I taught history in Putin's Russia

I taught history in Putin's Russia – and here's why I knew I had to leave From a childhood obsessed with medieval history to frozen landscapes and academic chaos, Peter Jones details the harsh reality of following his dream job to Siberia There’s a section at the back of Perekrestok, one of the biggest supermarkets in the Siberian city of Tyumen, that has a two-metre stack of clear glass bottles. On these shelves are 27 varieties of vodka. And although Perekrestok doesn’t always have fresh fruit or baguettes, it always has these. I know their number because one afternoon, three years into my teaching job at the University of Tyumen, I walked over to this part of the store and counted them. And that day I felt like drinking all 27. Too much to resist Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why I moved to Siberia. I didn’t know any Russian, I couldn’t pronounce the name of the city, and I was always disgusted by the politics (which, even if this was quite a few years before the war with Ukraine, were dismal). But there was one thing Tyumen had that no other place was offering – a job as a professor of medieval history. And I suppose, at that point in my life, this was too much to resist. Where do those dreams come from? The dreams that define but also ruin our lives? Mine began, as far as I can remember, when I was nine years old. As a child I spent the sunniest weekends indoors, drawing pictures of medieval kings and making my elderly aunt listen to stories of Joan of Arc. One day after school I threw myself into a river, trying to retrieve my backpack with The Usborne Guide to Medieval England inside it. If toyshops back then had let customers design their own Action Man, mine would have been dressed in tweed and named Professor Arnold Toynbee. If toyshops back then had let customers design their own Action Man, mine would have been dressed in tweed and named Professor Arnold Toynbee Some of our dreams shatter on first contact with the adult world. Others only get stronger. Studying history at university I discovered the thrill of the archive: the six-hour sessions in echoing rooms, using heavy magnifying glasses and blue plastic gloves to read lambskin books. On one of those mornings, I found what I still think of as history’s deepest joy. Hunting down tiny details, trying to reconstruct a world you know you’ll never see or touch. And that shock of recognition when, in a line of gothic handwriting, you feel the familiar anxiety of a person long dead, reaching out across a gap of 800 years. An almost glamorous life Up until that Siberian afternoon with the vodka bottles, my life as a historian had been almost glamorous. Completing my PhD in New York City I met my partner, whose obsession was with Irish literature. We moved to Toronto, where I got a two-year job with an office overlooking the CN Tower, then to New England, where she found a one-year position at an Ivy League college. We shared one salary between two, which always seemed enough. But everything changed when we discovered, one day in October, that we were expecting our first child. Now we spent every morning cycling through job postings, searching for the unicorn: the university that would offer two permanent positions and the freedom to continue ‘Doing What We Love’. Who knew that unicorn, when it popped up, would be covered in so much frost? The job we found was at a place called the School of Advanced Studies (SAS). And although it was located thousands of miles across the ice, it had us spellbound. SAS was recruiting academics from across the globe to join a fleet of research teams. And the professors on these teams would work together to solve some of humanity’s grandest questions. A revolutionary way to study One team (which ended up having a physicist, a lawyer, and another historian) would work on the problem ‘Do we have free will?’ Another (with anthropologists, economists, and literary specialists) had the question ‘How do we fix capitalism?’ The team I wanted to join had maybe an even bigger puzzle: ‘What is love?’ And although I knew this was a tiny bit absurd, I was also excited by the challenge. Spending days talking to neuroscientists about how sexual attraction works in the brain: wouldn’t this be a revolutionary way to study history? We arrived in Tyumen that autumn with our three-month-old baby girl. Snowfall began at the end of September, and the temperatures dropped below zero at a rate of about five degrees per week. To survive we had to adopt some strict clothing rules. Mittens were better than gloves. Thick waterproof boots should be fur-lined, if possible. Ears needed to be covered outside at all times, or else they’d go numb and ultimately (as our landlady told us, using mime) fall off. Ears needed to be covered outside at all times, or else they’d go numb and ultimately (as our landlady told us, using mime) fall off For our daughter we bought an ice-blue snowsuit and a purple woollen hat that fastened