Since the second decade of the 21st century the world has been living in a situation of disorder, which has now transformed into the most dangerous geopolitical turmoil since World War II. Its main characteristics are:
1) The emergence and consolidation of a multipolar world triggered by the rapid rise of China and other East Asian nations.
2) The relative decline of the West, accelerated by the United States’ highly problematic strategic choices: a three-front war against Russia, China, and Iran and, since 2025, an unprecedented fragmentation of the West.
3) The West’s frantic efforts to reverse its gradual decline, stopping short at nothing, including violation of international rules, use of violence, and piracy. To preserve their dominance, the U.S. and its allies are resorting to military operations and even wars.
4) This notwithstanding, the West, and especially the U.S., remain powerful to cause—and are causing—great damage urbi et orbi. This fact should not be underestimated.
An important facet of the West’s decline is its moral decay and intellectual degradation. This is clearly seen in the low morals of current European leaders, with few exceptions, and of U.S. presidents; as well as the electoral fraud and manipulations (e.g., used to elect George W. Bush and then Donald J. Trump twice as presidents).
Few could have imagined the scope of corruption, debauchery, and pedophilia among politicians, businessmen and intellectuals as the disclosed sex offence scheme of Jeffrey Epstein and his high-profile circle has shown.
All of this is well known in general outlines. Less recognized and often overlooked is the racial underpinning of the current tense geopolitical situation. The widespread ingrained racism of structural nature adds a particularly perverse connotation to the current geopolitical picture.
For purposes of analysis, today’s world can be divided into two parts—the Collective West and the Global South. The Collective West is normally understood as comprising the U.S.-led states: Canada, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and some other high-income countries. The population of the West, excluding Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, accounts for merely 12% of the world’s population, with a tendency to decrease. The Global South is usually understood to correspond to the Rest (to recall Niall Ferguson’s book The West and the Rest), i.e., the emerging and developing countries of Eurasia, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The central point is that approximately 3/4 of the people residing in the West are white, with non-white minorities mainly employed in low-skilled jobs that whites are no longer willing to do.
The population of the Global South is completely different in terms of racial composition. The vast majority are blacks, browns, yellows, mestizos, etc. Whites have been a minority in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America, where European colonization had more weight.
In the white West, structural racism has taken root, anchored in the conviction that Western civilization, more developed and sophisticated, is the product of superior people. People of much older civilizations, such as Chinese, Indian and Iranian, smile ironically at this pretension. When Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a journalist what he thought of Western civilization, the answer was: “I think it would be a good idea.”
Western racism is an old and persisting phenomenon. In the second half of the 20th century it was disguised by varying layers of hypocrisy, today the feeling of superiority over non-whites has become more transparent.
Yet the peoples who were previously colonized or semi-colonized no longer recognize the superiority of whites. They resist the colonial or neocolonial schemes of exploitation imposed by the Europeans and the Americans. They want to have their rights accepted—in practice and not just in theory. As Vladimir Putin said, “The Western elites are used to stuff their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. That vampire’s ball is coming to an end.”
The world’s white minority adamantly resents losing world hegemony and the privileges associated with it. ‘Human, all too human,’ Nietzsche would say. Centuries of world domination are not easily forgotten and abandoned.
Another phenomenon of crucial importance is the large-scale migration of Latin Americans, Africans and West Asians who flee wars (many of them unleashed by the West) or seek better living conditions in the U.S. and Europe. As migration grows, so does the revulsion in the West towards immigrants, especially Muslims. Restrictions on immigration have gained broad public support among Europeans and Americans. The barriers and—often—inhumane ways of border control, hostility against immigrants, and resentment against even migrant citizens, are indicative of the U.S. and Europe’s civilizational regression.
The popular fight against immigration, on both sides of the North Atlantic, partly reflects the desire to protect Western culture against the growing presence of people belonging to other cultures and other religions. This is understandable. However, it is mixed with deep-rooted racism—the belief in the superiority of whites. Remarkable in this respect is that white immigrants, e.g., from Ukraine, face far fewer obstacles in Europe than Arabs or black Africans. A Ukrainian immigrant or refugee is basically seen as “one of us.”
What we have, in fact, is a new form of xenophobic fascism, with the radical rejection of immigrants at its heart. On the political party level, it is manifested in the rise of the ‘new right’ discourse in Europe and the United States.
Often referred to as ‘populist’, resonating with broad anti-immigration public sentiment, it is growing—partly because the traditional parties cannot embrace it without violating their basic principles.
Like Jews in Nazi Germany and other European countries, Muslims and other non-whites have been made a convenient scapegoat for the adverse social consequences of the West’s decline and the impossibility of continuing to exploit the rest of the world. Non-white migrants are held responsible for all sorts of crimes and violence. They are accused of replacing white workers and generating unemployment among them—when, in fact, migrant workers are engaged in unautomated and low-paid jobs that the white population rejects.
The ‘new right’ discourse in Europe and America is not exactly new, it is rather a regression to the pre-Enlightenment conceptions. It can be called fascist or Nazi, as it contains elements of this worldview, with Muslims occupying the place previously reserved for Jews. Civilizational regression has acquired such a dimension that it would be appropriate to speak of an Age of Obscurantism or an Age of Endarkenment. In what other era could an absolutely crude figure like Donald Trump be at the center of the world stage? Trump is an extreme case, but the truth is that few Western leaders measure up to the positions they hold.
In short, Europe and the U.S., previously at the forefront of the Enlightenment, are vigorously sponsoring a movement in the opposite direction. The 18th century became known as the Century of Enlightenment; the 21st century may go down in history as the Century of Endarkenment.
The genocide perpetrated by Israeli Jews against Palestinians is perhaps the clearest symptom of Western civilization’s shipwreck and the central ingredient of this Age of Endarkenment. Europe’s and, above all, the U.S.’s support of Israel has compromised, perhaps irreversibly, the West’s adherence to the moral values it has been preaching so vigorously.
Importantly, Israel is far from an isolated case. Israel’s settler colonialism and genocide in Palestine have many precedents. In fact, Israel’s criminal behavior is part of the centuries-old European tradition.
What is happening in Gaza is the latest colonial genocide practiced by white Europeans against non-whites. Beginning in the 16th century, Europeans and their descendants destroyed peoples in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania to occupy their lands with immigrants from the metropolis. In Europe itself, the Holocaust would not have had the prominence it has if it had not victimized whites. Using various forms of genocide, Europeans victimized other races in what we now call the Global South, to the point of exterminating them completely or partially, like in Australia and North and South America.
The crucial and much commented difference of the genocide in Gaza from the previous genocides is that it has got wide and instantaneous media coverage, with a planetary impact. The Germans could, with some credibility, claim that they were unaware of the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps, the Israelis are not in a position to claim the same. And they do not really try. Moreover, Zionist extremists, inside and outside the Netanyahu government, take pride in killing Palestinians, justifying it by the “fight against terrorism” and even presenting the murder of Palestinian children as the elimination of “future terrorists.”
Furthermore, Gaza is sometimes interpreted as an experiment of the decaying Western Empire—a genocide broadcast globally in real time as a warning to all. The message goes like this: look what can happen to non-white peoples who resist the imperial pretensions of the West.
Inevitably, political, economic, and military support for Israel by the U.S. and most of Europe exacts an immense political price. No one believes anymore in the existence of Western values. The image, once so strong, has been destroyed in the name of a stalwart defense of Israel’s policies and priorities.
In conclusion a few words about Brazil that may be partly relevant to other nations of the Global South.
How can we prepare Brazil for a new international era, very different from the one we were used to?
The first imperative for Brazilians is to abandon, as soon as possible, the belief that international differences can be resolved with goodwill, diplomacy, and soft power. Careful psychological, economic and military preparation is imperative to face the storms ahead. It is not a choice or something that can be postponed. This is the most urgent challenge facing the country.
In the psychological realm, we need to overcome the inferiority complex that downgrades the country and makes our international relations so difficult. In other words, we must throw overboard all the remnants of centuries of cultural colonization. We also need to abandon our traditional pacifism—not to attack anyone, but to remember that to live in peace one needs to prepare for war. Se vis pacem para bellum, as the Romans said.
In the economy, Brazil must seek self-sufficiency in essential areas, avoiding dependence on foreign suppliers whenever feasible, especially from countries that appear as potential aggressors. Strategic production chains must be built mostly within the national territory or in reliable countries.
Self-sufficiency generates, of course, losses in economic efficiency, but the time is gone when one could rely with some plausibility on trade and financial openness as levers for development.
The second imperative is of positive nature. Brazil is able, perhaps like no other country, to offer a new word to the world, a message of reconciliation and unity. Moreover, our historical destiny may be in starting, together with other nations, a Second Renaissance that will free us from the threats and catastrophes of the Age of Endarkenment.
Thanks to its dimensions, mix of peoples from all parts of the planet, and tradition of openness to the world, Brazilians can play a significant role in the world’s salvation.
On July 23, the U.S. Department of Defense published a new list of organizations that, according to its assessment, pose a threat to U.S. national security or are engaged in problematic activity. The list includes Moscow State University, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the Higher School of Economics, Ural Federal University, and numerous other universities and research institutes. The Pentagon believes that these organizations may aim to steal American intellectual property, research data, technologies, and scientific innovations. The Department therefore urges American universities, research institutes, and individual scholars receiving Department of Defense funding not to collaborate with them in any way, exchange data, or provide financial support. Notably, this list is not identical to existing U.S. sanctions lists (read more: “Scientific Front: Who in Russian Science Ended Up Under Western Sanctions — and Why”) and it appeared at a time when, according to Reuters, the U.S. administration has significantly reduced efforts to enforce sanctions against Russia. T-invariant explores what this new policy means for American and Russian academia, how it differs from sanctions law, and who is likely to be affected.
T-INVARIANT BRIEFING
The restrictions certainly apply to:
- Researchers affiliated with the listed organizations and working in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, technology, and defense-related fields.
- American universities and colleges receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.
They are highly likely to affect:
- All employees of listed institutions, regardless of their academic discipline.
- Students of the listed universities when applying to conferences or submitting articles to journals affiliated with American universities or companies.
- Universities, colleges, research institutes, think tanks, and other organizations worldwide that receive funding from the U.S. government.
The restrictions might affect:
- Students and graduates of these institutions when applying to American universities.
- Universities in third countries participating in projects funded by the U.S. government.
- Researchers at other universities and institutes in Russia, Iran, and China.
The list was issued as an implementation of Section 1286 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2019. The NDAA is a law that is issued every year and that determines the structure and budget of the U.S. military, including troop numbers, defense spending, modernization programs, and other issues. However, alongside military provisions, Congress also includes neighboring measures, such as foreign policy objectives, and funding allocation. The 2019 NDAA received broad bipartisan support and was signed by President Donald Trump. Compared with previous versions, it increased the military budget, while shifting America’s strategic focus in foreign policy away from counterterrorism toward long-term competition with China and Russia, with considerably greater emphasis on China. This legislation was especially discussed in the media due to the restrictions of Section 889 targeting Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE.
As part of the same great power competition strategy, Congress included provisions designed to protect American academic research from foreign influence and intellectual property theft. Section 1286, which received the updated list of “problematic organizations,” is titled Initiative to support protection of national security academic researchers from undue influence and other security threats and it specifically addresses universities conducting defense and technology research. Although Congress passes a new NDAA every year, the Pentagon continues updating the same list of the Section 1286 of NDAA 2019 because the 2019 law explicitly requires the Department of Defense to revise it on a regular basis. The July 23 publication is therefore not a new law, but the latest update of an existing mechanism. Being published every year, these updates all have special emphasis, relevant for the moment. For instance, the 2025 version is primarily aimed at preventing foreign influence over research sponsored by the Department of Defense.
Such activities as funding sanctioned organizations, or exchanging data, were already prohibited by sanctions laws. Also, scholars employed by those organizations could not participate in conferences, or get published in the leading journals if they maintained formal affiliations. There are three fundamental points of difference between the new Pentagon list and sanctions: who is affected, who enforces the law, and what the consequences of violations are.
Who is affected?
Previous sanctions and earlier lists (such as the 2023 Section 1286 list) targeted a relatively small number of universities involved mainly in military technology development or, in Russia’s case, in promoting state propaganda. Moreover, the restrictions were generally limited to individual representatives or to specific institutes. Before the new list appeared, the largest Russian research center to be included in such restrictions in its entirety was Skolkovo, which was added in 2023 – and in that case, it was hardly surprising.
