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Research institutes and universities across Russia are keeping blacklists of their own staff. T-invariant has identified two patterns of pressure on scientists and faculty: they are summoned for “conversations” with FSB officers, or they are left without work when an expiring contract is quietly not renewed.

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Special Academic Operation. How the FSB has pursued the scientists who signed a letter against the war with Ukraine for two years running

The FSB has resumed its pursuit of the scientists who signed an anti-war letter in 2022. Also in the line of fire are staff at universities and research institutes whose names turned up in a data leak of users of Smart Voting [an opposition tactical-voting project run by Alexei Navalny’s team — T-invariant]. According to T-invariant’s reporting, this kind of pressure is most widespread at St. Petersburg State University (SPbU), where the deputy vice-rector for security is Oleg Shaidulin, former head of the political department of the city’s enter “E” [the police anti-extremism directorate — T-invariant].

Several former SPbU employees, all with many years at the university behind them, contacted the editors of T-invariant. Their immediate supervisors, they say, explained the refusal to renew their contracts by pointing to a blacklist. Talk of such a list at the university has been circulating for a long time, and media outlets have already written about it, T-invariant among them.

A faculty member in one of the social science departments, whose three-year contract ran out in 2026, told T-invariant that he had learned back in 2025 that he would be losing his job: “I don’t know what the main reason was. Maybe the letter, maybe other things I’ve done. Most likely it all just added up.”

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There is also a way off the blacklist at SPbU. “Kropachev’s [the university’s rector] terms are pretty lax. You don’t have to go to the Donbas. You can either donate to the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation [a state fund supporting veterans of the war in Ukraine — T-invariant] or sign on as a lecturer for the Znanie Society [a Soviet-era public-education society revived as a state outreach platform — T-invariant]. Then they forgive you both your Smart Voting registration and your signature on the letter. Though you do have to remove your signature. Unless, of course, there’s something more serious on you, like donations to the ACF [Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, designated ‘extremist’ in Russia — T-invariant] — that one sends you straight to a penal colony,” says a scientist who turned down the exit route his superiors offered him and ended up out of work. “For now I’m not even trying to find a university job, it’s hopeless. I’ve decided to pause, take stock and wait it out.”

A T-invariant source describes similar refusals to renew contracts at HSE University’s St. Petersburg campus and at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). In one case, a young researcher from one of SPbU’s IT faculties held concurrent appointments at two St. Petersburg universities and lost both: neither contract was renewed.

“My supervisor asked around on my behalf, and he was told the reason was that I’d been added to some internal list of ‘politically unreliable’ employees. It’s an in-house system that people at the university unofficially call the ‘traffic light’: staff are sorted into yellow and red lists. I’m on one of them because I registered on the Smart Voting site in July 2021,” she told T-invariant.

She is not certain there was only one reason: she also signed the scientists’ letter against the war and publicly supported other human rights and activist projects. Even so, she has never been detained and has never faced administrative charges.

Where Were You for Four Years?

The open letter of Russian scientists and science journalists against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine became the largest public statement ever made by a single professional group: more than 8,500 Russian-speaking scientists around the world publicly condemned Russia’s military aggression. It was only a matter of time before the FSB took an interest. In the winter of 2024, T-invariant described how officers summoned large numbers of signatories for interviews and also worked through the administrations of universities and research institutes. Many scientists were threatened with criminal prosecution; in some cases, charges were actually brought. The vast majority did not withdraw their signatures despite the pressure and the threats. In 2026, the security services resumed their pursuit of signatories across Russia’s regions.

A researcher at a university in the Urals says that because of his signature on the anti-war letter he was called in for a talk with the FSB officer assigned to his university [Russian universities and research institutes have security-service officers assigned to them — T-invariant]: “They asked how I felt about the war in 2022 and how I feel about it now. I gave a vague answer.” In the four years since he signed, he says, the letter had caused him no trouble at all. Removing the signature now, in his view, would be pointless. “The officer handed me a printout from the Wayback Machine dated spring 2022. They had seven people from different universities in my city under investigation — I saw the list of names and affiliations lying on his desk,” the scientist said.

