Category: News

33

Michael

Finally I became a full age hobbit.  A good reason to look back 😉

I was born in 1982, at the very end of stagnation years.  After my birth, Brezhnev was alive for seven more months 😉

When I was about a year old, Andropov just began his struggle against violations of labour discipline.  My mother had to take her passport with her even when she went to the shop at the ground floor of our house—as a confirmation that she really had a baby and was not shirking work.

When I was three, Perestroika began.  My parents subscribed to so many magazines that they had to put a schedule of their delivery on the wall.  We still try to put in order a vast collection of those magazines…

A first independent current affairs program appeared on TV.  It’s strange to remember that now, but it was called Vesti [Tidings]; now it’s become completely official and propagandistic.

At the age of seven my father took me for the first time with him to the elections.  These were the first real elections in the history of the Soviet Union.

At the kindergarten, our nursery teachers hang a new radio set on the wall to ‘listen the Congress’ (of Peoples’ Deputies).  To my surprise, they and my parents explained what it was in almost the same words.  My father, when I asked him what those people in the TV set were speaking about, said they were discussing why there were no goods at the shops.  Just a few days later a nursery teacher at the kindergarten said after the Congress, ‘milk, cheese and so on will appear at the shops again’, or something like that.

I remember well the empty shelves at the shops that time.

While being in the first grade at school, we were admitted to Little Octobrists.  But I have never become a Young Pioneer ;-(

When I was nine, a column of tanks passed along Michurinskii Avenue near my neighbourhood, armed patrols emerged in the streets, and all the programs on TV were replaced with endless Swan Lake ballet.  My father went to defend the White House—then a housing of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation which became the main stronghold of resistance to the putsch.

Several days later he took me for the first time to a meeting.  I remember a crowd in front of the White House, barricades that had not been pulled down yet, Yeltsin’s voice talking something about the victory of democracy, cries ‘Down with the CPSU!’.  It was boring to stand long at the same place, so we began walking around the building and missed the change of the flag.  When we were going back to the metro station, the red, with a blue stripe, flag of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic had already been replaced with the white, blue and red tricolour.

Four more months later the Soviet Union came to an end.  My parents said (without any enthusiasm) that at the shops ‘everything will soon emerge.  But will become more expensive’.

Everything became so much more expensive that new bank-notes of an adequate nominal value could not be put in circulation in time.  Following my parents’ advice, I opened both of my coin boxes to use their contents before it decreased in value.  We had to steam the cap of the wooden mushroom, and I didn’t want to break the piggy bank because it was a present from my sister-in-law for my tenth birthday, so we made a little hole in it and took the coins out 😉

I don’t remember when the Vremia [Time] current affairs program was closed on TV, but I remember what it looked like.  A strange notice ‘TV-Inform’ appeared in the screen instead of the usual picture of the globe, then the speaker said Vremia would never more be produced, and the news would be televised live, without any censorship.  After that a new current affairs program began.  There were two speakers, a man and a woman, as usually, but now they were talking with each other, exchanging the papers—they obviously wanted to show they were really televised live, not on tape delay as previously.

Somewhere at the same uneasy months my mother gave me a book, unknown to both of us, by an author, also unknown to both of us.  The book belonged to her and my father’s friend.  The title was attractive: ‘John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, being the first part of The Lord of the Rings’.  You can see  some long-term effects of reading it on this website 😉

Meanwhile, times were changing rapidly.  On weekends, my father and I went to a market some forty minutes way from my house for potatoes.  In winter, we continued to go to ski in the vicinities of Moscow, but there were not so many people like us, the forest had become quite ‘depopulated’ in comparison with the previous years.

For my family’s four privatization checks, my father bought forty shares of the Moscow Realty voucher investment fund.  I still keep the certificates in my desk, although the fund itself, as well as the other voucher investment funds like it, has for a long time already become a part of history ;-(

By the way, at school we were studying history using a Soviet text-book, although published in the years of Perestroika, so one day we were told to prepare a report about one of the heroes of the Civil War.  A long and difficult evening talk with my mother followed; as a result, she finally managed to shake my Communist convictions formed at kindergarten and elementary school.  Since then I became quite anti-Soviet 😉

I was eleven when all the TV channels became silent except the Second Channel that continued broadcasting from the Shukhov Tower instead of Ostankino Tower and transmitted alarming news: armed supporters of the Supreme Soviet are attacking the Moscow city hall and the TV centre in Ostankino, a state of emergency and a curfew are imposed in the city.  It happened only a night before the White House was shelled from the tank cannons…

Unlike 1991 my parents didn’t take part in that small civil war in the centre of Moscow.  Now, twenty-two years later, it seems to me that they were right.