This time, however, the Pentagon included 13 Russian universities as whole bodies, and those were not only institutions specializing in engineering, physics, and biology, but also several major multidisciplinary universities, including Moscow State University (MSU), the Higher School of Economics (HSE), and Ural Federal University (UrFU). Several of China’s leading multidisciplinary universities, including Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, were also added. HSE employees, speaking on condition of anonymity, told T-invariant that until now they had been able to collaborate with Western universities as private researchers without listing their affiliation, they participated in conferences online and sometimes even in person, conducted joint research, and published articles.
However, the wording of the new document makes it possible to extend the restrictions to employees of the listed organizations themselves. This means that concealing one’s institutional affiliation and presenting oneself as an independent researcher may no longer be sufficient to circumvent the restrictions: any collaboration between American researchers and scholars who are simply employed by universities on the list falls under Pentagon restrictions. Moreover, even though most organizations on the list conduct research in physics, technology, and such, the policy could affect physicians, historians, and even scholars of the Swahili language.
Who enforces the restrictions?
Another noteworthy aspect is that these measures operate through the National Defense Authorization Act, meaning they are administered by the Department of Defense, unlike the traditional sanctions system. Sanctions are often described as decisions made by the U.S. government as a whole, but departments matter. In reality, Sanctions legislation is passed through Congress or came in force by a presidential decree, and enforcement is typically carried out by either the Treasury Department or the Department of Commerce. But this list is neither a sanction imposed for specific actions, nor a punishment for participating in war or violating the law. Instead, it is presented as a preventive measure designed to protect American research and technology from national security threats. Meanwhile, the official sanctions lists themselves do not receive any updates, and President Trump has repeatedly signaled a willingness to improve relations with leaders of countries that remain under U.S. sanctions.
The Department of Defense is publishing this update because it is legally required to. At the same time, it does not provide any specific evidence demonstrating that every organization included is “engaging in activities that threaten U.S. national security interests.” The use of national security and foreign influence concerns as justifications for government intervention in science, media, and business is all too familiar from the Russian experience and feels rather unsettling. That is why it is important to understand what this policy means not only for Russian science, but also for American academia.
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After taking office, President Trump began exerting significant pressure on American universities. His primary targets were campus protests and the promotion of woke ideas concerning equality and the rights of gender, racial, and sexual minorities. The principal tool was the threat of cutting off federal funding. Yet even during Trump’s first presidency, the administration had already started intervening in universities through the concerns of espionage, and in 2018, the Department of Justice launched the China Initiative. According to the MIT Technology Review, the effectiveness of the initiative is highly questionable, partly because the Department of Justice never clearly explained its concrete objectives beyond broad references to protecting American technology and combating espionage. It also failed to clarify the criteria used to initiate investigations. Information about many cases never appeared on official government websites, some records were removed following media inquiries and requests for comment, and only about one quarter of the cases received actual convictions. Moreover, many prosecutions had no obvious connection to national security. This precedent is especially significant in light of the new Section 1286 list, as a precedent. As follows from the name of the programme, approximately 90% of those prosecuted under China Initiative were scholars of Chinese origin, and members of Asian diasporas were subjected to disproportionate scrutiny by law enforcement. MIT Technology Review argues that one of the initiative’s most damaging consequences was the brain drain of highly qualified researchers from the United States. Scientists and scholars were leaving because of the discrimination and pressure from the law enforcement, and it became harmful for the American science itself.
During President Biden’s administration, the espionage agenda receded somewhat into the background, but it reemerged, as Trump took office again. On March 26, 2026, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce heard reports on the activities of foreign intelligence services on university campuses. Once again, the discussion focused primarily on alleged espionage involving Chinese students, the recruitment of American students on campus, and cases in which researchers were drawn into projects without being informed on the true purpose of the research. It is worth noting that in his opening remarks, the committee chair emphasized that international collaborations should benefit America rather than its rivals. This idea contradicts the traditional understanding of academia as a transnational space for free exchange of knowledge. International conferences, academic and cultural exchanges, collaborative research, and multinational projects have advanced and benefited science worldwide for decades. As with the China Initiative, extending the logic of national security into universities and scientific research challenges this principle and contributes to the isolation of American science.
At the same time, it would be wrong to deny that espionage, foreign interference in academia and business, and theft of American intellectual property do exist. Roughly one quarter of China Initiative prosecutions ended in convictions, and over the past year, several cases have emerged involving Chinese intelligence agents infiltrating American academic institutions. But these cases differ in one respect, crucial for the NDAA 2019 list: the spies concealed their connections to Chinese universities, military structures, or intelligence agencies. They would typically enter the United States as students, visiting researchers, fellows, or even professors while hiding their institutional ties. They transferred research data and intelligence to the Chinese government, smuggled research materials into or out of the country – it seems that Ksenia Petrova was detained because of this atmosphere of heightened suspicion within academia.
There were also cases of recruiting American students and professors, but it generally happened through malign foreign talent recruitment programs, in which American researchers participated without being informed who would ultimately receive the results of their work or for what purpose. The 2024 version of the Pentagon list was specifically aimed at preventing this practice.
An even more common instrument of espionage has been cyberattacks, like the case reported recently by The Insider. In this case, Microsoft uncovered a scheme that allowed hackers to gain access to data from every device connected to compromised hotel Wi-Fi networks during academic conferences.
Journalist Roman Dobrokhotov described the method for the TVRain channel: “When you try to log in, your credentials get stolen. In the worst case scenario, you’re prompted to download software or click ‘OK’ or ‘YES,’ and a real spyware virus gets onto your laptop. It steals all your passwords and captures everything you type on the keyboard. If a conference has a thousand participants, it is enough just for two or three people to download the malware for the operation to succeed.” According to The Insider, “the group primarily targets governments, diplomatic missions, NGOs, and IT companies in the United States and Europe in order to collect intelligence supporting Russian foreign policy.”
All of these espionage cases share an important point: every time, the perpetrators concealed the affiliations with the organizations they were truly working for, they frequently used false documents, or even operated remotely. This raises a doubt as to the effectiveness of a ban on cooperation with specific universities. Such a policy is unlikely to counter the methods actually used to steal research data.
How grave are the consequences?
The third major difference between this list and sanctions packages lies in the mechanism of the restrictions: the Department of Defense does not put a ban on the activities of the listed organizations, but it is restricting its own ability to fund them. The universities included in the list, their employees, or American scholars – none of them will face prosecution by law enforcement. However, the Pentagon restricts its ability to provide funding to universities, institutes, or individual researchers who continue collaborating with listed organizations or their employees, or who use their equipment.
At first glance, it might seem that losing such a niche source of funding would hardly affect fields unrelated to the military. For instance, professor of Russian literature Oleg Lekmanov, who taught at Princeton University, expressed precisely this view: “As I see it, this is not relevant to the humanities, because no one from the military sector offers us funding in the first place.” However, the Pentagon has numerous programs and foundations that finance research, and not only in fields related to defense, but also in biology, psychology, medicine, linguistics, the social sciences, and area studies. For instance, Natalia Korbo, a former targeting analyst for the U.S. State Department Economic Bureau, confirmed to T-invariant that the Department of Defense supports an exceptionally broad range of projects, particularly in STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Moreover, funding extends well beyond STEM disciplines. For example, the Minerva Initiative distributes long- and short-term grants for research intended to help the Department of Defense better understand future challenges and prepare for them. Thus, the participating projects cover a range of disciplines. According to Science, Minerva allocated $24.8 million in 2024 alone to projects involving artificial intelligence, climate change, and migration. Yet, the Science reports that the initiative had already begun drastically reducing its funding, even for projects that appeared directly relevant to defense interests. Among those unexpectedly terminated were studies examining the factors that motivate military personnel to remain in service and the conditions that prevent the collapse of international alliances. And now, it might become even more difficult to obtain Pentagon funding, since applicants will have to demonstrate that no member of a project is affiliated with any organization on the list of “the undesirables.”
Apart from research, the Department of Defense provides funding for educational purposes. It awards scholarships to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students studying languages and regions considered “critical to America’s security,” and it sponsors academic centers devoted to these fields.
Judging by the Trump administration’s foreign-policy priorities, particular attention is currently being drawn to South America and the Indo-Pacific region. At the same time, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Russia remain areas of strategic interest as well. Consequently, the publication of the NDAA 2019 list will affect not only researchers in biochemistry, physics, engineering, and technology, but potentially also scholars studying Latin American music or Chinese dance if their academic center receives Pentagon funding.
Moreover, it is unclear whether the funding will be lost only by a project or an institute who maintains ties with a banned organization, or the research of the whole university will be considered compromised in case one body continues collaborations. It is entirely possible that if even one department within a university depends on Department of Defense funding, restrictions on collaboration with listed organizations could apply to the university as a whole.
Furthermore, the preamble to the document contains another provision that may substantially broaden its practical impact. Formally, the list applies only to Department of Defense grants, scholarships, contracts, and other financial support. However, it also warns that cooperation with listed organizations may negatively impact scholars’ eligibility for federal funding. And that is a much more serious prospect. The U.S. federal government finances roughly half of all research and maintenance expenditures at American universities and colleges. Federal money also supports countless scholarships, research grants, and academic conferences. In this light, universities will hardly risk losing access to federal funding, even if the document merely warns of possible consequences rather than imposing an explicit prohibition.
Denis Simon, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, argues that the U.S. government has effectively stopped distinguishing between leading civilian universities and institutions engaged in security-related research. He also believes American organizations will most likely interpret the conditions of the NDAA 2019 list very broadly. Simon further suggests that universities may begin limiting interaction not only with the organizations explicitly named on the list, but also with other research institutes in Russia, China, and Iran.
A similar concern is expressed by Evgeny Roshchin, Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Policy of the SAIS School of Advanced International Studies: “On the one hand, the document concerns the research funded through Department of Defense grants. On the other hand, the disciplinary boundaries are not specified. That means it could apply to virtually any field of research, including economics, if it is financed through Pentagon grants. Researchers applying for federal grant competitions will also have to disclose all of their connections with people affiliated with organizations on the list. The existence of such connections may reduce their chances of receiving funding. I believe this will become the main deterrent. Of course, everything will depend on how the rules are applied, but the policy could seriously damage academic cooperation, because some researchers might choose to abandon perfectly legitimate collaborations simply to avoid the risk.”
According to research data, international collaboration is a significant driver of scientific progress. Natalia Korbo believes that while some restrictions are understandable, a blanket prohibition is deeply misguided:
“I understand the logic behind banning joint research in fields like bioengineering or physics, although spies are smart enough not to be affiliated with problematic institutions. But prohibiting all collaboration is simply foolish. It will harm both American science and scientific research worldwide. The restrictions will absolutely affect cultural studies as well. Even the closure of the Confucius Institutes had negative consequences for Americans themselves. Yes, those institutes promoted the Chinese government’s propaganda, but in most American cities they were also the only places where people could learn Chinese. These kinds of bans, like the TikTok ban, are often poorly thought out and produce enormous collateral damage.”
A similar view is shared by Anton Kapustin, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology: “First, I believe these are serious restrictions, and they extend well beyond defense-related research. Originally, they applied only to projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. But similar restrictions have since been introduced for grants from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies. In practice, they now affect almost all federal grants. Second, the list of proscribed entities grows every year. Now it includes MIPT, HSE, and Moscow State University. If a student has co-authored publications with researchers from these institutions, any American university will think twice before admitting that student to a PhD program, because it will most likely be unable to pay their stipend using federal grant money. There are still many uncertainties, of course, but I think universities will prefer to be overcautious. And obtaining visas will also become more difficult for such students. So the consequences could be very serious.”
Thus, for Russian researchers, the publication of the list may result in profound professional difficulties. But how capable are these restrictions of protecting American interests? And is the loss of cooperation with Russian, Iranian, and Chinese colleagues truly significant for U.S. science?
Entrepreneur Oleg Tinkov argued in an interview with journalist Mikhail Fishman on TV Rain, that Russian universities continue to produce exceptionally strong specialists: “Whatever we may say about Putin’s Russia, or Russia in general, its universities and education – especially in mathematics, computer science, physics, and chemistry – remain exceptionally strong, even compared with the United States. I still think Russian education firmly belongs among the world’s top five, and specialists from Russia are highly valued.”
Academic collaborations with China seem to be even more important for American science. Over the past decade, Chinese science has dramatically strengthened its global position. China ranks second in the world in the number of scientific publications. In 2024, for the first time, Chinese researchers published more papers in leading natural science journals than American scientists did, exceeding the US by 17%. Niccolò Pisani et al. emphasize that China’s success has been driven largely by international collaboration and sustained government investment. Consequently, the restriction of scientific cooperation with China can also have an objective of slowing China’s scientific progress. But such a strategy is likely to have limited effectiveness as long as other leading countries continue collaborating with Chinese researchers. Meanwhile, American science itself risks losing specialists and forfeiting one of its greatest competitive advantages: participation in the global scientific community.
