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.