Slamming the window shut

Antebellum

Since it was founded in 1994 in an attempt to stem the post-Soviet brain drain that was gripping Russia at the time, the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) has consistently been ranked as one of the best universities in Russia, coming in above both Moscow State University or St. Petersburg State University for studying sociology in the QS World University Rankings in 2018. 

The university’s “European” epithet, which began as an innocuous reference to the academic standards and educational norms it sought to replicate in Russia, gradually became more and more of a burden, however, as political discourse hardened against liberal-democratic ideals. 

Indeed, as a small, private graduate college, the EUSP was always an outlier in Russian academia, with its Western-educated scholars and focus on academic research carried out jointly by students and lecturers in its four original departments: Economics, Ethnology, History, and Political Science & Sociology.

While originally a part of the Faculty of Sociology, the Faculty of Political Sciences eventually emerged from its shadow to become an academic department in its own right, and one that quickly began to attract the wrong kind of attention from the authorities.

In 2007, the European Commission awarded EUSP a €673,000 grant to fund its “Interregional Electoral Support Network”, which was aimed at improving how Russian elections were monitored, a move that prompted ruling party United Russia to request the Prosecutor General’s Office look into whether all regulations had been followed. According to one United Russia Duma deputy, the grant was an attempt “to directly interfere in the Russian election campaigns of 2007-2008”.

The following year, the EUSP was temporarily forced to close due to alleged fire safety violations, though, according to Margarita Zavadskaya, a former researcher in comparative politics at the Faculty of Political Sciences who is now a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of Foreign Affairs, it was widely understood by staff members that the “real reason EUSP was closed was the European Commission’s research grant”. Despite the fact that the university ultimately decided not to go ahead with the research project, Zavadskaya says that the fact that it was even theoretically possible for a Russian university to accept foreign funding in 2007 now seems remarkable to her.

War

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, staff at the Faculty of Political Sciences were subjected to a politically charged purge that saw some of its most respected academics dismissed or placed on indefinite leave. 

Not only was Zavadskaya informed that her contract wouldn’t be renewed once it came to an end in October 2022, she was also “strongly encouraged” to hand in her resignation. Despite her refusal to do so, she was ultimately fired in March 2023, a move that she describes as being “in line” with the authorities’ wishes. 

In March, EUSP dismissed US historian Ivan Kurilla from his post for his apparent failure to come to work since January, despite him having obtained permission more than a year beforehand to take a sabbatical. In a statement on the matter, EUSP accused Kurilla of taking a visiting professorship at a US college during his sabbatical and said that he had been given a choice between giving up his paid sabbatical or his US academic post.

Coincidentally, shortly before his dismissal, Kurilla had added his name to an open letter from Russian academics condemning the invasion of Ukraine. In a now deleted Facebook post, Kurilla said that he was unsure whether the decision to fire him had been made by the over-cautious university or had resulted from “a demand from the outside”. 

Zavadskaya says that what she finds most irksome about the situation is the manner in which university administrators have gone about dismissing her colleagues, using what she calls “classic” Soviet pretexts such as “not showing up at work, not completing a business trip”.

Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the faculty had been pressured into political neutrality, according to Zavadskaya, but the events of February 2022 only led the university’s administrators to redouble their efforts to silence its academic body.

“The atmosphere in the country is no longer conducive to researching a number of topics, and the availability of funding dictates research priorities,” Zavadskaya said, noting that unlike the now defunct Faculty of Political Sciences, most other departments at EUSP had long preferred to “enjoy a quiet life” by focusing on “issues as far removed as possible from the current political climate” such as art history, anthropology, or research into the Middle Ages.

While acknowledging that her colleagues must do what they have to in order to “survive” in Russia’s ever-more-suffocating political atmosphere and that working at EUSP, regardless of which faculty, is difficult, Zavadskaya likens the decision to shutter the Faculty of Political Sciences to “cutting off an arm to save the body”, and said that for her, the EUSP had gone too far and that lines had “been crossed”.

Survival mode

According to a member of university staff who asked to be identified only as Alexander*, while there were other factors that led to the department’s closure, it did indeed ultimately come down to “saving the university”.

Alexander now predicts that “various topics seen as sensitive such as authoritarianism or elections in Russia, will face censorship, as will anything that could appear suspect to inspectors”. 

Those already enrolled in the Faculty of Political Sciences have been transferred to the Faculty of History, where they will continue their studies, while the department’s former head, Grigory Golosov, has been transferred to the Faculty of Economics. 

“When the war started, I was very sad and upset about it," says Fyodor*, a graduate student who describes studying at the Faculty of Political Sciences as being “a form of therapy” for him, providing him as it did with a much-needed prism through which to understand politics and rationalise what was happening all around him in Russia.

Fyodor’s classmate Rustam* says that he chose to study at EUSP rather than go abroad, as he had wanted to study at an institution in Russia where he wouldn’t be “ashamed” to be enrolled.

According to Rustam and Fyodor, half of the students enrolled at the Faculty of Political Sciences have been instructed to change their thesis topics to avoid research areas that touch on modern Russia or the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The new curriculum for students who have moved to the Faculty of History has not yet been finalised and students don’t yet know who will be teaching them when they return in September, or what they will be taught. 

While the steps taken by EUSP may mean it will be able to “survive”, Rustam says that it will be relegated to the status of an “art school”, having removed social sciences from its curriculum in an attempt to ingratiate itself with the authorities, and will no longer be able to do “what it was set up to do”.

* Names have been changed