Here’s what centralised control over universities looks like

This March Vladimir Putin’s presidency was extended for another six years. So what does this mean for Russian science in the coming years?

The question is even more relevant at the start of a new presidential term than it would be in many other countries because in Russia higher education is now governed not only through a system of institutional regulations, but also through particular centralised decisions, including overnight changes to key documents that define the “rules of the game” in the national system of science and education.

When experts (as well as the general public) talk about current trends in the Russian academic system, they make a lot of parallels with the Soviet period. And indeed, there are many similar symbolic actions.

A brief history of Russian higher education and science under the Bolsheviks and the later Soviet period can be found here. In February 2024, for example, there was a jubilee event in honour of the 300th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences in the Kremlin concert hall in which the president took part. From the podium there were words about the importance of international collaborations, maintaining international contacts with “all those who are open to it” and the development of science.

One can easily see parallels with the full-scale jubilee of the Academy of Sciences in 1925 to which the invitation of leading foreign scientists was a way of showing that the new authorities were ‘open to the world’ and to gain legitimacy in the eyes of international society.

The political reality of isolation

Such symbolic expressions of internationalisation did not then and do not now relate to the political reality of isolation. A more important parallel is that of the centralisation of power in Russian science and education both then and now, after 30 years of greater institutional autonomy and international connectivity, converging in a national planning system.

What happens when the state directly manages the national academic system? There is a shift from fundamental research to applied research related to the direct needs of the national economy.

Disciplines that get priority for funding and organisational support may be chosen and determined ‘from above’ (including at the presidential level). Funds may be allocated directly by the president to particular organisations or research areas in addition to those allocated within routine budgeting rules and procedures.

Independent scientific expertise and peer review is to a large extent substituted by evaluation by the authorities, often not through a comprehensive assessment of results, but on the basis of a demonstration of symbolic results.

There are administrative appointments of heads of organisations such as research institutes and universities without prior consultation with the academic community. The organisational landscape of science and higher education in the country is designed and maintained by the state through a system of centralised decisions.

Greater state control

While in Soviet times there was a division of the academic system into academic (research) and university sectors, and each sector had its own functions and the relationship between the Academy of Sciences, its member research institutions and universities was rather clear, today the picture is less clear, as are the prospects of how things might change.

At present it is unclear what form the configuration between the main players will take. What is clear is that the separation of research and university sectors will remain in one form or another, but exactly how the Academy of Sciences and its research institutions will be managed, what power they will possess and how research funds will be allocated is an open question. However, the trend is towards greater manageability and control from the state.

The idea that leading universities should be world-class research centres is being nominally preserved, but the mechanism for achieving that is not clear.

The ‘5-100’ programme ended its work in 2020. The Priority-2030 programme, which has replaced it, has totally different goals and objectives.

The former’s focus on international integration and the formation of several world-class universities is being replaced by one on coordination at the state level of individual universities’ role in addressing national priorities.

As the programme documents say, its aim is “to concentrate resources to ensure the contribution of Russian universities to the achievement of the national development goals of the Russian Federation for the period until 2030”. More than 100 universities are now participating in it (compared to 21 participants in the 5-100 programme), with smaller funding but much more strict control and constraints.

Recently, several programmes have been launched to create ‘world-class centres’ at universities based on particular areas of expertise (for example, in the field of artificial intelligence research or engineering).

On the one hand, it is easier for the state to control the development of these in a way that assures that certain results will be provided at a certain time; on the other hand, universities’ independence is affected. Universities are increasingly turning from actors with their own missions and at least some degree of agency into particular parts of the national planning system, in which they are assigned a certain role by the state. At the same time, funding is short term, which means that these parts are relatively easy to manage.

There are promises that the funding of science will be increased in the coming years. However, there are also growing demands for science to produce applied results, including contributing to Russia’s defence capabilities and the development of ‘critical technologies as a response to ‘sanction pressure’.

Just as it was almost 100 years ago, statements about some research being ‘too fundamental’ may sound like criticism or even accusations.

Decline in international cooperation

Patterns of international cooperation have changed dramatically since February 2022. Most contact has been broken. All this has contributed to lower international collaboration and its formal indicators. For example, the number of journal articles from Moscow State University written with researchers from abroad decreased by 20% between 2021 and 2023 and from Saint Petersburg State University by 15%.

While the number of co-publications with China has increased, the number of joint Nature Index publications between Russia and the United States dropped by 50% over the same period.

There is a shift away from publications in international peer review journals indexed in Web of Science and Scopus as a core indicator of research evaluation at Russian universities. At the same time, a number of international journals actually pursue a discriminatory policy towards researchers with a Russian affiliation (sometimes at the journal level and sometimes at the level of individual editors).

As a result, for many reasons, the number of publications in international journals exhibits a noticeable downward trajectory. For example, the number of publications in Elsevier journals fell by 16% from 2021 to 2023, and similar dynamics can be observed for other major publishers. In 2023 compared to 2021, we see a 40% reduction in the number of publications in Nature Index in the country as a whole. The only one that exhibits a 50% increase is the set of open access MDPI journals of rather controversial standing.

