Chapter I
Higher Education in Russia

Writing from exile in 1929, Professor A. A. Kizevetter recalled the annual celebrations marking Tat'ianin Den' (12 January), the traditional founding day of Moscow University. Long before the tedious official ceremony started, officials, students, professors, and alumni from all over Russia filled the main auditorium. After sitting through the obligatory prayers, the long scholarly paper, and the rector's remarks, the throng would rise, sing the national anthem, and then depart for a day of festive partying in Moscow's restaurants. This was one day in the year when the police would look the other way as crowds of students in their distinctive uniforms sauntered down the Tver and Strastnoi boulevards to the Romanovka and other favorite hang-outs. Meanwhile, the alumni—professors, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, even a few industrialists and businessmen—would leave for smaller, more intimate gatherings all over Moscow. In the late afternoon, they would start making their way toward the large hall of the Bolshoi Moskovskii Traktir in the center of town. After more speechmaking and drinking, troiki began taking the alumni to the lar'. On this day, the famous restaurant served only revelers from the university. All the rooms were packed. New guests would arrive to cheers from the crowded rooms inside. V. O. Kliuchevskii, the great historian, would recite humorous couplets, while the famous lawyer F. N. Plevako improvised speeches on topics shouted from the audience.

This was a joyous holiday. It was very pleasant for everyone to feel, even once a year, that they belonged to a larger group of cultured individuals

bound by common memories and sharing the same mood. All the barriers that separated people—age, politics, occupation—were swept away. . . . What was this, this one-day Moscow carnival? Was it just revelry and merrymaking? No, this was a celebration of the conscious unity of cultured Russia. That cultured Russia was divided by many disputes . . . but on Tat'ianin Den' the feeling of belonging to the same alma mater outweighed all the divisions.^[1]

Not everyone shared Kizevetter's lyrical view of the "one-day carnival." In some years, ugly brawls broke out between the carousing students and the tough butcher-boys from the nearby Okhotnyi Riad market. Student organizations crusaded against the public drunkenness of Tat'iana and issued appeals for the students to uphold the traditions and honor of the studenchestvo —preferably by attendance at speeches discussing the terrible plight of the dark masses who stood totally outside the university world. For many, Kizevetter's family of "cultured individuals," the alumni of Moscow University, bore a closer resemblance to a panoply of characters from Chekhov's plays: bored and ineffectual doctors and civil servants, for whom university days seemed like a faded dream.

Thus even Tat'iana symbolized the ambiguities of the universities' position in tsarist Russia. The clashes between privileged students and their poorer contemporaries, the uneasy conscience which led many students to reject merrymaking in order to express concern about the underprivileged masses, the uncertainty as to whether the university produced a class united by common culture or only a pale imitation of a civil society that would disintegrate under the pressures of Russian life—all underscored the paradoxes of Russian higher education.

The root paradox was that institutions such as Moscow University were the creatures of a Russian state that had a profound mistrust of that very "conscious unity of cultured Russia" which Tat'iana was celebrating. Until almost the very end of the autocracy, there was no alternative agent—no churches, individuals, or cities—that could develop and support institutions of higher education without state participation. And, ironically, this Russian state, in many respects so reactionary, was a powerful source of revolutionary change, as its policy on higher education proved. Putatively dedicated to preserving the principle of estates, the inviolability of Russian orthodoxy, and the prerogatives of the aristocracy, the autocracy founded universities and institutes that undercut

[1] A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Prague, 1929), pp. 315–318.

the principle of privilege and status determined by birth. Open to young people from all estates, the institutions of higher education, especially the universities, posed yet another long-term threat to the state. Their dedication to nauka, the principle of education based on pursuit of scientific truth, implied an openness to inquiry and a connection to a cosmopolitan academic culture that would defy any attempt at strict regimentation and control and would clash with an ideology based on the personal authority of the tsar and official orthodoxy.

Russian Higher Education

In the last half-century of Romanov rule, imperial Russia developed a system of higher education marked by diversity and, especially in the 1905–1917 period, by rapid growth. Between 1897 and 1914, the proportion of the student-aged cohort attending some form of institution of higher education increased markedly (see Table 1). Furthermore, the ratio of higher-education enrollments to enrollments in primary and secondary education remained at its historically high level.^[2] One historian of Russian higher education has gone so far as to argue that such an imbalance, caused by the "emphasis of the state on extensive education for a few rather than modest schooling for the many," helped to sharpen "social differences and antagonisms even more rapidly than liberal or radical rhetoric was able to bridge or ameliorate them."^[3]

To what degree the state, especially after 1890, consciously emphasized and pursued a policy aimed at "extensive education for a few" is open to question. By the end of the nineteenth century, education bud-

[2] Michael Kaser has calculated that for every 1,000 primary pupils in 1914 there were 72 secondary and 15 higher-education enrollments. Corresponding figures for secondary and higher-education enrollments in earlier years were 106 and 14 in 1835, 93 and 9 in 1875, and 67 and 10 in 1905 ("Education in Tsarist and Soviet Development," in Chimen Abramsky, ed., Essays in Honor of E. H. Carr [London, 1974], p. 235).

[3] James C. McClelland, "Diversification in Russian-Soviet Education," in Konrad Jarausch, ed., The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860–1930 (Chicago, 1983), pp. 182–183. Certain objections can be raised to the points made in this provocative and stimulating essay. First, the apparent weakness of primary as opposed to secondary and higher education is accentuated by extremely low levels of reported schooling in non-Russian areas. In zemstvo provinces, with their Great-Russian peasant population, a surprisingly high percentage of the children were receiving some form of education. (A. G. Rashin writes that, by 1915, 78.2 percent of the 8–11-year-olds in Tula guberniia were receiving primary schooling: see A. G. Rashin, "Gramotnost' i narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii v 19om i nachale 20ovo vekakh," Istoricheskie Zapiski, no. 37 [1951]: 68.) Second, as Michael Kaser ("Education," p. 245) points out, many acquired literacy outside the formal school system. Kaser cites a district in Moscow guberniia in 1883–1884 where only 38 percent of literate factory workers had studied in formal schools.

gets clearly favored primary and secondary over higher education. In the university sector, the trend was toward less state involvement and greater reliance on student fees and local, rather than state, money to start new institutions, although the state still provided 60 percent of total university budgets in 1914. The tremendous spurt in higher-education enrollments was the result of a complex interplay of factors. On many occasions state policymakers talked of trying to slow the growth of the higher-education sector, to encourage more practical schooling on the primary and secondary levels, and to increase the inducements for young people to consider alternatives to a higher-education diploma.^[4] But the incentives for a young urban Russian to acquire higher education were overwhelming. Furthermore, the state, the zemstvos, and the private sector needed skills—especially medical,

[4] Tsar Nicholas expressed this wish on a number of occasions. See his remarks to a 6 April 1901 interministerial conference on higher educational policy (Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [hereafter referred to as TsGIA], f. 721, op. 2, ed. kh. 295). Examples of ministerial concern are the December 1909 and January 1910 meetings of the Council of Ministers to consider a new university statute (TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 471, 11. 182–198).

teaching, and technical skills—taught by the institutions of higher education. Pressure for new institutions of higher education, both universities and institutes, came from various sources: ministries anxious for skilled personnel in their particular area of competence;^[5] towns pledging large sums of money to train a local elite and keep their young people close to home after graduation;^[6] and high government officials convinced that universities and institutes in the non-Russian areas of the empire would spread Russian culture and initiate a benign and politically healthy process of cultural assimilation.^[7]

Besides opening the doors to the civil service, medicine, law, high-school teaching, and specialized technical professions, a higher-education degree became increasingly important for private employment and for zemstvo positions.^[8] Moreover, it was widely recognized that a sec-

[5] Examples, to be discussed below, are the role the Ministry of Finance played in setting up the polytechnics and the initiative the Ministry of Trade and Industry took in changing the status of the commercial institutes.

[6] An example of this local initiative can be seen in the records of the 10 April 1907 Council of Ministers meeting, which considered the question of starting a new university in the country. The Minsk city administration pledged 500,000 rubles and 16 desiatines of land if the government would approve a university there. Vitebsk promised 600,000 rubles, with "more pledged from the local merchants." Voronezh promised 950,000 rubles over a four-year period. Nizhni-Novgorod promised 650,000 rubles and a city building valued at 150,000 rubles. Saratov promised 1,000,000 rubles, and the local zemstvo pledged another 150,000 rubles. Astrakhan and Penza sent briefs supporting Saratov's position. State financial involvement was essential, as no offer exceeded 50 percent of the cost of setting up a new university. For financial reasons, the council decided on Saratov, which opened with one medical faculty in 1909. See Sovet Ministrov, Osobyi Zhurnal ob Osnovanii Novovo v Rossii Universiteta, 10 and 13 April 1907.

[7] See, for example, the arguments made by Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov in May 1912 in favor of founding a new polytechnic in Tiflis, or the 1904 memorandum of Minister of Education V. G. Glazov to Tsar Nicholas advocating increased government support of lur'ev and Warsaw universities. Both minimized the dangers of founding institutions of higher education in non-Russian areas and emphasized the success of Strasbourg University, which was allegedly strengthening the ties of the Alsatians to the German empire (Sovet Ministrov, Osobyi Zhurnai ob Uchrezhdenii na Kavkaze Vysshevo Uchebnovo Zavedeniia [24 May 1912]; TsGIA, f. 922, op. 1, d. 143).