As Denis Simon argues, “the policy is likely to accelerate the fragmentation of the US-China scientific relationship, including in fields that have traditionally relied on open exchanges and multinational research teams. It could also limit US researchers’ access to some of the world’s most productive scientific institutions.” Simon also questions whether the policy is genuinely capable of slowing China’s scientific development.
The publication of the 2025 Section 1286 list may therefore substantially limit cooperation between American researchers and colleagues from Russia, Iran, and China. Although at first glance, the restrictions appear to apply only to defense-related research, they are likely to affect a much broader range of academic disciplines. The precedent of prosecuting cases unrelated to security topics, set by the China Initiative, demonstrated that a program announced with narrow security objectives could, in practice, be applied much more broadly. Meanwhile, the threat of losing Pentagon funding and risk of losing eligibility for other forms of federal support are sufficiently serious that many universities are likely to abandon collaborations with listed institutions simply to avoid the risk. The inclusion of major civilian universities such as Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics potentially affects thousands of scholars who have no connection to military research. It will be harder if possible to participate in American conferences, conduct joint research, or publish in academic journals, even if they present themselves as independent researchers and do not list their institutional affiliation. Even the students from these universities, even though the restrictions do not formally prohibit them from applying to American colleges or universities, may face indirect consequences if institutions, fearing the loss of federal funding, begin extending these restrictions to graduates of listed universities as well. The policy may also affect universities outside the United States that are closely integrated into the American academic system, particularly those receiving U.S. funding. Such institutions may likewise begin limiting cooperation with researchers affiliated with organizations on the list.
Ultimately, the measures intended to protect American science may not only create serious obstacles for researchers from Russia, China, and Iran, but they may also undermine one of the fundamental strengths of American academia itself – international collaboration and the free exchange of knowledge.
The post New “Undesirables”: Why the Pentagon Is Restricting Cooperation with Moscow State University and Higher School of Economics appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
The meeting between the Russian and US presidents in Alaska last year caused a sensation in both form and substance. Expectations were so high, whether expressed as hope or alarm, that the Anchorage summit was almost certain to disappoint.
The conflict surrounding Ukraine is too deep and complex to be resolved at a single meeting, even one involving the leaders of Russia and the United States. Negotiations to end the Vietnam War dragged on for years, despite both sides understanding from the beginning that the conflict would eventually have to end.
The real question was whether Anchorage could provide the starting point for a peace process; it didn’t. Much has since been said about why, although the conditions for such a breakthrough probably didn’t exist in the first place. Yet rather than dismissing the summit with the usual sarcasm about the “spirit of Anchorage,” it’s worth considering what the meeting did achieve.
First, it exposed the widening divergence between the United States and Western Europe as the old world’s leaders remain committed to seeking a military victory over Russia, but Washington, by contrast, doesn’t want to become directly involved in pursuing that objective.
Donald Trump’s claim that the United States is merely a mediator rather than a participant is plainly disingenuous, given that Washington remains deeply involved, but American involvement could be far greater, even allowing for the apparent limits on its resources and its growing obligations elsewhere.
This divergence doesn’t mean the transatlantic alliance is about to collapse; however, it does suggest that the Atlanticism established during the second half of the 20th century will not survive in its old form. Whether its replacement will prove more advantageous to Russia remains unclear, but, nevertheless, Moscow has long wished to see the end of NATO as we have known it, and the chances of that happening are increasing.
Anchorage also demonstrated that the United States isn’t all-powerful, as Trump was unable to secure from Western Europe and Ukraine what he wanted at the time. In that instance, Washington’s failure worked against Moscow, but the broader recognition that American power has limits should be regarded as a positive development.
Taken together, these lessons show that the West is becoming more diverse and internally divided, so its remaining unity must increasingly be maintained by political pressure and institutional inertia. Russia must therefore develop a more sophisticated and flexible policy towards Western countries, exploiting their growing differences rather than continuing to treat them as a single bloc.
Anchorage offered a revealing model of modern diplomacy, in which personalities increasingly matter more than institutions, and character more than principles. There are no longer any “magic” agreements and a gentleman’s agreement lasts only until another gentleman arrives with different priorities.
What retains value is composure and reliance on one’s own capabilities, combined with a sober assessment of their limits. Russia’s mistake before Anchorage was to imagine Trump as an external force capable of fundamentally changing the situation, but he didn’t play that role, nor could he have done so.
That disappointment returned everyone to the reality of the conflict in that no outside power can impose its resolution. During the year since Alaska, the Russian-Western European military confrontation has acquired a clearer direction and an internal logic of its own and it’s within that logic that Russia must seek a way to end the present war and prevent the next one, without waiting for magical solutions or grand bargains imposed from abroad.
As recently as 26 July this year, Ursula von der Leyen appeared full of confidence in victory during her visit to Kyiv: she claimed the tide of the war had turned, that Ukraine had regained the initiative, and that Russia was on the defensive. The cause of this supposed turnaround, after four and a half years of a devastating war, is said to be a new ‘wonder weapon’: drones which, with the help of AI provided by Palantir and others, can carry the war deep into the Russian hinterland and precisely destroy oil refineries and other critical infrastructure there. The Russian economy – particularly the energy sector – is said to be severely weakened, and the war Russia started has now hit the country itself “with full force”.
On the battlefield too, according to these accounts, Ukraine has achieved considerable success with autonomously operating “killer drones”. These drones are said to be capable of automatically detecting and destroying all life at a distance of 30 kilometres on the front line. Technology, it is claimed, has thus more than compensated for the shortage of Ukrainian soldiers. Russian soldiers, by contrast, are now said paying a heavy price in lives without being able to demonstrate any military successes. This must be wearing down the aggressors and forcing Putin to acknowledge that he is going to lose the war.
These accounts were accompanied by media-effective drone attacks on Moscow and St Petersburg. No wonder, then, that the mainstream Western media have been full of victory reports over the past two months. Some even speculated that Russia could only hold out for another six months; a coup in Moscow was deemed possible. The strategically important Crimea was said to have been largely cut off from Russia by Ukrainian attacks. Putin would now be forced to the negotiating table as the loser – and on the terms of the European NATO states, which would amount to a Russian surrender. Their policy of providing massive military, political and financial support to Ukraine, whilst at the same time refusing any talks until Russia was ‘brought to its knees’, seemed to have paid off.
But is that really the case? Or may the tide actually have turned in Russia’s favour?
It is striking that for the past week there have been hardly any reports on the course of the war, and the victory announcements have largely fallen silent. This is because doubts are mounting, both in the US and in Ukraine itself, about the success of the drone war deep within the Russian hinterland.
One need only heed the warnings of General Zaluzhnyi: the drone war is not very successful and far too expensive. As a former Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and current ambassador to London, he should know. According to the pro-Ukrainian war monitors ‘Dron-Bomber’, the Russians are now reportedly achieving a high shoot-down rate of Ukrainian drones. The dismissal of Ukrainian Defence Minister Fedorov is also likely to be linked to the looming failure of the drone war. Is the realisation taking hold that this conflict cannot be won by a drone warfare alone?
This means that developments on the battlefield remain decisive. However, there can be no question of the military stalemate claimed by the Western media. According to a report by the Ukrainian ‘Telegram Channel’: “in July this year, the armed forces of the Russian Federation occupied 728.45 km² of territory in the SVO (Special Operation) zone, which represents the best result since October 2024 … The pace of the Russian armed forces’ offensive is increasing”. Russian territorial gains are said to have occurred not only in the Donbas but also around Kharkiv and in Zaporizhzhia. This is still proceeding slowly, but it is a war of attrition whose primary aim is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Could this objective be achieved by capturing the last remaining fortified defensive positions around the Donbas cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?
Even more serious for Ukraine is the fact that its drone attacks have led to a hardening of the Russian position. The Russian leadership is now openly speaking of a war – including a war by NATO against Russia – and has significantly intensified the conflict. In the cruel logic of war, the destruction in Ukraine now far exceeds that in Russia. Another crucial factor is that Ukraine has no air defences to speak of and is barely able to defend itself against massive Russian drone and missile attacks, whilst the intensity of Ukrainian attacks is reportedly waning.
This is already having consequences. The Ukrainian Black Sea ports in and around Odessa are said to have been bombed so heavily that Ukraine has effectively become a ‘landlocked country’. If these reports are accurate, this would be a severe blow: to date, around 70 per cent of all Ukrainian imports and exports, as well as 90 per cent of agricultural exports, have been handled via these ports. Key bridges, such as the Zatoka Bridge, which connects Odessa with the Romanian Black Sea ports, have also been destroyed. Furthermore, rail and road links, petrol stations, the power grid, industrial facilities and warehouses are being systematically destroyed.
The European NATO member states can do little to change this – they lack the military capabilities. Plans to station a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Poland or even to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine are completely unrealistic. The United States has recently announced that it will hand over the leadership of the NATO centre in Wiesbaden, which coordinates military support for Ukraine, entirely to European NATO member states. There is even talk of disbanding this NATO facility, which is crucial for Ukraine. Further, with the Iran war ranging, the US has hardly any weapons left to spare. There can therefore be little question of renewed US military involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Even before the latest escalation of the war, there were clear indications that the Ukrainian army was in considerable difficulty. Upon taking office in January, Minister Fedorov spoke of around 200,000 deserters; other MPs even cited significantly higher figures. Furthermore, some two million Ukrainian men are said to have evaded conscription orders. Whichever figures are accurate, they point to an alarming state of affairs within the Ukrainian armed forces – a situation that cannot be remedied either by forced recruitment on the streets or, as is now becoming apparent, by drones controlled by artificial intelligence. Similarly, a proposal now being discussed by the EU – to withdraw refugee status from Ukrainian men who have fled, in breach of international law, and to send them back to Ukraine to face the war – is further evidence of the hopelessness of the situation.
In May, the Ukrainian Minister for Social Affairs, Denys Ulyutin, stated that the population in the government-controlled part of the country had shrunk from 52 million (at the time of independence in 1991) to possibly 22 million. Of these, around 11 million are on social security, predominantly pensioners and war invalids. He expects the population to continue to fall after the war ends, as young men – once exempt from military service – would follow their families to the West. He does not expect any significant return of Ukrainians living abroad. Added to this demographic decline are increasing impoverishment, deep social inequalities, pervasive corruption, astronomical public debt and the country’s economic collapse.
This is hardly a state – let alone an army – to which the media could realistically attribute an imminent military turnaround or even victory.
Of course, such forecasts must be treated with caution. Yet the apparent failure of the drone war to bring about a strategic turning point should make it clear to the European NATO member states that, at the end of this escalation which we have accompanied with such fanfare, Ukraine may not emerge as the victor, but is instead sliding into an increasingly devastated, depopulated and bled-dry country. This should give us cause for great concern for the suffering people in Ukraine. European NATO-states must ask themselves whether a continuation of the war – which they have demanded and supported – can still be morally justified at all.
The European NATO member states are only harming Ukraine with their illusions of victory and wonder weapons, and must finally base their policy on a more realistic assessment of how the war is unfolding. It is therefore time to consider what would happen if the Ukrainian army’s resistance were to collapse one day and Russia were to capture Kharkiv and Odessa as well. Any remnant of Ukraine that remained would scarcely be viable. It must be in the top interest not only of Ukraine but also of its western backers to prevent such a scenario to develop. But how?
Certainly, this cannot be prevented through direct military intervention by NATO. This would make the situation only much worse – also for Ukraine – as such a course of action would inevitably entail the risk of a nuclear war, which nobody can win. Diplomacy therefore remains the only realistic option. After almost five years of war, it is high time that the European NATO member states actively sought dialogue with Russia. Germany – given its role as the strongest country in the EU, its geographical location and its historical responsibility – should take the first step.
To move beyond the entrenched positions of both governments, an initial rapprochement through a civil‑society initiative involving respected and influential figures may be advisable. Such an approach could open a first, cautious pathway toward renewed understanding after years of silence and mutual demonisation. Europe needs peace, and lasting peace can only be achieved with Russia, not against it.
There is not much time left for this.
In recent years, Serbia has appeared more and more often in news stories about violations of research ethics: plagiarism in the dissertations of high-ranking officials, purchased authorship, mass retractions of publications, dubious international collaborations, and studies verging on scientific curiosities. And also — mass political persecution of scholars and university teachers. Are these episodes accidental, or are they manifestations of one and the same problem? Plagiat-Navigator tried to make sense of the situation.
