Moscow University's main building is the Stalin Tower. People come and go, while on the left side fragmented bulletins stand isolated as if forgotten. This was once one of the main beacons of democracy in the Soviet Union.

Four years ago, when freedom of speech in the Soviet Union was still struggling in an atmosphere of orthodoxy, posters concerning the military repression of the Soviet people and propagation reform made this board the Soviet Union's first "democracy wall" and an object of attention for the Western media.

Taking Part in History: Three years ago the Soviet Union's first unofficial news service, Infax, was set up. The shadowy figures behind the scenes were teachers, students and alumni of the Journalism Department of Moscow University.

In the December before last, Moscow University also became the first university in the Soviet Union this century to achieve autonomous ad ministration. Budget, personnel and curriculum were no longer arranged by the Ministry of Education but came to be decided by a staff committee made up of students and faculty from each department.

At the time of the August coup by hardline communists, the staff and students of Moscow University formed the Russian Democratic Alliance, some of whom spent three nights on vigil in Red Square, shattering the idea that Soviet intellectuals do not care about the political future of their country.

Under the straight-jacket of 74 years of communist repression, Moscow took the lead in slaughtering sacred cows. First to start the thaw was Mikhail Gorbachev, a politician produced by Moscow University with its reformist blood running through his veins. Although he had to leave the political stage, this hero who gave a new future to humanity in the twentieth century will not be forgotten by history; for the same reasons, neither will Moscow University.

A Blood-Stained History: Moscow University was created in 1775 by Mikhail Lomonosov, the educationalist and scientist who had risen to fame from among the common people. For two hundred years the university district was separated from the Kremlin palace in Moscow city center only by a street. But due to a fire and the expansion of departments, in 1952 it moved to Mount Lenin in the southern suburbs. Today only the College of Asian and African Studies and the Journalism Department still occupy the original site.

In its early days the emphasis at Moscow University was on the humanities. Many teachers had studied in Germany or France, and raised the banner of the avant-garde in literary criticism and thought. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it gave much nourishment to great literary figures such as Gogol and Turgenev.

The period of tsarist conservatism at the end of the nineteenth century emphasized study of the classics and intellectuals were not allowed to delve into the natural sciences. Because Moscow was far removed from the center of power--then in St Petersburg--it became the hotbed of developments in the natural sciences and established a solid scientific structure.

As for its involvement in society, Moscow University has always been in the mainstream of history. The bloodstains of the university's two-hundred-year history are clear. To emancipate the peasants, the students and teachers adopted Russian in place of the French language stipulated by the court and called for democracy. . . . Declaring war on the authorities, they became leaders in smashing every kind of manifestation of social inequality.

With the coming of the twentieth century and the taking of power by the communists in 1918, everything changed. Having been the most free and colorful of institutions, Moscow University was now subjected to even greater attacks than were other circles.

Atop Mount Lenin and on the River Bank: Moscow in June and white catkins on the flourishing trees have taken the place of the winter snowflakes. Taking the metro from the city center towards Moscow University in the south, once out of the station the 31-story Stalin Tower, modelled in a sixteenth-century French clock tower, can be seen in the distance. This is the center of the university and it is surrounded on all sides by subordinate buildings, strictly arranged over some 300 hectares of the mount's summit. Backing onto the main building is a grassy plane where people lie to enjoy the rarely glimpsed sun and at its far edge is the riverbank. If you gaze into the distance, the city of Moscow can just be seen from here. By the river young people sing, dance and laugh.

Going back to the university area, one is struck by the memorial to teachers and students who gave their lives in World War Two. Every department also has its own memorial, in front of which fresh flowers are occasionally arranged. As you enter the heavy gray Stalin Tower, its cold severity creeps up on you. Within there are classrooms, laboratories and dormitories for staff and students. Altogether there are 3-4,000 rooms, and new students often get lost. The University has eighteen departments and more than 40,000 students have spent their most tough and depressing years within the solemn and oppressive atmosphere of this architecture.

Depressing Times: When the communists became the government they first of all set up a Young Communist League on campus to control and recruit young people. From this time on, university applicants were not only selected according to ability but also background. It was not long before they came to accept this as natural--if you wanted to get ahead then you had to actively take part in the League, national mass study organizations and social work. Moreover, there could be no questioning of communist thinking; otherwise one would be seen as a rebel and expelled from the League, making further study impossible.

