The St. Petersburg Times
Marina Shishkina, the dean of the journalism faculty of St. Petersburg State University, was fired this month by the university’s rector, Nikolai Kropachev.
During the past year, Shishkina had made statements critical of Kropachev, challenging what she described as “the authoritarian style of managing one of Russia’s oldest and most prestigious universities.”
According to the official version, voiced by Mikhail Kudilinsky, the university’s deputy rector for legal issues, Shishkina lost her job for “failing to perform her duties and violating the university’s charter.” A date for the election of a new dean will be set in the near future and held within the next two months, Kudilinsky added.
Anatoly Puyu, the first deputy dean of the journalism faculty, has been appointed acting dean until the election takes place.
Shishkina’s troubles began in September last year, when the Dzerzhinsky district court began reviewing cases against Shishkina and her husband Sergei Petrov, the former dean of the medical faculty.
Both cases were filed by the university’s president, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, who alleges that Petrov and Shishkina have made libelous statements discrediting one of Russia’s oldest and most respected academic institutions.
The investigators also allege that Shishkina embezzled university funds and abused her position. The investigation claims that at least half a million rubles ($17,000) have been misappropriated. Shishkina says that the prosecutors are trying to frame her, and that the real reasons behind the prosecution are entirely political.
Petrov began the conflict by publishing a revealing and critical interview on a popular web site, in which he accused the school’s management of authoritarian rule, rigid attitudes and the suppression of alternative opinions. Shishkina supported her husband’s crusade with a series of interviews in the media, in which she drew a sobering picture of what she described as the university’s “murky and non-transparent decision-making process” and “the oppressive rule of rector Nikolai Kropachev, who hides behind the facade of fighting corruption and instead uses all the administrative tools available to him to assert his personal power.”
Shishkina alleged that, having replaced Lyudmila Verbitskaya as the university’s rector in May 2008, Kropachev adopted a practice of launching vendettas against anyone who criticized his policies. The journalism dean said an atmosphere of fear and intimidation now reigns at the university, and that she and her husband are paying the price for being among the very few who dared to offer resistance.
The dismissed dean said the embezzlement charges were concocted using a bureaucratic trick. She insisted the journalism faculty has a transparent system of financial management.
“I was getting a salary of 80,000 rubles ($2,700); that figure was never a secret,” she said.”The investigators argue that I did not have the right to sign payslips for extra-budgetary earnings for myself and my staff — which is not true. This practice is legal and fully transparent and it existed for many years with no complaints — until I dared to tell the truth about the autocracy that reigns at the school.”
In December 2009, in the wake of the investigation, which has so far led nowhere, Shishkina was suspended from her job.
Shishkina said she had only found out about her dismissal from the media, and that she was considering taking the case to court.
In addition to her position as the journalism faculty dean, Shishkina was also deputy head of the university’s trade union. “I have met with the union’s representatives and discovered that Kropachev did not get their approval before firing me,” Shishkina said.
In order to illustrate her accusations of Kropachev acting like an authoritarian leader, Shishkina often mentioned in interviews the fact that the university’s rector had secured the right to personally dismiss any member of university staff, including faculty deans, despite the fact that the position of dean is an elected post.
“Now my own dismissal is a compelling enough illustration of the feudal principals of running the university that flourish under Kropachev,” Shishkina said, adding that she had not had a chance to discuss the situation with Kropachev face-to-face, though she would very much have liked to.
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