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
