ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Overview of State Policy

a. The Soviet Period

b. The “Wild Nineties”

c. 2000-2012: Return of the State

d. 2012-18: The May Decrees and the “Road Map”

3. The Condition of University Teachers Following the “Optimizing” Reforms of 2012-18

a. Employment

1. Massive Job Cuts

2. Permanent Probation

b.Remuneration

1.Salary Levels

2. “Efficient Contracts”

c. Workloads

d. Power and Academic Freedom

1. Exclusion from Governance

2.Restrictions on Freedom to Teach and Conduct Research

3.Repression of Union Activists and Other “Troublemakers”

4.Restriction of Freedom Outside of Professional Duties

e.Corruption in the University Milieu

1.Bribe-taking from Students

2.The Publications Business

3.“False Dissertations”

4.Raspil

5.Morale

4. “Universitetskaya solidarnost’“

a.Origins

b. Founding Positions and Strategic Orientations

c. Inauspicious Circumstances

5. UniSol at MFTI

a. Origins

b. The Initiative Group

c. Formation of the Union and Its First Steps

d. Open Letters

e. Partial Victories

f. The High Point

g. The Administration‘s Counter-Attacks

6. Rethinking Strategy: By Way of Conclusion

Bibliography

Scholarly Publications

Union and Related Internet Sources

Mass Media

Government Documents

Statistics

Others

1. Introduction

In 2012, soon after his election to a third presidential term as president, following a four-year stint as prime minister (to avoid modifying the constitution), and in the wake of an unprecedented wave of popular protests, Vladimir Putin issued his “May Decrees.” Notable among them was the government’s commitment to increase the salaries of doctors, scientific researchers and university teachers to double the average in their respective regions by 2018.1 But then on December 30 of that year, the government issued a “road map” for education, revealing that the salary increases in higher education would be paid for, not by significant new government funding, but by “optimization,” which would eliminate 44% of the current teaching positions in higher education. This was justified in part by a forecasted drop in student enrolment.2

Thus opened a new, accelerated period of reform of higher education. This book examines the impact of these reforms on the condition of Russia’s university teachers and the collective efforts of some teachers, a small minority, to organize themselves in an independent trade union to defend their professional interests and their vision of higher education.

Apart from the subject’s intrinsic interest, an in-depth examination of this specific aspect of social policy provides valuable insight into the nature of the Russian state, as well as into the condition of “civil society,” in particular the popular classes, to which Russian university teachers belong according to their socio-economic situation, if not necessarily their self-image.

The policies promoted by the Russian government in higher education are not unique to that country. Over the past few decades, similar policies have been promoted, in various forms and degrees, in many countries. Many academics who read this book will recognize tendencies at work in their own countries and institutions. But rarely have these policies assumed so grotesque and destructive a form as in Russia.

It has been observed that neoliberalism, whatever its ideological justifications, is, in reality, the policy of the bourgeoisie when it does not encounter serious popular resistance.3 There is resistance in Russia, but for both historical and contemporary reasons it is very weak. The Russian case can, therefore, be read as a cautionary tale by anyone who holds a humanistic conception of higher education.

This research was conducted over several years. It included lengthy stays in Russia, during which I was conducted interviews and held informal discussions with university teachers and union activists. I also participated in union educational activities, meetings, conferences, and protests. The study also makes use of government and union documents, as well as published scholarly studies and articles from the press and the social media.

Since I do not believe that neutrality is possible in the study of study significant aspects of society, I will make clear my social and ideological commitments. I have long been active in my own university’s trade union, the first accredited professors’ union in Canada, and in its efforts to resist neo-liberal pressures. I have also long been involved in trade-union educational activities in Russia. Notwithstanding those commitments, I have tried my best to make honest use of all the materials that were available to me and did not select or distort facts in order to support a parti pris.

A note on terminology. The Russian term professor is not usually used generically to denote “university teacher”, as is often the case in North America for tenured or tenure-track teachers. In this text, the term professor will be reserved for holders of the Russian title (roughly equivalent to “full professor”). “University teacher” will be used as the generic term. Other titles for teaching positions in Russia and their rough North-American equivalents are: assistent (teaching assistant), prepodavatel’ (lecturer), starshii prepodavatel’ (senior lecturer), dotsent (associate professor)—the most numerous category.

1 http://www.rsr-online.ru/doc/2012_06_25/6.pdf (accessed May 30, 2018)

2 http://legalacts.ru/doc/rasporjazhenie-pravitelstva-rf-ot-30122012-n-2620-r/ (accessed May 30, 2018)

3 M. Dudcik and A. Reed Jr., “The Crisis of Labor and the Left in the U.S.,” in L. Panich and G. Albo, eds., The Socialist Register 2015, Merlin Press, London, U.K., 2015, p. 373, note 10.

2. Overview of State Policy
a. The Soviet Period

University teachers were held in high regard in Soviet society, and university teaching was a coveted profession. In that relatively egalitarian system (even considering the privileges of the nomenklatura), a dotsent, the equivalent of a North-American associate professor, the most numerous category of teaching personnel, earned approximately double the average wage and could expect to obtain an apartment. A professor, a title awarded on the basis of major published research, earned double that amount.1 Performance bonuses, beyond the guaranteed part of the salary, were relatively small and stable.

