Chapter 7
New Possibilities, 1906–1910
Russia's institutions of higher education stayed closed until September 1906. When they reopened, the great transformation brought about as a result of the Revolution of 1905 was clearly visible: the curriculum had become much more flexible, student enrollment in the universities had nearly doubled, and barriers to the admission of Jews and women had all but disappeared. But the legal basis for all these changes rested on the professoriate's liberal interpretation of the 27 August 1905 Temporary Rules. Once the government recovered its balance, it remembered that the 1884 Statute remained in force, ready for use as the legal justification for a counteroffensive against the universities. The main theme of this chapter is how the Revolution of 1905 changed the universities and why the government, unable to accept the new situation, tried to reassert its control.
The aftermath of the revolution revealed important changes in both the professoriate and the student movement. The sobering experiences of 1905 had weakened the cautious but unmistakable corporate political commitment that had led more than half the academic profession to sign the "Declaration of the 342" and form the Academic Union. After a futile struggle against the growing indifference of the senior faculty, the Academic Union petered out. Meanwhile, conservative elements among the professoriate recovered from their 1905 disarray, especially in the provincial universities. Most of the professoriate wanted a new university statute that would guarantee wide professional autonomy and senior faculty preeminence in the universities. In 1906 a landmark confer-
ence called by the Ministry of Education seemed to put this goal within reach—all the more reason for the professoriate to revert to its traditional preference for a cooperative rather than a confrontational relationship with the government.
At first the government cooperated with the professors, but after Peter Stolypin became prime minister in 1906, the Ministry of Education charted a tougher course toward both the students and the professors. A major source of friction was the differing interpretations of the 27 August 1905 Rules: the faculty councils read them as supplanting the 1884 Statute, whereas the government, with increasing frequency, argued that except for making the faculty responsible for student discipline and the election of rectors, the rules in no way changed the status quo ante in the universities.
As before, the student movement complicated relations between the professoriate and the government. Stolypin charged that the student movement enabled the revolutionary parties to use the universities for their own ends, while the senior faculty (except in some provincial universities) contended that the students were losing interest in politics, a healthy trend that would continue as long as the government stayed out of the VUZy and left disciplinary matters to the faculty.
In fact the post-1906 period saw major changes occurring within the student movement. The new Duma, for all its imperfections, afforded Russia some semblance of an open political life and thus undermined one of the major bases for student protest. Many students argued that they no longer had any obligation to "wake up" society and incite wider social protest. And after the massive general strike of 1905 students could no longer delude themselves about the significance of the student movement compared to the labor movement. Moreover, student life itself was in flux. Enrollment had doubled, financial aid became even more of a problem, and the relaxed regulations in the universities led to open elections to student governments and political campaigns. A conspicuous student press became a new factor in university life. New agendas emerged, and extensive debate developed about the rationale and future of the student movement, the place of the skhodka in student affairs, and the merits of a "political" versus a "professional" student movement. But growing government interference in the universities eventually forced the students back into direct political confrontation with the state.
Complicating the university question was the ambiguous political system that emerged in Russia after 1905. Had the October manifesto,
the new laws establishing a Duma, and other changes in the Fundamental Laws made Russia a constitutional or even a semi-constitutional monarchy? Could the clock be turned back, or did the government have to widen its base of support to adapt to the new political situation? These ambiguities created a tense situation that helped the far right gain influence over the tsar and made political leaders such as Peter Stolypin extremely vulnerable to political attacks from that direction. Under the circumstances the university question assumed outsize significance as a gauge of the prime minister's zeal in defending the prerogatives of the autocracy.
A New Minister of Education
After two months of anguish, Russia's professoriate finally heard good news at the end of October 1905. Count Witte appointed a respected moderate, Count I. I. Tolstoi, as the new minister of education. A former secretary of the Russian Archeological Society and a vice-president of the Imperial Academy of the Arts, Tolstoi was a longstanding critic of the Ministry of Education. He was also known as a leading advocate of equal rights for Russia's Jews.[1]
Less than two months after his appointment, Tolstoi charted a major reform program embracing all levels of Russian education. In a memorandum to Witte, Tolstoi outlined some of his major goals: state support for universal primary education, an end to the Russification policies of the Ministry of Education, a greater role for private education, and the abolition of restrictions on Jewish students in secondary and higher education.[2] To show that he was serious, Tolstoi began to clean house, forcing the resignation of the two key officials in charge of higher-education policy, A. A. Tikhomirov and S. M. Lukianov. Their replacements, O. P. Gerasimov and P. P. Izvol'skii, enjoyed the reputation of being more progressive.[3]
In a major departure from past policy, Tolstoi took some important steps to ensure better relations between the professoriate and the government. Agreeing that the immediate priority in higher-education pol-
[1] A biographical sketch of I. I. Tolstoi can be found in Odesskii Listok, 2 November 1905.
[2] Gosudarstvennaia Publichnaia Biblioteka imeni M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, Otdel Rukopisei (hereafter referred to as GPB im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina), f. 781 (I. I. Tolstoi), ed. kh. 115.
[3] GPB im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrirna, f. 781, ed. kh. 568 ("vospominaniia I. I. Tolstovo za vremia evo upravleniia Ministerstvom Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia"), l. 34.
icy was to replace the 1884 Statute, Tolstoi decided to involve the faculty councils in all stages of the process. First he sent the statute draft, just completed by Glazov's commission, to all the councils. Without exception they rejected it.[4] In December, Tolstoi then invited all the universities' faculty councils to elect delegates to a conference to draft a new statute. The first meeting of the conference took place on 5 January 1906. In addition to Tolstoi, the conference included all nine university rectors and thirty-five professors representing various departments. Tolstoi made a brief welcoming address in which he promised the delegates that the Ministry of Education would exert no pressure on them.[5]
Tolstoi's initiative made Witte and other government officials nervous; they feared that the conference would turn into an anti-government demonstration.[6] Indeed, to quote Tolstoi's unpublished memoirs, "only five or six [of the delegates] were conservatives. Most of the elected professors were 'radicals' in the European sense; in Russia they would be called progressives."[7] Yet, far from being an oppositional forum, the Tolstoi Conference, as it came to be called, proved that the professoriate, given half a chance, preferred to work with the government rather than to fight it.
Although its draft statute got no further than the archives—the victim of rapidly changing political circumstances—the Tolstoi Conference was a major landmark in the history of the Russian academic profession and higher education. For the first time ever, the freely elected representatives of the professoriate could meet under the auspices of a sympathetic minister of education. But the conference also showed that it was much easier for the professors to unite against the old statute than to agree on the details of a new one.
The most controversial issues at the conference concerned whether the professor was a civil servant, or a professional who received no decorations from the state; the rights of the junior faculty; procedures for electing professors; professional prerequisites for a teaching career; stu-dent rights and discipline; the relationship between the faculty council and the individual departments; and the nature of the state's supervisory power over the universities. Recent events had obviously left their mark. The delegates quickly agreed that the universities should be defined as
[4] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 173, ll. 64–74.
[5] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 121 ("zhurnaly soveshchaniia po reforme universitetov obrazovannovo pri MNP v lanvare 1906ovo goda") (meeting of 5 January 1906).
[6] GPB im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, f. 781, ed. kh. 568, l. 83.
[7] ibid.
institutions dedicated to both research and teaching, but they engaged in a bitter debate on the relationship of the academic profession to the state and whether the word autonomous should be used to define the universities.[8] Quoting Pirogov on the scholar's inherent need for independence, Professor V. A. Steklov of Kharkov University argued against Article 14 of the proposed draft, which stipulated that professors would continue to enjoy the rights, privileges, and decorations conferred on them by their civil service status. But he failed to sway the conference. Professor N. M. Bubnov of Kiev University pointed out that getting decorations from the kaiser hardly compromised the German professoriate; in fact, it increased their prestige. Twenty-six delegates voted for Article 14 and only twelve for Steklov's substitute ("A professor is not a civil servant and enjoys neither rank nor decorations").[9]
The issue of required ministerial approval for academic appointments sparked another controversy. Warsaw's G. Th. Voronoi, supporting the minister's prerogatives, told his colleagues that "if we get paid by the government, then we should be subject to ministerial veto." By the very narrow margin of 22 to 20 the delegates voted to have the minister of education confirm professorial appointments voted by the faculty council. But the only grounds for nonconfirmation were to be clear violations of legal procedures by the faculty council; and such nonconfirmation would have to be accompanied by a written explanation. By the same vote, the conference agreed that rectors elected by the faculty councils were to be confirmed by the tsar.
The delegates also had difficulty coming to an agreement on another problem that tended to separate liberal from conservative professors: the relationship between the faculty council and the individual departments. Liberals tended to advocate a strong faculty council. It was, they argued, the fundamental institution of professional autonomy, since it symbolized the principle of the unity of knowledge. If individual departments had the right to bypass the faculty council in recommending appointees, the universities would be replaced by a random collection of departments with no claim to authority, autonomy, or respect. Proponents of departmental powers cited the example of the German universities and argued that the best judges of a candidate's merit were colleagues in the discipline.[10] The greater the role of the faculty council, the
[8] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 121 (meeting of 16 January 1906).
[9] ibid.
[10] For a strong defense of this position, see V. Sergeevich, "Germanskie universitety i nashi," Vestnik Evropy, no. 3 (1905).
more likely that political rather than academic considerations would influence the decision.[11] In the end the conference compromised by giving the ultimate decision to the faculty council unless the department unanimously supported one particular candidate. But the issue would surface again, a reminder that the Russian professoriate was deeply divided about the very structure of university governance.
The conference reached many other important decisions. It rejected a proposal from Professor D. A. Goldhammer of Kazan University to guarantee the university's extraterritoriality by expressly forbidding entry to police without the permission of the rector; instead, the conference voted that "police and troops cannot enter the grounds of the university without the knowledge of the rector."[12] Although the delegates called for an elective curriculum to replace the restrictive course system, they rejected Goldhammer's request to include chairs of anthropology and sociology in the draft statute. The Kazan professor had argued that the universities had forfeited their intellectual influence on Russian youth by adhering to an overly restrictive curriculum which slighted the social sciences. Russian students, he warned, got their education from the "thick journals" and ignored professors' lectures. Reflecting the sharp divisions within the professoriate about the merits of these disciplines, the conference compromised by leaving the question of new chairs to be decided by direct negotiations between the Ministry of Education and the faculty councils. And although the faculty councils would be allowed to spend income from student fees and endowments as they saw fit, any expenditures requiring government outlays and any action affecting the universities' physical plant would require ministerial approval.
After another sharp debate the conference smoothed the road to an academic career by abolishing the two-thesis requirement. It restored the official dozenty, abolished by the 1884 Statute, and recommended sharply increased salaries for both senior and junior faculty. The delegates also voted to abolish all admission bars to the professoriate and the student body based on religion, nationality, or sex. After a long argument about faculty responsibility for student discipline, the conference voted to include faculty disciplinary courts in the draft statute.
In another liberal move, the delegates voted to end the privileged
[11] This was the argument used by Professor Th. Th. Zelinskii of Saint Petersburg University in "Universitetskii vopros v 1906 godu," in Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, no. 8 (1906): 121.
[12] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 121 (meeting of 20 January 1906).
position of the classical gymnasia; graduates of all secondary schools would be eligible to enter the universities. Faculty councils, however, could still stipulate specific requirements, such as Latin and Greek. As expected, the delegates abolished the requirement that the faculty councils route all communication with the Ministry of Education through the curators. But the conference deadlocked on the thorny issue of abolishing the legal privileges connected with the university degree. Advocates of abolition argued that the government would then have less reason to interfere in university affairs. Besides, the quality of the student body would improve, for "careerists" would presumably have less reason to seek a diploma. But Professor D. D. Grimm of Saint Petersburg University marshalled the counterarguments: it was overly idealistic to expect universities to attract students motivated only by love of learning. The national interest demanded an educated civil service and a guaranteed position for the universities. And even if such special privileges as elevation from the subject estates, better status during military service, and a guaranteed entry rank into the civil service were abolished, Grimm argued, a university degree should at least remain a prerequisite for the state civil-service examination. This was necessary to "secure for the universities a certain position in our national life, as is the case in France and Germany. To abolish these privileges for university graduates and keep them for graduates of the specialized technical institutes would be unfair to the former."[13] Torn between idealism and realism, the conference could reach no decision, another sign that the Russian professoriate was not unanimous in its vision of the relationship between the universities and the wider society.
The issue of junior faculty rights produced one of the most serious disagreements at the conference. A small liberal bloc proposed to allow elected delegates from the junior faculty to enjoy voting rights at faculty council meetings.[14] But this proposal attracted only seven votes. As before, the junior faculty had no right to participate in or vote in faculty council meetings. Dozenty, however (who would now be required to hold a doctorate), would be able to attend—but not vote in—department meetings, except when academic appointments were under consideration.
On the whole the delegates had reason to be happy with the results of the Tolstoi Conference. The minister accepted the crucial first article
[13] Ibid. (meeting of 23 January 1906).
[14] Ibid. (meeting of 25 January 1906).
containing the professors' definition of the university as an autonomous institution dedicated to research and teaching and endorsed their conviction that the universities should stand at the center of the nation's educational system. Indeed, the draft charter proposed raising government expenditures on the universities from 5 to 13.5 million rubles a year.[15] The draft statute produced by the Tolstoi Conference provided for a university that would be more open than ever but where the professors, not the junior faculty or the students, would rule. Although divided on the exact relationship of the university to the state, the delegates mirrored the senior faculty's eagerness to accept the principle of the state university, especially when the government showed signs of finally respecting the professors' professional aspirations. At the same time, the university outlined in the draft statute was a Russian institution, not one fashioned after the German or any other foreign model.[16] Clear examples were the central role of the faculty council in university governance and the call for an end to discrimination based on religion or sex. One foreign professor commented that the draft statute would give Russian universities an independence from outside control that no other universities, even in the United Kingdom or the United States, enjoyed.[17] Nevertheless, the sharp debates at the conference showed some clear divisions within the professoriate.
A Divided Academic Union
To drive the point home, the third congress of the Academic Union, which was meeting at the same time, drafted a radically different university statute. The Academic Union's statute gave the delegates from the junior faculty an equal vote in the faculty councils, declared that professors had no civil-service status, and abolished the ministry's veto power over professorial appointments.[18] The delegates to the third congress also refused to define the universities as state institutions. The dif-
[15] D. E. Bagalei, "Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie russkikh universitetov," Vestnik Evropy, no. 1 (1914): 231.