[8] See the comments of Professor E. N. Trubetskoi to the 1902 commission on university reform: Komissiia po preobrazovaniiu vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii, Trudy (Saint Petersburg, 1903), vol. 1, p. 34. State service, as Charles Timberlake points out, offered significant material advantages over many branches of private service. For example, many state jobs offered housing allowances and generous pension plans, as well as the right to wear an "Anna on the Neck." In order to help certain institutions created by the Great Reforms (zemstvos, city Dumas, judicial institutions) compete for personnel, the tsarist government extended some civil-service benefits to certain of their employees. "As a result the distinction between the 'private' and the 'public' sector in Russian society was blurred" (see Timberlake, "Higher Learning, the State and the Professions in Russia," in Jarausch, The Transformation of Higher Learning, p. 337). Some professors criticized what they perceived as a hypocritical tendency on the part of students to engage in protest while they were at the university and then to prefer state to private employment after graduation. See, for example, I. Kh. Ozerov, Na temy dnia (Moscow, 1912), p. 179.

ondary school diploma by itself (either from a classical gymnasium or from a realuchilishche ) offered relatively few opportunities unless the student continued on to higher education.^[9] A higher-education degree allowed young people from the so-called subject estates (the peasantry and the meshchanstvo ) to acquire "honorary citizenship," to improve their legal position, and to enter the Table of Ranks.^[10] Students received a deferment from military service and served for a shorter time. For Jews a degree was a ticket out of the Pale of Settlement. A mere diploma from a classical gymnasium or a realuchilishche gave few privileges unless the student had won a gold or silver medal. As Minister of Education I. I. Tolstoi pointed out in 1906:

To a very large extent this explains why many graduates of gymnasia, progymnasia, and realuchilishcha strive so relentlessly for a diploma from an institution of higher education, despite all the material obstacles that stand in their way. For the son of a peasant or a meshchanin, a non-Russian [inorodets ], or even the son of a merchant not having enough money to set himself up in trade . . . higher education constitutes the only means of entering government service and securing personal status [lichnye prava ].^[11]

There were several types of institutions of higher education (VUZy ): closed schools, military academies, specialized institutes, women's institutes, polytechnic institutes, commercial institutes, private universities and institutes such as Moscow's Shaniavskii University, and state universities. The universities and several institutes were under the control of the Ministry of Education. Control over the rest of the higher-education establishment was distributed among several ministries.

[9] Professor M. M. Novikov recalled that his father, who was sure the family would not be able to afford to give his son a higher education, decided to send him to a commercial high school, since gymnasia and realuchifishcha only "prepared for higher education" (Novikov, Ot Moskvy do N'iu-Iorka [New York, 1952], p. 26). In a Ministry of Education survey of the 4,378 students who earned their high school diploma (attestat zrelosti ) from a gymnasium in 1900, more than 98 percent stated their intention of entering either a university or a special technical institute (79.7 percent wanted to go to university, 18.5 percent to specialized institutes). Of the 7,491 high school graduates in 1910, 76.2 percent wanted to go on to university, and 14.9 percent to specialized institutes (Otchët of Ministry of Education for 1900 and 1910). Of 4,376 graduates of realuchifishcha in 1912, 75 percent wanted to go on to higher education—14.7 percent to universities and 60.4 percent to specialized institutes. Of the remainder, 12.3 percent wanted to start military service and 9.5 percent were undecided. Only 3.0 percent wanted to enter either private employment or state service immediately after high school graduation (Otchët of Ministry of Education for 1912).

[10] First-class-degree graduates of universities and most technical institutes entered the civil service at rank X, second-class-degree graduates at rank XII. Holders of doctorates entered at rank VIII; those with a master's degree entered at rank IX.

[11] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 153, d. 174, I. 55.

The closed schools, to train the government elite, included the Pazheskii Korpus, the Alexandrovskii Lycee, and the Institute of Law (Uchilishche Pravovedeniia).^[12] Enrollments were small and selective. On the eve of World War I, just 290 students attended the Alexandrovskii Lycee, while 350 studied in the Institute of Law. One reason was cost: about 800 rubles a year for tuition, room, and board in the older classes—double the cost of attending a university. The closed schools were unique in the higher-education system in that they were open only to the sons of hereditary nobles. Honors graduates of the Pazheskii Korpus, the Institute of Law, or the Alexandrovskii Lycee started with the ninth rank in the civil service, whereas the rest entered state service at the tenth rank. (By comparison, only university graduates with a master's degree entered the civil service at the ninth rank, and only honors graduates of the universities entered at the tenth rank.)^[13]

The specialized institutes prepared trained specialists—engineers, surveyors, agronomists—not only for state service but also for private enterprise and zemstvo employment. Admission to these institutes, by examination only, was highly competitive and prompted the oft-repeated charge that a high proportion of university students were rejects from these institutes.^[14]

From 1860 on, the government's higher-education policy favored the specialized institutes.^[15] A 1916 Ministry of Education memorandum noted that between 1866 and 1916 the government founded fourteen new specialized institutes but only two universities, and those only par-

[12] V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine 19ovo veka (Moscow, 1971), p. 75.

[13] Alumni of these schools did well. The 1897 edition of the Almanakh sovremennykh russkikh gosudarstvennykh deiatelei listed eighty-four officials who were members of the State Council, ministers, or department chiefs (glavnoupravliaiushchie ). Of this group, only twenty-three were university graduates, including twenty-one alumni of Moscow University or Saint Petersburg University. Thirty-seven graduated from the closed schools, and fifteen received a military education. (The rest either had a secondary education or graduated from a specialized institute, or their education was not indicated.)

[14] See the comments of the Ministry of Finance at the March 1909 interministerial conference to discuss government financing of the universities (TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 471, 1. 114). In 1891 there were 213 applications for 21 vacancies at the Institute of Communications and 250 applications for 40 places in the Institute of Civil Engineers. See "Vnutrenee obozrenie," Russkaia Mysl', no. 9 (1891). For 665 places in six specialized institutes in Saint Petersburg during the 1899–1900 academic year, there were 3,261 applicants.

[15] James C. McClelland has argued that the state's higher-education policy in fact lavished too many resources on the universities (Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia [Chicago, 1979]). As will be argued below, state expenditures on nonmedical university education tended to stabilize after 1885.

tially staffed.^[16] Many of the institutes were not under Ministry of Education control. For example, the Ministry of the Interior directed the Electrotechnical Institute in Moscow, the Ministry of Trade and Industry supervised the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute, and the War Ministry oversaw the Military-Medical Academy. VUZy attached to ministries other than the Ministry of Education traditionally allowed their students a great deal more freedom than students in the universities enjoyed. For example, students in the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute maintained, with official permission, a library and a dining hall, as well as having the right to hold meetings (skhodki ).^[17]

One difference between the student bodies of the institutes and those of the universities was that the former were more likely to come from estates other than the nobility and civil service and also tended, as time went on, to be better off financially.^[18] Some contemporary observers noted that not only the merchants (kuptsy ) but also the peasants wealthy enough to give their sons a higher education preferred the prospects

[16] TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 206,1. 14. The memorandum argued in favor of more universities, citing regional needs and the shortage of physicians and high school teachers. The more important specialized institutes in St. Petersburg (excluding polytechnics and commercial institutes) with date of founding and number of students in 1912 were the Mining Institute (1773), 640; the Military-Medical Academy (1799), 900; the Forestry Institute (1803), 560; the Institute of Communications (1810), 1,384; the Technological Institute (1828), 2,525; the Institute of Civil Engineers (1842), 810; and the Electro-technical Institute (1886), 750. In Moscow the most important institutes were the Lazarev Institute of Eastern Languages (1815), 141; the Higher Technical School (1830), 3,000; the Petrovskii Agricultural Academy (1865), 1,000; and the School of Engineering (1896), 580. Important provincial institutes included the Riga Polytechnic (founded in 1862; not to be confused with the polytechnics started by Witte in 1898), 1,753; the Kharkov Technological Institute (1885), 1,400; the Ekaterinoslav Mining Institute (1899), 480; the Tomsk Technological Institute (1900), 1,171; and the Don Polytechnic (1907), 704. See Nicholas Hans, A History of Russian Educational Policy, 1701–1917 (London, 1931), pp. 239–240.

[17] A good description of the special privileges and traditions of the students at the Mining Institute can be found in Konovalovskii konflikt (Saint Petersburg, 1905); cf. Na puti k pobede (Leningrad, 1925). On the spirit of the Military-Medical Academy, see Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 1975), p. 131.

[18] In 1914, of 9,704 students at six technological institutes of the Ministry of Education, 26.5 percent came from noble and civil-service families, 2 percent from the clergy, 14 percent from the merchants and the honorary citizenry, 31.5 percent from the meshchanstvo and artisans, and 22 percent from the peasantry. In the same year, of 35,695 students enrolled in the universities, 35.9 percent came from noble and civil-service families, 10.3 percent from the clergy, 10.9 percent from the merchants and the honorary citizenry, 24.4 percent from the meshchanstvo and artisans, and 13.3 percent from the peasantry. See V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Russkaia intelligentsiia v 1900–1917 godakh (Moscow, 1981), pp. 15, 24.

offered by the specialized institutes.^[19] But fragmentary evidence suggests that in at least some of these institutes, students shared with their counterparts in the universities a deep ambivalence about their studies and their future careers.^[20] Prospective students would sit exams at several institutes and would go to whichever one accepted them. Often the match was less than perfect.^[21]

A major milestone in the history of Russian higher education was the decision of the Ministry of Finance, with some important financial support from leading merchants and industrialists, to build a network of polytechnic institutes in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, and Kiev between 1898 and 1902.^[22] The ministry, dissatisfied with the performance of university graduates, wanted to develop managerial as well as technical skills. For example, the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic added an economic-legal section to the existing departments of metallurgy, electromechanics, and shipbuilding.^[23] By 1913, the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic, with an enrollment of 5,215, was the "second-largest technical institute in the world."^[24]

Another important area of prewar Russian higher education was higher commercial education, concentrated in the Moscow and Kiev commercial institutes. In 1912 the Moscow Commercial Institute had 4,261 students, and 3,800 studied in the Kiev Institute during the 1913—1914 academic year. The Ministry of Trade and Industry fought hard to

[19] G. Gordon, "K voprosu o material'nom polozhenii nashevo studenchestva," Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 7 (1914): 175. A 1901 Tomsk census reported in this article found that 79.2 percent of the university students, but only 59.5 percent of the technology students, lived on less than 25 rubles a month.

