The Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Russian Federation Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The institute’s full name tells you that it did not belong to the USSR’s general system of higher education, but answered directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Because of this it could set its own admission rules. Applicants off the street had no chance whatsoever of submitting documents to MGIMO. The first barrier was the requirement to have a recommendation from the district or city Communist Party committee.
To get that recommendation, you first had to get one at the level of your class, then your school’s Komsomol committee, plus a series of interviews in the presence of representatives from the school’s Party committee, aimed at determining how ideologically literate a candidate for admission to an international-relations university was. And whether comrades and teachers could vouch for him for such a weighty course of study.
Then came the exams, which were impossible to pass on merit. The lists of future student groups were drawn up three or four years before the entrance exams. Union ministers and regional Party secretaries fought tooth and nail to squeeze their children onto those lists. The institute wasn’t made of rubber, and it couldn’t absorb every child of the Party, economic, and military elite.