Europe | A St Petersburg mystery

The strange limbo of a Russian university

Teaching and graduation have been suspended. But why?

IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S “Invitation to a beheading” the protagonist never finds out why he is to be executed. Cincinnatus, as he was called, was popular among his jailers, but none of them was able to say why their prisoner had to lose his life. Nabokov died in 1977 and knew nothing of the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP), which opened in 1994, 3km north-east of where he grew up before his family emigrated. But like Cincinnatus, the EUSP is being threatened with destruction by the state. Students are unable to graduate, and staff are forbidden from giving lectures. It is unclear if university life will ever return to normal, and nobody is able or willing to explain why it should close down.

The EUSP was established as a postgraduate institute by private donors during a short and unusual period of openness and liberalism in Russia. The 1990s ushered in free markets, democracy and greater academic freedom, though today they are more often remembered as a time of economic and social disarray.

Controversy first hit in 2007 after the university received a €700,000 grant from the European Union as part of a project to monitor elections in Russia. A subsequent fire inspection led to the temporary closure of the campus. An inspection in 2016 by the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science found 120 violations of government rules, including a lack of stands displaying alcohol-awareness leaflets and the absence of a gym on campus.

“These were just ways to catch us,” explains Ilya Utekhin, a professor in the EUSP’s department of anthropology, noting that the rule applies only to undergraduate students, of which the EUSP, as a postgraduate school, has none. “They are making us spend so much effort on complying with their silly requirements that we have neither the time nor energy for real research and teaching.”

The supervisory body insists that it has nothing against the EUSP, and oddly enough even President Vladimir Putin has written in support of the university. Some have speculated that the source of the trouble is Vitaly Milonov, a member of parliament. He had lodged a complaint against the university a few months before the inspection, objecting to a gender-studies programme organised by the school’s department of political science and sociology. Mr Milonov is known for his role in criminalising “homosexual propaganda directed toward minors” in 2013 and has now taken issue with the EUSP’s “unscientific” approach towards LGBT communities.

Not everybody is convinced that the problems are political. “Professors are supposed to do research, teach and at the same time fill in numerous complicated bureaucratic forms that are only distantly related to the educational process,” says Ekaterina Borozdina, a research fellow in the political science and sociology department. Dr Borozdina thinks the university’s travails may just be a symptom of Russia’s bureaucratic chaos. “When different state watchdogs assess universities according to contradictory requirements, one will almost inevitably be punished.”

A student rally last November to save the EUSP was attended by Ksenia Sobchak (pictured), a candidate in this weekend’s presidential election, providing a glimmer of hope to the faculty. Academics are now putting their faith in a post-election Kremlin reshuffle. But meanwhile students like Natalia Aluferova, a 23-year-old budding anthropologist from Petrozavodsk, are left in limbo, unable to learn and unable to graduate. “Now I have to hope that the licence will be returned to the university, or else must leave Russia to continue,” she says.

Correction (March 16th): An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Ekaterina Borozdina. Sorry.

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