Saint Petersburg State University

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Petersburg State University traces its origins to a single imperial decree signed on the 24th of January 1724. Peter the Great ordered the creation of a university, an Academic Gymnasium, and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences simultaneously. The founding ambition was sweeping: Russia would build a world-class institution of science and learning from scratch, in a city that itself was barely two decades old.

  What followed was anything but smooth. The university disappeared from official existence for fifteen years between 1804 and 1819, dissolved when a new Academy charter ruled out affiliated teaching. Students were expelled during waves of political unrest. Staff were imprisoned, sent into exile, or executed across multiple eras of repression. The building the university calls home, the Twelve Collegia on Vasilievsky Island, changed hands more than once before finally becoming its permanent seat.

  And yet the institution kept producing scholars who reshaped their fields. On the 24th of March 1896, on that same campus, a demonstration took place that would reach every corner of the globe. A physicist named Alexander Popov publicly transmitted radio waves for the first time in recorded history. The questions worth asking are how a university with such a turbulent past built that kind of record, and what the pressures of state power did to it along the way.

• 2. Building on Shaky Ground

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  Alexander I of Russia reorganized the Main Pedagogical Institute into Saint Petersburg University on the 8th of February 1819. At that moment it had three faculties: Philosophy and Law, History and Philology, and Physics and Mathematics. Ten years later, in 1829, the rolls showed just 19 full professors and 169 students between full-time and part-time.

  The physical home of the university was itself contested. The Twelve Collegia building, a long baroque structure on Vasilievsky Island, originally housed government administrative offices. The university shared it with the Pedagogical Institute from 1804, and it was only in 1830 that Tsar Nicholas returned the entire building to the university, allowing courses to resume there on a more stable footing.

  Growth came, but it was uneven. By 1861, the rolls had climbed to more than 1,400 students across full-time and part-time. The Faculty of Law alone held 498 of them, making it the largest subdivision. That faculty's cameral studies department trained students in a striking range of disciplines: safety, occupational health, environmental engineering, chemistry, biology, and agronomy, alongside law and philosophy. Russian and Georgian engineers, managers, and scientists moved through it in significant numbers.

  In 1855, Oriental studies gained enough standing to be separated from the Faculty of History and Philology. The Faculty of Oriental Languages was formally inaugurated on the 27th of August 1855, becoming the university's fourth faculty. Its appearance reflected the imperial reach of Russia at the time and the strategic value placed on expertise in languages spoken across its vast and expanding borders.

• 3. Unrest and Repression

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  Student unrest broke out in 1861-62, serious enough to force the university to close twice within a single year. Students lost the right of assembly, came under police surveillance, and public lectures were banned. Expulsions followed, and by 1865 only 524 students remained enrolled, down sharply from the more than 1,400 recorded just four years before.

  The cycle did not stop there. In March 1869, unrest shook the institution again. Then in 1880, the Ministry of National Enlightenment moved to bar married persons from the university entirely. In 1882, another disturbance. And on the 1st of March 1887, a group of university students was arrested while planning an assassination attempt on Alexander III. The minister of national enlightenment Ivan Delyanov responded that same year by approving new admission rules that barred persons of non-noble origin from the university unless they were deemed extraordinarily talented.

  The pattern of giving and taking away autonomy ran through the entire nineteenth century. The rector had been an elected position, revoked in 1849, restored by decree of Alexander II in 1863, stripped again in 1884, and returned once more during the upheavals of 1905. In 1911 the university lost its autonomy again and was temporarily closed for the second time in six years.

  When the Bolsheviks took power after the October Revolution of 1917, the university's staff and administration were openly hostile to cooperation with the new government. Between 1917 and 1922 some staff suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies were imprisoned, including Lev Shcherba in 1919. Others were executed or sent abroad on the so-called Philosophers' ships in 1922; Nikolai Lossky was among those exiled. In the fall of 1920, freshman student Alice Rosenbaum, later known as Ayn Rand, observed that enrollment was open and most students were anti-communist, including some who voiced opposition openly. By 1922, those students had been purged on the basis of class background; all non-senior students with bourgeois origins were expelled.

• 4. Scholars Under Stalin

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  The Academic Affair of 1929-30 targeted historians working within the university directly. Sergey Platonov, Yevgeny Tarle, and Boris Grekov were among those imprisoned on fabricated charges of conspiring to overthrow the government. The case was constructed to suppress intellectual opposition to Soviet power, not to address any actual conspiracy.

  During the Siege of Leningrad, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, many students and staff died from starvation, in battle, or through repressions. The university relocated to Saratov in 1942, and a wartime branch operated in Yelabuga. For its conduct during those years, the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union awarded the university the Order of Lenin in 1944.

