Insights from Russia on Academic Freedom During War

Being a scholar in a country that invaded its neighbor can be an odd, even dangerous experience. In such a setting, the ideal of academic freedom can seem oxymoronic. Yet, strangely enough, academic freedom is not entirely irrelevant to higher education even in these circumstances. The personal, policy, and structural factors that constrain academic freedom in the warring, authoritarian country deserve closer examination.

It is no surprise that in Russia the government was quick to launch a crackdown on all open opposition when the war against Ukraine began, including by suppressing dissent wherever it materialized, whether in the form of street protests or antiwar petitions. Through targeted repression, the government sought to ensure that dissent would be ineffective in the short term and would dissipate in the long term. The governmental repression is assisted by policies aimed at deepening indoctrination and curbing alternative views.

Policy and Ideology

During the war, the Russian government has dramatically increased pressure on universities and scholars, curtailing academic freedom. A set of administrative measures focused on university authorities has ensured universities’ active support for the war and facilitated the full-scale deployment of campus propaganda machines. That machinery has been slow to pick up momentum, but its impact on higher education and academic freedom may be more profound and lasting than the repression of individual scholars. The Kremlin’s new goals for the Russian higher education system are not only negative, in the sense that they seek to prevent it from becoming a site of political opposition and social unrest; there is also a positive vision rooted in the overall goal of “re-educating” Russian society along conservative and nationalist lines. Universities, in this view, should become centers of blunt and uncompromising indoctrination, and professors are expected to do their part to mold students into citizens who will bask in their country’s “historical triumphs,” be ready to sacrifice themselves for the state, and harbor deep hatred toward their homeland’s many enemies, both domestic and external.

In the early days of the war, the Ministry of Education, together with MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the leading professional diplomatic school) and “Znanie” (a state-sponsored learned society that publishes educational content aligned with the Kremlin’s vision), sent a first batch of poorly baked propaganda materials to universities with a directive to present them in the classroom. Additionally, the government instructed all secondary schools in the country to arrange classes on “conversations about important things,” propaganda sessions tailored to children. Begun as one-time events, these sessions quickly became standard policy.

In 2022, Andrei Polosin, a political strategist and manager at the Russian nuclear energy firm Rosatom who, according to the Latvia-based Russian news source Meduza, is well-connected to the highest levels of the Putin government, was appointed deputy president of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, commonly known by its acronym RANEPA, the largest university in Russia. Polosin was tasked to design a program of patriotic education, including the key propaganda class Foundations of Russian Statehood, which is required in most educational institutions. The Ministry of Education and university administrators together created an efficient policy machinery that is broadly recasting approaches to teaching and university life.

The new ideological content affects the structure of the curriculum by adding more teaching hours to the mandatory components of educational programs. Previously, the social sciences and humanities were subject to constant pressures of organizational optimization aimed at reducing teaching hours, but now the government seems eager to increase the teaching loads in these fields. This change of policy comes with an important caveat: The instruction in these special classes must be delivered exactly as specified by the authorities. Instructors are often required to take a training course prior to teaching these classes. Furthermore, to ensure the smooth delivery of propaganda to the targeted student audiences, the Ministry of Education is preparing tailored versions of the same core class for students in science, medical, and other fields outside the social sciences and humanities.

Under the pressure of sanctions, Russian universities have also reoriented their internationalization efforts away from the West. Until 2022, Russian higher education institutions had been actively involved in programs that supported academic excellence. Many sought higher scores in international academic rankings—a topic discussed in Dmitry Dubrovskiy’s article “Academic Rights in Russia and the Internationalization of Higher Education,” published in the fall 2019 issue of Academe. The Higher School of Economics, as a result of the quality of its research output and teaching, made particularly impressive progress in this quest for international recognition, joining the ranks of the global top five hundred universities and rising into the top one hundred in certain subject areas. Research universities and other advanced schools had been integrated into global research networks. With the start of the war, however, global integration efforts ended, and universities found themselves in a more fragmented and restricted international environment.