All these trends in the decline of Russian science’s international presence will clearly continue. The speed and pattern of this decline will depend on several factors – on the attitude of the international community to cooperation with Russian researchers and organisations, on the capabilities (both informational and economic) of Russian teams when it comes to obtaining world-class results under conditions of isolation, and also on what kind of system of science evaluation is in place in Russia (in other words, what type of results organisations will be paid for).

The impact of isolation on different disciplines will be different. Those disciplines and areas of research in which access to a collaborative scientific infrastructure and participation in international projects that are critical will be severely affected.

The agreement on cooperation between CERN and Russia (which was signed regularly since 1993, and before that with the USSR from 1967) ends in November and, according to CERN, will not be continued. That will have a huge negative impact on the development of science.

Some experts say that the impact on the social sciences (apart from the obvious negative impact of censorship that results in some research areas simply disappearing) will be lower than in the natural sciences.

But in fact, social sciences in Russia are also highly dependent on international cooperation when it comes to assuring their adherence to high quality standards. Their history in Russia is much shorter, their communities are much smaller and in isolation the risk of provincialism is greatly increased.

The brain drain and beyond

The academic system in Russia is also facing a severe brain drain. It is still difficult to talk about precise empirical estimates, but the system has lost quite a few faculty and researchers in all disciplines and at all academic ranks – both people in the early stages of their academic careers and senior faculty who have left their privileged positions.

Some of this brain drain is due to people intentionally wanting to leave (and, among other things, seeking academic employment abroad) because they disagree with Russia’s actions and-or university policies, and some is due to lay-offs or non-renewal of contracts by universities.

There is much evidence that many of these lay-off decisions are politically motivated. So-called foreign agents (among them quite a few public intellectuals and academics) are not allowed to teach in educational institutions. This brain drain not only impact negatively the quality of higher education and research but also its embeddedness in an international academic community.

But the long-run brain drain is only a part of the general problem, which is the future of academia. Undoubtedly, the state is making many efforts to attract young people to science, including launching special support programmes, creating ‘talent pools’ and providing various career opportunities.

A generation of new researchers and faculty has begun to form, for whom international integration is no longer something natural.

As a rule, today’s early career researchers have not participated in international conferences and summer schools in European countries or the United States. They have no independent scientific contacts with researchers from Western universities.

The majority of them do not discuss their works with international colleagues and have not received feedback on them. Certainly, for some young people these opportunities are maintained through the connections of their older colleagues, but the trajectory of declining contact is clear.

While there may be attempts to adhere to global academic standards, in fact there will be segmentation with the formation of Russia’s own standards. To what extent they will correspond with global standards is an open question.

In addition, under the current system for organising science, there are reasons to expect a reduction in academic mobility within the country. One should expect a return to inbreeding, when universities hire their own graduates.

A system in which the research landscape is the result of planning rather than free competition between organisations supports non-mobile careers and inbreeding. Low mobility and inbreeding, in turn, will definitely negatively affect research outcomes.

Expertise and research evaluation

In Russia, there was until recently a system in which the evaluation of research at all levels – organisations, grant teams and individual researchers – was largely based on a count of publications in international journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus scientific citation databases.

In the spring of 2022, the government approved the suspension of the use of Web of Science and Scopus for evaluation, and this is still in force. That said, this method of research evaluation certainly did not stop completely – but its legitimacy was to a large extent lost.

Also in spring 2022 work began on compiling an alternative list of journals to be used. Two years later, this list has still not been finalised. And there are reasons to believe that there are risks of quality decline and a trend towards including a broad range of Russian journals of varying quality.

The journal industry nowadays is extremely dependent on the technical issues that influence access to publications, their accessibility, visibility and citations. This in turn means that specific decisions (both within and outside Russia) regarding the listing of journals in these databases as well as subscriptions and access may play a big role in determining the visibility and impact of Russia’s research output in the global academic community.

Institutions of governance are being destroyed

The general long-term problem of Russian science and higher education is that the institutions of governance that have begun to emerge in the last 30 years are now to a large extent being destroyed.

There is no institution that stands for independent expertise. The institution of educational standards is not protected since the state can intervene and implement compulsory changes (in the structure of educational programmes as well as the curriculum) at any time.

In fact, universities are losing their autonomy (which was not substantial even in the most democratic periods) and mission – they are parts of a common planning system, each with their own task for the common aim. It is impossible to speak about the presence of agency among the participants of this system.

The destruction of the foundations of agency and the culture of autonomy of academic organisations, some sprouts of which were formed during the 30 post-Soviet years, is creating problems for the future, when political conditions in the country allow us to talk about the revival of Russian science as part of the global community.

And this is one of the key negative consequences of the processes that are taking place in Russian science today and are likely to take place in the near future.

Maria Yudkevich is associate professor in the faculty of education at the University of Haifa in Israel, and research fellow at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in the United States.