Transnational processes of neoliberalization of academia has become a prominent topic in the scholarship on university politics and governance as well a field of struggle for academic communities across the world. While neoliberalization of universities is a transnational phenomenon, I would argue that there are differences how neoliberal transition “resides” within a variety of political and economic contexts. In this paper, I am tracing the forces that make up contemporary Russian university assemblage, i.e. in the context of what may be referred to as the neoliberal transition of post-socialist university politics. The research has been informed by the assemblage theorizing and non-local ethnography. Analysis shows how transnational neoliberal mechanisms of competitiveness, audit and surveillance are increasingly used in Russian universities restructure research and educational activities through ranking systems and “effective contracts”. The Russian government being a powerful force within the HE assemblage promotes neoliberal changes and, oftentimes, benefits from transnational academic competition to exercise its authoritarian politics. I further investigate how such changes correspond to subject positions at universities: while some people comply with the changes stressing its fairness in post-Soviet realities, others underline its negative affect on quality of research and education and create spaces of resistance.