While some research and publishing activity was generally expected, most universities, with the exception of a few élite institutions, focused on teaching, with more advanced research being conducted in the network of institutes belonging to the Academy of Science. Accordingly, while the teaching load could be relatively heavy—300 or more academic hours2 for a dostent (but 120-150 for a professor)—it was manageable. In some institutions, such as Moscow State University, every fourth semester was free for the purpose of research.

Looking back to the Soviet period from 2017, professor of philosophy V. Afanas’eva of Saratov State University recalled: “In the 1980s, when I was pondering a career, to become a professor was not only interesting and respected, but practical too. Indeed, a professor was doing work that he loved. On the face of it, he did not work too much—it looked like a few hours a week. And he received the wage of a Norilsk miner.3 He could allow himself to buy a cooperative apartment in the city’s centre and a dacha on the Volga. And he came to the cashier for vacation pay with a small suitcase, since the money would not fit into a briefcase. Professors were respected, honoured; legends were told about them; each one was unique, irreplaceable, and therefore beloved.”4

There was no concept of tenure in the Soviet Union, but once hired, university teachers could expect to keep their jobs for life, as long as they conformed politically. Party membership, not easy to obtain for intellectuals in the later Soviet period (unlike workers, who sometimes resisted insistent invitations to join), was obligatory in politically sensitive disciplines, such as economics, history, or philosophy, which were under strict ideological control. Sociology, banned under Stalin, was resurrected after his death, but mainly as an applied (fact-gathering and analysis), rather than theoretical discipline. Courses in Soviet Marxism and party history were obligatory for students in all disciplines.

Power in the educational system, as in all social and political institutions, was highly centralized. Organization and financing were decided and administered centrally. In universities and in the more specialized institutes of higher learning subordinated to the various economic ministries, a strong basic education was combined with specialized training that prepared students for future employment. Tuition was free, and students who performed well received stipends, which could easily be supplemented by summer jobs. Employment after graduation in one’s field of specialization was guaranteed—the state’s job assignment was mandatory.5

Teaching personnel in institutions of higher learning, unless they were members of the party committee or held administrative positions, did not participate in important decisions. The most significant decisions were taken centrally beyond the university, including the disciplines and subjects to be taught, admission quotas, educational standards, workloads and remuneration.

The Trade Union of Workers of Education6, Higher Schools, and Scientific Institutions embraced all the employees of these areas, including the administrators. It functioned in practice as an arm of the state and of the local university or institute’s administration. The main focus of their activities was the administration of social benefits. After 1985, especially under Gorbachev’s perestroika, central state control of education was somewhat relaxed, but the union never assumed a significant degree of independence from the university and state authorities, nor did its basic functions change.

The October Revolution opened and greatly broadened access to higher education for the children of workers and peasants, and also for their adult members. And while the state clearly emphasized the role of education in the formation of the skilled labour force required for economic development, it also framed education’s mission in humanistic terms, as favoring the spiritual development of individuals and of society as a whole.7 The downside of this professed humanism was the imposed, crude “ideologization” of higher education, which included mandatory courses in “marxism-leninism,” the history of the Communist Party, and the like.

Soviet parents often invested considerable energy and financial resources in their offspring’s accession to higher education, which was a prestigious and widely-shared goal. Evening and extramural higher education was also widely developed, the law providing special conditions for working students enrolled in these programmes. Students in higher education were generally motivated to learn, since at least equally well-paid jobs not requiring higher degrees were available in industry. For those enrolled in full-time programmes, the university years became a cherished period of their lives, and the friendships established then often endured long afterwards.

b. The “Wild Nineties”8

The decade under Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the newly-independent Russian Federation, came to be known popularly as the “wild9 nineties.” This was a period of what Marx had termed “primitive accumulation”—the forced dispossession of toilers of their means of subsistence. The latter, according to the constitution inherited from the Soviet Union, were the collective property of the nation as a whole. The rapid privatization of the economy in the course of the 1990s assumed the form of massive corruption and theft. These were not only tolerated, but actively promoted by the government. 10

Formally, the new Russian state was, and still is, a democracy. But since Yeltsin’s coup d’état and artillery bombardment of the Supreme Soviet (the dominant state institution at the time) in October 1993, the executive branch of the government has been free of any significant outside control. Under this “managed democracy”, the state’s tolerance of individual and collective freedoms (which remain, nevertheless, significant on the background of most of Russian history) is conditional upon their not limiting the government’s freedom of action in matters that it considers important.

“Shock therapy,” a policy of forced, rapid transition to capitalism, actively promoted by the G-7 and the international financial institutions that they dominate, thrust Russia into one of the deepest and most prolonged depressions experienced by an industrial society.11 Throughout the decade, the government was determined to stay this course, regardless of the social and economic costs to the mass of the population, which was unable to mount effective resistance.

