Boris Yeltsin’s second and final term as president would expire in June 2000, and he anxiously searched for a viable successor. In summer 1999 a serious challenge emerged from two powerful regional leaders, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Tatarstan president Mintimer Shaimiev. They merged the two movements they headed, Fatherland and All Russia, into an alliance headed by Yevgeny Primakov, the prime minister whom Yeltsin had fired in March. Victory for Fatherland/All Russia in the State Duma election in December 1999 would give Luzhkov or Primakov a good chance of defeating the Kremlin’s candidate for the presidency in June 2000.
In response the presidential staff hastily created a new loyalist party, Yedinstvo (Unity), also known as Medved or Bear (from its official name, Interregional Movement “Unity,” whose first letters spell MeDvEd). Unity was launched in September 1999, just three months before the election. Unity mobilized the administrative resources of government ministries and regional governors, thirty-two of whom backed the new electoral alliance. Unity’s philosophy was simple: support for Prime Minister Putin, who was leading the fight against Chechen bandits. Putin declined to lead Unity; its official head was the ambitious young minister for emergency situations, Sergei Shoigu. In 1999 Unity was helped by oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose television station ORT launched relentless personal attacks on Unity’s rivals, Luzhkov and Primakov. Ironically, a year later Berezovsky fell out with the Kremlin and was forced into exile.
Apart from Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Russian political parties were exceptionally weak and unstable. Previous attempts to create a pro-government party, such as Russia’s Choice (1993) or Our Home is Russia (1995), had failed. People were willing to vote for a strong president but voiced their discontent by voting for opposition parties in parliamentary elections. About 20 to 30 percent of voters supported the communists, and a similar number supported the various democratic parties. Unity hoped to pull support from across the spectrum, especially from voters who were skeptical of all ideologies and preferred pragmatic leaders.
Much to everyone’s surprise, Unity did well in the December 1999 election, winning 23 percent on the national party list, close behind the Commu1620 nists’ 24 percent, and ahead of Fatherland/All Russia at 13 percent. This cleared the way for Putin’s successful run for the presidency. Unity then forged a tactical alliance with the Communists in parliament, and in 2000 and 2001 the Duma passed nearly all of Putin’s legislative proposals, from START II ratification to land reform.
Surveys suggested that Unity was maintaining its electoral support and gaining some influence in regional elections. In July 2001 Luzhkov’s Fatherland party, recognizing Unity’s administrative muscle and fearing defeat in the next election, reluctantly merged with Unity. Shaimiev’s All-Russia later followed suit. The three parties held a founding congress to form a new party, called United Russia, on December 1. The party claimed to have 200,000 members, but its support seemed to derive entirely from Putin’s popularity.
In November 2002 legislator Alexander Be-spalov was replaced as head of United Russia by Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, signalling the Kremlin’s desire to keep tight control over the party as it prepared for its main test: the December 2003 State Duma elections. A new July 2002 law introduced party list elections for half the seats in regional legislatures, giving Unified Russia a chance of establishing a presence at a regional level throughout Russia. See also: PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Malyakin, Ilya. (2003). “The ‘United Russia’ Project: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.” Russia and Eurasia Review 2, No. 5 (March 4). June 20. «http://www.jamestown.org/pubs/view/rer_002 _005_003.htm ».
In 1725 Peter the Great founded the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which, unlike its Western models, included a school of higher education known as the Academic University. The primary task of the university was to prepare selected young men to enter the challenging field of scientific scholarship. The university encountered difficulties in attracting and retaining students. Because all instructors- members of the Academy-were foreigners, there
Students gather for class at Moscow State University. © MICHAEL NICHOLSON/CORBIS was also a serious language barrier. The general atmosphere did not favor the new teaching venture, and the university folded before the end of the century.
After a slow start, Moscow University, founded in 1755, ended the century as a dynamic enterprise with a promising future. The initial charter of the university guaranteed a high degree of academic autonomy but limited the enrollment to free estates, which excluded a vast majority of the population. In 1855, on the occasion of the centenary celebration of its existence, the university published an impressive volume on its scholarly achievements.
The beginning of the nineteenth century manifested a vibrant national interest in both utilitarian and humanistic sides of science. During the first decade of the century, the country acquired four new universities. Dorpat University, actually a reestablished Protestant institution, immediately
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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began to serve as a link to Western universities and as an effective center for training future Russian professors. The universities at Kharkov, Kazan, and St. Petersburg benefited from an initial appointment of Western professors displaced by the Napoleonic wars. St. Petersburg University also benefited from the presence of the Academy of Sciences in the same city.
It was not unusual for the members of the Academy of Sciences to offer courses at the university. Kiev University was founded in 1833 with the aim of contributing to the creation of a new Polish nationality favorably disposed toward the spirit of Russia, a quixotic government plan that collapsed in a hurry allowing the university to follow the normal course of development.
The 1803 university charter adopted the Western idea of institutional independence and opened up higher education to all estates. Conservative administrators, however, continued to favor the upper levels of society. The liberalism and humanism of government management of higher education was a passing phenomenon. In the 1820s, the Ministry of Public Education, dominated by extreme conservatism, encouraged animosity toward foreign professors and undertook extensive measures to eliminate the influence of Western materialism on Russian science. Geology was eliminated from the university curriculum because it contradicted scriptural positions.
In a slightly modified form, extreme conservatism continued to dominate the policies of the Ministry of Public Education during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855). The 1833 university charter vested more authority in superintendents of school districts-subordinated directly to the Minister of Public Education-than in university rectors and academic councils. Professors’ writings were subjected to a multilayered censorship system.
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War in 1855-1856 stimulated rising demands for structural changes in the nation’s sociopolitical system; in fact, the Epoch of Great Reforms-as the 1860s were known-was remembered for the emergence of an ideology that extolled science as a most sublime and creative expression of critical thought, the most promising base for democratic reforms. As Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the famed neurophysiolo-gist, noted, the Nihilist praise for the spirit of science as an epitome of critical thought sent young men in droves to university natural-science departments.
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Inspired by the waves of liberal thought and sentiment, the government treated the universities as major national assets. Budgetary allocations for the improvement of research facilities reached new heights, as did the official determination to send Russian students to Western universities for advanced studies. New universities were founded in Odessa and Warsaw. In 1863 the government enacted a new university charter with a solid emphasis on academic autonomy.
At the same time, the government abrogated the more crippling provisions of the censorship law inherited
