Ilya Kalinin about Smolny College

How the College develops outside St. Petersburg State University and what students study.

Established in 1997 in collaboration with the prestigious American Bard College, Smolny College is the oldest liberal arts program in Russia. Unfortunately, at the new historical stage, the Russian authorities are so hostile to the idea of independent education that such organisations in Russia are criminally prosecuted and declared illegal. This fate has not spared Smolny. In 2021, Bard College was labeled a 'undesirable organization' in Russia, and it was illegal to have an educational partnership with one of the oldest American universities. Like many progressive projects in Russia, Smolny had its supporters, but they were no longer able to change the course of events.

The academics continued their work. A portion of Smolny has survived as Smolny Beyond Borders, an independent educational initiative in exile. Furthermore, the curriculum of St. Petersburg State University's Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which has been cleansed of 'Western heresies', is nevertheless offered in Russia, despite the fact that the Liberal arts concept itself can no longer be implemented there.

We spoke with Ilya Kalinin - former Smolny College associate professor, current visiting Fellow at Humboldt University, and current Smolny Beyond Borders faculty member.

Hello Ilya. Thank you very much for agreeing to our talk. Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background with Smolny?

Thank you for this invitation.

I am a Russian literature historian, having graduated from St. Petersburg University's philological faculty. However, I must state that I have never worked in the formal sense of Russian literary history. Even when I completed my PhD thesis in this field, it was interdisciplinary in character, focusing on Russian literary utopia from the 18th to the 20th century, so there was a lot of political theory and cultural history.

Then I worked on the periodical Neprikosvannyi zapas, which (then and today) is published by the house Novoye Literaturnoye Obozrenie. It is a socio-humanitarian journal that is more intellectual than academic, with a greater emphasis on social and political component. I worked at the magazine for almost 19 years. I once counted and discovered that throughout this time, I delivered exactly 111 issues to the printing.

In addition to my job in the magazine, I began teaching at Smolny in 2006. There was no separate Liberal Arts and Sciences department at the time, therefore we worked in the Faculty of Philology at St. Petersburg State University. It was a separate department composed of art historians, political scientists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, philologists, anthropologists, musicologists, and film studies professors - in short, representatives from all of Smolny's niches and research fields.

The program was then formalized in 2011, becoming a full-fledged faculty inside the university, and will continue to exist in this manner until 2021–2022. The faculty still exists, but the word 'liberal' and other references to the Liberal Arts paradigm of education have been removed from its name. To avoid needless links with the principles we now refer to as 'Anglo-Saxon'.

Many of our colleagues still work at this faculty in St. Petersburg. Most likely, the 'picture' of students entering the faculty has changed, as there is little left over from the previous program in terms of course selection and, more importantly, the idea of education itself. It represents a transition away from what is widely known as the Liberal Arts and Sciences approach. This means that students have the opportunity to choose their educational path within one of the following programs: political science, sociology, anthropology, history, art history, and so forth. Within these programs, students might select from a wide range of courses that they were interested in taking. As a result, the students generally developed his own course selection, influenced by their interests and professional needs.

There is a significant contrast here from how my and prior generations studied in Russia, when we arrived at the university at the start of the semester and saw a board on the wall with all of the courses and disciplines already written down. In this sense, the contemporary Smolny, as well as the entire Russian educational system, represents a step back in time. However, this rollback is openly represented as a deliberate return to 'the best model of education that has existed' - the Soviet model.

I propose looking into the history of Liberal Arts education in Russia. Several attempts were made to implement these ideas in the post-Soviet era. Smolny was the oldest and most experienced organization in this regard. I discovered that ties with Bard College began in the mid-1990s, and the program was institutionalized in 1997.

In 1997, the Smolny Center announced a public course program for students at St. Petersburg State University and other local universities. The Smolny Center was renamed the Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1999, and the first students were admitted to the Philology Department's basic educational program at Saint Petersburg State University. The effort began as a concept to form an institutional relationship between St. Petersburg State University and Bard College in New York.

It is critical to understand that this was not simply a 'grassroots' activity inside the Philology Department. It was an initiative that formed a relationship between two American and Russian colleges. All partnership agreements were signed by the rectors/presidents of both universities. The main point was that it was an official double-degree program (St. Petersburg State University and Bard).

In general, this program enabled students (more than 100 each year) to obtain a degree from an excellent American college while studying in St. Petersburg. The most successful and engaged students were sent to the United States for six months to a year of internships at Bard. The number of such internships was initially tiny, but by the 2010s, it had increased to dozens per year. In principle, anyone who worked hard enough to pass the requisite tests, compile a portfolio, and get recommendations from their teachers might take advantage of this chance.