Russian universities are now seeking new partnerships with universities in India, Vietnam, and some Latin American countries, but China has become the main destination for academic engagement. The government sometimes facilitates these partnerships—and seeks to decrease internal competition and support specific institutions—by dividing up the destination countries among universities. No such collaborations can address topics that the Russian participants would consider contentious. All of these institutional and administrative measures are meant to reduce the diversity of political views in Russian academia and ensure that there is just one perspective in academic discourse about Russia’s invasion and its political regime.

Targeted Repression

Security agencies and law enforcement have played a critical role in suppressing dissent in academia through targeted repression, particularly during the first months of the war. Milder internal university disciplinary measures include the dismissal of faculty members who express antiwar views, typically on social media. Such faculty members are also subjected to bullying by prowar zealots on social media. University administrators often use pretexts, such as charges of violating the university ethics code for having used inappropriate language in a public context, to fire faculty members instead of explicitly firing them for antiwar views. More severe punishments include the opening of civil and criminal cases—initiated by law enforcement agencies and by the secret police, in particular—against anyone who opposes the war (see sidebar). According to one 2024 report by OVD-Info, a human rights organization, 106 faculty members have been subject to civil cases and 23 to criminal cases.

In March 2022, just days after the invasion, the Russian parliament amended the country’s administrative and criminal codes to criminalize the dissemination of supposedly false information discrediting the Russian military. The prison terms for these “crimes” could be as long as ten years. In reality, dissenters in Russia were penalized for actions such as publicly displaying a “No to War” poster. Such repressive laws have had short- and long-term effects in academia. At the beginning of the war, many academics signed collective letters calling for the termination of hostilities. Representatives of disciplines (for example, political scientists or economists) or of entire universities (for example, the faculty and graduates of Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University) signed these letters. Some signatories were soon approached and intimidated by the Federal Security Service or other government representatives, forcing them to withdraw their signatures, resign from their positions, or leave the country.

Another tool of repression is the so-called foreign agent law, which allows the Ministry of Justice to designate individuals and organizations as “foreign agents.” This status comes with significant restrictions. For academics, it can mean a formal ban on practicing their profession. According to the law, individuals designated as foreign agents may not teach minor students, nor may they teach at state and municipal educational institutions. Yulia Galyamina, who taught at RANEPA, Moscow, was designated a foreign agent and subsequently fired from the university. She litigated in court, trying to argue for the illegality of her dismissal on the grounds of this law, but the court of appeal ruled against her. This court case demonstrated to the academic community how effective the foreign agent law could be in pushing people out of their profession.

One of the coauthors of this article, Ilya Matveev, has also been recently designated a foreign agent. Publicly expressing the “wrong” opinions and appearing in publications that have themselves been declared foreign agents is enough to earn one such a designation. Academics constitute a major group among the foreign agents, with twelve political scientists and twelve researchers in other disciplines having been so designated as of May 2023, according to Vyorstka, an independent Russian publication. Foreign agents are thrust into a Kafkaesque maze of arbitrarily applied rules whose violation can quickly escalate into criminal prosecution. The only way to guarantee a degree of safety for foreign agents is to completely disappear from public life. And, of course, teaching in Russia is out of the question.

Such enforcement measures have had a broader and long-term chilling impact on academia, making it impossible to discuss openly the ongoing war with Ukraine. Technically, one can still discuss the war, and such discussion is even welcomed by university and government authorities if it follows the interpretation dictated by public propaganda and the Ministry of Education’s guidelines. Expression of any other perspectives on the war, however, brings the risk of a prison term. The safest strategy for many faculty members is to avoid the topic altogether.

These risks explain why Russian academia has remained mostly silent on the war, which is not equivalent to endorsing it. There are surely many academics who either opportunistically or sincerely support the war and actively endorse it in the public sphere, with some, like Sergei Karaganov, a former dean at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, even calling for a preventive nuclear strike. But many—by some accounts even the majority—do not.

