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Transition from the Soviet type of economy to a new market system showed the necessity in reforms at the secondary school level. Based on a literature review, this paper aims to reveal how the thinking about teaching economics has changed over the past three decades (1991-2021), and how this has affected teaching economics as a school subject in the Post-Soviet countries. The article illustrates these with the cases of Russia and Kazakhstan. For this paper, a narrative literature review methodology was adopted and scanned studies included only those published in English and Russian.

Drawing on the analysis of discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers' roles during the twentieth century in the Russian Federation, this paper argues that pedagogy becomes redefined based on the political elites' vision for the society's future. During the Soviet era, teachers were expected to play a key role in social transformation. In order to transform the world, they were expected to deploy humanistic pedagogy to help all students realise their potential. During the post-Soviet era, this vision was abandoned. As teachers were expected to fulfil the function of social control, they were called to adopt technocratic pedagogy that comprised principles of psychologisation, individualisation, pathologisation, and depoliticisation. Psychologisation of teachers' roles and pathologisation of diversity became deployed to "adapt students to the world" by addressing problems "within" students rather than in the society. The significance of this paper lies in demonstrating connections between shifting discourses of teachers' roles, pedagogy, and pursuit of social transformation or conservative social change.

This article focuses on the latest developments in higher educational policy in the Russian Federation and the influence of international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on these policies and education reforms. This article's primary purpose is to explore how the newly adopted policies reflect the changes in Russia's political discourse. The focus is on the connection between the current higher education policies and the policies of the international organizations that are providing financial and expert support in education and therefore possibly influencing political and educational discourse. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper explores integrity dilemmas experienced by Russian academics in the context of building a world-class university. Interviews with professors and managers of major research universities in Moscow provide critical insights into the organisational and attitudinal incongruities generated by a coercive state--a challenge that Russia has been unable to rise above following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scepticism as to the "master model" of competitive performance is evident in relation to the Russian 5-100-2020 excellence scheme, the overseers of which prioritise "reputation management" over integrity in governance and performance. In addition to exposing the consequences of deficient institutional autonomy, which prevail in the context of a post-totalitarian society, this paper calls for enhanced critical inquiry into university excellence programmes imposed by performativist and vanity-driven governments.

This paper is relevant due to the need to find the mechanisms of overcoming social destruction caused by people's current personal alienation of the "Other," as well as alienation of oneself as "Another." The problem is considered in the context of the modern society's growing need for the creation of a community that adheres to diversity and inclusive values as integral conditions of individual existence. The concept of the evolution of inclusion as a modern culture universal, presented in the paper, expands the ideas about it and its addressees. The author emphasizes that the subject of inclusion is absolutely every human in need of self-realization in the society, a career of unique features and precious for the progress of human civilization. The authors emphasize that every born human is the subject of inclusion with the need for social realization, as the career of unique individual features which are the highest value for the social progress of human civilization. The authors urge to draw the attention of the scientific community to the lack of systematic reflection of this phenomenon, which manifests itself today in all areas of activity in the global format. This approach allows us to trace the formation of inclusion as a modern cultural universal, which this work is devoted to. The main instrument of the formation of inclusion is the creativity that actualizes its new perception as the process of getting the creative joy from the joint co-creative artistic activities that contribute to the ongoing personal development.

This paper examines the public education system in Vilna Governorate in the period between the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. This part of the paper analyzes the system's development in the period 1803-1880. In putting this work together, the authors drew upon a pool of statistical data published in Memorandum Books for Vilna Governorate in the period from the 1860s to the 1910s, as well as an array of statistical data on the Vilna Educational District published in the scholarly journal Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya. The authors also made use of several regulatory documents. The authors conclude by noting that the system of public education in Vilna Governorate had developed markedly distinct characteristics of its own. One of these characteristics was based on the motley ethnical and confessional composition of the area's population. As a consequence, in the period 1803-1880 the region witnessed two Polish uprisings, which would ultimately have an effect on its system of public education. At the same time, the development of the system of public education in Vilna Governorate had a set of features common to other regions within the Russian Empire as well. More specifically, there was a sharp rise in the number of educational institutions subsequent to the 1861 reform, and afterwards there was a drop in that number in the second half of the 1870s.