Any account of the current situation with academic misconduct in Serbia has to begin with the story of the doctoral dissertation of Sinisa Mali, then the mayor of Belgrade and now the country’s first deputy prime minister. After “terrible plagiarism” was found in his work, the familiar bureaucratic game began: academic bodies dragged out a decision for years. But in the end, under public pressure and in the face of irrefutable evidence, the ethics committee of the University of Belgrade did annul his doctoral degree. By that time, Mali had already become finance minister. Soon afterward, Serbia’s Constitutional Court overturned the university’s decision. Apparently having lost faith in his own country’s academic system, Mali — by then Serbia’s first deputy prime minister — went to defend a new dissertation… in Slovakia. The Serbian authorities immediately recognized the Slovak diploma. The saga has been going on for more than a decade, and it is not over yet. But it has already become a textbook example of how political weight can cast doubt on the very idea of academic integrity.
Not all stories about plagiarism in the work of Serbian officials end well. Filip Svarm, editor-in-chief of the weekly Vreme, and journalist Nemanja Rujevic, who published the investigation “Anatomy of a Dissertation,” were less fortunate. Former politician Jelena Trivan, now CEO of Serbia’s largest mobile operator and the subject of that investigation, sued the journalists at the end of 2024 and won 80,000 dinars for an infringement of her honor, dignity, and business reputation. At the same time, the court did not question the fact of the borrowings themselves. It concluded, however, that only specialists have the right to classify a scholarly work as plagiarism, while journalists do not have such authority.
University of Belgrade professor Aleksandar Kavcic called what was happening “a war of laypeople against scientists”: a country where ignorance is celebrated and ministers are people who “like to wave around purchased and plagiarized diplomas.”
Plagiarism in Serbia’s academic environment is not limited to politicians’ dissertations. The buying and selling of scientific publications is an even more acute problem. This may be why Professor Kavcic, speaking of colleagues in the field, diplomatically noted that the difference between a real scientist and someone who has acquired knowledge “third hand” is enormous.
Plagiat-Navigator has already written about such “third hands” — the Moscow exchange trading in scientific publications and authorship slots — in the article “Hirsch Index at Market Rate.” One of the figures in that story was Marko Milojevic, a professor at Singidunum University in Belgrade. The case concerned two publications in international scientific journals in which Milojevic purchased authorship in 2021 through the Moscow exchange. A closer analysis shows that, in at least six publications, Professor Milojevic shares authorship with Russian colleagues who regularly use the services of the Moscow firm.
Yet the Moscow trail is only the tip of the iceberg. Following a global trend, Serbian scholars have recently shifted from the Russian market to the more powerful and influential Asian markets for fake publications. In a recent study of retracted papers with Iranian affiliations in computer science, the authors concluded that Serbia ranks among the leaders in the number of jointly published questionable papers, second only to Malaysia. This is hardly surprising: the “paper mill” from the Iranian city of Ardabil, exposed in 2023, also worked actively with Serbian colleagues. The result was the mass retraction of 31 papers in Genetika, the official journal of the Serbian Genetics Society, which lost its impact factor because of “compromised” peer review and citation manipulation.
Manipulation of peer review, authorship, and citation in publications by Serbian scholars has been observed not only in Genetika. Several examples of such papers, retracted from various journals for this reason, are shown below. It should be noted that Russian scientists also appeared as co-authors alongside their Serbian colleagues in these papers.
The compromising of publication procedures is only one item in a long list of dishonest practices used to pull the wool over the eyes of journal reviewers and editors.
Consider another characteristic example: in 2024, experts found numerous distortions of established scientific expressions — so-called tortured phrases — in a paper by Professor Nebojsa Bacanin, vice-rector for research at Belgrade’s Singidunum University. This is a clear sign that the authors were trying to evade plagiarism-detection systems using automated paraphrasing. But, as often happens, the software malfunctioned: it paraphrased the text while leaving abbreviations unchanged, so that they no longer matched their expansions. For example, instead of convolutional neural network (CNN), the text produced the meaningless phrase convolutional brain organization (CNN). Such blunders are the calling card of texts written not by scientists but by algorithms. Incidentally, another paper by Vice-Rector Bacanin was found to contain numerous manipulations with irrelevant bibliographic references.
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The problem, however, is not only how the articles are written, but also how their number is artificially inflated. The inflation of publication activity in Serbian science does not do without a zoo — and what follows is not a figure of speech. The use of metaheuristics inspired by animal behavior is a frequently used method for artificially increasing the number of publications. Many such algorithms are described extremely superficially, while their novelty and applicability to a wide range of tasks raise serious doubts. In most cases, the proposed method differs little from long-known algorithms, and its supposed originality comes down to a new metaphor and fresh terminology. A significant share of such works are merely minor modifications of the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization method.
A telling example: in a 2026 paper by scientists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Serbia, the authors took an interest in the behavior of the spider-tailed horned viper and applied this metaphor to photovoltaic water-pumping systems. It sounds like science fiction, but it is a real publication in a scientific journal. Notably, among the co-authors of the paper we once again find the already familiar Professor Bacanin, vice-rector of Singidunum University.
Nor is the story free of image manipulation. In a joint Iranian-Italian article whose authors include a single representative of Serbia — University of Belgrade professor Jelena Popovic-Djordjevic — experts found telltale traces of Photoshop, the same techniques that have surfaced more than once in similar scandals.
It is worth noting that since 2020 Popovic-Djordjevic has been a constant co-author of Sina Moghaddam, an Iranian specialist in medicinal plants. The scheme is transparent: the participation of European scientists helps Asian authors break into prestigious journals. At the same time, the real contribution of the Western colleagues to the research is often minimal. Their role is reduced to status presence — a kind of “wedding general” at an academic wedding. Until 2020, this honorary function in Moghaddam’s publications was performed by a researcher from Greece. The outcome was entirely predictable: nine of their joint papers have already been retracted, and they have received scathing criticism on Retraction Watch. Now the baton has passed to Popovic-Djordjevic.
It should be added that image manipulation in her papers is not only an Iranian specialty. In a paper signed by ten employees of the University of Belgrade, a curious fact emerged: an image previously used to illustrate liver samples migrated unchanged into a new article — this time as an illustration of kidney samples. The authors were not at a loss: they apologized for an “unfortunate error” and corrected the article.
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The roots of this tradition of errors, however, run deeper. Back in 2003, one of the co-authors of the aforementioned paper about the liver — now a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Belgrade, and then a researcher at Queen Mary University of London — Zoran Todorovic, together with his British colleague Christoph Thiemermann, published a paper in which experts also found image manipulation, again involving liver samples. In response to puzzled questions from reviewers, Professor Thiemermann replied with lethal directness: the results of the study, by his own admission, “may not be reliable.” Since then, more than 80 negative PubPeer comments have accumulated on his papers, 15 of which have ultimately been retracted. Techniques honed at a British university, it seems, proved useful in Belgrade twenty years later.
One reliable sign of dishonest publication activity is a sharp rise in the number of papers co-authored with representatives of countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, around 2021–2022. In such papers, authorship is often shared by researchers from a good dozen countries — a kind of academic international, assembled by chance around a single publication.
The graph above shows the distribution of the number of papers by Serbian authors co-authored with colleagues from Asia and Africa, depending on the number of co-authoring countries. By a large margin, the leaders in the number of papers are two mathematicians from the University of Belgrade: Professors Dragan Pamucar and Vladimir Simic. The sharp surge in their publication activity falls precisely at the beginning of the 2020s. And if experts find elementary mathematical errors in their papers, there is nothing surprising about it: at a productivity rate of three papers a week, it is simply impossible not to make mistakes. PubPeer has already accumulated claims against a hundred of their publications in international journals, ten of which have now been officially retracted. It seems that in this case quantity really did turn into quality.
To conclude this theme, let us talk a little with plants — yes, yes, do not be surprised. Scientists from Slovenia, Serbia (the universities in Nis and Belgrade), and the University of Pristina decided to find out together whether plants are capable of talking to people in their own language. To do this, they attached a polygraph to the stem of a potted flower and asked the plant questions: “Are you alive?”, “Do you have consciousness?”, “Does it hurt?” The plant was interrogated using a radioactive source of a uranium isotope. The answers obtained were decoded with the help of AI, which translated them into Serbian. To avoid suffering from radiation themselves, the authors of the study used a homemade orgonite — a bioenergetic shield that transforms negative energy into positive energy.
The researchers’ first important discovery was observing how the experimental “vegetable” — this is exactly how they familiarly referred to the potted plant under study — sweated and changed its pulse and breathing rate. All of this was recorded using a polygraph. As a result, the Balkan scientists concluded that plants can be engaged in a rational dialogue in their own language. The results of the study were published in a scientific journal devoted to issues of… acupuncture.
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Behind all these scandalous stories, it should not be forgotten that the majority of Serbian scientists and university teachers are honest professionals who have nothing to do with plagiarism, purchased papers, or other manipulations. The events of the past two years have clearly confirmed this: many of them proved willing to risk their own careers in defense of academic freedoms and democratic principles.
The mass student protests that began in Serbia in November 2024 after the collapse of a canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad quickly grew into a nationwide movement against corruption and political pressure on state institutions. Universities became one of the main centers of protest activity: lecturers openly supported the students, while rectors and deans refused to obstruct university blockades. In response, the authorities and pro-government media launched a campaign against the academic community.
Political pressure was not limited to public attacks. At a number of universities, teachers who spoke out in support of students faced refusals to reappoint them, dismissals, and delays in career advancement. The best-known case was that of Jelena Kleut, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad, who lost her job after twenty years of teaching; she herself called what happened a political reprisal. These actions by the Serbian authorities, aimed at suppressing academic freedoms, attracted the attention of international organizations: the European Parliament and the human rights network Scholars at Risk documented an escalation of threats against Serbian scholars, publishing reports on a systemic crisis of freedom of speech.
All these stories are elements of a single ecosystem in which formal indicators replace real science, violations meet no serious resistance, and universities and courts sometimes side with the violators. Politicians themselves, by their own example, have demonstrated for decades that academic integrity is worth nothing if you have power. With this signal, they have been corroding the academic community for years, setting “their own” careerists against those who refused to play their game. It would be a mistake to think that the entire academic community has resigned itself to this state of affairs. But, unfortunately, for now the dialogue between the former and the latter looks more like a conversation with plants.
The post “Are You Alive?” Talking Plants, Purchased Papers, and Repression: What Is Happening to Serbian Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
Smolny Beyond Borders, an online education project, has launched the Smolny Associate Degree program, with applications open through July 31. Over two years, students choose courses across a range of fields — the social sciences and humanities, the natural sciences, the arts, and literature. Graduates receive an Associate of Arts degree, which qualifies them to apply as transfer students to U.S. universities, entering in their second or third year (including Bard College, which will also offer third-year admission to its online program). T-invariant spoke with Denis Skopin, a philosopher who teaches at Smolny Beyond Borders, and Philip Fedchin, manager of the Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative and an online-education specialist, about how a liberal arts program was built in exile, whether serious humanities research is still possible in Russia today, and what the future holds for distance learning.
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER
Denis Skopin
Born in 1976. Graduated from Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University. Defended his dissertation in philosophy in Paris in 2012. From 2012 to 2022 he taught at Smolny College (the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University), most recently as an associate professor. He was fired from St. Petersburg State University after taking part in the protests against mobilization in September 2022. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2023.
Philip Fedchin
Born in 1972. Holds a degree in art history from St. Petersburg State University and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Limerick. From 1998 to 2020 he taught at Smolny College, serving as associate dean in 2011. Since 2020 he has worked as an online-education specialist at Bard College Berlin. Since November 2022 he has directed the Smolny Beyond Borders project.
T-invariant: Smolny College was one of Russia’s leading centers of humanities education. What were the milestones in the development of liberal arts education in Russia?
Philip Fedchin: Smolny College was founded in 1997, and the first class of degree students enrolled two years later. In 2011 the program became a full faculty of St. Petersburg State University — the Russian equivalent of a school or college. Together with Bard College we ran dual-degree programs at the bachelor’s level (all of our programs) and, in later years, at the master’s level (two of the seven). At any given time the college had as many as 600 students enrolled and about 150 instructors. All told, it offered 14 undergraduate majors and seven master’s programs. Over the years, Smolny graduated more than two thousand students. It was a one-of-a-kind experiment in interdisciplinary education on the liberal arts model. Two other institutions also tried to reproduce that model — Shaninka [the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences — T-invariant] and RANEPA [the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration — T-invariant]. At a certain point Smolny became one of the city’s leading centers of cultural and intellectual life, with a brilliant teaching staff and exceptionally strong students. But in June 2021, when Bard College was declared an “undesirable organization,” our project took a devastating blow.
