Amid war, Russian academia is headed toward crisis

By Olha Chepil | 2025-03-07

KYIV -- Over the three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, scholarship in Russia has run into problems: hundreds of academics have emigrated and are trying to continue their work in new countries, while thousands who are staying in Russia are facing a range of restrictions and repression.

This trend will lead to the downfall of Russian academia, say analysts.

The most salient impact on Russian academia is mass exodus, both since February 2022 and in the past quarter century.

"The total number of personnel engaged in research and development in Russia has decreased by a quarter over the past 20 years," Russian security official Nikolai Patrushev said in November 2023 in Tomsk, according to Newsweek.

Russia had lost about 50,000 scientists from 2018-2023, Newsweek reported at the time.

Those departures, motivated by various reasons including discontent with restrictions on academic freedom and with Russian salaries, turned into a full-scale flood after February 2022.

Scholars and other highly educated workers either feared being drafted or could not abide the invasion of Ukraine.

Those who can find the means keep leaving Russia and depriving it of future intellectual energy.

"Demand for business and tourist visas to the 29-nation Schengen Zone rose by 35% between January and October [2024] compared to the same period in 2023," the Moscow Times reported last November.

The visa seekers, whom the article did not categorize by profession, likely include scholars.

Since 1917, talented Russians have fled their own country when conditions proved unbearable.

Four key mass migrations occurred after the Russian Revolution of 1917, during and after World War II, during detente in the 1970s, and after the Soviet breakup in 1991.

The opponents of Bolshevism who fled in 1917-1922 numbered about 900,000 to 2 million, according to the Czech NGO After Russia.

Meanwhile, about 80,000 scientists emigrated in the first half of the 1990s when the post-Soviet economy collapsed.

'All academic freedoms were lost'

The Kremlin is continuing to use censorship and the militarization of society to squeeze schools and universities.

The Russian instructors, researchers, academics and scientists who remain have faced heavy censorship.

In the first three years of the war, the humanities and social sciences, particularly economics, sociology, some areas of psychology, jurisprudence and Russian history, suffered greatly, say academics.

"All academic freedoms were lost [in Russia]," Olga Orlova, who is originally from Moscow and now lives in Israel and serves as editor-in-chief of T-invariant, a website for the academic community, told Global Watch.

T-invariant documents what is happening with science and education both inside and outside Russia in wartime.

It publishes the anonymous stories of scholars who developed economics and political science in Russia and conducted innovative interdisciplinary research.

But because of the war, innumerable scholars have wasted 30 years of work, Orlova said. The Kremlin is either censoring scholars or persecuting and punishing them.

"We're chronicling the repression of scholars and instructors. The number of trials of scholars is growing, and so is persecution by the FSB [Federal Security Service]," Orlova said.

T-invariant and the Washington-based Center for Independent Social Research, which are chronicling the persecution of academics in Russia, have documented or described about 200 such cases.

Many scholars are now afraid to write the truth.

"Many specialists we talk to, not just in the humanities and social sciences, say that this is marginalization, it's ... turning some areas of history or economics into pseudoscience," Orlova said.

'I can't go back'

Historians, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and sociologists who do not support the war or the Kremlin are either leaving Russia or withdrawing from academic pursuits if they stay, according to analysts.

"I can't go back. ... I'm not going to Russia because I'll get arrested," Dmitry Dubrovsky, a Russian researcher who founded the ethnic studies program at the European University at St. Petersburg and the human rights program at the former Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, told Global Watch.

He left Russia a week after the war began and now teaches social sciences at Charles University in Prague.

Scholars who want to work in Europe or the United States face withering competition and must be fluent in the local language, he pointed out.

"I don't recommend that anyone with a Russian passport go live in Europe right now. It's not a fun time," he said.

"I think 6,000 to 7,000 researchers and [university] instructors have left [Russia]. That's about 1% to 2% of all instructors and students. But they'll most likely need to look for other jobs that aren't related to science or education," Dubrovsky said.

Russians are predominantly going to countries that do not require visas: Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Türkiye, Serbia and Montenegro.

Yet these countries that allow Russians visa-free entry do not offer scintillating opportunities in academia, Dubrovsky pointed out.

Rupture with CERN

The doors are closing on Russian researchers who used to cooperate with international colleagues.

One case that shook Russians was the decision by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in December 2023 to let most cooperation with Russia and Belarus lapse in 2024.

"Undergraduates and graduate students used to go there, and then junior researchers and so on. That lasted for more than 30 years. ... This is a staggering loss for training specialists," Orlova said of the institute in Geneva, Switzerland.

Excluding the Russians from large international collaborations connected to the United States and Europe will take a massive toll on Russia's scientific future, said Orlova.

"We'll see the effects in a decade. Everything will be noticeable," Orlova said.

However, in one crucial instance to be reported in the next article, cooperation between CERN and Russia did not cease.