This mixed-methods ethnographic case study examines the socio-historical origins and current lived experiences of students at one Russian university to understand the role of a university education as an environmental factor in the development of a civic consciousness. Findings suggest that the institution has attempted to introduce liberal civic education reforms while competing with a system-wide civic passivity developed during the Soviet era. At the same time, the institution is balancing political neutrality and social development to effectively execute its mission in spite of increasing state control. Student voices suggest that human capital development remains a top priority, whereas civic development has been limited. This case study serves as a cautionary tale in light of oppression and compromises that higher education institutions have to make with the state. Moreover, countries with a similar Soviet legacy of an atrophied civic society can look to modest reform efforts to engage individual students in a way that can promote civic participation so long as the state allows civic development to occur. This paper also addresses the implications of higher education's role within the context of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This paper focuses on the dynamics of education in the interplay of power and seduction as creatively displayed in Takarazuka Revue's performances re-enacting the major players of the Cold War: USA and Russia (rather than former Soviet Union). "Oceans 11" (cosmos troupe, 2019) and "Once Upon a Time in America" (snow troupe, 2020), on the one hand, and "Land of Gods" (cosmos troupe, 2017) and "Anastasia" (cosmos troupe, 2020), on the other hand, lavishly display subtle interactions of longing and belonging, ecstasy and rage, love and betrayal, envy, hatred and passion, while painstakingly building up irresistible tensions between the instances involved in the performative process: actresses, administrators, audiences. The theoretical support is delivered by Robert Greene's pragmatic elaborations in his seminal works "The 48 Laws of Power" (1998) and "The Art of Seduction" (2001): education is never a linear process between a 'master' and a 'disciple', but an interactive game, governed by the pursuit of joy in overcoming challenges and finding ingenious solutions.

The beginning of the 21st century is marked by systemic, economic and social transformations in Poland and Russia, that significantly affected the education system, including the education for persons with special needs. This paper is an attempt to present synthetically the changes relating to persons with disabilities. The current state of the education for children and youth with special needs will be considered due to the new education system, legal regulations, the school population, type of disability of pupils and the kinds of schools they attend. Compulsory education, which includes the level of primary and lower secondary schools, will be subject to a separate analysis. The article presents significant systemic changes in Polish and Russian education and the state development strategy in the sphere of social policy towards persons with disabilities. The new documents are analyzed that have led to important changes in policy direction with serious consequences in terms of the structure and curriculum of inclusive education in both countries. The paper introduces a review of the changes in policy direction with serious consequences in terms of the structure and curriculum of education for persons with special needs. A key objective of the paper will be to examine the new approaches to education of disabled persons in Russia and Poland and the subsequent changes in it.

The paper tries to reveal how the modern university education could respond to changes that take place in contemporary society development. The research has tried to follow the task of bridging the Academy and Society needs. Special emphasis is laid to the legal education as graduates of respective institutions are supposed to contribute to the global rule of law, human rights provision, equal access to public goods. The article explores the international state of affairs with regard to administrative law status, specifies latest developments in the Russian national legislation. Due to the fact that the Code of Administrative Court Procedure came into force in Russia the paper argues for legal education curriculum renewal and some disciplines replacement, provides legal, conceptual and theoretical grounds for the above change. The methodology included literature analysis, empirical study of educational standards requirements and further went on to draft recommendations about the changes in the degree course contents and specifics with regard to the latest developments in national legislation.

How and why did Russian education go from the enthusiastic liberalization in the early 1990s to the restoration of a Soviet-style system in the new century? Attempting to answer this question, the authors reassess and advance a theoretical model that they initially proposed fifteen years ago. While most research on education in transitional societies focuses on either institutional or ideological changes, this paper addresses both kinds of transformation from a unified theoretical perspective. In this context, the authors show how ideological tendencies that were registered already in the textbooks of 1990-1992 (nationalist orientations were emphasized side-by-side with a rehabilitation of the Soviet past) have unfolded into a full-scale conservative and neo-imperial ideological reorientation manifest in a radical revision of the history curriculum and in the content of the newly introduced religious education. Overall, the paper advances theoretical and conceptual framework for examining educational change in the context of lengthy social and political transformations. It is especially relevant to comparative studies of cases where such transformations include religious resurgences and state-controlled desecularization.

