Knowledge as a threat

On August 20, it became known that the Kremlin had refused to approve a program to train Russians abroad, the Global Education project developed by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, which was supposed to be launched in 2014.

I remember well the moment when I decided: I want to study at Harvard. It was the ninety-second year, I came to the best university in the world for a special journalism program (Nieman Fellowship) and came to Harvard's Wiidener Library, the second library in the world (the first is the US Library of Congress). The elevator lowered me to the underground level D, I entered the hall with racks and gasped. It was the Russian department, and there was everything: books published before the revolution, books by emigrants from different decades, books published in tamizdat and samizdat, books that could not be found even in special Moscow stores during the day with fire. I thought: take a sleeping bag, spread it in a corner and live here for a couple of weeks.

In the doctoral program in political science for the next year, there were 23 places, there were 600 applications. Naturally, I passed before that by passing a special four-hour written exam (GRE) in a special computer center - knowledge of complex English vocabulary, logic, mathematics. I had no money, but I had a small child. Harvard paid for two years (later I learned that doctoral students at large private universities never pay themselves - private foundations and universities pay), during which it was necessary to complete ten courses of seminars and lectures. Plus, I gave out a scholarship that allowed me to rent an apartment: for the rest, I earned journalism and translations. Another seven years were spent on research and writing a dissertation, I paid for these years myself, most of them working in Moscow. The prize was substantial - a Ph.D., Ph.D. The degree gave the right to teach - which is exactly why it takes from six to ten years to get it. Worse only for doctors: their training in the US takes 13-14 years. For the past two years, I have already taught at Yale University: journalism and politics called me home.

I remember the first two years of training as one sleepless night. Statistics of political studies, probability theory, regressions, logits, the STATA program, which allowed to eliminate the prejudices inherent in the draft statistical material, 1500 pages of reading per week - only one seminar course ("Comparative Politics"), and there were three courses per semester. four, seven papers in eight weeks - also only one course plus term paper each semester plus research. Always written exams. At the end of two years: written exam - six hours, second - four hours, then oral - three hours with five professors of the faculty. I not only learned how to speed read and read thousands of pages, marveling at the fact that what had occupied my head for so many years had actually been thought out dozens of times by others, studies had been done, books had been written (and yes, I realized that the Soviet government had monstrously intellectually robbed, hiding knowledge behind the Iron Curtain) - there were no political sciences in the USSR, there are none in Russia even now - well, except for the works of the Russian School of Economics. There was no sociology, and even now it is at a primitive level. But Harvard not only gave knowledge - the university cultivates a number of important intellectual habits. For example, that there are no authorities, any text requires a critical look: say, a work on political philosophy required criticism of the views of Locke and Hobbes - and all this in seven pages, no quotations are needed - students' knowledge of the texts is taken for granted. Any used someone else's idea, someone else's thought (even without a quote) in any written work must have a mandatory reference: a lot of time was spent exactly on checking whether someone had come to similar conclusions before, and for this it was necessary to shovel a lot of articles in magazines and books. Borrowing, which is so common in both Russian student papers and dissertations, was out of the question (as well as cheating from a neighbor on an exam or cheat sheets): shame and immediate expulsion from the university. By the way, on this one - from those cases that I know about (at Berkeley and Yale University) - only students from the former socialist camp came across. Finally, perhaps the most important thing that Harvard gave: an understanding of the scope of the world that does not fit into primitive conspiracy theories, the realization that people thought about essential issues before you and will do it after, that there is no one truth, but approaches to the same problem there may be N + 1 and many of them may turn out to be correct. And one more thing, that a person in a cage, with the rarest exception, cannot think well, let alone create. Freedom is not a gift, it is what makes a person a person. Hence, apparently, the Kremlin's decision not to let students study in Europe: much knowledge is unnecessary sadness for the authorities.