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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 or criticism. Plagiarism became widespread, with various high government officials and parliamentary deputies in search of academic degrees showing the way.17

The attitudes of young people toward higher education also changed. In Soviet times, students often explained their pursuit of higher education in idealistic terms—a desire for self-realization and to contribute to social progress. In the 1990s, however, making money was at the fore, as a university diploma came to be viewed primarily as a means to finding a better-paying job.18 Concern for the quality of that education was, at best, a secondary consideration, an attitude often shared by employers.19 An additional motivation for male students was the desire to avoid, or at least postpone, military service.

Because lower-school teachers suffered similar economic hardship and were also forced to take on additional work, the level of preparation of students for university studies declined sharply. An economics teacher at Moscow State University recalled about this period: “They had apparently not learned about society in high school. It shocked me. I began by talking about simple things, and these young people quickly pulled out their notebooks to take notes. So there was some desire to learn. But they lacked a foundation. I had the impression that they had been completely deprived of knowledge. This was the middle 1990s.”

When the Soviet Union came to an end in a “revolution from above,” university teachers, as practically all the rest of Russian society, lacked traditions and experience of independent organization to defend their interests. The newly acquired freedom and opportunities to participate in university governance fell into their hands without struggle. And at once teachers were thrust into a struggle for physical survival, a condition completely unfamiliar to Soviet citizens. Indeed, an unstated goal of “shock therapy” was in that way to prevent significant popular resistance.20 And it succeeded well in the case of university teachers. As for the Trade Union of Employees of Education and Science, a corporatist organization inherited from the Soviet Union, it continued to rubber stamp the decisions of government and university authorities.

c. 2000-2012: Return of the State

The first decade of the new millennium began with the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia. He was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, a man who, among other things, could be relied upon to protect Yeltsin and his “family” from prosecution.

That decade saw the state’s return to an active role in educational policy, made possible by the economy’s emergence from its lengthy depression. There followed a decade of rapid economic growth, thanks in large part to a steep and prolonged rise in the price of oil, which eventually tripled. The recovery also benefitted from the dramatic fall of the ruble in 1998 (a devaluation that the IMF had consistently opposed) that cut imports in half, strongly boosting domestic production.

The state’s budget for education increased substantially from the desperately low levels of the 1990s, doubling by 2004 and growing even faster in subsequent years. As a percent of GDP in constant rubles, federal spending on higher education rose from 0.3% to 0.7% in 2000-2004 and another 140% in 2004-09%.21 Total expenditure from both public and private sources at all levels of education increased from 2.9% of GDP to 4.6% between 2000 and 2011. But even so, state spending on education was the fourth lowest among OECD members, well below the average of 6.1%.22

During his first electoral campaign, Putin did not present anything resembling an economic programme. But the appointment of German Gref, author of the “Gref Plan,” as Minister of Economic Development and Trade foretold a strongly neoliberal social policy. In higher education, the government contemplated replacing direct state funding based on itemized budgets with vouchers that would be distributed to students on the basis of their scores in unified high-school finishing exams. As consumers of educational services, students would use their vouchers to apply to universities, forcing the latter to compete for these clients. But experiments with this programme drew criticism from virtually all quarters, not least rectors, and were abandoned in 2005, although unified state high-school finishing exams were generalized in 2009.23 That innovation reduced the widespread corruption that had surrounded university admissions and broadened choice for high-school graduates. But the negative impact of the reform on the quality of high-school education, whose final two years were geared to the state exams, continues to be decried by educators, as is the shift in pedagogical emphasis from instilling knowledge to prioritizing the acquisition of “competences.”

Although the voucher system was abandoned, the neoliberal orientation in higher-education policy became increasingly pronounced in Putin’s second four-year term. University funding was largely based on the number of state-supported students enrolled. The Federal Programme for the Development of Education of 2005 clearly designated the labour market as the leading driver of educational policy, an orientation that only grew stronger over time. The promotion of personal and social development barely received mention. The sought-after “national idea” for post-Soviet Russia had at last apparently been found: international competitiveness. That document also introduced the term “optimization,” a goal whose application in the social sphere would have a major negative impact on the condition of university teachers in the following decade. 24

The Minister of Education from 2004 to 2012 was Andrei Fursenko, a personal acquaintance of Putin from his native St. Petersburg. Fursenko was a physicist who had turned to business after the Soviet Union and then entered government service. At a pro-government youth forum in 2007, he criticized the inertness of the educational system inherited from the Soviet past, which he was intent on transforming. That system, he opined, had stubbornly tried to make young people into creators; whereas the main goal of education should be to cultivate consumers who know how to make use of technologies and innovations developed by others.25

One of the reforms of this period was the designation of élite national research universities that received additional funding, part of the effort to promote basic research in universities and “international competitiveness.” Another programme introduced in the late 2000s and also aimed at diversification through the creation of an élite university sector was the formation of “federal universities” in Russia’s various regions. This involved the forced merger of hitherto separate, often very different, institutions, a process experienced very painfully by many teachers, who, in typical fashion, were not consulted. Along with the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities, that received a unique status in 2009, the élite tier eventually comprised some 60 institutions, about 12% of the public universities.26

The advancement of Russian universities in the “international educational marketplace” became an important goal of government policy. To that end, the government signed onto the Bologna process in 2003, leading to the replacement of the traditional five-year first degree with a four-year BA, that could be followed by a two-year MA course. The higher candidate’s degree (kandidatskaya—roughly a PhD) was, however, retained, along with the highest academic degree of Doctor. The avowed aim of this reform was to facilitate the international mobility of students and faculty. But it continues to arouse much criticism among university teachers, who complain that the resulting bachelor’s programme is merely a truncated version of the former five-year course of study that does not provide an adequate general higher education. Among other things, the bachelor’s programme is supposed to include a considerable amount of individualized student work, but the classroom teaching load of university teacher leaves them little time for individual student supervision.27

