Students and EUSP staff at the conference. Right in the last row – Alexander Kondakov and Evgeny Stororn. Photo from the author's archive.Academic research in Russia, particularly in the social and political sciences, is increasingly being directed by the law enforcement agencies. Two ongoing developments in St Petersburg confirm this trend. The first is the crisis that has enveloped the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP); the second is the story surrounding Evgeny Shtorn, an employee of the city’s Centre for Independent Social Research who has been forced to flee Russia.
For more than a year now, EUSP has been battling to claw back its educational license, which it almost lost in December 2016, before being stripped of it completely in summer 2017. The Federal Service for the Supervision of Education and Science (Rosobrnadzor) alleges that the university is ill equipped for teaching, citing various technicalities as evidence (there’s no swimming pool, you see, and the lift doors are too narrow).
As for Shtorn, his “transgression” was simply working for an academic organisation – Petersburg’s Centre for Independent Social Research – which, in 2015, was added to Russia’s “foreign agents” registry. It was precisely on these grounds that Shtorn was refused Russian citizenship, for which he (a stateless person) had applied according to standard procedure. The formal justification for the refusal was entirely unrelated to Shtorn’s research work and social activism (which encompasses LGBT issues). In reality, however, it was precisely these factors that were behind the pressure on him.
