Russian university leaders are imbuing the country’s education system with patriotism to favor Putin, quashing Western influences and dissent.
Yelizaveta Antonova leaves the journalism college at St. Petersburg State University. She believes a protest of an attack on a reporter cost her a spot in graduate school. Two weeks before the start of his 25th year as Russia’s supreme political leader, Vladimir Putin made a sweeping proclamation: “Wars are won by teachers.”
“Russia, Remastered” examines how Vladimir Putin, stoking conflict with the West and risking a new world war, is harnessing his invasion of Ukraine to transform Russia and fulfill his revanchist vision of a restored superpower.to belittle Ukraine, glorify Russia and whitewash the totalitarian Soviet past.
As a result, a system of higher learning that once was a beacon for students across the developing world is now shutting itself off from peer academies in the West, severing one of the few ties that had survived years of political turbulence. Freedom of thought is being trampled, if not eradicated. Eminent scholars have fled for positions abroad, while others said in interviews that they are planning to do so.
At times, people in Russia are afraid to speak with journalists or to say things that they worry could provoke the authorities. Many people in Russia avoid speaking in public about politics or the war in Ukraine, fearing they could be reported to the authoritiesFor these reasons, The Post agreed to withhold the identities of some people interviewed who expressed concerns about their safety.
Natalia Abbakumova has been a researcher and translator in The Post’s Moscow bureau since 2001, collaborating during that time with 10 bureau chiefs. Previously, she worked briefly for The Economist. She holds a degree in foreign languages from Moscow Linguistic University.Last month, students pushed an online petition to protest the naming of the school after Ilyin, a philosopher who defended Hitler and Mussolini in World War II and advocated for the return of czarist autocracy in Russia.
Like other aspects of Putin’s remastering of Russia — such as patriotic mandates in the arts and the redrawing of the role of women to focus on childbearing — the shift in education started well before the invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, Russia ended a more than 20-year-old exchange program between Smolny College and Bard College in New York state by designating the private American liberal arts school an “undesirable” organization.
The month before, according to court records and interviews, Skopin was arrested at an antiwar rally. He ended up sharing a jail cell with another professor, Artem Kalmykov, a young mathematician who had recently finished his PhD at the University of Zurich. Video of the gathering in the courtyard shows students erupting in sustained applause, and one student coming forward to hug Skopin.
Ulanovskaya said that on the political science track, only two professors have stayed, and many classes were eliminated, including a human rights course. There are now just two courses offered in English, down from 21. A few weeks after The Post interviewed Ulanovskaya last fall, she was expelled, formally for failing an exam, but she and Skopin said they believe it was retaliation for her activism.
They held up the poster for about half an hour, until another student threatened them by saying riot police were on the way to arrest them. Antonova believes the protest cost her a spot in graduate school, where she hoped to continue her research comparing Russia’s media landscape before and after the invasion.
Another history student, Fedor Solomonov, took the opposite view and praised the special military operation on social media. When Solomonov was called up as part of the mobilization, he declined to take a student deferral and went to fight. He died on the front on April 1, 2023. “I said he was for the war and I was against it — we could argue about that,” Martin said. “I didn’t find anything funny or interesting in this — I’m truly sorry for what happened to him, but at the same time, I don’t think that he did something good or great by going to war.”
“These are obviously propaganda courses that are aimed at turning historians into court apologists,” Martin said. Now, at least 10 percent of all fully funded university spots must be allocated to students eligible for the military preference. Those whose fathers were killed or wounded do not need to pass entry exams.
Deans of several leading Russian universities have made highly publicized trips to occupied Ukraine to urge students there to enroll into Russian schools, part of a multipronged effort to bring residents into Moscow’s orbit.
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