[16] The critical comments of foreign professors such as Germany's Friedrich Paulsen emphasize important differences between the draft statute of the Tolstoi Conference and university governance in Prussia. The most significant was the Russian professors' preference for a strong faculty council. See "Otzyvy nemetskikh i gollandskikh professorov o proekte universitetskovo ustava grafa I. I. Tolstovo," Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, nos. 3–4 (1910).
[17] Ibid., p. 10.
[18] P. N. Sakulin, "Novyi proekt universitetskovo ustava," Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 4 (1906).
ferences from the Tolstoi Conference draft were painfully obvious and showed the widening polarization within the academic profession. One member of the Academic Union, P. N. Sakulin, complained in Russia's leading journal of education that "the participants of the Tolstoi Conference, raised in the spirit of the 1884 Statute, did not have the courage to carry through the idea of academic autonomy in all its purity and integrity."[19]
By this time, however, the Academic Union was clearly in trouble. One major reason was the junior faculty's strong influence within the organization. Many senior faculty could not forget that, in the chaos of the previous fall, the junior faculty had largely supported the meetings in the universities and the student resolutions. They feared that the Academic Union was becoming a forum for pressing junior faculty demands for more rights in university governance. Besides, by the beginning of 1906 many professors saw ample grounds for optimism about both the general political outlook and the specific prospects for better relations between the professoriate and the government.
The defenders of the Academic Union, however, reminded their colleagues of the original reasons for the "Declaration of the 342" and warned against premature optimism. Despite all the promises of a Duma and the hopes generated by the Tolstoi Conference, the autocracy could not be trusted. This was the main theme of Nikolai Kareev's introductory speech to the union's third congress.[20] Tensions between junior and senior faculty, Kareev admitted, clouded the future of the Academic Union, but academic autonomy had not been won, the nation's political future was still uncertain, and Russia's academics badly needed an organization that would unite them regardless of what rank they held and in which institution of higher education they taught. After some debate, in which Professor A. A. Brandt urged the union "to get to work and seize power in the universities," the congress passed the following resolution:
Since political conditions in the country have undergone no fundamental change, and since as a result academic freedom and autonomy are not secure, it follows that the Academic Union should adhere to its previous political platform. At the same time it should [refrain from endorsing platforms of specific parties] in order to secure the . . . collaboration and unity of its members belonging to various progressive groups.[21]
[19] Ibid.
[20] Tretii delegatskii s"ezd akademicheskovo soiuza (Saint Petersburg, 1906) (meeting of 14 January 1906).
[21] Ibid. (meeting of 17 January 1906).
As in 1905, therefore, the Academic Union reflected a profession unable to unite on any but the most general political platform. The political ambivalence of even the most radical wing of the professoriate was underscored by the debate on another thorny issue: the current relation between the Academic Union and the Union of Unions. The latter was still demanding a constituent assembly and a boycott of the upcoming Duma elections. Professors Brandt and Zernov led the fight for a resolution dissociating the Academic Union from the Union of Unions, reminding the delegates that the Academic Union had gone its own way in 1905 and questioning whether it had ever actually been part of the Union of Unions. Furthermore, they argued, a fundamental principle of the Academic Union, full autonomy for local chapters, ruled out specific political resolutions that presumed to speak for all members. Opponents countered with warnings against excessive professional cowardice. By the narrow margin of 39 to 35 the third congress voted that the Academic Union was not a member of the Union of Unions. The closeness of the vote reflected the growing isolation of the Academic Union. Many of the senior faculty who had played such a key role in the first and second congresses had by now lost interest. Had they been there, the margin would have been much wider.
The third congress was the last gasp of the Academic Union, and nothing came of its resolutions. The Russian professors were abandoning the hesitant steps toward corporate union begun in December 1904. Attempts to hold the Academic Union together after the third congress were unsuccessful. On 11 May 1906, Professor Brandt resigned as president of the Central Bureau and was replaced by Professor D. S. Zernov, who tried to convene a fourth congress in Moscow in August but failed.[22] In 1907 the decline of the Academic Union continued. The Central Bureau, located in Saint Petersburg, continued to raise money to help members of the academic community arrested by the police and reminded reluctant colleagues that "in the past two years political repression of academics has actually increased."[23] But contributions declined. At the end of 1907 the union held an unofficial conference in Saint Petersburg which attracted only twenty-three delegates, mainly from the junior faculty. The conference resolved that the Academic Union was needed more than ever, especially because of the government's crackdown on the academic profession. The problem, of course,
[22] GPB im. V. I. Lenina, f. 264, folder 41, ed. kh. 27 ("otchët tsentral'novo biuro akademicheskovo soiuza za 1906–07gg.").
[23] Ibid.
was convincing the senior faculty. The conference called on professors to "remember the academic resolution passed by the first congress of the Academic Union and, if the circumstances dictate, to be ready to resign collectively [in order to defend academic freedom]."[24] But by this time the Academic Union was clearly moribund.
The decline of the Academic Union underscored Vernadskii's characterization of the professors as "reluctant politicians" during the Revolution of 1905. There was a strong feeling of ambivalence about the Academic Union from its inception, reflecting a lingering belief that the status of independent scholar was incompatible with participation in an organization aiming for the attainment of collective goals.
Professors also realized that the revolution presented them with problems that other professional groups, such as doctors and lawyers, did not have to face. Unlike other professions, the professors depended on the survival of a highly visible and vulnerable institution, the university. Tactics that might be acceptable for other segments of the educated public were too risky for the academics. Preferring to cooperate with the government, many professors refused to admit to themselves that many of the gains they thought they had won at the beginning of 1906 had come about as a result of the pressure tactics of others. The autocracy had granted the October manifesto under the pressure of the general strike and had issued the 27 August Temporary Rules for tactical reasons—such as concern about student unrest—not out of any newfound respect for the professoriate. The consensus of the senior faculty was that only "revolution from above" could deliver reforms without the urban violence so dangerous to the universities. But reforms born of expediency rather than conviction could hardly provide a stable base for the renewal of the universities.
Trusting in the stability of the new constitutional structure, most professors now hoped that the university question would simply fade away. The Duma would replace university auditoriums as the nation's political forum, and all citizens, including students, would be free to vote and join political parties. Presumably the student movement would then disappear, and the universities might finally achieve what so many professors envied the German universities for—a safe harbor "above politics." As Professor Sergei Trubetskoi had put it, a year and a half before his death:
[24] Ibid.
If only the Russian public would realize that the university is the key to a better future . . . then the attacks on its integrity would be unthinkable. In Germany it is impossible to imagine any upheaval, either political or social, that would threaten the independence and inviolability of the universities. There both conservatives and reformers realize that the university is the ancient and holy Palladium of the nation, the guarantee of its success and strength, spiritual growth, health, and freedom. . . . But in Russia the public does not leave the university alone. The university cannot serve two masters. It can serve only its own purposes.[25]
Of course Trubetskoi lacked a crystal ball to peer into 1933. But his statement is important for its unspoken assumption, shared by many of his colleagues, that when a society reached a certain level of culture and sociopolitical development, its universities would attain a secure position protected by a solid consensus concerning their indispensability. The corollary was that the university question was a function of political backwardness and social immaturity. Now that Russia had entered on a "new era," its universities could move closer to the stability shared by their European counterparts.
Unfortunately for the professors, they could not make a unilateral decision to take the universities out of politics. The real issue was whether the government would cooperate. Past experience had shown the strong dependence of the government's university policy on its general political line; the liberalism of early 1906 might last no longer than the tsar's temporary loss of self-confidence. The professors might proclaim their status as servants of science, but what defense did they have if the government chose to reverse course and treat them as potential subversives? Was it naive to think that the status of the universities could be divorced from the ultimate issue of power?
Ironically, one of the professors' major gains turned out to be a potential snare. The new electoral law regarding the State Council gave the faculty councils and the Academy of Sciences the right to elect six delegates. This made the professors a handy target for the emerging extreme right, since the election results, according to Moscow's leading liberal daily, showed their loyalty to the Kadet party.[26] After Stolypin became
[25] Russkie Vedomosti, 12 January 1904.
[26] Russkie Vedomosti, 11 April 1906. In the first State Council, the academic community was represented by professors I. I. Borgman, A. S. Lappo-Danilevskii, V. O. Kliuchevskii, D. I. Bagalei. V. 1. Vernadskii, and A. A. Shakhmatov. Delegates to the second State Council included Vernadskii, E. N. Trubetskoi, A. A. Manuilov, M. M. Kovalevskii, and A. V. Vasil'ev. With the exception of Kovalevskii, who had been abroad at the time, all were signers of the "Declaration of the 342."
prime minister, the conviction that the professoriate was part and parcel of the "disloyal" Kadet party was to serve as a major justification for a crackdown against the gains of 1905.
Tolstoi Departs
Meanwhile, a month after the January conference, I. I. Tolstoi began to sense that the political winds were about to change direction and that his days were numbered. On 2 February 1906, he wrote to Witte that the tsar trusted neither of them. But he tried to enlist Witte's support for his projected education reforms, reminding him that "the struggle with the revolution not only consists of repression but also demands the formulation of a creative policy, especially in the field of education."[27] But Witte had other worries. While he sympathized with Tolstoi's proposals for university reform, he advised him that they had little chance of getting through the State Council.
Tolstoi also encountered heavy opposition on the Council of Ministers. On 20 January he asked the council to recommend to the tsar the abolition of all restrictions on the admission of Jewish students to the universities.[28] Witte supported the proposal, but P. N. Durnovo, the minister of the interior, was firmly opposed. He told Tolstoi that he was not, of course, an anti-Semite:
I know and respect most Jews. When they come and ask me for such favors as allowing them to live outside the Pale of Settlement or getting them into a school I usually help them. And you can do the same. But it would be a great mistake to solve the [Jewish question] in principle, especially now. For one thing, we still do not know what the policy of Duma will be. There is much more anti-Semitism in Russia than you think.[29]
Tolstoi ignored Durnovo's advice and pushed ahead. But although most of the ministers, including Witte, supported him, the tsar refused to abrogate the numerus clausus . "The Jewish question," he declared, "will be settled in its entirety only when I feel the time is ripe."[30]
Meanwhile Tolstoi moved on his own to liberalize the universities.
[27] V. P. Iakovlev, "Politika samoderzhaviia v universitetskom voprose, 1905–11," Kandidat dissertation, Leningrad State University, 1970, p. 61.
[28] GPB im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, f. 781. ed. kh. 568, l. 171. The tsar told Tolstoi that while he favored equal rights for Jews in theory, in practice he had to consider the problems of "protecting Russians."
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
On 14 December he issued a circular allowing the graduates of seminaries to attend universities. On 8 February 1906 he rescinded Bogolepov's order forcing high school graduates to attend the university closest to their educational district, and on 18 March he issued a circular that allowed graduates of nonclassical high schools (realuchilishcha ) and commercial high schools to enter the universities upon passing a Latin examination.[31] These circulars opened the doors of the universities to new classes of students. The effects were dramatic. The number of university students rose from 19,563 in 1904 to 35,329 in 1908. Russian universities had never been as accessible as they were during the years 1906–1908.
But the tenure of one of the most liberal ministers of education ever to serve in Imperial Russia came to an abrupt end when the tsar forced Witte's resignation as prime minister in April 1906. After a short interlude, Peter Stolypin became the new prime minister. Stolypin, a complex figure, was no reactionary. The new prime minister, himself a graduate of Saint Petersburg University, fought conservative calls for cutbacks in educational expenditures. A Russian patriot, Stolypin understood how important education was for the national welfare, but he was also determined to restore order and liquidate what was left of the revolutionary movement. The universities were state institutions, and Stolypin would demand that they show their loyalty to the state. He would have little patience with the student movement or overt opposition from the faculty councils.
Peter Von Kaufmann
The new minister of education, a holdover from the short-lived Goremykin cabinet that replaced Witte, was Peter M. von Kaufmann, a career bureaucrat with little experience in the field of education.[32] Von Kaufmann was a pragmatic conservative who did not let his personal biases stand in the way of education policy. As far as higher education was concerned, his chief priority was seeing the universities reopen in the fall of 1906 with a minimum of student unrest.
In a 30 July memorandum to the Council of Ministers, von Kaufmann recommended the immediate approval of some of the key recom-
[31] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 152, d. 195, ll. 97–110.
[32] A biographical sketch of von Kaufmann can be found in M. L. Levenson, Gosudarstvennyi Sovet (Petrograd, 1915), pp. 97–110.
mendations of the Tolstoi Conference: admission of women, abolition of the inspectorate! and recognition of the right of the faculty councils to implement an elective curriculum.
The memorandum was an interesting document. The new minister left no doubt that he was holding his nose as he endorsed some of the Tolstoi proposals. For example, he justified the recommendation about women by arguing that past restrictions had forced many young women to seek an education abroad, from whence they returned "corrupted both morally and politically." Although admitting women might be dangerous, von Kaufmann told his colleagues, "[the situation] could not get much worse anyway. . . . I could bar women but this would lead to disorders." He also recommended the abolition of the Jewish quota, for pragmatic reasons:
I am convinced that . . . Jewish youth are a bad influence on Christian students. They infect them with a spirit of materialism and cosmopolitanism. The Jews spread an attitude that ends justify any means. . . . Nevertheless, I do not think it useful to maintain [the restrictions]. . . . The harm that they cause is not so much the result of their religion as it is . . . of the characteristics of their nationality. The readiness with which a Jew will convert for utilitarian ends . . . shows the futility of the quota, which is based on religious criteria and merely gives the Jews an excuse for complaining of oppression.[33]
The best solution to the problem was the complete exclusion of "racial" Jews from all Russian educational institutions. But the government could do this, von Kaufmann explained, only if the Russian people demanded it, just as southern whites in the United States demanded the exclusion of blacks. Until that happened, however, political expediency dictated the abolition of the Jewish quota.
Except for agreeing to abolish the university inspectorate, the Council of Ministers failed to approve von Kaufmann's recommendations.[34] The council decided to leave the issues of Jews and women to the discretion of the minister of education, pending final action by the Duma on a new university statute. The council pointedly refrained from recommending that von Kaufmann introduce for Duma consideration the statute drafted by the Tolstoi Conference.
On 16 August von Kaufmann convened a conference of university rectors to assess the chances for an orderly resumption of classes in Sep-
[33] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 122 ("O vremennykh pravilakh po upravieniiu universitetami i rassmotrenie voprosov, vozbuzhdennykh professorskim soveshchaniem").
