The Magnificent Corpse of Academia in Living Skin
There is a paradox that resists precise formulation, yet grows more visible through any serious discussion of the country's intellectual condition. Russian academia produces an enormous quantity of texts, dissertations, conferences, and monographs — while generating catastrophically little living knowledge. This is not a funding crisis, nor simply a brain drain problem, though both are present. It is a structural pathology of thought, so deeply entrenched that most of its carriers do not recognise it as pathology — they perceive it as normal. A norm that permeates both older and newer generations alike.
I. Substituting Classification for Understanding
Begin with the most obvious symptom. The academic machine, as currently configured, is trained not to produce explanations but to produce schemas. Elegant tables, multi-level typologies, itemised lists with sub-clauses — all of this creates the illusion of analytical work. But between classifying a phenomenon and understanding its nature lies an abyss. When a researcher constructs yet another "factor matrix," they are not answering the question "why does this happen?" — they are merely ordering the surface features of what they observe. This is positivism in its worst sense: a flat accumulation of facts presented as scientific analysis.
It is telling that this tendency manifests most acutely precisely where scholarship ought to engage with complex social processes. Economic research becomes statistical reporting. Sociology reduces to survey questionnaires. Historical scholarship fragments into micro-narratives, losing its capacity for synthesis. Political science reduces to describing institutions without analysing how they actually function. And all of this is produced in enormous volumes — because the machine demands a product, and the product is a text that has passed formal verification procedures.
One might put it plainly: academia does not exist. What exists is an academic corporation.
It is important not to confuse cause and effect here. The problem is not that individual scholars are lazy or dishonest — many have genuine research interests. The problem is that the institutional environment consistently rewards imitation and punishes attempts to break from accepted forms. Publication metrics, certification systems, funding mechanisms — all are calibrated to reproduce form rather than content. In such an environment, scholasticism is not an exception. It is a rational survival strategy.
The consequences, however, extend far beyond academic corridors. A society that does not produce living knowledge about itself goes blind. It cannot diagnose its own problems before they become crises. It cannot offer reasoned alternatives when old models stop working. Instead of analysis — rhetoric. Instead of forecasting — propaganda. Instead of concepts — slogans.
This is not an abstract threat. It is a description of the current state of affairs.
II. Three Managerial Pathologies
If the first part of the diagnosis concerns thinking, the second concerns institutions. Intellectual degradation does not occur by itself: it is reproduced through specific managerial practices that recur with striking consistency across Russian academic and research structures.
The first is the cult of loyalty over professionalism. In a healthy scientific environment, reputation is built on results: on the quality of research, on recognition from peers, on the capacity to withstand criticism. In ours, it is built on proximity to the right people. This is not merely an ethical problem — it is an epistemological catastrophe. When personnel decisions are made on the basis of personal loyalty rather than competence, knowledge ceases to be a criterion. It becomes a resource controlled by whoever controls access. Dissent — which is the very engine of science — is suppressed not through prohibition but through a subtler mechanism: the dissenter simply does not receive funding, positions, or publication platforms.
The second is the appropriation of results. Subordinates' successes are attributed to leadership; failures are attributed to those who carried out the work. This is not merely unjust — it destroys the incentives for genuine effort. Why produce original knowledge if it will simply be re-attributed? Why risk an unconventional hypothesis when you bear the cost of failure while your superior claims the credit for success? The system consistently selects not those who think, but those who know how to be useful at the right moment.
The third — and perhaps the most destructive — is managerial autism: complete deafness to feedback. Real problems are not discussed — they are suppressed or replaced by reports of successes. The person who exposes a systemic dysfunction is perceived not as a source of useful information, but as a source of threat. They are neutralised. As a result, the organisation loses its capacity for self-correction and drifts toward crisis with neither warning signals nor the tools to respond.
Together these three practices produce a distinctive type of academic organisation: externally active, filled with events, publications, and grand announcements — and internally hollow. A simulacrum of a scholarly institution: a structure that imitates the production of knowledge while actually occupied with reproducing itself as a bureaucratic unit.
