Statement by the Yabloko party, 27.05.2022

Photo by Alexander Kozlov / Kommersant

Recently a number of officials of the Government, the State Duma and the Security Council of Russia have made statements about their intention to withdraw from the Bologna process of a common European ​​higher education area.

These statements do not just uphold the current course of the Russian authorities towards Russia’s self-isolation. They create new threats of Russia’s scientific, technological and cultural backwardness from the modern world.

The Yabloko faction in the State Duma of the third convocation [December 1999 – December 2003] was one of the originators of Russia’s joining the Bologna process in 2003. We supported the initiative of St. Petersburg State University and other leading Russian universities aimed at developing academic mobility, improving the quality of higher education and the competitiveness of Russian higher education. The leaders of the university community well understood then the importance of including Russia in the modern processes of globalisation in the field of education.

Over the past years, millions of students and teachers have been able to experience firsthand the possibilities of studying and teaching at different universities (including abroad), the benefits of flexible educational trajectories, and the training of interdisciplinary specialists who were in demand in the modern economy. The compatibility of educational programmes, the common system of credits, the European Diploma Supplement and their mutual recognition, and the general principles for assessing the quality of education opened up new life prospects for many students and graduates.

Today, the authorities want to deprive people of these opportunities and close Russian higher education from the world.

There have already been times in our recent history when our country cut itself off from the world academic and scientific community, when genetics and cybernetics were considered bourgeois pseudosciences.

The price of this was a technological gap that we were never able to overcome.

Russia is again embarking on the path of self-isolation and the construction of the “Iron Curtain”. However, the cost of such self-isolation will be immeasurably higher in the 21st century, the age of globalisation and cross-border information technologies, when creative, intellectual, and entrepreneurial freedom of people plays a key role in the development of the country, and the negative impact of such self-isolation on the daily realisation of human rights, not to mention the decline in the level and quality of life, has been evident today.

Yabloko stands for freedom and openness. We are against the Iron Curtain, Russia’s withdrawal from the Bologna Convention on Higher Education, and international self-isolation of Russian higher education.

Nikolai Rybakov,

Yabloko Chairman

*The Yabloko Bureau’s statement will be sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Speakers of the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament Valentina Matviyenko and Vyacheslav Volodin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the Ministry of Education, the Russian Union of Rectors and rectors of federal universities.