Russian students who take part in street protests or publicly criticise the government are regularly threatened with expulsion.
Groza asked students from various parts of Russia about how this punishment functions: what is discussed in meetings with university staff, why students are referred to counsellors, and how universities collude with Russian law enforcement. And most importantly, is it possible to avoid expulsion or even take the university to court for violating your rights as students? (Spoiler alert: the answer is yes.)
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In September 2022, Daniil, a first-year Master’s student at the Tomsk Polytechnic University, was detained when protesting against the mobilization of citizens into the military. In early November, he was summoned to a meeting of a university “commission” that unanimously voted in favor of his expulsion. Daniil’s case wasn’t the first in the Tomsk Polytechnic University: in April 2023, another Master’s student, Bogdan Ovchinnikov, was expelled after being detained at “an unsanctioned protest” against the Russian invasion.
The policy of expelling students for participating in “unsanctioned protests” and publicly criticizing the government was instituted long before the current invasion. In 2020, Pavel Krisevich, an activist and a performance artist, was arrested for 15 days over a public protest in support of political prisoners in which he staged a mock crucifixion of himself at Lubyanka square in the center of Moscow. As a result, he was expelled from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia.
In October 2022, the Moscow City Court sentenced the artist to five years in prison for another public performance which involved a mock suicide attempt.
In 2021, Astrakhan Tatishchev State University was sued by a group of its former students over their expulsion after the protests in support of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in January 2021.
A week after his detention at an anti-mobilization protest, a student of the Tomsk Polytechnic University was summoned by the University’s Vice-Rector for Educational Work and Youth Policy Maria Moiseenko. According to the student, there were no signs that he could be expelled prior to the meeting. Thus, he had no idea that his participation in the protest would be the topic of their discussion.
“They asked me to explain what happened so that they were able to help me in court. But then they just kept saying that unsanctioned protests were illegal and that we’d better not criticize the government. Ultimately, the university didn’t help me in any way during the trial,” said Daniil.
Later in November he was summoned to a meeting with the university administration and the student council regarding the results of the internal investigation into his case. Daniil was not allowed to enter the meeting, however, he heard a lot of what was being discussed through the office door. They stated that Daniil “is interested in politics” and looked through some screenshots of his page in VKontakte (Russia’s biggest social media platform — Ed.). Daniil says, “They stated that the crime I’ve been convicted of was very serious, and that the punishment has to be just as tough.”
Another former student of the Tomsk Polytechnic University, Bogdan Ovchinnikov, wasn’t even told about the meeting regarding his expulsion. However, prior to that he had a conversation with another university official.
“Immediately when I entered the room, I saw a photo of president Putin meeting with students hanging on the wall and little flags saying ‘za nashih’ (‘for our [soldiers/people]’ in Russian — Ed.) standing on the table. The Z symbol wasn’t in use back then (the letter Z is widely used in Russia by civilians and officials to indicate their support for the invasion — Ed.). I was told that I should not criticize the government, especially now when times are difficult, and that I should not ‘talk trash behind our soldiers’ backs.’ I don’t like arguing so I was just silently freaking out. I don’t know what their goal was. Perhaps they wanted to shame me, but it didn’t have the desired effect,” recalled Bogdan.
Olga (name has been changed for safety reasons — Ed.), a student of Saint Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University, has ultimately managed to get reinstated after her expulsion by taking the university to court. She recalls that right after she was detained at a protest, she sought out a lawyer, as she understood that there might be problems with her university. Then, for a couple of weeks, everything seemed alright.
“All of a sudden there was a call from the dean’s office. ‘The vice-rector Lyakhov Dmitry Ivanovich wants to speak with you.’ I thought we’d meet alone but when I came there, the room was full of university officials. The rector himself was absent. They bad-mouthed me for 15 minutes and at some point I stopped arguing with them as it was completely useless. They said absolute nonsense about ‘traitors threatening the motherland, that [the war] started as a preventive attack, and that if we didn’t strike first we would have been invaded ourselves,” said Olga.
Olga paid for her tuition out of pocket, unlike other students, who had their fees covered by the government, thus, after the she was chewed out she was told that she could potentially be reinstated:
Timur, another student of that same university, was expelled after being detained at an anti-war protest in March 2022. He was summoned to a similar meeting.
“They began lecturing me under the guise of sorting out the situation. They didn’t exactly humiliate me, but it was certainly disrespectful. There were expressions such as ‘you’ve plunged a knife into the backs of our soldiers and twisted it; you are spitting on soldiers’ graves; you are lying through your teeth’ and so on. It felt like a show trial, and at the end they all voted in favor of my expulsion.”
Andrey Kichev, a student from Arkhangelsk, was expelled in September for “failure to follow the requirements of the curriculum and being negligent in his duties as a student.”
