at the minimum rate, Blatov continues. - They left in complete bewilderment; we compensated their travel expenses from our salaries. Interestingly, a photograph of one of them, together with a student working in our center, taken at our conference, is shown on the slider of the main page of the university website! Three of the seven were hired, but then fired, although they had already begun to publish their work with the name of our university.”

The specialist reported by the MNICTM is Professor of Chemistry Eon Jean-Guillaume from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). “Indeed, a few years ago I began to develop an informal collaboration with Vladislav Blatov and Davide Proserpio, and we tried to consolidate it when they invited me to visit Samara University during the last summer (2016 - approx. "Lenta.ru"). But the official proposal of the university was in complete discordance with what was discussed with the MNICTM, and was unacceptable for me, turning this cooperation into a dead end, - Jean-Guillaume told Lente.ru. “It is with great sadness that I see that almost four years of financial and human effort spent on the creation of the MNICTM, an important achievement of Russian science, can be jeopardized and simply lost without a clear motive.”

“We planned to organize a joint innovation center with the Northwestern Polytechnic University (Xi'an, China) - the university only needed to allocate a room. This has not been done so far; Chinese colleagues offered to organize a center with them, and we are now doing this, - says Blatov. - Our leading scientist Professor Davide Proserpio has been dismissed since November 2016 in violation of the contract, although he continues to work with us unofficially, coming at his own expense. I cannot explain to foreign scientists the reasons for such an attitude towards them, and I am ashamed that this can happen in my country.”

The SU leadership met with the leading scientist only once, in September 2016, after his urgent request. At the same time, according to Blatov, the conversation at the meeting "was about where to get the money for 2017." "As if it were Proserpio's concern!" Blatov is indignant. After that, the Italian scientist repeatedly tried to meet with the leadership of the SU, but his requests were ignored. In November, the lead scientist was fired. Lenta.ru asked SU to comment on the reasons why the leading scientist Proserpio has not yet been employed at MNICTM.

“After the contract expired at the end of 2016, Samara University offered Mr. Proserpio to sign a new employment contract for 2017. This document clearly spelled out the requirements for the mandatory full-time presence of a scientist at the university for at least 4 months per year, corresponding to the conditions for the implementation of the mega-grant. However, until now, Davide Proserpio has not signed it. The discussion of the terms of the employment contract with the leading scientist is currently ongoing,” the former SSAU said. According to information available to Lenta.ru, Proserpio did not receive any letters or calls from SU.

As it turned out, not answering letters is a glorious tradition of the aerospace university. In mid-December 2016, a letter to the leadership of the university (Rector Yevgeny Shakhmatov, Vice-Rector Andrei Prokofiev and President Viktor Soifer) was written by Roald Hoffman, with whom Proserpio works intensively. The 1981 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry expressed his concern about the situation around the IRCTM. Shakhmatov's team ignored this letter.

“You might think that research of such a level and the education that bright young scientists receive at the center, as well as their opportunity to work in Europe, Russia and Japan, will meet with gratitude, support and understanding from the administration of Samara University. Instead, the exact opposite happened. The administration in every possible way hinders and interferes with the activities of the center, ”Hoffman tells Lente.ru. - They did not pay wages, did not renew the appointment and work permit of Proserpio, which would allow him to obtain a visa, removed Blatov from the leadership of the center and forced young employees to move to other groups (thus the management of the SU, according to available information, is trying to quickly close work on megagrant - approx. "Lenta.ru"). "

“This is still going on! It seems that the administration of Samara University intends to make it impossible for these hard-working and creative scientists to continue their good work. Instead of being encouraged and supported, this world-class team is being erased and persecuted at every step,” says Hoffman, who visited SamSU two years ago. The scientist believes that MNICTM conducts world-class research and the center has greatly enriched the Samara scientific community.

The MNICTM megagrant, extended from the end of 2015 for two years, provided for the financial participation of the university. According to the agreement between the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia and the State University, the first party allocates 30 million rubles for the project financing in 2016, and the second - 10 million. In 2017, the university must find 30 million rubles to finance the MNICTM. In 2016, the university did not allocate a penny to the MNICTM, although in reports for the Ministry of Education it indicated the money earned by the center, primarily funds in the form of grants from the Russian Science Foundation.

“All additional funding in 2016 was received by MNICTM independently. Samara University did not fulfill its co-financing obligations in 2016, citing the “difficult financial situation” as the reason. The authorities of Samara University are violating the mega-grant agreement by forcing the researchers of the center to find co-financing, and moreover, they did not help us in any administrative matter, so we had to hire a secretary for work that was mandatory for the university departments responsible for servicing mega-grants,” says Proserpio.

