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A University in Exile for Russians?

Since Russia launched its “special military operation” on 24 February 2022 to demilitarize Ukraine, there have been 8,000 deaths and more than 13,000 injuries in Ukraine. Furthermore, the armed conflicts have forced 13 million Ukrainians to leave their homes, including 8 million refugees around the world and 5 million internally displaced people. This is an unprecedented refugee crisis since the end of World War II. University communities around the world have mobilized their efforts to help displaced Ukrainian scholars and students. For those who died in the war, the SUSK — Ukrainian Canadian Students’ Union ‒ organized a worldwide exhibition called “Unissued Diplomas” to commemorate the lost lives of Ukrainian students and remind the world that the full-scale war continues. The Russian-Ukrainian war affected not only Ukrainian individuals, but also Ukrainian universities,  which are now in a very complicated situation.

When Russia launched its offensive, many speculated about what might stop President Vladimir Putin waging war and, in the long term, put an end to his authoritarian regime. Mikhail Kokorich, a Swiss engineer and entrepreneur of Russian origin, published an article entitled “to hurt Putin, steal his top students”. Kokorich discussed how the West could undermine Russia’s long-term ability to wage war: by attracting Russia’s brightest minds, particularly young engineers, to pursue their education in the West. Actually, that wasn’t a fake expectation. Hundreds of thousands of people left Russia after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014, an unprecedented number since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. These exiled Russians are not only well-educated ‒ many come from the IT sector ‒ but have a strong anti-war position and are politically active.

It is obvious that any kind of foreign educational initiative is literally condemned to death in Russia. The case of Smolny College is exemplar. The latter is an international Russian-American project that began in 1997 between the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St Petersburg State University and the Bard College in New York. The Smolny College paved the path for the growth of liberal arts education across Russia and became the most robust Russian-American partnership in the higher education sphere. In the summer of 2021, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation declared that Bard College is an “undesirable organization”, the first college or university in Russia to be so named. The Russian authorities considered that the program with a suspect name was carried out by Smolny with the help of foreign NGOs affiliated with the businessman and philanthropist George Soros and was conducting destructive activities on the territory of the Russian Federation. The dismantling of Smolny, Russian academic emigration of 2022 and support by Bard College allowed a group of Smolny faculty members, who were forced to leave Russia due to the war, to launch the Smolny Beyond Borders (SBB) educational initiative, which is running as a Russian university in exile.

As regards the educational initiatives implemented abroad for Russians, a free online platform was launched in 2016 by the exiled Russian businessman and opposition activist, Mikhail Khodorovsky. The aim of the Open University is to “equip young Russians with the tools needed to critically analyze the propaganda disseminated by Kremlin-controlled media outlets” as well as to develop “a variety of skills, which will be necessary to the formation and maintenance of a democratic Russia”. Online video lecture series attempt to improve the participants’ critical thinking skills, formulate their logical and rational political opinions, and learn to defend their civil and constitutional rights, while providing basic legal, historical, and economic structure of Russia.

Khodorovsky also co-founded the Anti-War Committee with well-known exiled Russians, such as Mikhail Kokorich, to hold Putin accountable for launching the invasion of Ukraine. The Anti-War Committee also supports the Kovcheg initiative to help Russian exiles through housing, legal advice, psychological advice, or education, including scholarships and internships. According to Kovcheg founder Anastasiya Burakova, the aim of her initiative is to enable newly exiled Russians to bring democratic changes to Russia: “We try to get them to do what they can from abroad to stop the war and speed up the collapse of the Putin regime. We hope they’ll go back and become the backbone of a democratic Russia.”

Russian political emigration is divided while Russian emigrants have historically been unwilling to form communities in exile and have attempted to assimilate. Although the new emigrees are more homogeneous and politically active, socio-cultural factors make it difficult to create a liberal democratic Russian mindset in exile. For this reason, Russian journalist and educator Boris Grozovski laid out the plan for a School of Democracy for Russian Refugees. The latter would provide Russian-language educational programs with two components: the first part “would focus on national specifics, on mastering the culture, literature, history, traditions, and customs of the host country” while “the second part would be more universal and would provide an introduction to political theory, philosophy, and social sciences, civic education, critical thinking, women’s rights, environmental and media literacy”.

The initiatives mentioned so far are all non-state, non-governmental actions. I believe that in the future attention should be given to an emerging set of state-led initiatives in favour of Russian exiles, namely in Germany. Last September, German ministers already indicated that people fleeing Russia could apply for asylum in Germany after the announcement of partial military mobilization by President Putin. Recently, the Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gave an address on February 10 ‒ two weeks before the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ‒ at the annual Foreign Policy Conference of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The latter is a political foundation affiliated to the German Green party whose co-leader was Baerbock from 2018 to 2022.