This article describes a modernization project undertaken by a nationally accredited Russian university located in Omsk, Siberia, and aimed at developing a new international business school. A unique feature of the project is that it was successfully implemented in a former Soviet-era closed city. Until 1991, the university hadn't had any international connections and for both local faculty and administrators the concept of international business education was a radical new idea; therefore, the project development team needed to develop the project "from scratch" in an unfavorable environment. The paper describes the process of organizational innovation where gradual modernization was intertwined with radical innovations some of which were fiercely opposed by hardliners and bureaucrats. The paper reveals the need for the project, describes the process of its development, identifies major steps in implementation, explores its design, characterizes curriculum-related problems and innovations, evaluates available resources for internationalization of the school's faculty and students, identifies roles played by various stakeholders, evaluates key success factors and provides recommendations for future research.

Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-making, fakery, and duplicitous performances, sometimes involving researchers themselves. Drawing on Bakhtin's writing on jokers' pursuit of truth, I revisit the tensions I encountered in my ethnographic fieldwork in the Russian Federation to reimagine the possibilities of navigating research with the powerful. This paper offers a methodological provocation to rethink ethical imperatives and poses new questions for reimaging the problematics of critical policy analysis focused on equity and justice in the post-truth era.

This paper problematizes the dichotomy between neo-liberalism and socialism and the tendency to view the post-socialist condition as a process of convergence with 'Western' and 'global'. It does so by analysing the development and implementation of a quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) policy in school education in the context of the Russian Federation. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian national QAE policy has changed greatly and currently resembles the agendas of transnational organizations in education. At the same time, the national policy and the political discourse on quality continue to draw on Soviet as well as post-Soviet legacies. Juxtaposing the case of Russian QAE policy with theoretical models of post-bureaucratic governance in education, the paper also questions clear-cut distinctions between 'old' and 'new' governance regimes. The analysis in the paper is guided by two questions: 1) What has changed and what has remained unchanged in Russian education policy with the transition from the Soviet period to current state? and 2) How do different legacies and influences contribute to the QAE policy implemented at the local level? The brief inquiry into the history of Russian QAE policy focuses on three periods: post-war Soviet Russia, the transition period of the 1980-1990s and modern Russia. Recognizing the specific characteristics of each of the reviewed periods, the paper highlights complexities, contradictions and continuities within and between previous and present regimes of education governance in Russia. The analysis of the QAE policy implemented at the local level demonstrates the blending of diverse legacies, and the prevalence of Soviet-era practices in school governance.

This paper studies the dynamics of key characteristics of the academic profession in Russia based on the analysis of university faculty in the two largest cities in Russia--Moscow and St. Petersburg. We use data on Russian university faculty from two large-scale comparative studies of the academic profession ("The Carnegie Study" carried out in 1992 in 14 countries, including Russia, and "The Changing Academic Profession Study," 2007-2012, with 19 participating countries and which Russia joined in 2012) to look at how faculty's characteristics and attitudes toward different aspects of their academic life changed over 20 years (1992-2011) such as faculty's views on reasons to leave or to stay at a university, on university's management and the role of faculty in decision making. Using the example of universities in the two largest Russian cities, we demonstrate that the high degree of overall centralization of governance in Russian universities barely changed in 20 years. Our paper provides comparisons of teaching/research preferences and views on statements concerning personal strain associated with work, academic career perspectives, etc., not only in Russian universities between the years 1992 and 2012, but also in Russia and other "Changing Academic Profession" countries.

This article examines the comprehensive and participatory component of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's (SCO) approach to the fight against the "Three Evil Forces" within the theoretical framework of smart counterterrorism. After analyzing the problematic definitions of the concepts of terrorism and extremism, the authors choose to focus on the non-coercive preventive pillar of the SCO's counterterrorism strategy through the prism of youth education. The emphasis is placed on the strikingly similar practices of SCO Member States in this field, whereby state and non-state actors foster partnerships to conduct cultural activities promoting the same values of patriotism, civic identity, interethnic and interfaith dialogue as a counter-ideology to the dissemination of radical ideas among the youth. The experience of SCO Member States in implementing inclusive counterterrorism programs serves as a basis for the evolution of SCO's soft diplomacy, which has very recently entered a new phase in its development, following the first SCO Youth Assembly and Uzbekistan's decision to support the SCO Youth Council. In this paper, the youth is analyzed as the primary target and actor of the SCO's preventive counterterrorism efforts.

