The presidium of the Vak left Medinsky as a doctor of historical sciences, so as not to create a precedent. What does the council's recommendation to revoke a medical doctorate mean?
MOSCOW, October 20 - RIA Novosti. The Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission recommended that the Ministry of Education and Science not deprive Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky degree Doctor of Sciences. Medinsky himself told reporters about this.
"70 percent are for, 30 percent are against," he said after the meeting, which he attended in person.
"Some remarks of the members of the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission were of a very balanced, meaningful nature, and I will take into account in my future work," the minister stressed.
He added that he was grateful to the presidium for objectivity in considering his scientific work. The minister noted that the comments of the presidium members were balanced and meaningful and promised to take them into account in further work.
Later, he once again spoke with words of gratitude, this time on Twitter.
Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission for more than 2 hours today. dealt with my "dissertation case"
I thank the scientists for a balanced and honest approach https://t.co/bqmU2DxWT6— Vladimir Medinsky (@medinskiy_vr) October 20, 2017
In addition, Medinsky said that he plans to publish selected passages from his dissertation for "more popular reading", providing the text with comments, and expressed the hope that the publication will find its reader.
According to the minister, this whole long story, "reminiscent of a bad TV series," has a plus.
"It lies in the fact that - as a rule - no one, except for opponents, reads scientific works, and in general people know little of our history, especially history XV-XVII centuries,” he said.
The Ministry of Education and Science announced that in the near future they would prepare an order based on the recommendations of the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission. He will put an end to this story.
What is wrong with the dissertation of the Minister of Culture
Vladimir Medinsky defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic "Problems of objectivity in the coverage of Russian history second half of the XV-XVII centuries" at the Russian State Social University (RGSU) in 2011.
In April 2016, Ivan Babitsky, a member of the Dissernet community, questioned the scientific value of this work. He called the minister's dissertation absurd, partly plagiarized and appealed to the Ministry of Education and Science with a request to deprive him of his doctorate historical sciences.
Medinsky himself claimed that his opponents failed to find plagiarism in the dissertation, and the rest of the claims are related to the subjective perception of history.
Since the dissertation council of the RSSU had already been dissolved by that time, the issue of the preservation of the degree was transferred to the walls of the Ural Federal University.
At the appointed time, the meeting of the dissertation council of UrFU did not take place, since Medinsky did not come to it. The head of the VAK, Vladimir Filippov, promised that the dissertation would be considered at the Faculty of History of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov, but in March 2017 the dissertation council at the faculty was closed.
As a result, the package of documents was submitted to the dissertation council of Belgorod State University, which nevertheless found no reason to deprive Medinsky of his degree.
Nevertheless, in October 2017, the Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission recommended that Medinsky be stripped of his Doctor of History degree. The decision was adopted by a majority vote and was advisory in nature. In the opinion of those who voted in favor, Medinsky's study was performed at a low level and does not contain new scientific knowledge.
Commendable
In the Russian Military Historical Society, the decision of the VAK Presidium was called the triumph of scientific and simply human justice.
“We have witnessed, let’s say, not a very good, politicized story related to attempts to deprive Vladimir Rostislavovich Medinsky of his academic degree. I have repeatedly said and now I will repeat - if Medinsky is not a historian, then who is our historian?” Vladimir Kononov, executive director of the RVIO, told RIA Novosti.
The head of the State Duma Committee on the Development of Civil Society, Issues of Public and Religious Associations, Sergei Gavrilov, also supported the decision of the VAK presidium. According to him, it confirmed the nature and results of the discussion of the minister's work at Belgorod University.
At the same time, he highly appreciated the dissertation itself.
"I support the general opinion scientific community, such an adequate scientific community that the work deserves this high degree of doctoral dissertation, that it not only deserves, it is in many ways a breakthrough,” Gavrilov said.
He noted the high scientific relevance of the dissertation, because it studies the historical period "from the point of view of the maximum objective study of the events of Russia, freeing it, among other things, from the mythologies of Western European schools."
"This is very important inner work. It's an interesting methodology," he said.
At the same time, criticism of Medinsky's work, according to the deputy, is politicized and personal. Many are not satisfied with the language, but it is "fresh and new" and the text is easy to read, Gavrilov noted.
After the work of Medinsky, the deputy believes, new followers of such a scientific approach will appear, moreover, perhaps "a scientific school will arise."
The situation around Vladimir Medinsky's doctoral dissertation.
