Moscow State University Students Appeal to FIFA to Reduce World Cup Disturbance on Campus

MSU’s Rector, Vladimir Putin and Moscow's Authorities Have Already Ignored Their Pleas

Student activists at Lomonosov Moscow State University’s have mailed their second petition to FIFA appealing to move the 2018 FIFA World Cup fan festival from their campus.

Students already sent a letter to FIFA last year, but the organization did not respond. Now they have collected more than 4,500 signatures for a petition and occupied the rector's office to demand an audience with him, but the University administration has met their actions with misinformation and intimidation — even directed at teachers.

The protest has received wide publicity in the Russian media. The students filed appeals to Moscow city hall and to President Putin. So far there has been no response. If the fan zone’s location is not changed, 25,000 World Cup fans will descend upon Russia’s oldest and most famous university, dramatically impacting educational and research activities as well as campus life.

The students sent their first letter to FIFA on July 16, 2017. The second letter was sent on February 2, 2018. The texts of both letters are attached to this press release. They were signed by at least 10 percent of the student body and staff of Lomonosov Moscow State University, as well as residents of the university’s dormitories.

The fan zone will produce noise and require security measures that will have a severe, negative effect on the university’s educational and research activities, as well as the lives of the university’s 37,000 students, 9,000 professors and researchers, and 6,500 residents.

Participants in the protests particularly resent the attitude shown by the University administration and government to the institution’s academic environment: “Not considering the opinion of the university community and making it suffer in order to organize a commercial event is an insult to all of us,” one of the letters said.

University departments will have to shorted courses and exam sessions, while researchers will be forced to take holidays. The residents of the university dormitories must either suffer through the noise and disruption or else risk eviction. Local residents will suffer from a collapse of transport infrastructure resulting from the installation of a gate system around a campus that has always been open to the public. “The green territory around our university was not designed to host a festival with 25,000 football fans,” the students note.

We ask for local and international media outlets to take note of and cover our struggle.

A second letter to FIFA may go unanswered, as the first was. Perhaps FIFA is ignoring the problem in the interests of their sponsors, who need good visuals for television coverage — and our campus is indeed scenic. Now, we can only hope for your attention to the problem.

We will be happy to answer all of your questions. You can reach us via email at mail@igmsu.org or through our spokesperson, Alexander Bykov (aleksandr.s.bykov@gmail.com, or +31 6 20 69 1666). You can also contact the author of this statement, Alexander Zamyatin (zamyatinonline@gmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/aazamyatin). Both Alexanders are graduates of MSU.

You can find both petitions printed in full, as well as the latest updates on our situation on a dedicated website: http://nofanfest.igmsu.org. You can also follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/igmsu.