Moscow — After years of financing a huge number of obscure research institutes and scientific labs at second-tier universities, Russia’s ministry of education threatened this week to cut state spending at many of them, while diverting money to the most competitive.

Russia’s state institutes, many of them relics of the Soviet research model — such as an institute on the flu in St. Petersburg, or an institute on internal combustion in the southern city of Ufa — have been augmented by new private universities that also have sought state support.

The minister of education and science, Andrei Fursenko, said the excess must be pruned for competitive reasons. Mr. Fursenko said that 80 percent of the roughly 1,000 higher-education institutions do not innovate or conduct useful scientific research.

“In Russia today only 15 to 20 percent of universities can be competitive,” he said. “There should be a maximum 50 universities and 150 to 200 institutes of higher education left in the country.” The rest, he said, should become branches of major universities, shift to vocational colleges, or shut down.

Some university directors and professors welcomed the reform. “Unfortunately research activity at universities was weak in both Soviet and post-Soviet times,” Yevgeny Yasin, research director of the Higher School of Economics, and a former minister of the economy, said in an interview. “Russia has very few really progressive research universities.”

The president and owner of the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Management and Business, Alexander Yegorshin, said that his private college could survive without state subsidies, and that those that cannot should close.

“Since the government let the genie out of the bottle, and let us create private institutes, it will be impossible to pull us back into the system,” he said. “We are capable of financing and developing our scientific research without help from the state budget.” —Anna Nemtsova