With increased state funding for higher education, teachers’ salaries improved in the second half of the decade but remained well below the average wage in many of Russia’s regions. An international comparison found that average salaries of Russian university teachers in 2008/09 were equal to only 60% of per capita GDP, far below the level of their counterparts in the vast majority of developed, and even poorer, countries.28 “Salaries really did rise between 2001 and 2011, roughly speaking from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles,” observed mathematics teachers R. Karasev of MFTI. But that still remained far from the amount needed to feed a family.”29

To make matters worse, in 2008 the old centrally-fixed wage scale for public-sector employees was replaced with a New System for the Remuneration of Work. This gave heads of hospitals, schools, and universities broader latitude in spending their allotted budgets. Money that they economized on designated functions could be used as incentives to stimulate the work of employees. How that was done was supposed to be negotiated with the employees. But in the absence independent trade unions, the new law gave rectors a virtually free hand. As a result, an inordinate part of the new money went to the remuneration of administrators.

A teacher of higher mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI) recalled of this period: “The price of oil began to rise, and the situation became somewhat more comfortable for teachers. But we began to notice a growing disbalance. Ordinary colleagues really did begin to receive a little more, although nothing commensurate with the income Russia was taking in from oil. At the same time, the administration was beginning to make very big money. In a remarkable article, professor Pokrovskii wrote that although everyone says our work is selfless, that we are doing very important work, we are paid next to nothing, while university administrations are growing fat. Several such articles appeared at the time, as people were becoming aware of the disproportion, which by 2010-12 had already assumed an ugly form.” It was only in 2017 that the Minister of Education and Science finally recognized this as a problem, though nothing much was done.30

The second half of the 2000s thus witnessed a deepening of the opposition between university teaching staff and administrations. Those elements of faculty participation in university governance that had appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union began to be eliminated. A 2006 amendment to the Law on Education introduced a new procedure for choosing rectors, who had until then been elected by university academic councils (uchenye soviety), themselves elected by the teaching staff. According to the new amendment, a government committee was to approve candidates before the election, allowing it to eliminate undesirables. In the élite national-research and federal universities, rectors were now appointed directly by the government (by the President himself, in the case of the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities). As a result, the choice of rector fell increasingly to “strong managers”, people with academic degrees but also with experience in business or government administration. Rectors of the élite universities are generally very wealthy individuals.

Finally, the charters of the élite tier of universities provided for the creation of new academic units to replace the traditional departments and faculties. While department directors and faculty deans are by law elected by faculty councils, the heads of these renamed units are appointed from above. Under pressure from the ministry, this change has proceeded across the university system.31

As a result, rectors and other top university administrators became solidly integrated into the state administration’s “vertical of power”. This has been a central element in the state’s reassertion of control over higher education. In the “vertical of power”, loyalty of state functionaries is assured through a combination of reward, the source of which, at least in part, is some form of corruption, and the threat of punishment. The high salaries of rectors and other top administrators, as well as the proliferation of administrative posts in universities, are integral parts of the neoliberal “new public administration” that has been imposed upon universities in many countries over the last decades.32 The paradox, of course, is that the “free markets” and “competition” that are extolled by the policy’s promoters require muscular state intervention to create and maintain them.

The Putin regime inherited a system of higher education that was chaotic and in clear need of reform. But the new government, with the added resources at its disposal, was determined to impose its own vision of the needed changes, without consulting the parties directly concerned, university teachers, in the first instance. The reforms were undertaken without even a semblance of public discussion, let alone democratic participation, an approach that would be maintained in subsequent years.

d. 2012-18: The May Decrees and the “Road Map”

Putin’s election campaign in the spring of 2012 for a third presidential term (after a four-year pause as Prime Minister) followed upon unprecedentedly large popular protests, which were provoked, among other things, by the falsification of the previous fall’s parliamentary election results. People were also angered and insulted by the blatant cynicism of Putin’s “castling move,” whereby, in order to avoid changing the constitution, he exchanged places with President Dm. Medvedev, who had been his prime minister until four years before. This, Putin let it be known, had been planned from the very start.

During the election campaign Putin made the promise, repeated after his election, to raise the salaries of university teachers to double the average wage of their respective regions. Then on December 30, the government published its “road map” for “Changes in the Social Sphere Aimed at Increasing the Efficiency of Education and Science.”33 That document announced, among other things, that 44% of full-time teaching positions in higher education would be eliminated over the next five years. In absolute terms that meant the loss of 140,000 of the existing 318,000 positions. The document justified this by a projected decline of the university-age population, as well as by its goal of raising the student/teacher ratio from the current 9.4 to the OECD average of 12.

The projected job cuts were widely—and, as it turned out, correctly—interpreted by teachers to mean that the promised salary increase, even if realized, would not be achieved through significant new funding but by intensifying the workloads of those who remained. Moreover, the independent university teachers’ union Univesitetskaya solidarnost’ (henceforth Unisol) pointed out that the decline in university-age population, a consequence of the dramatic fall in births during the depression of the 1990s, would end as early as 2018.34 As for the teacher/student ratio, it was observed that Russia’s university teachers, unlike those of most OECD countries, do not enjoy the support of teaching assistants. On the other hand, doctoral students (aspiranty) who teach are counted as teachers. As a consequence, the average OECD student/teacher ratio is a meaningless benchmark for Russia.35