Moreover, because Moscow University became the center of excellence for the whole country, it provided personnel for all the most important government organs. "For example, the College of Asian and African Studies trained personnel in all kinds of languages, which meant that after graduation they would be allocated international affairs and diplomacy. If you were not a member of the League and not subject to party control, then you would not be selected," says Tan's Aoshuan, a lecturer there. Five years ago, before the Gorbachev reforms had been consolidated, more than 98 percent of the students at Moscow University were in the Young Communist League.

The university mass organizations, under the direction of the league and party branches, were also mainly groups with a heavy political flavor engaged in "patriotic work," maintaining social order and debating academic issues. From 1957, once students had completed their lives as freshmen, they had to go to the countryside to do hard labor for a month, helping the peasants to grow potatoes so as to get an understanding of the life of manual labor.

A Deadly Atmosphere for the Social Sciences: The teaching and research of philosophy, psychology, linguistics and every other kind of social science had to "hang on" Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. Independence or objective development was impossible.

"All previous philosophical education can be said to be mostly propaganda education," says Dzhulmukhamedova Gulia, a researcher in the teaching-laboratory on financial credit. Moscow University is extremely thin on economic theory.

Stalin, who massacred the intellectuals, paid special attention to genetics, psychology, applied mathematics and computers, which he saw as products of capitalism, and on the basis of pseudoscientific theories he ordered the schools to suspend any relevant teaching. "At that time a deadly atmosphere hung over academic circles," says Karapetjants Artemi, a senior collaborator in Chinese languages.

On the other hand, Lenin, who had finished off the age of tsarist feudalism, stressed the need to industrialize and modernize the nation. This meant paying special attention to the study of science and engineering. With the confrontation between East and West following World War Two, the communists put more energy into scientific research that was linked to the defense industries. Even a lot of persecuted researchers were made to continue their work in the laboratories established in prison.

Because the natural sciences have relatively little involvement with ideology and do not easily come into conflict with politics, and with equal salaries for all professions under communism, young people interested in science would easily be drawn in. Building on the scientific foundations already laid in the nineteenth century, Moscow University's research in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology and geography suddenly took on a different color.

Flourishing Physics: The nation's first photoelectric-effect laboratory was established by a Moscow University physicist in 1878. In 1988 the university celebrated the centenary of this laboratory and the government issued a special set of commemorative stamps. When the study of physics was established in 1933, it included research groups in the most advanced areas of atomic science and astrophysics.

The twentieth century has seen great names, such as the atomic physicist, V.S. Fursov, the first to set up an atomic pile reaction; A. Imovich the nuclear physicist; Landau, the genius of quantum physics . . . all world-class physicists. One professor of statistical physics is not only a physicist, a mathematician and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but also a well-known honorary academician in the United States and Italy.

Out of the more than 400 physical theorems to have come from the Soviet Union, more than one fifteenth of them have come from Moscow University's Physics Department. The department has a special exhibition room to introduce the achievements and life stories of its Nobel Prize winners.

According to Dr. V. Prudnikov, a teacher and researcher at the department's electro-magnetic laboratory, in the past education was only allocated one percent of the overall budget and the education department was poorest of all. But thanks to contributions from the defense industries, the nation has been comparatively kind in its investment. Such as personal computers, of which the students joke, "if a laboratory has one then that is not bad," although Dr. V. Prudnikov has computer and research instruments from Holland and Poland in his lab. "My research is into the magnetic properties of materials, which is related to equipment for national defense," he reveals. There are four research groups doing related research in the ex-Soviet Union, of which three are at Moscow University.

Because young people never cease to come into this area, thirty years ago the Physics Department took in 200 students, and the total number has now risen to 3,000, with 600 teachers. The number of research groups has grown to 32, practically covering every branch of physics. In the '6Os and '70s the Soviet Union opened up new territory in quantum physics and astrophysics, for which the teachers and students of Moscow University bore a large responsibility.

Practical Studies at Sea: The students and teachers of the similarly famous departments of geology and geography joke that because the ground has nothing to do with ideology or national defense technology, they are the areas of knowledge furthest removed from political power. In fact, with the opening up of Siberia after the War, a large number of personnel were needed for the exploitation of natural resources, and the area of economic geography was developed at Moscow University. Thus, today, the Geography Department is based on six floors of the Stalin Tower, with the upper three of them being for areas related to polar and space geography. The geological exhibition gallery has become a point for Moscow sightseers.