[20] See the discussion, in Chapter 7 below, of the 1909 census at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute.

[21] One complication was the fact that some towns had only a classical gymnasium and no realuchilishche, or vice versa. A graduate of a realuchilishche could enter a university only after passing examinations in Latin and Greek (later only one classical language was required), while a graduate of a gymnasium who wanted to enter a specialized institute was often at a disadvantage when taking the competitive examinations.

[22] A polytechnic opened in Novocherkassk in 1908. On the founding of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, see Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, 1982), p. 107. The best source on the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute is Gregory Guroff, "The Legacy of Pre-Revolutionary Economic Education: Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute," Russian Review, no. 3 (1972).

[23] See Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Otchët za 1902 god (Saint Petersburg, 1903), pp. 266–280. When the State Council objected that this was the purview of the universities, Witte pointed out their defects. True, he argued, the universities taught law, but their graduates received insufficient practical preparation in economics and took too long, as civil-service experience showed, to acquire practical skills.

[24] McClelland, "Diversification in Russian-Soviet Education," p. 185.

upgrade their status. In 1912, graduates of these institutes became eligible for the civil service and estate privileges granted to other officially recognized institutions of higher education.

Of all the sectors of Russian higher education in the last years of the autocracy, institutions for women showed the fastest rate of growth (see Table 2). This occurred despite an almost total lack of financial support from the state.^[25] In the deliberations preceding the promulgation of the 1863 University Statute, the state had considered making the universities coeducational, but most faculty councils opposed the idea, and the student demonstrations of 1861–1862 convinced the government that coeducation would lead to further unrest. By 1873, however, a special commission had concluded that the pressing need for female doctors and teachers justified the establishment of some form of higher education for women. In 1876 Tsar Alexander II permitted permanent women's courses in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kiev, and Kazan, as well as women's medical courses in Saint Petersburg. By 1910 the two largest institutions of higher education for women were the Bestuzhev-Riumin courses in Saint Petersburg, with an enrollment of 5,897 students, and the Moscow women's courses, with 6,477 students. At the Women's Medical Institute in Saint Petersburg 1,525 women were studying medicine, while 2,450 were enrolled in the Kiev women's courses.

The extraordinary growth of enrollment of women, despite the fact that for women a diploma brought few of the legal and civil privileges enjoyed by male graduates, and despite the heavy expenses involved, offers impressive evidence of the value and regard that growing numbers of young women attached to higher education.^[26] It also induced a change

[25] For example, 90 percent of the total 1912 budget of the Moscow Higher Courses for Women came from tuition fees. As Ruth Dudgeon points out, of the 7.5 million rubles spent by the Ministry of Education in 1911–1912, only 230,000 rubles (3 percent) went for women's education, and of that amount all but 12,000 rubles went to the Saint Petersburg Women's Medical Institute ("The Forgotten Minority: Women Students in Imperial Russia, 1872–1917," Russian History, no. 9 [1982]: 4). See also TsGIA, f. 1276, op. 2, d. 515,1.8. This document summarizes the 4 September 1908 meeting of the Council of Ministers, at which Minister of Education A. N. Schwartz submitted a memorandum outlining the state's policy toward the higher education of women.

[26] One commentator on Russian student life wrote 1914 that "it was only yesterday that the average provincial citizen [obyvatel' ] reacted with disgust to his daughter's dream of getting a higher education. Only yesterday such an admission meant a bitter argument with parents and a break with home. [Parents] feared the distance from home, the prospect of their daughter living in a strange city, the effects that higher education would have on the girl! Going to the 'courses' meant a break with the past and future at the same time. And then came 1905 and the provinces, the very citadel of these humdrum types [tsitadel' etovo obyvatelia ], themselves became the source of the [mania for higher education] which until now had come from the capitals" (L. Kleinbort, "Russkaia kursistka," Sovremennyi Mir, no. 9 [1914]: 22).

in the government's policy of withholding rights. The law of 19 December 1911 gave women graduating from a few state-recognized institutions all the legal privileges enjoyed by male graduates except the right to enter the state service and the Table of Ranks.^[27]

Most women students came from a professional, civil service, or mercantile background.^[28] Upon graduation, most became teachers or doctors.^[29] By 1914, however, they had won the right to begin the long process that led to admission to the bar.

The Universities

For men not wishing to proceed to a specialized technical career, the basic institution of higher education remained the university. On the eve of World War I, there were ten universities in imperial Russia. Six—those in Moscow, Kharkov, Kazan, Kiev, Odessa, and Warsaw—consisted of four departments: law, medicine, history and philology, and natural sciences and mathematics. Saint Petersburg University had a department of Eastern languages but did not train doctors. Tomsk University had departments of law and medicine, and Saratov University had only a department of medicine. Iur'ev University, in Dorpat, had, in ad-

[27] Dudgeon, "The Forgotten Minority," p. 4; K. Shokhol, "K voprosu o razvitii vysshevo zhenskovo obrazovaniia v Rossii," Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, no. 7 (1913): 7. From 1901 on, the state began to widen opportunities for women to enjoy a teaching career. In September 1901, women graduates won the right to teach in women's gymnasia. In August 1906, they were allowed to teach in the lower six classes of male gymnasia. The December 1911 law gave women equal status with men in secondary teaching.

[28] According to a census of students in the Bestuzhev courses in Saint Petersburg, 24.4 percent of the women's fathers were "free professionals"; 13.5 percent were in state service; 9.9 percent were on pension; 13.9 percent owned industrial or commercial enterprises; 8.3 percent were landowners; 7.5 percent lived on rents from a house or invested capital; 5.6 percent were clergy; 4.8 percent were employees in industrial or commercial establishments; 2.2 percent were employees in the transport sector; 1.7 percent were workers or artisans; and 1.7 percent were peasant cultivators. See A. Kaufman, "Russkaia kursistka v tsifrakh: Perepis' v Bestuzhevskikh Kursakh," Russkaia Mysl', no. 6 (1912): 65– 66. The census also corroborates the obsolescence of traditional estate rubrics. While the fathers of only 1.7 percent of the students were "peasant cultivators," 11.5 percent of the students indicated that they came from the peasant estate.

[29] Of the employed alumnae of the Bestuzhev courses, 67 percent were in teaching. As Ruth Dudgeon points out, this career was not necessarily the first choice of women students: "Seventy percent of the respondents in the humanities and natural sciences expected to become teachers although only 7 percent of the science students and 37 percent of those in the humanities indicated a preference for teaching" (Dudgeon, "The Forgotten Minority," p. 11).

dition to the four basic departments, a department of theology. Enrollment patterns in the universities, as can be seen from Table 3, showed that most students studied law and medicine.

Few professors would have argued with L. I. Petrazhitskii, a noted Saint Petersburg jurist, when he tried to defend the central role of the universities in Russia's higher-education system:

For state posts and public functions in general, where one seeks an idealistic, principled, and humane approach rather than entrepreneurial deftness and economic or utilitarian practicality—for example, judges, gymnasium teachers, doctors, posts in general internal administration, or supervisory responsibilities in the Ministry of Education—the university type of education is most desirable.^[30]

Petrazhitskii did not believe that the technical schools had attained a level of "psychic and ethical culture that would permit one to expect a spirit of disinterested honesty."

Elsewhere, Petrazhitskii's colleagues amplified these arguments by pointing out the fundamental relationship between strong universities and national power. For Moscow's N. V. Speranskii, the source of archrival Germany's vitality was obvious:

[30] Quotes from Petrazhitskii are taken from Leikina-Svirskaia, Russkaia intelligentsiia, p. 11. See also the review of L. Petrazhitskii's Universitet i Nauka in Sovremennyi Mir, no. 7–8 (1907).

To whom does Germany, which was once so abased and poor, owe its present power and fame? Above all, to the universities. Who preserved the feeling of national unity when Germany was fragmented? The universities! Who maintained the German spirit? . . . Who created the basis of Germany's economic power? . . . Who smashed the barriers to national unification?—the universities.^[31]

In a suggestive and cautionary comparison, Speranskii then turned to France. Quoting Louis Pasteur, Speranskii argued that the French had lost the Franco-Prussian War because, in its obsession with industry, trade, and agriculture, France forgot that "there is no such thing as applied science, only the application of science."

