Rise and fall: social science in Russia before and after the war

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we first briefly recount the post-Soviet history of social science in Russia, with particular attention to the role of international collaborations in spurring its growth, and we review the accelerating attacks on university autonomy and international collaborations that preceded Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Then we consider developments since the February 2022 invasion that, in our view, signal the demise of academic freedom. We consider how Russia-based social scientists have negotiated the mounting challenges to the practice of their craft. We draw on interviews with Russian and American social scientists involved in international collaborations conducted in summer 2021 and interviews with Russian social scientists carried out in spring and summer 2022, as well as scholarly and journalistic accounts of developments within Russian universities and research institutes.

KEYWORDS:

• Political science
• Russia
• authoritarianism
• academic freedom
• repression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Gel’man (2021) discusses Kuzminov and the rise of the Higher School of Economics as an example of “pockets of effectiveness” within the generally dysfunctional, rent-seeking governance structures of Russia and other authoritarian regimes. See also Dubrovsky and Kaczmarska (2021).

2. See Forrat (2016) and Chirikov (2016) for alternative accounts of the motives that led the Russian government to invest heavily in universities. Hanson and Wilson Sokhey (2021) discuss the perceived tradeoff authoritarian governments face between encouraging modernization and risking a restive student population, concluding that investing in higher education is an appealing strategy to secure the loyalty of the middle classes when the latter are heavily concentrated in government employment and thus dependent on the state.

3. We would also note that, despite the time-worn objections to quantitative social science and its alleged hegemony in “Anglophone” social science (raised, for example by Morris 2022 in this special issue), a lot of the inroads Russia-based social scientists have made in international journals has been through quantitative studies based on surveys and official data sources. At least in the Russian context, Morris’s characterization of the “extractive” nature of collaborations between Western and native researchers seems more accurately applied to qualitative studies. While this is not the place to join the old debate over the merits of quantitative and qualitative approaches, we do wish to register our skepticism regarding both extreme positions in the debate: in Russia, as elsewhere, both approaches have their merits and their limitations, and sweeping, categorical endorsements of either one at the expense of the other are misguided and counterproductive, especially in an era where mixed-methods research is rapidly growing. Of course, as other contributions to this issue (e.g. those by Lankina 2022; Libman 2022; Sharafutdinova 2023) imply, the drive of many Russia-based social scientists to place their work in international journals, at least in political science, may have come at the price of a narrowing of topics and methodological approaches in order to conform with expectations of journal editors. But here our focus is not on whether those expectations have unduly limited the scope of social scientific studies of Russia; rather we compare a situation where studies addressing mainstream topics with mainstream methods predominate to one where there are no studies of Russia by Russia-based researchers at all in international political science journals.

4. For similar insights into successful transnational collaborations between US- and Russia-based natural scientists based on interviews, see Dezhina and Wood (2022).

5. The perception of many of the interviewees of a tendency for Russian scholars to provide data and insider knowledge while their Western collaborators bring to the table theoretical insight may sound like confirmation of arguments that Westerners take a colonial or extractive approach to collaborations with Russians (e.g. Morris 2022 in this special issue). We wish to emphasize that here we are simply reporting the views of our interviewees, and we can ourselves raise examples of the opposite kind of relationship in transnational collaborations. At the same time, it is an empirical question whether these perceptions of general tendencies hold true as typical sets of comparative advantages in transnational collaborations, a question that would require a systematic analysis to resolve.

6. All interviews were conducted with academics in positions of responsibility (deans, chairs, heads of academic programs) who oppose the war, but decided to stay in Russia. To protect the anonymity of informants, we provide no information about their location or positions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Wisconsin Russia Project, which is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.