The situation with the dissertation of Vladimir Medinsky, which seemed to have been resolved after the decision of the Belgorod Discussion Council on the absence of claims to scientific work Minister, was again in the spotlight. On Monday, the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission on history by a majority of votes recommended to deprive the minister of the degree of doctor of historical sciences. Vladimir Medinsky himself has not yet commented on the situation, his assistant advised him to “ignore” this decision. The minister has a chance to keep his degree: the recommendation of the expert council must be approved by the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission.
Ivan Babitsky, an expert of the Dissernet network community, who was present at the meeting, announced the decision of the expert council on history. “The thing that had to happen happened. The expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission on history has just decided by an overwhelming majority to support our application to deprive Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, ”he wrote in Facebook.
Recall that an application demanding to deprive Mr. Medinsky of his doctoral degree was filed in April 2016 by historians Vyacheslav Kozlyakov and Konstantin Yerusalimsky and linguist Ivan Babitsky. In their opinion, the minister's dissertation "Problems of objectivity in the coverage of Russian history in the second half of the 15th-17th centuries" is unscientific. In addition, they pointed to plagiarism and forgery when preparing a dissertation - according to them, the minister referred to non-existent monographs. Their application was to be considered first by the Ural Federal University Discussion Council, then by the Moscow State University Discussion Council. As a result, the work of Mr. Medinsky was evaluated in July 2017 by the dissertation council of Belgorod State University, whose members refused to recognize the presence of plagiarism. According to them, the minister's dissertation "contains some elements of tendentiousness," but its scientific nature has not suffered from this.
“Members of the Belgorod dissident council attended the meeting of the expert council on Monday. They insisted that they were not supposed to evaluate the minister's dissertation itself, but only the credibility of our statement, ”the Dissernet expert told Kommersant. Also at the meeting were members of the RSSU discouncil, where the minister defended his dissertation. “They were asked why it happened that all three opponents of the minister were not experts on the topic of his dissertation. They answered: “We have no doubt that they have a broad scientific outlook,” said Mr. Babitsky. As a result, the council voted in favor of the recommendation to deprive the minister of his degree. A member of the expert council, Doctor of Historical Sciences Marina Moseykina, in an interview with Kommersant, emphasized that "during the voting, the majority voted in favor, but the decision was not made unanimously."
Vladimir Medinsky himself, who called the claims against his dissertation a "political order", has not yet commented on the council's decision. His assistant, scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society, Mikhail Myagkov, called the decision "predictable, but not final." “They ignored the decisions taken earlier by Moscow State University and Belgorod University not to deprive Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences,” Mr. Myagkov noted in an interview with RIA Novosti. ". The assistant minister advised "not to pay much attention" to the position of the expert council, stressing that final decision will be issued by the presidium of the VAK.
Indeed, according to the standard procedure, the recommendation of the expert council is considered and approved by the presidium. “The Expert Council is the highest professional authority. And on the presidium there are people from all councils, all specialties, historians there are no more than 15%, - Mr. Babitsky told Kommersant. - Usually he accepts the recommendations of the expert council. There are rare, isolated cases when new circumstances or additions appear - then the case is again returned to the expert council. But more often than not, the presidium simply agrees with the opinion of experts.” Dissernet suggests that this time everything could be different: “The story is very resonant, dedicated to the dissertation of a high-ranking official, and we understand that under such political circumstances, the presidium will be able to come up with some way out so that the minister retains his degree and face ". Nevertheless, the applicant believes that he has won a moral victory: “It is no longer so important whether he will have a crust or not. The Expert Council is the highest authority in the country's historical community."
The head of the VAK, Vladimir Filippov, was unavailable for comment. A source in the Higher Attestation Commission noted in a conversation with Kommersant that “today there was only a meeting of the expert council”: “Whatever decision they make, everything will still be decided at the presidium on October 20.” Member of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission, Head of the Department of the History of Ideas and Methodology of Historical Science high school Economics Igor Danilevsky also did not comment on the information about the decision of the expert council: "We have not yet received the materials of the council in the presidium."
Alexander Chernykh, Valeria Mishina
The expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC) recommended depriving Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences. He announced this on his page in Facebook one of the applicants for depriving Medinsky of his degree, an expert of the Dissernet community, Ivan Babitsky.
“The expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission on history by an overwhelming majority decided, contrary to the conclusion of the Belgorod council, to support our application to deprive Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences,” Babitsky said.
Medinsky's dissertation entitled "Problems of objectivity in the coverage of Russian history in the second half of the 15th-17th centuries." was defended in 2011 in the dissent council at the RSSU, the rector of which was fired by the former Minister of Education Dmitry Livanov due to plagiarism in her own dissertation.
