Modern Russian Higher Education on the Eve of Transformations

The article is devoted to the consideration of a wide range of problems of development of domestic higher education, and, first of all, the problem of continuity in this process. The reason for these discussions was the announcement of the beginning of the next stage of its reform, the current round of which is associated with the adoption of new strategies and programs aimed at achieving the desired scientific and technological leadership of the country. In this regard, an attempt was made to critically understand historical experience, aimed at revealing the roots of negative phenomena in modern Russian higher education. The leading method in this case was a comparative historical analysis of the conditions and circumstances of the formation of prerevolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet modes of higher professional education. It is noted that the key parameters of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet models were determined by their systematic integration into large-scale state projects related to the technological and cultural development of the modern way of life. The root cause of most of the problems in post-Soviet higher education is the collapse of the Soviet project itself, which left the complex subsystem of higher education in a situation of almost complete non-compliance with the new parameters of a sharply simplified social system. For various reasons, a radical reform of the educational sphere did not take place, and as a result, an independent post-Soviet model of higher education did not actually emerge. Instead, we observe a steadily regressing set of fragments of the former Soviet model and selectively borrowed individual elements of the Western model. The permanent reforms that have been ongoing in the meantime have not had the desired effect in the more than a third of a century that they have been implemented. The critical component of the work itself is directed at the inadequacy of the perception of foreign experience, which manifests itself in the mythologization of the Soviet and the fetishization of the Western. As a result, the conclusion is made that the improvement of the sphere of higher education is possible only under the conditions of the adoption and implementation of a project for system-wide development, clearly formulated in interconnected categories of value guidelines and socio-economic goals.