BY HANK REICHMAN

In the winter 2025 issue of Academe, which I guest-edited, exiled Russian scholars Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin surveyed the state of academic freedom in that country in the aftermath of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  (The issue also includes essays by Ukrainian scholars.)  Unsurprisingly, they reported that

Security agencies and law enforcement have played a critical role in suppressing dissent in academia through targeted repression, particularly during the first months of the war.  Milder internal university disciplinary measures include the dismissal of faculty members who express antiwar views, typically on social media.  Such faculty members are also subjected to bullying by prowar zealots on social media.  University administrators often use pretexts, such as charges of violating the university ethics code for having used inappropriate language in a public context, to fire faculty members instead of explicitly firing them for antiwar views.  More severe punishments include the opening of civil and criminal cases—initiated by law enforcement agencies and by the secret police, in particular—against anyone who opposes the war.

Matveev and Roshchin conclude that Russian scholars are “constrained in a number of ways: university autonomy (even for private universities) is no longer respected; certain subjects are required and must be taught as prescribed by state authorities; teaching about other issues and topics is prohibited. . .  Oddly, life in academia continues, but the pressures and constraints are never far away.”  That said, they write, “there is at least as much hidden resistance as there is compromise, accommodation, and opportunism.  In fact, academic professionalism itself, especially in the social sciences, has become a form of resistance: It requires an objective and critical view of reality that is inherently opposed to the regime’s propaganda efforts.”

Now a more detailed study by two Moscow-based independent researchers, based not only on published reports but on extensive interviews with twenty scholars subject to various forms of intimidation and pressure, both confirms and expands on the insights of Matveev and Roshchin.  The study, “Censorship, Denunications, and Silence Mode in Russian Academia: Informal Intimidation and Direct Pressure on Scholars,” by Ksenia Fedoseva and Tatiana Kuksa, is one of several treatments of academic freedom in a recently published issue of the journal Laboratorium devoted to “Reconceptualizing Academic Freedom: Inside and Outside Perspectives,” guest-edited by Dmitry Dubrovskiy and Lidia Yatliuk.  (Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research is “an international, interdisciplinary academic platform for critical discussion of the processes and phenomena taking place in the post-Soviet space.”  Founded in 2009, it was published by the Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg until 2023, after which it relocated to the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University.  Its advisory board includes scholars from the U.S.,U.K., France, and Germany.)

Fedoseva and Kuksa seek to identify the specific mechanisms, legal and extralegal, formal and informal, that sustain and reinforce “a culture of politically motivated silencing in academic institutions.”  While state actions against individual scholars — the case of Boris Kagarlitsky is one example — have played an important role, Fedoseva and Kuksa show how “agents of censorship” include “university presidents, administrative staff, heads of departments, university psychologists, part-time instructors, experts, as well as students.”  Complaints are almost always anonymous and hidden from those accused.  As in Soviet times denunciations may come from self-appointed informers and watchdogs (one is reminded here also of the activities of Turning Point, Campus Reform, or College Fix, the “usual suspects” for such activity in the U.S.)

Since the invasion, “university administrations have placed a tacit ban on antiwar opinions and censored statements by the research, teaching, and administrative staff made at work and outside of work.”  One of the study’s informants described how this can operate:

One denunciation against me was made by a lady on the internet—she wrote to the rector.  The rector passed it on to our security service officer and asked her to put the brakes on it.  The old bat then wrote to the president.  He called me up and said: “Knock it off!”  The second case—I was also written up.  The vice rector called me out into the hallway and wrote on a piece of paper: “You’re being wire-tapped, you’re followed.”  Then the president summoned me after a conversation with the security service officer and said: “There’s an inquiry about you from the regional administration.  You’ll be fired. You’ve got to keep quiet, but you do not.”

If such informal, if heavy-handed, methods have characterized much of the repression, these have been enforced by “a legislative criminalization of the (common before February 2022) antimilitarist stance of Russian citizens, which greatly aggravated the position of university administrations and required them to improvise and use bureaucratic tricks to organize censorship and persecution.”  Fedoseva and Kuksa examine the various means by which university administrators have compelled removal of offending staff members:

A significant number of cases found in the media and in our interviews testify to nonlegal coercion on the part of administrations, when vulnerable academic and teaching staff had their contracts terminated involuntarily, forcibly, as a result of informal influence: direct intimidation, threats, or hints at the consequences that could ensue, for example, from denunciations by “vigilant” (unnamed by the administration) colleagues or students.

Moreover,

after the events of February 2022, regardless of their physical location, degree of privilege, or precariousness of their academic position, university employees with an openly antiwar stance were in real danger of a much more significant loss of civil and teaching rights (than a voluntary resignation or forced dismissal).  Some prominent academics were assigned the status of a foreign agent by the government, banning them from teaching and requiring them to include this label on any of their publications or public statements to avoid fines.  Others were subjected to administrative fines and even criminal prosecution for disseminating “fake news” about the war or “defamation” of the military and even for high treason

The article concludes that “the Russian academic community is reverting to self-censorship and ‘silent mode'” as “university officials punish noncompliance, whether due to external pressure” or “to avoid potential confrontations with the country’s security services.”

The Laboratorium issue also includes articles on Russian undergraduates’ views of academic freedom, on precarious employment and its relationship to repression, and a consideration of the relationship between social science and academic freedom by Dubrovskiy.  Although the focus is understandably on the period since the onset of full-scale war, Russia’s drift back toward authoritarianism and censorship in higher education and away from the more liberal orientation that had emerged in the first post-Soviet years can be dated from at least 2011-12 when political protests and the subsequent 2014 invasion of Crimea shifted things, a process that Dubrovskiy has usefully summarized in a separate essay published elsewhere on “The Slow-Motion Collapse of Russian Higher Education” and in a 2019 contribution to Academe.  

Although I found several of the articles in the Laboratorium issue marred by an at times excess of theoretical jargon (that may be a matter of personal taste, however), they are well worth reading, especially the Fedoseva and Kuksa study, because they provide a chilling warning of what might very well happen here in the U.S., albeit under different circumstances and with differing means, if the current Trumpist assault on higher education, which so mimics the authoritarian style (and some of the substance) of Orban and Putin, is allowed to succeed.

Indeed, Putin’s own repressive hand is itself already reaching into U.S. higher education.  One of the Russian state’s more heavy-handed control mechanisms has been to label organizations “undesirable.”  Those so labeled are subject to heavy fines, while individuals affiliated with such associations can receive lengthy prison sentences if they fail to disassociate themselves from the designated group.  Recently, the Russian Ministry of Justice designated the U.S.-based Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) as “undesirable,” immediately endangering its Russian members and any Russian scholars who might wish to publish in its journal, Slavic Review, or attend its annual meeting (as many have in recent years), but also threatening the ability of Western scholars (ASEEES has many international members) to conduct research or even to communicate with scholars in Russia.  (In 2021, Bard College, which had a lengthy collaboration with St. Petersburg University, was also designated as “undesirable,” effectively terminating its Russian activities.)   While ASEEES has called on the Russian government to reverse this decision, it has also taken steps to ensure the confidentiality of all its members and conference participants who desire anonymity.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.