Imperial Russia Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute was founded in 1899 as an engineering school in Russia. The main person promoting the creation of this university was the Finance Minister Count
Sergei Witte. Witte viewed establishing an engineering school loosely modeled by the French
École Polytechnique as an important step towards the industrialization of Russia. The first director of the institute became Prince Andrey Gagarin. Unlike the French École Polytechnique, the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute was always considered to be a civilian establishment. In tsarist Russia it was subordinated to the Ministry of Finance; its students and faculty wore the uniform of the ministry. The main campus was built 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 the student body was so strong that classes only resumed in September 1906, almost two years later. Among the polytechnic students who participated in the Revolutionary events were the future
Bolshevik leader
Mikhail Frunze and the future writer
Yevgeny Zamyatin. Among the deputies of the
First Duma were four Polytechnic 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 1910 the institute was named Peter the Great Polytechnic Institute after
Peter I of Russia. In 1914 the number of students reached 6,000. sits first on the left, next to him
Nikolay Semyonov,
Abram Ioffe sits in the center,
Pyotr Kapitsa is on the left With the onset of World War I many students found themselves in the Army and soon the number of students decreased to 3,000. Some students, like future Soviet military commander
Leonid Govorov studied at the institute for one month. Part of the institute's buildings were transferred into the
Maria Fyodorovna Hospital. Despite the war the institute did not stop its work. In 1916
Abram Ioffe opened his Physics Seminar at the Polytechnic 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 On June 5, 1918 the institute was renamed to
First Polytechnic Institute (with the
Second Polytechnic Institute being the former ''Women's Polytechnic 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. A Soviet
(Council) of 11 professors and 15 students was given the main authority in the Institute. One of these 15 students in the Soviet'' was
Pyotr Kapitsa, a future Nobel-Prize winner in physics. The Faculty of Physics and Mechanics, headed at that time by Abram Ioffe, focused on
atomic and the
solid state physics. In winter of 1918/1919 there were
food shortages and no heating on campus due to
fuel shortages; many students and faculty members died of starvation and freezing temperatures. 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 stanchions and barbed wire and transformed into a
Red Army fortification. After December 1919 the Institute was completely empty.
Soviet era 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 Station on the
Dnieper River. In autumn 1920, due to the cold weather and the absence of heating some lectures were 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 the development of
electronic musical instruments. His first demonstration of the
theremin was held in Polytechnic Institute in November 1920. After the end of the
Russian Civil War many students returned to the Institute. By the spring of 1922 there were 2800 students on the campus. In 1926,
Sovnarkom re-established the title
Engineer and allowed "children of working intelligentsia" to enter the tertiary schools; prior to this only workers and children of workers were allowed. The number of students enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute reached the 1914 level of 6,000. By 1928 there were 8,000 students. In 1930,
Sovnarkom decided to create a network of highly specialized Engineering schools. On June 30 Polytechnic Institute was closed and a number of independent institutes were created instead: • Hydrotechnical (), • Industrial Civil Engineering (), now the
Military engineering-technical university (), • Shipbuilding (), • Aviation (), • Electrotechnical (), • Chemical Technology (), • Metallurgy (), • Machine Building (), • Industrial Agriculture (), • Physics and mechanics (), • Finances and Economics () and • Boilers and Turbines (). 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 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. by the Polytechnic Institute With the onset of the
eastern front of World War II, 3500 students went to the army and hundreds were involved in constructing fortifications to the university itself. 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 hold 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 Polytechnic 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 the Polytechnic Institute evaluated 19 dissertations, many related to military defense. In 1952,
Radio-physics Department was created. In 1988, the new
Physics-Technical (Fiziko-Tekhnichesky) Department (faculty) of the Institute was created. The department was modeled on the
Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute and headed by the director of the Ioffe Institute
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, recipient of the 2000
Nobel Prize in physics. ==Current status==