Johnson's Russia List
2012-#227
26 December 2012
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A World Security Institute Project
JRL homepage: www.russialist.org
#4
Moscow Students Invoke Putin for Protection in Rare Strike
MOSCOW, December 26 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) Moscow students on
strike to protest the merger of their college plastered the premises with
portraits of President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to repel possible police
attacks, a strike organizer said on Wednesday.
"Riot police are known to crack down on protesters who do not represent a
threat, we hope this will make them think twice," Ivan Mironov, a
nationalist champion who teaches history at the Russian State University of
Trade and Economics (RSUTE), told RIA Novosti.
Several busloads of police were deployed at the university while students
blocked the entrances by barricades and human chains on Wednesday, but no
violence took place.
The students also appealed to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
Patriarch Kirill for protection; although as of Wednesday evening he had not
responded.
The ongoing standoff has been called the first but likely not the last
after-effect of the government's latest attempt to overhaul the Russian
higher education system, notoriously inefficient and bloated, and often
accused of corruption.
In November, the Education and Science Ministry published a list of 136
higher education establishments across the nation that were deemed
"inefficient" and slated for revamp, closure or merger.
The RSUTE which failed to make the top 100 Russian colleges in a 2012
rating by respected weekly Expert was to be one of the first mergers,
joining with the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics (24th in the same
ranking) by 2014.
But about 400 of RTUSE's 70,000 students went on strike last Wednesday in
protest, refusing to leave the building they spent the night on college
grounds singing songs and playing Counter-Strike.
The college administration endorsed their protest, issuing a statement
opposing the merger. Three RTUSE professors declared a hunger strike on
Tuesday. The protesters said they feared that the merger would mean tuition
hikes, mass expulsions and sackings among the teaching staff.
Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov and Plekhanov University
officials denied these rumors, but Mironov told RIA Novosti that the
protesters did not believe them.
On Tuesday, the ministry also fired RTUSE head Sergei Baburin, who claimed
the decision was unlawful. Baburin is better known as a nationalist
politician who co-organized the Russian Marches, a series of annual
ultranationalist rallies in Moscow frequented by neo-Nazis, among other
participants.
His background did not discourage his political adversaries from helping the
protesters: Leftist opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov, Ilya Ponomaryov and
Dmitry Gudkov dropped by the college last week in a show of solidarity.
Mironov denied the strike was in any way political. "We all have our own
views, this is only natural. But we don't bring them into the current
protest," he said. The student strike has been running for a week now, with
no compromise in sight.
Russian students rarely strike to protect their rights, unlike their peers
in the West. The Kremlin under Putin was also known for its aversion to
unpopular measures that could trigger public protest.
At the same time, government officials have for years threatened to purge
the Russian higher education system, which teems with low-quality colleges
and "diploma mills."
RTUSE was one "weak" college ripe for a revamp, said Irina Abalkina, a
higher education expert who works at the Higher School of Economics, which
took 5th place on Expert magazine's ranking.
The students and teachers are likely protesting out of fear that they will
fail to meet the Plekhanov University's higher educational standards, she
told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
She added that she believed the ministry's inefficiency list a
"well-conceived" and "sensibly implemented" measure.
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