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Legacy, Bureaucracy, and Meritocracy of Leviathan: Student Representation in Post-Soviet Russia
This chapter investigates features of the Russian system of student representation including the context of socio-political post-communist transitions in recent decades. While earlier student professional unions were the only significant student representation bodies in Russia, in the 2010s the new legislation have been forced universities to create representation councils for considering student opinion on matters of disciplinary sanctions and local regulations. Five current key representation origins include educational units, thematic extracurricular clubs, dormitories, professional unions, and personal leadership teams. The main activities of the representation institutions are bureaucracy-, information-, or entertainment-related. Approximately one third of universities include students in the real decision-making processes. The national level of student representation has a corporatist nature, with several government-supervised organizations and without decision rights in public policy making. The chapter strongly highlights the decisive role of government agencies and university officials in Russian student representation, and briefly discusses alternative non-institutional activism and cooperation.