by ESTELLE LEVRESSE
Past: students at 1st Moscow University (now Lomonosov Moscow State University), c 1925 PHOTO/James E Abbe · Ullstein Bild · Getty
The Soviet Union was proud of its free education. But universities in Russia today impose huge fees on their students and keep teaching staff on a tight leash.
The temperature was close to zero in Ekaterinburg, some 1500km east of Moscow, but the late September sun shone brightly on the Ural Federal University (UrFU) building on Mira Street, with its imposing classical façade, and the nearby student halls of residence, and it felt as though the academic year had just started.
At 70 Komsomolskaya Street, I met the newly elected student union rep for residence no 8, in charge of 26 volunteers tasked with improving the lives of its 1,200 students. ‘It’s an honour to be chosen,’ he said. The five-year-old building is made up of two-bedroom apartments (each bedroom holds two or three beds) with a shared kitchen and bathroom; each floor has communal sitting spaces, study rooms and a laundry. The décor is plain but functional and in good condition. Rent is 1,000 roubles a month ($16). Some 10% Russia’s students live in halls like this.
The students’ union (UrFU’s only student representative body) spends its time not setting the world to rights, but enhancing campus life. Around 30 students employed by the university and 600 student volunteers organise leisure activities, night life, sports events, workshops, plays, talks, and festivities at the start of the academic year and on graduation day — ‘more than 600 events a year’, boasted union chairman Oybek Partov, whose office is provided by the university.
Students’ union leaders are on university salaries. It’s a permanent conflict of interest. They suppress their own dissatisfaction and even try to pressure protest groups, like when students who haven’t got places in halls of residence get together and set up a protest camp near the university
Dmitriy Trynov
Ekaterinburg has around 90,000 students at 50 higher education institutions. More than a third (some 36,000) — including 4,600 foreign students from over 115 countries — attend UrFU, where admissions increase every year; in 2021 it enrolled more students than any other (…)
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