When the students of the Geography and Geology departments have finished a year's course work, they can leave Moscow for a research station over 700 kilometers away to do work in fields such as astronomy, topography, and soil composition. These practical second-year studies make use of the University's private property. Moored not far from the Black Sea are two vessels which take to sea to do research. On board there is scientific equipment for physical, geological and geographical investigation. These two well-equipped boats are even used for undertaking United Nations research projects.

Apart from the general policy of developing national defense, the flourishing development of scientific research at Moscow University is also in fact due to the Soviet communist concentration of personnel under one roof for the purposes of observation and control.

Cramming Students and Teachers: To further training in mathematics and physics, the state in the 1930's attracted interested high-school students into so-called "training groups," which used teachers from Moscow University for out-of-hours classes. This was to put down a firm foundation in mathematics and physics, and an "academic olympics" was even started for these groups.

The group from Moscow University's Mathematics Department supported around 100 people, many of whom went on to take examinations and enter the department itself. With this good foundation and easy entry, such people often became great authorities in their field. Many of the Soviet Union's famous scientific researchers were also once achievers in the academic olympics.

Having started in Moscow, the system spread to become a nationwide competition. Moreover, from mathematics and physics it extended to the disciplines of biology, chemistry, geography and even into some areas of the humanities. "Punishing yourself from childhood, punishing your brain, and avoiding confused ideas," half-jokes Prof. E. Viviberg of the Mathematics Department. Yet this was also an important method for establishing scientific education.

In the Soviet Union, the government stipulated that the student-teacher ratio at universities should not be more than five to one. In the third year, students began to select their own research specialties and entered their tutor's teaching-laboratory to study.

The idea of the "teaching-laboratory" was originally transplanted from Western Europe. Under every department there are small groups led by authorities in every field. Under these come deputy professors, experienced lecturers and students. The teaching laboratories at Moscow University have fixed times for discussions, research into how to rationalize study, the organization of teaching materials, holding scientific conferences and experimentation with educational reforms.

The ordinary teachers are also rigorously tested, attend lessons and write theses. Publishing articles in academic journals is compulsory work and under-taking research occupies at least half the workload. The topics of research are decided from above and there is no autonomy here. "Researchers in national defense have all been through a strict process of selection," says V. Prudnikov.

No Place for Individualism: The research achievements brought about by this cramming system made Moscow University a leader in the European league. Yet emphasizing the values of production while neglecting the spiritual creativity brought about another kind of crisis.

Because study, living and work were all taken care of by the state, you only had to work well, have no ideological problems, never criticize the system and join the party when necessary to have your future guaranteed. The country would even pay for you to go abroad and study. "This eventually led to a special 'Soviet gene.' Students developed a kind of opportunistic attitudes and there was no way to throw it off," diagnoses Tan's Aoshuan. The system left people with no way to truly realize their individuality and gave birth to a group of students lacking in enthusiasm and spirit. The thinking at Moscow University was originally very forceful but the tradition of challenging authority was completely lost. In the wake of the recent reforms this problem became increasingly clear.

"Now Soviet students do not generally care about the nation. The enthusiasm among campus intellectuals in mainland China for national affairs is unusual here," says a student from mainland China who is studying Russian at Moscow. "The rounders of the Russian Democratic League four years ago were all teachers. There were hardly any students. Being one of those founders, Tan' Aoshuan says that she feels the students have already lost any sense of mastery.

From Youth Leagues to Economic Bodies: Another crisis has become clear on the economic front. Due to the failure of collective social security, the pressures of living have not allowed students to concentrate on their studies. Unwilling to accept work arranged for them by the state, they busy themselves trying to seek out their own futures.

"In the past, people were very satisfied with their studies, but now they are influenced by capitalist thinking and see no profit in planning pure research. There has been a succession of the department's researchers going west," says the professor of the Mathematics Department, worrying about the effect this will have on his country's strength.

Now the school is starting to set its own "practical" research in co-operation with businesses and accepting commissions from international research projects. With direct contracts between customer and provider, they have the right to select their own research and "there is more motivation in the work," unabashedly reveals Dr. V. Prudnikov of the Physics Department. But he is still concerned, along with many other teachers, that basic long-term research will not be attractive in the future.

