A Timeline of the Dissolution
Dmitry Dubrovsky
Photo: The amended university governance structure also simplified pay reform.. Photo by Roman Manshin on Unsplash
The incredible upswing in democratic procedures in Russian science and higher education seen in the 1990s gave rise to hope that university self-governance would be fortified and expanded. Instead, by the early 2000s, a significant rollback of the democratic practices of the 1990s had begun. Faculty activism gave way to a high degree of apathy and “apoliticality.” Even before the war, “self-governance” had become a mere veneer for decisions made by rectors and university administrations.
How and why did democratic self-governance disappear from Russian higher education?
The Nineties
The 1990s, especially the early years of the decade, were a time of high political activity for all Russian citizens, including scientists and teachers. The period featured functional academic councils; large numbers of elections, from deans to rectors; genuine procedural collegial comradery; and multi-hour meeting sessions of faculties and entire universities, in which teachers and researchers participated actively.
This high level of engagement was clear even from the university constitutions of the late perestroika and early post-Soviet periods. An analysis of these documents reveals the existence of vibrant, active university self-governance.
This period of vibrancy notwithstanding, researchers have long noted that Russian academia is generally characterized by a weak culture of participation in governance compared to its European counterparts. This is attributed both to the Soviet legacy and to the increased role of the rector’s office.
In the 1990s, university self-governance was largely concentrated in academic councils, which enjoyed considerable authority and legitimacy due to the active participation of professors in their work and the significant weight of their voice in decision-making.
This is probably why no serious independent trade unions emerged in the higher education system (unlike in schools, for example) during this time. Universities largely retained the old, Soviet-era trade unions, which continued the tradition of a “constructive”—in other words, subservient—relationship with management.
At the same time, sociological studies of teachers themselves show that, in the context of the severe economic crisis of the 1990s and the serious underfunding of science and higher education, the main priorities of scientists in the 1990s were maintaining employment and increasing income, not participating in collective management.
The Aughts
According to a 2008 study based on surveys conducted at Russian universities, decision-making was by that time already understood as hierarchical. Faculty members’ opinions were largely ignored, and their interest in participating in representative bodies was low.
The reason for this is, as Russian teachers realized, that these bodies do not make decisions, but merely formalize them, which makes participation in such bodies pointless.
This hierarchy, which brought with it the declining role of academic councils, began to emerge by the early 2000s. This trend was reinforced by the implementation of higher education reform. The so-called “authoritarian modernization” relied primarily on the power of the administrative apparatus and did not seek support from academics and teachers, suspecting them—perhaps not without reason—of having a negative relationship to the goals and objectives of the reforms.
Russia’s accession to the Bologna Process in 2003 appears only to have reinforced this skepticism, as well as the significant gap between the stated goals of educational reforms and the level of support for them among Russian higher education faculty.
Reforms of higher education and science were carried out through the means of
“authoritarian modernization,” by establishing a “vertical of power” centered on effective managers who regularly used Western management practices in the design and implementation of a new management structure for Russian higher education.
First and foremost, a vertical power structure was established in universities. To accomplish this, the previously numerous elections of rectors and deans were largely replaced with appointments or non-competitive elections. This was achieved as a result of the development of the 5-100-2020 program. Although there were no official demands to amend university constitutions to eliminate rectoral elections, it was informally made clear to university leadership that their successful participation in the program depended, among other things, on the state’s ability to directly oversee the appointment of rectors.
As a result, at a significant number of universities, elections—the only democratic procedure to have survived until the late 2000s—were replaced by appointments. Where elections remained, they began to resemble all elections of the Putin era: they were predictable and non-competitive.
This significantly strengthened the position of rectors and the university administration in university governance while diminishing the role and activity of academic councils. The changes to the university constitutions made the academic councils very Soviet-style, both in composition and function: their role was to formally approve the decisions of the administration.
The 2010s
The amended university governance structure also simplified pay reform. It was accompanied by increased oversight of university activity and administrative pressure on those who found the pay system changes unfair. The very idea of effective contracts was part of the general practice of NPM (New Public Management). In its Russian implementation, performance contracts practically transferred the logic of corporate contracts to academia. As a result, many faculty members received performance contracts, in which KPIs combined a high teaching load and a significant level of academic publications. This gave management weighty leverage, reducing the already low level of resistance and hindering the emergence of independent solidarity networks.
Since 2012, the system of so-called performance contracts has led to a high level of precarity among faculty. In some universities (particularly within the framework of the 5-100-2020 project), the use of special bonuses for international publications has significantly increased the pay gap between professors and regular faculty. This has led not only to disappointment with the results of democratic reforms, but also to the formation of polarized groups within universities—a small group of reform beneficiaries, who receive the bulk of bonuses and privileges, on the one hand, and a significant group of researchers and faculty members, primarily those engaged in core teaching, excluded from these bonuses, on the other hand.
At the same time, at a number of universities, the introduction of special fees for international publications served as an additional lever. As Gasan Guseinov notes, such fees created a significant salary gap between those who participated in programs to enhance the international visibility of Russian universities and those who did not. A former tenured professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU-HSE) called this system “grev”*—that is, a payment for belonging to the highest caste of thieves.
* Criminal slang for special accommodations provided while in prison.
Following Putin’s 2012 “May Decrees,” the average salary of researchers and university professors formally increased by 264%. But the reality was less rosy.
As a study by the NRU-HSE (2023) showed, salaries have increased sharply since 2018. However, this increase may be explained not by actual wage growth, but by the transfer of low-paid employees to the payroll, the inclusion of grant payments in salaries, and a doubling of the formal workload per teacher (which allows for an official doubling of the salary per position).
In surveys of teachers themselves, only 16% report a significant increase in their salaries over the past three years. The overwhelming majority believe that salaries have either remained unchanged or changed only slightly. This likely means that the “May Decrees” are being implemented not so much by actual pay increases as by manipulation of average salary calculations.
As a result, by the 2010s, collective mechanisms for representing and protecting the rights of scientists, primarily academic councils, were perceived as ineffective—more formal than substantive.
At this time, there began to emerge a system of interaction built not on the formal logic of university self-governance, but on an informal logic. The latter is constructed around the rector and his or her immediate team, supported by a network of loyal deans and department heads, and by informal agreements and exchanges (for example, “We’ll support your project, you’ll vote for our decisions in the Academic Council”).
As a result, what was once a forum for decision-making has become a place for the formal legitimization of decisions already made. Using the evolution of faculty and university self-governance as a basis, Mikhail Sokolov demonstrates that while formal procedures are maintained, they are in reality subordinated to the administrative hierarchy.
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Hence, as Sokolov notes, the modern Russian university appears to be a “democratic organization” (with elections intact, as well as academic councils of faculties and the university, and the existence of procedures and regulations), but in reality it is a “patriarchal” or “entrepreneurial” autocracy, where resources and initiative are concentrated at the top. From below, meanwhile, loyalty and participation in formal rituals are expected, replacing democratic self-government both in academic councils, which are completely subordinate to the rector’s office, and in pocket trade unions.
This dual structure explains the low motivation of teachers to participate in self-government bodies. They perceive a disconnect between the formal work and the actual impact.
The strengthening of managerial rule and the establishment of “entrepreneurial” (i.e., neo-managerialist) autocracies not only predetermined the degradation of academic councils and the continuation of the essentially Soviet practice of pocket trade unions. This system also undermined the very motivation for university faculty and staff to participate in self-governing bodies, which lost their independence and became part of the system of formal approval of autocratic decisions made by the rectors.
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