Baerbock based her speech on security, international cooperation, international law, and climate protection. After quoting the writer Heinrich Böll ‒ „Freedom is not a gift; it is something that is earned.” ‒ she outlined the German foreign policy for 2023. It consists in “enhancing international cooperation and strengthening international law; also in countries that, on account of their history or their geographic location, have particularly close connections with Russia”. As part of this policy, the German Government decided to coordinate intersocietal cooperation with the Southern Caucasus, the Republic of Moldova, and Central Asia. As regards Russia and Belarus, Baerbock stated to support democratic forces in these countries and in exile:

“Many courageous Russians who have expressed their opposition to this war are still there. Some of them have been locked up. However, they are there and they need dialogue more than ever. In Belarus, there are still more than 1500 political prisoners because Lukashenko is oppressing his own people. We’re creating specially tailored channels of communication and projects for these people, which neither Putin nor Lukashenko can destroy. The German Government is launching a round table with Russian civil society in exile to bring together exiled democratic Russian stakeholders so that they can actively campaign for a free, democratic Russia. We need to offer them something new these days. It’s more important than ever in this situation to offer them visas, scholarships and the opportunity to network online. At the same time, we also want to talk about how we can continue to support civil society in Russia. This year alone, we’re implementing more than 50 projects involving Russian NGOs and activists – not despite but because of Russia’s war of aggression. The political foundations are playing an important role in this. »

Veronika Durin-Hornyik PhD

Illustration: Open University

The Invisible University for Ukraine (Part 2): comparative study

The Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) is now accepting applications for its third semester, starting in spring 2023. The IUFU was launched by the Central European University (Budapest Campus) in April 2022 for Ukrainian undergraduate and graduate students whose studies were affected by the war, whether they still reside in Ukraine or are refugees. This non-degree, certificate program provides an education program in a hybrid format (online teaching and on-site summer/winter universities) with three components: thematic lecture courses in humanities and social sciences, mentoring, and skill-building with carrier support for future education.

The IUFU does not intend to replace or duplicate the existing education opportunities in Ukrainian universities. It supports Ukrainian educational institutions and its members (teachers and students) by connecting them to transnational networks “to counter the destructive effects of brain drain through creating access to educational infrastructure and academic knowledge for students irrespective of their current location”. The aim of the IUFU’s education program is “to study the role of Ukraine in changing European and global contexts, placing questions relevant for Ukrainian students into a transnational comparative perspective”.

The IUFU is part of the Central European University (CEU) and funded by philanthropic sources, mostly by the Open Society University Network and further American foundations, as well as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Its teaching staff includes teachers and researchers from the CEU, Ukrainian and German partner institutions, and other internationally recognized academics. The IUFU works in cooperation with universities in Ukraine and Germany while participating in the Ukrainian Global University initiative and exploring future partnerships with Ukrainian universities.

The IUFU defines itself as a transnational solidarity program. Its name was chosen as a reminder of the various clandestine and exiled educational initiatives in Eastern Europe that have existed throughout the 19-20th centuries, such as the “flying universities” and the “Invisible Colleges”.

Flying universities were informal education systems with underground classes organized by national teachers to national students to resist foreign occupation (i.e. Russification and Germanification in Poland during the 19th-early 20th century) or communist regimes (in Poland and Hungary during the 1970-1980s). Invisible Colleges were organized by the CEU after the fall of the Berlin Wall, first in Hungary in 1992 and later in other East European countries, to assist promising national students with scholarship, mentoring and academic support at national institutions, in lack of institutional framework.

If the new endeavor for Ukrainian scholars and students was named “Invisible University”, it could be due to three reasons. First, “flying universities” recall clandestine educational initiatives. Second, “Invisible University” refers more to the tradition of Invisible Colleges which the CEU set up in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Third, “invisible” also refers to the form of operation of the university that provides online classes and summer/winter universities.