Hidden Transcripts

Academic freedom is thus constrained in a number of ways: university autonomy (even for private universities) is no longer respected; certain subjects are required and must be taught as prescribed by state authorities; teaching about other issues and topics is prohibited. Yet academics engage in what the late political scientist James Scott called “hidden transcripts”: various forms of below-the-radar resistance. As some of our colleagues report, it is still possible to offer innovative educational programs and classes that require research and critical thinking. It is even possible to discuss current political and international developments with students with a degree of sincerity, on the condition that the professor practices a “neutral” approach to an issue. There are still journals publishing high-quality scholarly content, occasionally with contributions by scholars based in the West. Academic publishing houses, which had previously maintained rigorous standards, also continue their important work. Professional academic associations, such as the Russian Political Science Association, run their annual meetings as before. All of this work goes on against the background of the war, about which no one is allowed to speak other than in terms of the government-sanctioned narrative of a “special military operation.” Oddly, life in academia continues, but the pressures and constraints are never far away.

Some might describe the behavior of Russian academics as conformist. Indeed, their position is vulnerable, and the path of compromise is a slippery one. But there is at least as much hidden resistance as there is compromise, accommodation, and opportunism. In fact, academic professionalism itself, especially in the social sciences, has become a form of resistance: It requires an objective and critical view of reality that is inherently opposed to the regime’s propaganda efforts. Russia is a dictatorship, but not a totalitarian regime capable of controlling every aspect of social life; it is doubtful that centralized control on such a scale is even possible. Therefore, resistance in the form of objective and professional research, honest discussion in the classroom, and solidarity remains a viable strategy—one that many academics in Russia have chosen. This strategy carries risks—dismissals and criminal convictions of academics continue unabated—but many people are willing to take these risks. There is no academic freedom to speak of, but there is academic resistance.

An Invisible College

Professors are among the hundreds of thousands of Russians who have left the country since February 2022. According to one estimate based on changing Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) records, at least 2,500 academics emigrated from Russia in 2022–23 (this is, of course, a conservative figure, as many researchers do not have an ORCID profile or have neglected to update it). In August 2023, Andrei Yakovlev, former vice rector of the Higher School of Economics, reported that 700 academics (10 percent of the entire faculty), including Yakovlev himself, had left that institution alone. Russia’s publication numbers took an immediate hit, with 14.4 percent fewer articles indexed in the Scopus abstract and citation database in 2022 compared with the previous year; while we do not have statistics for 2023, the situation likely worsened.

A brain drain on such a scale would be deeply alarming for any government. The paradox in the Russian case is that the government made serious efforts to modernize and internationalize Russian science in the 2010s. The results of these efforts were wiped out virtually overnight by the Kremlin’s disastrous and criminal decision to invade Ukraine. The potential of Russian academia has been undermined and perhaps irrevocably damaged. The big question, however, is whether the new Russian academic diaspora can preserve at least some of this potential.

Scholars who have left the country (including the authors of this article) are fighting hard to remain in their profession. The new exiles have entered the international academic market, which is tough and hypercompetitive. Short-term positions are the best most of us can hope for. Moreover, as in any other country, most Russian academics in the humanities and social sciences have studied subjects related to their native country and now face problems with access to statistical information, archives, fieldwork, and so forth. In this situation, some members of the new academic diaspora will eventually change their profession; others will do everything in their power to integrate into a new academic environment, including changing their field of study. These latter scholars will continue to contribute to the international scientific process, but their connection to Russian academia as one of the nodes in this process will eventually disappear. This will impoverish Russian cultural and academic work both in the country itself and among the diaspora. However, a number of recent initiatives show that there is another way.