What is most troubling is not that such structures exist. It is that they are resilient. They know how to survive, attract resources, and maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Their disappearance would require not the reform of individual institutions but a fundamental reconsideration of the logic by which intellectual activity is evaluated and funded in this country.
More striking still: many young oppositional organisations literally copy this model, attempting to replace one hierarchy with their own.
III. The Loss of Conceptual Language
Having described the pathology, the honest thing is to resist the temptation to offer a simple solution — that would be to reproduce the very logic being criticised. Easy prescriptions for complex systems are not analysis; they are rhetoric. Instead, let me identify what seems to me the central question.
Russian intellectual life has, to a significant degree, lost the capacity for what might be called the production of conceptual language. This is not the same as losing specific knowledge — facts can be gathered, data processed. Conceptual language is the system of categories through which a society describes itself and understands what is happening to it.
When this system degrades, its place is taken by ready-made imports: either Western theoretical frameworks applied mechanically, without attention to specificity, or archaic domestic constructions that have long since lost their explanatory power while retaining a ritual function.
This is precisely where a significant share of the problems facing any large integration or regional project in the post-Soviet space originates. Without its own analytical apparatus, without living historical and social schools, it is impossible to correctly describe either the specificity of a particular region or the logic of interaction between them. Elegant ideological concepts collapse at first contact with empirical reality — not because they are necessarily false, but because they have not been tested by genuine research. They were never verified; they were used as decoration.
This means that restoring a functional academic environment is not a narrowly professional task. It is a question of intellectual infrastructure, without which neither competent governance, nor long-term planning, nor coherent foreign policy is possible. Knowledge functions here much as roads or power grids do: its absence is invisible in the short term and destructive in the long.
IV. The Disease They Carry With Them
There is a temptation, having described the pathologies of large academic structures, to settle on a simple conclusion: large hierarchies are bad, therefore small horizontal associations are needed. This conclusion seems logical — and for that very reason it is dangerous. In practice we observe something quite different: critics of the academic vertical, in creating alternative centres, reproduce the same logic of control, only at smaller scale and with greater intensity. A micro-hierarchy proves no less suffocating than a macro one — it is simply more intimate.
The mechanism is clear when viewed honestly. A person who has grown up within a particular institutional culture absorbs not only its content but its form. When they leave — through conflict, disagreement, or the impossibility of self-realisation — they carry this form with them. Their grievances against the old structure may be entirely legitimate. But in building something new, they instinctively reproduce familiar patterns: the concentration of decisions in one pair of hands, intolerance of internal dissent, the cult of the founder, the ritual citation of their own texts as canon.
Instructive in this regard is the line of tension that ran through Soviet philosophy between those who worked with dialectics as a living method and those who transformed it into a nomenclatural ritual. Evald Ilyenkov was inconvenient precisely because he thought — that is, he asked questions that disturbed institutional comfort. Opposed to him was a different type: the conscientious systematiser whose academic career was built on reproduction and ordering rather than conceptual breakthroughs.
The conflict between these two logics — living thought and institutional scholasticism — was not resolved then. It has not been resolved since. And what is crucially important: it is reproduced not only in large academic structures, but in every small "independent centre" that is created as an alternative to them.
Because the problem is not the size of the structure. The problem is the logic of knowledge management.
V. Three Pathologies of Small Scale
A small research centre, founded by people with genuine intentions and a real intellectual agenda, not infrequently becomes — within a few years — the very thing it was created against. This is not malice aforethought. It is a structural regularity worth describing on its own terms.
First. In a small group, the concentration of influence happens faster and less visibly. A large bureaucracy has at least formal procedures that slow down arbitrariness. In a small centre, everything rests on personal relationships — which means any disagreement is immediately read as personal disloyalty. Intellectual discussion becomes impossible where it is indistinguishable from interpersonal conflict.
Second. Small centres are typically built around a single figure — a founder, an ideologist, a "chief theorist." This creates what might be called an intellectual monoculture: all ideas pass through a single lens, all conclusions are verified against a single conceptual framework. Diversity is simulated but not produced — participants write different texts on different topics, but within the same logic, because any deviation from it generates internal tension that no one wants.