Putin’s third presidential mandate and the appointment of Dm. Livanov as Minister of Education and Science brought an intensification of the policy tendencies of the preceding administration. Writing in 2014, Professor A.V. Mogilev of Voronezh State Pedagogical University compared Livanov’s policies with those of his predecessor Fursenko: “With the change of Ministers of Education, the pressure on universities not only intensified, but took on a completely different character. If under Fursenko we witnessed the incomprehensible, almost senseless, bureaucratic overturning and demolition of established university practices and traditions in teaching and administration—the introduction of the bachelor’s programme, the new educational standards, the purported competency-oriented approach, the never-ending rewriting of course plans and work programmes; then now, under Dm. Livanov, we suddenly see come to the fore a certain efficiency… Many lances have been broken over that university efficiency… But the parameters set arbitrarily by the ministry for last and this year’s monitoring are such that Stanislavskii would say: “I don’t believe.” 36

In November 2012, early in his ministerial mandate, Livanov, a physicist, who had been vice-rector and then for several years rector of the National Research and Technological University (formerly Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys), provoked the ire of teachers by suggesting to an interviewer on national television that low salaries among university teachers were to be explained either by the low quality of those teachers, which forced them to agree to so little; or by their taking on work in several universities and running among them. A third possibility, he suggested, was that the teachers were taxing their students. “In all three cases,” he concluded, “such a university cannot be considered to be functioning efficiently.”37

With the declared goal of ensuring quality and “optimizing,” but with a clear emphasis on economizing public funds,38 the government established Rosobrnadzor in 2012, the Federal Service of Inspection and Control of Education and Science, a department of the Ministry of Education and Science. It was assigned the task of monitoring the performance of institutions of higher learning at regular intervals on the basis of some 150 indicators for each institution, with six to eight of these, depending on the year, considered critical. In 2012-13, 52 institutions were closed on the basis of Rosobrnadzor’s inspections and 373 satellites were either reorganized through mergers or shut down. The process continued in the following years, though at a slower pace.39

Few could deny the need to ensure the quality of higher education and to put some order into the chaotic situation that had arisen during the “wild nineties,” which, among other things, had witnessed the profound restructuring (some might say destruction) of the economy inherited from the Soviet Union and a major reorientation of the values and career aspirations of the university-age population. But Rosobrnadzor came in for harsh criticism from teachers for its formalistic, bureaucratic approach to evaluations, the inordinate amount of frenzied paperwork its inspections demanded form university staffs, the dubious quality of many of its “expert” inspectors, and, finally, the arbitrary, apparently politically inspired, nature of certain of its decisions.40

The counterpart to monitoring, whose purported goal is to weed out underperforming institutions, were new policies aimed at “promoting excellence.” One of the most notable of these was the “5-100-20” programme, launched in 2013 with the goal of five universities entering major global rankings of the top 100 universities by the year 2020. Initially, fifteen universities were chosen for special federal funding under this programme. Several more added in following years, while others were disqualified.

That university rankings have become a big business and have been the object of criticism for the dubious character what they in fact measure41 did not discourage the government. Many teachers, however, expressed their skepticism about the programme and about how the additional funding was being spent. M. Balashov, teacher of higher mathematics at MFTI, compared it to the New-Guinean cargo cult: “Many of my colleagues, myself included, can’t shake off the feeling that everything is being turned upside down in this project of ‘entering the top 100.’ After all, universities aren’t good because they’re in the top 100. On the contrary, they’re in the top 100 because they’re good.”

At a gathering of the supervisory boards of universities participating in the 5-100-20 programme in 2014, Minister Livanov decried the “ineffective administration that had been formed over decades” in Russia’s universities and that was holding back their development. For that reason, he explained, he had created supervisory boards in the participating universities, composed of business people and government functionaries, “people with experience in solving large-scale tasks.” They would become “in essence, the organs of strategic management of the universities, the analogue of boards of directors of big companies.” These boards would appoint the rectors. An assistant to Livanov let it be known that that innovation would soon be introduced in “all decent Russian universities.”42

Among the other important innovations of this period were the introduction one-year employment contracts for university teachers, as well as “effective contracts,” according to which a highly arbitrary bonus part of the salary, often equal or even greater than the guaranteed part, was made heavily dependent on publishing activity, with a special premium on publications in journals indexed in international citation databases.

And as one might surmise from Livanov’s words, no store was placed in faculty participation in university governance. And for all practical purposes, the elements of teacher participation that had appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union were eliminated in this period. And as before, these new reforms were adopted without consultation of the university community. Sociologist Zh. Toshchenko of Moscow’s RGGU (Russian State University for the Humanities) observed:

“When I began my career as a sociologist, I was impressed by the words of the director of one of Penza’s most successful factories, where problems not only relating to production but social questions, too, were resolved so well.

When I asked him how he managed that, he replied: ‘You can’t make people happy by deciding for them and without them what they need.’ Well, this education reform has been marvelously conducted without the teachers. Who needs them? Bureaucrats know themselves what people need. And so, all commands flow from above, fertilized by the grant-consumers that they finance, who churn out a vast amount of recommendations, norms, rules and standards in order to justify their existence.

Many of these energetic bureaucrats have not themselves experienced their teachings and methods. But they consider it possible to impose them on others. This reforming began, and is being continued, without any counsel from those who do the teaching.

In fact, we see before us a complete disregard for the teaching community. And the tendency not to consult the mass of teachers is also evident in the universities, where practices are far from any elementary respect of democratic principles. Teachers’ meetings to discuss matters, relating not only to teaching, but to any issue of university life, have ceased to occur.”43

The practical application of these reforms and their impact on the condition of university teachers are the subject of the following chapter.

1 M. Matthews, Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Institutions since Stalin, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982, p., 147. A certain decline in the relative remuneration of academic staff began in the 1970s. A. Smolentseva, “Challenges to the Russian Academic Profession,” Higher Education no. 45, 2003, p. 409.

2 An “academic hour” is 45 minutes.

3 Mining was one of the highest paid professions (outside of the nomenklatura), and the nickel miners of Norilsk also received a hefty northern supplement.

