from the era of Nicholas I. This reform, however, had a short history: In response to the Nihilists’ and related groups’ growing criticism of the autocratic system, the government quickly restored a long list of previous restrictions. This development, in turn, intensified student unrest, making it a historical force of major proportions. The decades preceding the World War I were filled with student strikes and rebellions.
The 1884 university charter was the government’s answer to continuing student unrest: It prohibited students from holding meetings on university premises, abolished all student organizations, and subjected student life to thorough regimentation. The professors not only lost their right to elect university administrators but were ordered to organize their lectures in accordance with mandatory specifications issued by the Ministry of Public Education.
Student unrest kept the professors out of classrooms but did not keep them out of the libraries and laboratories. The waning decades of the tsarist reign were marked by an abundance of university contributions to science. Particularly noted was the pioneering work in aerodynamics, virology, chromatography, neurophysiology, soil microbiology, probability theory in mathematics, mutation theory in biology, and non-Aristotelian logic.
World War I brought so much tranquility to universities that the Ministry of Public Education announced the beginning of work on a new charter promising a removal of the more drastic limitations on academic autonomy. The fall of the tsarist system in early 1917 brought a quick end to this particular project. During the preceding twenty years new universities were founded in Saratov and Tomsk.
The last decades of Imperial Russia showed a marked growth of institutions of higher education outside the framework of state universities. To bolENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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ster the industrialization of the national economy, the government both improved the existing technical schools and established new ones at a university level. The St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute was a major addition to higher education. There was also a successful effort to establish Higher Courses for Women financed by private endowments and treated as equal to universities. Sha-niavsky University in Moscow, established by a private endowment, presented a major venture in higher education. In the admission of students, it was less restrictive than the state universities and was the first institution to offer such new courses as sociology.
In 1899 the total enrollment of students in state universities was 16,497. Forty percent of regular students sought law degrees, 28 percent chose medicine, 27 percent were in the natural sciences, and only 4 percent chose the social sciences and the humanities. Law was favored because it provided the best opportunity for government employment.
The February Revolution in 1917 placed the Russian nation on a track leading to a political life guided by democratic ideals. The writer Maxim Gorky greeted the beginning of a new era in national history in an article published in the popular journal Priroda (Nature) underscoring the interdependence of democracy and science. The new political regime wasted no time in abolishing censorship in all its multiple manifestations and granted professors the long-sought right to establish a national association for the protection of both science and the scientific community. A government decision confirmed the establishment of a university in Perm.
Immediately after the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolshevik authorities enacted a censorship law that in some respects was more comprehensive and penetrating than its tsarist predecessors. The new government began to expand the national network of institutions of higher education; in 1981, the country had 835 such institutions, including eighty-three universities. The primary task of universities was to train professional personnel; scholarly research was relegated to a secondary position. This policy, however, did not prevent the country’s leading universities with research traditions from active scholarship in selected branches of science. The universities also concentrated on Marxist indoctrination. The curriculum normally included such Marxist sciences as historical materialism, dialectical materialism, dialectical logic, and Marxist ethics. To be admitted to postgraduate
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studies, candidates were expected to pass an examination in Marxist theory with the highest grade. Marxist theory was officially granted a status of science, and Marxist philosophers were considered members of the scientific community.
In their organization and administration, Soviet universities followed the rules set up by institutional charters, specific adaptations to a government-promulgated model. Faculty councils elected high administrators, but, according to an unwritten law, the candidates for these positions needed approval by political authorities. Local Communist organizations conducted continuous ideological campaigns and tracked the political behavior of professors. In the post-Stalin era political control and ideological interference lost much of their intensity and effectiveness.
During the last two decades of the Soviet system the government encouraged a planned expansion of scientific research in all universities. Selected universities became pivotal components of the newly founded scientific centers, aggregates of provincial research bodies involved primarily in the study of acute problems of regional economic significance. Metropolitan universities expanded and intensified the work of traditional and newly established research institutes. Leading universities were involved in publishing activity, some on a large scale. In university publications there was more emphasis or theoretical than on experimental studies. Mathematical research, in no need of laboratory equipment, continued to blossom in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev universities. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; EDUCATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kassow, Samuel D. (1961). Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vucinich, Alexander. (1963-1970). Science in Russian Culture. 2 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Signed July 8, 1833, between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi reflected the interest of Tsar Nicholas I in preserving
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legitimate authority and the territorial integrity of existing states in Europe and the Near East. Nicholas was concerned about the domino effect of successful revolutions against dynastic states. Unable to contain the rebellion of Muhammad Ali in Egypt, the Ottoman state was threatened by his advance across Syria and Anatolia in 1832. In response, on February 20, 1833, a Russian naval squadron arrived in Constantinople, followed by Russian ground forces, with the intent of protecting the Sultan’s capital from the rebels.
The treaty created an eight-year alliance between Russia and the Ottomans and provided for Russian aid in the event of an attack against the Sultan. It reconfirmed the 1829 Treaty of Adri-anople, which recognized Russian gains in the Balkans and the Caucasus as well as providing free access through the Straits for Russian merchant ships. A secret addendum to the treaty also required the Ottoman Empire to close the Straits to foreign warships. Nicholas and his foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, preferred to see the Straits remain in Ottoman hands rather than risk the disintegration of the Ottoman state whereby another European power such as France or Britain might take control of this strategic waterway.
The treaty appealed to Nicholas’s sense of Russia as the premier defender of legitimism in post-Napoleonic Europe. It also confirmed Russian supremacy in the Black Sea basin and guaranteed the free passage of Russian commercial vessels into the Mediterranean, an important point given the growing importance of Russia’s export trade from ports such as Odessa.
The treaty was superseded by the Straits Convention of July 13, 1841, when a five-power consortium guaranteed the permanent closure of the Straits to all warships. Hopes for a more permanent Russo-Ottoman alliance were dashed, however, when the alliance was not renewed, helping to lay the groundwork for the Crimean War. See also: NICHOLAS I; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fuller, William C, Jr. (1992). Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914. New York: Free Press. Riasanovsky,
