Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University ( ; abbreviated SPbSPU) is a major Russian technical university situated in Saint Petersburg. Previously it was known as the Peter the Great Polytechnical Institute ( ) and Kalinin Polytechnical Institute ( ).

Imperial Russia

Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute was founded in 1899 as the most advanced engineering school in Russia. The main person promoting the creation of this University was the Finance Minister Count Sergei Witte who saw establishing a first-class engineering school loosely modeled by the French École Polytechnique as an important step towards the industrialization of Russia. The idea was advanced by Agricultural scientist and Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Kovalevsky and the great chemist Dmitri Mendeleev who are often considered to be the founders of the school.The first Director of the Institute became Prince Andrey Gagarin. Unlike École Polytechnique the Polytechnical institute was always considered to be a civilian establishment. In tsarist Russia it was subordinated to the Ministry of Finance and its students and faculty wore the uniform of the Ministry.

The main campus was built by the architect Ernst Virrikh ( ) on the rural lands beyond the dacha settlement Lesnoye. The location was intended to provide some separation between the campus and the capital city of Saint Petersburg.

The Institute was opened to students on October 1 1902. Originally there were four departments: Economics, Shipbuilding, Electro-mechanics and Metallurgy.

Its work was interrupted by the Russian Revolution of 1905. One student, M. Savinkov was killed during the Bloody Sunday events of . The reaction of other students was so strong that classes resumed much later in September 1906 almost two years after the events. Among the students-polytechnics who participated in the Revolutionary events were the future prominent bolshevik Mikhail Frunze and the future prominent writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Among the deputies of the First Duma were four Polytechnical Institute's faculties: N.A. Gredeskul (Н.А. Гредескул), N.I. Kareev (Н.И. Кареев), A.S. Lomshakov (А.С. Ломшаков) and L.N. Yasnopolsky (Л.Н. Яснопольский).

In 1909 the Shipbuilding department opened the School of Aviation . It was the first aviation and aerodynamics school in Russia. In 1911 the same department opened the School for Car Manufacturing.

In 1910 The Institute was named Peter the Great Polytechnical Institute after Peter I of Russia. In 1914 the number of students reached six-thousand.

With the onset of World War I many students found themselves in the Army and soon the number of students decreased to three thousand. Some students, like future Soviet Military commander Leonid Govorov studied at the Institute for the brief period of one month. Part of the Institutes's buildings were transferred into the Maria Fyodorovna Hospital at that time the largest military hospital in Russia.

Despite the War the Institute did not stop its work. In 1916 Abram Ioffe opened his Physics Seminar at the Polytechnical Institute. The seminar prepared three Nobel Prize-winners and many other prominent Russian physicists. Eventually, this seminar became the core of the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute.

Revolution

In June 5 1918 the institute was renamed to First Polytechnical Institute (with the Second Polytechnical Institute being the former Women's Polytechnical Institute). In November 1918 Sovnarkom abolished all forms of scientific decrees, licenses and certifications. There remained only two positions for the faculty: Professor (that required three years of engineering experience) and instructor (with no formal requirements at all). Departments were renamed Faculties (факультеты), and the director became rector. Main power in the Institute was given to the Soviet (Council) of 11 professors and 15 students. The most active student in the Soviet was the future Nobel-prize winner Pyotr Kapitsa.

In March 1919 two additional faculties were formed: Physico-mechanics (fizikomekhanicheskij) and Chemistry. The Physico-mechanics faculty was at that time headed by Abram Ioffe and was devoted to the atomic and the solid state physics, which was an absolute novelty for an Engineering school of 1918.

In winter of 1918/1919 there was no heating on the campus because of the lack of fuel, many students and faculty members died of starvation and freezing. In the beginning 1919 there were only around 500 students at the University. In August 1919 the new semester started but on August 24 all the students were mobilized to fight Yudenich army. The Institute itself was encircled by truncheons and barbed wire and transformed into a Red Army fortification. After December 1919 the Institute was completely empty.

Soviet times

The Institute started working again in April 1920 when it became a part of the planning team for the GOELRO plan. Professor of the Institute, A.V. Wulf was the chairman of the group working on the electrification of the Northern Region of RSFSR. The Institute developed projects of the Volkhov hydroelectric dam on the Volkhov River and the Dnieper Hydroelectric Stationon the Dnieper River.

In autumn 1920 because of the cold weather and the absence of heating some lectures were often only attended by one or two students. At that difficult time Nikolay Semyonov and Pyotr Kapitsa, discovered a way to measure the magnetic field of an atomic nucleus. Later the experimental setup was improved by Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach and became known as Stern-Gerlach experiment. In another laboratory another student of the Institute, Léon Theremin worked on his electronic musical instruments. His first demonstration of the theremin was held in Polytechnical Institute on November 1920.

