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.