The Creation of Russian Zurich
In Utopia’s Discontents, Faith Hillis examines how Russian émigré communities evolved into revolutionary social experiments in the heart of bourgeois cities. Émigrés’ efforts to transform the world played crucial roles in the articulation of socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and Zionism across borders. But they also produced unexpected — and explosive — discontents that defined the course of twentieth-century history. In this excerpt, Hillis introduces the experiences of Zurich’s Russian students and the communities they established.
Any knowledgeable observer of the Russian emigration in the early 1870s would have agreed with Engels that its golden age had come to an end. But by this time, Zurich’s Russian students had already embarked on their experiment that would redefine the utopian potential of emigration. The presence of Russian students abroad was not novel: since the eighteenth century, Russian elites had flocked to European institutions of higher learning, especially in the German states.(116) By the 1860s, Heidelberg, for example, boasted some one hundred Russian students — enough to sustain several debating societies and a reading room.(117) However, these communities of students remained fairly isolated, having little contact with other countrymen living abroad. In Zurich, though, the old tradition of studying abroad would eventually converge with the radical political currents of the 1860s and preexisting communities of exiles.
The impetus behind the creation of Russian Zurich came from emancipated women, who had briefly been allowed to audit university courses at the height of Alexander’s reforms.(118) After a counterreform forced women out of classrooms, they began to look to the handful of European universities that admitted female auditors. In 1864, two petitioned Zurich University’s medical school to allow them to attend classes.(119) Their request provoked serious controversy. Although Zurich’s university had technically opened its doors to women in the 1840s, only two female students had taken advantage of this opportunity. Some professors objected that the women’s admission would result in overcrowded classrooms and that the coeducation of anatomy and physiology classes was unseemly. However, a group of liberal professors — several of whom were political refugees from Germany who had settled in Switzerland after 1848 — struck a compromise, convincing their colleagues to accept the petitions.(120) The Russian women arrived in Zurich in 1865 and began their medical educations. One soon withdrew, but the other, Nadezhda Suslova, flourished, defending her dissertation with distinction in 1867. Encouraged by Suslova’s success, the university opened all of its programs to female students in 1870. The nearby Technological Institute soon followed suit.(121)
Over the coming decades, hundreds of female students flocked to Zurich from across Europe and the Americas. From the beginning of its experiment in coeducation, however, Russian students dominated Zurich’s female cohorts. By 1873, 100 out of Zurich’s 114 female students came from Russia.(122) About 150 men of Russian origin ultimately joined the women in Zurich, drawn by the city’s low cost of living and the permissive admission policies of the university, which did not require proof of a gymnasium degree. Many brought their wives and children with them, bringing the total population of Russian Zurich to about 500.(123)
Over the coming decades, hundreds of female students flocked to Zurich from across Europe and the Americas.
The Zurich students hailed from every corner of the empire — even from distant Siberia, where railroad lines would not arrive for another few decades. Moscow and St. Petersburg provided many students, but so did the southern and western peripheries of the empire. A full one- third came from New Russia, which stretched across the north coast of the Black Sea; left- and right- bank Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Bessarabia were other major producers of students.Poles, Armenians, and especially Jews appear to have been overrepresented in the student population.(124) The social status of the students varied widely as well: children of bureaucrats, merchants, and nobles studied alongside those who had been raised in poverty. Suslova herself had been born into a serf family whose former lords had recognized the young woman’s intellectual talents and supported her education.(125) For the first time, a community of Russian subjects abroad reflected the complexity of the empire itself.
The Russian students were drawn to the Oberstrass neighborhood by its low cost of living and its proximity to the university. The foreign residents of the district — who accounted for about 1 percent of the city’s population of 35,000 — made it the first discernably Russian space in a European city. One resident recalled that one could not roam the streets of the Oberstrass without encountering large packs of students animatedly conversing in Russian.(126) Another observed that the influx of foreign students into the neighborhood created a cosmopolitan atmosphere that provided a sharp contrast to the stodgy and patriarchal culture that prevailed elsewhere in the city.(127)
The students who came to Zurich were highly idealistic, reflecting the fanatical altruism that drove the progressive youth of the 1860s. They were awed by their access to the “cathedral of science,” as one woman referred to the university, but they were also intent on sharing its riches with the Russian people. Vera Figner, a noblewoman from Kazan’ who enrolled in the university in 1870 along with her sister and her husband, planned to return to Russia to work as a village doctor after the completion of her degree.(128) Kuliabko- Koretskii, a native of Ukraine who had worked as a law clerk in the Caucasus, enrolled in the law faculty with the intention of returning home and providing legal aid to peasants.(129)
The students who came to Zurich were highly idealistic, reflecting the fanatical altruism that drove the progressive youth of the 1860s.