[34] TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 2, d. 515 ("Osobyi zhurnal soveta ministrov, 17ovo Avgusta, 1906g.").
tember.[35] The new minister was affable and conciliatory. Liberal rectors such as Moscow's Manuilov and Iur'ev's Passek argued that the best way to fight the student movement was for the government to adopt a policy of benign neglect, avoiding overreaction to student disorders. At the same time Passek and Manuilov urged that the government could ensure the decline of the student movement by promptly reconvening the Duma and guaranteeing freedom of assembly for the public. Conservative rectors such as Professor Tsitovich of Kiev University were more pessimistic and warned von Kaufmann that they might have to ask for police help in controlling the students.
The minister's political pragmatism led him to side with the liberal rectors. Student skhodki, he told the meeting, did not concern him unless the students gave outright aid and cover to revolutionary organizations. Unless outside elements were involved, the government would not hold the professoriate responsible for stopping student meetings. Furthermore, the government would warn local authorities not to send police or troops into the universities unless they informed the rectors first. Von Kaufmann also announced the lifting of existing restrictions on student dining halls. But he warned the rectors that "the coming year will decide the fate of higher education in Russia."
Back to Class: Changes in the Universities
After a long hiatus Russia's VUZy reopened in September 1906. Nobody could predict whether the student movement would again soon force the closing of the universities. The political situation was still tense. The Duma was prorogued while the government imposed emergency rule on most of the country. To counter a wave of terror against government officials, Stolypin responded with military courts and executions.
Conflict between students and professors began immediately after the reopening of classes and forced some of the universities to close for various periods. (The student movement will be considered in more detail below.) But there was no nationwide academic strike, no repetition of the chaos of 1905. Students protested over academic and local rather than political issues.
Legally the universities were in an uncertain situation. The 1884 Statute was still the legal basis of university life, but the 27 August 1905
[35] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 152, d. 176.
Rules, Tolstoi's circulars, and von Kaufmann's promises to the professors gave the faculty councils the impression that they could start making important changes. The professoriate took advantage of this situation by transforming curricular and admissions policy. This was especially true in the central universities. One of the most important curricular reforms was the transition to an elective system, the impact of which was greatest on the two faculties most severely affected by the 1884 Statute: law, and history and philology. By abolishing many of the onerous requirements in canon, police, and trade law, the legal faculty of Moscow University was able to give its students much more latitude.[36] They could now major in one of three subgroups: civil law, political science (gosudarstvennaia nauka ), or economics. Given the choice, most law students preferred civil law, a traditional career path, to more "relevant" cycles. As of 4 November 1906, 67 percent of the law students were specializing in civil law, a field considered to offer better career prospects; 26 percent specialized in economics; and only 7 percent in political science (most of the latter had also switched to civil law by the end of the academic year).[37]
The history and philology faculty also established new subgroups for student majors. George Vernadsky, who was a history student at Moscow University in 1906, recalled the marked improvement in the academic atmosphere and the establishment of closer ties between faculty and students.[38]
As before, most students entered the juridical faculty. Figures for the 1908–1909 academic year show a total of 36,195 students in the Russian universities. Of these, 15,416 were enrolled in a juridical faculty, 8,400 in medicine, 3,100 in history and philology, 5,239 in natural sciences, 3,740 in mathematics, and 120 in theology.[39] More students would have studied medicine, but the universities limited enrollment because of a lack of suitable facilities. Competition for the specialized technical institutes remained as severe as ever. In 1908 the mining institute received 1,480 applications for 200 places; the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute received 1,500 applications for 260 openings.
The Revolution of 1905 had another, even more important effect on
[36] M. Kuz'min, "Nasha predmetnaia sistema," Moskovskii Ezhenedel'nik, 12 May 1907.
[37] Ibid.
[38] George Vernadsky, "Iz vospominanii," Novyi Zhurnal, no. 100 (1970): 201.
[39] Ministerstvo Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, Otchët za 1908 god (Moscow, 1909). No field of study is given for the remaining 180 students.
the university curriculum: a great increase in the number of "scientific circles." These gave the universities an opportunity to explore almost any scientific problem or even controversial social or political question in an atmosphere of close faculty-student contact. Many of these circles functioned under the direction of some of the nation's leading scholars. Maxim Kovalevskii led a circle on constitutional and administrative law; Leonid Petrazhitskii sponsored a group on the philosophy of law. These circles met two to four times a month; a student would prepare an essay to be criticized by the circle as a whole.[40]
These scientific circles brought pressing political and social issues into the academic structure of the universities. The ongoing debate between populists and Marxists attracted a good deal of attention. In Saint Petersburg University, M. Tugan-Baranovskii directed a circle on political economy; students prepared papers on "The Marxist Theory of Value" and held a forum on "Agrarian Disorders in Russia." V. V. Sviatlovskii supervised a circle on labor economics that sponsored debate between populists and Marxists. The work here included tours of local factories.[41] Circles sprang up to discuss every conceivable subject. One group in Saint Petersburg University concentrated on mysticism; weekly discussion topics included the "purpose of life," "God," "woman," and "suicide."
The impact of the circles was not limited to the central universities. In Kiev, rector Tsitovich held a three-hour open debate on scientific socialism. After the debate, the rector took questions from the floor. The debate attracted more than a thousand students.[42] The government refrained from interfering with these groups, at least until Stolypin began to suspect some of them of providing fronts for revolutionary organizations (see below).
Another sign of a new era in the universities was the return of several prominent exiles, including Maxim Kovalevskii, Pavel Vinogradov, and Nikolai Kareev. Kovalevskii's first lecture in Saint Petersburg University filled the main auditorium. When he started to speak, the students' repeated applause forced him to stop.[43] At that time, Kovalevskii stood to
[40] Studenchestvo, no. 2 (1906).
[41] Studenchestvo, no. 1 (1906).
[42] Ibid. Studenchestvo, four issues of which appeared in Saint Petersburg in the fall of 1906, is a superb source on student life during this period. For Moscow's VUZy, an excellent counterpart is Studencheskaia Gazeta, sixteen issues of which appeared between 1906 and 1908.
[43] D. [A. Diakonov], 1905 i 1906gg. v Peterburgskom Universitete (Saint Petersburg, 1907), p. 105.
the right of the Kadet party and was an obvious example of the bourgeois professors against whom Iskra had tried to incite the students in 1905.
Meanwhile the Ministry of Education allowed the faculty councils a good deal of leeway. But there were clouds on the horizon during the 1906–1907 academic year. The 1884 Statute was technically valid; what the ministry granted by circulars, it could likewise take away. More ominously, von Kaufmann relied on the legal force of the statute to appoint politically reliable professors; a case in point was the appointment of Professor Merezhkovskii to the Kazan University medical faculty in October 1906.[44] The Kazan University Faculty Council had opposed Merezhkovskii, whereupon von Kaufmann told the professors that the 27 August Rules did not supersede the right of the minister of education, defined in Article 100 of the 1884 Charter, to appoint professors on his own. For the time being, the ministry did not interfere with the two major universities, but the provincial universities faced a far different situation. These universities were at the mercy of such local governors-general as Kiev's V. A. Sukhomlinov and Odessa's I. N. Tolmachev, who made wide and usually arbitrary use of the powers granted them under the extraordinary decrees. In short, the legal basis for the new policy of liberalization in higher education remained insecure, especially as the ministry made no move to introduce the Tolstoi Conference draft statute into the Duma.
Of course, higher-education policy ultimately depended on the overall policies of the government. Stolypin had already set the stage for a showdown with the professoriate by issuing a 14 September 1906 circular forbidding all "government employees" from joining "political parties, societies, and unions" that showed a "tendency to incite conflict between the government and the population."[45] In Stolypin's eyes, the Kadet party obviously belonged in this category after its celebrated appeal to the population not to pay taxes, as a protest of the dissolution of the first Duma. Two leading professors, L. Petrazhitskii and P. Novgorodtsev, signed the appeal and thus forfeited their professorial chairs.[46] Stolypin's growing distrust of the Kadets held ominous implications for the relations between the professoriate and the government. But the
[44] M. K. Korbut, Kazanskii gosudarstvennyi universitet imeni V. I. Ul'ianova-Lenina za 125 let, 1804/5–1929/30 (Kazan, 1930), vol. 2, p. 242.
[45] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 160, l. 9.
[46] They were, however, permitted to teach as privat-dozenty .
most immediate cause of strain was, as usual, sharp conflict between the government and the professors over how to handle the students.
The Student Movement
The salient features of the Russian student movement in 1906–1908 were failing confidence in the independent political potential of the studenchestvo, confusion about the proper role to be played by students in the newly "autonomous" universities, and a growing realization that the tremendous numerical expansion of the student body posed a fateful challenge to the whole concept of the studenchestvo as a distinct estate bound together by common interests, traditions, and principles.
When the universities and other VUZy reopened in September 1906 the students seemed, at least on the surface, to have lost little of the political radicalism of the previous fall. Judging by the elections to student government organizations, run on party lines, the studenchestvo still preferred Social Democracy—university-style—to the Kadet brand of liberalism. At Saint Petersburg University, for example, the Social Democratic group put twenty delegates on the Council of Elders, compared to four each from the Kadets and the Social Revolutionaries, three from the Polish Socialist party (PPS), and two each from the Trudoviki and nonparty students.[47]
Elections in Moscow University attracted a large turnout—more than 60 percent. The Social Democrats received 2,044 votes, the Kadets 1,462, and the Social Revolutionaries 1,258. The new Central University Organ included twelve Social Democrats, eight Kadets, and seven Social Revolutionaries.[48] Election results indicated greater radicalism among science majors and students from the younger courses. Results from several specialized technical institutes also showed strong leftist sentiment. The institute of civil engineers gave the Socialist bloc 256 votes to the Kadets' 132. In the forestry institute, the student body elected
[47] Studenchestvo, no. 3 (1906).
[48] Studencheskaia Gazeta, no. 3 (1906). Fragmentary figures permit some insight into the voting patterns of individual departments. From the history and philology faculty, the Social Democrats received 405 votes; the Kadets, 380; and the Social Revolutionaries, 243. Returns from third-, fourth-, and fifth-year medical students gave the Social Democrats 255 votes; the Kadets, 183; and the Social Revolutionaries, 157. First- and second-year medical students, whose returns were combined with students from the natural sciences faculty, gave the Social Democrats 681 votes; the Kadets, 353; and the Social Revolutionaries, 426. From the law faculty, 703 students supported the Social Democrats, 546 voted for the Kadets, and 435 for the Social Revolutionaries.
five Social Democrats, three Trudoviki, two Social Revolutionaries, and only one Kadet to the student government. The students of the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute put four Social Democrats, three Social Revolutionaries, and only two Kadets on the student council. In some places the Kadets made a better showing. In the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic, the student elections gave 508 votes to the Social Democrats, 466 to the Kadets, and 207 to the Social Revolutionaries. In the communications institute, with a 90 percent turnout, the Kadets won four seats on the student council, compared to three each for the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionaries, and the "academic" party.[49]
But, as in the fall of 1905, the strident rhetoric of the skhodki masked the students' fundamental ambivalence about committed activism and their political role. Addressing the inaugural skhodka of the 1906–1907 academic year, a leader of the Saint Petersburg University Council of Elders discussed the lessons of the Revolution of 1905 and its political implications for the student movement: "The revolutionary year has transformed the position of the students. The role of [the studenchestvo ] as a lonely political fighter, which we indeed had until last year, is now part of the past. . . . The revolutionary army has grown and, unlike in the past, it no longer needs constant 'initiatives.'"[50] But the workers and the peasants were now retreating from their violent confrontations with the autocracy, under the impact of fatigue, punitive expeditions, and martial law. As the popular movement ebbed, what should the students do? Should they take up their self-proclaimed role as "lonely fighters" once again, or should they use the revolutionary experience to rethink the place of the student movement?
The students were eager to maintain their verbal alliance with the revolutionary movement as long as this did not preclude their getting back to the classroom and making up for lost time. Boris Frommet, a veteran of the Saint Petersburg student movement, summed up the mood of the skhodki in September 1906:
[49] These figures come from various issues of Studenchestvo and Studencheskaia Gazeta . The Soviet historian A. E. Ivanov tabulated voting results from eight VUZy with a total enrollment of 25,677 students: the military medical institute, the mining institute, the womens' medical institute, the Tomsk Technological Institute, and Kiev, Tomsk, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg universities. The number of students voting was 12,996, about half the total. Social Democrats received 5,372 votes, Social Revolutionaries 3,278, Kadets 2,680, and Trudoviki 434; other lists received the remaining 1,232 votes ("Demokraticheskoe studenchestvo v revollutsii 1905–07gg.," Istoricheskie Zapiski, no. 107 [1982]: 209). This article must be used with some caution, especially because it tends to confuse "Social Democrat" with "Bolshevik" and fails to make any use of the contemporary student press, a source that would have acted as a corrective.
[50] Diakonov, 1905 i 1906gg., p. 73.
[The students] elected socialists to the Council of Elders and warmly applauded inflammatory speeches. . . . They liked the idea that the leaders of the revolutionary parties were using the universities as meeting places. On the one hand, this made it seem to them that they were in fact helping the cause of [political] liberation but, on the other hand, they themselves would be left free to study. The studenchestvo was happy that nobody kept it from studying . This was the clear impression of those who experienced the 1906–1907 academic year, attentively observed the dominant mood, and participated in both the revolutionary and the student movement.[51]
The ambivalent attitude toward the revolutionary movement affected even the relatively more committed students who joined the party factions, especially those of the Social Democrats. One speaker at a meeting of the Saint Petersburg University Social Democrats complained of their complete isolation from the regular Saint Petersburg City Social Democratic Committee. Some members of that faction called for a more active political stance; others saw the group's primary mission to be propagandizing the "Marxist viewpoint in all areas of university life." The faction, after some debate, adopted a resolution supporting the primacy of "cultural" over "political" work and elected a bureau composed of three Bolsheviks, three Mensheviks, and two Bundists. One observer of the student Social Democrats noted that their heroes were Struve and Tugan-Baranovskii, not Lenin and Plekhanov.[52]
It is not surprising, then, that the Russian Social Democratic party, hard-pressed to maintain its standing and organizations after the decline of the revolution, tried and failed to harness the nominally Social Democratic students for its own purposes. In the spring of 1907, after the arrest of the Social Democratic deputies to the second Duma, the Central Committee of the party called on the students to strike in support of the deputies and demonstrate against Stolypin. Student government organs in the city's VUZy, mostly dominated by Social Democrats, decided to ignore the order.[53]
[51] B. Frommet, Ocherki po istorii studenchestva v Rossii (Saint Petersburg, 1912), p. 85 (italics in original). The resolution passed at Saint Petersburg University by 1,203 to 141 was typical: "Whereas the strike as a form of passive protest no longer corresponds to the present needs of the revolution; whereas an open university, as the past year showed, plays an enormously positive role in the further development of the revolutionary struggle; whereas the interests of the general revolutionary movement demands the concentration of the studenchestvo in the large cities and its mobilization as one of the legions of revolutionary democracy: therefore, the general student skhodka resolves to open the university."
