ABSTRACT
Like Moscow State, Ural State University belongs to the group of classical universities with a wide range of programs in the humanities, the social, natural, and hard sciences. Unlike MSU, it does not have a pre-Soviet history: it was founded three years after the October Revolution of 1917 with the explicit goal to prepare specialists for the Soviet state. Located on the border between Europe and Asia, USU does not have the benefits of Moscow’s academic infrastructure and had to establish its own channels of communication with Western scholarly communities. USU is a central university in the Ural Region and therefore influential in the development of economics in the territory outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
