According to Marc Leonard (2002) and Joseph Nye (2008), there are three dimensions through which the diplomacy currently carried on in public by Russia can be analysed. The first is the mobilisation of media for daily communication with foreign public. This is often carried out with the aid of classic propaganda technology. The second is the launching of ambitious, albeit sporadic, strategic nation-branding projects (e.g., 2018 FIFA World Cup and the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics) which have their own symbolism and also provide a platform for the communication of reinforcing ‘central themes’. The third dimension is less overt than the first two and involves long-term and systematic networking with the aim of developing durable relationships with key individuals. The tools used in this direction include seminars, conferences, exchanges, scholarships and access to media channels (Nye, 2008, p. 102).
The focus of this chapter is on initiatives by the Russian government to attract foreign nationals to study in Russian institutions of higher education (HEIs) and Russian universities’ practice of outreach as an aspect of public diplomacy. The chapter will for the most part concern state or public institutions in Russia, as private HEIs have low involvement in training international students, 97 per cent of whom are on full-time diploma and degree programmes and almost every recipient of a government scholarship is at a state university.1
The Russian Federation has in excess of eight hundred academies and universities inside the country and some thirty active HEIs abroad.2 It has promoted an agenda to place itself among the world’s leading higher education systems in support of a modern, knowledge-based economy. Internationalisation is regarded as a main element in improving the quality of education provided by and the reputation enjoyed worldwide by Russian universities. Together with government support, aimed at enhancing the global academic rankings of the strongest schools and sending scholars for overseas study, Russian universities are presently attracting large numbers of international students. The UNESCO database on global flow of tertiary-level students reports that, in 2018, there were more than 243,000 international students in Russia which places it fourth after the United States, the UK and Australia and in front of France, Germany, Canada, China and Japan.3
Two factors are at work here. The first is the need for Russian universities to enrol more students from other countries to raise both their revenues and their status. The second is the view held by the political class in Russia that higher education and increased use of the Russian language are valuable resources in seeking to change the political context worldwide, particularly in Eurasia. Regarding itself as a Great Power, as well as flexing its military and diplomatic muscle, Russia also seeks to project its soft power to its neighbour countries and perceives educational exchanges as a valuable part of public diplomacy. Promoting higher education programmes in which instruction will be primarily in the Russian language, together with recruiting international students (especially in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union), provides an overlap between the interests of HEIs and those of the government. This sort of interdependence between diplomacy and education has been the source of Russian universities’ distinctive style of international outreach as well as of Russia’s public diplomacy.
Higher Education in the Context of Public Diplomacy
The role in public diplomacy played by international educational exchanges is crucial. As academic discipline, international education reviews exchanges as worthy goals in and of themselves, beyond politics and ideologies. However, educational and cultural endeavours are an integral part of public diplomacy and also components of propaganda (Lindsay, 1989, p. 427). Public diplomacy and international education are both complex phenomena whose implications can be vigorously debated. For the sake of simplicity, when this chapter discusses international education it has in mind “the informal, nonformal, and formal educational relationships among peoples of various nation-states” and is not focused on global supra-national issues that a comprehensive definition would otherwise need (Gutek, 1993, p. 33). International students are defined by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as students who reside in their country of study neither usually nor permanently or—as an alternative—as students educated in another country.4 Under either definition, an international student is one who has moved to another country from his or her country of origin in order to study.
Educational exchanges can only form an effective part of public diplomacy if they are coordinated with foreign policies intended to foster international cooperation. It is also true that their human aspect makes exchanges vulnerable when the political context is antagonistic. In the right circumstances, however, they can significantly change attitudes (Scott-Smith, 2009, p. 55). According to Joseph Nye, “because exchanges effect elites, one or two key contacts may have a major political effect” (Nye, 2005, p. 14).