Several months later, George Soros, now quite unpopular in Russia, tried to support Russian scientists with small grants.  My father invested his grant into shares of MMM company (the largest Ponzi scheme in Russian history) that had just entered the market and were the only instrument for investment of money that brought in an income exceeding the hyperinflation.  My initials were then popular more than ever 😉  We happened to be among the first investors and managed to sell some part of our shares in time, so we were not at a loss when MMM collapsed.  We spent our income for summer vacations and also bought a tortoise—just one or two days before the collapse of MMM.  We called her Marina Sergeevna—in honour of a heroine of MMM advertising.  She lived twelve years at our home…

An ‘operation of restoring the constitutional order’ in Chechnia, that is still far from an end, began six more months later.  It was my grandmother who was the first one in my family to say the word ‘war’.  After two years at the front in 1943–45 she really new what it means…

It turned to be not so easy for me to chose a profession because, being an excellent pupil, I was interested almost in everything; my parents told me, ‘Don’t study so much’ 😉  I wanted to become a physicist, but at the ninth grade I understood physics is too difficult for me.  I was (and still am) interested in computers, but in the tenth grade it became clear that my ability for mathematics was over, too, so I couldn’t become a programmer as my elder brother did.

Finally I decided to be a historian and graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities in 2004.  The years spent at the university were a wonderful time.  Only my travel to the USA in 2012–13 was the same full of events and impressions.

On holidays between the first and second years at the university I went to Iceland for the first (and, I hope, not the last) time.  It wasn’t my first trip abroad, but it was the first time I had to arrange everything myself because I travelled together with my mother and she doesn’t speak English.  I took a dictionary to that trip 😉

My first employment was the same as that of my both elder brothers—a worker at our father’s geological expedition (two travels to Karelia in 2000 and 2001).  Since 2008, after the defence of my Ph.D. thesis, I have worked at the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences.  By the time of my employment, salaries of researchers had been significantly increased (by staff reduction at all the academic institutions), but nevertheless, they still remain the only successful nanotechnology in Russia ;-(

In 2009 I went to Israel for the first time.  I enjoyed it 😉

In the beginning of 2010 I made a report at the Major Tolkien Seminar in Saint Petersburg and was rather surprised when discovered that I had no more ‘stage fright’.  It was also confirmed by my further experience of making a report at a conference on history of the Second World War at the Russian State University for the Humanities.  It was a really good news as I had lots of problems previously because of that fright.

A conference in Budapest in summer 2011 was my first travel abroad on business.  For the first time I spent several days in a foreign city alone.  My second trip to Israel the same year in September was my first travel on holiday without any organized tour, I booked hotels and bought tickets myself, travelled along the country just by intercity buses, and so on.  Later, in November, I had an opportunity to talk a lot to my Hungarian colleagues in Moscow and found out that I finally could speak English well enough.  The next year this allowed me to receive a Fulbright grant and to go to the USA for six months for a research.

While I was in Israel in 2011, Putin decided to become a president once more.  Several of my friends who had never voted before decided to vote that time.  After the parliamentary elections which were quite ‘magic’ as well as the previous ones, I began to go to political rallies.  Wish I weren’t ill at the day of the first meeting at Bolotnaia Square…  At the presidential elections in February 2012 I was a scrutineer.

In October 2012 I went to America.  It was a wonderful travel 🙂

In the fall of 2014 I became a senior researcher.  This year on 30 January, a fire destroyed my working place and also a half of my institute’s library.