Although the IUFU is built on the legacy of “flying universities” and “invisible colleges”, my argument is that it recalls another educational initiative – the Free Europe University in Exile. The latter was an American higher education initiative, implemented in France in 1951, to support Eastern European refugees who fled the communist takeover after WW2. The FEUE and its study center were funded by American philanthropic sources (National Committee for a Free Europe, Ford Foundation). The core operation was the FEUE’s study center called Free Europe College (Collège de l’Europe libre) in Strasbourg, France, which organized special educational training for the Eastern European refugees to complete their university studies. This special educational training consisted of national seminars for each nationality represented at the Free Europe College and summer universities with prominent Western and exiled scholars and public figures to discuss actual geopolitical issues and the future of Soviet bloc countries upon liberation. The FEUE and its study center were both publicly known and accredited educational institutions, but they did not deliver diplomas.

The Free Europe University in Exile was a three-sided educational endeavor, set up with American financial support in a host country to support refugee youth from Central and East Europe to resist Sovietization and train young liberals with a democratic spirit upon liberation. For this reason, the FEUE is very much in common with the Invisible University for Ukraine, which is implemented in the Budapest Campus of the CEU, funded by American philanthropic sources, in favor of Ukrainian academics and students at risk. Thanks to the online courses and following the aim “to counter the destructive effects of brain drain”, the IUFU can operate in Ukraine. It was unimaginable for the FEUE behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Nevertheless, the CEU’s Invisible University for Ukraine is not the only initiative for Ukrainian students at risk. The Kosciuszko Foundation ‒ founded in 2010 to support intellectual, scientific, and cultural exchange between Poland and the US ‒ also organized online academic courses for Ukrainian students in humanities and social sciences called Flying University Courses for Ukrainian Students (FUUS).

Veronika Durin-Hornyik PhD

Which future for Iran and young Iranians?

Air protest over Sydney on 29 October 2022

On Tuesday, November 15, Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert gave a talk on the occasion of the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer. The event was organized by Sydney PEN International at the New South Wales State Library. British-Australian academic, Moore-Gilbert was captured by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in September 2018 and detained as a political prisoner on charges of espionage in Tehran’s Evin prison until November 2020. She is one of the signatories to an open letter entitled “J’accuse”, referring to Emile Zola’s famous article of 1898 in the Dreyfus affair to protest the abuse of authority. The open letter, dated of October 18 and signed by nearly one hundred Iranians in exile and Western supporters, is an unprecedented initiative that brought together the divided and dispersed Iranian opposition movement in exile. The signatories call on the “free world” to act and support the people of Iran in its struggle against dictatorship and four decades of oppression: “While Ukrainians are battling an outside invader, Iranians are fighting an inside enemy – the regime.” They praise the young Iranians who “are fighting for their life and they are fighting with their lives.”

Protests in Iran began on 16 September after Mahsa Amini’s funeral in Saqqez, in the western part of the country. The 22-year-old Kurdish woman, who had just been accepted to study at Urmia University in North-West Iran, was arrested by morality police in Tehran on 13 September for allegedly violating Iran’s rules requiring women to cover their hair with a headscarf. Amini was reportedly beaten by the police. The latter said that she suffered a heart attack. The footages released by the police to reject allegations enraged Iranians which led to nationwide protests against gender apartheid in Iran and ultimately against the Islamic Republic itself. According to Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-born actor and Amnesty International ambassador, there is something new emerging on the streets of Iran: “Never in my 14 years working on human rights advocacy I have witnessed such disillusionment with, and opposition to, the Islamic Republic Regime. While Iran has become accustomed to mass protests every decade, neither the student protests of 1999 nor the Green movement of 2009 or even more recently the November 2019 protests compare in fervour or magnitude to current protests.” (The Guardian Weekly, AU Edition, 14 October 2022)

The most unprecedented part is that the protests are female-led ‒ its slogan is “woman, life, freedom”, which is antithetical to the Islamic Republic ‒ and widely spread on university campuses. So far, nearly 500 demonstrators have died and nearly 15,000 people have been arrested, fearing public trials as the government seeks to suppress the demonstrations. Two Iranian journalists, who first reported the death of Amini, have been arrested and labelled as foreign CIA agents. They are now detained in Evin prison, also known as the University of Evin for imprisoning political dissidents and intellectual opponents of the Iranian regime.

Meanwhile, demonstrations in support of Iranian protesters were being held and continue around the world. On Saturday, October 22, the largest gathering in the history of Iranians opposing the Islamic Republic took place in Berlin. 80,000 demonstrators marched in the German capital, many of whom came from neighboring European countries. The demonstration was organized by the Association of Families of Victims of Flight PS752, named after the Ukraine International Airlines flight from Teheran to Kiev that was shot down by the Revolutionary Guards in January 2020. The spokesman of the demonstration was the association’s president, the Iranian-Canadian social activist Hamen Esmaeilion.