More complicated is the correlation between public diplomacy, international education and propaganda. Different scholars take different approaches to the ‘uncomfortable question’ of connections between international education and propaganda, with some emphasising educational content rather than propaganda or public diplomacy:
To what extent they [international exchanges] may or may not be instruments of propaganda is debatable. If propaganda is viewed as the attempt to influence mass attitudes continually, then educational and cultural programs may be aspects of propaganda. If the focus is on short- and intermediate-range political objectives, then educational and cultural affairs may not be components of propaganda. The debate may be complicated further if funds for educational and cultural programs are gathered through the information or propaganda rationale of an agency. (Lindsay, 1989, p. 433)
Whereas propaganda refers to the deliberate manipulation of information to achieve the desired result, exchanges are (ideally) the most ‘two-way’ form of public diplomacy, opening up spaces for dialogue and the interchange of alternative viewpoints (Scott-Smith, 2009, pp. 51–52). ‘Propaganda’ as a term has negative connotations that still dog discussions on policies in international education. Thanks to the legacy from the Soviet regime, this is particularly true of Russian efforts. A number of Russian texts indicate no concern about the mixing of public diplomacy, propaganda and soft power, and these terms are quite frequently used to mean the same thing, especially in speeches by politicians.5 ‘Propaganda’ did not historically in Russia carry a negative connotation; it referred to any form of public persuasion and communication and did not of itself include suggestions of manipulation or deceit. Propagandirovat (to propagandise) is a verb appearing throughout Russian texts on soft power, cultural diplomacy and public diplomacy, meaning ‘to promote’ or ‘to advocate for’. It is necessary to take account of cultural and linguistic aspects of terminology because they reflect the attitude of the society towards public diplomacy and will impact international education practices.
Historical Background
The way higher education dovetails with foreign policy can be seen in how both sides in the Cold War used educational exchanges as a way of building alliances and combating rival ideologies. In the United States, short-term exchanges like the International Visitor Leadership Program and the Eisenhower Fellowships courted foreign leaders, both actual and prospective. There were also programmes like the Fulbright Program which offered scholarships to study for a full degree course. The USSR had similar programmes that used anti-imperialist solidarity as a way of drawing thousands of students from developing countries that were slanted towards socialism. Even overloaded with Marxist propaganda, the Soviet model of international student recruitment was able to compete with the West, making the Soviet Union the third most popular study destination in the world by the end of the 1980s (after the United States and France) (Tsvetkova, 2008, pp. 213–214).
The late 1980s saw the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War and changed the nature of the competition to attract international students. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw Russia let go of its ambition for worldwide leadership in education and end its large-scale programmes of aid to developing countries and parties sympathetic to communism in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Russia’s international image suffered as a result of the country’s large-scale economic and social upheavals. The year 1990 was the peak year for foreign students in Soviet universities, most of whom studied in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, which became the Russian Federation (RSFSR).6 In a single year, the number dropped from 126,500 to 89,400, and by 1996 it had reduced to 59,600.7
Focusing on the ‘Near Abroad’
The early 1990s were a time of geopolitical turbulence which drastically changed the nature of the international student body at Russian universities. Students from the new independent states were now foreign nationals, and neither they nor Russian universities’ international services were prepared for the extent of the change. Outreach recruitment in the former Soviet republics was not practised by Russian universities for a number of years and there was a great deal of doubt in the 1990s about whether there was any benefit from studying in Russia. On the other hand, there was no need for Russian universities to advertise their offerings to those who had previously been Soviet citizens because there was no major change to educational systems. New borders put new economic, political and legal obstacles in the way of academic mobility to follow what would previously have been domestic academic routes in what had been the Soviet Union.
Only ethnic Russian migrants from the former Soviet republics grew in number during the 1990s in Russian universities, though ‘ethnic Russian’ is used here to describe people of a number of ethnicities who were for the most part Russian speakers. Between 1990 and 2003, half of the eight million or more ethnic Russian migrants from the former Soviet republics were from Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—which were home to more than one-third of this Russian ‘diaspora’(Peyrouse, 2008, p. 1). For migrants from the former Soviet republics, their constitutional right (on a competitive basis) to receive free higher education was and remains a strong incentive as it offers an opportunity to become naturalised citizens of the Russian Federation. For the most part, an ethnic Russian migrant student will achieve Russian citizenship after graduation and therefore cease to be a foreigner.