By 1998, real GDP had fallen to around a quarter of its 1992 level. Popular incomes plummeted, along with the state’s social spending. Government expenditure on higher education as a part of GDP fell in this period from 1.21% to 0.040%; funding per student decreased by 70% compared to the end of the 1980s.12 Besides a catastrophic reduction of teachers’ salaries, institutions of higher learning struggled to survive by attracting various forms of non-state funding: tuition-paying students, commercial use of real-estate under their control, the sale of services, grants from private sources. These activities were legalized by the 1992 Law on Education, which also permitted the establishment of private universities.

In these conditions, the centralized control of education of the Soviet period necessarily gave way to broad decentralization and so expanded autonomy of educational establishments, as there was no other way for them to survive.13 It was not until well into the next decade that the state began to intervene actively again in higher education.

For university teachers, the freedom to teach, to conduct research and to publish was the main positive outcome of the Soviet Union’s demise. While the government still formally required its approval of programmes, in practice teachers were free to teach as they wished. “It was a period of full freedom—you did what you wanted,” recalled an economics teacher at Moscow State University. “It was the most interesting and creative time. I wrote a textbook that passed through three editions. There were a lot of different views, discussions, arguments. It was interesting!” “From an intellectual point of view, the 1990s were the best years of my life,” recalled a philosophy teacher at St. Petersburg’s Mining University. “We obtained access to books and translations and we could teach and say whatever we liked, without fear.”

This new intellectual freedom had the most meaning for teachers of the humanities and social sciences, since the natural sciences had not been subject to significant ideological control. But changes in this period also allowed a measure of teacher participation in university affairs, notably in the election of department chairpersons, faculty deans, and rectors, as well as in decisions regarding hiring and promotion of colleagues.14

The early 1990s also saw the introduction of employment contracts. Formally, teaching positions were to be filled and five-year contracts awarded through open competitions, on whose basis departments made recommendations to the institution’s elected academic council. In practice, however, teachers in this period could count on keeping their positions. Departments also obtained a decisive voice in decisions regarding promotions.

The dark side of this newly-found freedom and opportunities to participate in university affairs was a dramatic decline in salaries. The average salary of a university teacher in 2000 was a mere 1,226 rubles (approximately $US 40).15 Moreover, the payment of wages and salaries in the 1990s was often delayed, sometimes for weeks and even months, this in conditions of hyperinflation without indexation. A Moscow teacher recalled that “Salaries were so insultingly low that they barely covered the cost of transportation to and from the university.” Many with better options simply left the university, contributing to Russia’s massive brain drain.

Those who remained survived by various means, including depending on their spouse’s income or by renting out their apartment and living in their dacha. But the main means of survival was to take on additional teaching, sometimes in one’s own institution, but more often at other universities. This was possible because many teachers had left the profession, while the number of students enrolled in higher education expanded rapidly from the mid 1990s, almost tripling by 2008 (facilitated by the introduction of tuition-paying admission in public university and the expansion of private universities), after which their numbers began to fall.16 Many teachers earned money by tutoring high-school students for university entrance exams, while others took on consulting and other part-time work in private business. This additional work took a serious toll on the quality of teachers’ lives and their teaching, but it was more or less tolerable since the official teaching load was still relatively moderate at that time. Outside of the larger metropolitan areas, however, opportunities for earning extra money were much more limited.

The decline in salaries was accompanied by a decline in the prestige of the university teaching profession. And teachers’ own self-esteem suffered from their poverty and inability to do conscientious work. An overall decline in academic standards occurred, especially evident in the low quality of many dissertations: thesis defences became less demanding, often assuming a more-or-less formal character, without serious debate or criticism. Plagiarism became widespread, with various high government officials and parliamentary deputies in search of academic degrees showing the way.17

The attitudes of young people toward higher education also changed. In Soviet times, students often explained their pursuit of higher education in idealistic terms—a desire for self-realization and to contribute to social progress. In the 1990s, however, making money was at the fore, as a university diploma came to be viewed primarily as a means to finding a better-paying job.18 Concern for the quality of that education was, at best, a secondary consideration, an attitude often shared by employers.19 An additional motivation for male students was the desire to avoid, or at least postpone, military service.

Because lower-school teachers suffered similar economic hardship and were also forced to take on additional work, the level of preparation of students for university studies declined sharply. An economics teacher at Moscow State University recalled about this period: “They had apparently not learned about society in high school. It shocked me. I began by talking about simple things, and these young people quickly pulled out their notebooks to take notes. So there was some desire to learn. But they lacked a foundation. I had the impression that they had been completely deprived of knowledge. This was the middle 1990s.”

When the Soviet Union came to an end in a “revolution from above,” university teachers, as practically all the rest of Russian society, lacked traditions and experience of independent organization to defend their interests. The newly acquired freedom and opportunities to participate in university governance fell into their hands without struggle. And at once teachers were thrust into a struggle for physical survival, a condition completely unfamiliar to Soviet citizens. Indeed, an unstated goal of “shock therapy” was in that way to prevent significant popular resistance.20 And it succeeded well in the case of university teachers. As for the Trade Union of Employees of Education and Science, a corporatist organization inherited from the Soviet Union, it continued to rubber stamp the decisions of government and university authorities.

c. 2000-2012: Return of the State

The first decade of the new millennium began with the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia. He was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, a man who, among other things, could be relied upon to protect Yeltsin and his “family” from prosecution.