[52] Studencheskaia Rech', 15 November 1907; Alexei larmolovich, Smert' Prizrakov (Saint Petersburg, 1908), p. 9.
[53] Delo soveta studencheskikh predstavitelei Kievskovo Universiteta (Kiev, 1908), p. 9.
Within Saint Petersburg University itself the domination of the left in student politics started to erode during 1906–1907 and 1907–1908. In September 1907 the Kadets boosted their representation on the Council of Elders from four to twelve. (This new council consisted of eighteen Social Democrats, twelve Kadets, and eleven Social Revolutionaries.) According to a contemporary pamphlet, "student socialism was not quite Bernsteinism and not quite Kadetism, but to put it quite simply, bourgeois radicalism."[54]
The reappraisal of the potential political role of the studenchestvo can be followed in the student press, which became an important factor in Russian student life after the Revolution of 1905.[55] With so many new students, how could anyone still speak of the studenchestvo? One student newspaper wrote:
Students face a dilemma. The old methods of struggle have been rejected . . . but the struggle against the autocracy is not finished. . . . The tactic of the student strike has already been condemned. . . . We had enough unity to protest but not enough to follow through a struggle for the attainment of definite aims. . . . The sociopolitical differentiation of the studenchestvo is now obvious to everyone. . . . The loud slogan of the "united studenchestvo " as the "vanguard of the revolutionary democracy" figured, with impressive consistency, in all the resolutions of the old skhodki . But now it has become an obvious fiction.[56]
There were other signs of this "crisis of the studenchestvo ." In the fall of 1906 the Council of Elders of Saint Petersburg University rejected an appeal from the student governments of Iur'ev and Kharkov universities for united student action to protest the repressive policies of local authorities against students and professors at those universities. The Saint Petersburg Council of Elders replied that it did not believe in a "united student movement."[57]
The student movement also came in for increasing attack from the liberal camp, especially in A. S. Izgoev's article in the controversial collection of essays entitled Vekhi .[58] Izgoev attacked the students for their
[54] Iarmolovich, Smert' Prizrakov, p. 9.
[55] An excellent overview of the student press can be found in S. G. Svatikov, ed., Put' studenchestva (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 221–240.
[56] M. Podshibiakin, "Staroe i novoe v studenchestve," Studencheskaia Rech', 15 November 1907; on the same theme, see N. Tikhonovich, "Politicheskala differentsiatsiia studenchestva," Studenchestvo, no. 3 (1906).
[57] "Ocherednoi vopros," Studencheskaia Rech', 15 November 1907.
[58] A. S. Izgoev, "Ob intelligentnoi molodëzhi," Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (Moscow, 1910), pp. 97–124.
intolerance of dissenting viewpoints in their peer group; for their physical weakness in comparison to West European students; for their sexual promiscuity and tendency to masturbate; for their lack of family ties; and for their laziness and unwillingness to take their studies seriously. Izgoev's article approvingly quoted V. V. Rozanov's assertion that Russia's students resembled the old Zaporozhe Cossacks "with their unique customs and unique lifestyle."
In no other country, he complained, did the surrounding society so idealize a separate student subculture. But this subculture, Izgoev asserted, harmed the interests of the Russian nation by crippling the spirit of the professional classes. The average intelligent, "upon leaving this subculture, remains in limbo; he doesn't enter any other culture. . . . As long as he is in the university he feels that he has [an identity] but when he leaves he feels that he doesn't have anything." Izgoev thanked the students for their past services in the liberation movement but reminded them that now the Russian public had other priorities. A functioning Duma and political parties had now enabled adults to assume the students' former burden. Times had changed: "The Russian public demands [of the studenchestvo ] knowledge, willingness to work, and moral restraint."[59]
One of the most important developments of the post-revolutionary period was the Kadet-led attack on the authority of the skhodka and, by implication, on the whole notion of studenchestvo . The student Kadet factions claimed that the skhodka was an anachronistic holdover from days when universities were much smaller and students felt that they had more in common. The skhodka, they asserted, gave a distorted picture of student opinon and tended to favor extremists. Open voting and the chaotic atmosphere discouraged dissent and dissuaded moderate students from attending. They proposed replacing the skhodka with closed-ballot referenda to decide major matters such as strikes. Student government organs, elected on the basis of proportional representation, would handle routine matters. The Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries protested the Kadet proposals—and the skhodka emerged as a major issue in student politics during the 1906–1907 academic year.
The left argued that the skhodka was the most important tradition of
[59] In the same vein, see V. Levchenko, "Krizis universitetskoi zhizni," Russkaia Mysl', no. 5 (May 1908); E. N. Trubetskoi, "K nachalu uchebnovo goda," Moskovskii Ezhenedel'nik, no. 25 (1906). Levchenko attacked the student subculture for its conformity and intolerance of dissenting viewpoints. Trubetskoi asserted that student disorders had lost their point, except as a demonstration of the "mass suicide of the intelligentsia."
the studenchestvo, a reminder that it possessed a "general will" that found expression in direct democracy and that could unite the studenchestvo in immediate and collective action to defend its rights. The Kadets proclaimed that the "university should not be sacrificed for the agitational demands of the moment," but the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries warned that
the struggle over the skhodka will settle the question of whether the time has come for the studenchestvo to stop participating in the political life of the country and whether the battle for academic rights is finished. A rejection of the skhodka would mean a historic turning point in the history of the student movement. It would show that the professional interests of the students are fully satisfied by the existing [university autonomy] and that finally the professors' dream of Russia's students accepting a peaceful academic life has been realized.[60]
A showdown election on the issue at Moscow University gave the left 2,402 votes to the Kadets' 1,765.[61]
The "crisis of the studenchestvo " reflected in part the tension between the political and social changes brought about by the Revolution of 1905, and traditional concepts of student identity. But on a deeper level this period of reevaluation was less of a break with the history of the studenchestvo than appeared at first glance. The students' perennial insecurity about their place, political and social, had not changed. Just as the students of 1899 had envied the alleged moral superiority of the generation of the 1870s, so too did the post-1905 students exaggerate the political dedication and importance of the 1899–1902 student movement and bemoan their inability to live up to the allegedly higher standards of an earlier era.
But the post-1905 reevaluation did produce a new ideology of the student movement: "student professionalism," or the view that the best way for the student movement to fulfill its democratic obligations was to concentrate on the economic needs of the studenchestvo, even at the cost of foregoing direct political confrontation with the government on nonstudent issues. As has been shown, the Revolution of 1905 made higher education more accessible, but the large influx of new students aggravated the chronic competition for financial aid and part-time jobs.
[60] For a good exposition of the Kadet student viewpoint, see George Vernadsky, "Pis'mo iz Moskvy," Studencheskaia Rech', 15 November 1907; also Studencheskaia Gazeta, no. 11 (1906). The case for the skhodka can be followed in Rafael Vydrin, Osnovnye momenty studencheskovo dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1908), p. 63.
[61] Russkie Vedomosti, 10 March 1907.
Newly formed student cooperatives, along with the older zemliachestva, struggled to fill the gap.
Student mutual aid had, of course, long been a mainstay of Russian university life. What was new was the ideological ratification, by some leading student newspapers and commentators, of "student professionalism" as the raison d'être of the student movement. One observer noted that "[mutual aid] organizations existed before but the students are like Molière's bourgeois who spoke prose all his life and did not know it."[62]
There were some good reasons for the students to act like Molière's bourgeois, all of which were closely connected with the inner dynamics of the student movement. By its very nature, the studenchestvo was constantly in flux, especially during the hectic period following the revolution. The ideas of the student movement that had penetrated the secondary schools gave a somewhat romanticized picture of student life, focusing on the political role of the student movement and the radical nature of the student government organs.
In fact the changes in university affairs brought about by the revolution gave these formally radical bodies a new and important function: working with the professors to determine which students most deserved economic help. These organs of student government, dominated by Social Democrat and Social Revolutionary majorities, clung to the rhetorical slogan of "using the universities for the revolution when the time was ripe," but in fact they became vital intermediaries between the faculty councils and the student body on such issues as scholarships, control over the dining halls, and the status of various student organizations in the universities.[63] These bodies also tried, largely unsuccessfully, to regulate the chaotic student employment market by asking students seeking tutoring and other posts to register at central exchanges which would allocate available jobs according to need.
These changes reinforced a growing view that the student movement had at last found a purpose consistent with its character, constituency, and political strength. By 1908, students from various VUZy were
[62] Frommet, Ocherki po istorii studenchestva, p. 93.
[63] There are many references to the fact that the political student organizations actually devoted much of their time to serving students' professional interests. For a professor's account of the cooperation between the leftist-dominated student government and the Saint Petersburg University Faculty Council, see Ivan Grevs, "Stroitel'stvo i razrushenie v nashel vysshei shkole," Pravo, nos. 29, 31 (1908). For an account of the activities of the Kiev University student government, see the protocol of the trial of its leading members in 1908 (Delo soveta studencheskikh, pp. 20–42, 83–86).
organizing conferences to discuss this new "student professionalism."[64] Clearly, traditional zemliachestva and new types of mutual aid societies were showing what many observers considered to be surprising vitality. A major conference of this type met in Saint Petersburg in March 1908 to discuss the problems of the zemliachestva and the new student credit associations.[65]
During the 1907–1908 academic year there were 134 zemliachestva in Saint Petersburg University alone. Of these, 62 reported a combined membership of 1,581 students. Forty-three of these zemliachestva reported giving out more than 20,000 rubles in aid; this compared with 110,000 rubles in aid and scholarships from the university and 14,000 rubles from the Society to Aid Needy Students. In Moscow University in 1909 there were 77 mutual help organizations, mostly zemliachestva .
As was the case in the pre-1905 period, the zemliachestva received 60 to 90 percent of their income from balls and other charitable affairs organized in the provinces. They thus continued to constitute a major link between the studenchestvo and provincial Russian society. But some observers, especially student newspapers such as Studencbeskii Mir and Golos Studenchestva, began to point out the defects of the zemliachestva . Too many students, they said, failed to pay back loans; zemliachestva depended too much on charity and did too little to develop self-reliance.[66] They called for the institution of new kinds of student organizations.
Indeed, the post-1905 period saw the development of student credit associations and consumer cooperatives. They differed from the zemliachestva in that they were not based on the members' common origin in a particular locality but, rather, were open to all students in the particular university town. Some of these organizations became quite large. By 1912, the credit union of the Moscow University juridical faculty operated enterprises grossing over 50,000 rubles a year.[67] All these organizations faced harassment by local authorities.[68]
The advocacy of student professionalism opened a new debate. Some
[64] The best single account of "student professionalism" is P. Trofimov, "Itogi i perspektivy studencheskovo ekonomicheskovo dvizheniia: 1905–1915," in Svatikov, ed., Put' studenchestva, pp. 168–180.
[65] Trudy soveshchaniia predstavitelei studencheskikh ekonomicheskikh organizatsii o nuzhdakh studenchestva (Saint Petersburg, 1908).
[66] In 1909, for example, the Perm zemliachestvo of Saint Petersburg University had 267 debtors owing 12,124 rubles in bad debts.
[67] Frommet, Ocherki po istorii studenchestva, p. 98.
[68] If they met off the premises of the VUZ all student organizations had to register, to fulfill the requirements of the 4 March 1906 Rules on Organizations and Meetings.
leftists charged that the growing interest in corporate concerns was a betrayal of the student traditions of self-sacrifice and political involvement. The students were aping the general drift of the intelligentsia from altrustic concern for the poor toward bourgeois selfishness; the "crisis of the studenchestvo " replicated the "crisis of the intelligentsia" in miniature. Indeed, critics charged, Russian students were finally taking the bourgeois road of their post-1848 German counterparts.
Leading organs of the new student press, especially Studencheskii Mir and Golos Studenchestva, rose to the defense of the new ideology. Rafael Vydrin, the editor of Golos Studenchestva, attacked the view that student professionalism betrayed older traditions. "At the present time," he wrote, "the studenchestvo is as far away from the naive academism of the 1860–1890 period as it is from the political messianism of 1900–1905." The autocracy had punctured the "academic illusions" that the student movement could obtain academic and corporate reforms outside the context of more general political reform. But the Revolution of 1905 showed that student demonstrations had little independent political force: "Student professionalism combines two stages of the student movement: the academic and the soclopolitical [obshchestvennyi ]. Any struggle for a free school [cannot be separated from] the struggle for a free state and [vice versa]."[69] The social composition of the studenchestvo guaranteed that the student movement, even while fighting for the attainment of student corporate interests, would not abandon the wider goal of a democratic Russia:
Three factors make student professionalism a synthesis of the political and academic movements: the lack of firm constitutional guarantees in the country, the democratic composition of the student body, and the rich experience of the student professional movement. . . . The experience of the student movement, which has worked out the methods of struggle for the democratization of higher education, should guarantee that the haute bourgeoisie will not come to dominate higher education, as was the case in the West after the student disturbances of 1848.[70]
Vydrin's basic point, that student professionalism continued rather than violated the students' traditional view of themselves as "adversaries of the system," was corroborated by the results of the various elections during this period as well as by the findings of such surveys as the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute census conducted during
[69] Golos Studenchestva, 9 December 1910.
[70] Ibid.
the 1908–1909 academic year.[71] The census showed the continued strength of leftist sympathies but also demonstrated that incoming students were somewhat more moderate than their older colleagues. In response to the question "With which of the following political parties are you most sympathetic?" 25.3 percent answered that they sympathized with the Social Democrats, 20.7 percent favored the Kadets, 20.6 percent professed no party sympathies, 12.4 percent supported the Social Revolutionaries, and 10 percent favored an undefined "left." The anarchists, the Octobrists, the "moderate right," the Union of the Russian People, and other minor parties drew the support of 3 percent, 2.3 percent, 1.9 percent, 1 percent, and 2 percent, respectively. The census also showed some correlation between political preference and both financial status and anti-Semitism. Students who said that they supported the Social Democrats or the Social Revolutionaries indicated that they lived on an average budget of 33 rubles a month, while Kadets spent 40 rubles a month, and Octobrists, 44. Whereas 84.5 percent of the Social Democrats and 74.2 percent of the Social Revolutionaries favored equal rights for the Jews, barely half of the Kadets, one-third of the nonpartisan students, and only 8.7 percent of the Octobrists did so.
