The attack on academic freedom and university self-government began long before the open invasion of Ukraine. Apparently, the turning point here can be considered as 2012, when after a short-term and superficial rise in public protest activity, the authorities began to tighten the screws.

The Law “On Education in the Russian Federation” adopted that year quietly limited the rights of universities to self-government, transferring the approval of charters to the founders—that is, for the vast majority of the Russian universities—to the State. After this, the mass abolition of the election of vice-chancellors began, although even earlier the vice-chancellors of the two leading universities in the country, Moscow and St. Petersburg universities, began to be appointed by presidential decree.

The destruction of self-government in universities, starting with the vice-chancellors, quickly spread downwards, right down to the level of department heads and chairs of disciplines. Various methods were used. For example, the dissolution of faculties (whose deans, according to law, must be elected) and the creation of research institutes, where the law says nothing about appointing their heads. The same strategy is pursued when departments are replaced with educational programs. Another method is the appointment of “acting” officeholders without holding elections for a real leadership body. Here, two birds were killed with one stone: simultaneous deprivation of the right of faculties departments to elect their leaders along with increased subservience on the part of administrators (when you can be dismissed at any time without any procedural difficulty, you are unlikely to manifest “excessive” independence and criticism of the authorities).

The proportion of administrators in academic councils has increased: in many cases they are not even elected but occupy places on the council by virtue of their position. Meanwhile, while the academic council is formally the highest collegial governing body of the university, in reality it simply turns into a puppet of the administration, obediently rubber-stamping everything that is placed before it.

Fixed-term contracts for professors have an extremely unfavourable effect on the level of academic freedom. There is no equivalent of American tenure in Russia, and permanent employment contracts are a rare exception. It is very easy to keep a professor “on a short leash” when he or she must be elected to a position (by those same obedient academic councils) for a year, three, or even five. If behaviour is not loyal enough (whether it be activism in an independent trade union, an open statement of opposition to government—not only the all-Russian but also the regional—or a public presentation of a scientific position in the social sciences that contradicts official assessments) it is easy to fire a teacher by simply not announcing a competition for the next term or by organising a vote against re-election.

Russian legislation also contains a bludgeon like the possibility of dismissing teaching staff “for committing an immoral offense” in the absence of any legal definition of what is meant by this term. There have cases when, in accordance with this norm, professors were fired for anti-war statements, participation in street protests, and appearances in court with expert opinions in favour of defendants in political trials that contradicted the expert opinions officially issued by the relevant university.

Such are the systemic factors in the higher education system that negatively affect academic freedom in Russia.

No less, and in the current situation even more, significant are the factors associated with repressive legislation, which has been rapidly increasing since 2012, and especially since February 2022, and censorship on ideological grounds that is becoming more stringent, contrary to the Constitution.

Even before the start of the full-scale war, laws were passed introducing administrative and criminal liability for “insulting the feelings of believers”, “justifying Nazism”, “displaying Nazi symbols” (which now includes the state emblem of Ukraine), “equating the actions of the USSR in World War II with the actions of Nazi Germany”, “justifying terrorism”, and so on. All these laws are distinguished by gross indifference to legal rigour as well as vagueness and ambiguity about the areas of application of the “offenses” and “crimes”, which creates wide scope for arbitrary law enforcement in the present context of dependence of the courts on the executive branch and the law enforcement agencies.

Special mention should be made of the development of legislation on “foreign agents”, which has evolved into broadly interpreted legislation about “persons under foreign influence”. Initially, the 2012 law was used mainly for applying moral and political pressure on undesirable NGOs, media, and individual citizens. At the same time, the concept of “political activity” was interpreted extremely broadly, but to obtain the status of “foreign agent” it was at least necessary to receive foreign funding (though not always in real terms). The longer it was applied, the greater were the penalties imposed on organizations and individuals with this status and the more their rights were limited. Finally, in the summer of 2022, the law “On The Control Of Persons Under Foreign Influence” was adopted, according to which, firstly, the concept of “foreign influence” was completely blurred and, secondly, an open employment ban was introduced on teachers and, in general, employees of educational organisations who had the misfortune of earning this “honorary title” (along with other restrictions and forms of harassment).

The war also brought in several laws directly related to military action. These are laws on “discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation” and on so-called “fakes”, again with a wide possibility of completely arbitrary and unrestricted interpretation. According to an (obviously incomplete) report of the human rights organization OVD-Info, 23 criminal and 106 administrative cases are known against teachers employed in various levels of education (from pre-school institutions to universities).

Even if teachers can still avoid teaching this subject (although sometimes not without risk of spoiling relations with the authorities and not getting the necessary amount of academic work), then the unfortunate students cannot avoid taking the corresponding loyalty exam. It is debatable whether “Foundations of Russian Statehood” will be effective as a means of political and ideological indoctrination (after all, we had the relevant experience of the teaching of emasculated “Marxist-Leninist” subjects in the late Soviet period), but the notorious doublethink, which we began to get rid of during perestroika and in the post-Soviet years, will certainly be fostered again.

There is direct interference in scientific activities by both the administration and the “patriotic public”. Naturally, the most sensitive topics are those related to World War II, Stalin’s repressions, and the post-Soviet period. But the further back we go, the more news there is about interventions in such seemingly distant topics as Ancient Rus, Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina, or the events of the Time of Troubles of the early 17th century. Unlike the late Soviet era, when the official ideology at least formally did not reject progressivism, the scientific picture of the world, or internationalism, we are now increasingly immersed in an atmosphere of obscurantism, clerical dominance, xenophobia, rabid and aggressive nationalism and imperialism. The pressure on natural science and technical education (called STEM in English) is somewhat less intense--after all, the authorities are smart enough to understand that they directly influence economic development and—what particularly worries the authorities—military potential. However, the destruction of public and humanist education, although not so directly and not so rapidly, will also have the most destructive effect on the future of the country.