That decade saw the state’s return to an active role in educational policy, made possible by the economy’s emergence from its lengthy depression. There followed a decade of rapid economic growth, thanks in large part to a steep and prolonged rise in the price of oil, which eventually tripled. The recovery also benefitted from the dramatic fall of the ruble in 1998 (a devaluation that the IMF had consistently opposed) that cut imports in half, strongly boosting domestic production.

The state’s budget for education increased substantially from the desperately low levels of the 1990s, doubling by 2004 and growing even faster in subsequent years. As a percent of GDP in constant rubles, federal spending on higher education rose from 0.3% to 0.7% in 2000-2004 and another 140% in 2004-09%.21 Total expenditure from both public and private sources at all levels of education increased from 2.9% of GDP to 4.6% between 2000 and 2011. But even so, state spending on education was the fourth lowest among OECD members, well below the average of 6.1%.22

During his first electoral campaign, Putin did not present anything resembling an economic programme. But the appointment of German Gref, author of the “Gref Plan,” as Minister of Economic Development and Trade foretold a strongly neoliberal social policy. In higher education, the government contemplated replacing direct state funding based on itemized budgets with vouchers that would be distributed to students on the basis of their scores in unified high-school finishing exams. As consumers of educational services, students would use their vouchers to apply to universities, forcing the latter to compete for these clients. But experiments with this programme drew criticism from virtually all quarters, not least rectors, and were abandoned in 2005, although unified state high-school finishing exams were generalized in 2009.23 That innovation reduced the widespread corruption that had surrounded university admissions and broadened choice for high-school graduates. But the negative impact of the reform on the quality of high-school education, whose final two years were geared to the state exams, continues to be decried by educators, as is the shift in pedagogical emphasis from instilling knowledge to prioritizing the acquisition of “competences.”

Although the voucher system was abandoned, the neoliberal orientation in higher-education policy became increasingly pronounced in Putin’s second four-year term. University funding was largely based on the number of state-supported students enrolled. The Federal Programme for the Development of Education of 2005 clearly designated the labour market as the leading driver of educational policy, an orientation that only grew stronger over time. The promotion of personal and social development barely received mention. The sought-after “national idea” for post-Soviet Russia had at last apparently been found: international competitiveness. That document also introduced the term “optimization,” a goal whose application in the social sphere would have a major negative impact on the condition of university teachers in the following decade. 24

The Minister of Education from 2004 to 2012 was Andrei Fursenko, a personal acquaintance of Putin from his native St. Petersburg. Fursenko was a physicist who had turned to business after the Soviet Union and then entered government service. At a pro-government youth forum in 2007, he criticized the inertness of the educational system inherited from the Soviet past, which he was intent on transforming. That system, he opined, had stubbornly tried to make young people into creators; whereas the main goal of education should be to cultivate consumers who know how to make use of technologies and innovations developed by others.25

One of the reforms of this period was the designation of élite national research universities that received additional funding, part of the effort to promote basic research in universities and “international competitiveness.” Another programme introduced in the late 2000s and also aimed at diversification through the creation of an élite university sector was the formation of “federal universities” in Russia’s various regions. This involved the forced merger of hitherto separate, often very different, institutions, a process experienced very painfully by many teachers, who, in typical fashion, were not consulted. Along with the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities, that received a unique status in 2009, the élite tier eventually comprised some 60 institutions, about 12% of the public universities.26

The advancement of Russian universities in the “international educational marketplace” became an important goal of government policy. To that end, the government signed onto the Bologna process in 2003, leading to the replacement of the traditional five-year first degree with a four-year BA, that could be followed by a two-year MA course. The higher candidate’s degree (kandidatskaya—roughly a PhD) was, however, retained, along with the highest academic degree of Doctor. The avowed aim of this reform was to facilitate the international mobility of students and faculty. But it continues to arouse much criticism among university teachers, who complain that the resulting bachelor’s programme is merely a truncated version of the former five-year course of study that does not provide an adequate general higher education. Among other things, the bachelor’s programme is supposed to include a considerable amount of individualized student work, but the classroom teaching load of university teacher leaves them little time for individual student supervision.27

With increased state funding for higher education, teachers’ salaries improved in the second half of the decade but remained well below the average wage in many of Russia’s regions. An international comparison found that average salaries of Russian university teachers in 2008/09 were equal to only 60% of per capita GDP, far below the level of their counterparts in the vast majority of developed, and even poorer, countries.28 “Salaries really did rise between 2001 and 2011, roughly speaking from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles,” observed mathematics teachers R. Karasev of MFTI. But that still remained far from the amount needed to feed a family.”29

To make matters worse, in 2008 the old centrally-fixed wage scale for public-sector employees was replaced with a New System for the Remuneration of Work. This gave heads of hospitals, schools, and universities broader latitude in spending their allotted budgets. Money that they economized on designated functions could be used as incentives to stimulate the work of employees. How that was done was supposed to be negotiated with the employees. But in the absence independent trade unions, the new law gave rectors a virtually free hand. As a result, an inordinate part of the new money went to the remuneration of administrators.

