Erm... not really. Well, since you mentioned Euler: most of his funding came from the St. Petersburg Academy, which, in turn, was bankrolled by the Russian Cza

Erm... not really. Well, since you mentioned Euler: most of his funding came from the St. Petersburg Academy, which, in turn, was bankrolled by the Russian Czar (Catherine the Great, in this instance). The crown had absolutely no need to report back to its subjects on how and why it spends its money. The primary reason academies like that existed was that his or her highness wanted to impress their royal cousins with how intellectual they were and how much money they could spend on the matters they believed themselves to be responsible for. That's why if you look back at scientific publications or organizations, a lot of them have a "royal" in their name "the royal society of this", "the royal college of that". This is because of their sponsors. Since we are talking about Russia here, basically, until Alexander II (second half of 18 hundreds), there weren't any government institutions that could, in principle, manage the tax collected from the royal subjects and had to report and justify their activity. Until then, by and large, all the tax collected belonged to the crown and the crown was free to do with it however their heart desired. The initial ministry of education created by Alexander I (early 18 hundreds) was the first step towards transparency, but it wasn't much. If you are interested in the reasons: both the liberation of the peasants and the defeat in the Crimean campaign created a large hole in the crown's finances. If, until then, the crown disbursed some undisclosed amount to the minister, who would use the money however he wished (mostly stole), the changes in the 1860s made it harder to steal (the minister had to report the expenditures). One could say that at this point, the current approach to financing the education began. A lot of things, however, were still subsidized directly by the crown or various elites, rather than in centralized government-sanctioned way. Another large reform, that made the system more transparent and rule-based followed in 1904, but since the Communists completely reorganized the government in 1917, it's hard to tell what the results might have been. It's only really since 1917 that education and science became exclusively financed by the tax and not through private donors.