Despite the students' political preferences, the overwhelming majority, when asked about their reading habits, preferred fiction to social science and philosophy. Responding to the question "Which of the following do you ordinarily read?" 80.3 percent indicated fiction, 39.1 percent the technical sciences, 38 percent the social sciences, and 30 percent philosophy. Figures for students preferring Social Democracy still showed that 82 percent ordinarily read fiction, only 29 percent read the technical sciences, 38 percent the social sciences, and 30 percent philosophy. However, 40 percent of the Kadet students, 48 percent of the Octobrists, 53 percent of the moderate right students, and 51 percent of the nonpartisan students indicated that they read in the technical sciences. Given the fact that the census was conducted in a technical institute, this may imply some correlation between political moderation and certainty about career plans.
Indeed, only 39.6 percent of the students said that they had definitely
[71] M. V. Bernadskii, ed., K kharakteristike sovremennovo studenchestva (Saint Petersburg, 1910). The response rate to this census exceeded 50 percent: 1,021 students submitted completed questionnaires. In 1906 the student government at the institute included six Social Democrats, four Kadets, and three Social Revolutionaries. Corresponding figures for 1908 were four Social Democrats, three Kadets, three Social Revolutionaries, one "Socialist," and two nonparty students.
decided on a technical career (33 percent of the Social Democrats, 44.4 percent of the Kadets, and more than half of the rightist students). A comparison of this uncertainty with a 1903 census taken at the same institute is instructive. In 1903, 27 percent of the first-year students indicated that they were unhappy with their course of studies, and this jumped to 45 percent for fourth-year students and 68 percent for fifth-year students. In view of the fact that schools such as the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute offered better and more highly paid employment opportunities than did the universities, at least for first jobs, and were more selective in their admissions policy, the assumption is warranted that this high level of uncertainty about career prospects and dissatisfaction with the curriculum was at least as strong in the universities.
The census also showed that the tradition of the student skhodka remained strong at the institute, although less so than in the past, according to the census's editor. Of the students, 70.2 percent indicated that they usually attended skhodki: 81.5 percent of the Social Democrats, 87.6 percent of the Social Revolutionaries, 62.2 percent of the Kadets, 52 percent of the Octobrists, and 53 percent of the nonpartisan students.
The census gained wide acceptance in both the student and the general press as a reliable indicator of student moods. The editor's assertion that the students at the technological institute reflected the general mood and social physiognomy of the studenchestvo as a whole provoked no argument. The editor concluded that despite important changes in the VUZy since 1905, "the general mood of the studenchestvo has not changed." The studenchestvo still reflected Russia's middle classes, uneasily perched between the masses and the government. "Despite the great diversity of social ideals and the conflict of various political views, one fact basically remains: [Russian society and the studenchestvo ] have in essence [refused to accept] Stolypin's policy of 'normalization.'"[72]
If few students were willing to jeopardize their lives by engaging in direct revolutionary action, the studenchestvo as a whole had little use for any party to the right of the Kadets. In short, student radicalism remained; what changed was its political context.
Stolypin and the Students
Although the students were less inclined than ever to protest over political issues, the development of student professionalism portended
[72] Bernadskii, K kharakteristike sovremennovo studenchestva, p. viii.
sharp conflicts between the students and the government if the latter tried to erase the gains of the Revolution of 1905. A vital determinant of government education policy after 1905 was to be Prime Minister Stolypin's determination to crush the student movement. Seemingly unaware of the preoccupation of the student movement with internal concerns, Stolypin framed his policies on the assumption that the student movement was giving aid and comfort to the revolutionary movement and hindered the restoration of the government's authority.
From the beginning of the 1906–1907 academic year, Stolypin and the Ministry of the Interior took an intense interest in what was going on in the institutions of higher education. They were especially concerned about continued use of university premises for secret meetings by nonstudents and revolutionary organizations, as well as about frequent skhodki, which disrupted the normal functioning of classes.
During the first few months of the academic year there were scattered sharp conflicts between the student government organs and the faculty councils. The most important of these conflicts took place in Moscow University, which closed for brief periods in October and December over disputes between the Central University Organ and the faculty council concerning the time and place of skhodki and the role of the CUO in university governance.[73] Problems arose in Kazan and Kharkov universities over student boycotts of rightist professors and in Kiev over the decision of the faculty council to reintroduce an equivalent of the old inspectorate. Much of the tension between students and professors grew out of economic issues. Many students, for example, needed certificates of good standing from the faculty councils in order to get police permission to remain in the university towns, especially Moscow and Saint Petersburg. But the faculty councils refused to issue these certificates unless the students had paid all their outstanding bills. Martial law in the university towns complicated an already touchy situation.
To an increasing extent, government policy toward the student movement became intertwined with Stolypin's general course of suppression of the revolutionary movement in the country. Almost immediately Stolypin showed that he took seriously the bombastic skhodki resolutions about "using the universities in the interests of the revolution when the time is ripe." The prime minister quickly began bombarding von Kaufmann with letters reiterating his concern and urging firm ac-
[73] Studencheskaia Gazeta wrote that these conflicts underscored the "alienation of the student movement from the liberal camp."
tion by the Ministry of Education. At the beginning of October, Stolypin complained to von Kaufmann that although most students were willing to get down to serious academic work, "the revolutionary minority is still in charge. . . . Students at Saint Petersburg University are so used to being free to hold meetings and discussions in the university that the latter has become a 'Republic in the Capital of the Autocracy.'" Stolypin hailed the decision by the Kiev governor-general to use troops to break up a skhodka that nonstudents were suspected of attending and pointed out to the minister of education that this had had a "sobering effect on students and teachers."[74]
In addition to Stolypin's pressure on von Kaufmann, the local governors kept threatening to send troops into the universities if the rectors did not prevent disorders; these threats in turn made professors especially sensitive to the timing and location of skhodki and created additional friction between the faculty councils and the student government organs. Relations between the local authorities and the universities were especially poor in Moscow and Odessa and served to remind the faculty councils of the increasingly parlous position of the 27 August Rules—or at least of their interpretation of them.
On 16 October, Glagolev, the temporary governor-general of Odessa, told professor Zanchevskii, the rector of Odessa University, that the 27 August Rules "did not give the university the right of extraterritoriality." Stolypin supported Glagolev and told von Kaufmann to make sure that the faculty council cooperated with the Odessa administration. A. A. Makarov, the assistant minister of the interior, told von Kaufmann that the university was in the hands of a "group of revolutionary students acting in league with the junior faculty."[75] For good measure he complained that the university was the scene of frequent sexual orgies.
Stolypin also rejected Zanchevskii's petition to permit Professor E. N. Shchepkin, a leading member of the Academic Union, to return to Odessa. Shchepkin had been expelled by the local administration at the beginning of 1906, and his difficulties illustrated the extent to which the situation of the provincial universities was adversely affected by the broad powers granted to local administrations under the provisions of
[74] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 213, l. 48. On continued use of VUZy premises by outsiders and revolutionary organizations, see Ivan Korel', "Peterburgskii Universitet v 1905 godu," Leningradskii Universitet, 21 January 1939; A. E. Ivanov, "Demokraticheskoe studenchestvo," p. 210.
[75] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 267, l. 111.
martial law. Apparently the safeguards of the 27 August Rules were already a dead letter in some of the provinces. When Odessa and Iur'ev universities were searched by troops in the spring of 1906, neither the Ministry of Education nor the local rector was informed beforehand. Furthermore, continuing efforts to secure the return of Kharkov University's Professor Gredeskul, sentenced to four years of exile in December 1905, were unsuccessful.[76]
Tensions between the local authorities and the university also rose in Moscow, where A. A. Reinbot, the Moscow governor-general, warned rector Manuilov to stop skhodki at all costs—including calling in troops to restore order. Worried by this implied threat, the faculty asked for an urgent meeting with Stolypin on 3 October. Stolypin promised the faculty delegation that the local authorities would leave the university alone as long as the professors agreed to keep outsiders away from the university premises. But the guarantees did not improve matters.[77] On 13 December 1906, governor-general Reinbot told rector Manuilov that he had no right to negotiate with the student Central University Organ and demanded that Manuilov give him a list of its members. Manuilov refused, and the Moscow authorities directed their fire at von Kaufmann, asking him in a sharply worded note whether it was the policy of the Ministry of Education to tolerate "clearly revolutionary organizations" (meaning the CUO) in the universities.[78]
On 2 April 1907, von Kaufmann, under growing pressure from the government, summoned the nine university rectors to a high-level meeting to discuss the student movement and student organizations. The minister opened the conference by stating that he was aware that most students had settled down to hard work during the current academic year. But von Kaufmann warned the rectors to expect an imminent change in government university policy, especially because they seemed incapable of expelling "revolutionary organizations" from the universities.
I do not tremble when I read the resolutions of the . . . skhodki in the newspapers; I do not get worried when students boastingly call themselves Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries. . . . But I am really distressed when I hear that the revolutionary organizations have penetrated the institutions of
[76] On the exile of Gredeskul, a prominent member of the Academic Union and the Kadet party, see TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 164. The then minister of the interior, P. N. Durnovo, rejected I. I. Tolstoi's appeal to free Gredeskul. Gredeskul, according to Durnovo, was a "prominent Social Democrat" and a ringleader of the revolutionary movement.
[77] For the correspondence between Reinbot and rector Manuilov concerning the situation in Moscow University from 1906 to 1908, see GPB im. V. I. Lenina, f. 158, folder 3.
[78] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 553, l. 7.
higher education. I am distressed when I learn that these groups, few in number, hold in terror the majority that wants to study.[79]
Von Kaufmann then warned the rectors that they bore a major share of the blame, especially because they tended to misinterpret the 27 August 1905 Rules.
The rectors' replies showed an interpretation of the student movement radically different from that held by Stolypin. Professor I.I. Borgman of Saint Petersburg University declared that the Council of Elders at the university posed no problem, since it pursued academic and professional rather than political goals. Moscow's Manuilov told the conference that the Central University Organ "seemed political on the surface but really had goals of a fundamentally academic and corporate character—more specifically, the attainment of an equal role for students in the running of the university." Manuilov warned against a repressive policy. The student movement was in the process of shifting away from politics toward concern with corporate issues; in time, Manuilov continued, the zemliachestva and the credit unions would displace the influence of such central student government organs as the CUO. The right course was to sit and wait, not overreact. With the exception of Kiev's Tsitovich, the provincial rectors backed Borgman and Manuilov.[80]
The conference also discussed such matters as allocation of financial aid, rules governing student skhodki, and the question of auditors. Both von Kaufmann and Assistant Minister of the Interior Makarov, Stolypin's deputy attending the 7 April session, told the rectors that the government was unhappy about several issues in the universities. Von Kaufmann warned that the "influx of auditors was an anomaly which should cease." He also announced that the ministry was about to draft new rules governing the professors' disciplinary court. Several rectors rejoined that student discipline was the business of the faculty, not the ministry. The rectors also opposed Makarov's and von Kaufmann's suggestion that student skhodki be outlawed.
New Rules
A few weeks later the Council of Ministers met and decided to show the professors "where the rights granted by the ukase of 27 August
[79] TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 3, d. 800, ll. 56–87.
[80] lur'ev's rector Passek described with some exaggeration the growing political moderation of the students: "The typical first-year student is a Social Revolutionary. The second-year student is a Social Democrat. The third-year student is a Kadet, and the fourth-year student already stands to the right of the Kadets" (TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 3, d. 800, 1. 61).
1905 end and where the direct abuse of these rights begins."[81] According to the council, the 27 August Rules did no more than allow the faculty councils to elect rectors and deacons to assume jurisdiction over internal academic affairs. The professors had abused their mandate by using the cover of autonomy to condone anti-government student organizations. Many professors had become "carried away" during the recent revolution (smuta ) and allowed student organizations to tell them what to do.
In a sweeping attempt to suppress the student movement, the Council of Ministers issued new guidelines on student organizations, the 11 June 1907 Rules. The new rules banned university or institutionwide student government organizations and barred faculty councils from contact with such organizations. They allowed only those student meetings that had a clearly "academic character," and they gave the police the right to attend meetings and stop them when they strayed from their stated agenda. All student meetings required the approval of the rector, who had to record his decision and the subject of the proposed meeting in a book that was open to police inspection. Students could attend meetings only at their own institution. Furthermore, the 11 June Rules affected all VUZy, not just those associated with the Ministry of Education. The council warned the professors to expect further "clarifications" of the 27 August Rules "with a view toward inculcating in [the faculty] a consciousness of the responsibilities they bear for the maintenance of the orderly course of academic life."[82]
The Russian public linked the new rules to Stolypin's coup d'état of 3 June, which unilaterally changed the Duma electoral law to strengthen the influence of the landowners. The new university action appeared to be an integral part of a wider policy aimed at crippling potential opposition and forging a firmer base of support for the regime. In any event, it appeared as if Stolypin had succeeded in his gamble. The 3 June bombshell failed to spark significant protest, and nobody expected any major student reaction to the 11 June Rules. Besides, it was summer vacation.
Only one party, the Social Revolutionaries, tried to goad the students into massive protest.[83] But the returning students turned a deaf ear to
[81] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 122, ll. 20–26 ("Osobyi zhurnal Soveta Ministrov po proektu pravil o studencheskikh organizatsiiakh i ob ustroistve sobranii v stenakh VUZov").
[82] Ibid.
[83] Znamia Truda, 30 August 1907. In pleading with the students to take to the streets in September, the Social Revolutionaries emphasized that, unlike the Marxists, they had never seen the students only as a "reservoir whose sole value was to furnish potential recruits for the party." Instead they reiterated their respect and appreciation for the student movement as an independent force.
the party's appeal. A powerful deterrent to united student protest, apart from the realization that they would be acting alone and with scant hope of success, was the discovery of a large loophole in the 11 June Rules. The rules barred all student organizations based on universitywide vote but said nothing about forbidding the faculty councils to deal with student organizations elected by faculty or course. Keeping this in mind, the various student skhodki in September 1907 voted against a national student protest strike. The leftist factions, of course, responded to this attitude with loud disapproval. Social Revolutionary orators accused the students at Moscow University of "profound political apathy." A skhodka called for 12 September fell five hundred students short of the two thousand required to make its resolutions binding on the student body.[84] At Saint Petersburg University a coalition of Mensheviks and Kadets derailed a Social Revolutionary- and Bolshevik-sponsored strike resolution. The situation was no different at other VUZy . The Odessa Studencheskii Golos complained of the studenchestvo 's spirit of "meek submission."[85]
There was more willingness to support individual students who were arrested, but these short protest strikes remained localized. On 9 October Moscow University students struck for one day to protest the execution of two students from the Moscow Technological Institute on charges of terrorism. There were other short strikes, for similar reasons, in the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, the Tomsk Technological Institute, and Iur'ev University.[86]
Trouble soon came from another direction—the professors' disciplinary court of Kiev University, now firmly in conservative hands. As has been stated above, the provincial universities were in a much worse position than their central counterparts, especially when the local right enjoyed close contacts with the police and military government authorities. At the end of October the Kiev branch of the Union of the Russian People charged that the students were planning a commemoration of Balmashev's 3 November 1902 execution. On 1 November the police arrested the twenty-six members of the Kiev University Council of Student Representatives. Student protesters then marched into the university and began disrupting classes. On 5 November the police surrounded the
[84] GPB im. V. I. Lenina, f. 158, folder 3, ed. kh. 42.