A teacher of higher mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI) recalled of this period: “The price of oil began to rise, and the situation became somewhat more comfortable for teachers. But we began to notice a growing disbalance. Ordinary colleagues really did begin to receive a little more, although nothing commensurate with the income Russia was taking in from oil. At the same time, the administration was beginning to make very big money. In a remarkable article, professor Pokrovskii wrote that although everyone says our work is selfless, that we are doing very important work, we are paid next to nothing, while university administrations are growing fat. Several such articles appeared at the time, as people were becoming aware of the disproportion, which by 2010-12 had already assumed an ugly form.” It was only in 2017 that the Minister of Education and Science finally recognized this as a problem, though nothing much was done.30

The second half of the 2000s thus witnessed a deepening of the opposition between university teaching staff and administrations. Those elements of faculty participation in university governance that had appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union began to be eliminated. A 2006 amendment to the Law on Education introduced a new procedure for choosing rectors, who had until then been elected by university academic councils (uchenye soviety), themselves elected by the teaching staff. According to the new amendment, a government committee was to approve candidates before the election, allowing it to eliminate undesirables. In the élite national-research and federal universities, rectors were now appointed directly by the government (by the President himself, in the case of the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities). As a result, the choice of rector fell increasingly to “strong managers”, people with academic degrees but also with experience in business or government administration. Rectors of the élite universities are generally very wealthy individuals.

Finally, the charters of the élite tier of universities provided for the creation of new academic units to replace the traditional departments and faculties. While department directors and faculty deans are by law elected by faculty councils, the heads of these renamed units are appointed from above. Under pressure from the ministry, this change has proceeded across the university system.31

As a result, rectors and other top university administrators became solidly integrated into the state administration’s “vertical of power”. This has been a central element in the state’s reassertion of control over higher education. In the “vertical of power”, loyalty of state functionaries is assured through a combination of reward, the source of which, at least in part, is some form of corruption, and the threat of punishment. The high salaries of rectors and other top administrators, as well as the proliferation of administrative posts in universities, are integral parts of the neoliberal “new public administration” that has been imposed upon universities in many countries over the last decades.32 The paradox, of course, is that the “free markets” and “competition” that are extolled by the policy’s promoters require muscular state intervention to create and maintain them.

The Putin regime inherited a system of higher education that was chaotic and in clear need of reform. But the new government, with the added resources at its disposal, was determined to impose its own vision of the needed changes, without consulting the parties directly concerned, university teachers, in the first instance. The reforms were undertaken without even a semblance of public discussion, let alone democratic participation, an approach that would be maintained in subsequent years.

d. 2012-18: The May Decrees and the “Road Map”

Putin’s election campaign in the spring of 2012 for a third presidential term (after a four-year pause as Prime Minister) followed upon unprecedentedly large popular protests, which were provoked, among other things, by the falsification of the previous fall’s parliamentary election results. People were also angered and insulted by the blatant cynicism of Putin’s “castling move,” whereby, in order to avoid changing the constitution, he exchanged places with President Dm. Medvedev, who had been his prime minister until four years before. This, Putin let it be known, had been planned from the very start.

During the election campaign Putin made the promise, repeated after his election, to raise the salaries of university teachers to double the average wage of their respective regions. Then on December 30, the government published its “road map” for “Changes in the Social Sphere Aimed at Increasing the Efficiency of Education and Science.”33 That document announced, among other things, that 44% of full-time teaching positions in higher education would be eliminated over the next five years. In absolute terms that meant the loss of 140,000 of the existing 318,000 positions. The document justified this by a projected decline of the university-age population, as well as by its goal of raising the student/teacher ratio from the current 9.4 to the OECD average of 12.

The projected job cuts were widely—and, as it turned out, correctly—interpreted by teachers to mean that the promised salary increase, even if realized, would not be achieved through significant new funding but by intensifying the workloads of those who remained. Moreover, the independent university teachers’ union Univesitetskaya solidarnost’ (henceforth Unisol) pointed out that the decline in university-age population, a consequence of the dramatic fall in births during the depression of the 1990s, would end as early as 2018.34 As for the teacher/student ratio, it was observed that Russia’s university teachers, unlike those of most OECD countries, do not enjoy the support of teaching assistants. On the other hand, doctoral students (aspiranty) who teach are counted as teachers. As a consequence, the average OECD student/teacher ratio is a meaningless benchmark for Russia.35

