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Abstract. The article traces the evolution of age criteria applied by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Moscow State University in their personnel policy during the post-war decades. Drawing on documents deposited in the Archives of the Academy of Sciences and in the Central State Archives of the City of Moscow, the study shows that these criteria changed significantly over time. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, itappears to have been no articulated preference in terms of age, but high importance was attached to scholars’ ‘experience’, which was associated with ‘old generation.’ Those belonged to the younger generation were mostly treated as minors of sorts who had to be ‘brought up’ even if they were post-graduate students in their twenties or even thirties. Gradually, from the early 1960s organizational forms were introduced that made possible to use much wider the intellectual potential of ‘young scholars’ without changing their place in the personnel hierarchy – the so-called “young scholars’ councils”, “young scholars’ competitions”, and “creative youth groups”. In the second half of 1980s, after the proclaimed ‘rejuvenation’ in the party and state apparatus, the personnel policy of the Academy of Sciences changed by adopting notions of “aging” (as a synonym for “obsolescence”) and “rejuvenation”. As part of the reform in the Academy of Sciences, itwas prescribed to recruit annually a certain percentage of “young specialists” in order to “address new and topical issues”, whereas scholars who had passed a certain age line were to be fired. From that time it was no longer ‘experience’ but ‘youth’ that was expected to provide better performance of the Soviet academia.
Keywords: Soviet science history, personnel policy, age, experience, youth, aging, staff rejuvenation.