Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 10 – Because of
their natures, the humanities and authoritarian regimes are invariably in
conflict, with the former promoting the kind of questioning that undermines
those who seek to rule without reference to others or higher laws and the
latter viewing those who engage in humanities education and research as their
enemies and a threat.
Periodically, authoritarian regimes attack
the humanities in the hopes that they can bring them to heel. That is now
happening in Putin’s Russia, with the Kremlin using the case of Gasan Guseynov
to launch a broader offensive against humanities education, according to Andrey
Kolesnikov in a New Times commentary (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/187420?fcc).
The academic commission of the Higher
School of Economics in a manner that recalls Soviet times condemned Guseynov
for his criticism of the Russian language. It demanded that he apologize in the
same way that a communist party organization would have in a Soviet institution.
(For the text of its “deliberations,” see hse.ru/our/news/316393628.html.)
According
to Kolesnikov, Guseynov responded appropriately and fully “in the spirit of the
well-known Soviet anecdote in which a rabbi demanded that Katsenelenbogen who
had accused Rabinovich of being a fool publicly apologize. Katesenelenbog rose
and said ‘Rabinovich isn’t a fool? I apologize.’”
It
would be one thing, the commentator says, if this attack on Guseynov were
limited to him and to this issue; but in fact, it is part and parcel of
something much larger and more dangerous. “In recent years, enclaves of extraordinarily
high-quality education have appeared in Russia, including its humanitarian
component.”
These
centers represent a threat to the dead hand of the authoritarian regime because
they cause those exposed to them to question the dogma the Kremlin insists on.
As a result, the powers that be are now counterattacking, hoping to silence
their critics and intimidate others who might become such.
“Intuitively,”
Kolesnikov continues, “certain representatives of the authorities began to
sense this long ago. Problems arose with the European University in St.
Petersburg and with Moscow’s Shaninka; and certain higher educational institutions
were ‘strengthened’ with the assignment of ‘supervisors.’” But the powers
generally avoided direct condemnation.
Now,
however, over the last few months, “the senor political leadership and its
apparatus have begun to display ‘a new sincerity;’ that is, they have ceased to
be hold back displays of their police character and FSB essence. They have done everything so that their open ‘post-truth’
is radicalizing the students,” especially at the best universities in the
country.
What
is increasingly happening, the commentator suggests, is a return to the Soviet
practice of holding an entire institute or educational institution responsible for
the words of one of its instructors and putting the positions of the leaders of
these places at risk unless they impose the ideological straightjacket that the
Kremlin increasingly insists upon.
What
has happened with Guseynov shows how far things have gone back to a situation
when any incautious expression of an employee of an institution “can be interpreted
as the position of the university” and become the basis for an attack by the
political authorities and their allies in the state-controlled media.
“In
Soviet times, an ideologically incorrect step of this or that employee not
infrequently led to the defamation of an entire academic institution or the
dismissal of a sector, laboratory, or the institution as a whole as was the case,
for example, with the Institute for Concrete Social Research of the USSR Academy
of Sciences,” Kolesnikov says
“For
one partisan, the entire village was shot.”
“This
practice is gradually returning,” one intended to intimidate the leaders of
these institutes into becoming the enforcers of the Kremlin’s will. And once that happens, it can’t be excluded
that the regime will use charges of espionage and treason against anyone who
doesn’t respond quickly enough to the new order.
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