Inside Russia's Wartime Universities: A Digest

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has brought significant changes to Russian universities. Yet many of these developments remain largely invisible to international audiences, not least because access to independent Russian-language media is limited by linguistic barriers. Coverage of Russian higher education in Anglophone and other international media also remains scarce. The University Platform believes it is essential to document the state of wartime academia in Russia and make this information accessible to an international audience in order to foster transnational academic solidarity. To this end, we plan to publish an annual analytical digest synthesising the most important research, reporting, and commentary on Russian higher education available in Russian and English.

The first edition examines the transformation of Russian higher education since 2022. It is organised into thematic sections covering institutional transformation, wartime adaptation, resistance, academic freedom, academic labour, and student living conditions. As the digest demonstrates, many of the challenges confronting Russian students and academics are not unique to Russia: authoritarianism, militarism, the rise of the far right, the neoliberal restructuring of universities, and growing academic precarity increasingly threaten higher education systems across the world.

If you find this digest useful, we encourage you to share it with colleagues interested in contemporary developments in Russian higher education.

Institutional Transformations

The full-scale invasion has triggered significant institutional transformations in Russian higher education. One of the most important trends has been its growing international isolation. Following the introduction of both general and sector-specific sanctions, Russian higher education institutions were excluded from most European programmes for academic cooperation in terms of research and student mobility. Dmitry Dubrovskiy describes this process as the "deglobalisation" of Russian higher education.

In response to its exclusion from the Bologna Process, Russia announced plans to develop its own "distinctive, nationally based" higher education system and proclaimed a strategic reorientation towards the Global South. However, as Svetlana Shenderova, Jeremy Morris, and Giorgio Comai have demonstrated, this reorientation has proved difficult to implement. Despite official declarations of a break with the West, Russian higher education policy has historically treated the Global North as its primary benchmark and reference point.

At the same time, the Russian government is pursuing a far-reaching reform of higher education. The reform is characterised by the restructuring of degree programmes, the expansion of targeted training schemes, and efforts to assign the graduates to workplaces. Russia plans to abandon the Bologna model entirely and replace the bachelor’s and master’s degree structure with a single integrated programme lasting between four and six years. The new model emphasises early professionalisation and provides students with less flexibility in shaping their educational trajectories. Another aspect of these new policies is the restriction of students' international mobility. The designation of organisations such as the British Council and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as "undesirable" has complicated access to international educational opportunities and further limited students' ability to study abroad.

Responding to labour shortages, the Kremlin seeks to establish a more direct link between university enrollment and employment. Medical university and college graduates have become the first targets of this policy. Legislation adopted in 2025 requires students enrolled in state-funded medical residency programmes to sign targeted employment contracts and work in designated positions for up to three years after graduation. Those who refuse are required to reimburse the state for the cost of their education. It remains unclear how these reforms will affect the employment prospects of young people in Russia. Many graduates already struggle to secure well-paid jobs related to their qualifications in an economy that remains largely organised according to neoliberal principles.

Wartime adaptation

Universities clearly contribute to normalising the war in Russian society, although the scale and forms of their militarisation remain difficult to assess.

The Kremlin perceives the universities as "the backbone of the state", a position reflected in the public letter supporting the invasion of Ukraine signed by more than 300 university rectors within a week of the start of the full-scale invasion.

The militarisation of higher education is evident in the expansion of military training centres (VUCs) within civilian universities, whose number increased from 109 in 2021 to 150 in 2025. Many of these centres are headed by veterans of the war. In early 2026, a nationwide campaign began to recruit students into the newly created Unmanned Systems Forces. Recruitment quotas have reportedly been assigned to universities. Students are encouraged to sign one-year contracts, with promises of high payments (up to 5 million roubles (appr. €54,542) from the state), as well as academic leave and assurances that they will serve away from the front line. Human rights lawyers assert that most of these guarantees are misleading. Several students were subsequently killed in combat only months after signing their contracts. However, the campaign underperforms, in general. One student interviewed by NBC News described recruitment meetings as poorly received, whereas pro-war military bloggers have acknowledged that only a few dozen students, often "scraped from failing students" have joined. The University Platform has documented instances when faculty refused to circulate military recruitment materials, while individual lecturers sought to warn students about the risks of enlistment. At North Ossetian State University, second-year students petitioned against military agitation on campus; only for the rector to dismiss their appeal as "cheap hype and teenage rebellion".

Universities are also implicated in other direct forms of bolstering the war effort by organising fundraising campaigns for drones and ammunition.

