The Danyuk Project

At the end of October, Kommersant journalist Alexander Chernykh set off for the Congress of University Deputy Rectors Responsible for Student Welfare. He thought it would be good for a laugh…

Alexander Chernykh was in the congress audience when Nikita Danyuk, deputy director of the Institute of Strategic Studies and Forecasting at the People’s Friendship University, took the microphone. Danyuk said that he was supervising a programme, now in its second year, which organised special lectures and discussions in Russian higher education institutes to assess the “protest potential” of students; and that the findings were then being passed to representatives of “the appropriate specialist organisations.”

Apparently, over the past two years, the authors of the programme “Scenarios for Russia’s future” have taken soundings in more than 40 universities in Moscow and 10 in the regions.

Chernykh’s piece in Kommersant attracted some 250 comments. Some were very critical of Mr Danyuk.

Andrei: “You come to an institution, engage students in political discussion and then draw up a list to be sent ‘to the proper quarters.’ What kind of ideological battle for the hearts and minds of the younger generation is that? You will simply make them even more resistant to authority. Underground clubs, some of them radical, will flourish – you have only to read your history. You are reactionaries repeating the mistakes made a hundred years ago.”

Others see Mr Danyuk in a more heroic role.

Secretservis: “Some of our higher education institutes have long since become gigantic fifth-column training centres, where the teaching staff is ENTIRELY made up of dissidents on grants and ‘white-ribboners’ [reference to the protest marches of 2011/12]; lectures are openly anti-Russian and make use of terminology from the Maidan. One of them, I can tell you, is the Yeltsin Ural Federal University.”

When leading media outlets took up the theme, Mr Danyuk started back-pedalling: “We are not doing any such assessments (of opposition-minded students and lecturers). I only said that this kind of work is being used in the West to organise ‘colour revolutions.’ And we are certainly not drawing up any reports for the special services.”

Unfortunately for Mr Danyuk, Alexander Chernykh had kept a sound-recording of Danyuk’s speech at the congress and he posted it: “The results of this project were used to put together extensive empirical and analytical material, forming the basis for confidential information sent to officials, among others, as well as to ‘representatives’ of certain specialised organisations. These ‘reports’ are used to assess the protest potential not only of the students, but also – most importantly! – of the teaching staff. Unfortunately, members of the teaching staff are unashamedly peddling destructive propaganda of anti-state ideas.”

Mr Danyuk’s “Scenarios for Russia’s future” clearly has official blessing: gazeta.ru discovered that the Danyuk Project has received 12 million roubles in grants during 2015 and 2016.

Despite this, political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky is not inclined to take the Danyuk Project seriously: “It’s a pressure group of marginal idiots… today’s revelations have left them high and dry and this is the only result of their work. They have shown themselves to be people one should have nothing to do with, because the questions they ask are loaded. From now on it will be impossible to have any faith in sociology because it’s absolutely obvious that the sociologist is a government agent with whom all conversation should be avoided.”

Pavel Kudyukin, co-chair of the University Solidarity movement, agrees with Belkovsky’s assessment. “It’s simply information-gathering for political denunciations. After these lectures and chat sessions with lecturers and students, the officials have to write up confidential reports for ‘the eyes of government agencies only.’”

But should we be relaxed? Opposition politician Gennady Gudkov thinks not: “In essence, the regime is intent on establishing the most rigorous ideological control over Russian universities. This means that all honourable, talented and conscientious professors, readers and postgraduate students will be kicked out of institutions, and their places taken by grey, faceless, but loyal lecturers, ready and willing for the sake of political advancement or on orders from the management to assert that the Sun is once more turning around the Earth.”

Journalist Oleg Kashin thinks that the system has already reached the point where the pursuers are short of ordinary victims, so they need to attack their own people (students and teachers in pro-government institutions, for instance): “Danyuk may have been looking for protest potential in universities, but others will soon start searching for it in state corporations, the army, the police, and then in the Kremlin itself. This is a process which can no longer be stopped – one can only hold one’s breath and watch…”

Watch this space.