T-i: What exactly did you do to get on the wrong side of the Justice Ministry? Why go after some of the world’s leading universities?
Denis Skopin: Officially, Bard College was declared “undesirable” because its activities “pose a threat to the constitutional order of the Russian Federation.” That formula can be stretched to cover just about anything. But as far as I know, the real reason was that Bard received funding from the Soros foundation — and the foundation itself was already on the list of “undesirable” organizations by then. It’s worth noting that this was only a pretext: the leadership of St. Petersburg State University had known perfectly well about Bard’s ties to the Open Society Foundations long before 2021. At the time it looked as though that fact was simply put to use to destroy an independent school, at the very moment when an attempt was under way to spin it off from the university and create a separate liberal arts institution. In hindsight it’s perfectly clear that the direction the college was taking, along with our partnership with Bard College — an institution whose policy rests on respect for human rights and academic freedom — ran counter to the “party line.”
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER
The liberal arts are a model of higher education built on broad study across the humanities, the social and natural sciences, and the arts. The aim is to develop students’ critical thinking and communication skills, along with their ability to analyze information and draw conclusions. Within this model, students design an individual course of study and sample a range of disciplines. The system spread most widely at American colleges and universities in the mid-twentieth century. The first year — and very often the second — involves no specialization: during that period students are meant to work out what actually interests them. After the second year, a student declares a major. Because electives account for such a large share of the workload, students can often add a minor as well, and sometimes even a second major (a double major). The key point is that students make all of these decisions themselves, though with guidance from an academic advisor. Smolny College was the first program in Russia to operate on the liberal arts model. Today there are no institutions left in Russia that work this way.
T-i: Do you follow the academic work of your former colleagues who stayed in Russia? Is the range of what they can research narrowing under the pressure of repression? And is it still possible to do serious work in the humanities today, so long as you steer clear of obviously taboo subjects like the war or gender studies?
DS: I personally know a lot of competent, decent teachers who stayed in Russia. These are anti-war people, and their situation right now is not one you’d envy. The leading prewar educational projects in Russia have all fallen apart, one way or another. Smolny is gone. Shaninka has been shut down. HSE [the Higher School of Economics — T-invariant] has been thoroughly “purged” of disloyal faculty members. Russian higher education has withered before our eyes, in the space of just a few years. Faculty members who remain in the country can no longer say what they think. Before the full-scale invasion it was still possible, even as Russia was rapidly turning autocratic. Yes, there was administrative pressure, there were attempts to control what got taught, but what goes on in the administrators’ offices is one thing and what goes on in the classroom is another. Now that has changed: you can’t speak frankly with students, because sooner or later someone will report you. As the old line has it, “If twelve of you are plotting a conspiracy, one of you is bound to be a traitor.”
Researchers in Russia today are arguably worse off than they were in the Soviet Union. Back then, for instance, holders of a Doctor of Sciences degree [the higher of Russia’s two doctoral degrees — T-invariant] could order scholarly literature from abroad. Today Russian scholars’ access to foreign libraries is severely restricted. If you’re a historian or a literary scholar, say, some 80 percent of the foreign scholarly literature you need to read isn’t in Russian libraries, and you won’t find it in open access either. And that’s before you get to how much harder it now is for a Russian scholar to publish with a serious international academic press. My own book, for example, came out with Routledge in 2022, literally a month before the big war started. I find it hard to imagine a scholar living and working in Russia getting a monograph published by a Western press today.
T-i: What’s the bigger obstacle to cooperation between Russian and Western researchers: pressure from the authorities, or Western partners’ unwillingness to deal with an aggressor state?
DS: There is pressure from the administrations of Russian universities, but Western universities are hardly likely to work with scholars based inside Russia right now either. Before the full-scale invasion there were any number of joint projects, especially with Europe, which is right next door. After February 2022, collaborating with Russian institutions — state universities above all — simply became toxic. Which means that a researcher working with scholars in Russia has to be absolutely certain about the people involved: certain they haven’t signed pro-war letters or taken part in hounding their anti-war colleagues. Nobody can offer that kind of guarantee. So Western scholars don’t want to take on the responsibility. Of course, individual scholars had personal ties with Western colleagues, and those haven’t gone anywhere. But direct collaboration is on pause.
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T-i: Given everything you’ve described, how did your project come about in the first place? And tell us how it differs from other educational initiatives in exile — the Free University, for instance.
DS: In February 2022 the college was shut down in all but name. Officially it still exists, but in reality it’s a ruin, and as early as this year students will no longer be taught under the old liberal arts curriculum. The colleagues who left became the backbone of Smolny Beyond Borders. The core of our project consists of people who worked at Smolny College itself, and we’re carrying on the tradition Smolny had before the full-scale invasion. We started out as a set of standalone online courses, but last year we launched our first degree-granting online program.
That’s what sets us apart from many other online education projects: we are first and foremost an academic project. We don’t just let people sit in on our courses — we give our students a way to take their first step toward the global higher education system. We hold the relevant U.S. accreditation. Along with the Associate Degree, we also offer shorter certificate programs.
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T-i: So this is a full-fledged online bachelor’s degree?
DS: It’s more like the first stage of one. Our program runs two years, and graduates receive an Associate of Arts degree, which allows them to continue their studies in person at one of the institutions affiliated with Bard College (assuming, naturally, that the transfer goes through). Starting in September 2027, Bard Global Degree plans to open a full online bachelor’s program, into which our graduates will be able to transfer as third-year students. That degree will have three broad majors: 1) philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE); 2) literary and media studies; 3) data science.
T-i: Plenty of applicants will choose an online program over an in-person one. What do you see as the prospects for distance higher education in exile?
DS: I think the remote format creates obstacles and opens up new horizons at the same time. Among the drawbacks is the physical and psychological strain on students, who have to spend several hours a week in front of a computer. As a teacher, I miss the live, human contact with students that the classroom always provided. That said, online learning has obvious advantages. Above all, it’s far cheaper: a university doesn’t have to maintain a campus or buy equipment, which means those costs aren’t passed on to students. Online education has also long since become mainstream — practically every large university now has a unit devoted to it. Tellingly, most Russian faculty members who left after the full-scale invasion began — around 90 percent, I’d guess — now work in online education projects in one form or another. For them it’s both a way to survive and a new professional niche.
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T-i: How closely does your curriculum follow Smolny College’s?
PF: The structure of the Smolny Associate Degree is identical to that of comparable Bard College programs, since the degree itself is Bard’s. But the teaching is done primarily by our own instructors. Not exclusively, though — Associate Degree students can also take courses from the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century network, which widens their options considerably.
T-i: Do students pay tuition at Smolny Beyond Borders?
PF: Tuition is €5,000 a year. But we aren’t counting on tuition to bring in any real income, and we encourage everyone who can’t pay anything at all to apply.
All of our students currently receive substantial discounts, up to 100 percent, depending on what they can afford. In effect, you can complete two years at an American college practically for free (setting aside what a laptop and an internet connection cost) and then either try to transfer to a regular in-person institution — where tuition is a different matter, and whatever discounts exist depend on the school you’re transferring to — or apply and enroll as a third-year student in the online bachelor’s program, on roughly the same terms you had for those first two years.
T-i: What share of the prewar teaching staff now works at Smolny Beyond Borders? Do you hire instructors who haven’t taught in other liberal arts programs before?
PF: Of our 30 current instructors, roughly half once taught at Smolny College or were directly connected to it. But we also have people who taught at the European University at St. Petersburg, at Shaninka, and elsewhere.
T-i: The Associate Degree offers a wide range of courses, from philosophy to data science. On the one hand, that looks appealing to a Russian applicant used to narrowly specialized degree programs. On the other, plenty of people will ask themselves: “And what are my job prospects once I finish?” A lot of people have switched into survival mode, and it can feel like this is no moment for philosophy or art history — far better to study something applied that pays off quickly.
PF: If you look at global university rankings, American universities are at the top — and their undergraduate education is built on precisely this liberal arts model. Students get to choose a specialization not when they apply but later, once they’re already at the university, after a year or two. A student first picks a few individual courses, tries out different fields, and only then, on the strength of that experience, chooses a major. The Associate Degree is exactly those first two years, and the point is to help students figure out what actually interests them. This trend didn’t emerge in a vacuum: it answers the demands of the labor market and, above all, the needs of students themselves. And yes, one important point. When someone claims a program embodies liberal arts principles, I usually suggest asking a simple question: what share of their coursework do students genuinely choose for themselves? If it’s less than half, it’s liberal arts in name only. In our case, of the 64 credits in the two-year program, only 13 are required courses. In other words, students choose three-quarters of their courses on their own, with a single additional constraint on the remaining 50 credits — they must take at least one four-credit course in each of the four distribution areas (mathematics and the natural sciences, the social sciences, literature, and the arts).
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T-i: How will events in Russia shape your project’s fate and trajectory? Take two extreme scenarios five years from now: either Russia enters a period of sweeping change and democratization, or the country goes down the North Korean road. Would either affect you, or are you building your educational path independently of what happens in Russia?
PF: If positive change does come to Russia, I’m confident that the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences will quickly be restored to its former shape. And that would mean not just the revival of one school but the full implementation of the model within the official educational standards. The thing is, when the plan for a new university built on Smolny was being drawn up, an enormous amount of work went into developing a new educational standard. In the end it never came to anything, but what’s written down doesn’t disappear — those ideas can perfectly well be taken up again in the future. Much of what made Smolny College interesting was precisely that it ran a liberal arts and sciences model inside a Russian university.
As for the North Korean scenario, our program was international from the outset, and we’re part of the Bard Global Degree project, whose whole purpose is to build a model for supporting displaced students and displaced scholars in a range of contexts. And while we do enroll students located in Russia in courses outside the Associate Degree, for the Associate Degree itself we accept only applicants who are outside Russia, for obvious reasons. In that sense we work with the diaspora — and given that all the program’s required courses are taught in English [except one — T-invariant], internationalization is a natural process.
The post <h1>Smolny in Exile: From a St. Petersburg Faculty to a Global Online College</h1> appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
This text has been published in Russian in the newspaper Kommersant as part of the project Contours of the Future.
There is one brutal truth about war. No matter how devastating it becomes, states continue to find reasons to fight each other. But while war is a permanent attribute of global politics, its characteristics are always evolving.
Today, military power has been democratized by changes in warfare technologies and economics. The proliferation of cheap, precise, and mass-produced drones and missiles has leveled the playing field, allowing small states to compel larger, more sophisticated militaries to accept stalemate. Already, protracted wars have ensnared the United States and Russia, two of the most powerful militaries, and this trend will continue.
Over the next decade, easily deployed destructive weapons will ordain indecisive conflicts that cost a lot and achieve little. This will not convince political leaders that military force should be abandoned. But it will shape the tactics of future wars, as states will try to avoid the challenges of attrition warfare.
First, hybrid tactics—those that fall just below the threshold of full-scale conflict—will become more prevalent and aggressive. These tools have clear benefits for states trying to stay out of long and expensive confrontations because they limit direct involvement, attribution, and the scope of the victim’s retaliation. These tactics are already widely used. China, for example, has exploited hybrid methods against Taiwan and Japan to limit their freedom of maneuver.
In future wars states will upgrade their use of hybrid tools qualitatively and quantitatively. They will substitute them for conventional warfare, using pressure to open space for future more assertive military action. They will also revise the boundary between war and peace, normalizing a new hybrid status quo that encompasses even some kinetic operations.
This might include physical destruction of critical infrastructure, debilitating cyber and economic campaigns, and limited strikes on government and civilian targets.
As a result, future war will increasingly develop into a daily routine, spilling off battlefields into the lives of average citizens far from frontlines.
Second, wars fought primarily as campaigns of dueling deep strikes will become more common and punishing. Such ‘stand-off wars’ (so named because they can be fought by adversaries far from a line of contact) have a low and falling cost of entry, but they can still impose physical and psychological damage, destroy industrial capacity, or disrupt an adversary’s military development. This makes them seductive for states seeking to avoid expensive ground campaigns and the collateral risk of a deadlock.
In the past, deep strike capabilities were the privilege of major powers, but this is changing. States will still invest in advanced powerful missiles, but they can also turn to inexpensive long-range munitions and drones that are almost as effective if less powerful. This will expand the frequency of stand-off wars but also their ferocity, as combatants increase the volume, precision, and payload of their strikes, as seen in the Iran war.
As deep strike weapons become faster, more deadly and difficult to intercept, acceptable target sets are likely to be expanded, making future stand-off wars more grueling and terrifying for civilian populations. In addition, as deep strike weapons can more easily hit sensitive military sites and assassinate leaders, their use will feed insecurity, fuel arms race, and make pre-emptive attacks or nuclear strikes more likely.
