The Establishment of New Universities in the Asian Part of the USSR as a Building Block of Center-Periphery Relations (the Second Half of the 1960s - the First Half of the 1970s)

The higher school of any country and its regional scientific and educational complexes are the drivers of many economic, socio-cultural and other processes. The leading role here has always belonged to universities as a focus of education, science, and worldview transmission practices, which also have a close connection with the national economy. In the USSR, this role of universities was most clearly manifested on the periphery, rather than in the center. Important milestones in the development of Asian Russia were associated with universities, starting in the last quarter of the 19th century with the appearance of the first university in Asian Russia, and ending in the 1970s - with the expansion of the university network in the context of the last modernization breakthrough of the USSR. For the first time in Russian historiography, the article undertakes the research task of identifying the main trends and content of the largest Soviet "universityfication" of higher education and determining its impact on peripheral regions. The methodological novelty of the study is the complex application of several research strategies to the material of Russian science and higher education, seen from a macro-regional perspective: the theory of modernization and the concept of "center-peripheral relations", with the latter being differentiated into national and peripheral systems of such relations. The author identifies the inner periphery of the Asian macro-region, manifested in the building of "center-peripheral" relations between "old" and "new" universities, determines the three main trajectories of the creation of new universities with an analysis of their specific features, specifies the "third role" of universities and characterizes the criteria of their influence on the regions.