Dissergate

On April 17, the State Duma is going to demand the resignation of the Minister of Education Dmitry Livanov. One of the main reasons for this is the discovery of falsified dissertations that were found in the possession of important United Russia members and government officials.

Dissergate has reached the highest political level: very influential people are interested in stopping the investigation. In the meantime, we can draw intermediate results.

The main one: the public's attention was drawn to the problem of pseudo-dissertations. The first decisions of the special commission of the Ministry of Education - on those works that had time to check in the allotted two months - showed where the main efforts of the ministry are directed.

The struggle is being waged with texts that, only at first, superficial glance, are dissertations. As a rule, a significant part of them was made using copy-paste from other works. The commission was reinsured, each time documenting significant borrowings. Although, by and large, one borrowed paragraph is enough to disqualify a scientific work without considering it on its merits. Another common method of producing false dissertations has been the practice of voluminous parts of the text being accompanied by references to the journals in which they are allegedly published, as required by the dissertation defense regulations. In some cases, the references were simply false; in others, the copies of the journals presented by the “dissertators” turned out to be false.

Yes, of course, the Ministry of Education could take a different and more difficult path: to invite experts to evaluate the quality of dissertations.

The fight against linden is a less ambitious task, but it is visible: the theft of someone else's is understandable even to non-specialists.

Apparently, most fakes are concentrated in those areas in which science suffered the most damage during the Soviet era - in the social sciences and in certain sections of the humanities. Take, for example, economics in Russia. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Russian economists were in serious competition with their foreign counterparts. The communists who came to power killed some (for example, Kondratiev and Litoshenko), hunted down others (Kulischer), pushed others into emigration (future Nobel laureate Vasily Leontiev). And Evgeny Slutsky, whose name is the formula in any textbook of microeconomics, was forced to take up mathematics and died in obscurity. In place of real scientists, ideologized, and often simply illiterate, dogmatists reigned. This is how the mid-century mold formed—vague and often just pseudoscientific standards—on which fake dissertations have sprung up in our time.

Other areas in which massive falsifications have so far been discovered are political science - there simply was no such science in Soviet times, modern history, management and pedagogy, which also practically did not exist in the USSR at any serious level.

Judging by the first revelations, most of the authors of the fakes defended their dissertations in the dissertation councils of universities, and not in the institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Perhaps it was the archaism and conservatism, for which the academy is rightly criticized, that did not allow the creation of dissertation factories there. Well, that's the positive side of conservatism. Among universities, the most scandalous stories are still associated not only with the Moscow Pedagogical University (MPGU), in which a fake factory operated for many years, but also with Moscow State University. Lomonosov - both authors and supervisors of fake dissertations work there to this day.

The third conclusion is probably the most optimistic. Real scientists, who for many years tried to pay attention to the outrage that was happening, suddenly discovered that state bodies, so clumsy in the fight against corruption and mutual responsibility, can act clearly and decisively. Even if we are talking about politically influential characters. And even if the State Duma openly declares war on them.