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The bulky, twin towers of the Russian Academy of Sciences jut into the Moscow skyline, with the spire of Moscow State University protruding in the distance. EVGENY BIYATOV/SPUTNIK VIA AP
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A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 382, Issue 6671.Download PDF
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Yuri Kovalev remembers how some of his older colleagues took offense when he moved to the United States in 2003 to take a postdoc position at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He could have stayed in Russia where he got his Ph.D., at the Lebedev Physical Institute, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious science centers. Why would he ever want to leave? “But for me it felt really natural as we were now part of a bigger world,” he says.
Yet Kovalev returned a few years later, drawn by the power and potential of science in his home country. He rejoined Lebedev to work on RadioAstron, an international project that linked radio dishes in the U.S. and elsewhere with an orbiting Russian satellite to create a giant virtual telescope. With the system, Kovalev and his colleagues created some of astronomy’s highest resolution images, including ultrasharp pictures of the jets shot out from supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies.
Kovalev was also encouraged by growing Russian R&D spending, which at about 1.2% of gross domestic product was half of rich-world levels but far higher than during the tumultuous 1990s. Russian scientists were retooling their labs, publishing in high-ranking journals, and adapting as science funding shifted toward competitive, merit-based grants. And Lebedev was a great place to be. It had a successful partnership with CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, as well as a high-temperature superconductivity center of its own, dreamed up by Vitaly Ginzburg, one of the institute’s seven Nobel Prize winners. “We had both freedom of movement and license to pursue any direction in research,” Kovalev says.
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All that has changed. The political climate in Russia began to sour in the 2010s, with President Vladimir Putin gradually cracking down on civil society. For many scientists, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was the last straw. Many have fled to the West for political and personal reasons, and those who remain are contending with sanctions affecting the supply of laboratory basics. International collaborations have shriveled, and no new ones are in sight, says Kovalev, who moved away again in 2022, this time to Germany. “That is an enormous problem, and we are not really feeling its pinch yet,” he says.
The Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent and free speech makes it risky to speak out about science’s troubles, and several researchers in Russia contacted by Science declined to be interviewed. One economist who asked for anonymity says expatriates should not criticize those in Russia who don’t openly speak out against the war or the government. “They are blaming us for staying quiet—well, be my guest, come back here and tell us everything,” the economist says.
And for some researchers in Russia, discussing their plight feels inappropriate amid the death and destruction that Russia has wrought in Ukraine and on its science community. “It’s as if you’re going through this case of food poisoning and someone else nearby is having a heart attack,” says Mikhail Gelfand, a bioinformatics researcher at the Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems and vice president for biomedical research at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech).
For those who stay quiet, life in Russia can carry on mostly as normal. That’s why many Ukrainian scientists want to see stronger sanctions against Russian research institutions. They say some of those institutions aid and abet Russia’s military-industrial complex. “There is no doubt that blocking access to scientific equipment, international funding, high-profile collaborations, databases, and publications will make Russian science weaker, and thus, to a degree, will decrease the capacity of Russia to invade its neighbors,” Yaroslaw Bazaliy, a Ukrainian condensed matter physicist at the University of South Carolina, and his colleagues said in a statement to Science.
Some Russian researchers aren’t ready to give up on their country yet—in part because of the scientific riches it holds. For example, Russia controls a large fraction of the Arctic—a region that contains clues to the pace of climate change and its consequences. Alexander Kirdyanov, a tree-ring researcher at the Sukachev Institute of Forest, has kept up summer field trips to Siberia and plans to return to Russia once he concludes a visiting position in the United Kingdom. “If you think you can precisely study everything from space, good luck measuring the age of a tree or the thickness of moss cover by satellite,” he says.