Ethnic Russian students from newly independent states generally received the designation ‘Russian compatriots’ (sootechestvenniki); according to the 1999 Federal Law, a compatriot is, in Russian terms, “any citizen of the former Soviet Union, even if he or she, or their forebears, never lived in the RSFSR (now the Russian Federation)” (Zhuravsky & Vyhovanets, 2013). The 1999 Federal Law’s Article 17 sets out measures designed to defend the rights of compatriots in the areas of culture, language, religion and education. Foreign nationals able to prove their compatriot status could claim a right of admission equal to that of a Russian citizen, including enrolment in programmes where tuition was free.
The Russian Federation’s compatriot legislation undertakes an obligation to negotiate the recognition of educational documents, academic degrees and other qualifications among members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This process began in 1998 when agreements were signed with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Eleven CIS countries, the exception being Turkmenistan, concluded in 2004 a detailed agreement by which equivalence would be recognised of educational documents for complete secondary general education, primary vocational education and secondary vocational education.8 By 2009, all CIS countries had agreed on this recognition, at least for certificates of graduation from high school.
The Russian language, economic interdependence and proximity combined to make countries that had once been part of the Soviet Union—and especially those in Central Asia—the largest and closest market for Russian universities. What motivated Russia was deeper than a desire for economic integration or to assist in development. Yelena Osipova identifies that the desire to re-establish, reinforce and build upon already existing and deeply held historical ties with the former Soviet republics is inevitably interrelated with the primary focus of the Russian foreign policy on the CIS (Osipova, 2012, p. 16). When President Putin made his 2005 annual address to the Federal Assembly, he referred to a continuation of what he called Russia’s ‘civilizing mission’ on the Eurasian continent.9 President Medvedev in 2008 signed the ‘Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation’ which once again identified the CIS as the area of highest priority in Russia’s foreign policy. Included in the Concept was a commitment to support the educational and cultural rights of ethnic Russians living outside Russia and a welcome for the reintegration of the national educational systems of post-Soviet states as re-establishing and developing a common cultural and civilisation heritage.10 In 2010, President Medvedev said that Russia was able to capitalise on existing bonds with former Soviet republics and emphasised further integration with the CIS to achieve its objectives in foreign policy, and public diplomacy in particular (Osipova, 2012, p. 16). By the late 2000s, Russia’s main foreign policy priority was the area that had previously made up the Soviet Union, and the majority of its educational and cultural programmes were focused there.
This geopolitical thinking led Russia to regard its higher education’s underrepresentation and an increasing reduction in the use of Russian as the language of the former Soviet republics as a threat to Russian national security. A weakening of its cultural influence in the South Caucasus and Central Asia was seen as representing success for the public diplomacy of rival foreign nations and as demanding a Russian response. According to the Russkiy Mir Foundation website, academic exchange programmes with educational establishments in the United States, Europe, Turkey and China undermined the traditional dominance in academic and cultural spheres of Russia in the ‘near abroad.’11
At the end of 2015, President Putin signed the Strategy of National Security of the Russian Federation. The document actually referred to a necessity to increase the export of high-quality Russian education, with the first targets being CIS member states, and the need to make Russian more attractive as a global language for training. These were listed among the priorities for national security from then until 2020.12
Russian Universities Go International
Russian foreign policy , until the later years of the noughties did not greatly stress the export of higher education, but that changed in 2008 with an expansion of Russia’s scholarship programme which subsidised study by foreign nationals at Russian universities, from 7000 students (the quota set in 2003) to 10,000 per academic year.13 To increase the percentage of CIS citizens among those receiving a scholarship, there was a redistribution of annual country quotas by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This had the effect of subsidising a larger number of students from post-Soviet states at the expense of the rest of the world. The annual quota for foreign students was increased again in 2013, this time to 15,000, resulting in significant growth in the percentage of students who were CIS citizens. The CIS share of international students in Russia in 2008 was 36.1 per cent, a little less than 38.1 per cent from Asia-Pacific (predominantly China, India and Vietnam) which supplied more international students globally than anywhere else.14 The CIS share had risen to 53.4 per cent by 2017, while Asia–Pacific was down to 25 per cent.15 A number of small, provincial universities have taken no international students from anywhere other than the South Caucasus and Central Asia, the majority of whom speak Russian well. Further increases in scholarships to 20,000 per annum by 2019 was discussed, but the Russian Federation’s economic difficulties and the Western sanctions imposed on it since 2014 have caused these plans to be deferred.16