at the chin. Every day we blinked our way through horizontal blizzards, ploughing the same path back and forth between our apartment and work. We put a snow shield over the stroller and began learning some words in Russian. ‘Cold’ is holodno. ‘Tired’ is ustala. ‘Can you see my ears?’ is vidish mayi ushki? At first the blizzards didn’t bother us. Our classes were fun, our students were all bright and interested, and the research teams were thrilling. But the real star was Tyumen, which revealed its magic week by week, block by block. The streets of the old city, with their green, painted wooden houses and golden stone churches, smelled of birch bark and wood smoke. The bank of the Tura river was dotted with restaurants, all humid with garlic and barbecued meat, and little shops decorated with colourful balloon arches. But the city also had its hyper-modern side. As well as Russia’s easternmost McDonalds, it had space-age shopping malls with branches of Stradivarius and Starbucks, and a luxury waterpark, where you could swim through steaming pools under the stars, even in minus 25ºC. The bitter reality Siberia, it turned out, wasn’t really the problem. Over those first few months we came to taste the bitter reality of teaching under Moscow’s regime. After decades of odd choices, Russian universities paid some of the lowest wages relative to GDP on the planet. An ordinary professor’s salary at that time was around 400 euros per month (which, as a cappuccino still cost two euros, was horrendous). Universities like ours got around this problem by offering bonuses, which took our pay up to something like a typical European academic salary. - Read more | 40 years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, what's Chernobyl really like today? But we soon came upon the poisonous twist in our contracts. If any of us failed to publish at least one article per year in a top-standard academic journal, as defined by a ruthless metric, those bonus payments would be removed. And so, unless my team answered that question ‘What is love?’ pretty soon, we’d get a salary cut of 80 per cent. Behind this scheme was a propaganda objective. Our micro-university, we discovered, was really a national experiment. Formulated in the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, it was part of the ‘Russian Academic Excellence Project 5-100’: a plan to get five Russian universities in the global top 100 by 2020. “Look at yourselves,” our director, Andrey, told us one day in a faculty meeting. “You’re all losers. Has any of you published a book with Cambridge University Press?” Although harsh, Andrey wasn’t just being cruel. He wanted us to embrace our identity as underdogs. Like his colleagues at Skolkova, he was fascinated by Silicon Valley, where tiny start-ups often reach the top by leveraging their strengths. And Andrey’s message was that we needed to make the most of the capacities that made us unique. We were a group of isolated scholars and, thanks to the frozen landscape, we had no distractions. Best of all, we had a passion for our research so huge that it had driven us to move to Siberia in the first place. With enough pressure he hoped these conditions could make us super-efficient researchers: willing to stay up round the clock – while our American rivals slept – to get our articles into the globe’s top journals. Unpredictable behaviour Our students were brilliant. Not only had they mastered English, they were brave enough to study at this bizarre experimental school, where they had to read Jacques Derrida one week and subatomic physics the next. And they were always fascinated – whether we were discussing the Haitian revolution or the Stonewall riots – by the prospect of transformation or escape. But these students were probably the biggest victims in our race to the top 100. Because when we weren’t panic-writing our articles we were rush-preparing our classes. Our school had attracted and retained fewer staff than hoped, which meant many of us were teaching around 18 hours per week. Although this may not sound much, the 18 didn’t include the time needed for reading and planning, for grading papers, or for consultations with students. Our true working schedule, with these included, was somewhere in the region of 60 or 70 hours per week. And that’s before adding in the three-hour staff meetings, the emails to students, or – most urgently – the research for those world-leading articles we were supposed to write. It doesn’t matter how many trips to the hot springs you take, or how much money you splurge in Stradivarius, it’s hard to stay calm in these conditions. Over the course of those months many of my colleagues began acting unpredictably. One professor, apparently upset that his students had failed to hand in an essay, smashed apart the furniture in his classroom. Later he explained that he’d been staying up till 3am every night, making PowerPoint slides but also, understandably, applying for other jobs. Another colleague, whose face was