he article examines the history of the May 1927 elections of full members of the Acad-emy of Sciences of the 󰁵󰁳󰁳󰁲. At the center of attention are issues such as the proce-dure of the electoral campaign and the criteria that ought to have guided the Academyof Sciences in electing new members – particularly the attitude of academicians to“improper borrowing of materials” (plagiarism) in candidates’ works. The article intro-duces several dozen documents – private letters, meeting protocols, reports and thelike – illustrating the complex system of personal relationships within the Academy,the sharp disagreements of its members over crucial matters of scholarly ethics, andthe archaic nature of the Academy’s organizational structure. These documents en-able the authors to suggest that, in the 1927 elections of full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, all participants ignored fundamental principles of scholarly eth-ics. The last elections to occur before the scandalous “Academy a􀁦fair” showed that the Academy of Sciences badly needed organizational reforms: the cumbersome natureof the structure and the ease with which electoral manipulations occurred were tooobvious to be ignored. Yet the reforms which followed the 1927 elections led to estab-lishment of total state control over the Academy