There’s nothing to be done, life’s going on.  I don’t know whether I’ll have an opportunity to celebrate my eleventy-first birthday, but at least the past thirty-three years were not so bad anyway.  Let’s be in touch 🙂

Dry Books Have Been Taken Out from the INION Building

Michael

I had to spend the beginning of this week for writing some more abstracts for our abstract journal, so I’m posting with a delay again.  The dry books have finally been taken out of the building of my institute (INION).  I took part in packing the last newspapers on Saturday, and the rest of them was packed on Sunday without me and taken away on Monday.  Thanks to our volunteers—we wouldn’t be able to do all this work in three weeks by ourselves.  One more thanks to our sponsor whose name I don’t know and who bought for us boxes, bags, sticky tape, clothes and water for volunteers etc.  It wouldn’t be easy to get such money from the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations.

At present, almost all the dry books are stored in Lyubertsy near Moscow, we’ve been given a building there in an industrial zone of the publishing centre of the All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), and it was told we would be given one more building there later.  Tomorrow we are going there to unpack the newspapers that are a bit wet and shouldn’t be stored in polyethylene bags.  The readers’ catalogue is being transported to Lyubertsy, too; it has almost not suffered from the fire or water.  The service catalogue is to be dried, but it’s still inaccessible because of breaking-downs inside the building.  Wet books are being transported to a cold storage facility in Kotelniki near Lyubertsy.  Books are rather heavy in such a condition, so only professional porters strong enough are involved in this work.  Unfortunately that’s why, at least till now, wet books have been taken off the building much more slowly than the dry books have, although it would be better if it were just the opposite.  In February the non-heated building worked itself as a kind of improvised cold storage, but it’s getting warm now; for wet books, that is really dangerous…

Bibliography on World War I

Michael

In the fall of 2014 we finished our bibliographical database on history of Russia in World War I, it didn’t function for a while after the fire, but they have just restored it from a backup.  It’s available at http://www.inion.ru/I_publ.html and contains information about books and articles from the library of our institute, that is, about almost everything published in Russia and also about some foreign publications.  We’ll probably be able later to add information about books available at some other major libraries as well.  The interface is only in Russian, but it’s quite simple.  Search by author, title, annotation and keywords is available, there’s also a subject directory.  Each reference in the search results has a list of tags, each of them is a link to the list of corresponding references.  My role was mainly the communication to the programmers.

News from INION: Taking out Books and Some Other Events

Michael

This week I had to make a short break with this website, but events at my institute (Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences, INION) and around it have meanwhile been moving swiftly all these days.  On the previous Thursday we finally took out the books and documents from the study of the head of our Department of History.  The study was on the first floor and hadn’t suffered from the fire.  The storage with the production of our typography is said to have burned, so it’s in this study that the only copies of many publications of our department have survived.

At the same time we got an opportunity to see the ground floor and partly the first floor at the damaged part of the building.  The view is oppressive.  Mud all around, no ceiling overhead, frozen flows of water and pieces of half-burned pages underfoot.  Some rooms are really life-threatening to come in—too many heavy things can fall down from above at any moment.  The damaged part of the main book depository can be seen through a hole in a wall at the ground floor—it seems that it was mostly the book depository that was burning at the ground floor and at the first floor.

On the same day we were told the Institute had finally got a new building for temporary housing not far from the old one and we would move there the next (which is already this) week.  They say it’s in a terrible condition, but it’s better than nothing anyway.

Meanwhile ‘professional patriots’ go on attacking our director Yuri Pivovarov in the mass media and at the State Duma (we are still trying to understand what it could mean), and the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations (FANO) seems to have recovered from the initial fright (earlier than we hoped, unfortunately) and turned to a decisive counter-offensive using heavy artillery, tanks and aircraft.  The same Thursday Nezavisimaya gazeta quoted the head of FANO Mikhail Kotiukov that ‘overall responsibility for the liquidation of the consequences of the fire lies with the administration of INION’.  Does it mean they aren’t going to help us at all, although FANO is our only sponsor and our Institute is officially subordinated to it?  By the way, INION still receives no additional financing for that very liquidation of the consequences of the fire, we have no money to buy furniture and computers for our new building.  Do they suppose us to use our own salary for it?

A week earlier the minister of education and science Livanov had said almost literary that the fire at INION was the best evidence that the scientists could not manage their own property well and that the ‘reform’ of the Russian Academy of Sciences was really necessary (he calls it nothing less than ‘the main event in our science for the last twenty years’).  Of course those persons prefer not to mention their own ‘effectiveness’ although our Institute (and many other institutes as well) received almost a half of the financing for 2014 in the fall of the year.  Where that money had been the most part of the year and who received the dividends—nobody knows.

