A Bright Future: Russian Higher Education by Sophia Kishkovsky New York Times Moscow Bureau Reacting to their new freedoms, Russian students, professors and universities are reinventing themselves, but in a distinctly Russian style.

For nearly thirty years, Midkhat Faroukshin taught “scientific communism” at Kazan State University (KGU). He was tapped for the job in 1963 as a young law graduate and loyal Communist Party member. In 1989, he was one of the first to introduce the study of political science in Russia. Today, the owlish Faroukshin, still lawyerly in a suit and tie, teaches comparative politics to political science majors planning careers in business, civil service and public relations. Communism is just one of the systems they study. Students decide for themselves which one they like best.

KGU, in American terms the Russian equivalent of an Ivy League school, has its share of famous alumni. Leo Tolstoy enrolled in 1844. Vladimir Lenin attended for one semester; he was expelled in December 1887 for his involvement in revolutionary activities. When Tolstoy and Lenin attended KGU, two courses not yet on the curriculum were “Scientific Communism” and “The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” later to become mandatory for every single student in the USSR.

If scientific communism was meant to indoctrinate students into quoting Marx and Lenin as the answer to any dispute, new subjects like political science aim, at least in part, to instill an understanding of the open discourse encouraged in a democratic society. Faroukshin frets about a recent government decree making political science an elective.

“Who will tell students about today’s life?” he asks. “I don’t understand how chemists or biologists will understand what is happening in Russian society.”

Faroukshin teaches in Tatarstan, a perfect case study for a fledgling political scientist. The largely Muslim republic on the Volga River has avoided Islamic fundamentalism and negotiated much of the autonomy that regions like Chechnya are still demanding. Tatarstan is also one of the most authoritarian republics of the new Russian Feder-ation, with a president who often acts like a feudal lord.

But these days, says Faroukshin, no one can tell him—or instructors at any other Russian university—what to teach. In Faroukshin’s class, for example, Lenin’s State and Revolution has made way for Arend Lijphart’s* Democracies. Students have to learn English (soon a second language will also be required), navigate the Internet, and would read publications like the American Journal of Political Science, Faroukshin says, if the university library could afford a subscription. KGU is federally financed, so local authorities cannot tighten the screws, but money is always short. Faroukshin recently paid his own way to a national congress of political scientists in Moscow. The top-heavy federal education ministry, for all of its bureaucratic heavy-handedness, does not micromanage individual course content or faculty development.

“We are free in our teaching,” Faroukshin explains. “No one keeps track like in Soviet times of what we are teaching, how we are lecturing. This does not exist now. Now there is freedom. Even in a republic where an authoritarian situation flourishes, where in essence a regime of dictatorial power has been established, we speak openly about those things that are happening in the republic as well.”

Three time zones away, at Tomsk State University (TGU) in a region known as the Siberian taiga, political science majors are clamoring for practical applications for their newfound political knowledge. All of the university’s political science majors have worked in hotly contested political races full of mudslinging. The head of the department, Vladimir Scherbinin, was chief strategist for the parliamentary campaign of Yegor Ligachev, the former number two bureaucrat in the Soviet Politburo. Scherbinin, never a Comm-unist, prides himself on having taken on a challenge and run the region’s only clean campaign as an example to his students. Ligachev won.

Condemned by Soviet officials as a bourgeois pseudo-science, political science is now one of the most popular new subjects at universities across Russia. Young Russians are also flocking to classes offering other subjects that used to be banned or nonexistent, from gender studies to Jewish studies. Business schools have also become popular.

Other avenues of educational exploration are also opening up to Russian students and teachers. Grants from foundations like Carnegie Corporation, Ford, MacArthur and the Open Society Institute sponsor Internet communication, fund research projects and make it possible for students and teachers to travel abroad and return to Russia to apply their knowledge. A $50 million World Bank loan is earmarked for improving social science education at several universities, including TGU, which will receive $1.5 million.

Russian Universities: Reaching Out to the World

Universities themselves are beginning to benefit from the confluence of a more open society and the availability of new communications tools. In Russia, as in many other places, educational institutions have begun to embrace whatever technology they can gain access to. From Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, a computer network links universities to each other and to the rest of the world. With support from the Open Society Institute, 33 Internet centers have been established at various higher education institutions. One Moscow-based institute, which is pioneering distance learning, has increased its student body from 5,000 to 32,000 and sends out over three tons of course materials monthly.

“Russia has been integrated into the world,” says Alexander Kondakov, a deputy education minister in charge of international programs. And there’s probably no turning back: It’s hard to imagine someone like Dina Chum-akova, for example, a 19-year-old majoring in international economic relations at the Financial Academy in Moscow, ever agreeing to Russia closing its doors again. While in high school she was an exchange student in Minnesota. Last summer she worked in the Moscow office of the international banking firm, BNP-Dresdner. In April she joined a group of other Russian students for a week-long conference of the Association of Young Leaders at Stanford University. According to officials in the Russian Ministry of Education, the number of students studying in the United States continues to grow.

Returning students sometimes find it hard to adjust. Along with other social institutions such as the church and the press, the education system offers examples both of great progress and often frustrating stagnation, where the new freedoms and Internet culture run up against the Soviet status quo and ghosts of past glory. Unlike Faroukshin and Scherbinin, some newly-christened political science professors go on teaching the same old Marxism-Leninism. Andrei Muchnik, a senior political science major now attending Voronezh State University, studied at Wesleyan University for a year. “I was very disenchanted when I returned,” he says. “Our professor is about 70 years old. I know more from reading several articles than he teaches us in class. His geopolitics are from the point of view of the Communists. It’s all about the Russia-India axis.”

Then again, many professors were teaching pretty much what they wanted in the 1980s, taking advantage of the already shaky Soviet ideology. Mikhail Shoubsky, a professor of philosophy in Krasnoyarsk, says he taught his students about his favorite Russian religious philosophers, such as Nikolai Berdyayev and Semyon Frank, under the guise of a course about Marxism-Leninism. No one reported him.

Next page: Students say that some professors are toeing a new party line: knee-jerk anti-communism.

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