After the end of the Russian Civil War many students returned to the Institute. In the spring 1922 there were 2800 students there. In the Autumn 1922 the Institute got the new Agricultural Faculty on the base of the closed Agricultural Institute in Tsarskoe Selo.

In 1926 Sovnarkom re-established the title Engineer and allowed "children of working intelligentsia" to enter the tertiary schools (before only workers and children of workers were allowed). The number of students of the Polytechnical Institute reached the 1914 level of 6000. In 1928 there were 8000 students. In 1929 two new faculties were opened: Construction of Aircraft and Water resources.

In 1930 Sovnarkom decided to create a network of highly specialized Engineering schools. On June 30 Polytechnical Institute was closed and a number of independent institutes were created instead:

• Hydrotechniques (Гидротехнический),
• Industrial Civil Engineering (Институт инженеров промышленного строительства),
• Shipbuilding (Кораблестроительный),
• Aviation (Авиационный),
• Electrical Techniques (Электротехнический),
• Chemical Technology (Химико-технологический),
• Metallurgy (Металлургический),
• Machine Building (Машиностроительный),
• Industrial Agriculture (Индустриального сельского хозяйства),
• Physico-mechanics (Физико-механического),
• Finances and Economics (Финансово-экономический) and
• Boilers and turbines (Всесоюзный котлотурбинный).

Soon another Institute of Military Mechanics forked from the Machine Building Institute.

In April 1934 most of these institutes were merged back into the Leningrad Industrial Institute. In 1935 it was the largest in the Soviet Union engineering school with ten thousand students, 940 professors and teachers, 2600 of workers.

In November 1940 the Institute almost got its original name back. Now it was named the Kalinin Politechnical Institute (Leningradskij Politekhnicheskij Institut imeni Kalinina) after the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Mikhail Kalinin.

With the onset of the Great Patriotic War 3500 students went to the Army, and hundreds were involved in constructing fortifications. The main building was transformed into a hospital, and another building was used as a tank school. Institute shops filled military contracts. On September 8 1941 the Siege of Leningrad began. Research on the strength of ice by employees S.S. Golushkevich, P.P. Kobeko, N.M. Reyman and A.R. Shulman proved the feasibility of transporting vital materials across ice. The researchers selected the safest route for the Road of Life - the transport route across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which provided the only access to the besieged city.

Some faculties and students were evacuated to Tashkent in January 1943; where they were able to start classes. In November 1943 they restarted classes in Leningrad as well. In 1943 in Leningrad there were 250 students and 90 teachers at the Institute. The Polytechnical Institute was the only school in the besieged city that had the authority to evaluate the Kandidat (Ph.D) and Doctor of Science dissertations. Before the end of the siege they evaluated 19 dissertations (mostly defense-related). After the end of the war the Institute was rebuilt.

In 1988 the new Physics-Technical (Fiziko-Tekhnichesky) Department (faculty) of the Institute was created. The department is based on the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute and headed by the director of the Ioffe Institute Zhores Ivanovich Alferov (2000 recipient of the Nobel prize.

Today

In September 1991 Leningrad returned its historical name Saint Petersburg and the Institute was renamed Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University. Most people continue to call it Polytechnical Institute.

Today the Polytechnical University is a large educational complex that includes 23 Institutes and Faculties, 6 associated institutes outside Saint Petersburg in the cities of Pskov, Cheboksary, Cherepovets, Sosnoviy Bor, Smolensk and Anadyr, and many scientific research laboratories. There are about 15500 students including 800 postgraduates and 1100 internationals students. Usually the Polytechnical University is considered the second best Russian Engineering School after the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Alumni and faculty

In total the University prepared more than 150,000 engineers. Among its alumni and faculty are:

• Nobel Prize winners Pyotr Kapitsa, Nikolay Semyonov, and Zhores Alferov
• The former president of the Russian Academy of Sciences Anatoly Alexandrov
• Academicians Igor Kurchatov, Georgy Flyorov and Abram Ioffe
• Nuclear weapon designers Yulii Khariton and Nikolay Dukhov.
• Aircraft designers Yulii Khariton and Oleg Antonov, Nikolai Polikarpov and Georgy Beriev
• The designer of the T-34 tank, Mikhail Koshkin
• Chess grandmaster David Bronstein
• Writer Daniil Granin
• Aksel Berg

See also :Category:Alumni of Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University

References

• Official Website of the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University