The Russian Academy of Sciences was established in 1725 under Tsar Peter I. Since its inception, the Academy aimed at creating an educational cluster allowing to train future scholars in close contact with the ongoing research work and thus to ensure a continuing academic tradition that had not previously existed in Russia. Thus, an academic University and a Gymnasium were called into being at the same time as the Academy’s main research body was being established. However their activities were discontinued several decades later due mostly to a lack of funding and political commitment, with their main educational functions and staff passing to the newly created universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
Two centuries later, as the Russian Academy of Sciences re-emerged as the main successor to the Soviet Academy, an idea of an academic University began to gain currency with the Academy’s leadership, keen to break free from decades of ideological domination while maintaining the high standards of Soviet science. The University’s faculties were set up as educational outposts of some of the academic disciplinary institutes, with their programmes taking into account both Russian and European university traditions and the research layout of the Academy.
Following a period of exponential growth in the 1990s, following academic institutes opted into co-organising the university and setting up its departmental structure:
| HISTORY | REGIONAL STUDIES |
| PHILOSOPHY | PSYCHOLOGY |
| POLITICAL SCIENCE | SOCIOLOGY |
| INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | ORIENTAL and AFRICAN STUDIES |
| CULTUROLOGY | MANAGEMENT |
| JURISPRUDENCE | ECONOMICS |
| ARTS and HUMANITIES | |
Five well-equipped, comfortable, and modern hostels in Moscow downtown provide international students with accommodation for study periods at GAUGN. Students usually share a double room in the hostel, with a shared kitchen, washing machines, and nearby dry cleaners. Students wishing to live not in hostels will find abundant affordable, for Moscow, accommodation to rent near the University.