Putin’s third presidential mandate and the appointment of Dm. Livanov as Minister of Education and Science brought an intensification of the policy tendencies of the preceding administration. Writing in 2014, Professor A.V. Mogilev of Voronezh State Pedagogical University compared Livanov’s policies with those of his predecessor Fursenko: “With the change of Ministers of Education, the pressure on universities not only intensified, but took on a completely different character. If under Fursenko we witnessed the incomprehensible, almost senseless, bureaucratic overturning and demolition of established university practices and traditions in teaching and administration—the introduction of the bachelor’s programme, the new educational standards, the purported competency-oriented approach, the never-ending rewriting of course plans and work programmes; then now, under Dm. Livanov, we suddenly see come to the fore a certain efficiency… Many lances have been broken over that university efficiency… But the parameters set arbitrarily by the ministry for last and this year’s monitoring are such that Stanislavskii would say: “I don’t believe.” 36

In November 2012, early in his ministerial mandate, Livanov, a physicist, who had been vice-rector and then for several years rector of the National Research and Technological University (formerly Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys), provoked the ire of teachers by suggesting to an interviewer on national television that low salaries among university teachers were to be explained either by the low quality of those teachers, which forced them to agree to so little; or by their taking on work in several universities and running among them. A third possibility, he suggested, was that the teachers were taxing their students. “In all three cases,” he concluded, “such a university cannot be considered to be functioning efficiently.”37

With the declared goal of ensuring quality and “optimizing,” but with a clear emphasis on economizing public funds,38 the government established Rosobrnadzor in 2012, the Federal Service of Inspection and Control of Education and Science, a department of the Ministry of Education and Science. It was assigned the task of monitoring the performance of institutions of higher learning at regular intervals on the basis of some 150 indicators for each institution, with six to eight of these, depending on the year, considered critical. In 2012-13, 52 institutions were closed on the basis of Rosobrnadzor’s inspections and 373 satellites were either reorganized through mergers or shut down. The process continued in the following years, though at a slower pace.39

Few could deny the need to ensure the quality of higher education and to put some order into the chaotic situation that had arisen during the “wild nineties,” which, among other things, had witnessed the profound restructuring (some might say destruction) of the economy inherited from the Soviet Union and a major reorientation of the values and career aspirations of the university-age population. But Rosobrnadzor came in for harsh criticism from teachers for its formalistic, bureaucratic approach to evaluations, the inordinate amount of frenzied paperwork its inspections demanded form university staffs, the dubious quality of many of its “expert” inspectors, and, finally, the arbitrary, apparently politically inspired, nature of certain of its decisions.40

The counterpart to monitoring, whose purported goal is to weed out underperforming institutions, were new policies aimed at “promoting excellence.” One of the most notable of these was the “5-100-20” programme, launched in 2013 with the goal of five universities entering major global rankings of the top 100 universities by the year 2020. Initially, fifteen universities were chosen for special federal funding under this programme. Several more added in following years, while others were disqualified.

That university rankings have become a big business and have been the object of criticism for the dubious character what they in fact measure41 did not discourage the government. Many teachers, however, expressed their skepticism about the programme and about how the additional funding was being spent. M. Balashov, teacher of higher mathematics at MFTI, compared it to the New-Guinean cargo cult: “Many of my colleagues, myself included, can’t shake off the feeling that everything is being turned upside down in this project of ‘entering the top 100.’ After all, universities aren’t good because they’re in the top 100. On the contrary, they’re in the top 100 because they’re good.”

At a gathering of the supervisory boards of universities participating in the 5-100-20 programme in 2014, Minister Livanov decried the “ineffective administration that had been formed over decades” in Russia’s universities and that was holding back their development. For that reason, he explained, he had created supervisory boards in the participating universities, composed of business people and government functionaries, “people with experience in solving large-scale tasks.” They would become “in essence, the organs of strategic management of the universities, the analogue of boards of directors of big companies.” These boards would appoint the rectors. An assistant to Livanov let it be known that that innovation would soon be introduced in “all decent Russian universities.”42

Among the other important innovations of this period were the introduction one-year employment contracts for university teachers, as well as “effective contracts,” according to which a highly arbitrary bonus part of the salary, often equal or even greater than the guaranteed part, was made heavily dependent on publishing activity, with a special premium on publications in journals indexed in international citation databases.

And as one might surmise from Livanov’s words, no store was placed in faculty participation in university governance. And for all practical purposes, the elements of teacher participation that had appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union were eliminated in this period. And as before, these new reforms were adopted without consultation of the university community. Sociologist Zh. Toshchenko of Moscow’s RGGU (Russian State University for the Humanities) observed:

“When I began my career as a sociologist, I was impressed by the words of the director of one of Penza’s most successful factories, where problems not only relating to production but social questions, too, were resolved so well.

When I asked him how he managed that, he replied: ‘You can’t make people happy by deciding for them and without them what they need.’ Well, this education reform has been marvelously conducted without the teachers. Who needs them? Bureaucrats know themselves what people need. And so, all commands flow from above, fertilized by the grant-consumers that they finance, who churn out a vast amount of recommendations, norms, rules and standards in order to justify their existence.

Many of these energetic bureaucrats have not themselves experienced their teachings and methods. But they consider it possible to impose them on others. This reforming began, and is being continued, without any counsel from those who do the teaching.

