4 - Professors and Soviet power

Summary

In the Civil War years, almost all professors regarded the new regime with deep hostility. In the provinces reached by the White Armies, the professors simply voted with their feet. Virtually the entire faculty of Perm University fled east as the Red Army approached Perm in 1919. Of the faculty of Tomsk University, 3 out of 39 full professors were actually ministers in Kolchak's Siberian government. Eighty professors left Kazan with the Czechs in the autumn of 1918; and both the Kazan and Perm faculties established short-lived universities-in-exile in Tomsk under Kolchak. In southern Russia, most of the faculty of the former Imperial University of Warsaw (evacuated to Rostov on Don in 1915) retreated with the White Armies in 1920 and took the boat to Constantinople.

This hostility is explained by Soviet historians in terms of the bourgeois political affiliations of the professors, and by emigré writers in terms of the hostile and provocative actions of the Soviet government. There is much to be said for both views. Many of the professors were Cadets, a number of them had been active in politics before October, and some undoubtedly continued covert political activity against the new regime. Yet ‘bourgeois’ political affiliations were not necessarily a barrier to cooperation with the Bolsheviks: S. F. Oldenburg, a former Provisional Government member and secretary of the Academy of Sciences, quickly established a working relationship with the new government; and M. M. Novikov, Rector of Moscow University during the Civil War years, seems to have been prevented from doing so mainly by the recalcitrance of his colleagues.