T-invariant has repeatedly described how one of the leading interdisciplinary research institutes, the Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems (Kharkevich IPPI RAS), is being destroyed by administrative pressure from the Ministry of Education and Science and the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A.A. Kharkevich Institute of Information Transmission Problems (IPPI RAS). Demonstrative cancellation of the contract with the head of the Institute Andrei Sobolevsky, ignoring the opinion of scientists, led to a conflict between the scientificstaffand the new directorate, the departure of a number of employees to MIPT andthe appointment of Dmitry Repin, a scientist with a dubious reputation, as deputy director. The new scandal is connected with the fact that as a result of the election of the Academic Council, this body at IPPI was headed by Dissertnet members. Only three years ago it was impossible to imagine such a thing happening at the renowned institute.
Earlier in T-invariant
Acting deputy director of IPPI RAS became a scientist with a scandalous reputation
In early November 2024, it was announced about the election of a new Academic Council of IPPI RAS. According to its regulations, the body includes employees elected by the conference of the Institute’s employees, as well as those who are included without elections – by order of the Director of IPPI. The conference was scheduled for 11 November. Before that, staff meetings were held in the Institute’s subdivisions to nominate delegates to the conference and candidates to the Academic Council. At the conference it was decided to hold a secret ballot by crossing out the names of candidates. The composition of the counting commission was also determined. According to the same regulation on the Council, its members should have a degree in any speciality. Therefore, the Academic Council of an institute specialising in computer science, mathematics and physics can theoretically include, for example, specialists in agriculture, art historians, economists and sociologists. At first glance, this may seem strange, but it should be remembered that computer science methods are widely used in a wide variety of spheres of national economy.
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The secret ballot to elect the council members was held over two days: 13 and 14 November. Ballots with the names of the candidates were given to the electors just before the vote. The electors were also given ballpoint pens to cross out. No one doubted that this was done purely out of convenience. The completed ballot papers were placed in a box specially prepared for this procedure. Everything seemed to be going according to the established regulations. But soon it turned out that the ballots were signed not by the chairman or members of the counting commission elected at the conference, but by the chairman of the trade union committee of the institute, who led the conference (by the way, he will also become a member of the Academic Council). In addition, the voting did not take place at one time and not at the conference itself, so there were questions about the inviolability of the ballots from the end of the voting to the counting of the votes, which, according to some IPPI staff, was not fully ensured. Shortly after the counting of the votes, the election results were released and IPPI staff discovered that one candidate who had received at least seven votes had only two votes in the released results. If this is indeed the case, it is conceivable that someone, in the period between the end of voting and the start of counting, had removed the names of individual candidates from the ballot papers, thereby increasing the relative weight of the “more valuable” candidates.
Already on 20 November, on behalf of five employees of the Institute, who discovered discrepancies in the voting results, a statement was sent to the IPPI management with a demand to declare the past Academic Council elections invalid and to appoint new ones. Copies of the statement were simultaneously sent to the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Minister of Science and Higher Education of Russia. It should be mentioned that in the atmosphere that developed after the appointment of the new Director of IPPI, it required a certain amount of courage to sign such a statement. Not surprisingly, several staff members did not dare to do so, although they told their colleagues that they had cast their votes for the very candidate discussed above.
Meanwhile, a new Academic Council was formed at IPPI and its composition was posted on the Institute’s website. D.A. Repin, Doctor of Sociological Sciences, whose PhD thesis the scientists have a lot of questions about, became the acting Chairman of the Council , and O.Y. Klevtsova, Candidate of Economic Sciences, became the Academic Secretary. Thus, for the first time in the history of IPPI’s existence, the head of its Academic Council is a person in whose thesis large-scale incorrect borrowings were found .
It should be reminded that the presence of borrowings in Repin ‘s dissertationwithout references to the authors or sources of borrowings was earlier recognised by the Dissertation Council 24.2.419.01 at the Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education “Tyumen Industrial University”, which unanimously recommended the Russian Ministry of Education and Science to deprive Repin of his degree of Candidate of Sociological Sciences. The newly elected head of the Academic Council of IPPI has been trying to challenge this decision in court for almost a year now.
