Academic freedom in Russia is increasingly subject to political interference as the influence of the security services grows. The eight years since Vladimir Putin was elected president have seen more and more meddling in academia. At best, academics have been put under pressure to join the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia. At worst, they have been jailed on spying charges for their research in security-sensitive fields.

United Russia won 60% of the votes cast in December's parliamentary elections, which foreign observers denounced as unfair. Putin went on to anoint as his favoured successor Dmitry Medvedev, a lawyer and academic from St. Petersburg, who made a career in the Kremlin and the gas monopoly, Gazprom.

Putin has accepted Medvedev's offer to serve as his prime minister, should the younger man be elected president. Barring surprises, Medvedev – author of a law text book and keen student of Roman law – will become Russia's president in March, with Putin continuing to wield much power.

But the election of a man many characterise as a mild-mannered academic, who continues to invigilate final exams in the law faculty of his alma mater, St Petersburg State University, may not spell halcyon days for Russian university teachers.

Pre-election reports that teachers and students were ordered to vote for United Russia or face career and study sanctions were dismissed by the Kremlin as untrue. But evidence that academics have been under pressure to toe the Kremlin line – and display their loyalty by joining United Russia – has been accumulating for some time.

In April 2006, a historian at Saratov State University in central Russia hit the headlines when his rector dismissed him for alleged 'anti-government attitudes' and undermining academic authority.

Velikhan Mirzekhanov, then aged 43, refused to take it lying down. Twice elected during the previous seven years as dean of the university's history faculty, he defied Rector Leonid Kossovich. When Kossovich called a meeting of faculty staff to announce the dismissal – without any reference to established disciplinary procedures – the historians rose as one and walked out.

Later, an impromptu meeting of the faculty's 2,000 students and 120 staff, called to defend the dean, was broken up by security men, some of whom were armed. Staff had to restrain students from marching on the rector's office, fearing violence might erupt.

"It was as if Soviet history was repeating itself as farce – the tactics of 1937 being applied to 2006," Mirzekhanov said at the time.

The robust response put the rector on the defensive and Mirzekhanov kept his position. But the incident, coming immediately after the historian had been criticised by a State Duma (parliamentary) deputy for United Russia, was a sign of the decline in pluralism in Russia.
The Saratov dean's treatment was mild compared with that of Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov, both of whom are serving long prison sentences after being convicted of spying.

Sutyagin, who turns 43 on Thursday, was an arms control researcher at Moscow's Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada when, in 1999, he was arrested and charged with selling a dossier, allegedly containing classified information, to a London firm said to be a front for the CIA.

Although a physicist, Sutyagin insisted he had had no access to classified information and that all data in his report on atomic submarines had been drawn from public sources. He came to court in 2004, in a trial held in camera, and was convicted of treason and imprisoned for 15 years. Human Rights Watch condemned his trial as unfair, noting that "the Russian government appears to be using his case to intimidate academics, journalists and others who research sensitive issues".

Sutyagin's case coincided with that of Siberian physicist Valentin Danilov, who was imprisoned for 14 years after Russia's Supreme Court overturned his acquittal in December 2003 on charges that he had spied for China.

Danilov, head of thermo-physics at Krasnoyarsk Technical University, said a report he drew up for the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, on space propulsion techniques, relied on open-source information that was more than 20 years out of date.

His initial acquittal – by the first jury trial in an espionage case in Russia – was hailed at the time as a sign of progress in the judicial system. His subsequent conviction at a retrial caused dismay among his supporters.

A trend towards cracking down on academics who step out of line is becoming apparent. Last year Oleg Korobeynichev, a laboratory chief at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Kinetics and Combustion, was accused of passing classified solid rocket fuel data to a US defence department research centre.

And Ufa-based physicist Oscar Kaibyshev was given a six year suspended sentence after he provided a South Korean firm with information relating to motor vehicle die castings. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, said the information could be applied in rocket construction.

While there has been international concern over the cases, little criticism has come from Russia's academic establishment, despite years of under-funding that pushes researchers towards finding foreign contracts. The Russian Academy of Sciences, caught up in its own battle with the Kremlin over control of its vast property holdings and recently criticised by Putin for earning money from renting out rooms to private firms, seems to prefer not to rock the boat.

The clampdown on academics appears connected to increased Kremlin rhetoric that foreign espionage in Russia is on the up, a claim made last year by FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev. Serving or former members of the security services are becoming increasingly influential in government at local, regional and national level.

A study by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, founder of the Centre for the Study of the Elite at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology in Moscow, records a huge expansion in the so-called 'siloviki', as this powerful clique of ex-secret service officials are known in Russian. Today four in five of all political leaders and state administrators in Russia could be classified as members of the 'siloviki', she says.

Presidential hopeful Medvedev has no known connections with the 'siloviki' but his mentor and, as critics say, puppet master, Vladimir Putin, was a KGB agent and head of the FSB before he rose to ultimate power in the Kremlin.


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