A key area of activity for Russian scientists in the diaspora is online education accessible to those who remain in Russia. Fortunately, the last wave of emigration from Russia took place in the era of Zoom, creating opportunities unavailable to previous generations of exiled intellectuals. The Free University, established in 2020 and now the largest grassroots educational initiative of this kind, demonstrates the possibilities: Each semester it offers nearly a hundred different courses and enrolls thousands of students. Of course, the authorities have cracked down on this project, declaring it an “undesirable organization” (which prohibits any open participation in its activities), but the organizers have found ways to make the participation of students from inside Russia safer by ensuring everyone’s anonymity. The Free University and scores of other online initiatives have created a vibrant transnational educational space. They strip the idea of the university down to its bare bones: a collegium of professors and students who govern themselves. This is academic freedom expressed as direct action.

Exiled Russian academics also keep independent Russian cultural and scientific scholarship alive by publishing Russian-language journals and books from abroad. Such publications are easily accessible to those inside the country over the internet. Moreover, solidarity networks ranging from Telegram group chats to full-fledged organizations such as Academic Bridges ensure that a divided community remains connected and capable of defending its own.

In “The Powerless People: The Social Role of the Intellectual,” an essay written during World War II and reprinted by the AAUP, C. Wright Mills urged intellectuals to be realistic about the limits of their influence: Culture, science, and rational discussion always lose to naked violence. In the 1960s, however, Mills rediscovered the power of the intellectual class, coining the term “cultural apparatus.” Since 2022, Russian intellectuals have had many opportunities to feel powerless. Putin’s dictatorship and the war it launched have devastated Russian academia, essentially dismantling the last vestiges of academic freedom as an institutional mechanism in Russian universities. However, Russian intellectuals have also demonstrated a kind of immanent power in their below-the-radar resistance inside the country and their organizing efforts outside of it. Despite everything, we are not entirely powerless. Our institutions are captured by a hostile regime, but the invisible college of Russian academics lives on.

Ilya Matveev was associate professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, North-West Institute of Management, at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), St. Petersburg, and is currently a visiting scholar in the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Evgeny Roshchin was head of the School of Politics and International Relations at RANEPA, St. Petersburg, and is currently a Future Russia Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and visiting scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Boris Kagarlitsky

In February 2024, a Russian military court sentenced Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent Marxist sociologist, to five years in prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine. The sentence reversed a previous court ruling, which had ordered Kagarlitsky to pay a fine but serve no further time in prison. The harsher sentence was issued after an appeal from prosecutors and reflected a continuing crackdown on the few dissident voices remaining in Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. In many instances, defendants found guilty of criticizing the war now receive longer prison terms than those convicted of crimes such as rape or assault.

Before his July 2023 arrest, Kagarlitsky was a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and head of the Moscow Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements. He continues as an editor of the Marxist online publication Rabkor. Prior to his arrest he had already been designated as a foreign agent, a label Russian authorities attach to many who have criticized the war. Kagarlitsky was detained after the security service in the Komi Republic, more than eight hundred miles from his Moscow home, determined that a posting on Rabkor’s YouTube channel constituted justification of terrorism. He was taken to the Komi region and held in a pretrial detention center.

In November 2024, the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign released a statement from the scholar, now confined to a penal colony in Torzhok in the Tver region. Responding to rumors of a potential prisoner exchange, the sixty-six-year-old Kagarlitsky wrote, “If I had wanted to leave the country, I would have done so myself. But I am not planning to leave my homeland, and if it means I must sit in prison to remain here, then I will sit in prison. After all, for a left-wing politician or a social scientist in Russia, imprisonment is a normal professional risk, one that must be accepted when choosing this path—just as it is for a firefighter or emergency worker. It’s simply part of the job, which I have done and will continue to try to do conscientiously. . . . Whatever choice we make, we must never forget that our goal is freedom and rights for everyone. Not only for those behind bars but also for those facing any other forms of oppression in Russia and around the world.”—HENRY REICHMAN