INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method as catalogued here was developed within the scientific establishment of the Russian Empire.
Geography: The Empire — the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the universities at St Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kazan, and Dorpat, the Institute of Experimental Medicine, and the technical schools and observatories under them.
Time: c. 1850 to 1917. The bound is the state's at the closing end and the founding of the Petersburg mathematical school at the opening one. The tradition's distinguishing constraint is the opposite of its successor's: Imperial science was integrated with Western Europe rather than isolated from it, published in French and German as readily as Russian, corresponded with Göttingen and Paris, and answered to an academy rather than to a plan. A method developed under those conditions is Imperial even where the Soviet period is what made it famous.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- Development within the geographic and temporal bounds above
- An attributable lineage: the academy, university, or institute, and the problem it was set against
- The procedure itself specified before 1917, not merely anticipated
Not sufficient: Being Russian, which is a nationality and not a tradition. Being pre-revolutionary in ancestry where the Soviet development is what the entry catalogues. A method whose procedure was only fixed after 1917 by later workers.
Boundary: This tradition and Soviet share a geography and divide on an institution, so the test is which body of work the entry catalogues rather than when its author was born. Lyapunov's stability theory originates in an 1892 Kharkov thesis and is filed under Soviet, because what the entry catalogues is the absolute stability school of Lur'e and Yakubovich, which made a theorem into a method; the 1892 direct method would be an entry here if it were written as one. Bogdanov's Tektology (1913–1922) straddles the founding and is Soviet because its completion and its institutional life are. Straddling research programmes are placed by where the procedure was fixed, not where it was published: Pavlov's conditioning paradigm was specified in the Imperial institutes and is here, though the book that carried it West is 1927 and Soviet. Slavic holds pre-modern and folk practice and does not overlap with this tradition, which is institutional and modern.