This article contributes to denationalizing Bourdieu's field theory by analysing the relationship between a regional news media field, the state and transnational influences. The article seeks to answer the question of how a state can impose limits on the autonomy of the news media field during political transition. Field theory is applied to changes that have taken place in Crimean news media since Russia's annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Drawing on narrative interviews with journalists who worked in Crimea in 2012-17, expert interviews, and secondary sources, I demonstrate how Crimea's news media field went from being dominated by varied Ukrainian private news media owners to becoming dominated by the Russian state. I show that states can employ direct measures such as anti-press violence and ownership appropriation of news media outlets in order to increase concentration of state media ownership. In addition, states can reallocate capital in the news media field, disenfranchising some journalists and outlets while favouring others. The adaptive strategies of individual journalists, who, upon losing capital, can sometimes relocate or leave their jobs, also changes the composition of news media fields. Departing from a common view of social spaces as bounded within nation-states, I examine how the news media field of Crimea has been shaped by both transnational influences, and by the direct imposition of Russian state power through a reconstitution of national borders., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.)

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of "educational quality" in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology. Alongside other major reform initiatives, the "quality revolution," proclaimed by the Russian Government in the early 1990s, signified a rhetoric shift away from the Soviet-era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm. Through fine-grained textual analysis of policy documents and political statements by key educational stakeholders, the analysis unpacks the discursive underbelly of the new quality paradigm, in an attempt to determine whether a paradigmatic transformation has taken place. The paper argues that despite the nominally proclaimed shift towards a quality assurance model of educational governance, the representation of educational stakeholders and responsibilities within the new quality paradigm continues to correspond to the Soviet-era command-and-control authoritarian model. The study challenges the popular claim of a neoliberal turn in Russian education and suggests that a neoconservative authoritarian approach to education governance has been smuggled in under the disguise of "quality assurance."

This paper argues that during the "perestroika" period the institutionalised context of the Soviet higher education governance was transformed dramatically, and has attempted to explain the outcomes for higher education from the "perestroika" period and proposed the theory of "institutional dis/continuities". The theory employs elements of historical institutionalism in the explanation of higher education governance changes during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in the countries under review, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Historical institutionalism addresses the institutional changes in historical development. The changes are explained by "critical junctures". Therefore, the "perestroika" period is seen as a critical juncture in this paper. They may be caused by times of great uncertainty. The changes were dramatic in spite of the short timeframe. This critical juncture period is identifiable subject to a reference to the Soviet period.

This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917-1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall's Academy, Bakhtin's Circle (and associated animations with other intellectuals of tis era), and Malevich's experiments, artistic group UNOVIS--all in fierce dialogue with one another--made the town of Vitebsk into an artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin's subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy.

This paper explores initial teacher education (ITE) in Russia, its organisation and content in the light of international literature. Changes in the political, socio-economic and cultural life of Russia in recent decades have defined a completely different model of teacher education. This model has evolved through key policy documents including the "Conception of pedagogical education development support" (2013; http://minobrnauki.rf/documents/3871); "The teacher professional standard" (2013; http://www.rosmintrud.ru/docs/mintrud/orders/129/), and, in 2014, the "Comprehensive programme to improve the professional skills of educational institutions teaching staff" (http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_166654/). These documents have led to important changes in teacher education policy with serious consequences in terms of structure and curriculum. A key objective of this paper, therefore, is to examine the structure and curriculum of ITE in Russia within competency-based approach. The article also explores how the research dimension is integrated in ITE programmes, as well as new concepts and approaches linking theory and practice. In outlining the new model, the approach to teacher education followed by Kazan Federal University is used an illustrative example.

