[2][4] Now headquartered in Moscow, the academy (RAS) is a non-profit organization established in the form of a federal state budgetary institution[5] chartered by the Government of Russia.

As of November 2017[update], the academy included 1,008 institutions and other units;[6] in total, about 125,000 people were employed of whom 47,000 were scientific researchers.

Since 2015, the academy also awards, on a competitive basis, the honorary scientific rank of a RAS Professor to the top-level researchers with Russian citizenship.

In 1990, the Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences was founded, a specialized university intended to provide extensive opportunities for students to choose an academic path.

The academy gives out a number of different prizes, medals and awards among which:[33] The academy was a culmination of Emperor Peter the Great's inspiration from his tours to Western Europe and its higher education centers along with the beginning of his correspondence with Gottfried Leibniz, a philosopher, mathematician, and diplomat.

[34] Also, Leibniz suggested creating an arts and sciences institution with faculty consisting of leading foreign scholars.

[2] The academy achieved a major goal in the 1740s by turning out the first Russian scholar members, Stepan Krasheninnikov and Mikhail Lomonosov.

[3][2] The charter also emphasized the hope for Russian Academy graduates to replace all the foreign scholars in time.

[2] To heal the growing internal German versus Russian conflict of the faculty, Catherine the Great convinced Euler to return to St Petersburg and head the academy in 1766, where he stayed until he died in 1783.

[3] In 1803, Alexander I reverted to reforms from Catherine the Great's era and gave the academy self-administration power in a new charter.

[38] Foreign scholars invited to work at the academy included the mathematicians Leonhard Euler (1707–1783),[38] Anders Johan Lexell, Christian Goldbach, Georg Bernhard Bilfinger, Nicholas Bernoulli (1695–1726) and Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782), botanist Johann Georg Gmelin, embryologists Caspar Friedrich Wolff, astronomer and geographer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, physicist Georg Wolfgang Kraft, historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller and English Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811).

[4][40] From 1750 to 1777, the academy published 20 volumes of their academic journal called Novi Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae.

Shortly after the October Revolution, in December 1917, Sergey Fedorovich Oldenburg, a leading ethnographer and political activist in the Kadet party, met with Vladimir Lenin to discuss the future of the academy.

The most important activities of the academy in the 1920s included an investigation of the large Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, of the minerals in the Kola Peninsula, and participation in the GOELRO plan targeted electrification of the whole country.

The Stalin years were marked by a rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union for which a great deal of research, mainly in the technical fields, was done.

In the years of the Second World War, the Soviet Academy of Sciences made a big contribution to a development of modern weapons – tanks (new series of T-34), airplanes, degaussing the ships (for protection against the naval mines) etc.

The Russian Academy practically lost a generation of people born from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s; this age category is now underrepresented in all research institutes.

[42] Furthermore, a lack of competition, decayed infrastructure and continuing, though slightly reduced, brain drain play their part.

On June 28, 2013, the Russian Government announced a draft law that would dissolve the RAS while creating a new "public-governmental" organization with the same name.

Instead, the new government agency FASO was empowered to "evaluate", relying on its own criteria, the efficiency of research institutes and rearrange ineffective ones.

[45] The draft law, which, in its initial form, would have fundamentally changed the system of science organization in Russia, provoked conflicts and protests within academic circles.

[46] A large group of the RAS members signalized their intention not to join the new academy if the reform is run as planned in the draft.

[47] Some leading scientists (including Pierre Deligne, Michael Atiyah, Mumford, and others) wrote open letters which referred to the planned reform of the RAS as "shocking" and even "criminal".

In 2014, Putin announced more changes to science funding that reduced RAS power while increasing that of the government.