Karelian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR

a branch of the Academy of Sciences, established at Petrozavodsk in 1945; originally it was called the Kare-lo-Finnish Scientific Research Base of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and then, from 1949 to 1956, was the Karelo-Finnish Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

As of 1972, the Karelian Branch consisted of geology, forestry, biology, language, literature, and history research institutes and water problems and economics departments. Its major activities include detecting mineral resources and working out rational means for their exploitation, comprehensively studying the forests of the Karelian ASSR and Murmansk Oblast and the means of increasing their productivity, physically and chemically analyzing wood and its by-products, and studying the biological resources of Karelia. The branch is also concerned with theoretical approaches to draining and reclaiming marshy areas and wetlands and with long-range planning of the development of the productive forces of the Karelian ASSR. Furthermore, it is involved in the study of the history, archaeology, and ethnography of Karelia; the history and present state of Karelian and Finnish literature and folk art; the Veps, Karelian, Finnish, and Lapp languages; and contemporary problems of the construction of communism.