Sanctions have targeted laboratory supplies but researchers have found workarounds.SERGEI KARPUKHIN/TASS VIA ZUMA PRESS
Kirdyanov also feels an obligation to continue to train young researchers in Russia. Kovalev worries that, as more and more bright, young colleagues leave, maintaining a critical mass of researchers able to do high-quality science will become extremely difficult. “So, we should be beyond grateful to those top researchers who choose to stay in Russia,” he adds.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, there is little appetite for collaboration with Russia, and little hope for peace and rapprochement any time soon. But Dmitri Kuvalin, a member of the Russian National Security Council’s scientific advisory board who studies Russian industry at the Institute for Economic Forecasting, still sees science as a bridge. It “connects countries now and will help reconnect in the future,” he says.
JUST BEFORE TANKS rolled toward Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2022, Irina Dezhina, a researcher at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, and Elizabeth Wood, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a study on 3 decades of U.S.-Russian partnerships in science. They identified numerous cases where researchers in both countries benefited from collaboration, despite geopolitical tensions and major differences in scientific cultures. They found U.S. researchers often marveled at Russian ingenuity and strong theoretical instincts, whereas the Russians adopted U.S. habits in writing good grant proposals and publishing internationally.
The timing was ironic. “We had so many plans to continue this work,” Dezhina recalls. Yet at the end of that month, just 4 days into the invasion, MIT pulled the plug on its decadelong cooperation with Skoltech, an English-language university it had helped launch, and ended the joint seed grant program that had funded Dezhina’s work.
A cascade of similar decisions followed. Like many other nations, Germany ended all research collaborations with Russia. That forced the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, for example, to shut down one of the two instruments onboard the Russian Spektr-RG spacecraft, which was mapping the universe in x-ray wavelengths. CERN said it will cut ties with Russia when its contract expires in 2024, ending a relationship with more than 1000 Russian scientists. The U.S. hit Russian research organizations, including Lebedev, with harsh sanctions that drove away suppliers, partners, and even some employees.
To tackle climate change, we have to work in Russia, with Russians.
Outspoken Russian scientists began to protest the war, with the first open letter published hours after the invasion began. Soon after, young researchers and university faculty mobilized to publish dozens of other protest letters.
The state hit back, detaining people at street protests and pressuring the scientific establishment. Leaders at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) chastised members who had signed letters for “insulting the government.” Rectors of major universities published a pro-war statement that called for supporting the army and Putin. The science community newspaper that started the initial campaign, Troitsky Variant, was designated a “foreign agent,” a label that scared off donors and forced its nonprofit publisher to close. After the government introduced novel criminal offenses—including calling the events in Ukraine a “war”— organizers had to hide the lists of signatures.
“You can’t watch everyone in the country, but everyone who signed those letters is certainly being watched,” one signatory says. They told Science they had several increasingly uncomfortable conversations with their superiors about their actions later in the year. Those discussions were invariably prompted by “reports” by someone outside the organization that were never shown or discussed in detail.
An Orthodox priest blesses Russian conscripts called to war (first image). At a quantum research forum in July, Russian President Vladimir Putin (second image, right) railed against what he called Western attacks on the nation’s technological sovereignty.ALEXEY PAVLISHAK/REUTERS; ALEXANDER KAZAKOV, SPUTNIK, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA AP
Many researchers now fear being reported to the authorities by “concerned citizens” or even their colleagues. Those fears are not unfounded. Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist formerly with the Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, a civil service and management university in Moscow, has been tracking court sentences for “discrediting the Russian army” since the novel offense was created. Her team has found more than 7200 cases so far, including hundreds where offenders said something in a public setting— and were later snitched on by witnesses.
She says there is no clear pattern in who gets persecuted: “This wave of repression is expressly random.” To her, that is the point; a climate of fear is more useful to the state than any sort of logic. Arkhipova, who was informed on several times herself, left Russia in 2022 and continues her work at France’s School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
FOR THOSE WHO just want to carry on quietly with their studies, sanctions are making it challenging. The fallout varies by scientific field: A 2022 industry survey of more than 4000 scientists, run by the RAS Institute of Psychology and the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, showed some 70% of those in natural and medical sciences expected major disruptions. Some of the new hurdles are mundane, such as being unable to pay to publish articles in Western journals because Russian banks have been banned from SWIFT, an international financial transaction processing system.