The issue with the dissertation was planned to be resolved by the end of January 2017. However, in February, Ivan Tuchkov, dean of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, said that the university's dissertation council refused to further consider the dissertation, not finding plagiarism in it.
In July 2017 dissertation dissertation council of Belgorod State University.
However, following the meeting, 19 representatives of the dissident council voted to leave Medinsky with the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences. 3 people abstained, no one voted against.
“Theoretically, the presidium has the right to disagree with the expert council, but in practice there was no such case. There have been situations when the presidium agrees with us, but the expert council does not, but for the expert council to agree with us, but the presidium does not, this has never happened,” one of the founders of Dissernet commented on the situation to Gazeta.Ru » Andrey Zayakin.
“The decision of the expert council is advisory in nature, and has a recommendatory character. There were precedents when the expert council made one decision, and the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission - another. In this case, I believe, the principle of professionalism was not respected - the decision was biased, and it was made by the majority negatively disposed towards the dissertation.
The decision of the Moscow State University and the positive decision of the Belgorod University were ignored. I hope that the decision of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission will be objective and take into account the opinions of the dissenting councils of the two universities, ”Mikhail Myagkov, scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society, told Gazeta.ru.
The decision was announced at 16:45 Moscow time, Babitsky specified. 17 people voted for the deprivation of Medina's doctorate in history, three against and one abstention. The voting was secret, he told RBC. Medinsky himself was not at the council, Babitsky remarked. Instead of the minister, his representatives were present at the VAK: Head of the Center for the History of Wars and Geopolitics of the Institute world history RAS Mikhail Myagkov, presenter Researcher Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Konstantin Averyanov and member of the Public Council of the Ministry of Culture Sergei Chernyakhovsky.
Denmark is not Scandinavia
Ivan Babitsky filed an application for depriving Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences in April 2016, in addition to him, two doctors of historical sciences were among the applicants - Konstantin Yerusalimsky and Vyacheslav Kozlyakov. The applicants' comments relate to the Minister's scientific methodology, which he used in his dissertation. Medinsky evaluates historical events in his work, weighing them "on the scales of Russia's national interests", and this contradicts the scientific approach, which presupposes objectivity and non-judgment in the analysis of the material, the applicants pointed out. In addition, Medinsky, they noted, incorrectly formatted references to sources. Thus, Medinsky referred to a “scandalous for serious research” resource specializing in the sale of abstracts on the Internet.
Scientists believe that the minister's text is "replete with gross errors." For example, he writes that during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, church books in Russia were written in Russian, so it was easy to understand them, in contrast to the religious works of Catholics and Protestants, written in Latin. “In one sentence, he was able to show that he knew nothing about such a phenomenon as the Church Slavonic language, nor about the translation Holy Scripture on the German made by Luther,” the statement said. In addition, Medinsky believes that the Russians were the first among the Europeans to face the attack of non-Christians. However, two and a half centuries before the baptism of Russia (988 AD), in 732, in the battle of Poitiers, the French stopped the invasion of the Arabs, scientists remind. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, an Italian humanist of the 15th century, Medinsky considers a German, and disputes the version of the origin of Rurik from Denmark by saying that the annals say: the prince was a Varangian and came from Scandinavia (Denmark belongs to Scandinavia).
Intermediate Solution
The recommendation to deprive Medinsky of his academic degree does not mean that the minister will lose it. After the decision of the expert council, the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission chaired by the head of this structure, the rector of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia Vladimir Filippov, should make its conclusion. The final decision of the Presidium is approved by the Ministry of Education and Science.
Prior to the expert council, Medinsky's dissertation materials were considered by three dissertation councils. In October 2016, the VAK sent them to the Ural federal university in Yekaterinburg, but the meeting was first canceled at the request of Medinsky, who could not come due to a busy schedule, and a few days later the dissertation was withdrawn because the deadline for its consideration had expired. In February 2017, Moscow State University did not become the Minister's work on the merits, since no plagiarism was found in it. At that time, some members of the dissenting council stated that the MSU experts were not provided with a dissertation for consideration at all.
In July 2017, the dissertation council of Belgorod State University to deprive Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences - 19 out of 22 members of the council voted in support of the minister. In addition, the council concluded that the announcement of the Minister's deprivation of the degree was made in a "cheeky, offensive tone that has nothing to do with scientific discussion."
