Academic Personnel Training in Postgraduate Education in Krasnoyarsk Region in 1949–1988

Science and education are especially important in the post-industrial society. Past experience makes it possible to develop these spheres. In the second half of the XX century, the Krasnoyarsk Region was undergoing a double transition. On the one hand, it was experiencing industrial modernization; on the other hand, it was turning from a resource region into a developed semi-peripheral region. Both transitions required a local system of academic personnel training. This article reconstructs the development of the postgraduate training system in the Krasnoyarsk Region in 1949–1988, from the first to the last postgraduate cohort in the Soviet Russia. Until 1949, the Krasnoyarsk Region had no postgraduate education of its own. Methodologically, the research relied on the symbiosis of an adapted world-system approach and modernization theory, which made it possible to analyze the quantitative changes in the local postgraduate education over a forty-year period as part of the regional development. The early 1950s saw new universities and scientific institutions with their own programs for training senior research personnel. The economic profile of the Krasnoyarsk Region required a sharp increase in scientific personnel to implement the industrialization and ensure the transition to intensive development. Between 1949 and the late 1960s, the number of postgraduate students in the region grew by 9,000%, after which the enrollment and graduation rates reached plateau. The curricula were changing as well, and the number of specialties was increasing. The areas of training and their proportions depended on the economic development plans. The number of graduate students peaked when the new industrial base was completed. The region turned from a periphery into a semi-periphery of the Soviet economy. The postgraduate education in the Krasnoyarsk Region reflected its economic profile in the period under study. Exact and natural sciences had the largest share: more than a third of all postgraduate students were trained in technical specialties, followed by physics, mathematics, and agricultural sciences. Their numbers continued to grow until the end of the 1960s, after which they gave leadership to social sciences, thus reflecting the changes in the local economic and social development.