[85] Studencheskii Golos, no. 1 (1907).
[86] Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 4 (1908).
building and took down the names of all suspected demonstrators.[87] The faculty council then voted to close the university until 12 November.
An angry Stolypin now intervened, lambasting the professors for their decision to close the university instead of solving the problem by a blanket expulsion of all suspected troublemakers.[88] Closed universities, he argued, reflected poorly on the government and raised doubts about its ability to maintain control.
The faculty council took Stolypin at his word. When classes resumed and the students called a new skhodka on 17 November to discuss the fate of their arrested comrades, police surrounded the meeting and transmitted the names of all the participants to the professors' disciplinary court. The court then voted to suspend 719 students for one year, an unusually severe punishment.
The Kiev affair touched off short strikes and skhodki in other VUZy and led to a nationwide conference to discuss the political situation of the studenchestvo .[89] The conference, which met in Saint Petersburg on 26 and 27 January 1908, attracted more than seventy delegates from various VUZy, including thirty-four Social Democrats, twenty-four Social Revolutionaries, and twelve Kadets. The delegates' reports gave a revealing picture of the student movement at various institutions of higher education, but the meeting could not reach consensus on what tactics the studenchestvo should pursue on a national scale. The Social Revolutionaries wanted an activist policy, arguing that students should fan local conflicts with professors and police in order to set off a national academic strike. But the Social Democratic delegates repeated the familiar argument that the era of independent student action was gone: the students had to wait for the workers. The Kadets also opposed a strike. They recognized the seriousness of Stolypin's attack on the gains of 1905 but warned that the students were too isolated to make any effective protest. Unable to agree on a plan, the conference dispersed, after calling for another meeting in September.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Kiev affair, the right escalated its attacks on von Kaufmann (and, by implication, Stolypin), accusing the minister of laxity in dealing with the threatening student movement. The leading editorial writer of the influential Novoe Vremia, M. O. Men'shikov, emerged as von Kaufmann's most dangerous critic. Men'shi-
[87] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 192.
[88] TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 1, d. 731.
[89] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159, l. 5.
kov even attacked the mass suspension from Kiev University, on the grounds that the students, free to go elsewhere, would start trouble in other universities and thus "give the Kadets [sic ] exactly what they wanted."[90] The criticism hit home. A nervous Stolypin told von Kaufmann to make sure that the suspended students were not admitted to other universities.[91] The prime minister also forwarded to von Kaufmann the barrage of protest telegrams from the Union of the Russian People, charging professors and students at various universities with treason, terrorism, and other offenses.[92]
By now the university question had joined anti-Semitism as a staple of right-wing politics. Stolypin worried about this new threat to his flanks. After all, the tsar wore the lapel pin of the Union of the Russian People, an organization that cordially detested the prime minister for his efforts to work with the Duma. Furthermore, Stolypin's attempt to curtail the power of the aristocracy in local government won him few friends in the influential Council of the United Nobility. Another problem for Stolypin was the conservative group in the State Council, headed by P. N. Durnovo and V. F. Trepov.[93] With so many enemies after his political hide, Stolypin could not afford "disorders" in the VUZy and grew more impatient with the Ministry of Education.
At year's end, leading professors were worried about the new crusade against the universities and how it would affect Stolypin's policies. V. I. Vernadskii, in a year-end review in Rech', warned his colleagues that although the historic threat from the revolutionary movement had ebbed, the universities faced a dangerous challenge from the right. The big question now, Vernadskii emphasized, was whether the government would resist this pressure or would cave in and follow the lead of the Union of the Russian People.[94]
A. N. Schwartz
Stolypin did not make Vernadskii wait long for his answer. In a New Year's surprise, Stolypin fired von Kaufmann and replaced him with A. N. Schwartz, a former classics professor at Moscow University who
[90] Quoted in Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 4 (1908).
[91] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 84, l. 21.
[92] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 213; TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159.
[93] On Stolypin's political position, see Roberta Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia (Princeton, 1982).
[94] Rech', 1 January 1908.
had subsequently served as the curator of the Riga and the Warsaw educational districts, where he earned a reputation as a hard-nosed Russifier and conservative.[95]
Stolypin complained to Schwartz that von Kaufmann had been ineffectual in suppressing the student movement and keeping order in the VUZy . The former minister had shifted the burden of keeping discipline to the local authorities, thus "contradicting a basic principle of the 27 August Rules."[96] Clearly Stolypin saw the rules not as a guarantor of university autonomy but, rather, as a procedural order charging the professors rather than the police with the major responsibility for university discipline. Furthermore, von Kaufmann had been too lax with the professors. By letting them suspend classes rather than fight student disorders with mass expulsions, von Kaufmann had compromised the prestige of the government and fostered the impression that it was too weak to keep order. If the professors did not meet their responsibilities, Stolypin wrote to his new minister, they should be fired. Many of them, Stolypin complained, were poor servants of a state "which secures their material existence and gives them career privileges." Stolypin summarized his charge to Schwartz in two words: "Be hard!"[97]
On 7 March 1908, Stolypin asked Schwartz to outline how the Ministry of Education could tailor its policies to a "general plan of defending the state."[98] In response, Schwartz submitted a ten-point proposal that represented a sharp break with Tolstoi's liberalism and von Kaufmann's cautious pragmatism. Schwartz emphasized Russification—the ministry would play a crucial role in "exerting an assimilatory influence on the non-Russian population." Schwartz promised to abandon the "mistaken" policy of granting too many concessions to the non-Russian peoples. He also told Stolypin that the ministry favored a strict quota for Jewish enrollment at all levels of education and, of course, a large increase in its own budget.[99]
[95] Von Kaufmann had expected to stay on, and the firing took him by surprise. Assistant Minister Gerasimov, a liberal appointee of Tolstoi's and a specialist in higher-education matters, followed von Kaufmann into retirement (Russkie Vedomosti, 1 January 1908). Schwartz himself, in a letter to a friend (which the police intercepted), emphasized that he tried to dissuade Stolypin from appointing him. See "Iz otchëta o perliustratsii del politsiei za 1908 god," Krasnyi Arkhiv, no. 28 (1928).
[96] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 192, l. 79.
[97] Ibid.
[98] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 196, d. 198.
[99] Other aspects of Schwartz's plan included giving special attention to building schools in the Russian areas of the empire ("where most supporters of the state are concentrated") and sharp curbs on the expansion of private education.
Shortly thereafter, the new minister of education submitted to the Council of Ministers a remarkable memorandum on higher-education policy. The crux of Schwartz's argument to the council was that the students and much of the professoriate represented a real danger to the security of the state; the relative laxity of the post-1905 period had to give way to stricter controls.[100]
Schwartz warned his colleagues not to underestimate the students; far from being harmless, they were in fact "the only organized force able to keep up systematic mass disorders in order to maintain pressure on the government." But the students needed and received the help of the professoriate. Until 1905 the professors had been content to make "timid and diffuse statements." But things had changed with the Academic Union. Now the professors saw the universities as playing a major role in politics and proceeded to undermine the government by a willful distortion of the 27 August Rules, which the professors took as license to establish a "state within a state." One flagrant example, Schwartz argued, was the deliberations and draft statute of the 1906 Tolstoi Conference.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the memorandum was the charge that the professoriate was consciously collaborating with the revolutionary movement in a plan to topple the government. Schwartz "proved" this charge by questioning the motives of many faculty councils in admitting Jews and women and establishing an elective curriculum:
We should not assume that the faculty councils did all these things because of inexperience . . . without the presence of an ulterior motive. The jamming of the universities with all kinds of students, including many completely unprepared for higher study, was a conscious step aimed at concentrating large numbers of young intelligenty in the large urban centers for the purpose of political indoctrination and the eventual use of this organized mass in bringing about the revolution. Such is the plan of the main revolutionary staff and it is being executed in all its details by the autonomous faculty councils.
Why did the professors institute the elective curriculum, if not to allow students to devote more time to revolutionary activities? Another danger was the professors' tolerance of the zemliachestva and other student "economic" organizations which in fact also pursued political ends.
[100] The text of the memorandum is found in TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, ed. kh. 137, l. 11 ("Zapiska ot imem Ministra Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia A. N. Shvartsa o merakh bor'by s volneniiami studentov i politicheskimi partiiami v vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenitakh posle 1907ovo goda").
This was all part of a plan to prepare the students for socialism. "All of these organizations . . . and the skhodka . . . prepare in miniature the [aspects] of the social system in Russia that the revolutionary parties seek."
Thus while political hotheads in the universities were decrying "student professionalism" as a betrayal of the revolutionary traditions of the student movement, and shortly after a student conference had decided that the studenchestvo was too isolated and disorganized to take united action, the new minister of education, ignoring all indications to the contrary, depicted the student movement as a dangerous threat to the state. The now moribund Academic Union, whose history showed how difficult it was for the professoriate as a body to collaborate with the Union of Unions, not to mention the revolutionary parties, became living proof that the professors were collaborating with the left. The Tolstoi Conference, which signaled the end of the Academic Union as an important force and the development of a modus vivendi between the senior professoriate and the Ministry of Education, was transformed by Schwartz into a radical gathering dominated by the Academic Union. Schwartz concluded with three specific recommendations: the drawing up of a new university statute, a clear definition of the 27 August Rules "to preclude [their] arbitrary interpretation by the professoriate," and the "complete expulsion of student organizations from the confines of institutions of higher education."
Schwartz's memorandum pleased Stolypin, who forwarded it to Gurliand, editor of the semi-official Rossiia, along with instructions to begin a press campaign against the professoriate and mobilize support for the government's crackdown on the universities. To remove all doubts, Stolypin emphasized that "this is the policy not just of the Ministry of Education but of the government as a whole."[101] It was time, the prime minister warned, to show the professors who was boss. Basically, most students were political innocents who had fallen under the harmful influence of the professoriate. Now the professors and the VUZy would return to normal: "We must root politics [out of the universities] and replace it with legality [zakonnost' ]. . . . The government must be firm. It cannot ignore the recent lessons taught us by the Academic Union and the student organizations. No barrage of protests can force the government to allow petty political dabblers [polikanstvuiushchie ]—left-wing professors—to mold students [as they wish]."[102]
[101] TsGIA, f. 1662, op. 1, d. 86.
[102] Ibid.
The first step in the crusade against the universities and other VUZy was to remind the faculty councils that the government, not the professors, decided what the 27 August Rules really meant. To make his point, Schwartz told the faculty councils to accept his interpretation of the 11 June Rules and stop cooperating with student organizations. Article Four of the 11 June Rules had forbidden organizations representing the student body as a whole, but most faculty councils continued to recognize student government organs elected on the basis of course or faculty. A few days before his dismissal, von Kaufmann had indicated his acceptance of this policy. But shortly after taking office, Schwartz told the Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Kharkov faculty councils to close down the student organizations.[103]
This order came as a heavy blow to professors, who had felt that they were slowly winning the trust and confidence of the studenchestvo . At Saint Petersburg University, for example, the faculty council had managed to establish very close ties with the Council of Elders, and the Saint Petersburg delegates to the January 1908 student conference cited this good relationship as a major reason why they had opposed calls from the provinces for a nationwide student movement or protest.[104] When Schwartz, on 14 February, ordered the organization closed down, five thousand students packed the dining hall to protest. A worried rector F. A. Braun told Schwartz that this was the biggest skhodka since 1905, all the more impressive because it drew more than three-quarters of the student body actually in residence.[105]
The faculty councils charged the minister with violating the 27 August Rules which, they felt, gave them the major responsibility for ensuring the orderly continuation of the academic and disciplinary process. The Saint Petersburg Faculty Council protested that Schwartz's policies would turn it "into a passive observer" of events in the university. If the minister insisted on his new course, then the council would have to consider resigning all responsibility for university affairs.[106]
Schwartz also began to attack the post-1905 liberalization of university admissions. On 19 February the Council of Ministers directed him to review the whole question of Jewish enrollment in the institutions of secondary and higher education in the empire; Stolypin wanted a uniform policy that would also guide educational institutions not under
[103] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 93, ll. 267–269.
[104] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159, l. 5.
[105] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159, l. 13.
[106] Rech', 12 September 1908.
the direct control of the Ministry of Education.[107] The prime minister proposed a flat 4 percent quota on admission of Jews to institutions of secondary and higher education financed by the government, while Schwartz advocated a 3 percent quota in the Moscow and Saint Petersburg districts, 10 percent in educational districts of the Pale of Settlement, and 5 percent in the remaining districts. Furthermore, he told the council that an effective way to combat revolution was to make access to gymnasia and universities available only to the children of rich Jews; the rest would go to lower-level schools. The proposed restrictions drew a protest from the minister of trade and industry, who felt that the numerus clausus in the commercial institutes would hurt the efforts of his ministry to develop commercial education in the country. After some debate the Council of Ministers voted, in its meeting of 19 August, to apply Schwartz's plan to Russia's institutions of higher education.[108] The result was the beginning of a sharp drop in Jewish enrollment.
The government also attacked the educational gains of groups such as seminarists, women, and auditors. A 16 May circular revoked Tolstoi's concessions by forcing seminarists to pass additional examinations in order to be admitted to a university.[109] The provisions affecting auditors in effect barred women from attending the universities. Furthermore, Schwartz changed the status of auditors already in the universities. Until the 16 May circular, they had de facto student status and could receive de jure status upon passing examinations in Latin and Greek. (Most auditors had not attended classical gymnasia.) The faculty councils had made these examinations a precondition of graduation but not of admission. Women auditors were in the same position, except that they were designated as vol'noslushatel'nitsi (unofficial auditors) rather than postoronnye slushateli (official auditors). But the 16 May circular made these examinations a precondition for admission itself. Furthermore, any auditor had to obtain a certificate of political reliability from the police, and the circular decreed that the Jewish quota would apply to auditors as well as students. Any auditor currently enrolled who had not completed all the requirements of the circular would have to withdraw after the end of the 1907–1908 academic year.
