page_title: Kazan Federal University
section_title: Soviet period
hierarchical_section_title: Kazan Federal University / History / Soviet period
caption_attribution_description: English: An image of the State University of Kazan as it appeared before the abolition (1928) of the arabic script's use in the Tatar language.
context_page_description: Kazan Federal University is located in Kazan, Russia.
  Founded in 1804 as Imperial Kazan University, famous mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky served there as the rector from 1827 until 1846. In 1925, the university was renamed in honour of its most famous student Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. The university is known as the birthplace of organic chemistry due to works by Aleksandr Butlerov, Vladimir Markovnikov, Aleksandr Arbuzov, and the birthplace of electron spin resonance discovered by Evgeny Zavoisky.
  In 2010, Kazan University received a federal status. It is also one of 15 Russian universities that were initially selected to participate in the Project 5-100, coordinated by the Government of the Russian Federation and aimed to improve their international competitiveness among the world’s leading research and educational centers.
  As of January 2020, the university comprises 18 primary educational units, 2 of which are territorial branches. More than 50,000 students are enrolled in over 600 degree programs at undergraduate and postgraduate level; the number of international students is about 9,700 from 106 countries.
context_section_description: In accordance with a directive from the Council of People's Commissars issued on October 9, 1918, the system of academic ranks was abolished and all university-level lecturers with at least three years of teaching experience were qualifying for the title of professor. This allowed the University of Kazan, which had lost the vast majority of its academic staff during the turmoil of the civil war, to restart proper education and research.
  The university soon opened a 'workers' faculty (fifth in the RSFSR), which aimed to provide the education for peasants. On 1 November 1919 peasant workers started their first classes without the requirement to pass an entrance exam. In 1922 the University's Faculty of Forestry merged with the Faculty of Agriculture of Kazan Polytechnic university to form Kazan Institute of Agriculture and Forestry.
  In 1925 by the decision of All-Russian Central Executive Committee Kazan State University was renamed to the V. I. Ulyanov-Lenin Kazan State University.  This was done in order to recognise the period of time Vladimir Lenin spent as a student at the University of Kazan.
  In the 1930s the university continued to evolve with a number of its faculties being separated from it in order to become independent institutions of higher education. Some of them continue their existence, for instance Kazan State Medical University. Moreover, during the World War II years (1941–1943) a number of members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were evacuated from Moscow and Leningrad and housed under the premises of the university; this, in turn, led to the foundation of Kazan Department of the Academy in 1945.
  In the post-war years the University of Kazan underwent a period of rapid expansion and development of its academic base. To recognize the hard work in providing education to the peoples of the Soviet Union Kazan State University was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1953 and later, in 1979, the Order of Lenin. In the 1970s the University's two distinctive high-rise academic buildings were built – the Department of Physics in 1973 and Faculty of Mathematics in 1978. The final major Soviet-era change to the university came with the opening of UNICS Sports Center and Concert Hall in 1989.
caption: The university's name appeared in Arabic-script Tatar on the main building before that script's abolition in 1928.
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