Militarisation is closely linked to the ideological transformation of universities. The Russian state has dramatically increased funding for youth policy, allocating nearly 100 billion rubles in the 2026 federal budget. The desire to promote a kind of state ideology is reflected in the introduction of ideologically-loaded courses, such as Foundations of Russian Statehood, mandatory for all undergraduates, and other modules on military economy and strategy, such as Introduction to Westernology and Political theory (theology) of People, taught by Kremlin-linked ultra-nationalist political philosopher Alexander Dugin. These disciplines share emphasis on the recognition of Russia as a great power, legitimacy of Russian expansionism including the annexation of Ukrainian territories, the image of Russia as a civilization-state, the representation of geopolitical confrontation between Russia and the West as a historically inevitable conflict, and the elevation of patriotic duties over the rights of citizens which include eagerness to die for state interests. Beyond the classroom, universities organise militarist events featuring veterans and propagandists and support patriotic communities. These communities are reported to have been used by the universities as a counter-alternative to independent student initiatives: they have participated in identifying anti-war students and have contributed to the further erosion of student self-government.

The war has also reshaped universities' institutional relationships. Following Russia’s occupation of parts of Ukraine, universities located in the occupied territories were placed under the jurisdiction of the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and several Russian universities, including the Higher School of Economics, established formal partnerships with them. Another manifestation of war policies is free admission of children of the war veterans. According to Vedomosti, more than 15,000 students have been admitted annually under this quota system since 2023.

Resistance

After February 2022, open antiwar dissent in Russian universities was met almost immediately with expulsions, dismissals, and criminal prosecution. Yet despite growing repression and mounting pressure from university administrations, independent university activism has not disappeared.

Political scientists Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin argue that open protest has increasingly given way to "below-the-radar" forms of resistance adapted to authoritarian conditions. These include critical research, alternative educational initiatives organised both inside Russia and in exile, such as the Free University, Smolny Beyond Borders, and other post-2022 émigré programmes as well as honest classroom discussions and everyday acts of solidarity among students and academics.

According to an anonymous political scientist still working in Russia, a kind of ‘protest subculture’ has survived in Russian universities. Rejecting self-censorship, students continue to discuss recent political events, exchange perspectives from independent media and establish informal discussion groups on feminism and philosophy. Meanwhile, educators quietly subvert official curricula in the classroom. As documented by the University Platform, a session officially devoted to the "reunification of Crimea with Russia" may instead become a lecture on the peninsula’s physical geography, while the textbook for Foundations of Russian Statehood is sometimes read aloud for the sole purpose of exposing it to ridicule.

Collective actions occasionally surface openly. One notable example is the student campaign against the establishment of the Higher Political School at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU). Named after Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century fascist philosopher frequently cited by Vladimir Putin, and headed by the far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin, the school quickly became the target of student protests. Although the campaign could not prevent its creation, it led to the emergence of the Student Antifascist Front, a multi-campus left-wing movement dedicated to opposing the resurgence of the far right in higher education and defending students' rights.

Spontaneous campaigns were able to achieve more tangible successes. One recent example was the coordinated opposition to the introduction of the state-controlled messaging app MAX. Owing to collective efforts involving the University Platform, the Student Antifascist Front, and other initiatives, its mandatory introduction was suspended at several universities. Students have also mobilised in defence of university self-government, as demonstrated by campaigns against administrative interference at the Far Eastern Federal University between 2023 and 2025. In other cases, resistance has focused on protecting academic programmes. At the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in 2024, for example, students campaigned, ultimately unsuccessfully, to save the master’s programme in mediaeval studies from closure.

Alongside these forms of resistance, a broader network of independent initiatives continues to operate. Molnia provides legal assistance to students facing unlawful expulsions and political pressure. Independent media outlets such as DOXA, Groza, and T-invariant continue to document repression and expose problems in Russian higher education despite being designated "undesirable organisations" or "foreign agents".

Academic Freedoms

Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, academic freedom in Russia has deteriorated rapidly. The number of dismissals and expulsions of dissident scholars and students, as well as politically motivated criminal prosecutions, has increased significantly following the adoption of new repressive legislation that further restricts freedom of expression. Many academics have been forced to leave the country for political reasons. By January 2024, no less than 2,500 researchers had left Russia. The University Platform has argued that repression in Russian academia is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it stems from the neoliberal restructuring of universities and the tightening of financial, political, and ideological state control over higher education and science during the 2010s. However, as documented in the reports by Dmitry Dubrovskiy, Petr Torkanovskiy, and Groza, the scale of systematic interference by state authorities in academic life, as well as the involvement of university administrations in political control and censorship, has reached unprecedented levels.

At least 71 academics have been designated as "foreign agents" since the beginning of the war. Amendments to the foreign agents legislation have effectively barred them from employment at universities, excluding them from the profession. The persecution of independent educational initiatives has also intensified. Between 2022 and 2025, 21 organisations connected to academia were designated as "undesirable", while a further 10 were labelled "foreign agents".