[107] "Osobyi zhurnal Soveta Ministrov 19ovo Avgusta 1908ovo goda po voprosu ob ustanovlenii protsentnykh norm dlia priëma v uchebnye zavedeniia lits iudeiskovo proiskhozhdeniia," in "Spravka po evreiskomu voprosu" (n.d.). This unpublished compilation of official documents is located at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California.
[108] Ibid.
[109] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 152, d. 195, l. 240. These restrictions did not apply to seminarists who wished to enter Warsaw University. The Ministry of Education tried to counter the effect of the Polish boycott by filling that university with Russian seminary graduates.
On 4 September the Council of Ministers met to consider the question of women in the universities. Here Stolypin wanted to go further than Schwartz, who favored allowing women currently enrolled to finish their course (a softening of his May position). But the council, noting that the professors had been admitting women "in violation of the law," insisted that they could remain only if the faculty met the onerous condition of giving them separate lectures duplicating the regular courses. Meanwhile, Rossiia, echoing Stolypin, charged the professors with hypocrisy and reiterated that Schwartz acted in the name of the whole government.[110]
After a few weeks the government made a small concession to public opinion by allowing women and auditors currently enrolled to finish their studies. But this did not really alter the dramatic impact of Schwartz's circulars on the student population. The number of auditors and Jewish students began a sharp decline.
In another move that antagonized the professoriate, Schwartz began to curtail faculty jurisdiction over the curriculum. When the natural sciences faculty of Moscow University protested the order to cut down on assigned reading in foreign languages, Schwartz replied that the ministry "had not only the right but the duty" to inspect course offerings and reading lists and issue requisite instructions to the professors.[111] Schwartz also undermined the post-1905 curricular changes by forcing candidates for secondary-school teaching posts to take special examinations keyed to the 1896 examination rules.[112]
Schwartz's moves now began to provoke opposition not only from the left and the liberals but also from the Octobrists. In the 1908 budgetary commission debate on higher-education policy, the leading Octobrist spokesman in this area, V. K. von Anrep, complained that Schwartz's policies were leading to a "Tsushima" of higher education.[113] The Octobrists directed most of their fire at Schwartz's foot-dragging in response to Duma calls for the building of new universities and the expansion of existing ones. The Duma called on the ministry to facilitate the planned opening of a new university at Saratov, add new faculties to
[110] The Council memorandum is quoted from TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 2, d. 515. The Council of Ministers declared that "the girls have a right to feel betrayed [by the unlawful decision of the professors to admit them in the first place]. . . . Those professors who do not wish to read separate lectures will only prove that they are more willing to break the law at the government's expense than on their own time." Rossiia was cited in Rech', 6 September 1908.
[111] Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 7 (1908).
[112] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 152, d. 195, l. 251.
[113] Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii Sozyv, Stenograficheskii Otchët (Saint Petersburg, 1908), pervaia sessiia, 3ch., p. 2384.
Tomsk University, and spend more funds on training additional professors.[114] In passing the ministry's budget, the Duma added a charge to Schwartz to rescind the restrictions on the admission of seminary graduates and increase expenditures for financial aid, but although he promised to do something about Saratov University and the shortage of qualified professors, Schwartz rejected the Duma's call for widening access to higher education. Russia needed quality, not quantity. "Higher education," he told the deputies, "is not for everybody."[115]
In short, significant elements of the moderate right did not want the policy of quelling student protest, a policy they supported, to serve as an excuse for pursuing a course detrimental to Russia's economic development and international status. Keep troublemakers in line, they said, but open new universities and satisfy Russia's need for trained specialists. The conflict between the search for stability and educational and economic imperatives—epitomized by Octobrist opposition to Schwartz's policies—reached the Council of Ministers itself. In August Stolypin rejected a request from the Ministry of Trade and Industry that graduates of commercial high schools be allowed to enter universities.
In the summer of 1908 another controversy embroiled Schwartz with the professoriate when Tolmachev, the governor-general of Odessa, expelled four liberal professors from the city. Tolmachev's use of the state of martial law to effect this action was another example of the vulnerability of the provincial universities to arbitrary measures by the local authorities. Schwartz played a duplicitous role. On 28 July he assured the four—rector Zanchevskii, E. F. Vas'kovskii, V. A. Kossinskii, and B. F. Verigo—that he had nothing to do with the matter.[116] But at the same time Schwartz wrote to urge Tolmachev to take advantage of the absence of the four liberals to install the reactionary professor S. V. Levashev as rector.[117] Schwartz also pressed charges against Zanchevskii and Vas'kovskii for alleged dereliction of duty and anti-government activities during the Revolution of 1905. On the basis of testimony by their more conservative colleagues on the faculty council, the Senate found Zanchevskii and Vas'kovskii guilty, ousting the former rector from the civil service and suspending Vas'kovskii for three years.[118] Meanwhile,
[114] Ibid., p. 2783.
[115] Rech', 11 June 1908.
[116] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 162, ll. 22–29.
[117] Ibid.
[118] For a right-wing account of what happened at Odessa University in 1905, see Revoliutsionnoe gniezdo (Saint Petersburg, n.d.).
the ministry brought the same charges against rector Passek of lur'ev University, who also lost his post.
As the 1908–1909 academic year began, the policy outlined in Schwartz's memorandum was in full swing. Restrictions on the admission of Jews, women, and seminarists, retaliation against professors affiliated with the Kadet party,[119] reprisals against faculty members who had played a prominent part in the Revolution of 1905, suppression of student organizations, and collaboration with local authorities to ensure conservative domination of provincial faculty councils all showed that Schwartz was executing a systematic policy with the direct support of Stolypin.
The liberal professoriate protested Schwartz's policy but stopped short of direct defiance. When rector Borgman of Saint Petersburg University submitted his protest resignation on 3 September, he was persuaded by his colleagues to rescind it. Moscow's Manuilov also protested but remained at his post and enforced the new circulars. The liberal professoriate, heartened by the recent coolness between Octobrists and Schwartz, now pinned its hopes on the Duma. Many professors feared, with reason, that Schwartz would soon seek to cap his new university policy by introducing for Duma consideration a new draft statute even worse than the discredited 1884 Statute. The liberal professoriate now had one major fear—that an outbreak of massive student unrest would abort this growing Duma support of the professoriate and play into the government's hands. Therefore as the students returned for the start of classes, the liberal press appealed to them to stay calm and leave the defense of the university to the professors.[120]
The 1908 Strike
Never before had the studenchestvo been so directly challenged, and never had its dilemma been so great, as in the fall of 1908. The students had now become the objects of direct government repression. Fellow students were being thrown out of the universities because of their sex, reli-
[119] On 18 August 1908, Schwartz told his curators that professors who signed the 1906 Vyborg manifesto had to swear, as a condition of their remaining in government service, that they were not members of any anti-government party or organization. The teachers directly affected by Schwartz's order—Kadet party members S. A. Muromtsev, G. S. Shershenovitch, Novgorodtsev, and Petrazhitskii—signed the disclaimer. TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 192, l. 26.
[120] Rech', 3 September 1908.
gion, or educational background, and the Ministry of Education had ordered the liquidation of what was left of the student government organs.
The history of the student movement had shown that direct attacks on student interests were the surest way to provoke student unrest. But 1908 was not 1899 or 1905. This time the students knew that their protest would fail to arouse even public sympathy. The liberal press, the Kadet party, and the professoriate clearly opposed student unrest. The workers and peasantry were politically dormant and the revolutionary parties were at a low ebb. In the words of one observer, the studenchestvo, in making the decision to fight Schwartz, "had to choose between a Sedan and a Waterloo."[121] Most students realized that a Russian public who meekly accepted Stolypin's revision of the Duma electoral law cared little about student demands.
But a decision not to strike would mean a fateful break with those traditions of the studenchestvo that called for student solidarity, mutual help, and a constant readiness to fight for student interests. For the past two years skhodki and the student press had been debating the future of the studenchestvo . Students had accused their comrades of cowardice and careerism; articles bemoaned the fact that Russian students were following the bourgeois road taken by their German counterparts after 1848. Now in September 1908, the students knew that they were facing a moment of truth.
Between 4 and 7 September an ad hoc group of Saint Petersburg students from various VUZy in the capital and representing a number of political factions and zemliachestva met to consider the options open to the studenchestvo . The group sent delegates to other university towns, decided to call a nationwide student protest strike, and issued an "Appeal to Russian Society."[122]
This "Appeal" became the basic document of the 1908 student strike and served as the model for resolutions adopted in other VUZy . Couched in very moderate terms, the "Appeal" was a plea for public support, which the students knew they did not have. It began by analyzing the significance of student protest in Russia before 1905: "Before 1905, the student movement was basically a protest against the restraints that the bureaucracy placed on Russian society. . . . The student movement,
[121] A. Iarmolovich, Smert' Prizrakov, p. 33. It is assumed that larmolovich was comparing the students with the French side.
[122] "Dokumenty studencheskovo dvizheniia," Znamia Truda, no. 14 (December 1908).
although in essence dictated by the academic interests of the students, thus also became a political movement at the same time, achieving social significance and serving as a barometer of . . . the mood of the Russian public."
Since 1906, both students and professors had settled down to the serious job of making Russian higher education work. But then the government began a crusade against the universities, which it regarded as "having no cultural value, . . . [as being] fomenters of constitutional illusions and a threat to public order." The war against the students and the professors received the same priority as the struggle against the revolutionary left. The latest circulars were the last straw. The studenchestvo had tried to protect its rights by legal means but now "the illegal measures of the government have deprived it of the opportunity of seeking legal recourse." Schwartz was trying to turn the universities into "diploma factories . . . mills spewing out petty bureaucrats."
The "Appeal" admitted that the only hope for student victory lay in the support of an aroused Russian public. The students concluded by outlining their fundamental demands: the right of the studenchestvo to its own organizations, and the right of professors to enjoy full academic autonomy—construed as meaning that the professors would control the academic and economic affairs of the universities. Therefore government controls on university admissions were incompatible with the exercise of real academic freedom. The "Appeal" ended with a call for a nationwide academic strike.
On 13 September a crowded skhodka met in the main auditorium of Saint Petersburg University to discuss the "Appeal" and its call for a strike. At first many students were indecisive, weighing their moral obligation to Jews, women, and seminarists against their fear of expulsion from the university for participating in a protest action. What finally convinced the Saint Petersburg students to fight was a direct appeal to the traditions of the Russian studencestvo and the students' sense of honor.
"The strike," one eyewitness reported, "broke out not because the masses really wanted it but because of a direct appeal to the students' sense of their own past [and traditions]."[123] One student told the skhodka that unless it voted to protect students' rights, the notion of the studenchestvo would be gone forever.[124] The skhodka voted 2,398 to 77 to
[123] Iarmolovich, Smert' Prizrakov, p. 48.
[124] Ibid.
strike.[125] The strike began on 20 September and quickly spread to most of the other institutions of higher education in Saint Petersburg.
Meanwhile Moscow's students were following the events in Saint Petersburg closely. Descriptions of the 13 September skhodka in Saint Petersburg festooned the walls of Moscow University.[126] The Central University Organ called a skhodka on 19 September to consider whether the Moscow University students should join the strike. The student Kadets, however, strongly opposed the CUO action and launched a vigorous pamphlet campaign to convince the students to heed Rech', the Kadet newspaper, to refrain from striking and give the professors a chance to mobilize support in the Duma. The Duma, given a chance, could pressure Schwartz into beating a retreat. The students themselves, the Kadets argued, had long since lost their political importance and should therefore save their one weapon, the academic strike, for a truly decisive occasion.[127]
The Moscow skhodka met on 19 September and attracted more than four thousand students. The speakers concentrated almost exclusively on the students' academic demands, making virtually no references to the general political situation. A high point came when a delegate from Saint Petersburg took the floor and appealed for the support of Moscow. The skhodka passed, 2,106 to 548, a pro-strike resolution modeled on the Saint Petersburg "Appeal." The students knew they would probably lose, but they could not reject the traditions of student honor, which called for a gesture to be made. The result was a curious mixture of enthusiasm and ambivalence: "One moment everybody was hesitating. And then suddenly they shook their heads, waved their arms and said, 'Hell, I don't want to think anymore! If we have to strike, then let's strike!'"[128]
On 22 September, the Moscow University students established an Executive Committee to direct the strike, and this committee in turn joined an all-Moscow coalition council.[129] That same day a large skhodka in Kharkov University endorsed the strike. The strike also spread to Ka-
[125] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159, l. 184.
[126] TsGAOR, f. 102, op. 117, ed. kh. 42, 5ch. 1/A/1908, ll. 6–8.
[127] These Kadet student pamphlets can be found in GPB im. V. I. Lenina, f. 158, folder 6, no. 127.
[128] Iarmolovich, Smert' Prizrakov, p. 48.
[129] TsGAOR, f. 102, op. 117, ed. kh. 42, 5ch. 1/A/1908, l. 16. A noticeable feature of these two organizations, compared with past years, was the prominent role now played by the student "economic organizations"—zemliachestva and credit societies.
zan, Kiev, and Odessa, though it achieved only limited success, because of immediate police interference.
The Social Revolutionaries wholeheartedly endorsed the strike, but the Social Democrats were much less enthusiastic. One observer expressed a common sentiment when he noted that the student Social Democrats were "in the piquant position of claiming to represent a proletarian party fighting for the class interests of a bourgeois university."[130] The student strike did not arouse one iota of worker support in Saint Petersburg or any other city. The Saint Petersburg Committee of the Social Democratic party sent a letter to the city's student Social Democratic organizations telling them that they would get no regular party support until they fought for "general as well as only student demands."[131]
The moderate Saint Petersburg "Appeal" was a major source of friction. The Saint Petersburg City Social Democratic Committee complained that it was an "Octobrist-Kadet document . . . permeated through and through with the stupidest [poshlyi ] kind of bourgeois liberalism."[132] Proletarii, a Geneva-based Bolshevik journal, acidly noted that the students were going to extreme lengths to avoid any identification with the revolutionary parties: "After years of leftist predominance [in the student movement], we now see the students issue an 'Appeal' directed at Mom and Dad [Momasham i Popasham ] promising 'no politics if you'll only get us autonomy."'[133]
As was the case in 1899, many student Social Democrats found themselves in a dilemma: they did not want to support their classmates' "bourgeois protest" but at the same time they did not want to desert their comrades or stand on the sidelines. Furthermore, in 1908 the labor movement had not recovered from the revolution: the students were the only social group doing any protesting at all. Seeking advice, a group of student Social Democrats wrote to V. I. Lenin.
