Russia

Academe, Jul/Aug 1999 by Sokolov, Andrey K

When the Soviet Union fell, educational change seemed possible. But the old hierarchies remain in place, while most scholars must scramble to survive.

TO UNDERSTAND THE STATUS OF academic freedom in Russia today, it is necessary to know something about the past. In the Soviet era, science and education played special roles in society. The social sciences and humanities, for example, served mainly ideological goals and tasks, while technology and the natural sciences served military ends. These relationships did not, however, preclude growth and development in these fields.

The USSR had one of the largest populations of scientists, scholars, and university teachers in the world. They were dispersed in several different kinds of institutions, including academies, universities, and institutes. Most Soviet academics worked in the Moscow area, where the Academy of Sciences and its main constituent parts were located, along with the most prestigious universities and civil and military institutions. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) had the second-largest concentration of researchers, while other branches of the academy existed in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East.

Few universities combined the functions of research and teaching. Basic research was the preserve of academies; the applied sciences had their homes in the institutes of state ministries. After the rise of the communist regime's policy of rapid modernization in the 1930s, when the state became interested in training scientists and technicians, only about 6 percent of research was carried out in universities.

Obstacles to academic freedom abounded. They included not only censorship and ideological pressure, but also centralized and bureaucratic planning of research, secrecy surrounding all research connected even tangentially to technology, isolation from the international community of scholars, limited access to information, and restrictions on foreign contacts and exchanges. Yet aside from these limits, few (and no official) incidents of persecution on economic, cultural, gender, or ethnic grounds occurred.

The unique system of governmental certification of academic and teaching staff helped control academic life. Only the "AllUnion Certification Commission" could confer the degrees of doctor or candidate of sciences. After the degrees were given, the Ministry of Higher Education (with some exceptions) then awarded the academic ranks of professor and associate professor. The most distinguished research professors could become members or corresponding members of the four academies: the Academy of Sciences (the largest and most prestigious), the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Agricultural Academy, or the Academy of Education. This system survived the fall of the USSR and still dominates academic life today.

After Mikhail S. Gorbachev and like-minded leaders came to power in 1985, the climate for academic freedom improved. The pressure of communist ideology gradually lessened, censorship on political grounds was abolished, and international contacts increased. Any attack on academic freedom became a matter of public discussion and condemnation. Scholars and other supporters of academic freedom who had suffered under the Soviet regime, such as A. N. Sakharov, became academic heroes and moral leaders of the nation. The last years of Gorbachev's rule were a real golden age for academic freedom.

Afterward, in the market economy promoted by the postGorbachev reformers, the large research establishment inherited from the USSR came to seem superfluous and burdensome. Indeed, recent Russian leaders have demonstrated an inability to save and draw on the accumulated intellectual and educational potential of the Soviet period. Material conditions for scholars, which are not a government priority, are terrible.

In recent years, scholars have endured a tenfold reduction of financial support from the state. In 1996, Russia spent only $4,400 on each researcher, but in 1997 that figure fell to $3,720. That amount covered salary, electricity, heating, communications, and other payments. The academic community survives only by leasing its premises to commercial concerns, by taking part-time jobs not declared officially, and by engaging in overt commercial activities. A new Russian government program called Integration seeks to integrate research and teaching at the universities, but it is moving slowly. Paradoxically, then, the social group that most supported liberal reforms has suffered from them most severely. What was built under the Soviets is now in a stage of systematic degradation and painful adaptation to a new order.

Two government foundations, the Russian Fund for Fundamental Studies and the Russian Fund for Humanities, are to some extent helping the academic community survive. These funds are meant to support research projects, conferences (especially international ones), publication of books, computerization, and telecommunications. But two-thirds of the grants go to the Academy of Sciences. Moscow State University is getting 8 to 10 percent of the grants; all other universities together receive about 20 percent. Dreams to use the funds to integrate research and university teaching, and thus to create centers of academic excellence, exist only on paper. Even limited efforts toward such goals were sharply reduced following the economic crisis of August 1998.