In a conversation with Lenta.ru, an MNICTM employee who wished to remain anonymous confirmed Proserpio's words, saying that the SU has an extremely "inefficient document management system." “Until the moment I came to the conference for registration, I did not know whether I had paid the registration fee or not,” said an employee of the center. According to him, papers for paying the registration fee were sent to the SU about two months before the trip, but each time the services of the united university had questions about them. “They tried many times to demand some kind of service agreement to participate in the conference,” the scientist says. “That is, foreigners must conclude an agreement with us that they provide us with services for our participation in their conference.” According to scientists, foreign business trips were processed quickly at SamSU and they did not ask for such papers.

“In 2016, the mega-grant agreement provided for co-financing from the university in the amount of 10 million rubles. However, we did not receive a penny - all more than eight million rubles, which the university reported for the past year, were earned by us ourselves - through various additional projects. In 2017, we already found ten million rubles of funding, and the Samara region promised to allocate 15 million rubles. From 2018, we will be fully self-sufficient,” says Blatov. - All employees of our center receive a salary from our grants, the university does not spend a penny on us. To maintain the current level of salaries (we employ 25 people), we need about ten million rubles a year, that is, we already have the necessary minimum.”

According to MNICTM employees, in 2016 they signed an employment contract not for two years, but for one. Then they were assured in the SU that, since the agreement between the Ministry of Education and the university was designed for two years, subsequently labor contracts would also be signed for 2017.

“In 2017, the project should be implemented at the expense of other sources attracted on the terms of co-financing. At the moment, the search for such sources continues. Accordingly, labor contracts with employees employed in the works under the mega-grant were concluded until December 31, 2016. At the end of last year, notifications were sent to them about the expiration of their contracts, - they told Lente.ru in the SU. - Prior to receiving co-financing, these employees were also offered to continue working under the mega-grant and conclude labor contracts, the source of financing of which would be the university's own funds. Unfortunately, this group of MNICTM employees refused to conclude such agreements.”

According to them, the MNICTM employees did not receive notifications, and they did not sign the dismissal orders. Only nine employees out of 25 were offered employment only at the beginning of March 2017, after the lead scientist applied to the ministry. The employees refused to conclude contracts. The situation was aggravated by the appointment of Igor Platonov, head of the Department of Chemistry from SSAU, to the post of director of the MNICTM, who has vanishingly small scientometric indicators.

“Yesterday (March 16 - approx. “Lenta.ru”) I was informed that the director of the MNICTM, Professor Vladislav Blatov, was dismissed from his position while he is in the United States as a visiting lecturer at a prestigious research center. The new director is a specialist in chromatography, a field that does not concern theoretical materials science at all! It looks like a disgrace; naturally, I will not work with the new director,” Proserpio said.

You don't have to look far to understand just how big the contribution of the ISRCTM to the SU rankings is. At the time of this writing, the website of the university contains a presentation "Analysis of the results of scientific activities of Samara University in the analytical tools of Thomson Reuters." There is some very interesting data there. Thus, all five of the most cited papers by SU in the Web of Science were written by specialists from the MNRCTM. Of the ten most cited scientists of the joint university, seven are from SamSU and only three are from SSAU, and they are at the bottom of the list. If you look at citation rates over the past ten years, the aerospace university is also not catching up with the classical university. The ratings of Samara scientists can be visually assessed on the site expertcorps.ru - there you can see how the indicators of the stronger Samara State University have flowed over to the lagging SSAU.

Further study of the presentation shows that the largest number of publications from SU is concentrated in the field of optics. However, they are extremely poorly cited, in fact, their contribution to the overall rating is due not to the quality of the work, but to the quantity. The greatest citation is in another area - crystal chemistry and physical chemistry. The conclusions of Thomson Reuters experts are impressive: the calling card of the aerospace university is called "optics, crystallography and certain areas of chemistry." Thomson Reuters does not recommend that the university "promote its own journals and develop mutual citation networks." Unfortunately, SSAU-SU does not heed the recommendations of experts: the main printed organ of the university's optical engineers is the journal "Computer Optics" with minimal scientometric indexes. However, in recent years they have grown - the reasons can be understood by seeing the list of affiliations of the authors of articles published in the journal.

If you look at another popular Scopus database (it is closed, access is needed), it turns out that out of the 50 most cited works in the history of the united university, 39 are publications from SamSU, and only 11 - from SSAU. Further more interesting. It turns out that the ratings of SamSU before joining SSAU were better than those of the latter. “In the ranking of Russian universities of the RAEX agency (Expert RA) for 2016, Samara University took 26th place, while in 2012 the university occupied only 35th position in this ranking,” they boast in the SU, but they are silent that in 2012 In the same year, in the same ranking, SamSU far outstripped SSAU and took 27th place.

You can take, for example, the QS University Rankings: Emerging Europe and Central Asia (QS EECA) and see how SSAU-SU reports about their achievements in it. In 2015, Samara State Aerospace University was included in the top 150 universities in developing countries in Europe and Central Asia in the international ranking; while analyzing the performance of 368 universities from 30 countries. In this rating, SSAU fell into the group 141-150.

