05/08/2024

Russian Universities Purge Liberals and Embrace 'Patriots' to Please Putin

They are quashing Western influences and dissent

Two weeks before the start of his 25th year as Russia's supreme political leader, Vladimir Putin made a sweeping proclamation: "Wars are won by teachers."

The remark, which Putin repeated twice during his year-end news conference in December, shed light on a campaign he is waging that has received little attention outside wartime Russia: to imbue the country’s education system with patriotism, purge universities of Western influences, and quash any dissent among professors and students on campuses that are often hotbeds of political activism.

At St. Petersburg State University, this meant dismantling a prestigious humanities program called the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more than a decade, until May 2022, the faculty — or college — was led by Alexei Kudrin, a liberal economist and former finance minister who had been a close associate of Putin's since the early 1990s, when they were deputy mayors together in St. Petersburg.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.