  Four years later, in 1948, the Soviet Council of Ministers named the institution after Andrei Zhdanov, a senior Communist official who had recently died. The full official title that followed was unwieldy: Leningrad State University, named after A. A. Zhdanov and decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. In 1949-50, several professors died in prison during the Leningrad Affair, another fabricated investigation. Alexander Voznesensky, who had served as rector from 1941 to 1948 and also held the position of minister of education of the RSFSR, was executed.

  The Zhdanov designation was finally removed in 1989 during Perestroika, and in 1992 the name Leningrad was officially replaced with Saint Petersburg. Rector Nikolay Kropachev, who has led the university since 2008, signed a letter of support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In early 2022 the university expelled 13 students who had protested against that invasion, and a series of international partnerships with universities in Hamburg, Bremen, and elsewhere were suspended or terminated in response.

• 5. A Campus in Two Places

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  Vasilievsky Island holds the oldest and most architecturally distinctive parts of the university. The main building, the Twelve Collegia, contains the Library, the Faculty of Biology, and the Institute of Earth Sciences. Nearby, the Faculty of Philology and the Faculty of Oriental Studies share a Petrine Baroque building on Universitetskaya Embankment of the Bolshaya Neva. That building was designed by Domenico Trezzini and originally constructed as the Palace of Peter II of Russia.

  The New Gostiny Dvor, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi and built in the 19th century, houses the Institute of History and the Institute of Philosophy. The Faculty of Psychology sits on Admiral Makarov Embankment of the Malaya Neva. Several other faculties, including the Graduate School of Management, the Faculty of Law, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, are also on Vasilievsky Island but located farther to the west.

  The decision to build a second campus came in 1966, when the Council of Ministers approved a suburban site in Petrodvorets, now known as Peterhof, for the mathematics and natural science faculties. Relocation of those faculties stretched across decades and was not complete until the 1990s. The Peterhof campus today holds the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Control Processes, the Institute of Chemistry, the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics, and the Faculty of Physics. Nearby the campus is a park area called Sergievka, where abandoned buildings of the Faculty of Biology still stand.

  Four social science faculties are located east of the city center on the southern bank of the Neva. The Faculty of Economics sits near the Chernyshevskaya metro station. The Faculty of Sociology, the Faculty of Political Science, and the School of International Relations occupy historical buildings of Smolny Convent.

• 6. Notable Minds

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  The list of scholars affiliated with Saint Petersburg State University in the second half of the 19th century reads like a catalogue of foundational science. Mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev, physicist Heinrich Lenz, chemists Dmitri Mendeleev and Aleksandr Butlerov, embryologist Alexander Kovalevsky, physiologist Ivan Sechenov, and pedologist Vasily Dokuchaev all worked there. Mendeleev had also studied at the Main Pedagogical Institute before it was merged into the university in 1819 and later restored as an independent institution in 1828.

  The political reach of the university's alumni is striking across the former Soviet sphere and beyond. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev both studied law there. So did Lenin, who led Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924. The university produced the first presidents of Lithuania, Armenia, Poland, and Moldova. Gabriel Narutowicz, the first president of Poland, attended. So did Pyotr Stolypin, the third prime minister of the Russian Empire, who held that position from 1906 to 1911, and Anatoly Sobchak, the first mayor of Saint Petersburg, who also co-authored the Constitution of Russia.

  In the arts and sciences, Igor Stravinsky studied there before becoming one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century. Ayn Rand, then known as Alice Rosenbaum, graduated from the university before emigrating to the United States. Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, graduated from the department of philology. His brother Nikolai Durov received his PhD from the department of mathematics. Yakov Rekhter, a graduate, is known for creating BGP, a routing protocol that underpins much of the modern internet. Nine graduates of the university have received the Nobel Prize.

  The university first opened Russia's first student dining hall in 1902. By the time of that small but telling milestone, more than 9,200 students had already graduated from the institution since its reorganization in 1819.

• 7. Admissions and Scale Today

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  In the 2023 admissions campaign, more than 106,000 domestic students applied to Saint Petersburg State University for bachelor's and specialist programs. Only 4,617 were accepted. Domestic admissions for state-funded places are decided through the Unified State Exam, and the average score of applicants in 2023 was 90 points out of a possible 100.

  International demand is similarly concentrated. Over 21,000 students from 100 different countries applied for state-funded scholarship programs in 2023. One thousand were accepted. The acceptance rate across both categories runs at around 4 percent.

  The university today comprises 24 faculties and institutes, ranging from Applied Mathematics and the Faculty of Physics to the School of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Governance is structured through an Assembly that elects the rector and Academic Board for five-year terms. The dean of each faculty is elected by that faculty's academic board, also for five-year terms.

  In international rankings, the university was placed 242nd by the QS World University Rankings in 2022 and 35th by The Three University Missions Ranking that same year. The academic year begins on the 1st of September and runs across two semesters, with exams in January and June. The question of whether Saint Petersburg State University or Moscow State University holds the older claim remains officially disputed, a rivalry that stretches back to the competing founding dates of 1724 and 1755.