Academic Dishonesty at Russian Universities: A Historical Overview

The problem of academic dishonesty at Russian universities is often foregrounded in discussions of contemporary academia, but it is not new. Only its scope, complexity, and pressure from various stakeholders to mitigate or—on the contrary—completely ignore this growing challenge are new. This paper presents a historical overview of corruption at Russian universities, demonstrating that the lack of academic integrity, in many forms, existed in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. In addition to drawing from interviews with experts, the paper examines memoirs about student life edited by Russian historian Vasilii Klyuchevsky, the movies Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (dir. Leonid Gaidai, 1965) and Balamut (dir. Sergei Bodrov Sr., 1979), and literature by Ivan Kuprin (‘A Clump of Lilacs’, 1894), Lev Kassil (The Black Book and Schwambrania, 1928–1931), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The First Circle, 1978).