It wasn’t all.  After a session of our directorate on Sunday (!) it was said, firstly, that this week we would have to start not only moving to the new building, but at the same time taking the books off the old building (which we were not able to do up to now otherwise than in small shipments because the investigators continued their work in the building).  The motivation is the FANO insists us to leave the old building as soon as possible.  It seems they have finally decided to pull it down.  It’s a pity, but it was predictable, unfortunately.

Secondly, it was said our administration is now required to work without days-off and that the representatives of the FANO had already visited our new building and were very angry as they hadn’t seen our employees there.  I don’t want to comment on this, but I’m afraid I have to.  I don’t mind to sit on the floor in an empty room with a book and a laptop computer without Internet all the working day, but only if those persons from the FANO take the books out of our book depository on the week-end together with us.  But I’m afraid it’s too much for them to do that.

And even this was not all.  On Monday afternoon (23 February, that is still a holiday in Russia, since the Soviet time) we were suddenly said the beginning of taking out books from our damaged building (along with moving to a new building) was planned as early as for the Tuesday morning, the volunteers were needed badly.  The motivation is the FANO, instead of sending the necessary money at last, it threatening to punish the administration of the Institute if the work isn’t begun immediately.  We really began to take out the dry books on Tuesday and managed to transport first several hundreds of boxes to a storage of the All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) in Lyubertsy near Moscow.  Luckily, we’ve found enough volunteers, our work would be much more slow without them.  Since next week we are going to work from early morning till late evening, including on week-ends; our librarians hope we’ll be able to rescue the dry books in about two weeks.

The situation with wet books is much worse.  There are at least two times as many of them as of the dry books, and our librarians are still not ready to allow the volunteers to work with them—one should be too careful with books in such a condition.  Where and how to transport them for freezing, where to dry them then, and where to get money for all of this—is still not clear.  AFAIK they have found a contractor with necessary equipment, specialists and experience, but it costs over a million dollars that we haven’t got at all.  This week they took a small number of books to a cold storage facility in Kotelniki near Moscow that agreed to receive those books into custody without prepayment, but it’s a temporary decision of course.

At least four journalists have arrived among the volunteers on Tuesday and Wednesday to find something exclusive inside our building, but didn’t say they were journalists.  Two of them were working together with me.  They were working well enough, but we found out their real profession only the next day when we saw their accounts in the Internet.  One girl’s article in Sobesednik wasn’t too friendly, she has shamelessly misquoted my answers to her questions, but she doesn’t seem to try to attack the Institute intentionally, so her mistakes were probably due to her bad knowledge of the subject, especially since she wasn’t able to ask me to explain anything additionally because she had to disclose her incognito in such a case.  One more guy’s reportage on TV was rather sympathizing. There’s nothing to be done, professional ethics isn’t a frequent guest in Russian mass media now ;-(

The Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences still doesn’t interfere in the situation.  We don’t know what they think about all of this there.

The causes of the fire are still unclear, too.  The main versions are the same three ones as previously…

The Fire at the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences: Two Weeks Later

Michael

This week, good news have finally appeared.  The first and most important one is they have begun to take the books out of the building.  As the investigators are still working in the building, almost no one is allowed to come inside, so only a limited number of employees take part in the transportation of the books.  We hope later we’ll be able to increase the work pace.  The Institute has made contracts with several cold storage facilities to freeze the books, and the Federal Agency for Scientific Organisations has approved the purchase of a freeze drier to dry them.  Those books which are not too wet, will be dried in a separate rooms with special temperature and air humidity.  One of nine sections of the book depository, the current journals, hasn’t suffered at all.

In some rooms, there’s already electricity and heating.  The typography is at work again, and the publishing department will probably continue its work soon, too.  The government has decided not to destroy the building, but there are no details yet.  The remains of the roof are being taken out from around the building; we are looking forward to see them taken out from the second floor as well.  They are going to isolate the western half of the building from the destroyed part of the eastern half, so that we’ll be able to use the western half while the eastern one is under reconstruction.

