ABSTRACT
This chapter explores several interconnected dimensions of the ongoing efforts to construct or, perhaps more accurately, to reconstruct higher education networks in Russia and Central Eurasia, a region sometimes referred to as the “post-Soviet space” (Segbers, 2001; Trenin, 2011). This chapter constitutes a preliminary element of a larger study on the formation, collapse, and subsequent partial reformation of networks of “soft power” around the Russian Federation (until 1991 the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic or RSFSR, which was throughout its history the economic, political, and educational core of the USSR). Until the 1980s, the 15 constituent republics of the USSR, along with key Soviet allies and client states, had been closely integrated into the Soviet system of higher educational exchanges and research collaboration. These networks extended throughout the socialist “bloc” and were especially strong in Central and East European higher education. Focused on cultivating emerging elites and ideological sympathizers, this included additional rings of relations and educational exchanges around the socialist bloc network and extended to selected states in the “nonaligned” and developing world in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (Tsvetkova, 2008).