But others are more technical. Russia remains far from self-sufficient in research supplies and equipment. Speaking at a conference in December 2022, Dmitry Livanov, rector of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and former government minister for science, said some 80% of the Russian science market belonged to foreign suppliers—in his words, an unfortunate situation “of our own making.” The country imports not only high-end devices such as DNA sequencers, but also basic equipment such as laboratory balances.
Faced with shortages and supply disruptions, Russian researchers are getting creative. On Telegram, a popular messaging app, researchers chat to trade consumables, find reviews for a lab animal vendor, or even pick up something that another lab is throwing out. Our Lab, a project supported by the government, is coordinating a database of about 500 local suppliers for items such as lab benches, infrared lasers, and petri dishes. Researchers have made their own silica gel, а staple in chromatography machines, which separate chemical compounds from mixtures. Others returned to a practice of smuggling plasmids, circular molecules of DNA used to manipulate genes, from abroad after Addgene, the U.S. nonprofit plasmid repository and distributor, stopped shipping to Russia.
In addition to facing material shortages, Russian scientists have also been isolated. Many conferences place restrictions on researchers with Russian affiliations—or ban them outright. This is bad for science overall, which is international by default, Kovalev says. “Astrophysics in particular can’t be confined to national borders.”
Some Russian researchers have attended conferences without an institutional affiliation. But Kovalev says that approach exposes the scientists to administrative risks and even legal liability in Russia for misappropriation of funds used to cover the costs of attendance. It’s also an ethical problem, because researchers are expected to acknowledge the institutions that support their work.
Some in the West worry about what is being lost. Siberia, for example, is a hot spot of Arctic field research, providing valuable data on environmental change. Western research institutions, which threw a lifeline to many Russian permafrost and climate projects in the 1990s, now find themselves cut off from about half of the Arctic as collaborations wither.
Researchers prepare to deploy buoys below the frozen surface of Siberia’s Lake Baikal as part of a telescope to detect neutrinos from space. SERGEY PONOMAREV/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Ulf Büntgen, a geographer at the University of Cambridge, has worked in the Siberian north for decades, gathering tree ring data for paleoclimatic studies in a region still poorly covered by measurements. He fears disruptions in fieldwork may break continuous observational records that took a lot of effort to build. Büntgen wants climate scientists to set aside politics and resume collaborations with Russian scholars and institutions, as he believes their data and expertise are too critical to forgo. “To tackle climate change, we have to work in Russia, with Russians,” he says.
Bazaliy and his colleagues reject that idea. Setting politics aside will only help the Russian government return to “business as usual,” they say. “You might think you are helping scientists in Russia, but in reality, you may be assisting Mr. Putin.”
PERHAPS THE MOST lasting damage the war has done to science in Russia is to accelerate the ongoing exodus of scientists. A sensitive subject since the 1990s, its magnitude is hard to gauge. But Johannes Wachs, who studies computer science at Corvinus University of Budapest, says emigration among the tech community can give a sense of the potential scale. He analyzed GitHub, a popular open-source developer site, for changed or deleted location information in its list of software developers. He estimates that between 11% and 28% of Russia’s developers have left since the war began.
Another clue comes from the 2022 industry survey, which asked scientists how the “special military operation” affected their intention to leave Russia. One-third of respondents said it “somewhat” or “strongly” increased their intention to leave. For scientists under age 39, that figure was slightly over 50%.
In lieu of hard numbers are personal stories. Ilya Schurov, a mathematician who left Russia in early March 2022 after protesting the war, found a 2-year postdoc position in condensed matter physics at Radboud University in the Netherlands. His former employer, the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), has lost about 700 faculty since the war began, its co-founder Andrei Yakovlev said in a Facebook post announcing his own departure in August. Schurov says it was a big step down to trade a senior position for a postdoc, but he appreciates his academic freedom. “At least I can be sure I won’t get fired at any moment if someone doesn’t like something,” he says.