Finally, future war will be increasingly automated. This may not mean war fought by robots, but rather by remote-operated uncrewed systems and artificial intelligence.
The push for automation is about efficiency. Reliance on AI-controlled, remote-operated, and uncrewed systems make war faster and less personal. These systems reduce the demand for manpower, allow military commanders to take greater risks, and speed decision-making in high pressure environments. Israel, for example, has used such systems in Gaza to search houses and map tunnels while soldiers remained out of danger.
As their quality improves, automated and AI-powered systems will dominate warfare planning and execution. This will relegate military personnel to the role of programmer or remote operator. However, automation may never be absolute. Autonomous systems cannot (yet) replicate human strategic thinking or judge context.
Automated war will feel different to those involved. It is hard to imagine a populace being invested in a war fought by machines on their behalf, though this prospect is deeply unnerving. Automated war will also bring uncertainty and misperception, especially when errors occur, which will complicate decision-making and lead wars to spiral in undesired ways.This picture of future warfare is unsettling. Political leaders may think twice about costly ground invasions. But the type of warfare that emerges instead will be more diffuse, blurring the line between war and not war. It will also be more vicious and perilous, dominated by high-powered missiles and automated systems only loosely controlled by humans.
Future wars, then, will not be more decisive or controllable. They will simply swap the old risks for new risks, leaving the enduring potential for catastrophe unchanged.
T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 35, dated July 31, 2026. Russia’s State Duma has passed a law aimed at political émigrés. Human rights advocates say it is effectively a citizenship-stripping law. The Russian authorities are expanding the practice of freezing bank accounts outside of any specific case, on the basis of “suspicion” alone. Extrajudicial persecution is becoming ever more widespread.
According to First Department [a Russian human rights organization that defends people accused of treason and espionage — T-invariant], on July 22, 2026, Russia’s State Duma passed a law aimed at political émigrés. Human rights advocates say the law drastically curtails the rights of Russians who have left the country and been found guilty in criminal or politically motivated administrative cases. As lawyers describe it, this is a de facto citizenship-stripping law: “For now, lawmakers aren’t proposing to confiscate the passports of people named in political cases — but they are proposing to strip them of many key civil rights.”
“Under the text of the law, anyone named in a criminal case or a political administrative case will be unable to obtain a new foreign-travel passport, execute a power of attorney, access government services online, dispose of their property, register a vehicle, or use a digital signature. These are only some of the basic rights that people persecuted by the state will lose,” First Department reports.
Our database tracks scientists, university teachers, and research engineers persecuted in Russia. A large group of them have been labeled “extremists” or “extremists and terrorists” by the state — that is, entered in the registry kept by Rosfinmonitoring [Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service — T-invariant]. For the repressive machine, this is a very convenient form of persecution. Rosfinmonitoring puts a person on the registry, and the banks do the rest: they freeze the accounts — and the freeze takes effect at every bank at once — which makes that person’s life extremely difficult. This applies both to those living in Russia and to those living abroad who keep an account at a Russian bank, to receive a pension, for example.
As a rule, putting someone on Rosfinmonitoring’s public registry required that a case first be opened against them under an “extremism” or “terrorism” article. A conviction was not necessary; not even formal charges were necessary. An investigator would send a letter to Rosfinmonitoring, the person would be added to the registry, and the banks would freeze the accounts. But the existence of an administrative or criminal case, or of inclusion in the Rosfinmonitoring registry, is a matter of public record: it is easy to find out about, and the decision can be appealed.
Back in 2013, Federal Law No. 115-FZ, On Countering the Legalization (Laundering) of Criminally Obtained Income and the Financing of Terrorism, was supplemented with Article 7.4, expanded in the summer of 2025 to cover sabotage. It provides for another way to freeze accounts: with no case opened at all — on the basis of “suspicion.”
On July 21, 2026, Meduza reported: “The Russian authorities have quietly begun freezing the accounts of well-known cultural figures who have left the country. The first to report this was political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, on her show ‘Status,’ back on July 14. According to her, this is being done on the basis of an unofficial ‘secret list,’ without any notification whatsoever. Schulmann said the freezing decisions are made by the Interagency Commission for Countering the Financing of Terrorism and Extremist Activity.”
This kind of covert freezing appears not to have been used before 2026, at least not on a mass scale. Meduza writes: “First Department lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told Agentstvo [an independent Russian news outlet — T-invariant] that the commission’s decisions are supposed to be published under the law, but they are impossible to find, since the commission does not even have a website. Smirnov said that lawyers have been running into cases like these over the past six or seven months.”
We know of accounts frozen in June–July 2026 that belong to people who are not currently in the Rosfinmonitoring registry. It may well be that the Interagency Commission really is compiling a “secret list” of its own, as Schulmann suggests.
A specific charge, a specific article of the code, specific evidence — all of these can be appealed. But a decision by the Interagency Commission, which never discloses what the “suspicion” consists of, is very hard to contest. Formally, the law does provide a right to judicial review (Article 7.4, paragraph 3). In practice, though, to appeal a decision you first have to learn that it exists and read it — and according to attorney Evgeny Smirnov, the decision cannot even be located.
The Russian authorities continue to expand the machinery of extrajudicial persecution, and the emphasis has now shifted to those who have left the country. Until now, we have been able to track persecuted scholars who ended up in the Rosfinmonitoring registry and faced banking restrictions. If a “secret list” exists, that kind of monitoring is incomplete. The registry gives us only a lower-bound estimate, which we can supplement with the testimony of those affected.
New entries
July 29, 2026. The Moscow City Court sentenced science journalist Darya Shipacheva to 12 years in prison on a charge of treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code). This is the same term the prosecution had requested. The court also confiscated 1.5 million rubles from her and imposed a fine of 300,000 rubles, Politzek-Info [a Telegram channel that tracks political prisoners in Russia — T-invariant] reports. The trial was closed to the public. The defense asked the court to take into account her guilty plea and her cooperation with investigators. T-invariant reports that the treason charge grew out of a money transfer to Ukraine.
July 22, 2026. The Central District Court of Volgograd ordered Roman Melnichenko, a lawyer and former lecturer at Volgograd State University, held in pretrial detention. He will remain in custody at least until September 20, Politzek-Info reports. Melnichenko was detained in a criminal case over repeated “discrediting” of the Russian armed forces (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code) [the criminal charge applies to those who have already been penalized once for the same offense under administrative law — T-invariant]. The prosecution was triggered by a post on VKontakte and a video on another, unnamed video platform, both published in September 2025.
July 19, 2026. It became known that a criminal case had been opened against Maxim Kravchuk, a physicist from Shchyolkovo, under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code (high treason). Kravchuk was detained on June 24, but this only came to light on July 19, Politzek-Info reports. According to Mediazona, citing Kravchuk himself, he is accused of sending photographs to a relative abroad. “Sergey Nikolaevich Kazimir is my uncle; the only thing between us is a family relationship. I do not agree with the charge brought against me. I’m ready to swear that I never sent any photographs. The investigation will figure this out,” Kravchuk said. According to his attorney, Kravchuk is accused of ties “with people from the near abroad, specifically with Kazimir” [“the near abroad” is the standard Russian term for the other former Soviet republics — T-invariant]. His attorney also pointed out that the law does not prohibit communicating with relatives.
Updates
July 28, 2026. A new case has been opened against Valery Kachin over alleged justification of terrorism, reports Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. Rights advocates have learned that the new case rests on a few remarks Kachin made a year ago, when he compared Ukrainian special forces units to fighters from the Wagner private military company. What exactly he said is not known in detail. So far this is the only episode in the case, but a second may be added, over some comment Kachin made about the Network case during a walk while he was being held in a punishment cell.
July 21, 2026. Mikhail Volkov has been removed from the Rosfinmonitoring registry, Politzek-Info reports.
July 15, 2026. The Labytnangi City Court ruled unlawful the Investigative Committee’s refusal to open a criminal case in response to mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s complaint of torture at penal colony IK-18, known as Polar Owl. Investigators are now required to conduct an additional review within 30 days, Politzek-Info reports.
July 14, 2026. Prosecutors appealed Maxim Kruglov’s earlier sentence. Prosecutor Yulia Guznyaeva filed an appeal asking that the sentence be vacated and the criminal case sent back for a new trial. On June 24, 2026, Kruglov was sentenced to seven years in a general-regime penal colony, but the prosecution was not satisfied with the sentence and wants Kruglov punished more severely, Politzek-Info reports.
February 18, 2026. The Paninsky District Court in Voronezh Region sentenced Severin to three years in a strict-regime penal colony under the law on public “discrediting” of the armed forces, SOTAvision reported. On July 6, 2026, the Voronezh Regional Court reduced Severin’s sentence from three years to two years and ten months in a strict-regime colony. This was reported from the courtroom by a correspondent for SOTAvision.
July 4, 2026. The Northern Fleet Military Court sentenced activist and journalist Olesya Krivtsova in absentia to six years in a general-regime penal colony under the articles on “justifying terrorism” (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) and “repeated discrediting of the Russian armed forces” (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code). On top of the prison term, she was barred for three years from administering online resources, Politzek-Info reports.
June 27, 2026. Dmitry Bogmut fainted for the second time during roll call at his penal colony, reports Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. He had lost consciousness once before, on June 9, also during roll call. His blood sugar was elevated after the first episode and higher still after the second. An endocrinologist has yet to examine Bogmut, because the doctor is on leave. He was excused from morning roll calls for six days. “For now they’ve chalked it up to vegetative-vascular dystonia, some type or other,” his support group writes [vegetative-vascular dystonia is a catch-all diagnosis common in post-Soviet medicine and not recognized internationally — T-invariant].
June 22, 2026. Prosecutors asked that the case of Kirill Yakovlev (Glikery Ulunov) be sent back for a new trial. This was reported by First Department, citing attorney Anastasia Pilipenko. Pilipenko writes: “Prosecutors don’t like it when young, happy, and utterly harmless poets go free. <…> On the plus side, for the first time the prosecution managed to call a poem a poem, rather than ‘textual material.’”
The post <h1>Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 35</h1> appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
In 1993, Marina Bykova became the youngest scholar in the humanities in Russia to earn a Doctor of Sciences degree [Russia’s higher doctorate, awarded years after the Ph.D.-equivalent candidate’s degree — T-invariant]. Today she is a professor at an American university and editor-in-chief of the influential international journal Studies in East European Thought. For many years her professional life has been devoted to building and sustaining dialogue between the Russian philosophical tradition and the international academic community. It is a singular and often difficult mission — keeping intellectual bridges open at a time when political conflict is tearing apart the usual academic ties. In an interview with T-invariant, Marina Bykova reflects on why Russian academia has been paralyzed by fear, how the cultural project of the “Russian World” turned into a political ideology, what happens to philosophy when it loses its autonomy, and how the experience of the Soviet “sixties generation” of philosophers [shestidesyatniki, the reform-minded intellectuals who came of age during the post-Stalin Thaw — T-invariant] helps us understand the relationship between philosophy and power today.
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Science Under Sanctions
T-invariant: Let’s start with your work as a journal editor. Before you became editor-in-chief of Studies in East European Thought, you ran another journal devoted to philosophy in Russia, didn’t you?
Marina Bykova: Yes, before that I was editor-in-chief of Russian Studies in Philosophy; I was invited to take it over in January 2008. By then I had already guest-edited two thematic issues for it at the invitation of the editor at the time, Taras Zakydalsky, a well-known scholar of Russian and Ukrainian philosophy. After his death, the publisher asked me to take charge. The journal had a rather unusual format: it published thematic clusters of articles that had previously appeared in Russian and were then translated into English, mostly from journals such as Voprosy filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), Filosofskie nauki (Philosophical Sciences), and Vestnik MGU (the Moscow University Bulletin). I proposed expanding that model to include original research written specifically for the journal.
T-i: So the journal was a window through which Russian-language philosophy reached Western academia?
MB: Exactly. Most Western scholars had limited access to philosophical literature in Russian, and many of them found it hard to read Russian at all. So our job was to give Western readers a sense of what Russian philosophy was preoccupied with, which problems it was debating, and what intellectual discussions were unfolding inside it.
T-i: How did you manage to keep that format going?
MB: We put out thematic issues, for which Russian authors sent us their articles in Russian. Professional translators then turned the texts into English. But philosophical translation takes more than simply knowing the language; it requires a deep grasp of the subject, the terminology, the context. So I often had to edit the translations heavily, and sometimes essentially rebuild whole passages from scratch. What came out in the end were fully fledged scholarly articles that specialists still use today. The journal’s archive is available on the publisher’s website.
