higher school

The historiography of higher education is often characterized by a watershed presented by the events of 1917. The change in social and political structures opened a new era in the history of Russian higher education. However, with such an approach, it is often forgotten that the changes of the first decades of Soviet power were experienced by people formed in the old, pre-revolutionary tradition. This situation is typical as well for higher education, where the inertia of its existence under the old regime was preserved throughout the 1920s. First of all, this inertia can be traced in the forms of organization of student self-government. The main and senior body of mutual economic assistance among the students was the fraternities. Initially, from the first half of the 19th century, they provided active material support to the out-of-town students. In this article, using the example of St. Petersburg / Petrograd / Leningrad University we will trace the history of fraternities, define the features of their legislative status, connections with political movements. The analysis allowed the author to come to the conclusion that both in the Tsarist and in the Soviet period, the fraternities in many aspects faced similar problems. Being organs of grassroots initiative, they were weakly amenable to control, bureaucratization, their activities did not coincide much with the existing legislative provisions. And most importantly, they were considered to be bodies of possible protest. Therefore, in the Soviet period, during the tightening of political control, such organizations were doomed to be closed, as they seemed to be a place of concentration of non-party people, i. e. a potentially hostile studentship.