4 V. Afanas’eva, “Pyat’ prichin po kotorym ne sleduet stat’ professorom,” Komsomol’skaya pravda, Mar. 20, 2017, https://www.kp.ru/daily/26655.5/3676180/ (accessed Aug 21, 2018)

5 D. Platonova, D. Semyonov, “Russia: the Institutional Landscape of Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al., ed, 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018, p. 1.

6 Prosveshchenie—literally “enlightenment.”

7 A. Smolentseva, “Where Soviet and Neoliberal Discourses Meet: the Transformation of the Purposes of Higher Education in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Higher Education, December, 2017, pp. 1096, 1098.

8 For a useful overview of the institutional changes in higher education in Russia since the end of the USSR, see D. Platonova and D. Semyonov, “Russia: The Institutional Landscape of Russian Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al. (eds.), 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave, London, 2018.

9 “Likhie”—literally “dashing” or “daring.” But in this case, “wild” seems more appropriate.

10 On primitive accumulation and the resulting nature of the state in Russia, see D. Mandel, “Primitive Accumulation in Post-Soviet Russia,” M. Vidal, et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, Oxford University Press, N.Y., 2019, pp. 739-54.

11 J. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, W. Norton, N.Y., 2002, ch. 5.

12 Banque européenne de reconstruction et de développement, Rapport 1998, cited in E. Kniazev, “Les problèmes nouveaux posés par la gestion d’une université russe,” Politiques et gestion de l’enseignement supérieur, vol. 14, n° 1, 2002, p. 121; T. Klyachko and I. Rozhdestvenskaya, Obrazovanie, Institut perekhodnogo perioda, Moscow, 1999, p. 4.

13 A. Smolentseva, “Challenges to the Russian academic profession,” Higher Education, 45: 2003, p. 397.

14 For a discussion of this issue, see A. Kosmarksii, “Universitety stali gibridom patriarkhal’nhykh demokratii s prepriniamtel’skikh avtokratiyamy: sotsiolog Mikhail Sokolov o tom, kak ustroena vlast’ v rossiiskikh vuzakh,” Indikator, Sept, 25, 2018, https://indicator.ru/humanitarian-science/intervyu-mihaila-sokolova.htm. (accessed Aug 21, 2019)

15 A. Smolentseva, op. cit. 409

16 Platonova and Semyonov, p. 344. In 2,000, 4,741 million students were enrolled in higher education, as compared to 2,790 million in 1995. In the state system alone, one third were by then paying tuition. A. Smolentseva, “Universal Higher Education and Positional Advantage: Soviet Legacies and Neoliberal Transformations in Russia,” Higher Education, vol. 73, no. 2, 2016, p. 21; Obrazovaniye v Rossiiskoi Federatsii: 2010, Moscow: Vysshaya shkola ekonomiki, p. 102.

17 See the section 3.e below.

18 J. Zadja, “Educational Reform and Transformation in Russia,” European Education, vol. 35, no.1, 2003, p. 69.

19 An significant exception in this period was the revolt of the students in the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University in 2007, in which the main issue was the low quality of education offered. See, Initsiativa gruppa Sotsfaka MGU “OD Group”(2007-2008), http://chronicles.igmsu.org/odgroup/.

20 Concern over a possible “return of the Communists” was a major concern of government leaders in the 1990s.

M. Goldman, The Piratization of Russa, N.Y., Routledge, 2003, p. 75.

21 N. Forrat, “The Political Economy of Russian Higher Education: Why Does Putin Support Research Universities?” Post-Soviet Affairs, 2015, vol. 32 no. 4, 2016, p. 12; B. Saltykov, ”Enseignement supérieur en Russie”, Russie. Nei. Visions, no. 29, Apr. 2008, p.16; C. Sigman, “Retour de l’État et formes de domination en Russie”, Revue française de science politique, vol. 66, 2016, p. 923.

22 OECD Country note (http://www.oecd.org/education/Russian%20Federation-EAG2014-Country-Note.pdf (accessed June 10, 2018)

23 Forrat, op. cit., pp. 11-12

24 A. Smolentseva, “Where Soviet and Neoliberal Discourses Meet,” Higher Education, 2017, Dec. 2017, Vol. 74, no. 6, p. 1100.

25 L. Mazurova, “Potrebiteli’ nynche v defitsite?” Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 32, Aug. 8, 2007.

26 C. Sigman, “‘Retour de l’État’ et formes de domination en Russie,” Revue française de science politique, no. 6, 2016, p. 925.

27 I. Kurilla, “Education Reform in Russia,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 137, 2013, p. 2.

28 P. G. Altbach et al., ed., Paying the Professoriate a Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts, Hoboken, N.J., Taylor & Francis, 2012, p. 30. M.A. Borovskaya et al., “Higher Education Institute Salary System as a Factor of Modernization of Education and Science in Russia,” World Applied Sciences Journal 30 (11), 2014, pp. 1678, 1680.

29 S. Dobrynin, “Ortogonal’nhyi fitzekh,” Radio Svoboda, Dec. 6, 2015. https://inosmi.ru/science/20151206/234702542.html (consulted Apr. 5, 2020). For an international comparison of university teachers’ salaries that situated Russia at the end of the decade well down at the bottom of a list of 29 countries, see P. Altbach et al., Paying the Professorate, N.Y. Routledge, 2012.

30 “V Moskve obsudili finansovuyu politiku Ministerstva obrazovaniya i nauki,” https://минобрнауки.рф/пресс-центр/11685 (accessed Aug. 8, 2018).

31 Forrat, op. cit., p. 26.

32 On new public administration in Russia’s universities, see C. Sigman, “La montée de l‘État-entrepreneur de l’enseignement supérieur’ et l’hybridation public-privé: l’exemple de la Russie,” Économies et sociétés, Cahiers de l’ISMEA, XLIV, no.4, 2010, pp. 581-602.