At about the same time, the famed geologist V. I. Vernadskii voiced the concern, shared by many of his colleagues, that the state's higher-education policy, concentrating as it did on specialized technical education rather than universities, was shortsighted. Universities, Vernadskii argued, were "a weapon in the universal struggle for survival, a weapon stronger than dreadnoughts."^[32]

Founded by the state in the eighteenth century to train civil servants, from their very inception the universities embodied a variety of distinct and potentially contradictory features. A basic problem was the tension between the identity of the universities as state institutions and their various other roles: their dedication to the principle of the pursuit of "pure knowledge," their service to the emerging Russian public, and their teaching functions. As the Kharkov University Faculty Council argued in a 1901 memorandum, the university as an institution was "sui generis" and therefore needed a large degree of autonomy. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Pirogov, the liberal curator of the Kiev educational district, argued that it was easier to define the Russian universities in terms of what they were not than in terms of what they were:

If it is difficult to define the West European universities, it is even more difficult to define ours. . . . The Russian university is not an institution of applied learning, but it is also not a scientific research institution [svobodno-nauchnoe uchrezhdenie ]. It does not impart general education, but neither is its main purpose moral education. In character it is not based on the estate principle, nor is it a church institution, a private-philanthropic institution, a purely bureaucratic institution, or an institution modeled on the lines of a medieval

[31] N. V. Speranskii, Krizis russkoi shkoly (Moscow, 1914), p. 38.

[32] V. I. Vernadskii, "Vysshaia shkola v Rossii," Ezhegodnik Gazety Rech'za 1914 god (Petrograd, 1915), p. 317.

corporation. And yet, in varying degrees, each of the above principles is incorporated into our university structure.^[33]

Pirogov then made the case for granting faculty councils a large degree of autonomy in internal university governance.

The first real debate over the function of the Russian universities and their relationship to the state took place during the era of the Great Reforms, in the early 1860s. Shaken by the student unrest of 1861–1862, some conservatives wanted to turn the universities into closed institutions modeled on the elite Alexandrovskii Lycee. Others held up the model of mid-nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge, where the main goal of the university experience supposedly was "moral education" (vospitanie ). Unlike the German model, tutorials rather than lectures, and "Christian values" rather than Wissenschaft, were to be the centerpiece of higher education. Some liberals, such as N. I. Kostomarov, looked to the French model of the Collège de France. Kostomarov advocated turning the universities into completely open institutions where anyone could attend lectures. Other noted scholars, such as Moscow University's B. N. Chicherin, argued against all these views, claiming that the German model of the university, with its emphasis on the lecture system, the pursuit of pure knowledge, faculty prerogatives in internal university governance, and student guidance based on an examination system, offered the best direction for Russia's higher-education system. The best source of moral education was, they argued, scientific research, not tutorials. Furthermore, strong universities were essential to the future welfare of the nation, and only universities, not specialized institutes, could develop scientific knowledge.^[34]

The 1863 University Statute represented a victory for the arguments of Chicherin and Pirogov. Student rights were severely circumscribed, and the professors were given extensive powers. They were authorized to elect rectors and other professors and were granted jurisdiction over student discipline. In a significant departure from the German model, faculty councils rather than individual departments voted on new faculty appointments—a procedure meant to symbolize the principle of the unity of science as well as the unity of the university.

[33] Quoted in A. Filippov, "Moskovskoe studenchestvo," Russkoe Obozrenie, no. 5 (1897): 457.

[34] These debates are summarized in G. A. Dzhanshiev, Epokha velikikh reform (Moscow, 1900), pp. 265–270; and Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1970), vol. 2, p. 38.

The 1863 Statute, however, was short-lived. Student unrest led to calls for more government control over university governance and teaching. In 1879 the government relieved faculty councils of all responsibility for student discipline and instead appointed outside "inspectors." Meanwhile, influential conservatives such as Mikhail Katkov, the editor of Moskovskie Vedomosti, dreamed of using an outside examination system to guarantee government control over the content of university teaching. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and the ensuing appointments of I. D. Delianov as minister of education and Dmitry Tolstoi as minister of the interior increased the pressure on the universities.

At the end of 1882, Tolstoi submitted a project for a new university statute to the State Council.^[35] The project, which was approved and became the 1884 University Statute, represented a drastic shift in power in university governance, from the faculty councils to the minister of education and his appointed curator. It provided that the curator would convene meetings of the faculty council and individual departments. Faculty councils and rectors lost the right to communicate directly with the minister of education; they now would have to address all requests to the curator. The rector, who had previously been elected by the faculty council, now became an appointee of the minister of education. Deacons of departments, who had hitherto been elected by the faculty councils, were now to be named by the curator. The minister of education would assume control of faculty appointments. Article 100 of the statute gave him the choice of either filling a vacancy himself or asking the faculty council to select a candidate, who would then be subject to his approval. The faculty council lost all power over the disbursement of university funds and now found itself limited to functions of a purely formal nature: deciding student prizes, conferring degrees, and approving doctoral dissertations. The council would have to secure ministerial approval for such decisions as electing honorary members of the university or founding learned societies. Authority over student discipline would be vested in an inspector appointed by the curator. One of the inspector's more important powers would be that of determining which students would receive scholarships. The draft statute also incorporated

[35] On the deliberations leading to the 1884 Statute, see P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse 19ovo stoletiia (Moscow, 1970), pp. 320–322; Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 122–125; G. I. Shchetinina, Universitety v Rossii i ustav 1884ovo goda (Moscow, 1976), pp. 127–154; Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, Otchët za 1884 god, pp. 231–392.

Katkov's idea that all university graduates would have to pass state examinations administered by outside examiners.

The statute encountered strong opposition in the State Council. Baron A. P. Nikolai pointed out that the statute betrayed "an insulting lack of trust in the professoriate." Even K. P. Pobedonostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod, voiced doubts about such aspects of the statute as the state examination system. Although the majority of the State Council voted against the statute, Tsar Alexander III ratified it on 23 August 1884.

Implementation of the New Statute

In his valuable survey of Kharkov University, which appeared in 1905, Professor V. Buzeskul divided the history of the implementation of the 1884 Statute into three periods. During the first period, 1884 to 1888, the Ministry of Education tried to follow the new statute to the letter. From 1888 to 1899 it was forced to modify many of its basic principles significantly. The outbreak of massive student disorders in 1899 brought about the third period, marked by "the total collapse" (polnoe krushenie ) of the statute.^[36]

Yet the 1884 Statute would remain in force until 1917; its history shows just how difficult it was for the autocracy to realize its intention of asserting state control over university teaching, university governance, and student discipline. It soon became clear that in dealing with the universities, laws by themselves offered little guarantee that the government would have its way. By 1905 the statute was, as Buzeskul pointed out, in shreds. What is truly extraordinary is that although the government recognized the need to replace the statute as early as 1901, it lasted until the fall of the autocracy.

Ministerial interference in faculty appointments was most pronounced in the years immediately following the introduction of the 1884 Statute. While the Ministry of Education practiced relative restraint in appointing university rectors, replacing only a few of the previously elected incumbents, it did undertake a minor purge of the professoriate.^[37] Even before the statute went into effect, professors I. I.

[36] V. Buzeskul, Istoriia Khar'kovskovo Universiteta pri deistvii ustava 1884ovo goda (Kharkov, 1905), p. 1.

[37] Only one elected rector, Professor Tsekhanovetskii of Kharkov University, was replaced immediately. In 1887 Delianov installed Professor M. I. Vladislavlev as rector of Saint Petersburg University, a move that led to some student unrest.

Mechnikov, A. S. Posnikov, and V. V. Preobrazhenskii had been forced out of Odessa University. Delianov also fired, in 1887, two popular professors of the Moscow University juridical faculty, M. M. Kovalevskii and S. A. Muromtsev. Professor F. G. Mishchenko was forced to leave Kiev University for "Ukrainophile leanings." The new minister dismissed privat-dozent V. I. Semevskii from Saint Petersburg University because he did not like what he heard about Semevskii's lectures on the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. Professor I. I. Ditiatin had to resign the chair of Russian law at Kharkov University. In 1890 the famous chemist D. I. Mendeleev resigned from Saint Petersburg University after receiving a reprimand from Delianov for passing on a student petition.^[38] The brunt of the ministry's attacks on the professoriate occurred in the 1880s. During the following decade, the Ministry of Education began to pay more attention to the opinions of the professoriate in filling vacancies—although it always had the legal right to overrule faculty recommendations.^[39]

When it introduced the 1884 Statute, the Ministry of Education told the professoriate that "university teaching . . . must serve the interests of the state; it must be patriotic."^[40] To this end, new examination rules went into effect in 1885.^[41] University teaching was now divided into "primary" courses, for which students would be responsible when taking the state examinations, and "secondary" courses, on which they would not be examined. The new rules were designed to have their greatest impact on the two most politically sensitive departments: history and philology, and law. The curricular emphasis in the former was shifted toward a heavy concentration on the classics; subjects such as Russian literature and philosophy now became "secondary."^[42] As for the juridical faculty,

[38] A good source on these dismissals is S. G. Svatikov, "Opal'naia professura 80-kh godov," Golos Minuvshevo, no. 2 (1917). In justifying his decision to fire Kovalevskii, Delianov wrote to the curator of the Moscow educational district that "it is better to have a professor of mediocre capabilities than to have an especially gifted professor who has a deleterious effect on the minds of the students."

[39] See Buzeskul, Istoriia Khar'kovskovo Universiteta, pp. 17–27; Th. Zelinskii, "Universitetskii vopros v 1906 godu," Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, no. 8 (1906). Zelinskii does point out that this restraint lacked any legal underpinning. Bogolepov's unceremonious dismissal, after the 1899 student disturbances, of Nikolai Kareev and Ivan Grevs from the Saint Petersburg University faculty reminded the professors of their vulnerability under the law.

