Historical legacies of soviet higher education and the transformation of higher education systems in post-Soviet Russia and Eurasia

Abstract

The history of Soviet higher education was closely intertwined with the broader histories of Soviet-era general education, with science policies and research institutions, and with the various models of political economy that were embraced and then altered between 1917 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Such close bureaucratic control and tight policy coordination were inherent in the state socialist higher education system that allowed no private institutions or alternative models to function (Chanbarisov, 1988), and was arguably the source of Soviet higher education's greatest strengths as well as the cause of its greatest weaknesses. State support and massive public investment meant that Soviet higher education witnessed some of the most rapid and truly impressive quantitative and institutional growth in the world (Yelyutin, 1959). In other words, Russian and then Soviet higher education grew from its modest domestic influence and marginal global status in the early 1900s to become one of the largest and most comprehensive systems of higher education and research in the postwar era.