Objective: To describe the mental health care system in Russia against the background of rapid social, economic and political change since the late 1980s. Method: Indicators of social stress and deteriorating population mental health and official data on service provision are presented. Results: In the current system of psychiatric care dispensaries take a central position. Key issues of the discussion on mental health care include ways of coping with social stress disorders, strategies to redefine psychiatric rehabilitation in a changed social-economic context and steps towards strengthening social support networks for people with mental illness. Following political abuse of psychiatry, professionals have had to face justified and unjustified accusations, and been faced with a general challenge to their role. Conclusion: Tackling problems of social stress, the integration of mental health care in the general medical care system and the building-up of general hospital in-patient psychiatric units are of strategic importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the identity and the social/political behaviour of Russians in post-Soviet Central Asia through a comparison with the Baltic countries via a "hot and cold ethnicity" paradigm. Central Asian Russians are more likely, ceteris paribus, to be found at the "cold" end of the spectrum of "ethnic temperatures." The article starts with outlining the historical roots of a specific Russians' self-designation in the "imperial peripheries"--that is, a lowered attachment to their ethnic group as compared with loyalties towards the state. However, patterns of imperial penetration into different territories of the former USSR (FSU) were different, and so were the sociopolitical conditions under which Russians have found themselves after the collapse of the FSU. Due to this, patterns of Russians' self-designation turned out to be quite divergent: Central Asia represents a contrasting pattern in comparison with the Baltics. Subsequent parts of the paper contain a more detailed analysis of the reasons behind a relatively "cold" ethnic stance of Russians in Central Asia. These reasons include the salience of sociocultural boundaries versus ethnic ones, the nature of local political regimes, the role of Russian language and culture, official and popular interpretation of the Soviet past and attitudes towards the present-day Russia.

The paper traces the level of bilingualism in several highland villages of Daghestan (Northeast Caucasus) through the twentieth century. We show that historically, men were more multilingual than women, but this was not true to the same extent for all languages. Highlanders' repertoires suggest a correlation between the social function of the second language and the degree to which its command was gendered. We also explore the dynamics of multilingualism from the generation born at the end of the nineteenth century to the generation born in the 1990s. We show that during the twentieth century local L2s were gradually displaced by Russian, and Daghestanian multilingualism lost its gendered character. We argue that these changes were caused by the introduction of Soviet schooling.

This paper addresses theories of the avant-garde, especially but not exclusively in art and as part of a modernist aesthetic. The paper examines the ways in which avant-garde theory of the creative process can inform educational administration in the change process, as both a critique and an ideal. The argument adopted here is that if administration can be conceptualised as an art, then art's critical and creative traditions also speak to those aspects of professional practice that involve creative activity such as organisational design, leadership vision and strategic analysis. This is a possible way towards rethinking schools and educational systems.

This paper reviews the recent turn toward a capitalist approach to higher education with specific reference to the social, demographic, and legislative changes, including growing academic capitalism, which led to a transformation in Israel's higher education system. In an empirical comparative case study of students from Israel and Russia, this study explores students' assessments of profit and utility of an academic education and its value in the respective local job markets. Findings confirm that students have adopted a capitalist approach to academic degrees, to which universities and colleges have responded by incorporating major changes and effectively instituting a paradigmatic shift in the roles and mission of higher education.

New people are being born, children are growing up, and young people are entering adult life; the complexity and contradictions of this process have been described very well in the literature. Leaving aside many essential aspects, people are being socialized--becoming a part of society--in a system of values that is entirely different. This paper examines socialization as an extremely broad concept that includes not only education (with its components of upbringing and instruction), but also life's influence in all the fullness of factors that are consciously taken into account and arise randomly. How coordinated (or, in any case, noncontradictory) the entire system of these influences is will determine how people turn out. Moreover, the experience of all cultures shows that socialization, the influence of the life around people, in many respects exerts a stronger formative influence than education does. To put it another way, the school of life is stronger than school per se--in the broad sense, to be sure--and if their influences go in different directions or are simply not coordinated, a whole system of risks arises for the individual, for society, and for the state. This paper discusses the possible risks and opportunities of the system of socialization in today's Russia.

This paper examines the discourses framing citizenship education in Ukraine and Russia from "perestroika" to the present and assesses the role of the Council of Europe in promoting democratic citizenship in both countries. We argue that there is a tension between the discourses of active citizenship, strongly disseminated by international agencies (the Council of Europe in our case), and national consolidation, pursued by Ukraine and Russia since the fall of the Soviet regime. While the beginning of the 1990s was marked by democratization and individualization, from the mid-1990s the emphasis on state cohesion became more prominent in both states. From the end of the 1990s, however, citizenship education aims started to diverge, despite a similar approach of the Council of Europe to the two countries. In Russia the government reinforced the state cohesion agenda, which led to the patriotic education discourse gaining strength. In Ukraine, nation-building was made secondary to bringing the education system in line with international standards in order to improve the country's competitiveness. The nature of citizenship education in the two countries therefore seems to be more a reflection of domestic political developments than the product of international policy agenda. (Contains 12 notes.)