The trees from the second floor which we took off the building on previous Wednesday are at a greenhouse now.  All of them are alive, although in a different condition, unfortunately.  We hope all of them will recover.

The causes of the fire are still unclear.  The main versions being discussed are the same as previously: an incident with electricity, an arson, a stray petard.  Until they take the remains of the roof out from the second floor, there hardly will be any more information.

Now the sad news.  According to the calculations that have just been published, almost half of the books that were stored in the building are lost.  Before the fire, the library of our Institute had some 14,700,000 books, but this number includes 3,700,000 books which are stored at the branches of our Institute at the other institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a great number of books that had been prepared for transportation to the Institute of World Literature many years ago, but that institute hasn’t take them.  Many of them were stored in boxes on the second floor and have been of course completely annihilated by the fire. 800 thousand more are in a hangar in the courtyard of our Institute up to now.  So there were some 10,200,000 books in the building.  5,400,000 of them have burned, that is, the collections of the reading rooms on the second floor, the books for the Institute of World Literature, and some part of the main book depository.  Among them 1,100,000 books were published in Russia since 1945, they are available at other libraries.  800 thousand books are available at the branches of our Institute at the other institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  1,200,000 books were the out-of-date ones and second copies which were to be discarded anyway in order to get some free space for new books: our depository is designed for 7 million books, not for 10 million.  So the really irretrievable losses are 2,300,000 books.  Only a death of a beloved person may be more painful.

4,800,000 books have survived.  Almost 3 million have to be freezed; nobody can imagine how long it will take to restore them.  About a million books are in a satisfactory state, among them are the most valuable—the scarce books collection and the Gottish Library that was brought to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.  Fortunately, they were stored on the ground floor.  890 thousand books are the out-of-date ones and second copies which are to be discarded anyway.

It was one of the best libraries in the USSR and it continued to be one of the best libraries in Russia even in the recent years.  When libraries begin to burn, it’s a bad sigh for any country…

Learning How to Use Tor

Michael

Censorship in the Internet has still only a limited scale in Russia, but the message ‘The Web page you are requesting has been blocked according a court decision’ has already appeared in the window of my browser several times, so I decided to find a solution for this problem before it becomes really serious and learned how to use the Tor network.  The technical details are described in Wikipedia, and the best way for a quick start is to visit the official Web site of the Tor project and to download the so called Tor Browser which includes a set of programs to work with Tor and a copy of Mozilla Firefox with a special configuration (and with the Adobe Flash Player plug-in being turned off as it can undermine your anonymity).  To my surprise, it really turned out to work ‘out of the box’, without any manual configuration; all the Web pages I tried to read opened fast enough and with no errors, including the pages that are blocked in Russia.  Thanks a lot to the developers and to the numerous Tor volunteers—owners of the Tor nodes!  Hope the Russian government won’t prohibit the Tor itself as it has been done in China and Iran.  Anyway, at least now, the Russian users who prefer to choose their sources of information by themselves have got a real opportunity to do so.

An Experts’ Report on Rescuing the Library of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences

Michael

An experts’ report has finally been published on the website of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences on necessary measures for rescuing the books from the Institute’s library.  Unfortunately the document still doesn’t contain any detailed plans; neither does it contain any estimations of the damage to the main book depository from the fire.  Waiting for further information…

New Year of Trees in the Burnt Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences

Michael

The Jewish holiday of Tu BiShvat, or the New Year of Trees, that was on 4 February this year, I had to celebrate at work.  Some of the evergreen inhabitants of the second floor have survived the fire, and we didn’t want them to die from cold, so we decided to take them out of the building and to bring them to a greenhouse for temporary storage and did this on Wednesday evening.  ‘We’ were a group of the Institute’s researchers (mostly from our department of history, that was especially pleasant 😉 ), post-graduate students and our friends and colleagues who volunteered to help us.  The work was hard, but now there’s a hope at least some part of the plants will survive and recover.

Unfortunately it was the most serious of what we could do for our Institute that time because we still don’t know whether the fire has damaged the main book depository and to what extent.  The more or less exact data will probably appear only next week.

