The transformation of Russian graduate school, from reform to counter-reform. Part 1.

Dmitry Dubrovsky

 

Photo: The Soviet graduate student was understood primarily as part of a trained scientific cadre rather than as an autonomous researcher and bearer of academic rights. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43814069

 

As of 2021, graduate school in Russia was a hybrid of the Soviet system of state certification, the Bologna educational process, and the neoliberal model of management and financing.

The reforms that went into effect on March 1, 2022, removed a layer of the Bologna process and returned the central focus to the dissertation but did not fortify the academic rights of graduate students nor increase their participation in self-governance and the institutional autonomy of universities.

Combined with the political repression and international isolation that have followed February 2022, this has led to the formation of a model that can be defined as neo-Soviet control without Soviet social guarantees.

 

The Third Level of Higher Education

Within the framework of the European Bologna Process, doctoral research programs, as a distinct path for students after receiving a higher education, are equated to a “third level” of higher education, following the “Bachelor’s – Master’s – Doctorate” structure. They represent a form of postgraduate study that combines research activity with an advanced-level education.

Hence, they also have a separate structure of academic freedom, distinct from that of both the professoriate and the student body. Only relatively recently has this become a subject of research and practice.

In Europe, this level is called “Doctor of Science.” In a number of documents dedicated to the subject—including the Salzburg Principles, the results of discussions held in 2005 in Salzburg, Austria—it is asserted that the essence of doctoral education is the advancement of knowledge through original research.

Doctoral candidates are regarded as early-career researchers and full-fledged members of the research community even while preparing their dissertations, not merely after defending them. The defense itself is an integral part of the training process and takes place at the same institution.

 

Three Dimensions

I evaluate the position of post-graduate students along three different dimensions:

• individual academic rights
• academic self-governance
• institutional autonomy

This framework was developed on the basis of the Salzburg Principles but is not a verbatim reproduction thereof.

Individual academic freedom relates to:

• the extent to which postgraduate students’ right to defend their dissertations is protected
• the transparency of the dissertation defense and evaluation process, including preventing the student’s supervisor from being part of the dissertation committee
• the extent to which a student’s right to academic supervision—including the option to change supervisors—is protected

Institutions of academic self-governance have an important influence on:

• the extent to which postgraduate students are represented as a distinct group within academic self-governance
• whether they have a distinct voice—given their special status—or are absorbed into other groups (for example, undergraduate students)

With regard to university autonomy, the following are key points within the Bologna system:

• the possibility of degree conferral by specific universities
• the establishment of doctoral programs without state approval or specialized national-level quality assurance institutions

In other words, a university’s institutional responsibility lies in fostering an appropriate research environment, providing guidance and funding, and establishing an independent dissertation assessment procedure that enables a young researcher to independently conduct original research and bring it to the defense stage.

 

Soviet-Style Personnel Reproduction Line

The Soviet model of postgraduate study, meanwhile, was based on a different institutional logic.

Its goal was the “reproduction of scientific personnel” through a centralized state certification system, rather than the creation of an autonomous research environment within the university. Consequently, responsibility for the quality of training was distributed primarily between the academic supervisor, the dissertation council, and the state. For its part, the university was not viewed as an autonomous guarantor of the doctoral student’s academic freedom.

Within the system of Soviet science, postgraduate studies was the pivotal institution for the reproduction of the Soviet scientific order. It combined state planning, disciplinary logic, scientific schools, the leader’s patronage-based authority, and centralized degree conferral.

Postgraduate students were viewed primarily as scientific personnel in training, rather than as autonomous young researchers with independent academic rights.

In light of the planned economy and strict selection process, there were significantly fewer postgraduate students. In the USSR, 37 of every 100,000 people were postgrad students. In today’s Russia, that number has nearly tripled: it now stands at 86 per 100,000.

A third of Soviet graduate students wrote their research, as they called it then, “on the job.” The postgraduate scholarship was less than half the average salary (about 70 rubles per month), allowing them to just about scrape by—as long as they lived in the dorms and didn’t have a family.

 

Postgraduate Studies in the New Russia

After the collapse of the USSR, the postgraduate structure remained Soviet. This continued into the early 2000s, when active higher education reforms began.

Meanwhile, the postgraduate stipend fell dramatically. It has not recovered since: statistics show that the average postgraduate stipend is only around 5-10% of the average salary.

