moscow

Police in Ekaterinburg, the capital of the Sverdlovsk district in the Urals and home of the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, last week attacked students from local universities who had taken part in a national protest against proposed educational reforms (see Nature 392, 429; 1998).

Between 3,000 and 4,000 students gathered at the city's Youth Palace for a meeting that had been approved by the city council. After discussing their problems and the apparent indifference of federal and local authorities to their needs, they adopted a resolution demanding that the president and the cabinet abandon reforms that, they argue, would make higher education unaffordable for most people.

The leaders of the students' trade-union association, which organized the meeting, then asked the students to return home. But more than 1,500 students, angry that no member of the city authorities had agreed to meet them, moved to the Ekaterinburg city council.

They then marched to the Sverdlovsk district administration, where 200 students approached the main entrance of the district government's building. Some were eventually admitted, and met Anatoly Gaida, the first deputy head of the district government, responsible for education, science and culture, who endorsed the students' demands and added some of his own.

Meanwhile, more than 250 members of the Special Police Force, armed with steel shields and rubber clubs and accompanied by a military armoured car, started to move the students out of the government building. Injuries were received by many students.

Local television reports, subsequently shown nationwide, generated wide indignation. Yeltsin ordered the newly appointed acting minister of internal affairs, Sergei Stepashin, to investigate the case urgently, and the parliament also set up a special commission of inquiry.

Sergei Kirienko, the acting prime minister, said the cabinet was deeply concerned by the incident. General Boris Gromov, a former head of Russian troops in Afghanistan, said that “only silly and irresponsible people could throw at our future with police clubs”.

Yuri Brusnitsin, the president's recently appointed representative in the Sverdlovsk district, promised to pass on the students' demands to Yeltsin. The students told him that, although they were until recently “passive politically”, that did not mean their needs “should be neglected by the authorities”.

University lecturers from Ekaterinburg who attended the student meeting told local officials that, although they had previously acted as a “separating layer” between the authorities and the young people, they would join the students “if the present educational policy is kept unchanged”.

Three high-ranking officials of the Sverdlovsk district government, including Gaida, have already been dismissed. The heads of the district and city police forces, who ordered the use of the special forces, are also likely to lose their jobs.