[40] Buzeskul, Istoriia Khar'kovskovo Universiteta, p. 5.

[41] The full text of the examination rules for all departments is reprinted in Ministerstvo Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, Alfavitnyi spisok zakonopolozhenii i rasporiazhenii po Sankt Peterburgskomu Uchebnomu Okrugu (Saint Petersburg, 1893), pp. 1260–1279.

[42] A. I. Georgievskii, one of the architects of the statute, pointed out that Russian literature was an undesirable subject because Russian writers "have followed only one goal: to point out . . . the defects . . . of the contemporary state and of the social order. Given the sociopolitical bias of Russian literature, the lectures of the professors . . . are full of harmful nonsense." See G. I. Shchetinina, "Universitety i obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v poreformennyi period.," Istoricheskie Zapiski, no. 84 (1969): 196. These changes were not popular with students. Enrollment in this faculty fell from 11.3 percent of all students in 1880 to 3.9 percent by 1900.

the new statute abolished the teaching of foreign constitutional law and turned such politically sensitive fields as state law into secondary subjects. Attention now focused on Roman, civil, criminal, and church law.^[43] The new examination rules instructed professors to glorify the Russian autocracy and stop comparing it to other governments. Furthermore, they were to emphasize concrete facts rather than spend too much time on "abstract legal theories."^[44]

The new rules, however, soon disappointed those who had seen them as an effective vehicle to ensure state control over university teaching. As the State Council majority had in fact predicted, the scarcity of qualified personnel soon led to a situation where state examination commissions had to be composed of the very professors whose teaching they were supposedly regulating. The examinations themselves soon became so standardized that students could pass them by taking two-week came courses.

Dissatisfaction also mounted with the curricular changes mandated by the new statute. On the history and philology faculty, the unpopularity of the forced concentration on classics and the mass flight of students to other faculties forced the ministry to beat a hasty retreat. In 1889 Delianov announced the restoration of the pre-1884 division of the faculty into classics, history, and Slavic departments.^[45]

Criticism of the juridical curriculum also mounted; even other government departments implied that the 1884 Statute had failed to raise the level of legal graduates. The Ministry of Justice complained that the

[43] In his memoirs A. N. Naumov describes the basic course prescribed by the 1884 Statute for law students. In the first year the courses, all required, included the history of Russian law, the history of Roman law, political economy, and the encyclopedia of law. During the second year students took Roman law, Russian state law, financial law, church law, and the history of legal thought. The basic subjects in the third and fourth years included criminal law, civil law, international law, police law, and commercial law, as well as electives in such fields as forensic medicine and penology (Iz utselevshikh vospominanii, 1868–1917, [New York, 1954], vol. 1, p. 82).

[44] Ministerstvo Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, Ekzamenatsionnye trebovaniia, pravila i programmy ispytaniia v komissii iuridicheskoi (Saint Petersburg, 1885), p. 2.

[45] A critical view of the history and philology curriculum at the turn of the century can be found in S. P. Mel'gunov, Vospominaniia i dnevniki (Paris, 1964), pp. 79–81. Mel'gunov complained about his educational experience in Moscow University, where the professors supposedly discouraged research in contemporary topics. A more positive view can be found in Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, pp. 50–92.

excessive number of courses students had to take precluded the development of critical legal skills. To press his case for economic-administrative education in the polytechnics, Finance Minister Witte cited the deficiencies of the university juridical faculties. A 1902 review commission appointed by the Ministry of Education recommended the reintroduction of the teaching of foreign constitutional law. Other critics complained that the statute barred students on the juridical faculty from taking courses such as logic or psychology, which were taught only on the history and philology faculty.^[46]

While the medical and natural science faculties did not come under the same political scrutiny as did the departments of history and law, they too suffered from another stricture of the statute: inflexible staffing guidelines which failed to keep pace with scientific developments and the demand for new faculty positions. The 1902 commission on university reform pointed out that the 1884 Statute left the natural science departments severely understaffed, while medical teaching demanded new chairs in obstetrics, bacteriology, pediatrics, medical physics, and psychiatry.^[47]

In order to improve the quality of teaching and encourage professors to compete in tailoring their courses to the requirements of the new examination system, the statute introduced the German institution of the privat-dozent as well as the honorarium. Privat-dozenty received the right to compete with senior professors by offering the same courses, while all students had to pay their teachers an honorarium of one ruble per course-hour. Thus high enrollments would bring financial reward and would presumably encourage professors to concentrate on preparing students for the state examinations.

Here, too, reality fell far short of the expectations of the government. Privat-dozenty, whose prospects for an academic career depended on the favor of their senior faculty mentor, would rarely risk alienating the senior faculty by giving parallel courses. Another reason real competition did not develop was the chronic shortage of qualified teaching personnel. Making German Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit work in Russia presupposed a supply of qualified university professors that the country simply did not possess. Because there was a shortage rather than a sur-

[46] Komissiia po preobrazovaniiu, Trudy, vol. 1, pp. 123–125; O. F. Shershenovich, "O zhelatel'noi postanovke iuridicheskovo obrazovaniia," Pravo, no. 4 (1900); Sergei Zhivovo, "Chevo nedostaët v universitete nashim budushchim iuristam?" Russkaia Mysl', no. 10 (1902).

[47] Komissiia po preobrazovaniiu, Trudy, vol. 1, pp. 104–105, 133.

plus of university teachers meeting the requirements of the 1884 Statute, the honorarium led to gross inequities; it benefited those lucky enough to be teaching required courses in departments with large enrollments but did little to encourage healthy competition to raise the quality of teaching.^[48]

One major reason for the teaching shortage was the numerous obstacles that the statute put in the way of aspiring professors. Jews and women were automatically barred from the professoriate. The 1884 Statute provided for two faculty ranks—associate (extraordinary) and full (ordinary) professors. But in order to meet the statutory requirement for an associate professorship, a young man had to earn two research degrees, a master's and a doctor's degree, each requiring a long dissertation. In practice, this meant that many university teaching posts were filled by individuals who did not meet the statutory requirements. In 1908, for example, out of a total of 474 statutory professorships and associate professorships in Russian universities, 115 were "vacant," that is, they were staffed by professors who were teaching beyond the normal retirement age or who did not have the required doctor's or, in some cases, even the master's degree.^[49] Those who opposed calls for more universities argued that the "vacancy rate" proved that Russia did not have enough teaching personnel even to staff the existing institutions and therefore should not start building new ones. This was met by the counterargument that the fault was the government's: it allocated too little to graduate fellowships and clung to an unrealistic and outmoded two-dissertation requirement.^[50]

[48] In 1899 the historian P. G. Vinogradov argued that one motive of the Ministry of Education for introducing the honorarium was to divide and demoralize the academic profession. It did lead to wide disparities in compensation. In 1906, law professors at Saint Petersburg University received an honorarium 1,250 percent higher than the honorarium of history professors, and at Kiev University they received 830 percent more. In 1897, of sixty-seven professors in Saint Petersburg University, thirty-four received less than 500 rubles a year in honorarium, whereas five earned more than 4,000 rubles. By 1909, a professor on the juridical faculty of Saint Petersburg University averaged 9,229 rubles in honorarium a year, while a colleague teaching Oriental languages averaged 76 rubles. In 1902 a law allowed faculty earning less than 1,000 rubles in honorarium to collect a 20 percent raise in their basic salary. (See P. G. Vinogradov, "Uchebnoe delo v nashikh universitetakh," Vestnik Evropy, no. 10 [1901]; D. I. Bagalei, "Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie russkikh universitetov," Vestnik Evropy, no. 1 [1914].)

[49] Ministerstvo Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, Otchët za 1908 god . Of these vacancies 38 were filled by professors who had passed the mandatory retirement limit, 47 were taught by privat-dozenty, and 30 were not taught at all.

[50] There is an extensive literature on this subject. See Komissiia po preobrazovaniiu, Trudy, vol. 4, pp. 132–164; A. M. Mironov, "Pravovoe i material'noe polozhenie privatdozentov v russkikh universitetakh," Vestnik Vospitaniia, no. 1 (1906). For a defense of the two-degree requirement see Novikov, Ot Moskvy do N'iu-Iorka, pp. 71–72. Novikov contended that the shortage of qualified professors in the country guaranteed academic jobs for those who managed to win the support of a powerful member of the senior faculty. Therefore the goad of two degrees and a public defense was needed to encourage research. Few of Novikov's colleagues shared his opinion; the 1906 Tolstoi Conference (see Chapter 7, below) recommended abolishing the two-degree requirement.