It must be noted that scholarly exchange was two-way. Dozens of American students studied in Saint Petersburg. They were not the only Bard students. The college served as an aggregator, bringing in streams of American students who wished to study in St. Petersburg in our department. These students took both Russian and English language classes. At Smolny, the number of courses offered in English was always rather high, and there was constantly English speech in the halls of the faculty, creating a really international student atmosphere.

The faculty existed in this form from 1997 to 2021, when it received not its first, but maybe its most powerful punch. In May 2021, the Russian Ministry of Justice labeled Bard College a 'undesirable organization.' This was the first time an educational institution, such as a university or college, was declared an undesirable organization in the Russian Federation. Bard's legal qualification had an immediate and far-reaching impact. Of course, St. Petersburg University could no longer participate as a partner in such an organization, therefore all ties and contracts between the university and Bard College were broken. The identical double degree program no longer exists, therefore the last Smolny students obtained their Bard diplomas in the spring and summer of 2021.

International partnership may have taken many different forms. I recall a fascinating example from history. After EHU faced repression in Minsk and before it relocated to Vilnius, university students moved to St. Petersburg for a transitional period in 2004. I remember these amazing students from when I first started teaching at Smolny. Now it's the other way around: people who studied or want to study in Smolny may end up in Vilnius. So the story of intellectual solidarity began 20 years ago and continues.

What issues has Smolny encountered over its quarter-century of business in Russia? It seems impossible that it could have lasted this long. Most of the Initiative's work has taken place in an authoritarian country. Perhaps this is essentially a concern of organization, with administrative and budgetary implications. How have you managed to survive all this time?

I am unlikely to be familiar with every element of this long history. I've never had any relevant administrative positions, but I can tell you something. Smolny and the university of which it was a part had an uneasy connection from the start. The tension existed both before and after Smolny was established as a distinct department in 2011, however the causes and personalities behind it may have differed.

On the one hand, according to administrative reasoning, our faculty was just like any other. On the other hand, it was a completely different faculty, with instruction founded on very different concepts, and with its own external - even international - funding. For example, the faculty possessed its own endowment, which was an entirely unusual scenario. As a result, our faculty's independence from other SPBGU departments was significantly greater, both in terms of personnel policy and financial opportunities, as well as the character of the curriculum and extracurricular activities in which our students participated. Furthermore, the atmosphere that prevailed on the faculty (perhaps due to constant external pressure) fostered a general spirit of camaraderie among administration, faculty, and students - despite the fact that these three 'corporations' do not always get along well in academia.

To summarize, the faculty went through various stages of development, each of which was both demanding and inspiring. So, despite the pressure, it seemed like the very speed of time was working for us. The political climate in Russia has not always been as it is now. If we look back a few decades, we can see the origins of Smolny, when the university administration saw the concept of a Russian-American educational program as a success story.

What about the project's supporters in the government?

This name would undoubtedly come up in our conversation at some point. One of the key components of our program's long-term viability, particularly at the turn of the 2000s and 2010s, was the fact that Alexei Kudrin was somehow behind Smolny's efforts. Later, he led the faculty directly from the moment it was established.

As we know, he was in charge of practically all new educational programs in Russia at the time (from the European University in St. Petersburg to the Russian School of Economics). In some way, the viability of these organizations was tied to Kudrin's lobbying powers. When he was finance minister and deputy prime minister, he had more opportunities. When he departed the government, they decreased, but they remained important.

Smolny showed the dual logic that underlies the survival of Russian institutions, which became increasingly grotesque and tragicomic between 2014 and 2022.

On the one hand, the typical administrative concern with conservative ideology and traditional values was intensifying. On the other hand, there was the neoliberal logic of KPIs, reports, and standards, which were developed not in the Kremlin or in Staraia and Lubyanka squares, but in Harvard and Shanghai universities, whose evaluations are the most authoritative in the world. These scores also take into account professors' and students' publications, as well as universities' engagement in international academic and educational exchange programs. Now, I believe that Russian institutions can compete based on the number of children produced by students during their studies and by professors during the period of their work contracts, rather than the number of published articles.

For a while, it appeared to us that we could remain within this divided logic, and time was on our side. We are graduating students who have a different perspective on Russia's future than the group that has held power for the past quarter century. This generational shift was unavoidable, and it required a shift in political and value orientations as well. That appears to have been understood by others as well as ourselves. Those who designed university life were well aware of the disparities between its various logics. These mechanisms of the desire for efficiency eventually faded away, becoming irrelevant. There is no longer a need for universities such as Smolny, Shaninka, and the European University in St. Petersburg. From the state's perspective, these centers of freethinking pose a threat, and they no longer provide the previously relevant KPIs. So why should they be tolerated?