T-i: Why was the journal shut down?
MB: I’ll admit this is still a hard question for me to answer. That journal was bound up with many years of my life, and its closing was painful. But to understand the decision, I need to say a few words about the journal itself. It was part of a large series that originally ran to more than ten titles covering Russian scholarship across the humanities — history, literature, cultural studies, education, and other fields. These journals were founded back during the Cold War and at first served as an important source of material for Sovietology. After the Cold War ended, they retained their significance and continued to serve an important informational function for the Western academic community.
Originally the entire series was published by a small publishing house, M. E. Sharpe, but by the time I was editor-in-chief the titles had moved to Taylor & Francis, which had acquired M. E. Sharpe along with everything it published. In its final years, Russian Studies in Philosophy appeared under the Routledge imprint — one of the leading international humanities publishers — which raised its standing considerably. The journal was widely cited, scored well in the international databases, and consistently ranked highly in Scopus-based metrics, which in turn drew a large number of Russian authors.
BACKGROUND
M. E. Sharpe was an independent American academic publisher founded in the 1950s. It issued a series of journals under the general heading Russian Studies in…, which grew out of American academia’s interest in studying the USSR and Russia during the Cold War. The series included Russian Studies in Education, Russian Studies in History, Russian Studies in Literature, Russian Studies in Critical Thought, and Russian Studies in Philosophy. In the 2000s, a substantial part of M. E. Sharpe’s academic portfolio, the journals included, was acquired by the Taylor & Francis Group, which went on publishing them under the Routledge imprint.
After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, the publisher sent the editors of every journal in the series a notice that it had decided to discontinue them. Formally, this was presented as a business decision. I managed to win a one-year reprieve, since by that point we already had a fully prepared publishing plan of six issues. Simply abandoning material that authors and editors had worked on for years struck me as impossible. As a result, ours was the last journal in the series to go: it closed only in May 2023.
T-i: And do you think it really was a business decision, or…?
MB: No. My own experience, at any rate, convinces me otherwise. I believe it was first and foremost a politically motivated decision. In January 2019, nearly four years before Russian Studies in Philosophy closed, I had also been invited to head another journal, Studies in East European Thought (SEET), published by Springer. After the war began, representatives of the publisher approached me as editor-in-chief and proposed limiting submissions by authors with Russian institutional affiliations. I asked on what grounds such a measure was being proposed. I was told that the policy followed from the general sanctions regime and from political decisions taken in Europe and North America with respect to Russia. They also stressed that many Ukrainian colleagues categorically objected to publishing Russian authors.
But a scholarly publication is not in itself an expression of support for a state or its policies. I consistently distinguish between philosophical thought and state ideology: the first, by its very nature, presupposes critical thinking and autonomy, while the second seeks to use knowledge as an instrument of political ends. Judging philosophical work primarily through the lens of political affiliation inevitably undermines the very principle of academic freedom.
So my position was a matter of principle: the only criterion for publication in an academic journal should be the quality of the scholarship. I replied that the journal would go on accepting articles from researchers with Russian affiliations. My editorial board fully supported that stance. I also told Springer that if the publisher found this approach unacceptable, I was prepared to step down as editor-in-chief. After internal discussions, Springer decided not to interfere with the journal’s editorial policy. As a result, Studies in East European Thought remains one of the few international philosophy journals where Russian scholars can still publish on standard academic terms.
T-i: Isn’t that dangerous for the authors themselves right now?
MB: That’s a hard question. Situations vary. Some authors prefer to publish under pseudonyms or anonymously; others use their own names and even list their institutional affiliations. We try to take each author’s particular circumstances into account. At the same time, it should be understood that what we are dealing with here is scholarly work and scholarly publication. That said, we are certainly aware that for some Russian authors, publishing in a Western academic journal can itself look like a risky step today.
T-i: Which raises the obvious question: what makes that risk worth taking for them?
MB: For most of our Russian colleagues it is less about building a new reputation than about not vanishing from the international academic landscape. Many are afraid of being shut out of the global scholarly community altogether.
I was also struck by how closely Russian researchers still follow our journal. Although official access to many international databases is now restricted in Russia, scholars find ways to get the literature they need through personal contacts, professional networks, and other informal channels of academic exchange. Springer recently gave me download statistics for individual articles and full issues over the past three years. The largest number of downloads came from Russia and China.
T-i: Even though the journal comes out in English?
MB: Yes. And what is more, our journal is hardly politically neutral. We were one of the first academic publications to respond openly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and not merely with a statement. In December 2022 we brought out a special issue, Russia’s War in Ukraine: When Barbarism Takes Over Civilization (SEET, vol. 74, issue 4). I edited it and wrote the introduction. It ran to 22 pieces, including research articles and the proceedings of a roundtable with young Russian scholars. As far as I know, it was one of the first collective — and genuinely international — responses to the war from the philosophical community. That issue mattered not only as an academic reaction to the war but as an attempt to preserve the critical function of philosophical language: the capacity to describe what is happening without substituting ideological formulas and euphemisms for analysis.
Just recently, in early 2026, we put together a special double issue, Aleksandr Dugin and Contemporary Russian Conservatism (SEET, vol. 78, issues 1–2), which I co-edited with my Canadian colleague Jeff Love. The contributors examine in detail the intellectual sources, ideological foundations, and political consequences of contemporary Russian conservatism, along with the role Aleksandr Dugin’s ideas played in shaping it. The issue was important because it analyzed not just Dugin as a public intellectual but the broader phenomenon of philosophical and pseudo-philosophical constructs being turned into instruments of political mobilization. We wanted to show how ideas, once they leave the academic context, can be reinterpreted and put to work in ideological projects with real historical consequences. And of course, in that issue we stated our own position on the Dugin phenomenon openly.
T-i: As far as I know, academics don’t regard him as an academic philosopher.
MB: That’s partly true. But in the West — and this is by no means a new tendency — Dugin is often seen as one of contemporary Russia’s leading intellectual figures, even as the chief architect of the Putin regime. He is frequently called “Putin’s brain,” on the assumption that the key to understanding Kremlin policy lies exclusively in his writings. To my mind, that is a serious oversimplification. The main goal of our special issue of Studies in East European Thought was to show that this picture does not hold up and to subject the Dugin phenomenon itself to critical analysis. We set out to show that Dugin is not an independent philosopher in the strict academic sense, still less a hidden architect of Russian policy, but a political ideologue and polemicist who uses philosophical terminology to construct a particular ideological worldview. Since in the post-Soviet space Dugin is sometimes presented as virtually the foremost authority on Martin Heidegger, we brought in leading Western specialists in Heidegger, the history of ideas, and intellectual history, among them such well-established authors as Mark Sedgwick. In the pages of that issue, researchers analyzed Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory and his geopolitical concepts in detail, exposing their eclectic, ideologically driven character.
The analysis showed that behind the outward philosophical vocabulary there often lies an arbitrary assembly of disparate ideas, in which quotations from Heidegger, Max Weber, and Max Stirner, torn out of context, are mixed at will with radical traditionalism and far-right political concepts. Our special issue thus made an important contribution to the critical study of the Dugin phenomenon.
We aimed not merely to explain to the Western intellectual community who Dugin is as a political thinker, but to move the discussion out of sensationalist journalism and into the space of serious philosophical and intellectual-historical analysis.
From the “Russian World” to War
T-i: Do philosophers today — you among them — understand what is happening in Russia right now? Why did the war become possible in the first place?
MB: Whatever we do understand as researchers, we ought to be able to explain clearly. That, to me, is where the responsibility of philosophers and humanities scholars lies. I recently wrote an article on the genealogy of the “Russian World” ideology, because it is particularly important today to understand how this concept arose and why it acquired such destructive political potential. What matters to me above all is showing that ideas are rarely born in finished ideological form. They go through a long evolution, in the course of which their original cultural meaning can be radically reinterpreted and harnessed for political ends. That, in my view, is exactly what happened with the concept of the “Russian World.” The paradox is that the idea was originally neither narrowly nationalist nor aggressive. It emerged in the 1990s, during the period of democratic reform, and was largely conceived as a network of cultural centers meant to support the Russian language and Russian culture and to maintain ties with compatriots and Russian-speaking communities outside Russia. It took institutional shape in 2007 with the founding of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, charged with coordinating the promotion of Russian language and culture abroad. That was when the existing Russian Houses [Russian state-run cultural centers abroad — T-invariant], along with newly opened ones, were given fresh impetus, with an emphasis above all on cultural diplomacy, support for the diaspora, and the maintenance of cultural ties with it. There is nothing unique about institutions of cultural diplomacy. Many countries invest heavily in strengthening their cultural presence and deploying the instruments of soft power — China’s Confucius Institute, Germany’s Goethe-Institut, and the British Council, to name a few.
It is important to stress that the “Russian World” project was, in its formative stage, a matter of cultural policy, not political ideology. There is nothing exceptional or nationalist about wanting to support a language, a culture, and ties with a diaspora. Yet it was precisely in that period that the groundwork was laid for the ideological transformation that followed. Why did it happen? The answer, I think, has mainly to do with the crisis of national and cultural identity that Russian society went through after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet identity was gone, and a new one had not yet taken shape. For the first time, Russian society faced the question: what does it mean to be Russian? Out of that situation came the idea of defining “Russianness” not through citizenship but through language, culture, historical memory, a shared cultural heritage, and historical traditions. That search for identity was not in itself nationalist, nor was it peculiar to Russia. Similar processes are typical of societies living through the breakup of states, a change of political system, or deep historical upheaval. What changed the situation was that this cultural concept gradually took on political content. Language and culture ceased to be a space of free communication and became a criterion of political belonging. If millions of people share the Russian language, Russian culture, and a common historical memory, then they can be portrayed as a single civilizational space bound together by a shared history and a special historical mission. An important role in this transformation was played by the Izborsky Club, founded in 2012, which brought together ideologues such as Alexander Prokhanov and Aleksandr Dugin. It was there that the attempt was made to formulate a new state ideology, to explain who the “Russian person” is and what Russia’s special historical mission consists of. And in the process, the notion of “Russianness” increasingly shifted from cultural self-identification and toward political loyalty.
Unlike classical nineteenth- and twentieth-century European nationalism, this concept rested not so much on the idea of common descent or “blood” as on a shared history, the Orthodox tradition, the legacy of Kievan Rus’, and the notion of a single civilizational space of the Eastern Slavs. It is in this context that Putin repeatedly spoke of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people.” In the West the phrase was often rendered as “one nation,” though in Russian narod (a people) and natsiya (a nation) are far from identical. That distinction is essential for grasping the underlying logic of the “Russian World” ideology.
Little by little, the circle of those counted as part of the “Russian World” widened. At first it meant the Russian-speaking population, then the Eastern Slavs, and eventually virtually all peoples historically tied to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. That is how a cultural concept finally turned into a geopolitical project. The result was a fundamental substitution. What began as a program to support the Russian language and culture gradually became an ideology of Russia’s historical exceptionalism, of a special civilizational path, and of political revisionism. This is why the “Russian World” today should be seen not as a cultural initiative but as an ideological project that legitimizes expansionism, rejects the universal principles of international law, and defines itself against the liberal-democratic world order.
T-i: Are there questions about Russia that you keep asking yourself without finding an answer?
MB: There are quite a few. The one that keeps haunting me is how such a destructive war could come to be seen by a substantial part of Russian society as historically necessary. Rationally, much of what is happening is hard to explain in the familiar categories of political or economic calculation.
In the first months of the war, it seemed to me that Russian society was largely hostage to the political regime and to a vast machinery of state propaganda. In other words, I assumed that support for the war was largely coerced. Over time, though, my understanding grew more complicated. Talking with colleagues in Russia, including people from the academic community, I increasingly ran into a different line of reasoning. Many of them do not welcome the war at all. Some say outright that they consider it a tragedy and, quite possibly, a historical mistake. And yet they are convinced that now that the war has begun, Russia cannot afford to lose it. Underlying that position is the belief that Russia’s defeat would mean not just a military setback but the end of the country as a great power — and perhaps a threat to the very existence of the Russian state. I do not share this view, but I think it is extremely important to understand the internal logic of such convictions. If we want to make sense of what is happening, it is not enough simply to declare these views irrational or propaganda-driven. We need to understand how they took shape and why they proved so persuasive to millions of people, including people in intellectual circles. That remains one of the hardest — and at the same time one of the most important — questions for me today.
T-i: What is happening today among Russian-speaking researchers, both those who left and those who stayed? What unites them, and what divides them?
