Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 1 | A Bright Future: Russian Higher Education, page 2 (low bandwidth)

At Petrozavodsk State University, northwest of St. Petersburg, in a region bordering Finland, students say that some professors are toeing a new party line: knee-jerk anti-communism. Petrozavodsk took in many scholars who were deemed subversive in Soviet times and exiled there from what was then Leningrad. The students expressed their criticism freely, paying no attention to a history professor sitting in the back of the lecture hall.

“My professor’s always hinting that everything was about the Gulag then, that it was all bad,” said Kostya Skvortsov, a 26-year-old senior studying Russian literature. “It’s the same as a Soviet professor who was supposedly teaching Tolstoy but talking about communism all the time.”

Another student, Liza Lopatkina, 19, who is studying English and Swedish, wonders when her teachers were showing their true face. “They taught in Soviet times. I don’t understand this transformation,” she says. “When were they sincere? In Soviet times or now?”

Galina Belaya, dean of the department of history and philology at the Russian State Humanities University (RGGU) in Moscow, worries that students do not know about the horrors of the past and suffer from what she calls “historical deafness.” She assigns reading that includes the shattering memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Osip Mandelstam, the poet who died in the Gulag.

But holdovers from the Soviet era still do have an effect on the lives of most students, subjecting them, for example, to grueling entrance exams, rote learning, lottery-like oral exams at the end of each semester, and only minimal student participation allowed in classes led by dictatorial professors.

Even at universities that tout freedom of choice, the number of mandatory courses is so great that students have little room to maneuver. Dormitories are cheap, but also dirty and dangerous. Corruption is rife. Education is becoming more regionally stratified. Fewer students are travelling to Moscow to study because of prohibitive travel costs and substandard living conditions. Russian universities now have closer ties with their Western counterparts than with their immediate neighbors. An example: in 1992 there were nearly 30,000 students from Ukraine studying at Russian schools, but by 1999, the number was 4,703.

Another major unresolved issue is how closely intertwined higher education is with military service. Young men at state institutions and some “commercial” or nonstate schools enjoy a deferment from the mandatory draft of 18-year-old males, many of whom are sent to fight in the ongoing war in Chechnya. Top universities lure young men with “military departments,” similar to the U.S. military’s ROTC program found on many American campuses. In exchange for one day per week of military training they graduate as officers and avoid basic training if they end up having to serve. Graduate students can defer even further. Those with the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D. are completely exempt.

Still, it is not hard to find ways in which Russian student life is similar to that of their American counterparts. On a Saturday night in Tomsk, young men and women converge at a nightclub called Millennium where admission costs nearly $4 or about half a student’s monthly stipend. The nightclub, with its Siberian Corona beer on tap, yards-long bar and mural of the New York City skyline, looks like it could be in Moscow, London or Manhattan, and the nightclubbers display the expected Generation X ennui, only in typical new Russian style, they are better dressed, sporting designer clothes and trendy sunglasses.

Education: Still Russian by Nature

Russian students may like to unwind in the same kinds of places their American cousins frequent, but back in school, their education is delivered by a decidedly Russian system—and that’s a source of national pride. Both Russians who support change and those disheartened by reform have not forgotten that their institutions of higher education gave birth to pioneers of the atomic and space ages. Like Russian music, literature and dance, education is a reminder of both past and potential glory.

Russian children, who usually start school at age 7 and spend 11 years in the school system, are taught the basics so well early on (elementary school students study algebra, high schoolers take calculus), that some bright college students in the sciences tell of attending lectures only a couple of times each semester and doing just fine on exams. Proof that this may be more than an idle boast comes from a recent international computer programming competition where a student from St. Petersburg University took first place, beating out teams from Harvard, Stanford and the California Institute of Technology.

“In Russia, education was always very important,” says Belaya of RGGU. “We are an illiterate country of peasants who still have a complex about being poorly educated. This is one of Russia’s big problems.”

Another looming problem—at least from the Russian point of view—is the prospect of American-style education gradually taking over. It’s a scenario with possibilities, because American schools are beginning to open branches in Russia. Bard College of Annandale-on-Hudson, together with St. Petersburg University, recently created the first college in Russia to offer an American liberal arts program. Graduates earn a B.A. awarded jointly by Bard College and St. Petersburg University. Though Belaya is a great champion of educational reform—RGGU is one of the most liberal schools in Moscow, popular with the children of Moscow’s intelligentsia—even she is wary of outside pressure. “I’m concerned that we often turn to educational models that are alien to us,” she says, adding that her department chose to follow a pre-revolutionary model of combined comparative literature and area studies.

As befits a psychologist and professional educator, Alexander Asmolov—a reformer who spent the years 1988-98 as a Deputy Minister of Education—believes the roots of the problems with Russia’s educational system and their solutions are in childhood. Asmolov—who was constantly attacked by Communist critics during his tenure in educational administration—sees conservative bureaucrats and university rectors as enemies of change. He compares them to the “red directors”—the heads of factories who feared reform and wouldn’t let decrepit post-Soviet industry out of their iron grip. Only in this case, he intimates, they are, as Stalin called them, like “engineers of human souls” who do not want to let young minds out of their grasp.

Asmolov states that, “We have to create a school of uncertainty that will teach a person to make decisions in unforeseen, nonstandard, atypical, indefinite situations. That would be different than in the Soviet Union,” he continues, “where at eight-thirty in the morning all children sat down to the same textbook, at the same hour, and learned the same exact thing, and a misstep was treated like an escape attempt, like in a concentration camp. In essence, in the Soviet education system the shaping of consciousness was much more powerful than that of the Party or of the KGB. If Freud saw this he would be upset because it doesn’t confirm his theory. Children didn’t love their father—they didn’t have an Oedipus or Elektra complex—they loved Lenin, the Great Father. We had a powerful system of totalitarian consciousness.”

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