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Find opportunities that are right for you to continue your education outside your home country.
© 2024 Freedom Degree
Freedom Degree, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. © 2024 | Powered by Strapi
Sep 24, 2024
Interview with historian Vasiliy Zharkov
The European Humanities University (EHU), a Belarus's university in exile, has been operating in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for 20 years. EHU was founded in Minsk in 1992, taking as a model the Western standards of education in the social sciences and humanities. This was as necessary as air for the new post-Soviet societies after decades of academic isolation. Unfortunately, the free exchange of knowledge in Minsk did not last long. In 2004, the Belarusian authorities revoked EHU's educational licence as part of a campaign to pressure civil society and universities. Nevertheless, EHU survived and managed to reassemble in Vilnius, just a couple of hundred kilometres away from its former home. It was in the European Union, with great help and assistance from the international community, first of all, the Lithuanian one.
The year 2022 was the beginning of a great challenge for the whole of Europe, including universities. EHU usually accepts young Belarusians who face repression in their homeland. But now there are many more academic refugees: students and researchers, because Ukrainians and Russians have been added to them.
We talked to people who live, study and work here - one student, one visiting professor, and the acting rector of the EHU.
This is the conversation with historian Vasily Zharkov, who used to work at Moscow's "Shaninka" (Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences).
Hello. Thank you for inviting me for this conversation.
I made the decision to leave in March 2022, when it became known that my name was on a certain list made by the Investigative Committee of Russia. This list included other people [from "Shaninka"] who, let's say, spoke out against the war. This was taken as a signal to leave. I, among others, did so.
As for the European Humanities University, it is part of such an invisible commonwealth of new free universities of the post-Soviet space. In the early 1990s, several such projects were opened in Russia, Belarus and elsewhere. The European Humanities University, the European University in St. Petersburg, and the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences ("Shaninka"). All these universities were different in content, but, in general, they set the task of developing Western models of education in the post-Soviet space, the task of educating new professionals for their countries, in particular, in the humanities and social sciences. We were in such an invisible alliance, so it was quite easy for me to find a common language with my colleagues in Lithuania. And we obviously knew about each other's existence before and, for example, consulted about the possibility of relocation. The founder of EHU, Anatoly Mikhailov, by the way, was well acquainted with Teodor Shanin.
Life goes on, in general. I try not to dramatise my emigration. You know, there is this notion among some emigrants of the last wave, this preconception that we are on a long-term work trip. I try to think of myself the same way. I live normally. Lithuania is quite a hospitable and peaceful country.
I can't say that there are any big differences from my past experience here. It is a small liberal arts university with a very good campus, with a human-oriented interface. And in that sense I don't feel like an immigrant, I can honestly tell you - it's about the same. Except for the fact that "Shaninka" existed in accordance with the strict British standard of education. This concerned, for example, assessment procedures, knowledge testing, and so on. In terms of format and teaching traditions, EHU is pretty close to the good examples of new universities of the 1990s in Moscow like RSU (in its best years), "Shanika" and the Higher School of Economics before its rapid growth and expansion with Russian government money.
I worked at a British university in Moscow from 2010 to 2022 and I have a slightly different optics. In England, it is standard practice that most programs and courses there involve written student accountability. At the same time, student progress reporting is unified for each course of the curriculum. This is logical and fair, because if we give the same credits for each course, the accountability should be uniform. In addition, it allows for the systematic development of certain skills of a student and checking their quality in the same way. This ensures equality in access to educational outcomes and their predictability. Students in the UK usually take written work, essays, rather than oral exams. An essay is not in the sense of 19th century essayism and journalism. It is about an academic article that is written in an appropriate manner. The lion's share of student activity in a course is devoted to writing such articles.
This standard suggests that after the course is over, communication between students and professors is minimised. This is done in order for professors to evaluate the work, the text itself, and not the personality, appearance and public presentation of students. The student submits his/her work not to the professor, but to the academic department, and from there all works are submitted for inspection in encrypted form. All the texts are double-marked. In addition to the course teacher, each work is evaluated by another professor of the faculty, and then they agree on the grade. At the end of the year, a third, external examiner - a representative of another British university - joins this company as a final chord. It turns out that this is quite different from exams, as we are used to understanding them in Russia. Teachers in the British system approve final grades without the students being present. I was brought up in such a system and I like it very much.
I was speaking more about my experience and preferences. But in general, the European Humanities University at this particular moment in 2024 is practically the only university in the post-Soviet space where you can freely study according to Western standards, using the Russian language as well. This is a great opportunity for many people and we hope that it will continue for as long as possible. We live in a strange situation, a situation of collapse. Imagine, there is the Russian language - it is quite a large area on earth. After everything that has happened in the last 2.5 years, we have only one(!) place accredited by the EU state and having experience for several decades, where bachelors can study freely in Russian in 2024. That is, not to be afraid to express their point of view, not to be afraid to do science and give in their works references to some organisations (important from the point of view of their research), recognized in Russia as “undesirable”, “foreign agents” and so on.
Thank you! It seems to me that we should not expect quick results from our activities. If we can help ten people, that is already very good. If each of these ten leads a few more, it is already a good growth. We need to realise that we are on a very long, long road and it does not promise to be completely successful.
Now it is very important to preserve educational opportunities and do not forget the tradition of free thought. First of all, I am referring to the great legacy of European humanism and the Enlightenment, which have had a certain positive impact on Russia and other Eastern European countries over the past two-plus centuries. We must critically reflect on this legacy, largely lost back in the 1990s, and build our narratives for a future peaceful Russia based on the experience of the struggle for freedom and justice. We stand on the shoulders of great thinkers, we have the history of liberation movements in Russia, the United States and European countries, we need to actualize it. We need to stop being afraid of it, stop being so conservative and so protective as we have become in the last 20-30 years. This, I think, is a very important task.
The list of programs of the European Humanities University in Belarusian, Lithuanian, English and Russian languages can be found on the official website of the University.