In fact, we see before us a complete disregard for the teaching community. And the tendency not to consult the mass of teachers is also evident in the universities, where practices are far from any elementary respect of democratic principles. Teachers’ meetings to discuss matters, relating not only to teaching, but to any issue of university life, have ceased to occur.”43

The practical application of these reforms and their impact on the condition of university teachers are the subject of the following chapter.

1 M. Matthews, Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Institutions since Stalin, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982, p., 147. A certain decline in the relative remuneration of academic staff began in the 1970s. A. Smolentseva, “Challenges to the Russian Academic Profession,” Higher Education no. 45, 2003, p. 409.

2 An “academic hour” is 45 minutes.

3 Mining was one of the highest paid professions (outside of the nomenklatura), and the nickel miners of Norilsk also received a hefty northern supplement.

4 V. Afanas’eva, “Pyat’ prichin po kotorym ne sleduet stat’ professorom,” Komsomol’skaya pravda, Mar. 20, 2017, https://www.kp.ru/daily/26655.5/3676180/ (accessed Aug 21, 2018)

5 D. Platonova, D. Semyonov, “Russia: the Institutional Landscape of Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al., ed, 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018, p. 1.

6 Prosveshchenie—literally “enlightenment.”

7 A. Smolentseva, “Where Soviet and Neoliberal Discourses Meet: the Transformation of the Purposes of Higher Education in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Higher Education, December, 2017, pp. 1096, 1098.

8 For a useful overview of the institutional changes in higher education in Russia since the end of the USSR, see D. Platonova and D. Semyonov, “Russia: The Institutional Landscape of Russian Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al. (eds.), 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave, London, 2018.

9 “Likhie”—literally “dashing” or “daring.” But in this case, “wild” seems more appropriate.

10 On primitive accumulation and the resulting nature of the state in Russia, see D. Mandel, “Primitive Accumulation in Post-Soviet Russia,” M. Vidal, et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, Oxford University Press, N.Y., 2019, pp. 739-54.

11 J. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, W. Norton, N.Y., 2002, ch. 5.

12 Banque européenne de reconstruction et de développement, Rapport 1998, cited in E. Kniazev, “Les problèmes nouveaux posés par la gestion d’une université russe,” Politiques et gestion de l’enseignement supérieur, vol. 14, n° 1, 2002, p. 121; T. Klyachko and I. Rozhdestvenskaya, Obrazovanie, Institut perekhodnogo perioda, Moscow, 1999, p. 4.

13 A. Smolentseva, “Challenges to the Russian academic profession,” Higher Education, 45: 2003, p. 397.

14 For a discussion of this issue, see A. Kosmarksii, “Universitety stali gibridom patriarkhal’nhykh demokratii s prepriniamtel’skikh avtokratiyamy: sotsiolog Mikhail Sokolov o tom, kak ustroena vlast’ v rossiiskikh vuzakh,” Indikator, Sept, 25, 2018, https://indicator.ru/humanitarian-science/intervyu-mihaila-sokolova.htm. (accessed Aug 21, 2019)

15 A. Smolentseva, op. cit. 409

16 Platonova and Semyonov, p. 344. In 2,000, 4,741 million students were enrolled in higher education, as compared to 2,790 million in 1995. In the state system alone, one third were by then paying tuition. A. Smolentseva, “Universal Higher Education and Positional Advantage: Soviet Legacies and Neoliberal Transformations in Russia,” Higher Education, vol. 73, no. 2, 2016, p. 21; Obrazovaniye v Rossiiskoi Federatsii: 2010, Moscow: Vysshaya shkola ekonomiki, p. 102.

17 See the section 3.e below.

18 J. Zadja, “Educational Reform and Transformation in Russia,” European Education, vol. 35, no.1, 2003, p. 69.

19 An significant exception in this period was the revolt of the students in the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University in 2007, in which the main issue was the low quality of education offered. See, Initsiativa gruppa Sotsfaka MGU “OD Group”(2007-2008), http://chronicles.igmsu.org/odgroup/.

20 Concern over a possible “return of the Communists” was a major concern of government leaders in the 1990s.

M. Goldman, The Piratization of Russa, N.Y., Routledge, 2003, p. 75.

21 N. Forrat, “The Political Economy of Russian Higher Education: Why Does Putin Support Research Universities?” Post-Soviet Affairs, 2015, vol. 32 no. 4, 2016, p. 12; B. Saltykov, ”Enseignement supérieur en Russie”, Russie. Nei. Visions, no. 29, Apr. 2008, p.16; C. Sigman, “Retour de l’État et formes de domination en Russie”, Revue française de science politique, vol. 66, 2016, p. 923.

22 OECD Country note (http://www.oecd.org/education/Russian%20Federation-EAG2014-Country-Note.pdf (accessed June 10, 2018)

23 Forrat, op. cit., pp. 11-12

24 A. Smolentseva, “Where Soviet and Neoliberal Discourses Meet,” Higher Education, 2017, Dec. 2017, Vol. 74, no. 6, p. 1100.

25 L. Mazurova, “Potrebiteli’ nynche v defitsite?” Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 32, Aug. 8, 2007.