He worked as a reporter for RusNews and was detained on September 24 while covering an anti-mobilization protest. Inside a police van the student was handed a draft notice. Two days later, he was notified of his expulsion via phone.
The official reason for his expulsion mentions an internal report made by someone named N. Kolygina. Andrey has never heard of this person before. He had no overdue assignments and failed no exams, but before his detainment he refused to attend the extracurricular “conversations about important things” (a new program of extracurricular classes at Russian educational institutions dedicated to pushing state propaganda — Ed.). He also didn’t participate in the weekly ceremony of raising the national flag. In order to avoid having to attend propaganda events, Andrey filed an application based on a template by the independent trade union Teachers’ Alliance.
“When I submitted my application, the headmaster asked me why I didn’t respect the Russian flag and why I didn’t like such events in general.” He accepted the application, but later used it to justify Andrey’s expulsion. After leaving Russia to avoid being drafted into the army, Andrey now communicates with college officials by phone.
“Their reasoning for expelling me seemed like an excuse. When I spoke to the headmaster, he said, ‘I’m just an ordinary man who does what he’s told.’ I think my expulsion was actually instigated by [law enforcement] officials,” stated Andrey during his conversation with Groza. “There are next to no correspondents from opposition-aligned media in Arkhangelsk who report on protests. During the last few rallies, I was the only one there. They needed to get rid of me, but knew that even if I was expelled and conscripted, I would return in a year (in Russia, one year of military service is compulsory for all males aged 18 and above, with the exception of students — Ed.). So I think instead of simple conscription, they meant for me to be mobilized and sent off to die in the war.”
This document (which Groza possesses a picture of) states that the law enforcement agency had sent the university a list of students who have “committed an administrative offense of participating in an unauthorized rally.” Police chief Dmitry Baranov requested the rector to “elucidate the current legislation of the Russian Federation to students” and to “report the result to the Center for Combating Extremism.”
After his first meeting with the Tomsk Polytechnic University’s staff, Daniil had to write an explanatory note and was sent to see a counselor in order to “be profiled.” Daniil noted that it was made clear to him that seeing a counselor was mandatory.
“As far as I’m aware, the university needed to write a comprehensive report of the incident. That means they need an explanatory note and a description of the student’s psychological state, which would allow them to determine what led to such a turn of events,” Daniil explained. But, according to him, the counselor simply asked him the same questions as the vice rector about how he got detained.
As for the Arkhangelsk journalist Andrey Kichev, he didn’t have to attend any commissions or write explanatory notes, but he had already been sent to see a counselor after being detained at similar rallies in the past. The counselor asked him why he had participated and covered the rallies, whether he was from a full family, and whether he was a member of any political parties.
In most cases of expulsion administration refers to the “violation of the university’s charter” as the reason. Sometimes they refer to specific paragraphs of the charter and sometimes they use vague language. These chapters differ from one university to another.
In the Tomsk Polytechnic University, internal rules state that the university could impose disciplinary sanctions on the students who have been "found liable of criminal or administrative offenses.“In the case of Saint Petersburg State University, sanctions for criminal liability are mentioned while some paragraphs state that students must “comply with the legislation of the Russian Federation.”
In most cases, university charters assume that when selecting the disciplinary measure applied to a student (either issuing them a warning, a reprimand, or expelling them) the following factors should be taken into account:
Additionally, each university’s charter has to contain a description of the expulsion procedure. Those paragraphs could be used in a lawsuit to prove that a student’s expulsion was unlawful.
"They did not comply with their own internal charter. The expulsion has to have many steps: multiple warnings, a meeting of the student council, me getting to submit an explanatory note. But they made the decision in a single day,"said Olga, former student of Saint Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University.
The charter of the Tomsk Polytechnic University states that when choosing between several disciplinary measures “it is necessary to take into account the opinion of the student council, and the trade union committee of students and postgraduates.” When Daniil was summoned to the dean’s office, there were student council members present, but they voted in favor of granting the university administration’s motion to expel Daniil.
Bogdan Ovchinnikov was not notified of any meetings, but when his expulsion was made official it was stated in the documents that the decision “took the opinions of the student council and the trade union into account.”
After his expulsion Bogdan wrote to the rector. In the letter, he disagreed with the selected disciplinary measure and asked the university for access to all of the documents relating to his expulsion. In response, the university sent him a copy of the internal investigation protocols, the decree terminating his enrollment, and the protocols of the internal meeting that made the decision to expel him. Bogdan was expelled at the end of March, but according to those documents (which were made available to Groza), the university’s student council held a meeting in May where they again voted unanimously for Bogdan’s expulsion, while the university’s trade union only had three people out of eleven voting against the expulsion during their meeting. “I don’t know whether it’s conformism or their genuine opinion,” commented Bogdan.