Mikhail Myagkov, a supporter of Medinsky, from the Center for the History of Wars and Geopolitics of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that the expert council showed "unprofessionalism" because it did not take into account the position of the BelSU and Moscow State University dissident councils. “In any case, this is a technical decision, which, in fact, means nothing. We are waiting for the meeting of the presidium of the VAK,” Myagkov summed up.
Calls the decision "" and the press secretary of Medinsky Irina Kaznacheeva. “If you remember, there was a positive conclusion of two dissenting councils - Moscow State University and BelSU. At BelSU, it was decided by an overwhelming majority that the work corresponds to a scientific degree. So the presidium of the VAK will figure everything out, ”she told RBC. The meeting of the presidium, at which they can decide on Medinsky's dissertation, will be held on October 20, Babitsky told RBC.
“We received an order at our level, considered what was ordered, and made a decision. The professional community is guided by professional motives. It is difficult for me to comment on today's decision, because I do not know the kitchen of the VAK expert council. But this doesn’t concern us anymore and we won’t do anything, since we have done our job, and it’s hard for me to say why it happened today, ”Nikolai Bolgov, chairman of the dissertation council of Belgorod State University, told RBC.
The Presidium may not agree with the decision of the expert council, Mikhail Gelfand, co-founder of the Dissernet community, deputy director of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told RBC. “There were situations when the expert council proposed to leave the degree, and the presidium decided to deprive it, as in the case of the deputy Alexander Smetanov, but it was the other way around. This is a normal situation,” he says. According to Gelfand, the composition of the presidium for the humanities is "non-uniform." "There are very worthy people, but there are those who are not so principled, ”he explained to RBC. Gelfand specified that Medinsky, according to the rules of the Higher Attestation Commission, would be invited to the meetings of the presidium.
The Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC), which met at 11 am on Friday, October 20, to decide the fate of the doctoral dissertation of the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, the scientific value of which had serious doubts, decided to leave the head of the Ministry of Culture as a doctor of historical sciences.
"They left the doctor of sciences. 14 - "for", six - "against," a source who participated in the meeting of the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission told Interfax. This was also stated by philologist Ivan Babitsky, an expert of the free network community Dissernet, who was present at the meeting, RBC reports. The vote was not secret, the decision was made by a show of hands - a simple majority.
Sergei Parkhomenko, co-founder of Dissernet, commenting on this decision, said that the VAK presidium "considered the issue of its reputation and decided that it could well do without it in the future. The issue of Medinsky's reputation was resolved earlier." He commented on the results of the vote on his page in Facebook like this: "Six people "for" the deprivation of the Medina degree - because the reputation is still important. 14 people are "against" the deprivation, and let the reputation go to waste. Four people "abstained" - because the reputation does not matter at all. So they are now will live on."
Earlier, the vice-president of the Liberal Mission Foundation, Doctor of Philosophy Igor Klyamkin, already wrote that the incident with Medinsky's dissertation could enter Russian history as. "This incident will go down in history in any case. But it can go down in it as a marker of the state of dishonor, or maybe as an example of the successful resistance of society to state dishonor in one, separately taken area of decaying sociality," the professor wrote.
Thus, the VAK presidium ignored doubts in the scientific value of the dissertation and rejected the recommendation of his own expert council, which is considered a very rare case in the scientific community.
Explaining the decision of the scientists, academician Alexander Chubaryan, who participated in the meeting, told TASS that "the presidium did not decide on the approval or disapproval of the dissertation on the merits, the task was to make a decision on the proposal to deprive the degree, and the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission made a decision, not to set a precedent."
In total, the meeting, which instead of the expected one hour lasted about two hours, was attended by 32 people - 20 members of the Higher Attestation Commission and 12 experts on the topic of the dissertation. From VAK, among others, the chairman of the commission Vladimir Filippov, his deputies - academician, psychiatrist Lubomir Aftanas, rector of ITMO, doctor technical sciences Vladimir Vasiliev, sociologist, Doctor of Philosophy Vladimir Shults and President of St. Petersburg State University, Doctor of Philology Lyudmila Verbitskaya. In addition, the presidium included the chief scientific secretary Igor Matskevich, who, on October 18, by order of the Russian government, replaced Nikolai Arister in this position. He led the "Medinsky case", and after his dismissal from the VAK, there were no more documents on the dissertation left, and there was no one to ask questions about where everything had gone, Sergey Parkhomenko wrote earlier.
Sergey Chernyakhovsky, a representative of Medinsky, doctor of political sciences, said that the minister's speech "at the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission caused applause."