I am aware that there was some student protest activity in Smolny following the beginning of the history with political pressure. How did the initiative groups formed during that time develop? Are they still around today?

At the time, Smolny saw the formation of a student group known as Save Smolny. And they attempted to defend their legal right to study in the faculty to which they had been admitted. Here, you must comprehend the context. Until recently, the Russian authorities were defined by a certain legalism - a determination to conduct everything 'within the law' or 'within the legal framework'. It so occurred that the earliest Russian state leaders attended the law department of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) University. The institution appears to have maintained this tradition over the years, as it is still led by Nikolai Kropachev, a lawyer and former dean of the law faculty. Even throughout Smolny's history, the university's leadership attempted to do everything 'by the law,' that is, to first amend the university's regulations and then carry out oppressive acts.

The obvious legal issue was that students enrolled in one program but later discovered that they were being offered degrees from another. They were enrolling in the Liberal Arts program, which had a set of training profiles and courses from which to chose during their four years of study. So, by modifying the program's structure, students were no longer served under the contract they signed when they entered. And there was understandable place for student protest action in today's circumstances, which are not conducive to any form of protest. The university breached their rights as customers of educational services.

However, it was evident that this struggle was unlikely to be successful. The organizers of this student struggle met multiple times, including with the rector. Intimidation followed, and the most active students were simply expelled from university.

If collective modes of protest fail, some people get desperate and engage in individual acts of disobedience and resistance. Sasha Skochilenko and Sonya Semenova, among others, studied under your supervision at Smolny.

Yes, one of the most well-known cases of anti-war persecution is that of Sasha Skochelenko, who graduated from Smolny's BA program. In reality, she completed all of her term papers and diploma under my supervision, so we were in constant communication for several years and never lost touch. Thank God, she's finally free and secure. Sonia was also a student in our faculty; I remember her well because she was involved in numerous student projects at Smolny.

Tell us about the Smolny Beyond Borders Project. How did it start?

Our effort began in the fall of 2022, just as a substantial number of the Smolny staff and students fled Russia. Initially, the initiative focused on narrower pragmatic goals connected to the logic of rapid response, such as assisting instructors and students who found themselves in tough situations: without a job, a place to study, means of subsistence, or their usual living surroundings. However, we quickly gained a broader understanding of our mission.

Our program's webpage shows that many current faculty members have never worked with the previous Smolny. Nonetheless, the majority of them have previously been involved with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences in some way. In this regard, the project is historically linked to the St. Petersburg Smolny. Furthermore, we continue to stick to the ideals of the liberal education paradigm, so they are not simply lecture courses. Our project relies heavily on active participation in lectures and small group work. The connection between student and professor is intense and two-way, which distinguishes us from traditional education, in which a professor just passes on his knowledge and abilities to students. As a result, students continue to write extensively, teachers must review and remark on their students' written work, and feedback is required. Yet, students must also evaluate the lecturer at the end of the course. All of these elements are retained.

The project's growth is limited by its financial resources. We have limited budgets, just as everyone else. In the academic year 2022-23, we offered approximately 15 courses; in 2023-24, we have offered almost 40 courses thus far. We had between 250-300 students each semester. Our objective for 2024-2025 was to increase our course offerings to 80. Unfortunately, we had to change our goals because our financial resources did not allow us to grow. By the way, students can study with us for free and earn college credits, specifically US credits, because all of our courses are licensed by a US university. Students earn transcripts for completing a certain course, which they can transfer to colleges they already attend or will attend in the future.

We have a very diverse group of people who come to study with us. Many persons have previously attended Smolny, Shaninka, European University, or Higher School of Economics. However, there are many new people of various ages. Many of our students continue to reside in Russia, which is quite significant. As a result, micro-communities of students and teachers grow, forming links between people on opposite sides of the border, which is critical for us. I believe that the existence and reproduction of such a connection are critical in making the possibility of our return to Russia more concrete.

How do you view the project's future?

Of course, I do not consider our project as a training ground for Russia's future. Meanwhile, I do not see our or similar projects as a form of protection where students disoriented by relocation and migration might learn a new framework for their existence in a therapeutic way. Perhaps they will then be able to adapt to their new surroundings. Of course, this is what many individuals experience, and it is very natural. We are not implying that if you studied at the Svobodny, Smolny, or FLAS in Montenegro, you would be forced to move to the Russian regions to build a new country, as was the case in the Soviet education allocation system. However, in order for such a vision of establishing a new country to be possible, we must maintain contact with one another. It appears to me that we all, by default, serve the duty of reproducing community - and community specifically Beyond Borders, that is, above and against the physical barriers that divide people. Only by protecting such communities will Russia achieve a better future.

Information about the Smolny College’s programs is available in the Freedom Degree database here.