After the Arab Spring of 2011, Berlin has become the capital of the exiled Arabs, just like New York City of the 1930s for Jewish intellectuals who forced to flee Europe. In an essay published in 2019, the Egyptian sociologist Amro Ali called on Arab intellectuals to gather and launch an initiative in Berlin: “This may include a school of thought, political philosophy or even an ideational movement – all cross-fertilized through a deeper engagement with the Arab world.”

As for the future, “Iran will be democratic one day”, Shirin Ebadi said. The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Iranian human rights activist received on October 21 the Honorary Award for Democracy and Freedom of the Human Rights Film Festival in Berlin “on behalf of the countless courageous women who protest the regime in Iran”. Ebadi said she was going to give the award to Amini’s family in Iran. Throughout her career, Ebadi has defended intellectual dissidents tortured for criticizing the system of the Islamic Republic. In her speech, she was talking about the great number of educated Iranian youth who have no future in their country and, as a result, are taking to the streets to protest. Ebadi is now calling for a UN-supervised referendum, which would allow a peaceful transition from the Islamic Republic to a “secular parliamentary democracy”.

While Ebadi is optimistic about Iran’s future, the democratization of the country will be a long path. Maryam Rajavi is one of the most influential figures of the opposition with 40 years of activity in Iran and in exile. She is the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, founded in Tehran in 1981 and based in France. Her international grassroots movement called Iran Freedom Network is supported by American and other Western politicians. The book of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, entitled Creating Local Democracy In Iran: State-Building and the Politics of Decentralization, was published this year at the Cambridge University Press. A former political prisoner held in the Evin prison, which he calls Iran’s Bastille, Tajbakhsh was arrested in Tehran in 2007 because of his work supporting democratic groups in Iran for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, and later in 2009 because of his participation in the Green Movement protests.

A decisive step towards Iran’s future democratic generation was taken in 2012 by establishing the Iran Academia, based in The Netherlands. Run by mainly Iranian scholars, the first Persian online university for Social Sciences and Humanities offers learning opportunities, which are free of charge. The university’s mission is “to encourage critical thinking and build capacity for Iran’s youth by increasing access to uncensored knowledge” through various platforms.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik PhD

Photograph: “Free Iran” air protest over Sydney on 29 October 2022

Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU)

My next blog post will deal with the Central European University’s new educational initiative, set up for Ukranian refugee students or still residing in Ukraine and built on the legacy of Polish “Flying Universities”.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik PhD

Universities in the Ukrainian Conflict

“These are among the darkest hours for Europe since World War II”, told Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine this morning in his Press Statement, “A major nuclear power has attacked a neighboring country and is threatening reprisals on any other state that may come to its rescue”.

In the early hours of Thursday February 24th, 2022, Russian forces entered Ukraine from the north, south and east and there are reports of deaths at military bases and explosions near major cities. According to the official Russian statement, “Today Russia has begun a special military operation aimed at protecting the people who for the last eight years have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv”. Poutine says that the Russia’s aim is the demilitarization of Ukraine.

Consequently, people are trying to flee the capital Kyiv and other regions. Ukraine’s western neighboring countries and other European countries, such as Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldavia as well as Finland and Germany, were among the first to prepare for the flux of refugees from Ukraine. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi also made a statement earlier in the day that UN and partner organizations would provide humanitarian assistance in case of emergencies.

Since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in February and March 2014 and backed armed separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, civil society and public institutions were harmed. Many universities in the separatist-backed regions had to relocate themselves, at the initiative of faculty staffs and students. A Council of Rectors of Displaced Universities was set up in January 2016 to coordinate activities. Meanwhile, in the areas controlled by separatist forces, two self-styled republics ‒ the so-called Donbas People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) ‒ were created in 2014, with their own governments and Ministries of Education. These republics run so-called “shadow universities” which use same names and claim similar legacies as the relocated Ukrainian universities, even as they are not recognized by the Ukrainian government. This creates an extremely complicated and precarious situation in the higher education in Ukraine.

In the 20th century in Europe, the first and the most famous university in exile was the Ukrainian Free University (Ukrainische Freie Universität, Український вільний університет). It was founded in Vienna in 1921, then relocated to Prague, at the initiative of exiled Ukrainian professors, writers, journalists and students who fled the country following the failed Ukrainian liberation efforts after the First World War and the Russian Civil War. The aim was to establish a private university outside the borders of Ukraine. In 1945, the university moved to Munich where it still runs as a higher education institution recognized by the Bavarian state government.

Veronika Durin-Hornyik PhD