In the old days, when I lectured, a professor's salary of 3000 roubles was so ample that I could even keep a footman – I took on Alyosha, you know

In the old days, when I lectured, a professor's salary of 3000 roubles was so ample that I could even keep a footman – I took on Alyosha, you know. But does it provide so well now? If I were a minister and were asked to name what a professor ought to be paid, I should say: not less than 10000 roubles. Outside earnings, literary work or consultancy, are also much harder to come by nowadays. For literary work, a great many people have sprung up, and in consultancy the need for professors is far smaller. Formerly a professor with a general training could be a valued adviser anywhere, but now any good factory has such specialists that they would put a professor in the shade. And the public standing of professors? Once their opinions were heeded, but who pays them any attention now? You, of course, are in no hurry, a suitable post will turn up – at our Chamber, for one. And if you do not wish to tear yourself away from science, well, science can be pursued anywhere. Science is a mistress who will embrace you wherever you are – only do not push her away yourself.

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev on professors' salaries, in conversation with the young chemist Vyacheslav Tishchev in 1890.

10,000 roubles at that time, calculated by the gold parity method from present-day gold prices, would be equivalent to roughly 150 million present-day roubles. Per year.

There are other methods of converting nineteenth-century roubles into modern ones, for example by purchasing power, by which this sum would correspond to 10–25 million roubles, which is still very considerable. By the wage method, a salary of 10,000 roubles in 1890 corresponds to 50 million in 2026. Calculated via the silver rouble, it comes to a little over 40 million roubles.

In any case, it is hard to picture a university professor in Russia today on a salary of several million roubles a month, let alone tens of millions. One would sooner believe in a mere 10 thousand roubles 😆