Russian universities see CIS countries as their priority international market for a number of reasons. The first is that they are closer to Russia both geographically and culturally, with the Russian language still the main means of local communication, to say nothing of ethnic Russian communities living there. The second is that two decades of independence have allowed countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan to reach a level of economic stability that allows young people from the emerging middle class to study abroad and, for the reasons already stated, Russia is the choice of many of them. Then there is the fact that Russian universities have been forced to become more open internationally and more foreigner friendly because of changing demographics. Russian birth rates by the early 1990s had significantly reduced the number of high school graduates, causing stiff competition for applicants among Russian HEIs. This was accompanied by high birth rates in Central Asia which has become the most mobile student population, the number of its students who study abroad doubled between 2003 and 2012. UNESCO figures indicate that in Central Asia domestic tertiary enrolment has not kept pace with the growing demand for higher education.17
Reform of higher education in Russia pushed a number of universities, and particularly those of small or medium size, close to collapse and when the Ministry of Education and Science introduced a new quality assurance policy, the implication was that international development would be monitored and enrolment of international students would be a key performance indicator. The need to maintain their funding from the government and uphold their reputation domestically and internationally caused universities to begin a search for students in new markets. Many of them would see the best solution to their problems as lying in attraction of students from countries that were once part of the USSR.
When the government increased federal subsidies for the enrolment of CIS citizens, higher education in Russia faced a need for change in its marketing policies. The Rossotrudnichestvo18 was created in September 2008 and linked universities with foreign policy. This was a new institution for public diplomacy; it operated under the auspices of Russia’s MFA and demanded the worldwide promotion of Russian higher education, giving Russian universities a greater ability to promote themselves abroad. This meant that, after 2008, it was the universities that were to take on the task of recruiting international students, with the Ministry of Education and Science merely setting and distributing government scholarships and country quotas and the Rossotrudnichestvo being required to undertake direct communication with foreign publics to recruit students.
The offices of the Rossotrudnichestvo outside Russia had the power to change country quotas, because the demand for tertiary education in Russia in a number of developing countries, especially those in Africa and Asia, always exceeds supply while demand from developed countries varies over time. Limitations in human and material resources meant that the new agency must collaborate with universities to offer organisational and technical support to universities’ marketing campaigns outside Russia. Universities run by the state were instructed that their international students should be recruited from the most geopolitically significant countries. Universities, in other words, were expected to follow the guidelines on foreign policy laid down by the government. There is a very high level of engagement on the part of Russian universities in the government’s public diplomacy and HEIs are also generally dependent on foreign policy guidelines. The best illustration of this may be what happened when Turkey downed a Russian warplane over the Turkey/Syria border on 24 November 2015. Russia introduced sanctions against Turkey and, in the following week, more than 40 Russian universities complied with ‘urgent recommendations’ from the Ministry of Education and Science and broke ties of academic cooperation with Turkish partners.19
Part of the Rossotrudnichestvo’s inheritance from Soviet times is a network of Russian Centres of Science and Culture (RCSC). The majority were small libraries or cultural offices operating out of Russian diplomatic missions abroad.20 Between 2009 and 2011, a number of new RCSCs were set up, mostly in CIS countries. Farit Mukhametshin, former Russian ambassador to Uzbekistan and the Rossotrudnichestvo’s first director, said that the RCSCs’ task was to represent ‘Russia’s face abroad’21and stressed the need for increased funding to make RCSCs viable competitors to the UK’s British Council, Germany’s Goethe Institut, Spain’s Cervantes Institute, France’s Alliance Française and China’s Confucius Institutes.22
The RCSC became the main avenue through which Russian higher education was advertised abroad and operated as the local agent for a number of Russian HEIs. All parties benefited from this collaboration; the Rossotrudnichestvo in reaching more prospective international students beginning with Russian compatriots and universities in being authorised to choose applicants and to strengthen their position abroad through the use of government resources. Russian universities have been authorised since 2012 to sign bilateral agreements to cooperate with the Rossotrudnichestvo and to establish joint action plans for outreach activities.23
There are four main aspects of interaction between the RCSC and the universities. The first is for the RCSC to be the location for exclusive direct communication with foreign publics in Russian universities’ outreach presentations. Outreach events can be conducted one or two times each year in a given country and, on occasion, have been intensive marketing campaigns with a high degree of media coverage. The RCSC also provides sources of information from which universities’ promotional materials can be disseminated.
