In today's world, institutional changes in Russia's educational landscape are mainly defined by global trends transforming traditional Humboldt research universities into entrepreneurial universities. The driving forces of these changes are: massification of higher education, changes in state policies, growing multidisciplinarity, the high cost of research, and so on. In this paper we investigate the reactions of academics in national research universities (NRUs) in Russia to the new institutional arrangements recently introduced by the state: universities are being transformed into entrepreneurial organisations ruled by new public management principles (NPM). The productivity and efficiency of this new managerial strategy are mainly defined by the attitudes of all actors, or stakeholders. As such, it is very important to investigate local responses on a workplace level, in order to understand how insiders - lecturers and researchers - view the structural changes taking place within Russian universities. In o