The view inside the building, especially late in the evening, is rather post-apocalyptic; somebody has already compared it to Chernobyl.  Dark, cold, ice underfoot.  While entering the hall of the catalogue, not separated from the destroyed part of the building, one feels an abrupt change of the temperature as if one came into the open space.  Dust, soot, pieces of fluorescent lamps rustle underfoot.  Holes in the floor, through which they were pumping water into the book depository; we had to keep our lamps turned on all the time in order not to break our legs.  Flecks of snow are falling from above.  The eastern half of the second floor is completely ruined; the remains of the roof are lying on the floor, covered with snow.  Shelves of the book depository can be seen through the holes in the floor.  When we looked from one side, we saw empty shelves; when we looked from another side, we say shelves with books.  It was of course impossible to understand their condition from such a distance and in the darkness; we could only see that everything was in the dust.

The situation as a whole is clearing up little by little, although not so quickly as we’d like.  It seems that apart from the book depository, only the second floor was burning, and the first floor a little; the ground floor suffered only from a flood.  Documents of the administration are already being taken to a new place.  The publishing department and typography (and the cafeteria as well 😉 ) are expected to resume operation soon.  The major conference hall is all right.  The readers’ catalogue is also alive and even dry.  The German Historical Institute had only a little damage; at least the books have survived, although are rather dirty and need to be dried.  It’s really a good luck as their library was right on the front line.  The Franco-Russian Centre, as I can understand, has survived, too.

Our department of history is buried under the fallen roof.

The causes of the fire are still unclear, but the experts are said to be already working.  Folks discuss three versions the most actively: incident with electricity, arson, a petard that had fallen on the roof (somebody was probably seen letting off fireworks not far from our building).  All of this is still pure guess-work.

They try to repair the computers, but the perspectives are questionable.  The ancient Hewlett-Packard where our electronic catalogue was functioning has, as I’ve heard, not suffered from the fire, but had a long ‘shower’.  Whether they’ll be able to reanimate it after that is a good question, unfortunately.

The administration has temporarily moved to the building of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.  Besides that, our Institute will probably get an empty building at Krzhizhanovskogo Street and a ‘corner’ at the Central Scientific Medical Library (both are not far from our own building).  It’s also expected that new books will be catalogued at the Institute of World Literature and stored at the branches of our library at the other institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with a mark that they are our property and should be returned to our Institute as soon as it’s restored.

It seems that our director still hopes to repair our building.  We were also told that our help will probably be needed next week to take the books out of the depository.  As I can understand, all or a great part of them have to be frozen and then dried.  I’ll try to write again as soon as I have any more information 🙂

The Fire at the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences is Extinguished

Michael

One more attempt to summarize information from different sources including my colleagues’ own observations.  It seems that by now the fire is mostly extinguished, smoke isn’t coming out of the building almost at all.  The water has been pumped out.  The firemen will probably stay at the place to clear the debris, but it was said the experts had already begun their work.  The causes of the fire are still unclear, there are a lot of versions being discussed, but none of them looks reasonable enough.

The smoke that was inside the building has been sucked out, but the walls haven’t cooled yet, so not all the rooms are accessible.  What has survived with a high probability are the publishing department with the typography, the accounts and planning departments, the cafeteria ;-), the German Historical Institute and the Franco-Russian Centre, and the paper catalogues of the library—both the public catalogue and the service catalogue.  What has probably survived too, but with not so high probability, are the personnel department and the directorate.  What has certainly burned are the research departments and the specialized reading rooms with their own book collections; they gave the main ‘food’ to the fire.  The fate of the servers is still unknown, including the antiquarian Hewlett-Packard mini-computer where the electronic catalogue was functioning that was the basic part of all the library’s infrastructure.  It’s also unclear if the main book depository has suffered from the fire and to what extent.  The researchers will continue their work at home, our salary won’t be reduced.  The research work and informational work will be continued.  It was also decided to increase the number of guards this week and to organize additional volunteer patrols of the Institute’s employees.  It’s too early to discuss the further perspectives: there are a lot of potential opportunities, but a good question is if at least some of them will be actually realized.

Prime-minister Dmitrii Medvedev has ordered the vice-premier Arkady Dvorkovich ‘to prepare suggestions on the restoration of the library of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences’.  We are waiting for the results.

A petition to save the Institute has been published in the Internet (in Russian).  We’ll be really grateful for your signatures 🙂