Russia under the Old regime

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The controversy which later divided intellectuals into 'Westerners' and 'Slavophiles', for example, first broke out in salon conversations and only later found its way into print.

The second was the university. Russia's premier university, that of Moscow, had been founded in 1755, and although its Press proved useful to Novikov in his publishing ventures, it can hardly be said to have had much of an intellectual impact on the country. Its largely foreign faculty lectured in German and Latin to an uncomprehending audience composed of priests' sons and other plebeians; dvoriane saw no point in sending their sons there, die more so since years spent at the university did not count towards the accumulation of service seniority. This situation continued until the 1830s, when S. S. Uvarov took over the Ministry of Education. A conservative nationalist but also an eminent classical scholar, Uvarov believed that scientific and scholarly knowledge was the best antidote to subversive ideas then floating in the country. Under his ministry, higher learning began to flourish spectacularly in Russia. In the 1830s it became very fashionable for sons of aristocratic families to enrol at the University of Moscow. The government, anxious not to contribute to the creation of a large and unemployable intelligentsia, deliberately kept the number of students low: under Nicholas 1 it remained constant, barely exceeding three thousand throughout the empire. The government also placed great obstacles to the admission of commoners. With the death of Nicholas 1, access to institutions of higher learning was eased. Many professional and technical schools were opened with the result that in 1893-4 Russia had 52 institutions of higher learning attended by 25,000 students. Several thousand more were enrolled at foreign universities. In an age when parental authority was strictly upheld by law and custom, the university provided a natural breeding ground for oppositional activity. It was here that young people from all parts of the empire first found themselves in a relatively free and informal society of their peers, where youth was in absolute and dominant majority. Here they heard articulated their privately nourished resentments and visions. Those who arrived without any strong public commitments were soon drawn into a vortex of common action which could only be resisted at the risk of ostracism: for the university was then, as it is today, one of the most effective means of enforcing intellectual conformity. In the early 1860s, unrest began to engulf Russian universities, and from then on the 'student movement' became a constant feature of Russian life. Protests, strikes, harassment and even violence against unpopular teachers and administrators were countered with mass arrests, expulsions and the closing down of universities. In the last half century of its existence, the old regime was in a state of permanent war with the student population.