All over the world governments withdraw from full funding of their universities. Nowhere this world-wide trend is illustrated more sharply than in Russia. The share of higher education in the gross domestic product has declined drastically. This has led to a dramatic reduction of the higher education budget in real terms. A consequence is the growing share of non-governmental money in the yearly budgets of the higher education sector. The basic sources for this new funding are national, international and private. They come as well from foundations as from multinationals. Their distribution over the institutions and, within the institutions, over the different departments seems extremely unequal. Therefore old academic traditions only survive in fewer and fewer schools and, within these schools, in fewer and fewer centres of excellence. For a great number of institutions the basic educational subsidy does not permit a decent remuneration of their academic staff. This forces a majority of them to look for a second and even a third job outside the university. This again weakens the institution and leads to a widening range of quality of institutions and, within each of them, of departments and centres. At the same time the field is wide open for the development of private schools, which often only select types of educational activities which are remunerative in the market...