Meanwhile, the universities are turning into surveillance institutions. The Federal Security Service (FSB) has tightened its control over academic appointments. The state has also intensified its monitoring of students' political views. It conducts large-scale non-anonymous surveys of students about their attitudes toward the war and the government. Students expressing dissenting views have been subjected to various forms of repression. Since 2022, Russian universities have expelled more than 70 students for political reasons and have pressured student councils, further undermining their autonomy.

Under the pretext of security concerns amidst the ongoing war and geopolitical rivalry with the West, the Russian state has tightened control over academic research. In June 2025, State Duma adopted the law expanding the Federal Security Service’s authority to monitor international scientific cooperation. The legislation allows security agencies to review planned collaborations and screen publications involving foreign partners for potential disclosure of sensitive information. This securitisation of research has been accompanied by an increase in treason prosecutions against scientists, mainly physicists, reflecting the broader surge in treason cases observed in Russia since 2022. One of the most shocking cases was that of physicist Dmitry Kolker. Arrested on treason charges in 2022, he was transported from Novosibirsk to Moscow despite suffering from stage IV cancer and died in a detention centre three days later.

Another manifestation of the securitisation of higher education is the pressure on students and staff to adopt the state-backed messaging app MAX as the primary communication platform within universities. Critics argue that the app could facilitate surveillance of its users and increase the risks of political persecution. The promotion of MAX reflects the state’s broader emphasis on "technological sovereignty" and digital control. Since September 2025, universities and colleges have reportedly threatened students and staff with exclusion from examinations, dismissal, or expulsion if they fail to install the application.

Academic Labour

Since 2022, little has changed in the position of university lecturers in Russia. In terms of academic precarity, Russian universities are not fundamentally different from their counterparts across the neoliberalised higher education sector. Academic staff continue to face severe exploitation. Most are employed on short-term, performance-based contracts—typically lasting three years—which require them to teach, supervise students, and produce research simultaneously. Their workload is excessive, often reaching up to 900 academic hours per year for teaching and supervision alone, with research excluded from the formal workload calculation. Although research time is not officially recognised as part of their duties, lecturers are nevertheless expected to publish articles, books, and textbooks outside their assigned workload in order to retain their positions, earn bonuses, or secure promotion.

University lecturers have been among the main losers of Russia’s wartime economic growth. Their salaries have not been adjusted for inflation. Since the beginning of the war, universities have largely abandoned efforts to implement the presidential decree issued in 2012, which promised to raise academic salaries to 200 percent of the regional average. A recent article by Daria Gerashchenko vividly demonstrates enormous income disparity between top administrators and faculty. Research conducted by the University Platform into salary structures at universities with the highest-paid rectors reaches a similar conclusion. In some institutions, rectors earn more than twenty times as much as lecturers. For example, the rector of Tomsk State University receives a monthly salary of 1,165,620 roubles (€13,750), while a senior lecturer earns only 44,000 roubles (€519). This highlights a simple reality: Russian universities are institutions in which only top management can thrive.

Permanent contracts are extremely rare in Russian higher education, despite the fact that the Labour Code formally allows for them. However, the amendments to article 332 of the Labour Code introduced in 2022 have made the prospect of permanent employment even more remote. Faculty members have largely lost any bargaining power over the length of their contracts, which is now determined by academic councils that are typically under the control of university management.

Student Living Conditions

Against the backdrop of rising inflation and economic crisis in Russia, the living conditions of students are deteriorating. The minimum academic scholarship awarded to students with good academic performance is around 2,224 roubles per month (€25), while the federal subsistence minimum for 2025 stands at 17,733 roubles (€197). In other words, the basic scholarship covers barely one-eighth of what the state itself considers the minimum cost of living. Unsurprisingly, an increasing proportion of students combine full-time study with paid employment in order to make ends meet. By 2026, around 60 per cent reported working alongside their studies.

The cost of higher education has also risen sharply. Major universities have increased tuition fees, with some institutions raising prices by more than 30 per cent and pushing annual tuition costs for certain programmes above one million roubles. These increases have coincided with the government’s decision to eliminate 47,000 fee-paying university places across a range of disciplines, further restricting access to higher education. As a result, university education is becoming increasingly inaccessible to those unable to secure one of the limited state-funded places.

Housing is a major source of discontent. Students face skyrocketing dormitory fees, deteriorating living conditions, and administrations that often ignore complaints. Reports of misconduct by dormitory staff, including intimidation, harassment, and, in some cases, physical violence, remain widespread. Every summer, thousands of students are required to vacate their dormitories, not because they choose to leave, but because university administrations order them to do so, although these evictions are illegal. According to Molnia, around 13,000 students have been affected this summer alone, including approximately 4,000 in Kazan and 7,000 at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg.