In the 18th century scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) traced disciplinary history in order to think about scientifc questions in their research felds. When it came to the 19th century, some historians tried to make studies of the history of science from the humanistic perspective. The Commission for the History of Knowledge (CHK) was set up by the RAS in 1929. V.I. Vernadsky, the president of the CHK, regarded the history of science as an independent feld of science, and proposed the main questions and focuses for the studies of the history of science, laying the groundwork for the discipline of the history of science and technology. When the CHK was reconstructed as the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1932, so that the research on the history of science and technology became institutionalized in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The Russian (Soviet) Academy of Sciences had its own specifc scholarly approach to the studies of the development of science, philosophy, and technology in the framework of "the history of knowledge" in the 1920s, and further pioneered the Marxism-Leninism studies of the history of knowledge, which significantly contributed to the international research on the history of science and technology.