With business calling the shots, students have also set up various organizations to get an income. Thus the students of the College of Asian and African Studies have set up a unit to do translation work and teach foreign languages. "The youth leagues have all become economic bodies," it is cynically joked. "It is the low standard of living that has let the market take over from the executive," remarks senior scientific collaborator Valeutin N. Golosov of the Geography Department, "I am also torn in two directions," says Karneev Andrei, a lecturer in Chinese economics who has to spend much time doing translations for travellers from Taiwan.

Renewed Spirit: Today the communist organizations have disappeared from the campus, the Youth League is no more and there is freedom of thought. However, the academic and economic crises are still not solved.

When Stalin died, many people seized the opportunity to start developing the humanities again; after the 1960s, Western ideas incessantly came in. "But past pressures have meant that the standard of Moscow University's work in the social sciences lags about five years behind that of the West," estimates Karapetjants Artemi.

The Gorbachev reforms brought a lot of Western scholars over and many persecuted exiles also returned to study. These included the Nobel Prize winning economist, Leont'ev, who frequently brings back the Western "bible"--all kinds of suggestions on how to throw off the present economic woes. Under this Western stimulus, "The department's teachers have started to change their thinking and pay more attention to other economic systems. New teaching-laboratories are also being started up." Gulia says that her own laboratory for research into financial credit was only opened the year before last.

The evidence has shown that taking the old allembracing Marxist-Leninist theory to solve concrete problems was an oversimplification of academia, which has already been rejected by teachers and students at Moscow. Yet, hing broken Marxism-Leninism, "We have still not established a new kind of thinking," says Andrei. For example, philosophical ideas are in chaos, and there are endless disputes. "Many people think that merely drawing on the use of purely Western models is also a dead end," he says with an inclination to agree.

More Value for Right Thinking: One professor in the Physics Department thinks that Moscow University is like the mass of people in the new commonwealth that was the Soviet Union: in the process of searching out a new road, there is a pressing need to study and become accustomed to things, "But we cannot rush it, we do not want to get into the old ruts again. After all, although free thought is valuable, right thinking is even more important. Thus you first need to have an open attitude!" After a little thought, he revealed his solution: hope in the students and teachers of Moscow University--hope in the new Soviet Union.

[Picture Caption]

The landmark Stalin Tower of Moscow University is called by the name of "eat people's blood"--a homophone of its real name in Russian.

In its early days Moscow produced a number of famous thinkers and revolutionaries whose portraits can often be seen on the campus.

Doctoral candidates undergo oral tests in preparation for their viva voce examinations. Students and teachers often wait with fresh flowers for the new doctors (below) outside the formal examination.

The Stalin Tower sticks out from the rest of the university architecture, which is planned along fairly uniform lines.

The manager of the Mathematics Department's algebra research laboratory is as familiar with past leaders of his laboratory as with family treasures.

An American-born- Russian professor of mathematics who has returned as a guest lecturer first gives a lesson to the Mathematics Department's teachers.

The College of Asian and African Studies still remains at the old campus site in the city center.

Posters about the Great Patriotic War can still be seen there.

Reading under the sun? It is because the sun is not often seen in Moscow.

Past student entertainments were confined to the activities of mass study or political organizations under the leadership of the Young Communist League.

Graduate student Gulia, from the Republic of Kazakhstan, stays in a student dormitory in the Stalin Tower.

The Stalin Tower's square under a blue sky.

In its early days Moscow produced a number of famous thinkers and revolutionaries whose portraits can often be seen on the campus.

Doctoral candidates undergo oral tests in preparation for their viva voce examinations. Students and teachers often wait with fresh flowers for the new doctors （below） outside the formal examination.

The Stalin Tower sticks out from the rest of the university architecture, which is planned along fairly uniform lines.

An American-born- Russian professor of mathematics who has returned as a guest lecturer first gives a lesson to the Mathematics Department's teachers.

The manager of the Mathematics Department's algebra research laboratory is as familiar with past leaders of his laboratory as with family treasures.

The College of Asian and African Studies still remains at the old campus site in the city center.

Posters about the Great Patriotic War can still be seen there.

Reading under the sun? It is because the sun is not often seen in Moscow.

Past student entertainments were confined to the activities of mass study or political organizations under the leadership of the Young Communist League.

Graduate student Gulia, from the Republic of Kazakhstan, stays in a student dormitory in the Stalin Tower.

The Stalin Tower's square under a blue sky.