33 “Ob utverzhdenii plan meropriyatii (“dorozhnoi karty”) ‘Izmeneniya v otraslyakh sotsial’noi sfery, napravelnnie na povyshenie effektivnosti obrazovaniya i nauki’,” http://government.ru/docs/3391/. A modified “road map” was published on Apr. 30, 2014. https://rosmintrud.ru/docs/government/137.

34 “Kak raspoznavat’ i borot’sya s massovymy uvolneniyamy PPS,” http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=490. (consulted Mar. 30, 2017)

35 V. Perfil’eva, “Vas proveli po konkursu na odin god ili zaklyuchayut srochnyi trudovoi dogovor?,” Universitetskaya solidarnost’, 22 Aug. 2015, http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=3749 (consulted June 5, 2017).

36 K. Stanislavskii, renowned Russian and Soviet theater director, when dissatisfied with an actor’s performance, would comment: “I don’t believe!” A.V. Mogilev, “Effektivnost’—eto vam ne igrushka—i nam tozhe,” Jan. 27, 2014, http://unisolidarity.ru/?p=1756 (consulted June 5, 2017)

37 “Livanov o zarplatakh prepodov,” http://phdru.com/paycheck/livanovsalary/; “Ministr obrazovaniya otsenil uroven’ prepodavatelei po ikh zarplatam,” https://www.ntv.ru/novosti/369807/ (accessed June 15, 2018)

38 “Dmitiri Livanov i vuzy: optimitizatsiya vmesto obrazovaniya,” Kapital strany, May 15, 2013. http://kapital-rus.ru/articles/article/dmitrij_livanov_i_vuzy_optimizaciya_vmesto_obrazovaniya/ (accessed June 15, 2018)

39 D. Platonova and D. Semyonov, “Russia: the Institutional Landscape of Russian Higher Education,” in J. Huisman et al., eds., 25 years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries, Palgrave, 2018 p. 355.

40 For a critical assessment of Rosobrnadozor’s academic experts, see K. Guba, et al., “Kak rabotaet Rosobrnadzor,” Troïtskii variant, July 3, 2018, p. 4. https://trv-science.ru/2018/07/03/kak-rabotaet-rosobrnadzor/ (accessed June 15, 2018) On Rosobrnadzor’s controversial and, at least partly politically motivated, cancelling of the accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (“Shaninka») and of the European University, see “Eto bor’ba ne za “Shaninku, a za peresmostr polnomochii Rosobrnadzora”, Vesti obsrazovaniya, June 29, 2018; https://vogazeta.ru/articles/2018/6/29/quality_of_education/3801-vshe_vstupilas_za_shaninku (accessed June 15, 2018) and “Pochemu attaka na Evropeiskii universitet v Peterburge—katastrofa dlya rossiiskoi nauki i obrazovaniya,” Meduza, Sept. 29, 2017. https://meduza.io/feature/2017/09/29/pochemu-ataka-na-evropeyskiy-universitet-v-peterburge-katastrofa-dlya-rossiyskoy-nauki-i-obrazovaniya (accessed June 15, 2018)

41 See, for example, M. Gladwell, “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us,” The New Yorker, Feb. 14 and 21, 2011.

42 A. Chernykh, “Pochemu vedushchie vuzy perevodyat na vneshnee upravlenie,” Kommersant, July 1, 2014, p. 5.

43 Zh. Toschchenko, “K chemu vedet neskonchaemaya optimizatisya obrazovaniya,” Nepavisimaya gazeta, Jan. 1, 2020. http://www.ng.ru/stsenarii/2020-01-27/9_7778_education.html? (consulted Jan 14, 2020)

3. The Condition of University Teachers Following the “Optimizing” Reforms of 2012-18
a. Employment
1. Massive Job Cuts

The “road map” called for a 44% reduction of full-time teaching positions by 2018. As noted, this drastic job cut was ostensibly based on a projected 30-percent decline in the 17-25 age cohort, reported in the document, as well on the goal of raising the student/teacher ratio from the current 9.4 to 12, the OECD average.

In May 2018, V. Tilles, physics teacher at Yugorskii State University and a co-chairperson of Unisol, citing government statistics, informed a special session of the President’s Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights that 125,000, almost 40% full-time university teaching positions or their equivalent, had been cut since publication of the May decrees. And job reductions were continuing.1

The “roadmap” did not specify how teaching positions were to be eliminated, and university administrations were apparently left to improvise. One widespread early method was to reduce full-time positions to three-quarters, half, even a quarter, while salaries and workloads remained unchanged, although not for long.

This method offered administrations several advantages, since various quantitative parameters for the ministry’s evaluation of universities are calculated with the number of equivalent full-time teachers as the denominator. This was therefore an easy way to appear to meet the ministry’s performance indicators. Among other things, it allowed rectors to show that teachers’ salaries were indeed rising, as promised by the Decrees. M. Feigelman, physics teachers at MFTI, reported that in 2015 many teachers suddenly saw themselves shifted to 0.7 of a position. “At the same time, they promised to leave their basic salary as it was, but the teaching hours were not reduced. The teachers could not understand this, and so it was explained to them that that is how the university is trying to carry out the presidential decree to increase salaries. On paper, the full-time salary will rise, but since the colleague has been shifted to 0.7 position, the expense remains the same.”2 This method also allowed rectors to demonstrate a reduction in the number of full-time teaching positions without creating a shortage of teachers, while at the same time showing an increased teacher-student ratio.