Third. Small centres are especially vulnerable to the "scholasticism of living work" — the transformation of an initially vital idea into a frozen dogma. In a large structure, one dogma at least competes with others. In a small one, it monopolises the entire space. The founder once articulated a key concept — and from that moment the centre is occupied not with developing it but with defending and reproducing it. The concept ceases to be an instrument of inquiry and becomes a marker of identity. This is especially painful to observe when the original concept was genuinely interesting: the living thought is walled up inside a monument to itself.
The result is an ecosystem of small centres, each claiming to be an alternative to the academic vertical, that collectively reproduces the same vertical logic — simply fragmented into numerous small verticals, incapable either of cooperating with each other or of substantive mutual criticism. Instead of a horizontal network: a scatter of micro-hierarchies competing for the same limited audience.
VI. The Architecture of Failure
There are managerial pathologies that look like the personal failings of specific individuals — cowardice, dishonesty, arbitrariness. But if the same patterns recur in entirely different organisations, with different people, across different eras — the problem is not personal character. It is architecture.
In a rigid vertical hierarchy, information travels upward in filtered form: each level instinctively removes whatever might create problems for itself. What reaches the top is a picture increasingly at odds with reality. Decisions are made on the basis of this picture — and when they prove wrong, the mechanism for attributing failure is already built into the structure: the blame falls on those who executed, not those who decided on the basis of distorted information.
A leader who publicly accepts responsibility for failure is perceived in such a system not as honest, but as weak. The system consistently selects those who can evade accountability and eliminates those who cannot. After several such cycles of selection, those occupying key positions have a very particular set of skills — and a very particular relationship to knowledge as such.
Because in this logic, knowledge becomes dangerous. An accurate diagnosis of a problem implies the necessity of action; action implies the risk of error; error implies vulnerability. Better, then, not to know precisely. Better to work with blurred formulations that can be interpreted retrospectively in any direction. This is the institutional foundation of managerial autism: deafness to feedback is not a personal trait here — it is a structurally advantageous position.
The ostrich tactic and the personality cult appear to be different phenomena — one about concealment, the other about glorification. But they are produced by the same mechanism and serve complementary functions.
The ostrich tactic is not simply the avoidance of unwelcome news. It is the active maintenance of a particular version of reality within the organisation. When the person who exposes a problem is removed — dismissed, marginalised, discredited — everyone else receives a very clear signal: noticing problems is permissible, speaking about them is not. Gradually a collective blindness forms that is no longer pretence — people genuinely stop noticing what they are punished for noticing. This is the classic mechanism of institutional repression: an organisation protects its picture of the world exactly as the psyche protects traumatic zones.
The personality cult in academic hierarchy functions as a compensatory mechanism. The greater the divergence between reality and the official picture, the more urgently needed is an authority beyond question. If one cannot appeal to results — because the results are unsatisfactory — one can appeal to the person. The leader ceases to be a function and becomes a symbol. Their biography is mythologised, their texts are canonised, their decisions receive sacred justification after the fact.
In a small centre, the personality cult is often more intense and more suffocating than in a large bureaucracy, precisely because there are no formal procedures there to constrain it even partially. The founder's personal charisma converts directly into intellectual authority, and intellectual authority converts directly into administrative control. Three types of power fuse into a single point.
For knowledge, this means the end. Not because any specific leader is foolish or dishonest. But because knowledge by its nature requires the possibility of being wrong, of being challenged, of being revised. Where the bearer of authority cannot by definition be mistaken, knowledge is displaced by dogma — and the organisation begins to reproduce not the understanding of reality but the legitimation of decisions already taken.
VII. Heterarchy as Answer
To speak of heterarchy in the Russian academic context is to immediately encounter two types of objection: "this is a Western concept inapplicable to our conditions," and "this is anarchy that produces nothing." Both are symptomatic — they reproduce exactly the logic that a heterarchical approach is designed to overcome.