That’s what happened to Dinara Gagarina, a digital humanities researcher at a local branch of HSE. She was abruptly dismissed from all her projects and later fired for “amoral behavior” after she made antiwar posts on social media. Gagarina fought her termination because she wanted to keep supervising students who were preparing to graduate. Early this year she, too, left Russia after receiving calls from the police. She ultimately landed a job at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. “I think I’ve been unfairly fired, and that was really hard for me,” Gagarina says. In June, a local court rejected her second appeal.
Russia holds most of the world’s permafrost. A researcher in Yakutsk cuts a sample.MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
A decade ago, Dmitrii Musolin, an entomologist who studies forest pests, had returned to Russia after 10 years of research in Japan because he saw “positive signals” of change. He joined the Saint Petersburg State Forest Technical University and eventually became its vice rector, overseeing research and international affairs. “But in reality, it all went downhill from there,” he says. In March 2022, he left Russia for a job at the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization, just as his university boss in St. Petersburg signed the prowar declaration.
Unlike those who left the rubble of the Soviet Union, today’s scientists are better equipped to find new homes for themselves abroad, in part thanks to all those international partnerships. And they join a big and diverse community abroad ready to help both Ukrainian and Russian researchers, often with little regard for passports.
“I feel equally close to both groups, I grew up in the Soviet Union after all,” says Alexander Kabanov, CEO of the Russian American Science Association, a nonprofit hub for the Russian-speaking research diaspora that recently launched a mentorship network for scholars at risk. Yet he feels those fleeing bombs take priority: Kabanov has supported a Ukrainian pharmaceutical scientist who joined his nanomedicine lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and he has helped several others find work.
Dmitry Rudenkin, a sociologist and nonresident fellow of the Russia Program at George Washington University, finds the current wave of migrants different from earlier ones. Back then, people were on a quest for a better life. Now, they are driven by fear. “They were leaving for somewhere else,” he says, “and now we are only running from Russia.” Like many researchers studying this exodus, he is also part of it: When the invasion started, Rudenkin was on a work trip abroad and decided not to return home to a job at Ural Federal University.
Most exiles are not rushing to cut ties with Russia. Two senior researchers abroad, who spoke to Science anonymously to avoid professional repercussions, have maintained their affiliations at their home research institutions, although neither is getting paid. They say it’s a gesture to co-workers that they are not abandoning ship, and a way to keep helping junior colleagues. “Why should I be the one to quit? If they want me gone, they will have to fire me,” one of the researchers says.
IN JULY, Putin paid a visit to a swanky quantum research forum in Moscow. In a speech, he said that by limiting Russia’s access to technology, “ruling elites” of some countries wanted to pressure Russia into giving up its sovereignty. “Russia will only go forward and follow its own road but without isolating itself from anyone at the same time,” he said.
State propaganda has amplified the claim that Russia welcomes collaboration but is being targeted by unprovoked and unprecedented sanctions. “Destroying Russian science” is one of the top priorities for the West, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told the council’s scientific advisory board in April.
The government has turned to “friendly” states, bolstering joint Russian Science Foundation funding schemes with China and India and launching a new one with Iran. But many of these countries have scant, if any, history of large-scale research cooperation with Russia.
To entice researchers from overseas, the government revamped its megagrant program, which, like China’s Thousand Talents Program, is intended to lure expats to Russian institutes with generous lab support. Kabanov, who received one of the first grants in 2010, believes few, if any, leading scientists working in the West would be tempted to join now.
Despite the grim mood, none of the Russian researchers interviewed by Science expects the massive Russian scientific sector to wither quickly. The slow-moving nature of many projects, with budgets set years ago, has also insulated some scientists from the war and its impacts, creating a patina of normalcy. An attendee at a Moscow science policy conference in April was stunned by an atmosphere they described as delusional optimism—“It’s all great and going to get better.”
But Gelfand applauds Russians who are continuing their work, even under the pressures of an authoritarian state. He also sees some hope in those who keep doing science in exile. “The tree may be dead, but you can graft an offshoot elsewhere, and you can even bring it back to the same place later,” he says.