Another important advantage of the method is that it avoided, or at least reduced, resistance on the part of teachers, who could optimistically view the change as somehow merely formal. The Labour Code requires employees’ consent to such changes in their terms of their employment. But the correlation of forces in universities, and in the broader state, is such that teachers’ consent is usually forthcoming. Nevertheless, the insulting nature of the reduction moved some teachers, in particular those at or past retirement age, to leave the university “of their own accord.”

A related method was to change teachers’ the job title, for example, from teacher to methodologist, a fate that befell, among others, the entire faculty of modern languages of MFTI in 2017, despite Unisol’s protest.3 In May 2015, the rector of Ural Federal University let it be known that 700 teaching positions would be cut. But he ensured local president of Unisol, Dm. Trynov, that “We plan to cut teaching positions, not people.” A protest organized by the union and that attracted the attention Vl. Burmatov, vice chairperson of the State Duma’s committee on education, put a temporary halt to the rector’s plan. But, as another union activist, A. Ladygin, recalled, after a visit to the university from Prime Minister Medvedev, who indicated clearly his approval of the rector’s course, Burmatov changed his tune, and “the process went ahead at full speed. Officially, no one was fired. […] A directive was simply issued to all department chairpersons—and they are all on contracts, with the rector regulating the length of their leashes—to talk privately with teachers, especially with the elderly ones who have reached pension age. The union was active among the teachers, explaining that it was a violation of the Labour Code, that the administration could not fire them. All the same, the bulk of teachers behaved rather passively in the situation. And as a result, (in my department) it comes to a planned cut of 17,5 positions, though initially 7,5 positions. This in reality is the departure of very real people at the end of their contracts. They are planning the merger of a series of institutes and faculties, also in the interests of optimization. In general, there is no end in sight. It is a policy of cutting off the dog’s tail piece by piece.”4

Teachers who refused to accept the change risked being marked as trouble-makers and being dismissed when their contract came up for renewal. And that, in fact, became a widespread method for cutting jobs: at the end of a teacher’s current five-year contract, his or her position would be simply eliminated by the fact that a new competition was announced. Teachers who sought recourse through the courts were told that it is the employer’s right to determine the list of job titles in their institution.5 Universities were able to make these job cuts without paying the compensation (up to three months’ salary) or assuming the other responsibilities that are required by the Labour Code for cases of “mass dismissal”.

All this took place with the silent approval of Rosprofobr, the main trade union of employees of the educational sector. This holdover from Soviet times claims five million members, including higher managerial personnel of universities and schools.

2. Permanent Probation

Over the course of this period, one-year employment contracts became a widespread, if not quite universal, norm6. Still other teachers were placed on civil-law (grazhdansko-pravovye) contracts for a limited, concrete task and even smaller salaries. As a result, highly competent teachers, some with decades of experience at the same institution, found themselves on a “short leash,” in effect, on permanent probation. “We now find ourselves ‘suspended,’ as never before under the Communist regime or under Yeltsin,” observed R. Kostiuk, political scientist at St. Petersburg State University.

Article 332 of the Labour Code states that the contracts of university teachers may be of limited or unlimited duration. On the other hand, article 70 expressly forbids probationary periods for employees hired through competitions. But repeated annual contracts are, of course, nothing but permanent probation. The collective agreement of 2015-17, “negotiated” by Rosobrofobr on behalf of the teachers, recommended that unlimited contracts be the norm and that any short-term contracts be concluded for not less than three years. But it made no attempt to enforce that. That same agreement also stipulated that if the parties could not agree to the length of the contract, it would be of unlimited duration.7 “But in Russia,” explained Unisol co-chairperson, V. Tilles, physics teacher at Yugorskii State University, “the Labour Code is one thing, and the life of a university teacher is another. As for that mass trade union, it is not a union, but only an imitation.”

In a very limited number of cases, one-year contracts have been successfully contested in court.8 But even if the courts were friendlier to teachers, it takes an unusual amount of courage to go that route, since experience shows that a determined administration can find other ways to rid itself of “troublemakers.” Sociologist A. Alimpieva, dismissed after twenty years at the Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, was told in no uncertain terms by the administration that “any person whosoever can be fired on purely formal grounds,” when she informed it of her intention to contest her short-term contract.9

Of course, the competitions for annual contracts can, and often are, mere formalities for teachers. But the latter are nevertheless painfully aware that the competitions and one-year contracts provide administrators with an easy way to be rid of “disloyal” employees. This can be done, as already noted, by simply failing to announce a new competition for the position when the current contract ends.10 If for some reason that method is not practicable, perhaps because the courses covered by the position are indispensable, an outside candidate can be found, whose selection is guaranteed, regardless of his or her relative qualifications. Alternatively, requirements for the position can be arbitrarily redefined so as to disqualify the incumbent and favour an outsider.11

This method for controlling teaching personnel became available to university administrations thanks to the concentration of power over the previous decade that deprived teachers of the degree of influence they had gained over appointments and promotions following the Soviet Union’s demise. That power was transferred by ministerial decision to academic councils. These are typically packed with administrative personnel and teachers beholden to the administration and can adopt decisions that are contrary even to unanimous recommendations of the members of the department whose position is being filled.

Although both the constitution and the Labour Code forbid discrimination, the courts, even when presented with overwhelming evidence, refuse to intervene in the hiring decisions of academic councils, citing their secret ballots, which, so the court argues, make impossible to know the motives for the vote.12 And if the aggrieved teacher appeals to the ministry, the latter’s typically cites university autonomy as the excuse not to intervene.