Earlier, when he was director of the Ural Institute of Management of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Repin became famous for a story about alleged threats against him by one of his professors. Given this background, the dubious results of the Academic Council elections might not seem like something out of the ordinary anymore. But the Institute’s mathematics and computer scientists were outraged when they discovered what they considered to be an obvious deception.
Dmitry Repin. Photo: e1.ru
As for Klevtsova, it is known that the defence of her PhD thesis in economics took place at RSUH in early 2013. At that time in RSU worked dissertation council D 212.198.01, which would later be called “the factory of fake dissertations”. It was in this dissertation council that Olga Yurievna Burmistrova (Klevtsova’s maiden name) successfully defended her thesis. However, the obligatory copy of the dissertation deposited in the Russian State Library, unlike all other dissertation works, was not digitised and for many years was unavailable for electronic processing, for example, with the help of the “Anti-Plagiarism” programme. Intrigued by this circumstance, an expert of the DissertationNet community went to the dissertation room of the main Russian library to verify the existence of the dissertation. First of all, the expert’s surprise was caused by the not quite usual appearance of the book: on pages 102-151, instead of continuing the text of the scientific research, the previous pages 51-100 were inserted in reverse order.
Most likely, this is a technical error. However, having studied the available text, the expert assumed that the text of Burmistrova’s dissertation was a paraphrased text of E.E. Borisova’s doctoral dissertation, defended earlier in the same dissertation council of RSUHU.
In the expert’s opinion, the “remodelling” of the text of a possible source could have been carried out in two ways:
1) synonymisation – replacement of words and word combinations by constructions similar in meaning (for example, “machine-building complex of Russia” – by “Russian industrial complex”, “sales” – by “supplies”, “industries” – by “sectors”, “world” – by “international”, etc.);
2) replacement of phrases and insertion of text templates (e.g., “competitive in the global technological environment within the framework of the modernisation strategy”, “technological and other similar clusters”, “based on the development of the scientific and technical sector of the industry”, etc.).
Each of these textual patterns occurs dozens of times in the thesis. In some cases, the patterns follow one after another. As a result of deep paraphrasing, grammatical inconsistencies inevitably arise, as, for example, on page 45 of the dissertation: E.E. Borisova had “in sectoral and regional aspects”, while O.Y. Burmistrova lost the adjective “regional” and got “in sectoral aspects”; on the next page 46, in the phrase “mechanisms for the development and implementation of neoindustrial”, the inconsistency arose as a result of replacing the words “formation and implementation of integrated” with the template “development and implementation of neoindustrial”. Such inconsistencies are observed throughout the text of Burmistrova’s thesis and seem to suggest a direction of borrowing. Overall, the text of this dissertation is quite different from what the Dissertnet experts usually encountered, so they asked an independent expert, a doctor of economics, professor, to provide feedback on the dissertation.
According to the invited expert, “in general, Burmistrova’s work is characterised by a significant volume of text, which is simply a set of words and phrases that do not carry any semantic load, but are written to create the volume of pages of the dissertation text”.
The examination of O.Y. Klevtsova’s (Burmistrova’s) dissertation can be found on the DissertNet community website. There you can also see that the texts of Burmistrova’s publications on the topic of her dissertation mostly coincide with each other, thus flagrantly violating the principles of publication ethics.
Thus, the Academic Council of the leading institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences was headed by people with dubious dissertations, while the ordinary members of the Academic Council are mostly outstanding scientists with an impeccable reputation in the academic community. The result is a kind of inverted pyramid (in sociology – the principle of “reverse hierarchy”).
This was not the end of the story with the election of the Academic Council of IPPI RAS. Five daredevils who signed a petition to the Institute’s management complained to their colleagues that they were pressurised to withdraw their signatures. In particular, they report that Repin in a private conversation threatened them with legal action for defamation. Given this, it is not surprising that one of the five petitioners has already withdrawn his signature, and humanly speaking, he can be understood. As a result, today there were four who did not succumb to the pressure and refused to withdraw their signatures.
So the story of confrontation between the scientists and the administration is not over. For the third year the employees have been trying to preserve the territory of academic purity and academic freedom. The experience of their struggle is an important example for other institutions in a similar situation, which is why colleagues and T-invariant are following them so closely.
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Text: Andrey Rostovtsev
Andrey Rostovtsev 20.01.2025