MB: A serious split has opened up in the Russian-speaking academic community, above all between those who left Russia and those who remained. But that line does not map neatly onto attitudes toward the war: among those who left there are people with very different positions, and by no means all of them are willing to voice their disagreement openly. It seems to me that one of the key factors shaping the current situation is fear. And I mean not only political fear in the usual sense of the word, but a deeper, almost existential fear — fear for one’s own safety, for the future, for one’s loved ones. Many of those who emigrated still have ties to Russia. Elderly parents, relatives, property, professional contacts are all still there. On top of that, many are unsure whether their emigration will be temporary or permanent, and they want to keep the option of returning open. All of this creates a climate of self-censorship.
People may disagree with what is happening and still avoid saying so publicly, fearing the possible consequences — not only for themselves but for those close to them. It is this fear — which one might call a biological, instinctive drive toward self-preservation — that largely defines the state of the Russian-speaking academic world today. And what makes it especially paradoxical is that this holds equally for those who stayed in Russia and for those who ended up outside it.
T-i: Émigrés of the White movement also expected to return, yet they spoke and thought freely.
MB: Yes, many in that first wave of emigration [Russians who fled after the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War — T-invariant] also hoped to come back. But the historical situation was fundamentally different: after the Revolution and the Civil War, many of them were stripped of citizenship, of property, and of any possibility of return. The practice continued through the Soviet period: the state restricted freedom of movement and often turned departure into a forced separation from one’s homeland. The border was closed, and emigration effectively meant a final break with one’s former life. But at the same time, those who left gained the freedom to speak, write, and act openly in accordance with their views and convictions. I’m reminded here of a passage in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs about his expulsion from the Soviet Union. He wrote that the moment the plane left Soviet airspace, he felt absolute freedom for the first time. He had lost his homeland, but he had gained the freedom to speak and think without fear.
The paradox of the present situation is that open borders have brought not only greater mobility but also a distinctive instrument of political leverage and pressure in the hands of the state. This, to my mind, is one of the most unusual features of the current Russian regime: a new form of political control based not on closing the borders but on maintaining controlled openness. People can leave the country, but the act of emigrating does not necessarily mean freedom from fear. Those who leave find themselves in an in-between state — between physical freedom of movement and a sense of constant vulnerability. Physically they leave Russia, but psychologically and socially they are not always entirely free of the system they left behind.
Self-Censorship Against Philosophy
T-i: What is happening inside the Russian philosophical community?
MB: To be honest, what troubles me today is not so much state censorship as the gradual transformation of the very culture of philosophical thinking. I don’t think what is going on can be explained by direct state pressure alone. Institutional constraints certainly exist, but self-censorship has become a far more serious problem. It is self-censorship that largely sets the intellectual climate today.
Let me give an example from my own experience. In 2022 the centenary of the famous “philosophers’ ships” was being marked [the 1922 expulsion from Soviet Russia of some two hundred intellectuals, most of them deported by steamship — T-invariant], and a major international conference was in preparation. I was invited onto the organizing committee as a representative of the academic community abroad. After the war began, the European participants had to withdraw from the committee, because their universities and government bodies prohibited official cooperation with Russian state institutions. In the end, the only foreign participants left were a retired French colleague and me — there were no such restrictions in the United States. I was asked to give a plenary talk over Zoom and then publish it in Voprosy filosofii. And this is where the mechanism of self-censorship became fully apparent. I was told the text was too critical, that publishing it could put the journal in the line of fire and create problems both for the editors and for the Institute of Philosophy, which publishes it. No one officially forbade printing my talk. The decision was made purely out of fear of possible consequences. That, to my mind, is the most alarming feature of the situation today.
Self-censorship is always more dangerous than censorship proper: censorship restricts what is said from the outside, whereas self-censorship gradually rebuilds and deforms thinking itself. That is why I see self-censorship not simply as a political phenomenon but as a philosophical problem. It changes not only what people say but what questions they are capable of putting to themselves. When a researcher rules out entire areas of reflection in advance as “dangerous” or “undesirable,” philosophy stops doing its central job — subjecting reality to critical scrutiny.
Self-censorship is essentially one of the most dangerous instruments of authoritarian power: it limits not only freedom of speech but freedom of thought, imperceptibly narrowing the very space of what can be asked. Every authoritarian regime seeks to control not only public expression but the conditions under which independent thinking becomes possible. And self-censorship turns out to be a remarkably effective tool of that control.
T-i: How does self-censorship show up in philosophical research?
MB: Self-censorship inevitably changes the intellectual agenda itself. Many researchers try to steer clear of topics that might be read as politically sensitive. That is part of why we are seeing a marked rise in interest in traditional values, in the history of Russian philosophy, in Eastern philosophy and religious thought. I certainly don’t mean that these subjects are unworthy of attention. On the contrary, they are important fields of study. The problem arises when the choice of topic is driven not by scholarly interest but by considerations of safety. The result is that philosophy stops asking uncomfortable questions and starts circling around long-familiar material.
One episode in particular stunned me. Talking with a colleague, I learned about plans for a summer school devoted to Kant’s essay Toward Perpetual Peace. Both the work itself and the subject it raises are exceptionally important — especially now, in the middle of a bloody war. I was excited, and I asked how they intended to discuss the text under present conditions, and how far the ongoing war would become a subject of reflection. What I heard shook me to the core. The plan, it turned out, was to discuss the essay “in purely theoretical terms,” without touching on current social and political realities. That answer became for me a symbol of where Russian philosophical scholarship, and philosophical discourse generally, stands today. And it is very sad, because philosophy exists precisely in order to connect ideas with reality. If philosophical concepts lose all connection to historical experience, they become a purely academic exercise. It would of course be unfair to claim that all Russian philosophers have abandoned this much-needed reflection and blindly support what is happening. They have not. I know many people who stayed in Russia and inwardly refuse to accept the war. But fear — for themselves, for their colleagues, for the institutions they work in — leads many of them to keep quiet, retreating into the internal emigration we know so well from the Soviet period.
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T-i: And do philosophers in emigration discuss the current situation?
MB: Émigrés certainly discuss what is happening far more freely. But another problem arises here. An enormous number of texts about the war, about Russian society, about the Putin regime are being published now. Most of these, though, belong to the genre of opinion journalism or political commentary rather than to philosophical research in the strict sense. And that is entirely understandable. Philosophical reflection requires a certain historical distance. Philosophy does not simply record events; it tries to understand their inner logic, to identify the concepts and structures that become visible only with time. And we are still inside the event itself, which is not yet over. So many of today’s interpretations are inevitably preliminary and fragmentary. This does not mean philosophy is silent. Rather, it is in the process of making sense of what is happening and searching for an adequate language to describe it. I am convinced that the most significant philosophical work on this war and on the transformation of Russian society is still ahead of us.
T-i: But parallels can be drawn.
MB: Parallels are certainly possible, though they have to be handled with great care. History never repeats itself literally. Even so, it is parallels that occupy me most as a researcher today. My recent article is about philosophers of the shestidesyatniki generation and what lessons their experience can offer us now. The main resemblance, as I see it, lies not in the political circumstances as such but in the fact that the question of philosophy’s relationship to power has once again moved to the foreground. The shestidesyatniki, after all, also lived under conditions of limited freedom. During the Thaw there was a sense of intellectual liberation, but it very quickly became clear that this space of freedom had its limits. Philosophers were confronted with the question of how to preserve the autonomy of thought inside a system determined to subordinate intellectual life to itself. That question is still with us today. Present-day conditions are of course different from Soviet ones. But the problem of the relationship between philosophy and power, between independent thinking and institutional loyalty, has not gone anywhere.
What worries me most is that many academic structures today prefer not to resist outside pressure but to adjust to it in advance. This is not only about political restrictions; it is about a willingness to give up their own intellectual responsibility. When a university or a research institute stops deciding for itself what its curriculum contains or what its researchers work on, it risks losing its central function — being a space for the free pursuit of truth.
T-i: Why do the shestidesyatniki philosophers seem so important to you today? What lessons can we draw from their experience?
MB: The shestidesyatniki are often seen simply as a generation of liberals and reformers, but that reading oversimplifies things badly. For me, the shestidesyatniki movement in philosophy was not so much a generation as a distinct philosophical project aimed at restoring philosophy to its true purpose. Their main task was to reestablish philosophy as an independent form of thinking. It is no secret that by the early 1950s philosophy in the USSR had largely turned into an ideological discipline, reduced to commenting on and quoting the canonical texts of Marxism-Leninism. Philosophy had effectively lost its own voice. It was in this context that the famous “Theses on the Subject Matter of Philosophy,” written in 1954 by two junior lecturers in the philosophy faculty at Moscow State University, Evald Ilyenkov and Valentin Korovikov, became such an important event. It is worth stressing that this happened two years before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, where Stalin’s cult of personality was criticized, along with its consequences — including for philosophy, which had been steadily drained of living thought. The authors of the “Theses” called into question the very understanding of philosophy as the handmaiden of ideology. They insisted that philosophy must have its own object of inquiry and its own criteria of truth. They paid dearly for it. They were harshly attacked, and both were forced to leave Moscow State University. But the significance of their intervention lay in more than the specific theses. In effect, these scholars asserted philosophy’s right to exist autonomously, to have its own object of study and its own independent thinking. In other words, this was not about reforming Soviet ideology but about restoring philosophy as an independent field of inquiry — which is impossible without giving philosophy back its principal subject: the human being as a thinking, autonomous subject. That, in my view, is the central philosophical achievement of the shestidesyatniki.
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Stalinist intellectual culture was dominated by the language of collective historical forces, classes, parties, and state interests. The human being as a subject of philosophical thought had all but vanished from philosophical discourse. The shestidesyatniki put the real human being back at the center of philosophical analysis — his consciousness, his freedom, his responsibility. They returned to philosophy not merely the human being as an object of study but the human being as a thinking subject, capable of posing questions independently and answering for his own judgments. It is no accident that turning to the early Marx, and especially to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, came to matter so much to them. In the young Marx they saw not a theorist of the state machine but a thinker of human emancipation. Many of them therefore set out to analyze not abstract historical laws but the concrete forms of alienation, bureaucratization, and dehumanization in social life.
T-i: And how was it in the sixties?
MB: This is exactly the question that interests me most today. As I said, it seems to me that the experience of philosophers of the shestidesyatniki generation holds two lessons — a positive one and a negative one. And what matters especially is that these lessons did not emerge at the same time. The positive one had to do with the fact that the shestidesyatniki managed to give philosophy back its autonomy and restore the right to think for oneself. The negative one became clear much later — during perestroika, when philosophers themselves encountered an entirely different relationship between philosophy and power for the first time. We know the achievements of the shestidesyatniki well. Far less attention goes to the limitations and internal contradictions of their project. The paradox is that a generation that had fought for philosophy’s autonomy turned out to be largely unprepared for the changes perestroika brought. Faced with a new historical situation, in which the intelligentsia — members of the philosophical intelligentsia included — gained access to political and administrative structures of power, many of them became an integral part of those power structures and lost their critical distance from them. Serving as deputies, advisers, and heads of academic institutes and universities made them active participants in the machinery of decision-making.
Let me stress that there is nothing objectionable in intellectuals taking part in public life as such. Quite the opposite: philosophy that genuinely does any work is never wholly detached from society. The problem arises when the necessary distance between philosophy and power disappears, when the philosopher becomes indistinguishable from those in power and loses the capacity to look critically at them and at their decisions.
This, in my view, is where one of the main negative lessons of the shestidesyatniki experience becomes visible. It has to do not with the mistakes of particular individuals or particular institutions but with a deeper structural danger that accompanies philosophy in every era: the temptation to gain influence, recognition, and institutional support at the cost of one’s own independence.
Kant warned long ago that the philosopher should not become the ruler. The state may turn to the philosopher for advice, but that advice must remain independent of the immediate interests of those in power. By its very nature, philosophy has to remain a space of critical reflection — including criticism of the structures that wield political power.
T-i: And the negative lessons?
MB: This is precisely why the phenomenon of the shestidesyatniki philosophers extends far beyond its own era: it is a distinctive philosophical experience that helps us understand the relationship between philosophy and power. That experience left us with two lessons — a lesson in resistance and a lesson in the seduction of power. The first shows that even under ideological pressure philosophy is able to preserve its autonomy and give people back the right to think in their own name. The second reminds us that the freedom of philosophical thought is threatened not only by censorship and repression but also by the lure of power, which gradually erodes the critical distance philosophy requires. It seems to me that the ability to maintain that distance is one of the most important professional and moral obligations of a philosopher. And in that sense the experience of the shestidesyatniki philosophers remains strikingly contemporary.
The post <h1>The Paradox of Open Borders: Why Physical Freedom Doesn’t Liberate the Mind. An Interview with Marina Bykova</h1> appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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