What Was the St. Petersburg State University?
The university was founded on 28 January 1724, the day Peter the Great signed a decree authorising the Russian Academy of Sciences. The university — initially the Akademicheskiy universitet — was a department of the Academy, not an autonomous body, and Peter staffed it from abroad: of the first 17 professors, 11 were German, 4 French, 1 Swiss. Teaching was in Latin. The first Russian language of instruction was introduced only in 1766, by Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev. The institution has had a continuous existence since 1724 (Lentin, Petri Primi Academia, 1995; Freeze, Russian Levites, 1977).
Lomonosov
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov arrived in Moscow in January 1731 disguised as a nobleman’s son and entered the Slavic Greek Latin Academy; the procurator of the Academy of Sciences, Johann Schöpf, sent him to Marburg to study with Christian Wolff. On his return to St Petersburg in 1741, Lomonosov was admitted to the Academy and made professor of chemistry in 1745. He re-founded the university in 1747 as the Moscow University (a separate institution), drafted the first Russian grammar and the first Russian textbook of rhetoric, and worked out the doctrine of the trikhravye (three styles) that became the basis of modern Russian literary prose. He died on 15 April 1765 in St Petersburg and is buried in the Lavra (Lentin, 1995).
The nineteenth century
The university was reorganised by the 1819 Statute under the Ministry of Education. The faculties, in the 1819 form, were: history and philology, physics and mathematics, law, and medicine. Of the 1,250 students enrolled in 1855, 36 percent were from the hereditary dvoryanstvo, 22 percent from the personal nobility, 25 percent from clerical families, and 17 percent from the meshchanstvo and kupchestvo. Women were admitted as volnye slushatel’nitsy (free auditors) in 1869. Chemistry under Mendeleev (1855–1890), physiology under Ivan Sechenov and Ivan Pavlov, and the legal-historical school of Milyukov and Kareev were the major centres of reputation in the late empire (Freeze, 1977; Rauch, Politics of Education in Imperial Russia, 1969).
Political role
The university was the site of the November 1861 student demonstrations, the 1899 and 1901 expulsions, and the 1905 student strikes. In February 1917 the Petrograd University building on Vasilyevsky Island served as the meeting place of the provisional Committee of the State Duma; in October 1917 the same building was the headquarters of the Military Revolutionary Committee during the Bolshevik seizure of power. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) was admitted to the university as an external student in 1887, was expelled in December 1887 for participation in a student demonstration, was readmitted in 1890, and was awarded the degree of candidate of law in 1891 — without having attended a single lecture.
The Soviet and post-Soviet university
The university was renamed Leningrad State University in 1924; renamed Leningrad State University (order of Lenin, 1940); and renamed St Petersburg State University in 1992. After the 1992 reorganisation, the university adopted a Statute that restored the Akademicheskiy universitet of 1724 as its formal name and re-established the post of rektor in place of the Soviet pro-rektor chain. Mathematics (P. L. Chebyshev, A. A. Markov, V. A. Steklov, S. V. Kovalevskaya, the St Petersburg school of A. N. Kolmogorov) and chemistry (Mendeleev, Butlerov, Favorsky) remained the dominant international schools (Rauch, 1969; Dunning, Science and the State in Russia, 1999).
The university today
The university occupies the Twelve Collegia building on the Neva embankment and the eighteenth-century buildings of the Petergof and Stary Peterhof campuses. In 2022, the Russian Ministry of Education reported an enrolment of about 28,000 students in the St Petersburg division, of whom about 5,000 were from outside the Russian Federation. The faculty of medicine, the faculty of law, the faculty of Asian and African studies (founded 1855 as the Faculty of Oriental Languages), and the mathematics research institutes remain the strongest of the post-Soviet institution. The Imperial-era research and teaching tradition has been disrupted twice — by the Civil War and the Stalinist reorganisation of the universities between 1929 and 1941 — but a continuous institutional record exists (Dunning, 1999).