Eschewing the fraternities and taverns around which Swiss student life revolved, the students led a “monastic” existence that centered on their studies and on their small circle of friends.(130)Their isolation from the city that surrounded them allowed them to build their own society from ground up. The students settled in groups of six to twelve that lived, worked, and ate together in the cheap pensions of the Oberstrass. These institutions created a familial and supportive environment for students living far from home. They also created new connections between individuals from different walks of life, bringing the children of Russian nobles and government officials under the same roof as those of Jewish artisans and merchants.(131)
By about 1870, the students had built a network of mutual aid associations and cultural institutions that served the community at large and further consolidated the solidarities between different groups. Wealthier students pooled their resources to assist less fortunate comrades, and a low- cost canteen was established to feed the neediest. The students also organized discussion circles that united those with common origins or interests. One discussion club, for example, brought together students from the Caucasus, another the colony’s women. They even established an informal system of self- governance — an elected “court” empowered to arbitrate disputes among them.(132)
A small reading room became the spiritual center of the Russian colony and the place where the students spent most of their time. Stocked with literature in Russian, Armenian, and Georgian as well as “Jewish” and European languages, it also boasted books banned in Russia. Using its collections, the students embarked on ambitious programs of self- education. The law student Kuliabko- Koretskii, who grew frustrated by the esoteric nature of his courses soon after his arrival, stopped attending the university, instead spending his days in the readingroom poring over the classics of socialism and Marxism.(133) Figner and her friends — who referred to themselves as “the Fritschi,” after the landlady of the building in which they resided — divided themselves into groups charged with researching the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of government.(134)
116. A. Iu. Andreev, Russkie studenty v nemetskikh universitetakh (Moscow, 2005).
117. See, for example, “Piat’desiat let nazad. Osnovanie russkoi chital’ni v Geidel’berge v 1862 godu,” BACU, S. G. Svatikov Papers, Box 74, Folder 1.
118. E. Likhacheva, Materialy dlia istorii zhenskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, 1856– 1880 (St. Petersburg, 1901), 472– 83.
119. “40 letnii iubilei Nadezhdy Prokof ’evny Suslovoi,” in P. N. Ariian, ed., Pervyi zhenskii kalendar’ na 1908 g. (St. Petersburg, 1908), 32– 34.
120. Verena E. Müller, “Die Medizinische Fakultät,” in Ebenso Neu als Kühn: 120 Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität Zürich, ed. Katharina Belser (Zurich, 1988), 147; Likhacheva, Materialy, 489.
121. Monika Bankowski- Züllig, “Nadezhda Prokof ’evna Suslova (1843– 1918) — Die Wegbereiterin,” in Ebenso Neu, 121– 22. For an overview of women’s education in Switzerland, see Das Frauenstudium an den schweizer Hochschulen (Zurich, 1928).
122. Daniela Neumann, Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz (1867– 1914) (Zurich, 1987), 12.
123. Kuliabko- Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 32.
124. M. P. Sazhin, “Russkie v Tsiurikhe,” Katorga i ssylka 10, no. 95 (1932): 41. The data on the origins of Zurich students is based on my geo- spatial analysis conducted in ArcGIS. For an interactive visualization, see https:// utopiasdiscontents.com/ zurich- colony.
125. Bankowski- Züllig, “Nadezda Prokof ’evna Suslova,” 121– 22.
126. Kuliabko- Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 12.
127. Käthe Schirmacher, Züricher Studentinnen (Leipzig, 1896), 4– 5.
128. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 1872– 1876 (Moscow, 1924), 3– 9, quote at 9.
129. Kuliabko- Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 17– 23.
130. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 10.
131. Petr Vitiazev, “P. L. Lavrov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov,” Golos minuvshego 10 (1915): 141; Figner, Studencheskie gody, 31– 32.
132. Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York, 1968), 269; Kuliabko- Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 12, 27; Figner, Studencheskie gody, 19– 31.
133. Kuliabko- Koretskii, Iz davnikh let, 12, 25– 26. These were the early days of Yiddish literature, so the “Jewish” materials were likely in Hebrew.
134. Figner, Studencheskie gody, 32– 33.
Faith Hillis is Associate Professor of Russian History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Nation.