Medinsky himself, noting that they voted "70% in favor", thanked the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission for the fact that his dissertation was considered objectively and that he was allowed to express his point of view, RIA Novosti reports. He stressed that the comments of the presidium members were balanced and meaningful, and promised to take them into account in further work.
The meeting was also attended by Deputy Minister of Science and Education Grigory Trubnikov, and the head of the ministry, Olga Vasilyeva, said the day before that she would not take part in the meeting: "I can't, I'm a minister. I can't be on the presidium," she said.
exodus before last day remained a mystery, before the vote there were signs that it could be objective - for example, the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission supported the proposal to deprive Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, from the commission brought out several people, including the chief scientific secretary Nikolai Arister.
The gist of the claims against Medinsky's dissertation was that it was "unscientific" and proved that all the unattractive aspects of Russian history were invented by the hostile forces of the West.
The Ministry of Education and Science promised to prepare an order in the near future
“It can be concluded that the Santa Barbara series, which lasted more than a year, is over,” said Mikhail Myagkov, scientific director of the RVIO, who represented the interests of Medinsky. He also noted that the adoption of a different decision by the presidium of the WAC would open a "Pandora's box".
"We ... would get a situation where each student could write a slander against his teacher. But today's discussion was about science," Myagkov said.
Medinsky's dissertation case is classified for everyone except Medinsky
Among the claims against Medinsky, the issue of the third version of the dissertation abstract, presented by the representatives of the minister after the scientists named as opponents in his defense, announced that they were not opponents. After that, a version of the abstract with other opponents was presented.
In the scientific community, they started talking about the falsification of the defense, but it was not possible to clarify the issue, since the chairman of the Higher Attestation Commission, Vladimir Filippov, refused to give the presidium member, scientific supervisor State Archive Sergei Mironenko was given an attestation case on the history of the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, Mironenko told RBC.
“I tried for several days to get his file, at first they didn’t give me a clear answer, but now they told me that this can’t be done,” Mironenko said. According to him, Vladimir Filippov explained his refusal by the fact that the procedure stipulates the right to issue an attestation file for review for a dissertation student, but not for someone else. On this basis, the head of the Higher Attestation Commission concluded that he had no right to issue this case to anyone other than Medinsky.
"As far as I know, if a ban is not prescribed, then it is possible. And I made this argument, but it did not work," Mironenko said.
Medinsky defended his dissertation in 2011 at the Russian State Social University (RGSU). However, after confusion with the names of opponents there were suspicions that he did not protect her at all.
In April 2016, historians Vyacheslav Kozlyakov and Konstantin Yerusalimsky, as well as Dissernet expert Ivan Babitsky, filed an application to deprive the minister of his doctoral degree. They called the minister's dissertation unscientific and "absurd in places", revealing "gross mistakes" in it.
Since the RSSU Discussion Council was dissolved, the issue of Medinsky's academic degree was transferred to the Ural Federal University. Subsequently, the Higher Attestation Commission instructed the dissertation council of the history department of Moscow State University to study the dissertation of the minister, but he refused to consider the work of the minister on the merits. After that, the documents were sent to the Belgorod State University, where they refused to recognize the claims to the work of Medinsky.
In October 2017, the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission supported the application to deprive Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, since the author of the dissertation missing"Basic Skills of a Historian".
Medinsky insists: the main thing is not history, the main thing is national interests
When on October 2 the expert council on the history of the Higher Attestation Commission recommended that Minister Vladimir Medinsky be deprived of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, scientists emphasized that his claims to the dissertation were not in the field of plagiarism, but related to its "scientific nature", in particular, the methodology - incorrect references, controversial sources, from -for which a dissertation on the topic "Problems of objectivity in the coverage of Russian history in the second half of the 15th - 17th centuries." turned out to be a work that all the unsightly aspects of Russian history are "black myths" invented by the hostile forces of the West. Scientists came to the conclusion that the dissertation "discredits domestic science."
In response to this statement, MGIMO professor Mikhail Myagkov, adviser to the head of the Ministry of Culture, who represented the interests of the minister at dissertation councils, as well as Sergei Chernyakhovsky, professor of Moscow State University, a member of the Science Council of the Ministry of Culture, said that the conclusion of the VAK expert council was biased.
Medinsky himself believes that all the opponents' claims were not substantive, but ideological. He explained that he approached the assessment of certain historical events in his dissertation "not from an abstract point of view, but from the point of view of the national interests of the state at a given historical stage." At the same time, he stated that he put Russia's interests above certain "abstract positions, general historicism."