The second is through joint expositions of Russian universities at international educational fairs, exhibitions and festivals. Although a few of the wealthier universities choose to perform on their own and exhibit at more expensive and prestigious events, these RCSC events are the only way that many of the smaller schools can afford to be represented, taking part at no charge or at a discounted rate in educational fairs and so accessing countries where they might otherwise be invisible.
Third is the Rossotrudnichestvo’s facilitation of contacts between universities and local pro-Russian NGOs, which for the most part are cultural societies, centres, clubs and foundations that either work as part of Russian embassies or are supported by the Russkiy Mir Foundation. While the numbers of structures of this sort may look impressive, Konstantin Kosachev, the Rossotrudnichestvo’s director between 2012 and 2015, admitted that more than 5,000 pro-Russian NGOs around the world could sometimes operate less effectively than a number of US and European foundations (Kosachev, 2012, p. 187). Efficient or not, such NGOs are in some countries the only channel that makes possible legal communication with the local public.
Fourth is the assistance given to some universities by Russian diplomatic missions in establishing regional branches. Lomonosov Moscow State University, for example, has opened branches in Astana, Tashkent, Baku, Dushanbe and Yerevan. Worthy of note is the network of joint Russian (Slavonic) universities that operate in Armenia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan under bilateral intergovernmental agreements with joint jurisdiction by the Russian Federation and the host country. Russia also continues its ambitions to extend RCSC’s global network to 100 countries, to support pro-Russian NGOs, and to promote Russian-language studies and cultural diplomacy initiatives (Kosachev, 2012, pp. 188–189). The Russian government is also attempting to restore ties with Soviet and Russian universities’ alumni around the world, and in 2018 the Global Alumni Alliance of Soviet/Russian Academic Institutions acted as an umbrella for 68 country associations.24
Conclusions
The politics of large-scale recruitment of international students by universities and public diplomacy agencies (Rossotrudnichestvo, RCSC) has led to an increase in the number of government scholarships, primarily to students from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. By 2018, more than half of all the full-time international students in Russia were citizens of CIS countries. Many smaller and medium-sized universities have reoriented their international marketing towards former Soviet republics, thus beginning to internationalise and culturally diversify their campuses.
The Russian government sees international education in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union as a competitive environment of geopolitical rivalry and, accordingly, encourages state-owned universities to recruit an increasing number of students and establish partnerships in what it sees as a very strategic region with the aim of taking on competitors from the United States, the European Union, Turkey and China. In exporting Russian higher education, Russian universities work not only for their own reputations and economic success but also as agents of public diplomacy, complementing official institutions’ activities. This is particularly the case in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, which regions require a less aggressive style than Russia practices in the West and in nearby European countries such as the Ukraine and the Baltic states. It fears that its Eurasian allies will accuse it of imperialistic behaviour; Russia attempts to maintain political influence with populations who still share closely similar political habits and cultural values through an emphasis on public diplomacy including scholarship programmes and education exchanges as part of developmental assistance and a drive for economic integration.