One risk of formalizing relations between government and universities in an all-inclusive statute was that it became more difficult to respond quickly to changing economic needs and circumstances. The professoriate wanted higher salaries and increased state expenditures on higher education. Although the Ministry of Education was sympathetic, little changed between the introduction of the statute and the onset of World War I, in part because of opposition from the Ministry of Finance, in part because of the government's failure to modify or replace the 1884 Statute. Full professors earned 3,000 rubles in addition to honorarium; associate professors, 2,000 rubles in addition to honorarium. These salaries had not changed since 1863 and were much lower, faculty councils contended, than those of other civil servants in the same grade.^[51]

Unlike members of some other elites (such as the State Council) few professors had a nonuniversity education. A significant percentage had a degree from either Moscow University or Saint Petersburg University. The social profile of the university professoriate showed marked differences from that of the student body it was teaching. (Estate categories, however, have limits as scholarly tools.) On the eve of World War I only 20.3 percent of the professoriate came from the meshchanstvo, the merchant estate (kupechestvo ), and the peasantry and honored citizenry (pochetnoe grazhdanstvo ), whereas 45.7 percent of the student body claimed these estates as their origin. The percentage of nobles ranged

[51] In a response to a 1901 Ministry of Education questionnaire, the Moscow University Faculty Council made the case for higher academic salaries. It took the average privat-dozent lucky enough to secure an academic post 10.8 years to attain an associate professorship and 14 years to attain a full professorship. In short, he had to wait a long time before he could earn even the 2,000 rubles given an associate professor. When he became a full professor, he would attain the fifth rank in the civil service and realize that other ministries awarded much higher fifth-rank salaries (e.g., 67 percent of the civil servants in the Department of Transport received between 6,000 and 8,000 rubles a year). The faculty council reminded the Ministry of Education that even in 1863, 5,000 rubles had been recommended as the optimum salary for a full professor. Eight years later, arguing that professors had too easy a life (considering their vacations and extramural earnings), the Ministry of Finance opposed higher salaries and expressed skepticism about the efficiency of the universities in the nation's higher-education system. Professor Bagalei pointed out that by 1914, many gymnasium teachers could earn more than an associate professor. See Imperatorskii Moskovskii Universitet, Suzhdeniia Soveta Imperatorskovo Moskovskovo Universiteta (Moscow, 1901), pp. 64–68; TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 471, l. 114.

from 46.2 percent for historians and 48.1 percent for mathematicians down to 29.3 percent for medical faculty. It was not a rich profession, nor did it appear to have close links with the landed nobility. Of the professoriate, 83.5 percent owned neither landed property nor a house. The profession was becoming more homogeneous in religion: 75.7 percent over the age of 65 were Russian Orthodox, and the proportion increased to 86 percent of those between the ages of 35 and 54.^[52]

Between 1884 and 1917 the state made only limited increases in its financial support of higher education, and these small additional sums were allotted mainly to medical education. By 1914 the state was allocating about 5.5 million rubles a year to the universities, 60 percent of their total budget. Six years earlier a professorial conference called by the Ministry of Education had recommended raising annual outlays to 13 million yearly. As of 1914 the Russian universities had 7.8 million rubles outstanding in requests for urgently needed construction.^[53]

The universities coped with these financial limitations by relying more heavily on student fees and junior faculty. Student fees made up an ever-expanding part of the university budget as enrollments increased, and since the statute made it difficult to establish new professorial chairs, the universities made growing use of junior faculty to teach new courses and keep pace with rising enrollments and the expansion of subdisciplines.^[54] Still, the ratio of teachers to students tended to deteriorate, especially after 1900. For example, at Moscow University between 1900 and 1914, teaching staff increased by 21.7 percent, while enrollments increased 161.8 percent.^[55]

As the junior faculty members assumed an ever larger role in university teaching, they became increasingly dissatisfied with their failure to win the role in university governance and the improvement in financial status to which they felt they were entitled.^[56] The road to an associate professorship was long and grueling. An aspiring academic had to be

[52] This paragraph is based on the 1913 service lists of the Ministry of Education. See Appendix Table B-2 in this volume.

[53] Bagalei, "Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie."

[54] In 1912 there were 649 privat-dozenty, 350 of whom taught in either Moscow University or Saint Petersburg University. Subjects neglected by the 1884 Statute, such as bacteriology and mathematical physics, were often taught by privat-dozenty . See N. Kol'tsov, K universitetskomu voprosu (Moscow, 1909), p. 4.

[55] Istoriia Moskovskovo Universiteta, ed. M. N. Tikhormirov (Moscow, 1955), vol. 2, p. 372.

[56] On the position of the junior faculty, written from a junior-faculty point of view, see Kol'tsov, K universitetskomu voprosu; Mironov, "Pravovoe i material'noe polozhenie privat-dozentov."

recommended by his university, undergo a risky and feudal relationship with an academic advisor, write and publicly defend two dissertations, secure the approval of the curator of the educational district, and then put in long years as an underpaid privat-dozent until a position became available.

Senior faculty kept the well-remunerated courses for themselves. Of the ninety-five privat-dozenty teaching in Saint Petersburg University in 1895, only eleven received an honorarium of more than 600 rubles, while sixty earned less than 300 rubles a year, and eighteen earned nothing at all. Fixed salaries were laughable. In 1908 a privat-dozent reading two lectures a week could count on 80 rubles for the academic year.^[57]

But in order to become a privat-dozent, a student had to earn an advanced degree. Stipends for graduate study were quite small. Of eighty-five aspirants in Moscow University in 1908, ten received scholarships from the Ministry of Education, twenty-four obtained scholarships from other sources, and the remaining fifty-one had to support themselves. Ministry of Education scholarships awarded the recipient 600 rubles yearly—about half the starting salary of a teacher in a classical gymnasium. Thus privat-dozenty and graduate students had to undertake outside work.

A major complaint of the junior faculty members was their almost total lack of professional rights. They were excluded from faculty council meetings and could not even attend a meeting of their own department except by invitation. They were at the mercy of their dissertation supervisors and also of the curator, who could discharge them at any time. Thus resentments built up not only against the Ministry of Education but also against the senior faculty. These resentments were to surface in 1905, when the junior faculty would demand that the senior faculty share some of its newly won powers, and the senior faculty would refuse.^[58]

The Statute Under Fire

The outbreak of large-scale student unrest in 1899 forced the government to confront the question of revising the 1884 Statute. The inves-

[57] Kol'tsov, K universitetskomu voprosu, p. 5.

[58] See, for example, the report of the January 1906 commission created by the Moscow University Faculty Council to study the junior faculty's demand for the right to elect delegates to attend faculty council meetings (Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy [hereafter referred to as TsGIAM], f. 418, op. 249, ed. kh. 97).

tigatory commission headed by General P. S. Vannovskii concluded that a major reason for the chronic student unrest was the unsatisfactory state of the universities and the failure of the 1884 Statute to achieve its objectives.

Acting on Vannovskii's report, Minister of Education N. P. Bogolepov convened a conference that recommended key changes in some of the basic assumptions of university policy. A fundamental feature of the 1884 Statute had been the clause that contact between students and professors be limited to the classroom and laboratory. Another assumption was that students were "individual visitors" of the university, with no corporate identity (see Chapter 2, below). The conference now admitted the unfeasibility of these assumptions and accepted the alleged connection between student unrest and the deficiencies of government university policy. The conference recommended that the government take steps to improve the conditions of student life, to encourage more interaction between students and professors, and to ensure that the students spend more time on their academic work. It proposed that the government start building dormitories, that the Ministry of Education encourage previously banned, extracurricular "scientific circles" under faculty direction, and that professors modify the lecture system by teaching more seminars and giving students more frequent work assignments.

P. S. Vannovskii, who became minister of education in 1901, gave the professoriate an opportunity it had long been denied under the 1884 Statute: to arrive at and express a professional consensus about the entire university structure. On 29 April 1901, Vannovskii sent to the faculty councils a list of eighteen questions on possible directions for university reform. Analysis of the replies of the faculty councils to these questions permits the conclusion that despite individual differences of opinion among the professors, the academic profession as a whole seized the opportunity presented by Vannovskii and began to speak with one voice.

The Professoriate Calls for Change

The 1884 University Statute confronted Russian professors with a basic tension between their identity as independent scholars, loyal to specific disciplines, and their relationship to that complex and highly fragile institution, the university, for which they felt primary responsibility but over which they had insufficient control. This tension emerged in the subtle but crucial difference between two major professional

goals: academic freedom and scientific freedom. As Walter Metzger points out:

Academic freedom is the ideology of a profession-across-the-disciplines, the profession created out of the common circumstance of an academic appointment in a college or university and of the common duties and anxieties that this entails; scientific freedom is the ideology of the diverse professions-within-the-discipline, the professions based on regularized advance of knowledge in distinctive fields.^[59]

The contrast between growing scientific self-confidence and humiliating state tutelage, epitomized by the 1884 University Statute, became increasingly sharp with the passage of time. The steady growth in membership and activity of learned societies signified increasing confidence in the ability of Russian scholarship to reach the highest professional standards.^[60] In addition, the learned societies brought professors together with other members of educated urban society—bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors—and provided the academic profession with a significant opportunity to exert cultural influence and leadership.^[61] Indeed, when one remembers the lex Arons in Germany and the gross violations of academic freedom in the United States at the time, and when one considers that professors fired from state universities could teach at other ministries' VUZy, one may well argue that the conditions of Russian life were not completely inimical to scholarship, even when compared to those in more "advanced" countries. (Nikolai Stepanovich, the hero of Chekhov's "A Boring Story," certainly seemed content with his achievements.) It was not in scholarship but in defining their relationship to the state and the nature of their professional identity that the Russian professors faced their most serious challenge.

The issue of state tutelage was complicated by the absence of an eco-

[59] Walter P. Metzger, "Academic Freedom and Scientific Freedom," Daedalus 107, no. 2 (1978): 107.

[60] On learned societies see Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, vol. 2, pp. 204–209; Leikina-Svirskaia, Russkaia Intelligentsiia, pp. 91–92; A.D. Stepanskii, "Liberal'naia intelligentsiia v obshchestvennom dvizhenii," Istoricheskie Zapiski, no. 109 (1983): 64–94. An excellent exposition of the dichotomy between state interference and the growing self-confidence of the professoriate can be found in V. I. Vernadskii's "1911 god v istorii russkoi umstvennoi kul'tury," Ezhegodnik Gazety Rech' za 1911 god (Saint Petersburg, 1912). It should be noted that relations between the government and some of the learned societies were delicate. For example, in 1899 the Ministry of Education ordered the Moscow Juridical Society closed, after a "seditious" speech by its president, S. A. Muromtsev.

