At the time of the October Revolution, Bolshevik support in the universities was almost non-existent. Among the professors, the dominant political orientation was liberal, the Cadet party having the strongest following. Among the students, patriotic feelings were strong in the first years of the war, and the small Bolshevik organizations were almost annihilated by police action. By 1917, patriotism had given way to a more revolutionary mood, and the students came out on the streets in February. But there was only a handful of active Bolsheviks in the universities of Petrograd and Moscow, with most of the politically active students supporting the Cadets, the SRs or the Mensheviks. ‘In the period of the October battles [in Moscow]’, one Bolshevik recalled, ‘class contradictions attained an extreme sharpness and were expressed with a clarity which was almost sculptural. On the side of the revolution were workers and soldiers; on the side of the counter-revolution, Junkers, officers and the overwhelming mass of students.’ So firmly were students associated with the Whites that during the street-fighting they were able to cross White lines simply by showing their student cards.

The first action of the Soviet government in regard to higher education was to declare open admissions, with the intention of thus democratizing the student body. When this produced only an influx of white-collar students without secondary-school diplomas, the new regime looked for other ways of bringing in working-class and peasant students.