The results of the liquidated SamSU are in the group 131-140. The website of the university reports that in the last year of its existence, Samara State University entered the top 200 in the following areas: Arts & Humanities (25th place in Russia), Natural Science (31st place in Russia), Social Sciences & Management (38th place in Russia). One gets the impression that the SU is silent about the role of the units that were part of the SamSU, which was liquidated in 2015. At least, everywhere the new university is silent about the achievements of SamSU, but it probably has nothing to say about its own.

“Research conducted by the MNICTM team under the mega-grant program is undoubtedly of great importance for Samara University. They deservedly received wide recognition from the scientific community and made a significant contribution to the growth of the scientometric indicators of our university. At the same time, there are questions about the fulfillment of a number of other obligations assumed by the ISRCTM under the mega-grant program. In particular, a number of violations were revealed in the reporting documentation submitted by the management of the center for 2016, including those related to the fulfillment of the terms of the current contract (further, the press service of the SU reported information that was in the public domain that in 2016 no dissertations were defended at MNICTM and actually accused the leading scientist Proserpio of absenteeism - approx. "Lenta.ru")", - very modestly and critically noted the role of the MNICTM employees in the growth of scientometric indicators in the SU.

In SU, there are practically no programs related to the financing of fundamental, and in particular, humanitarian, science. This is eloquently evidenced by the list of three Strategic Academic Units implemented at the university. The question arises - why was it necessary to attach SamSU, if the scientific developments implemented in it do not find support in the SU? The answer to this question could be heard from the speech of the Samara Governor Nikolai Merkushkin.

“If SamGU is liquidated, nothing terrible will happen, but SSAU cannot, then it will fall out of the top!” - said in June 2015 the former governor of Mordovia. Indeed, the ratings of SSAU, the only national research university in the region and a participant in the 5-100 Project, left much to be desired. The only thing in which the technical university was superior to the classical one was the budget, which was more than three times higher than that of SamSU.

Even earlier, Merkushkin wanted to merge SSAU not with Samara State University, but with Samara State Technical University (SamSTU). “You can balk as much as you like. You are welcome. I'm just a stubborn person too. There was not a single thing in my life that I did not convince people. And people did not believe and did not go. If you are the first here, then well done. But you will be suicidal. You, like Alexander Matrosov, stood on the embrasure. And this is not a joke,” Merkushkin chose a strange way to influence the SamSTU audience. This university escaped liquidation, apparently due to the influence of its graduates - it was graduated, in particular, by the former (and already deceased) Prime Minister of Russia and the country's ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin, as well as Rem Vyakhirev - the "gas king" Russia. Currently, SamSTU has the status of a flagship university in the region and is protected from any changes.

Unfortunately, the influence of the staff produced by SamSU, as well as its ratings, was not enough to prevent the liquidation of the classical university. However, the education that chemists and physicists received at SamSU is enough to make world-class scientific discoveries, even if they may not be useful in Russia. At present, the Germans and Chinese are interested in the practical implementation of the theoretical developments of Samara scientists. The latter are setting up a laboratory in Xi'an: it is planned to develop promising batteries there, which should replace lithium-ion batteries. Most likely, they will find application, including in modern electric vehicles.

What can remain SU from MNICTM? Apparently, a supercomputer and formal ratings. According to the terms of the agreement, the cluster becomes the property of the university, where work is underway on a mega-grant. The cost of the supercomputer, together with air conditioning and uninterruptible power supply systems, exceeds 40 million rubles. At present, it is the most modern supercomputer in the Samara region. Cluster MNICTM performs calculations seven days a week and is loaded almost at full capacity. Unlike "Sergey Korolev", the SSAU supercomputer, as can be seen from the above graph, is half loaded, and for some reason goes on vacation in the summer.

After the united university managed to increase funding, it would seem that SSAU finally reached the SamSU level of research. In September, it became known that Alexander Mebel, Professor of the Faculty of Biochemistry at Florida International University (Miami, USA), will implement a mega-grant on the topic “Development of Physically Based Combustion Models” at SU. The goal of the project should be, as Prokofiev, Vice-Rector for Science and Innovation of Samara University, notes, the creation of an environmentally friendly and efficient combustion chamber for gas turbine engines.

“Winning this competition is very important for us. The competition was huge - 428 applications. The united university is already running one project under the mega-grant program. It is led by Vladislav Blatov and the Italian scientist Maria Davide Proserpio. This project is entering its final stage and has been receiving budget funding for the last year, and it has been successful, as it completed not only the task of attracting a leading scientist to Russia, but also the task of creating a scientific laboratory capable of reaching self-sufficiency - that is, maintaining its existence through contractual work , wins in other grant competitions. I am sure that the same situation will develop with Alexander Mebel,” Vice-Rector Andrey Prokofiev is convinced.