The Russian Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Schiller Institute, organized a forum celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences founded by Peter the Great. The forum was opened by RCC director Olga Golovashchenko followed by an introductory address by moderator, the Schiller Institute’s Bill Jones. Jones underlined the parallel development of the United States and Russia as modern nations beginning from the early 18th century and working in collaboration to this day, with support by Empress Catherine during the American Revolution, by Alexander II during the Civil War, and especially by the crucial wartime collaboration between Stalin and Roosevelt, in defeating fascism. He also explained the forum’s theme in the importance of international cooperation in science, including the U.S.-Soviet cooperation in fusion energy, initiated by the Soviets’unilateral declassification of the tokamak program in 1956.
Speakers Prof. Robert Crease, head of the philosophy department at Stony Brook University, and Prof. Vladimir Shiltsev, a Russian-American accelerator physicist at the Fermi Labs in Chicago, gave a fascinating picture of the life and achievements of the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. The two are also concerned with preserving the chemical lab that Lomonosov built in St. Petersburg, the first of its kind in Russia, which is now threatened with being sold on the open market for its real estate value. While there was a smaller group at the Center, there was a lively array of questions from the audience and from online guests about Lomonosov, whose achievements are little known by scholars in the West.
Prof. Cliff Kiracofe from the Virginia Military institute followed, giving an overview of the U.S.-Russian relationship, which had only been severed once, between 1917 and 1933. He then went through the relationship between Lomonosov and his American contemporary, Benjamin Franklin. From contemporary letters and articles Kiracofe demonstrated that Lomonosov was closely following Franklin’s experiments in electricity and was conducting his own similar experiments. Kiracofe moreover indicated Franklin’s interest and curiosity in Lomonosov’s work, especially his studies of the Russian Far East.