[61] On the role and influence of the Moscow Juridical Society, see Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, pp. 25–27.

nomic base capable of providing a real alternative to state-financed university education. This confronted the professoriate with two interrelated problems. The first was that of deciding whether the professor was a civil servant or an independent professional. The second was the issue of how to defend professional rights in case of state attack. As Kendall Bailes has pointed out, one dilemma of Russian professionals was "to free themselves from the tutelage of the state, while still using the state for their own ends."^[62] This was a dilemma the Russian professor could not escape.

Except for the short-lived Academic Union of 1905 (discussed in Chapter 5, below), the Russian professoriate never created a nationwide professional organization. The focal point of professors' scholarly identities was the laboratory or the learned society, while their cross-disciplinary identities centered on the faculty council. Yet even here there was a strong conservative minority which argued for the primacy of individual departments in university governance, especially with respect to the election of new professors.^[63] The attitude toward faculty council powers, so sharply curtailed by the 1884 Statute, was a basic litmus test of "liberalism" and "conservatism" within the academic profession. Liberals argued that a strong faculty council signified not only belief in the "unity of science" but also the professoriate's dedication to the principle that the university was more than the sum of its parts, that there was in fact a profession-across-the-disciplines with common interests centered on the universities.^[64]

Indeed, one reason that the 1884 Statute was so disturbing to the majority of the professoriate was that it showed how professional arguments could cut both ways. Most professors would agree that from their point of view, the worst ministers of education turned out to be their ex-colleagues, Bogolepov, Schwartz, and Kasso. These ministers, representing a significant minority of the professoriate, believed that it was

[62] This paper represents the conclusion to the as yet unpublished "Professions in Czarist Russia," edited by Harley Balzer and Kendall Bailes. This book is based on various papers, including one by this author on the university professoriate, delivered at an NEH-AAASS—sponsored Conference on Professions and Professionalization in Tsarist Russia, held at the University of Illinois in June 1982.

[63] See, for example, V. Sergeevich, "Germanskie universitety i nashi," Vestnik Evropy, no. 3 (1905). The case for departmental as opposed to faculty council powers rested on the assertion that when the latter decided academic appointments, political considerations tended to outweigh scholarly issues.

[64] See, for example, the record of the meeting between the rectors of Saint Petersburg and Moscow universities with Minister of Education Schwartz in October 1908 to discuss his draft statute (TsGIA, f. 733, op. 154, d. 269,1. 3).

not the government that was violating professional norms, but, rather, the majority of their colleagues, who engaged in "political intrigue," "pandering to students," "diluting standards," and so forth. Such professors saw the state as an essential protector against the tyranny of their colleagues, just as the statute was regarded as a professionally honest document that tried to protect educational excellence from extraneous considerations. In short, the complexity of the university and the tension between scholarship, teaching, and institutional responsibility combined to provide a coherent alternative to the dominant professional ideology.

The experience of the Russian university professoriate under the 1884 Statute was to show that defining the obstacles to academic freedom was much easier than deciding just what academic freedom actually meant; that the professoriate's "professional ideology" assumed a consensus among academics, government, and students on what the university should be; that this consensus, because of the complex nature of the Russian universities, did not exist; and, finally, that the almost hopeless tactical situation of the professoriate severely hampered its prospects of attaining its professional goals. By the eve of World War I, relations between the Russian government and the professoriate were worse than at any time since the reign of Nicholas I. Tsarist Russia developed great scholars and scientists but failed to develop a stable university system or a satisfied academic profession.

Major reasons why most of the professoriate disliked the 1884 Statute were its emphasis on the utilitarian functions of the universities and its failure to recognize the essential interrelationship of scholarship, research, and teaching. Professors who taught and trained future civil servants found it difficult to explain why the government should not treat them as employees and regulate the universities. But professors who devoted their lives to pure research, which in turn was the only guarantee of effective teaching, could make a much stronger argument for academic freedom and university autonomy.

There was yet another reason why expecting the universities to train students or impart practical skills threatened the professional interests of the university professoriate. The tremendous explosion of knowledge, the creation of new subdisciplines, and the demands of various ministries for civil servants with better training and more specialized skills threatened to make the university obsolete and to undercut claims that the state should recognize its primacy over the specialized institutes.

Therefore defenders of the university had to stress the primacy of method over content as the basis of university teaching.^[65]

University teaching would, proponents argued, prepare students for future careers, but only indirectly. Strictly avoiding all "practical" or "applied" courses, the universities would instill a respect for free research and an understanding of scientific methodology that would provide the nation with independent, critical thinkers who would be dedicated civil servants and professionals.^[66]

If Harold Perkin's thesis of two conflicting ideals in the formation of middle-class identity—the entrepreneurial, and the professional—is valid, then it is certainly the latter that the professoriate propagated.^[67] The professionals' claims to status rested on the mastery of scientific and conceptual rather than on merely applied knowledge; on their claim that the practice, application, and development of this knowledge demanded autonomy, especially from the state; on their self-proclaimed aloofness from the naked battle for economic self-interest. Professionals, to be sure, demanded their fees, but only as deserved compensation for the vital services they performed for society as a whole. In theory, at least, the academics constituted an elite among professionals. They not only communicated knowledge but also created it. Their power to grant university degrees, as Joseph Ben-David has pointed out, controlled a basic standard for entry into other professions.^[68]

Only through such universities, professors argued, could Russia develop effective free professions or an honest and capable civil service. It

[65] Among many articles on this issue, one example is that of E. D. Grimm, "Organizatsiia universitetskovo prepodavaniia po proektu novovo ustava," Russkaia Mysl', no. 4 (1916). After complaining about the government's preference for specialized technical education, Grimm pleads with the government and the Russian public not to demand more from the universities than they can or ought to give—that is, a good grounding in scientific (nauchnyi ) thinking. "An individual," Grimm points out, "who has had a serious scientific education can easily and quickly absorb the 'practical knowledge' the government and the public [obshchestvo ] demand. He will not find himself lost, either when he pursues his own intellectual interests or when he is confronted by various problems encountered in the hard school of life" (p. 117).

[66] A typical defense of the key role of the universities in educating competent professionals and honest civil servants can be found in Vinogradov, "Uchebnoe delo v nashikh universitetakh."

[67] Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), pp. 218–339. I owe much to conversations with other participants in the June 1982 conference on professions in tsarist Russia, and especially to the comments of Kendall Bailes.

[68] Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins, "A Comparative Study of Academic Freedom and Student Politics," in S. M. Lipset, ed., Student Politics (New York, 1970), pp. 149–150.

followed from this that the university, rather than the specialized institute, should be the linchpin of the nation's system of higher education. Universities based on science would become, the liberal professoriate hoped, a driving force behind government policies serving the interests of the nation as a whole rather than those of separate social groups; moreover, they would pave the way for the gradual democratization of Russia while avoiding the pitfalls of revolution from below. Also important was a belief held by many liberal professors that the university was an essentially "democratic" institution—not because the senior faculty regarded junior faculty and students as equals, but because the universities were scientific institutions based on the principle of meritocratic achievement.^[69]

Most professors would have agreed with George Young's statement that the function of the nineteenth century had been to "disengage the disinterested intelligence, to release it from the entanglements of party and sect . . . and to set it operating over the whole range of human life and circumstance."^[70] Businessmen, entrepreneurs, and merchants, albeit important as creators of wealth, could not be trusted to develop a sense of the common good.^[71]

Ironically, the easiest way to achieve the common good in tsarist Russia was to work with, rather than against, the state—if the state would only cooperate. Moscow University's Professor I. I. Ianzhul, more politically conservative than many of his colleagues, did not find much disagreement when he argued the case for strong state intervention to temper many of the evils of capitalism and ensure balanced economic development. Naturally, the state would be well advised, Ianzhul argued, to call on professors and other experts to ensure that the government was "maintaining the proper equilibrium" among classes and

[69] See, for example, E. N. Trubetskoi, "K nachalu uchebnovo goda," Moskovskii Ezhenedel'nik, no. 34 (1907).

[70] In Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, p. 260.

[71] In the Iuridicheskii Vestnik, the organ of the Moscow Juridical Society, can be found numerous references to the alleged backwardness of the kupechestvo and the industrial entrepreneurs. In a typical reference, the Vestnik bemoans their "lack of consideration for the worker, their lack of concern for the common good" ("Raznye zametki," Iuridicheskii Vestnik, no. 10–12 [1880]: 70). In turn, as Albert Rieber and James West have pointed out, many merchants and/or industrialists resented these attitudes on the part of the professional intelligentsia (A. J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia [Chapel Hill, 1982], pp. 319–323; James West, "The Riabushinskii Circle: Russian Industrialists in Search of a Bourgeoisie, 1909–1914," in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, no. 3 [1984]). Of course, not all professors shared this hostility; a prominent exception was I. Kh. Ozerov of Moscow University.

groups.^[72] And while relations between the government and the professoriate were far from smooth, the state did in fact make extensive use of academic consultants.^[73] Yet while the government collaborated with professors as individuals, it distrusted the profession as a corporate entity.

