The paper is devoted to the life of the academic community in the last decade of the 20th century: the making of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the economic problems of those years, the emergence of scientific foundations, the interactions between senior staff and employees of the RAS institutions, the attitude towards the developing legal framework for science, etc. Those were the years of changes and reforms in the academic sphere, the years of formation of a legal framework for science, the years of the scientists’ unprecedented civic activism that manifested in advocating the interests of science itself, scientific community, and individual scientists.