Student obstruction at Moscow University in the second third of the 19th century as a form of protest activity

Abstract

The object of the study is the phenomenon of student obstruction at the Moscow University of the XIX century as a form of student protest against lecturers who caused dissatisfaction. The subject of the study is the reasons for student protests against professors, reasons for demarche, as well as the results and consequences of obstruction for the teachers, the most active students as well as the organization of the educational process and ways of student management by the university authorities. In addition, within the framework of this article, based on official sources, memoir literature and archival documents, an attempt is made to reconstruct the mechanics of student protest itself using the example of two of the most high-profile and significant cases in the history of Moscow University of the specified period, namely the "stories" with professors Malov and Varnek. The research methodology is classical for works on social history: It is based on the fundamental principle of historicism and a number of traditional methods for historical science (historical-genetic, historical-typological, comparative). The novelty of the research lies in the fact that in the Russian literature there have been practically no attempts to study the phenomenon of student obstruction at the pre-reform Moscow University. A special contribution of the author of the work is the study of the topic of student protests in the context of the formation of a student corporation with its inherent ethics, an unspoken set of rules, special ways of defending their rights in conflicts with teachers and university authorities. The author of the study also concludes that the university leadership in this era was generally quite lenient towards cases of obstruction and protests against teachers, although after the "Varnek's story" the university authorities treated the instigators and participants of the protest more strictly than the initiators of the obstruction against Professor Malov in the 1830s.