A major obstacle to recognition of the professoriate's professional demands was the student problem, specifically, the differences that constantly surfaced between students and professors over how to respond to perceived government attacks on the universities. The professoriate, which almost always counseled students to "take the long view" and show restraint, represented a perfect target for the studenchestvo . In the eyes of many students, the professoriate embodied the hypocrisy of Russian liberalism in its pursuit of self-serving ends disguised by the rhetoric of lofty ideals. That many students glimpsed their own future position embodied in the professors' behavior only added to their bitterness. Heavy criticism of the alleged cowardice of the professoriate and its unwillingness to match the courage of the studenchestvo in defending the universities was to figure prominently in the student movement.

The professoriate's very definition of the university and of its own professional role left it open to criticism. There was a large gap between the professional ideology and the reality of university life. In theory, students went to a Humboldtian university where they eagerly listened to the lectures of eminent scholars and honed their characters by learning the methodology of, and respect for, pure academic research.^[74] Many students indeed met these expectations.^[75] But, as was the case in many other countries as well, most students entered the university with little idea of exactly what they wanted to do and therefore had only vague and contradictory expectations of what their university education should give them. Furthermore, the professors, with their own professional in-

[72] I. I. Ianzhul, "Bismark i gosudarstvennyi sotsializm," Vestnik Evropy, no. 8 (1890): 729–730.

[73] There are many examples of "scholarship in the nation's service." S. A. Muromtsev did valuable work in legal codification; V. O. Kliuchevskii tutored the royal family and submitted memoranda in 1905 on institutional reform; A. I. Chuprov undertook important studies that affected railway policy; I. I. Ianzhul worked as a factory inspector; I. Kh. Ozerov served as a consultant on tax policy and cooperated in Zubatov's attempts to create police unions; and V. V. Dokuchaev, V. I. Vernadskii, and D. I. Mendeleev undertook vital surveys of the nation's natural resources.

[74] A good exposition of this theory is offered by Ivan Grevs, in "Zabytaia nauka i unizhennoe zvanie," Nashi Dni, 20 December 1904.

[75] Such students formed organizations such as the Scientific-Literary Society in Saint Petersburg University in the 1880s and the Historical-Philosophical Society of Moscow University, founded in 1902 and directed by Professor Sergei Trubetskoi.

terests at stake, gave the students a nonvocational "elite" rather than an "expert" education.^[76]

It was not clear, however, that the kind of elite the universities were preparing—a professional elite—would in fact be running the country. In addition, most of the roles for which the universities were preparing the students, especially those of physician, lawyer, high school teacher, and zemstvo employee, involved entry into professions and occupations that were either fighting the state over issues of professional autonomy or whose professional activities were often stymied by perceived government obstructionism. Furthermore, even professionals who worked for employers other than the state—zemstvo physicians, for example—often encountered the hostility of such entrenched elites as the landed aristocracy, who often showed little sympathy for the professional ideal.^[77]

Adding to the tension between professors and students was the steady worsening of the faculty-student ratio between 1880 and 1914. Excellent teaching was the exception rather than the rule.^[78] The examination system encouraged rote memorization rather than creative learning, especially in departments, such as law, with large enrollments. But many professors suspected that calls for better teaching and more direct supervision of students' work masked an attempt to turn them into "high school teachers," and they fought back by making extravagant claims for the intellectual and the moral superiority of the lecture system, even if the lectures were poorly delivered and boring.^[79] Frustrated by the stu-

[76] I have borrowed the terms elite and expert universities from Ben-David and Collins's highly suggestive article "A Comparative Study of Academic Freedom and Student Politics." Elite universities did not try to give their graduates practical training; expert universities did. The authors also distinguish between model and non-model systems. In the former, the universities train graduates for positions and responsibilities that have clear models in the wider society; in the latter, universities are "created by a traditional, or at any rate uneducated, elite for the purpose of eventually reforming themselves or increasing their efficiency through training new and better qualified people of a kind that do not yet exist in the country" (p. 162).

[77] Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905 (Princeton, 1981); John F. Hutchison, "Society, Corporation or Union? Russian Physicians in the Struggle for Professional Unity, 1890–1913," paper delivered at the June 1982 Conference on Professions in Tsarist Russia, held at the University of Illinois, Urbana.

[78] Mark Vishniak, Dan' proshlomu (New York, 1954), p. 47; N. I. Astrov, Vospominaniia (Paris, 1941), p. 191; Mel'gunov, Vospominaniia i dnevniki, pp. 79–81.

[79] This was especially true after 1899, when the Ministry of Education decided that better teaching and more seminars would be a useful antidote to student unrest. See N. Kazanskii, "Eshche o prepodavanii na iuridicheskikh fakul'tetakh," Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnovo Prosveshcheniia, no. 1 (1901). For a defense of the centrality of the lecture system, see the review of L. Petrazhitskii's Universitet i Nauka in Sovremennyi Mir .

dent problem, the professoriate tended to blame unrest in the universities on the government's treatment of the academic profession and pointed to Germany as an example of how government respect for professors led to good relations between professors and students.^[80]

The collective frustration of the university professoriate finally found a legally sanctioned outlet when the faculty councils were asked to reply to the 1901 Ministry of Education questionnaire. The dominant tone of the replies was reflected in the Moscow University Faculty Council's statement that it made little sense for the government to entrust the educational development of the students to professors who were not allowed to elect their own colleagues, appoint rectors, determine lecture schedules, or oversee student discipline.^[81] All the councils asked for the right to elect their own rectors as well as for control over student discipline, higher salaries, abolition of the honorarium, and more faculty power—vested in the faculty council, rather than in the department—in making new appointments. The professors also favored retention of the rights and privileges associated with the university degree, as well as the replacement of the moribund examination system. The Saint Petersburg Faculty Council argued that it would be unfair for the universities to lose these privileges while they were retained by graduates of the specialized technical institutes or the closed schools. The Kiev and Kharkov faculty councils pointed out the importance of these inducements in ensuring a capable civil service. Removing them would open the way to favoritism and patronage.

Yet the professors left no doubt that they preferred to work with rather than against the state. In their replies to the Vannovskii questionnaire, the faculty councils stressed the fundamental compatibility of university autonomy, which they preferred to call self-rule (samoupravlenie ), with the autocratic system. The Kharkov University Faculty Council argued that ideas needed freedom but conceded that as soon as an idea "entered the realm of word or deed, then it fell under the jurisdiction of the . . . laws ensuring public order and peace." If such a distinction held in Germany, which combined Lehrfreiheit and university autonomy with a stern commitment to defend the existing social order, then why

[80] In his Tat'ianin Day speech of January 1904, Professor Sergei Trubetskoi appealed to the Russian educated public to look to the example of Germany, "where no possible political or social upheaval could upset the consensus that the universities were inviolable and independent" (Russkie Vedomosti, 12 January 1904).

[81] The replies of the faculty councils to Vannovskii's questionnaire are found in TsGIA, f. 733, op. 226, d. 95.

could not such a distinction, the Kharkov professors asked, gradually be introduced into Russia? The Moscow Faculty Council bluntly rejected the assumption of the 1884 Statute that the universities needed strong government control. Why, the faculty council asked, did the government distrust an academic profession that was totally loyal?^[82]

The government responded with some apparent concessions. In 1902 the Ministry of Education named a commission composed of professorial appointees to consider the replacement of the 1884 University Statute. The recommendations of the commission, whose deliberations ran to five volumes of closely printed text, largely agreed with the faculty council replies of the previous year. Some recommendations were immediately implemented—for example, the conclusion that graduates of realuchilishcha and seminaries be allowed to enter universities upon passing examinations in Latin and Greek.^[83]

At the same time, the ministry granted a major demand of the professoriate by allowing the faculty councils to elect disciplinary courts to deal with student disciplinary infractions. Each court was to consist of five professors, approved by the local curator, who would hear cases referred to it by the rector. Cases falling under the jurisdiction of the courts included conflicts between students and professors, student infractions of university rules, and student violations of the "rules of morality and honor." The court was empowered to issue punishments ranging from a reprimand to expulsion.^[84] Unfortunately, the rules establishing the disciplinary courts did not clearly delineate where the authority of the professors ended and where that of the curator began. Nor would the curators approve what they considered to be the lamentable practice of over-lenient sentences. It would not be long before the two key issues of jurisdiction and punishment would transform the courts into a major area of conflict between the professoriate and the government.

In the end, little was to come of these government initiatives. The 1902 commission report was consigned to the archives. By 1903 the government was attacking the disciplinary courts for the leniency of

[82] "We suggest that the main danger facing Russia is not the development of phantasmagoric republics rejecting the authority of the government . . . but, rather, the overabundance of chancelleries which interfere everywhere . . . and deprive citizens on the local level of the possibility and desire to accomplish something" (ibid.).

[83] Seminarists already had the right to enter the universities of Tomsk, Warsaw, and lur'ev.

[84] Russkie Vedomosti, 29 August 1902. During the 1902–1903 academic year the courts heard forty-four cases, involving 1,985 students. Of these, 1,453 students received "light" sentences—reprimands, censure, fines—and 376 were acquitted. See TsGIA, f. 733, op.151, d. 299.

their sentences. Both Vannovskii and his successor, Professor G. E. Sanger, were forced to resign. After the assassination of D. S. Sipiagin in November 1902, V. K. Plehve, the new minister of the interior, orchestrated a tougher policy not only against the universities but against the specialized VUZy as well.

On the eve of the Revolution of 1905, therefore, the 1884 Statute was in tatters. Yet it remained on the books, a constant reminder that the status of the Russian academic profession rested on a precarious legal foundation. The professoriate was beginning to realize more clearly than ever that the major priority of the government's university policy was to curb the student movement, not to enlist the cooperation of the faculty in undertaking a general reform of the universities.