26 C. Sigman, “‘Retour de l’État’ et formes de domination en Russie,” Revue française de science politique, no. 6, 2016, p. 925.

27 I. Kurilla, “Education Reform in Russia,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 137, 2013, p. 2.

28 P. G. Altbach et al., ed., Paying the Professoriate a Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts, Hoboken, N.J., Taylor & Francis, 2012, p. 30. M.A. Borovskaya et al., “Higher Education Institute Salary System as a Factor of Modernization of Education and Science in Russia,” World Applied Sciences Journal 30 (11), 2014, pp. 1678, 1680.

29 S. Dobrynin, “Ortogonal’nhyi fitzekh,” Radio Svoboda, Dec. 6, 2015. https://inosmi.ru/science/20151206/234702542.html (consulted Apr. 5, 2020). For an international comparison of university teachers’ salaries that situated Russia at the end of the decade well down at the bottom of a list of 29 countries, see P. Altbach et al., Paying the Professorate, N.Y. Routledge, 2012.

30 “V Moskve obsudili finansovuyu politiku Ministerstva obrazovaniya i nauki,” https://минобрнауки.рф/пресс-центр/11685 (accessed Aug. 8, 2018).

31 Forrat, op. cit., p. 26.

32 On new public administration in Russia’s universities, see C. Sigman, “La montée de l‘État-entrepreneur de l’enseignement supérieur’ et l’hybridation public-privé: l’exemple de la Russie,” Économies et sociétés, Cahiers de l’ISMEA, XLIV, no.4, 2010, pp. 581-602.

33 “Ob utverzhdenii plan meropriyatii (“dorozhnoi karty”) ‘Izmeneniya v otraslyakh sotsial’noi sfery, napravelnnie na povyshenie effektivnosti obrazovaniya i nauki’,” http://government.ru/docs/3391/. A modified “road map” was published on Apr. 30, 2014. https://rosmintrud.ru/docs/government/137.

34 “Kak raspoznavat’ i borot’sya s massovymy uvolneniyamy PPS,” http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=490. (consulted Mar. 30, 2017)

35 V. Perfil’eva, “Vas proveli po konkursu na odin god ili zaklyuchayut srochnyi trudovoi dogovor?,” Universitetskaya solidarnost’, 22 Aug. 2015, http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=3749 (consulted June 5, 2017).

36 K. Stanislavskii, renowned Russian and Soviet theater director, when dissatisfied with an actor’s performance, would comment: “I don’t believe!” A.V. Mogilev, “Effektivnost’—eto vam ne igrushka—i nam tozhe,” Jan. 27, 2014, http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=1756 (consulted June 5, 2017)

37 “Livanov o zarplatakh prepodov,” http://phdru.com/paycheck/livanovsalary/; “Ministr obrazovaniya otsenil uroven’ prepodavatelei po ikh zarplatam,” https://www.ntv.ru/novosti/369807/ (accessed June 15, 2018)

38 “Dmitiri Livanov i vuzy: optimitizatsiya vmesto obrazovaniya,” Kapital strany, May 15, 2013. http://kapital-rus.ru/articles/article/dmitrij_livanov_i_vuzy_optimizaciya_vmesto_obrazovaniya/ (accessed June 15, 2018)

39 D. Platonova and D. Semyonov, “Russia: the Institutional Landscape of Russian Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al., eds., 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave, 2018 p. 355.

40 For a critical assessment of Rosobrnadozor’s academic experts, see K. Guba, et al., “Kak rabotaet Rosobrnadzor,” Troïtskii variant, July 3, 2018, p. 4. https://trv-science.ru/2018/07/03/kak-rabotaet-rosobrnadzor/ (accessed June 15, 2018) On Rosobrnadzor’s controversial and, at least partly politically motivated, cancelling of the accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (“Shaninka») and of the European University, see “Eto bor’ba ne za “Shaninku, a za peresmostr polnomochii Rosobrnadzora”, Vesti obsrazovaniya, June 29, 2018; https://vogazeta.ru/articles/2018/6/29/quality_of_education/3801-vshe_vstupilas_za_shaninku (accessed June 15, 2018) and “Pochemu attaka na Evropeiskii universitet v Peterburge—katastrofa dlya rossiiskoi nauki i obrazovaniya,” Meduza, Sept. 29, 2017. https://meduza.io/feature/2017/09/29/pochemu-ataka-na-evropeyskiy-universitet-v-peterburge-katastrofa-dlya-rossiyskoy-nauki-i-obrazovaniya (accessed June 15, 2018)

41 See, for example, M. Gladwell, “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us,” The New Yorker, Feb. 14 and 21, 2011.

42 A. Chernykh, “Pochemu vedushchie vuzy perevodyat na vneshnee upravlenie,” Kommersant, July 1, 2014, p. 5.

43 Zh. Toschchenko, “K chemu vedet neskonchaemaya optimizatisya obrazovaniya,” Nepavisimaya gazeta, Jan. 1, 2020. http://www.ng.ru/stsenarii/2020-01-27/9_7778_education.html? (consulted Jan 14, 2020)

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