A Russian court has ordered a university that receives support from Western organizations and had offered courses in election monitoring to shut down immediately, in what professors said was the first time an entire university had been closed for political reasons under President Vladimir V. Putin.
The ruling, issued by a court in St. Petersburg on Friday, shut down the European University of St. Petersburg just as a new semester was about to start and after many of the 170 students who were scheduled to attend had arrived in the city.
Mr. Putin had criticized the university last fall, accusing it of meddling in Russian politics, according to news reports, and a highly placed government official raised similar concerns in late December, a professor told The Chronicle.
The order to close came despite the university’s recent decision to shut down a major program on election monitoring as too political, with Russia’s presidential election coming up on March 2.
Buildings Blamed
The court’s ruling did not mention politics. Instead, it upheld a decision by the city’s fire department, also issued on Friday, that the university’s historic buildings were unsafe for students because of fire hazards.
The institution’s president, Nikolai Vakhtin, disputed that finding. “We were totally shocked on Friday when the fire inspector announced their verdict to us,” Mr. Vakhtin said by telephone on Monday.
“Our university had never had even any complaints from fire or any other inspections since 1996, when it began its work,” Mr. Vakhtin said. “There is a dark cloud of uncertainty hanging over our university. I keep hoping and telling our students that we will solve our problems and reopen our university.”
While denying the fire-safety accusations, Mr. Vakhtin declined to say whether he believed the closing was political.
The university, which was supported in part by grants from the Ford, MacArthur, and Soros foundations, offered master’s degrees in economics, ethnology, history, and political science/sociology. Its diplomas were issued in conjunction with the University of Helsinki, in Finland. It also provided programs in the humanities, including an art-history program that offered special access to the treasures of the State Hermitage Museum, which holds one of the world’s largest repositories of art (The Chronicle, June 19, 1998).
Liberal politicians in St. Petersburg, journalists, and professors familiar with the European University described it as a well-known island of liberal ideas for its offering of courses on human rights and democratic institutions.
Research on Elections
Its political troubles started last year, when the university won a European Commission grant worth about $900,000 for a project intended to improve the monitoring of elections in Russia. The political-science faculty created a regional network to provide research materials on regional and federal elections and prepared a course for political-party workers on election law.
“If we saw violations of election law, we openly talked about,” said Grigory Golosov, a professor of sociology and political science who led the project. Mr. Golosov said the university was closed because of his project, even though the program had already shut down.
Another professor, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, told The Chronicle that the university had received a threat in late December from a high-ranking government official who said that the project should end or the whole university would be shut down.
The university closed the project on January 31. Mr. Golosov said no formal explanation was provided for the closure, and Mr. Vakhtin, the president, declined to discuss it.
Mr. Golosov suggested that the closure might have unintended consequences for elected officials. “Authorities do not understand what a big mistake they are making,” he said. “Now they are supported by the majority of Russians, but very soon, depending on the country’s state of economy, the majority might change their mind and say the election was fake.”
“Our project was needed to avoid such outcomes,” he said.
During Mr. Putin’s eight years in office, his government has shut down a number of human-rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, and political parties, usually citing technical reasons but often with suggestions that the organizations were interfering in Russian politics. Most recently, two English-language schools operated by the British Council were closed in January. Authorities said the schools, in Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg, were closed for lacking licenses, but some politicians accused the council of using the schools to recruit spies.
“The totalitarian system has once again shown that it has no tolerance of criticism,” said Maxim Reznik, a leader of the opposition Yabloko party in St. Petersburg. “Opposition candidates have no chance to register,” he said, adding that Western-supported organizations “get on the Kremlin’s blacklists, and now the whole university is being closed for its fair and genuine research about elections.”