The Specifi c Features of University Education in Russia: The Conception of “Educational Distribution”

There is a predominating opinion that higher education in Russia principally does not differ from that in other countries, having been at a certain time created following the example of the later, while merely endowed with regional specifi c features. However, its peculiarities (higher education as a social status, the social distribution of diplomas of a single sample, absence of academic freedoms) are so essential, that they make it possible to speak of education of a different type, contrasting the modernist research “Humboldt” university. In to the opinion of the authors, it is based on “distribution”, the mechanism of which has been described by economist Olga Bessonova and sociologist Simon Kordonsky. “Distribution” includes in itself handing over and disbursement, nationalized instrumental property, compulsory subservient labor, planned organization of labor and, fi nally, the institution of complaints — the reverse connection between the distributing and the receiving channels. The authors of the article defi ne higher education in Russia (both the state-run and the so-called “commercial”) as “distribution of higher education” and consider that it corresponds with the peculiarities of the Russian civilization, which has preserved a traditional character at its core. The aspects of the “distribution of higher education” (both the social status and the sum of knowledge indispensable for it) are briefl y described in this work.