as grey as the steel Siberian sky, threw a coffee cup at our director in a faculty meeting, telling him to “stick” his job. Several others were stressed or debilitated or depressed. On a social media page one evening I saw a post from a student and it seemed to sum things up: “How is it that our professors aren’t all drinking themselves to death?” Alone in Siberia A knot of poor and ruthless decisions led me to count those vodka bottles in Perekrestok. After a publisher delayed an article, my partner was sent an email. She was now liable for a pay cut. But because she’d worked so hard they’d make her a deal. Agree to teach an extra class each semester and they’d only reduce her salary by 25 per cent. So when she was offered a research position in Dublin, late in the summer, we both felt she had to jump at the chance. And so she went on a plane, and took our daughter with her. And I, in my stupidity, stayed in Siberia, alone. Sitting in our apartment that winter, surrounded by abandoned toys and children’s books, I turned to a medieval poem. Pearl, written in the late 1300s, is narrated by a man who wanders through a garden looking for a jewel he’s lost between the grasses and flowers. Only it turns out he isn’t actually looking for a pearl. Really, he’s searching for his two-year-old daughter, who recently died on this same spot. Overcome with grief, he slips into a cosmic dream vision of paradise, and there he finds his lost daughter again, now no longer a toddler but the grown woman she would have become. And she tells her grieving father some difficult truths. That, no matter how hard we cry for them, the lives we’ve lost will never come back. That, as beautiful as our dream visions are, they are always insubstantial. That the only solution for heartache is to live in and absorb the moment. That life begins again when we can appreciate what we have, not what we think we ought to have. As beautiful as our dream visions are, they are always insubstantial. The only solution for heartache is to live in and absorb the moment In the years since I quit working at SAS, I’ve had a lot of time to think about those life-defining dreams. When do they sustain us, when do they inspire us, and when do they drain us of all our joy? And how can we tell the difference? Drip by drip, that last winter in Tyumen, I shed the fragments of our Russian life. One evening I took a taxi through the snow and moved all our things – the car seats, the toys, the highchair we’d been keeping for a second child, the books, the tweed blazers, the children’s clothes – into a storage unit near the city’s train station. And then, alone in the darkness, I sent an email to our director. This decision was painful, I said. I’d never loved teaching anywhere as much as this. But with sadness, I would be quitting the job at the end of the academic year. Digging in a dark and difficult place I remember, in the moment I pressed ‘send’, feeling a surge of something rebellious, almost revolting. Was it the heart of that nine-year-old boy, shattering? I would never become Arnold Toynbee, after all. But in the rush of that email, watching the ‘undo’ button disappear as an option on the screen, nothing seemed so simple. Maybe what I felt was the spirit of my adult self, grim and apologetic, taking a place at the table. Or maybe it was the vertical terror of a bright new hope. Now all that frantic history was over, could the real history begin? These days I live somewhere much warmer. We have more children and a line of houseplants and flip flops piled up by the apartment’s door. I haven’t heard much about the School of Advanced Studies these last years, only that things got difficult with the Ukraine war, which the professors were compelled to call the “special military operation”. I also know that our director, Andrey, died last year. He’d always had problems with his heart, and it finally gave out. I can’t say that I don’t miss him. And I can’t say that I regret those years in Siberia, those days helping to build Andrey’s dream school. If there was a pearl waiting in Tyumen it wasn’t so much the career, or the fulfilled ambition of that child who once drew pictures of medieval kings. It was the hope, sharpened by all that ice and snow, of digging in a dark and difficult place and coming out with something beautiful. It was the itch to reach the first generation who had grown up under Putin and to find out how the past looked to them. I wanted to see the strangeness of this world through Siberian eyes. And, between all the visits to archives, the struggle to reconstruct lost worlds, isn’t that what history has always been about? Peter Jones is a historian and writer who specialises in the intellectual and emotional life of premodern Europe. He has taught at University College London, the University of Toronto and Complutense University of Madrid, as well as the University of Tyumen in Siberia. His book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages, was published in April 2026