This paper seeks to outline different strands of the reconfiguration of the social and spatial perspectives on the countryside in Russia in the last 20 years. The country's transition implied changes in the production of knowledge, including the re-examination of research topics and bringing new theories into rural studies. The article strives to develop a theoretically informed critique of the recent studies, specifically addressing the changing vision of rurality. Taking as a starting point traditional concerns in rural discourses, i.e. the ways rurality have been traditionally studied in Russia, this paper seeks to identify what rural studies might gain and lose from the shift in academic research. Critics have focused on the problems of bringing together past and recent trajectories in rural research, concentrating on the power of construction of particular rural discourses in different environments. The reconstruction of changing rural discourses aims to provide an interpretative framework for understanding the ways various rural images and policy concepts are implicated in the construction of the Russian countryside.

This paper presents an overview of the current situation with integration and inclusion in Russia. It explores the challenges of special education and legislation. It provides some examples of integration and inclusion initiatives and discusses them as examples of social transformations in post-Soviet Russia. The study concludes that the world trend towards inclusive schools has impacted the post-Soviet Russia and an attempt to narrow the gap between special and regular education has been made by non-governmental organizations, individual schools, and the formal system. More decisive and synergetic effort is required from the state as well as individuals to develop and implement a well defined policy that supports inclusion and equity education for all. (Contains 2 tables.)

This opinion paper examines the educational process in Russia's pedagogical colleges over the past several years, noting how the democratic changes in Russia's economic and social life have affected the Russian system of education. Problems with the system and perspectives for the future are discussed. (SM)

The expansion of higher education leads to a number of consequences. The case of Russia has both specific features and features common to processes taking place in other countries. This paper offers a retrospective description of educational system manipulation and changes that have occurred due to general transformations in Russia. The new labor market required qualified specialists. At the same time, employers needed a significant number of more or less socialized young people, and these skills are considered to be acquired as a result of studying in a higher education institution (HEI). Both demands from the labor market were transmitted to families, who, in turn, translated demands to the educational system. The educational scope responded adequately to demand from families. HEIs underwent differentiation: some provided knowledge, along with socialization, confirmed by degrees; others just gave degrees plus socialization. Enrollment in HEIs grew continuously and very rapidly. Two types of consequence of the resulting situation are considered here. Using the findings of 50 years' research, it is shown that increased HEI enrollment has led to greater uniformity in aspirations for education among young people and to their broader participation in higher education. However, this has not proved conducive to lessening social inequality in higher education. In addition, studies of HEI graduates in the labor market testify that the growth of HEI differentiation has raised inequality in the labor market.

In this paper, we try to unravel some of the unintended and intended academic effects associated with post-Soviet educational reforms by focusing on three cases: Estonia, Latvia and Russia. We have chosen this comparison because a unique "natural experiment" in the three countries allows us to compare the changing academic performance on an international test of a largely similar population in the three countries--Russian origin students attending Russian-medium schools--subjected to three variations of post-Soviet reforms. We find that relative to students in Russia, Russian-medium students in the Baltics made significant gains in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test. In Latvia, these appear to be an unintended effect of somewhat "softened" state language policies, the conditions surrounding minority rights, and the general context of maintaining social cohesion. In Estonia, the (later) relative gains of Russian students appear to an intended effect of locally grown educational (and language) policies and increased, more effective cooperation with Russian medium schools to further improve PISA performance in a relatively high scoring, PISA-focused country.

This paper discusses the features of the Soviet higher education system that have been crucial to the formation of the current system and then focus on the main changes that it has endured in the past 20 years. We pay special attention to the current challenges in the sphere of higher education and the counter-measures taken by the government and the academic community.

The author contemplates the fate of Russian science in the light of the reforms that are going on today, and the requirements of bringing it into conformity with this country's traditions as well as with international practices. [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]