Lenin quickly published an open letter to his student correspondents, entitled "The Student Movement and the Present Political Situation."[134] Lenin chided his colleagues for taking an overly pedantic view of the current strike and emphasized that the 1908 protest, while academic
[130] Iarmolovich, Smert' Prizrakov, p. 29.
[131] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159, l. 188.
[132] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 159, l. 190.
[133] Proletarii, no. 36 (1908).
[134] Ibid.
rather than political in character, could still play a positive role in politicizing the student masses. Characterizing the broad social significance of the student movement, Lenin emphasized that the students were "connected by thousands and millions of strands with the middle and lower bourgeoisie, the petty bureaucracy, and certain strata of the peasantry and the clergy." Viewed in this light, the strike was the symptom of growing tension between these groups and the Stolypin government. The current student generation had come into the universities after 1905 and had, until 1908, gravitated toward the Kadets and their liberal mistrust of direct action. Therefore, Lenin explained, the 1908 strike, with all its imperfections, nevertheless marked an anti-government protest that the student Social Democrats should not ignore. On the contrary, Lenin explained, the Social Democrats' task was "to explain to the mass of the protesters the objective meaning of this movement and to make it consciously political."
Meanwhile the students were losing whatever hope they had had of rallying public support for the strike. The Kadet party, along with virtually the entire professoriate, called on the students to return to class and leave the defense of the universities to adults. The Octobrists, notwithstanding earlier disagreements with Stolypin over education policy, wholeheartedly supported the government. Even relatively radical faculty members such as Saint Petersburg University's Sviatlovskii and Tugan-Baranovskii ignored student appeals to stay away from the lecture halls. When asked by his students to cancel a lecture, Moscow's Evgenii Trubetskoi replied that the students were giving the government more help than the Black Hundred movement was. The strike, Trubetskoi complained, had compromised the position of the professors. "Up to now," he told his audience, "the professors could at least say that when there was autonomy the students trusted them and listened to their advice. But now we cannot make that claim."[135] Furthermore, he warned, the students were turning the Duma against the universities.
The government appreciated the potential political windfall from the strike and carefully avoided repressive actions that might generate sympathy for the students. In a circular sent to subordinates in all university towns, the director of the Department of Police, N. P. Zuev, outlined his main concern: keeping the student disorders off the street. As long as there were no signs of active collusion between the student movement and the revolutionary movement, the police should keep a low profile,
[135] TsGAOR, f. 102, op. 117, ed. kh. 42, 5ch. I/A/1908, l. 21.
taking care to enter university premises only at the express invitation of academic authorities and arresting only those students who were clearly involved with revolutionary elements.[136] As the strike dragged on, with no visible results, morale sagged and the students began to look for a way out of the impasse. On 1 October a skhodka at Saint Petersburg University voted to send a delegation to the Duma and its president, A. I. Guchkov, asking for support. When this overture failed, most student Social Democrats joined the Kadets in calling for an end to the strike.[137] The next day the Saint Petersburg coalition council, which included representatives from ten city VUZy, voted 11 to 7 to sponsor resolutions ending the strike. In Moscow a student referendum voted 3,522 to 1,420 to end the strike.
Although the resolutions ending the strike tried to make the best of a bad situation, there was no hiding the overwhelming reaction of the students: they had been defeated, mainly because the public remained indifferent to their cause. Two years later a leading student newspaper offered the following post-mortem of the 1908 strike—and, it believed, of the whole Russian student movement:
Look at the last great strike of 1908. This presents the historian of the Russian student movement with one of its most interesting chapters. All agree now that the strike was unsuccessful. To be sure, it was, but not in the usually understood sense. If you look at the 1908 strike from the purely quantitative point of view it attracted more student participation than any other action with the exception of 1905. Tens of thousands of students stayed on strike for more than two weeks. And what was the public significance of such an extraordinary event? None. Not small—none. If the student strike had had only a small effect there might be some hope for the future [of the student movement]. But the result was such that in fact there can be no such hope.[138]
Events were soon to show this gloomy appraisal to be unduly pessimistic; the turbulent student disorders of 1910–1911 erupted soon after the appearance of the article. But the analysis confirmed what many students felt: without public support, student protests were little more than a quixotic bow to the past.
In many respects the 1908 strike was a unique chapter in the history
[136] TsGAOR, f. 102, op. 117, ed. kh. 42, 5ch. 1/A/1908, l. 44. But in Kiev, Kazan, and Odessa universities, the academic authorities called in the police as soon as skhodki met to discuss the strike.
[137] "Dokumenty studencheskovo dvizheniia."
[138] Golos Studenchestva, no. 12 (1910).
of the Russian student movement. Its purposes, demands, and basic nature were more closely linked to the students' corporate interests than was the case in any other coordinated student protest. In a sense the students had come full circle, back to 1899, leaving the streets to return to protest within the universities. But the 1899 strike had advanced a broader issue, one with which wider sections of the Russian public could sympathize: the principle of personal inviolability. The 1908 strike, however, raised only the corporate demands of the students. Carefully avoiding identification with the revolutionary left, the students sought the support of what was widely regarded to be a reactionary Duma, dominated by the Octobrist party and elected on the basis of the newly revised electoral law.
Another important feature of the 1908 student strike was its relatively high level of organization. This time the student action was not an impulsive act of rage against police brutality. The students had had the whole summer to ponder the meaning of Schwartz's circulars and the cruel fact that while most students were left unscathed, certain groups of students might lose their chance of receiving a higher education. The issue was group solidarity versus individual self-interest. When the students returned in September, however, there was no mood of fervent outrage, as had been the case after the 1899 beatings or the Bloody Sunday massacre. Instead, the student masses waited to be challenged by some organized initiative that would awaken their sense of moral obligation. This was the role of the ad hoc group of Saint Petersburg students who issued the "Appeal" and recommended that the strike begin. The strike itself was the result of calm and deliberate consideration. The Saint Petersburg skhodka that approved the strike had stipulated that there be a five-day waiting period in order to enlist the cooperation of the various student zemhachestva and economic organizations. Like past student movements, the action of one of the two central universities served as a signal for the rest of the studenchestvo . Because of conditions of martial law and immediate use of police power, however, the strike did not really get off the ground in Odessa, Kiev, or Kazan.
One of the most significant features of the 1908 strike was that it showed once again the strong hold that the student past and the traditions of the studenchestvo still had on the student masses, even those who could not remember the pre-1905 universities. Perhaps the major reason for the strike was the widespread determination to meet the stern test imposed by these traditions, although many students probably would have preferred not to strike. But once most students realized that
the strike was attracting little public support, enthusiasm quickly waned. Some cynics, reporting on the mood of the skhodki that decided to end the strike, remarked that the gesture had been made and now it was time to get back to business. Again, however, it would be most fair to say that, as in the past, the student movement walked a fine line between moral obligation and self-interest, and between the need to protest and the inadequacy of available methods.
The strike also showed that the division of students into formal political factions after 1905 did not mean that the studenchestvo had lost its corporate identity, as many feared (or hoped), or that the interests of the national political parties overshadowed academic and corporate concerns. Although Kadet and Octobrist factions opposed the decision to strike in the two central universities, they nonetheless joined it during the first week, out of a feeling of solidarity with a corporate decision of the studenchestvo .[139] Despite opposition from the local Social Democratic party, student Social Democrats played a leading role in the Saint Petersburg student movement. Indeed, the tension between student and adult Social Democrats had also been apparent in 1899 and 1901, but now, in 1908, this friction was emphasized by the decline of worker interest in the student movement.
If the students gained little from the strike, neither did the professors. Some prominent leftist journals charged the professoriate with cowering on the sidelines while the students defended the VUZy against Schwartz.[140] Ironically, the government agreed with the leftist assessment of professorial spinelessness. In a confidential report to Stolypin on the strike, Assistant Minister of the Interior Makarov concluded that the professors had really welcomed the strike, because they preferred to let the students fight their battles for them.[141]
New Legislation
Schwartz soon gave the professoriate a sharp reminder that its anti-strike stand earned it little credit from the government. His new draft statute, announced on 4 October 1908, confirmed the worst fears of the professoriate.[142] Unlike the Tolstoi Conference draft, to which the
[139] GPB im. V. I. Lenina, f. 158, folder 6, no. 127.
[140] V. Miakotin, "Tragediia vysshel shkoly," Russkoe Bogatstvo, no. 10 (1908); I. Larskii, "Na granitse akademizma," Sovremennyi Mir, no. 10 (1908).
[141] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 160, l. 89.
[142] For a full and critical discussion of the draft statute, see Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 8 (1908).
Schwartz project was diametrically opposed, there was no attempt to involve the professoriate in framing the statute. The new statute defined the universities primarily as teaching institutions preparing future civil servants and professionals. This was fundamentally different from the Tolstoi Conference emphasis on the research functions of the university. In reverting to the 1884 definition of the university, the ministry laid the groundwork for justification of extensive state interference in the VUZy . Centrally appointed curators would continue to supervise the universities and, in extraordinary circumstances, could "exceed their specified authority." In a concession to the 27 August Rules, the new draft retained the faculty council's right to elect rectors, but the rectors' main role was to ensure internal discipline. Yet professors would lose their disciplinary functions to a reformed inspectorate. Teaching had to conform to study plans approved by the ministry. New professors could either be appointed by the minister himself or be elected by the department. In the latter case the minister had to approve the department's choice. Thus the draft deprived the faculty council of any role in faculty appointments. The new statute required two degrees for the holder of any faculty position and abolished the rights and privileges associated with the university degree. Entering students had to be males graduating from Ministry of Education gymnasia or presenting certificates proving they had completed an equivalent course of study. The statute banned student meetings in the universities and directed rectors to call police to enforce this rule. Although students were allowed to form organizations, they could meet only off campus and were subject to general legislation. Schwartz called for a major hike in university fees, as well as an annual state allotment of 7 million rubles to the universities. This was well below Tolstoi's recommendation of 13 million.
A few days later Schwartz met the rectors of Saint Petersburg and Moscow universities to discuss the new draft statute. Even the official minutes of the meeting between Schwartz and the rectors convey a tense and bitter atmosphere as Schwartz outlined the main features of the project.[143] Borgman, the rector of Saint Petersburg University, charged that the projected draft entailed the "total destruction of the Russian university." By abolishing the important prerogatives of the faculty council, especially in faculty appointments, Schwartz was destroying the principle that distinguished a university from a mere school or insti-
[143] The minutes of the meeting are found in TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 269, l. 2.
tute. As Manuilov put it, the draft statute contradicted "the fundamental basis of the universitas scholarum-litterarum . Scientific education cannot be split into separate parts, because science is a unity, the [basis of] . . . the concept of the university. . . . And the unity of the university is epitomized by the participation of all professors, as a faculty council, in the election of their colleagues." Manuilov also reminded Schwartz that it was strange to see the government returning to the spirit of 1884 after the student disturbances of the past ten years had demonstrated the fundamental backruptcy of that statute and had forced its piecemeal revision.
A few weeks later the professoriate suffered another setback as the state Senate upheld Schwartz's interpretation of the 27 August Rules.[144] The 27 November 1908 ruling rejected the contention of the Moscow and Saint Petersburg faculty councils that the 27 August Rules had superseded the 1884 Statute. The rectors of these universities had held that by charging the professoriate with the duty of ensuring the "proper functioning of academic life," the 27 August Rules had in fact abolished the provisions of the 1884 Statute dealing with academic affairs and student discipline and had guaranteed the faculty council freedom from government interference in the regulation of student life and internal university discipline. But the Senate, while emphasizing that the rules gave the professoriate much responsibility, refused to back the faculty council's claim to enhanced power. In matters pertaining to student life, financial aid, admissions, and rules about the status of student organizations, the Ministry of Education would have the final word. Faced with Schwartz's project and stung by the Senate ruling, few liberal professors could dispute Vernadskii's New Year's prediction that 1908 would turn out to be a hard year for the universities.
Conclusion
The toughening of the government's policy after 1907 clearly shows the close link between the situation of the universities and Stolypin's general political policies. Without actually repealing the 1884 Statute, the government at first allowed the professors to make major changes in university teaching, admissions, and governance. But after the dissolution of the second Duma and the promulgation of a new restrictive elec-
[144] TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 3, d. 800, l. 177.
toral law on 3 June 1907, university policy also shifted in ways directly dictated by the prime minister. Stolypin, as has been shown, took a close interest in the university question. Why?
Labeling Stolypin a reactionary does not answer the question. In fact there is solid evidence to show that on occasion the prime minister understood and defended the nation's interest in higher education. A clear example is the April 1907 Council of Ministers debate on the question of opening a new university. (Various cities had offered sites and partial funding.)[145] Conservatives on the council objected to any new universities because of fear of student unrest. But a majority of the council, including Stolypin, supported funding a new university in Saratov.[146] One reason cited in the council journal was that it was important to stem the outflow of young talent from the provinces into the overcrowded central universities. Furthermore, the council majority agreed that "no matter how unsatisfactory the present state of the universities happens to be . . . we [refuse] to close them . . . because we are convinced that higher education in the empire is necessary and useful."
Stolypin's university policy derived from four basic factors: his conception of the relationship between the university and the state, his determination to crush the revolutionary movement, his firm belief in strong state authority, and his own political vulnerability to rightist attacks. Stolypin saw the universities as state institutions, the professors as civil servants, and the students as young men whose role was to study and graduate. Unable to appreciate the complexity of the institution and unwilling to accept the professoriate's ideological justifications for an autonomous, research-oriented university, he overreacted to the continuing student disturbances and the professors' seeming inability to control them. He failed to appreciate that almost all professors, liberal as well as conservative, feared the revolutionary movement. Like many in the Russian government, Stolypin, for all his constructive vision, failed to see the opportunities presented by pursuing a policy of benign neglect, which might have slowly depoliticized the universities. Unrest, in his view, undermined the prestige of the state and demonstrated the government's inability to maintain order, the professors' duplicity, and the students' unreliability. Whatever his other qualities, Stolypin could not free himself from the "politics of order" in dealing with the university question.
[145] "Osobyi zhurnal soveta ministrov ob osnovanii novovo universiteta v Rossii" (10, 13 April 1907). This unpublished source is located at the Hoover Institution.
[146] The new university opened in 1909 with only a medical faculty. It also had to overcome strong conservative opposition in the State Council.