Paradoxically—or perhaps not—while teachers have seen their own numbers diminish, they have witnessed the proliferation of administrative positions. Union activists at MFTI reported in 2015 that “from discussions in the rectorate, we have learned that the number of top managers and administrative employees exceeds the number of regular teachers. An example: growth in the ranks of the administration over the last years has led to a situation whereby it no longer takes a day or two to obtain a signature on a document, but between a week to a month, since each document requires the agreement of a greater and greater number of bureaucrats.”13 At Yurgorskii University, reported Tilles, “we have 180 teachers and 100 bosses, eight lawyers and five assistant rectors, each of whom earns 450,000 rubles.14

As one might expect, the insecurity these changes have introduced into the situation of teachers has undermined their professional autonomy and has had a deleterious effect on the work climate, reinforcing the teachers’ tendency toward atomization, a major obstacle to independent organization capable of defending their interests. “The psychological situation is very difficult. To obtain the list of teaching personnel without any personal information from the rector in order to establish the fact of mass dismissals, the union has to accomplish great feats or live in courts. All this creates an atmosphere of fear in the universities: it is enough to fire a few teachers who express opinions different from the rector’s ‘correct’ one.”15

At the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the local chapter of Unisol complained that “the time-consuming procedure each year for participation in the competition for one’s post creates a nervous and unhealthy atmosphere, distracting teachers from their authentic tasks and degrading them by its bureaucratism and senselessness.”16 A. Alimpieva put it this way: “Besides the political context here, there is also the concrete social vulnerability of university teachers. We are nobody, nothing. We have a contract for one year. No one has to forewarn us two months ahead [that no competition for one’s position will be held]. Is that normal? Jobs were being cut these past years. Why? Because Putin said that a certain salary level is needed; and so, to reach it, they cut positions and increase the workloads. It turns out that janitors have more security than teachers… One has the complete feeling of sovok [slang for Soviet person]. In fact, it is much worse.”17

And as is so often the case, the various aspects of government policy for higher education work at cross purposes. The heightened job insecurity (as well as the inordinate teaching load—to be discussed presently) is at odds with the government’s goal of promoting research in universities, which is a condition for success in international ratings. Serious academic research, let along the establishment of scientific traditions and schools, requires long-term planning and commitment. But “instead of thinking through fundamental questions and working on long-term research projects,” observed sociologist I. Yasaveev, “teachers are worried about publishing as fast as possible to demonstrate their activity, in an effort to hold onto their jobs.”18

b.Remuneration
1.Salary Levels

The government declared that the increase in salaries of university teachers to double the average wage of their respective regions by 2018, as ordered by the May Decrees, was achieved. Rosstat, the state statistical service, reported that the average salary of university teachers in 2018 was 82,486 rubles, equal to 217,7% of the country’s average wage.19

But much evidence casts doubt on this claim. Unisol conducted a survey of university teachers’ salaries in September and November 2017 and continued to collect data throughout most of 2018. It found that the average salary (before income tax, a flat 12%) in those months was close to 38,000 rubles (approximately $585 US), below even the average national wage in 2017 of 39,144 rubles. The majority of the survey’s respondents (who sent photos of their paystubs) were dotsenty, the most numerous category of university teachers.20

With presidential elections set for March 2018, special efforts were made to boost public-sector wages. Not surprisingly, the salaries reported to Unisol for December 2017 were significantly higher than those of the previous months, averaging 57,630 rubles. This was mainly due to unusually high year-end bonuses. V. Dikarev, Unisol activist and geography teacher at Moscow State University, remarked that “The supplement didn’t correspond to any sort of logic. Calculations by activists at MGU indicate that the entire research and teaching staff received [a bonus worth] five times their [guaranteed] base pay.” 21

But the sudden increases turned out to be temporary, leaving salaries far short of the promise of the May Decrees. The Tatarstan branch of the “Alliance of Teachers” (a “virtual” union created by anti-corruption campaigner A. Naval’ny), lodged a complaint with the regional Labour Inspectorate in April 2019 about the low salaries of university teachers that varied between 15,000 and 25,000 rubles, well below the 35,100-rouble regional average.22 Even at MFTI, where salaries are on average among the highest for Russian universities, a typical dotsent earned 75,000 rubles (US $1,071) in October 2018, slightly less than a single average wage in Moscow.23

Besides sudden, non-recurrent bonuses and outright falsifications, various other methods were used to show fulfillment of the May Decrees. Among these was the decision of Rosstat in 2015 to modify the method for calculating average regional wages by including the earnings of workers in the vast informal sector, estimated at a fifth of the workforce and typically among the lowest paid workers in the country.24

University administrations also did their part. A classic method already mentioned was to transfer teachers from full-time status to a fraction of a position but keeping the same salary. This formally raised the individual’s salary, as calculated on a full-time basis. Another method was to shift teachers to civil-labour contracts that are paid pay by the course or by a number of hours. These teachers and their salaries are excluded from calculation of the average. Yet another popular method was to assign high-earning administrators a fraction of a teaching position and then to include their total earnings in the teachers’ average for the university teachers.25 Hence Unisol’s call to use of the median, rather than the “average temperature in the hospital”.

P. Kudyukin, national co-chairperson of Unisol, described a common scene at university assemblies of this time: “The rector or vice-rector proudly cites the average salary, and noise arises in the hall. The assembled begin to look around for the lucky individual or ask to ‘show us that dotsent’.”26

The May Decrees did nothing to reduce the abyss that separated the salaries of top administrators and those of teaching staff. Writing in 2017, philosophy professor V. Afanas’eva, of Saratov State University observed: “The poverty of the majority is especially glaring on the background of the financial well-being of university administrations that shamelessly allow themselves salaries ten, sometimes even a hundred times higher than those of their subordinates, salaries that in Russia are not given even to geniuses. This unnatural and immoral stratification is another important source of the underpayment of teachers.”27

Another problem is the large, arbitrary differences that sometimes exist between the salaries of teachers who occupy similar positions and perform essentially the same work. This was publicly recognized in 2017 by then Minister of Enlightenment O. Vasil’eva: “My colleagues in the audit department have compiled an entire array of schema, whereby university administrations, by raising the income of only certain individuals close to them, don’t really increase the salaries of the teaching collective. This is done according to the principle: you get 20, I get 120—our average is 70.”28 Nor are these differences always a question of individual teachers who are favourites of the administration. At the St. Petersburg Mining University, for example, all the teachers of the “profile” (engineering) faculties earn salaries three to five times higher than those of teachers in the humanities departments.

