By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — If you talk to a young person serving in one of the commercial kiosks that line the main streets of Russian cities, the chances are rather high that he or she will turn out to be a student in a local university or other institute of higher education.
Back in a lecture hall, meanwhile, a professor will very likely be gazing bitterly at row on row of empty seats. Quite probably, the students in the kiosks will not be missing much. The lecture will be only sketchily prepared, since the professor is exhausted from overwork; he or she holds down a second job, now almost essential if a tertiary teacher is to feed and clothe a family.
The professor will not blame the students who have cut classes in order to work long hours in street trade or other such occupations. The average monthly stipend for a full-time student no longer buys even one basic meal a day in a college cafeteria. Parents often subsidise student offspring, but few families now have the money to allow a student the luxury of real full-time study.
As a result, the professor will have relaxed his or her formerly exacting academic standards. Students who have almost never showed up for face-to-face teaching will be passed on the strength of written assignments hurriedly cribbed from textbooks, and of sadly inadequate answers in examinations. When summer arrives, another batch of half-educated young people will receive their diplomas, and Russia's higher education system will have moved forward a stage on its short, swift road to collapse.
In a recent article in the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, two researchers from the Institute of Sociopolitical Research of the Academy of Sciences accused the country's government of directing "the casual economic vivisection of society's intellectual potential". Another article in the paper noted that funding of the Academy of Sciences — the huge state-financed complex that oversees the bulk of Russian scientific and scholarly research — has declined by 80% in the past two years.
The hiring of young researchers by the academy has fallen in recent years by two-thirds. Large numbers of people who qualify as scientists cannot even contemplate a career in research; the starting salary in an institute of the Academy of Sciences is now worth about US$25 a month, in a country where many expenses are as high as in the West. If one makes it to the rank of professor or senior researcher, the typical salary is now worth about $40.
Among scientists and scholars with established careers, the pressures can be enormous to quit in order to take up less stimulating but better paid work in business or the state bureaucracy, or in order to emigrate. According to Moscow News, the number of people engaged in "science and scientific service" in Russia declined by more than 1 million between 1986 and 1992. The Academy of Sciences has reportedly lost 17% of its researchers during the past two years alone.
According to one of the recent articles in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, at the current rate of attrition the last Russian with a higher university degree will retire, die, emigrate or cease working in his or her specialty in the year 2013.
At present, only about one scientist in ten who quits Russian science does so in order to settle abroad. Nevertheless, the number of emigres is increasing, with the United States and Australia the most popular destinations. The loss is felt especially keenly since it is usually permanent, and because the scientists who emigrate tend to be people of outstanding promise — young, enterprising and ambitious.
Estimates of the number of Russian scientists who will leave the country in the next few years run as high as 200,000, and "Western experts" are quoted as putting the ultimate cost to Russia at $600 billion. This dwarfs the total aid, of $14 billion, which the US has promised.
The drain of researchers out of Russian science would be less alarming if a large crop of new talent were nearing maturity in graduate schools. But gifted young graduates are understandably reluctant to spend years pursuing the higher studies needed to turn them into world-class experts. In 1989, about 3500 post-graduate students were accepted into the institutes of the Academy of Sciences; in 1993 the number was fewer than 400.
At a superficial level, undergraduate studies have proven remarkably resilient; few Russians are ready to conclude that a university degree is not worth having, or that the demand for tertiary-trained specialists will not eventually recover.
Nevertheless, enrolments are down. At the elite Moscow State University, student numbers have dropped for three years running; from nearly 26,000 in the late 1980s, they are now near an eight-year low of 22,000. In 1990, Russia had 190 students in higher education per 10,000 of the population; by 1993 this figure had dropped to 171. It is indicative of where the "reforms" of the 1990s are taking Russia that this latter figure is lower than in many countries of Latin America.
The quality of the education which students receive in tertiary institutions has slipped badly. This is not only because large numbers of teaching staff have quit, tired of trying to survive on insulting wages. The government has largely ceased supplying funds for teaching materials, and institutions of higher learning are at times denied money even for their basic operating costs. According to Izvestiya, in January and February not even Moscow State University received a single rouble from the state for expenses such as electricity and heating.
As state budget allocations for higher education are slashed — or promised, and then not delivered — universities and institutes are told to seek money from local authorities. They are advised to cut student numbers and to seek fee-paying students; in order to attract the latter, they are often urged to revamp their structures in favour of courses in law, economics and business studies, for which demand is strong. Eventually, the suggestion goes, federal allocations will be reserved mainly for science and education centres of all-national importance.
But local authorities have rarely been able to contribute much toward the upkeep of higher educational institutions. Cuts in student numbers have occurred spontaneously, but have had little effect on costs; half-empty classrooms still need heating and light. Fee-paying students have become commonplace, but to the further detriment of academic standards. In many institutions, students now officially have the choice of paying to enrol in or continue courses for which their grades would not otherwise qualify them.
Meanwhile, the starvation-level wages paid to teaching staff have caused the burgeoning of another aspect of user-pays education. Students who do well in "biznes" often buy the grades they cannot obtain by legitimate means.
Workers in higher education and science in Russia have not accepted the decay of their institutions without a fight. Pointing to the folly of destroying much of the country's intellectual wealth for the sake of minor budget savings, staff in about one-third of Russia's centres of tertiary education took part in mid-February in a day of strikes and public protests. In the city of Nizhny Novgorod, professors and instructors staged a symbolic burial of higher education.
Employees of the Academy of Sciences planned to picket the Ministry of Finances in Moscow for several days in mid-March, demanding the payment of debts owed to the academy by the state. This action, however, was postponed.
Impressive as some of the protest actions have been, they do not amount to a powerful fight back against the government's policies. Both professors and students are often too heavily preoccupied with ensuring their immediate survival to be able to join in political struggle.
At a deeper level, the limited reaction to the "vivisection" of higher education reflects the deep ideological bafflement of today's intelligentsia. Ecstatic at the collapse of Communist Party rule, many educated Russians steeled themselves to hardships during a transition period which, they expected, would soon end with their transformation into members of a prosperous, Western-style professional middle class.
That transformation has not occurred, and large sections of the intelligentsia have been thrown into pauperdom. Nevertheless, illusions and prejudices are only slowly being shed. Creating an important current of civilised anti-capitalist opinion, capable of nurturing a broad fight to defend higher education, is a task likely to take years. The danger is that by the time that task is accomplished, Russia's scientific and cultural potential will have largely ceased to exist.