A survey conducted in 2010—while not representative (as it covered only the readership of the scientific newspaper Troitsky Variant)—predictably showed that financial issues remained the primary problem for postgraduate students: 80% of respondents were compelled to find work, with half of them working in jobs outside of science.

The survey also revealed the extent to which students remain personally dependent on academic supervisors, even within the comparatively strong natural sciences segment of doctoral studies. Interestingly, 56% of postgraduate students participating in the survey chose their supervisors for their “personal qualities.” The high importance attached to a supervisor’s personal qualities appears to have been a rational response to a system in which the quality of leadership, access to professional networks, and the prospect of defense depend predominantly on a single individual, as postgraduate students have virtually no protected right to change their supervisors. In the opinion of Vladimir Gel’man, former dean of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) and now a professor at the University of Helsinki, this situation—characterized by a lack of researcher mobility and the continuous progression from student to postgraduate within a single department—led to “inbreeding”: the stagnant self-reproduction of scientific schools. Consequently, no new scientific ideas or methods emerged, and there was no motivation for any form of scientific development.

 

Reforms of 2012–2014

It was not until 2012–2014 that reforms of postgraduate studies actually began to change the situation. Even so, researchers characterize these reforms as inconsistent and slow.

At the regulatory level, postgraduate studies became the third step of Russian higher education. In 2014, the Federal State Education Standards for postgraduate studies were introduced. They inaugurated the qualifications of “researcher” and “lecturing researcher.” Structured doctoral programs began to develop at a number of leading Russian universities.

The most prominent Russian example of this type of education is the European University at St. Petersburg. Since the 1990s, postgraduate training here has been structured around research seminars, intensive theoretical and methodological preparation, an international academic environment, and the integration of young researchers into faculty communities. In essence, the EUSP was the historic pioneer of such programs in Russia, combining features of the American graduate school and the European research university:

• research seminars
• strong educational component
• active inclusion in existing research programs

The fact that the university did not have its own dissertation council highlighted the contradiction between the modern internal organization of training and the external state system of academic certification.

An attempt was made to bridge this gap in 2013, when the university launched its PhD program in political science and sociology.

Later, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow translated this concept into a larger, more formalized system of disciplinary graduate schools. By 2018, HSE offered around fifteen such programs, covering economics, history, sociology, political science, law, mathematics, computer science, and other fields. From 2018 onwards, HSE also gained the right to award academic degrees independently and began positioning its postgraduate qualification as its own PhD system.

The system that was created included the features that distinguish European doctoral education programs, including:

• international joint supervision
• a comprehensive subject-matter program
• international mobility
• a collaborative research environment
• interdisciplinary seminars

A key aspect was the discussion of research projects at the admission stage. For instance, during the selection process for the doctoral school in International Relations, specific research projects were evaluated based on their quality and alignment with the school’s priority research areas.

This brought HSE’s procedures even closer to European programs. One instance of international collaboration in postgraduate programs is the joint “Global History of Empires” program with the University of Turin, which involved postgraduate students in history from the Moscow and St. Petersburg campuses.

Another example is the Nizhny Novgorod Lobachevsky University. It was here, centered around B.I. Bedny and the Institute of Postgraduate and Doctoral Studies, that both a theoretical concept and a practical model for modernizing postgraduate education were developed—a model focused broadly on the training of research and teaching personnel through the integration of master’s and postgraduate programs. The concept of a “new type of postgraduate program” emerged in , encompassing specialized courses on academic writing, participation in collaborative research projects, involvement in international projects, and so forth.

 

* * *

These cases, however, remained isolated institutional pockets and did not transform the national Doctorate of Science system. While Russia successfully adopted the institutional design of the European “third cycle,” it failed to restructure key doctoral institutions or remedy the Soviet system’s fundamental flaw: the disconnect between the Doctor of Sciences program and the institutions responsible for the defense of candidate dissertations.

Dmitry Dubrovsky holds a PhD in History and is a researcher in the social sciences department at Charles University (Prague), a research fellow at the Center for Independent Sociological Research in the USA (CISRus), a professor at the Free University (Latvia), and an associate member of the Human Rights Council of St. Petersburg.

 

In Part 2, we will discuss how, since parting ways with the Bologna system, Russian postgraduate studies has returned to a new version of the Soviet model.

 

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