Heterarchy is not the absence of structure, nor horizontal chaos. It is a system in which different nodes hold different types of authority depending on the context of the task. Not one centre to which everything is subordinated, but multiple centres of competence, each authoritative within its domain and capable of interacting with the others without compelled subordination. Hierarchy does not disappear here — it becomes situational and functional rather than permanent and status-based.
The modular approach adds the following: research units are built as relatively autonomous modules with clearly defined interfaces for interaction — a shared conceptual language, common methodological standards, transparent mechanisms for mutual criticism. Each module operates according to its own internal logic, but its results are compatible with those of others. This means the system as a whole is capable of scaling without loss of quality — which is fundamentally unachievable in a rigid vertical structure, where scaling inevitably produces bureaucracy.
What does this mean concretely? First, abandoning the model of a "scientific school" as a group of followers gathered around a single master — in favour of a research community united by a shared problematic rather than personal loyalty. Second, the institutionalisation of disagreement: mechanisms for internal criticism must be built into the structure rather than suppressed by it. Third, the separation of types of authority: a person may be a recognised expert in one domain while having no administrative power over those working in adjacent ones. Fourth, synthesis generated through the collision of contradictions and different critical perspectives.
VIII. How Living Knowledge Actually Works
A heterarchical system is organised in one fundamentally different way: there is no single point controlling simultaneously the production of knowledge, its verification, and the distribution of resources. Separating these functions across different nodes of the network is not merely an organisational decision — it is an epistemological one. It makes impossible the type of institutional defence of a picture of the world described above.
When the centre of competence in one domain does not coincide with the centre of administrative influence, the transfer of responsibility becomes significantly more difficult. There is no one to shift blame down the vertical — because the vertical in the old sense no longer exists. There are nodes with different types of authority, and each answers for its domain to the community as a whole, not to a superior. This changes incentives: diagnostic accuracy becomes advantageous here, because reputation is built on the quality of judgements rather than proximity to the right people.
The ostrich tactic loses its purpose in a heterarchical network for a different reason: information in such a system does not travel through a single channel from bottom to top. It circulates between nodes along multiple routes simultaneously. To silence a problem in one node does not remove it from the system. Another node working on adjacent problems may register the same symptoms independently. This creates built-in redundancy — what engineers call fault tolerance.
The personality cult is structurally impossible in such an architecture — not because the people in it are more virtuous, but because the concentration of three types of power in a single point is not provided for by the system's own logic. Authority here is always partial and contextual: you are a recognised expert in your field, but this does not grant you automatic rights to determine the agenda in someone else's. This is not humiliation — it is normal epistemology.
In a hierarchical system, knowledge accumulates in nodes and congeals there. It becomes the property of the structure, a marker of its identity, an object of protection. In a heterarchical network, knowledge circulates — between nodes, between domains, between scales. Each node produces something of its own, but does so with open interfaces: its results are available for use, criticism, and supplementation by other nodes.
This is precisely where what hierarchy is fundamentally incapable of producing emerges: synthesis through the collision of different competences. When a research centre working on the economic history of a region interacts directly with a group engaged in the anthropology of the same space — and both are in dialogue with people working on institutional theory — questions arise that none of them could have formulated alone. This is the living production of knowledge. Not the classification of what is already known, but the discovery of the new through the productive friction of different optics.
Conclusion
The problem with Russian academia is not that the alternative described here is impossible in principle. The problem is that the existing incentives — financial, professional, reputational — are calibrated against it. They reward the concentration of influence, not its distribution. They encourage the reproduction of hierarchy rather than its functional flexibility.
Changing this without changing the incentives themselves is impossible. And so the conversation about heterarchy is not only a conversation about organisational forms. It is a conversation about what we consider valuable in intellectual activity: status or results, loyalty or competence, form or content.
A network in this sense is not the sum of its nodes. It is an environment in which connections become possible that are impossible within any single node in isolation. The result here is not the outcome of producing forms or corporate deliverables — it is unceasing living thought, capable of continuously generating the new within the walls of universities and research institutions alike. And this is the only way out of the closed circle in which Russian academic life has reproduced itself for several decades running.
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