2. “Efficient Contracts”

As noted, the reform of the public-sector wage system in 2008 eliminated the centralized wage structure inherited from the Soviet Union and gave public institutions broad autonomy in the area of remuneration. The declared aim of the reform was to promote efficiency by strengthening the role of performance incentives, which would henceforth constitute a much larger part of the salary. The new system was to be negotiated between the employees and the administration of the institution, but given the correlation of forces, administrations had a virtually free hand. The result was to introduce large measure of arbitrariness into the remuneration of employees and to significantly widen the gap between the salaries of top administrators and the rest of the employees. The “effective contracts” that followed the May Decrees took this a step further.29

It was left to university administrations to concretize the new bonus system. And as usual, it was done without consultation of the teachers and with blatant violations of the Labour Code, all duly rubber-stamped by Rosobrprof.30 According to Unisol’s survey of teachers’ salaries in 2017-18, as well as numerous other reports from teachers, the non-guaranteed part of remuneration usually varies between 25% and 40% of the total salary, although it can exceed that. (The ministry’s recommendation is 30-35%, and the President’s Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights called for not more than 50%.)

A widespread complaint of teachers is the lack of transparency and the arbitrary character of this bonus system.31 In a striking example from St. Petersburg State University, after the forced merger of the geography, geo-ecology and geology faculties of into a newly-created Institute of Earth Sciences, nearly all the teachers lost their bonuses, which had been until then a regular significant part of their salaries. No explanation was given. This assault became an important factor in the organization of one of the rare mass protests against university reforms.32

“Russia is possibly the only country where teachers don’t know what their salaries will be in the current month,” observed professor of mathematics B. Kashin of Moscow State University. “It depends entirely on the will of the bosses. Meanwhile the incomes of rectors and of those close to them are beating all records, something that (along with the fictitious transfer of teachers to partial employment) helps to report fulfillment of V.V. Putin’s 2012 decrees… And it is no simple matter for trade-union activists, or for a director of a structural division, to find out the real situation. For example, when I learnt from the media that the average teacher’s salary at Moscow State University had reached 136,000 rubles, I went to the dean’s office to ask for information about the average wage in the department that I head. The answer was negative: ‘That information is most personal.’”33

Another frequent complaint of teachers is that bonus criteria are often announced late—in the middle or even at the end of the year. Moreover, they can change suddenly without notice. “The problem is that the demands change every year,” complained a teacher at the St. Petersburg Mining University, “and you are given no warning. And so, when you find out, it is already too late. It becomes a lottery. And each time they try not to include in the bonus some of the things that you have done.”

“Efficient contracts” are supposed to have three main types of indicators, for which are set minimal limits: teaching, scientific work, and social (or public) activity. These are to be defined according to the concrete nature of the person’s position and the profile of the individual’s faculty. But as with so much else, the indicators are adopted without consultation of the teachers and they are often of a dubious nature. For one thing, they fail completely to take into account the inordinate increase in teaching loads (treated in the next section) that has occurred over the last several years.

“Effective contracts” place a particular emphasis on publications, in particular articles in “high-impact” journals that are indexed in international data bases, such as Scopus and WoS, a specific demand of the May Decrees. Apart from the dubious nature of these bibliometric measures for evaluating the quality of research, they discriminate against texts published in Russian or that are of interest mainly to Russians. The emphasis on articles also penalizes teachers who write books. “The demands on publication activity, that grow heavier with each passing year,” complains Unisol at the Higher School of Economics, “leads to a decline in the quality of scientific publications and promotes a formalistic attitude toward research activity. Besides that, in a series of cases, they have a discriminatory character that is contrary to any interest in the development of fundamental scientific directions and to the practical implementation of results obtained.”34 Failure to meet these publication criteria has been used as grounds for dismissal through non-renewal of the employment contract.35

The performance indicators of “effective contracts” often include money brought into the university through grants and commercial contracts, the number of tuition-paying students, the percentage of students that obtain a passing grade, student evaluation of courses. At Ivanovo State University, for example, the effective contract includes promotion of the university among high school students and teachers.36 At the Higher School of Economics students are invited to vote for the best professor, who receives a special bonus.

Some demands of the “effective contract” go well beyond the absurd. At Yugorskii State University, for example, all teachers, including those in the humanities, are supposed to bring in money from experimental-developmental projects (opytno-konstrukorskie raboty). Failure to do that can mean the loss of a bonus equal to half of the average teacher’s salary.37 At Michurin State Agricultural University, according Professor of horticulture A. Verzilin, “In addition to everything else, each of us has to bring in 70,000 rubles in the form of grants, some kind of agricultural work, etc. But what are we capable of doing? We go about, we humiliate ourselves, we offer landscaping services… All this is very slow, but if we don’t bring in money to the university, they look askance at us.”38

The administration of Yugorskii State University adopted the practice of annually certifying the “efficiency” of teachers. In 2018, it found a majority of them to be ineffective. This moved professor Y. Yavoruk, a physicist of international reputation, to resign in disgust: “My beloved university informed me in February that I am not up to muster. That month was my fiftieth birthday, and after my many years of work there, as a gift, they give me notice of my ineffectiveness.”39

Finally, in many institutions, for example the Higher School of Economics, performance according to the criteria of “effective contracts” serves not only a basis for bonuses but also plays a role in decisions on whether to renew contracts. At Moscow State University, the decision to accord a five, three, or one-year contract depends largely on that rating.