Higher School of Economics

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 27th of November 1992, Yegor Gaidar signed a government decree creating the Higher School of Economics. It was, as the source notes, his last act as Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. The founders deliberately chose the word "school" over "university," nodding to the London School of Economics as their model. What they were building, in a country still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union, was something Russia had never had: a genuine research institution in economics, built from the ground up. How did a think tank for government officials become one of the most prominent universities in Russia? How did it navigate the tension between serving the state and defending academic freedom? And what happened when those two purposes collided?

• 2. A Gap Left by History

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  At the start of the 1990s, Russia had 33 state universities specializing in sociology and economics. Yet the country was desperately short of people who could actually work in a market economy. The communist system had, over decades, pushed intellectuals into exile and left entire academic fields underdeveloped. When the Soviet Union began its transition away from a centrally planned economy in the 1980s, the structural gap became acute. Gaidar's government, in 1992, enacted a series of reforms that immediately amplified the need for economists and analysts. The founding team considered reforming existing universities, including the Moscow State University, but concluded that such reform would be too slow and too constrained. One of the co-founders later described the situation plainly: "At the beginning of the 1990s, we understood that the absence of Russian economic school and Russian financial education is a strategic problem for the country... the Higher School of Economics started from scratch."

• 3. Two Men and a Grant Application

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  Yaroslav Kuzminov and Yevgeny Yasin drove the creation of HSE more than anyone else. Both had taught economics at the Moscow State University, and by 1989 Kuzminov had already set up what was described as an "alternative" Department of Economics there, sponsored by the Soros Foundation. In 1991, the two men joined with economists Oleg Ananin and Rustem Nureev to prepare a grant application to the European Union. The proposed project was drawn up for 100 million euro and described itself as providing "technical assistance in the field of economic education." It included roughly 30 sub-projects, among them what would become the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy. When the university launched, the European Union and the Government of France immediately sponsored it. Scholars were sent to study in the Netherlands, and professors were invited from the Sorbonne University through the Erasmus Programme. The missing library was covered by a rapidly assembled online resource system built on translations of advanced foreign textbooks.

• 4. Introducing the Bologna System

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  In September 1993, HSE became the first university in Russia to introduce the Bologna education structure. That put it five years ahead of Russia's formal entry into the Bologna Process in 1998. The first Master's graduation from the program took place in 1995, and the first Bachelor's graduation followed the next year. The university also divided its academic year into five modules rather than semesters, later reducing that number to four. Starting in 1997, most exams moved to written format, and all major student work was run through plagiarism detection software. HSE also introduced a major/minor system that gave students a primary field of study alongside a freely chosen block of additional programs. Assessment followed the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, and each student's GPA shaped not only their academic standing but also their scholarship level, tuition discounts, and eligibility for foreign internships. In 1997, HSE and the London School of Economics signed an agreement to establish what would become the International Institute of Economics and Finance, offering a double diploma from both the University of London and HSE.

• 5. The State Exam and the Think Tank Role

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  In 2001, the Ministry of Education launched the Unified State Exam, and HSE specialists helped develop it. The USE replaced the old graduation examination system and became the sole form of school-leaving assessment by 2009. HSE was the first university in Russia to accept USE results as its primary admissions criterion. That allowed the university to set a high entry threshold and recruit students from across the entire country, not just from Moscow. Beyond admissions, the university had already positioned itself as a policy workshop. By the early 2000s, more than 20% of its income came from custom research for government agencies. Kuzminov and Yasin participated in drafting the "" social and economic development program, initiated by German Gref and intended to set the foundation for government policy. In August 2008, HSE was placed directly under the Russian government's authority, and under presidential instructions it then led development of the "Strategy 2020" program. Applied research commissioned by government agencies, private companies, and international organizations would eventually account for up to 40% of the university's income, with regular clients including the Ministry of Education, Rosneft, Aeroflot, Gazprom, and Russian Railways.

• 6. Research, Rankings, and Global Reach

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  Nobel Laureate in Economics Eric Maskin supervised the Laboratory of Decision Choice and Analysis at HSE. Fields Medal recipient Andrei Okounkov was among the academic supervisors of the university's international laboratories, of which there were 37 as of 2018. Those laboratories were funded through a combination of university resources and government "Megagrants." In the QS World University Rankings, HSE climbed from the 501-550 range in 2014-15 to 298th place in 2020-21. In subject-level rankings, the university consistently placed in the top 50 globally in Politics and International Studies, and ranked 50th in Sociology in 2021. Since 2013, HSE has recorded courses for Coursera. By 2017, it had posted the most recorded courses of any university in Russia, and by 2018 it had around 100 courses on the platform, 25 of them in English. The average number of participants across those courses reached roughly 1 million, with 17% of listeners coming from the United States. The university's citation index in Scopus rose from 0.5% in 2013 to 6.2% in 2016.

• 7. Politics, Protest, and Pressure

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  In 2009, following a Dissenters' March, the Moscow police sent a formal request to HSE asking it to expel students and fire lecturers who had participated. The university refused, stating publicly that participation in politics was not prohibited for its members. Two years later, in March 2011, HSE hosted a debate between oppositionist Alexei Navalny and rector Kuzminov on the public procurement law 94-FZ, with representatives from the Ministry of Economic Development present. At the 2014 United Russia congress, the university was described as a "snake's nest." In 2018-20, a university talk show called "V Tochku" became a flashpoint. After press secretary Dmitry Peskov gave a talk and the recording went unpublished, a full transcript appeared on the BBC website and students sent an open letter calling the situation censorship; the Department of Media and Communications issued a public apology. In 2020, several professors were fired, including Yelena Lukyanova, Alexander Kynev, and Kirill Martynov, in circumstances widely attributed to their public criticism of that year's constitutional amendments. Their lawsuit seeking 550,000 rubles in compensation was rejected by the Basmanny Court of Moscow.

• 8. After 2022

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  Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Rector Nikita Yuryevich Anisimov was suspended by the European University Association. The EUA described the Russian Union of Rectors' support for the invasion as "diametrically opposed to the European values that they committed to when joining EUA." Several international partners suspended ties, including the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, and Australian National University. Ukraine formally sanctioned HSE. The university also dismissed dozens of professors who had protested the invasion. These events arrived against the backdrop of a university that had, on paper, been expanding rapidly: new faculties in Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology, and History had all opened since 2014. The Faculty of Computer Science launched in 2014 with support from the Yandex group, and the Faculty of Physics took its first admissions in 2017. In 2019, the Academic Council approved a renaming program under an HSE 2030 development strategy, with the stated aim of increasing global competitiveness and reflecting how far the institution had grown beyond its origins in economics.