SUMMARY:

The article describes repeated attempts by Russian authorities to establish a well-ordered administration of the imperial universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. There were several reasons for the government’s discontent with the state of affairs in education: the recently founded Russian universities were a far cry from the ultimate benchmark – the old German universities – in terms of teaching and research results, while being equally suspicious as breeding grounds for subversive ideas. Since Alexander I’s accession to the throne, his reformist government was busy trying to introduce firm state control over universities simultaneously with taking the very first steps in laying the grounds for a modern bureaucratic regime of governance. Universities were a hotbed of producing modern knowledge and training future bureaucrats, and thus the modern state was created in Russia in the process of rationalizing the administration of universities.