Both protocols contain identical conclusions:
“Taking into account the severity and the repeated character of the offense, along with the neglect of the established rules of behavior for students outside university grounds, we found it possible and reasonable to apply to B. Ovchinnikov the disciplinary measure of expulsion.”
Former students of Saint Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University Olga and Timur noted that their university’s student organizations haven’t reacted in any way to the expulsions and didn’t take part in the meetings where these decisions were made.
In March 2022, the administration of Saint Petersburg State University prepared to expel 13 students who were detained at various anti-war demonstrations. At the time, the chairman of the university’s student council, Mikhail Mochalov, told Kommersant that, “unfortunately, the opinion of the GSC (The Great Student Council of SPbU — Ed.) is only advisory in nature” and “these students are doomed.”
The Saint Petersburg State University Students’ Council has a Disciplinary Committee, an internal body charged with drafting the council’s opinions on disciplinary offenses. It consists mainly of law students.
Daniil Chmutov, the chairman of the SPbSU Disciplinary Committee, told Groza that in March they were charged with drafting the student council’s opinion on expelling the aforementioned 13 students.
“We said we were against the expulsion and started thinking what to do. Then we found out that other students were being expelled as well. We believe that if we have the opportunity to defend someone’s rights, we have the obligation to give it our best shot.”
The Disciplinary Committee assembled a group of council members and university students who gathered as much information as possible about the people who were on the expulsion list. One of them, Veronika Samusik, confirmed to Groza that it was Disciplinary Committee members who communicated with the students and worked to come up with a solution.
“Each student worked with a single member of the Disciplinary Committee, who monitored their situation and gave us information relating to their case: where they were detained, whether they challenged the court’s ruling, whether they had a lawyer. That way, we were always on top of the situation,” — recalled Daniil.
He explains that they were trying to stall for time to increase the students’ chances of resolving the problem. They cited the fact that according to the university’s charter, it was necessary to wait until the students would run out of time to submit their appeals to the courts in order for their rulings to come into effect. “We’ve for two months, during which the number of students to be expelled grew substantially. Apparently, the university administration then decided that expelling 80 people at once was too much.”
Veronica believes that she managed to avoid expulsion because “the student council made a fuss” and the media got involved. She noted that afterwards, many students were summoned for “conversations with [the First Vice-Rector for Youth Policy Alexander] Babich.”
“This story was heavily influenced by media coverage because the university is afraid of the attention. In general, it was a big team effort, involving both journalism students and volunteers from different faculties. We simply created a working model which was easy to follow,” said Daniil. “Additionally, the openness of the university’s administration helped, because it meant that I could come talk to them without needing an appointment — many universities don’t allow that. But if it wasn’t for the students, the administration would never have made that decision.”
Some of the students with whom Groza spoke decided to leave Russia after being expelled. Bogdan Ovchinnikov wrote a letter to the rector, but did not make it to court:
“To be honest, after expulsion I did not want to be involved in this any more — nor did I want to stay in Russia. The statute of limitations [of the university’s offenses] still allows me to sue the university, but after this September I don’t really want to.”
For some students it was important to defend their right to study. Daniil, formerly of the Tomsk Polytechnic University, has already filed a complaint with the rector against his unlawful expulsion and intends to go to court if necessary.
Olga from the Saint Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University immediately contacted a lawyer, saying, “First of all, I spent a lot of money on tuition. Secondly, this is lawlessness, and I do not like lawlessness. It is a matter of principle. And I just couldn’t let all the rubbish they said to me at that meeting slide. It sounded like complete propaganda nonsense.”
She filed a lawsuit to declare the university’s actions unlawful and a petition for a preliminary injunction in order to speed up the judicial process and not fall too far behind in her studies. Her injunction request was denied, but the court scheduled for a hearing to take place in three weeks after she filed the application. In the end, the university canceled the expulsion order even before the trial, so Olga withdrew the lawsuit. She was reinstated and is now continuing her studies.
Timur Garipov, despite being expelled almost at the same time as Olga, got a lawyer a little later, so he did not manage to be reinstated as quickly. He turned to the lawyers of the Net Freedoms human rights project, and filed a lawsuit in May to have the expulsion order declared illegal, himself reinstated, and his damages compensated. The court upheld his claim, and, as of the next semester, Timur is expected to return to his studies. In addition, he is set to receive a compensation of 20,000 rubles (approx. $241 — Ed.).
Eduard Koval, a freshman at the Kolyvan Agrarian College who was expelled for refusing to sing the national anthem and raise the Russian flag, was reinstated without a trial. Together with the lawyers of the human rights project for students Molnia, Eduard filed a complaint against the educational institution with the prosecutor’s office, which forwarded it to the Ministry of Education of the Novosibirsk Region. The governmental department found the college’s actions to be unlawful and ordered the student’s reinstatement.