A researcher at a Siberian institute tells a similar story.

“My boss called and said the FSB officer assigned to us wanted to see me, and that a request had come down from Moscow. The man showed up at our institute and started asking: where did I get the link to the letter, who sent it to me, had I forwarded it to anyone else, had I talked about it with anyone, which social networks had I posted it on. That same day they summoned another colleague of mine from the institute — which is how I found out I wasn’t the only one who’d signed. We had a good long talk,” she said.

All of T-invariant’s sources at regional universities said that for more than four years their signatures on the letter had brought no consequences at all — which is why the new wave of FSB interest caught them by surprise.

‘Love Conquers All’

Sometimes the pressure on academics becomes public. In September 2026, it emerged that Tatiana Kudryavtseva, an instructor at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, had resigned after 30 years there over complaints about her old Instagram posts. The story was reported by Kommersant.

According to Kudryavtseva, she was called in after class by the director of her institute and by the vice-rector for student affairs [a post responsible for students’ moral and ideological upbringing — T-invariant]. She was shown two screenshots from Instagram (owned by Meta, which Russia has designated an extremist organization and banned). “One, a photograph from 2020, showed an image (graffiti) in a St. Petersburg courtyard of a well-known and now deceased politician who has been designated an extremist, a terrorist and so on (years after that photo was taken),” the instructor said (quoted from Kommersant) [the reference is to Alexei Navalny — T-invariant]. The second, dated January 2021, showed Kudryavtseva holding a flashlight in a courtyard on Dumskaya Street, beside an inscription in Latin, Omnia vincit amor (“Love conquers all”) [in early 2021, Navalny’s supporters staged courtyard protests by shining phone flashlights — T-invariant].

The instructor says she was told the posts could be treated as displaying banned symbols, and was warned about a disciplinary committee and possible administrative and criminal liability. Kudryavtseva then handed in her resignation.

“I’m going to miss all of it. And it really stings that someone’s bigotry, someone else’s eagerness to curry favor, and someone else’s unwillingness to lift a finger and look into the situation ended with me being all but thrown out of the university I call home,” Kudryavtseva wrote.

The existence of staff blacklists at pedagogical universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg was described to T-invariant by an employee of one of them. His contract was not renewed, he said, because he “did not pass the security department’s check.” Management made it clear, he added, that with his signature on the anti-war letter he would no longer be able to find a job at any major state university.

The post The Academic Traffic Light. How Russian universities flag “politically unreliable” academics appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36, dated August 31, 2026. Azat Miftakhov has published a paper in the French quarterly La Revue de la filière mathématiques (June–August 2026). The paper was written at the suggestion of French mathematician Bernard Randé, a member of the journal’s editorial board and of the international association Solidarité FreeAzat. Miftakhov completed the work while held in prison in Dimitrovgrad.

Azat Miftakhov’s paper is titled “La conjecture de Chui dans un cadre hilbertien” (“Chui’s Conjecture in a Hilbert Space Setting”). Unfortunately, we have not been able to read it. The paper was not posted on arXiv.org, and the journal itself is available only by subscription. However, The Insider published the first page of Miftakhov’s manuscript, which gives a sense of both the subject of the paper and his approach to the problem.

The problem Miftakhov tackled concerns a variant of Chui’s conjecture. The conjecture came about in 1971, more or less by accident. In a short note, the well-known American mathematician Charles Chui asked how to place N unit point charges on the unit circle so that the average strength of the field they generate inside the disk is as small as possible. More precisely, he asked whether this quantity is bounded below by an absolute constant — one that holds for any number of charges in any arrangement. The answer came a year later: in 1972, Donald Newman published an elegant solution — yes, such a constant exists, and π/18 will do.

The conjecture itself is a remark Chui dropped in that same note. It is plausible, he wrote, that the minimum is attained by the most natural arrangement: the charges placed at the vertices of a regular N-gon. Chui offered no proof and moved on to entirely different things. The conjecture remains unproven to this day.

Even the case of two charges turned out to be hard. The proof was found in 2023 by Fedor Nazarov, a professor at Kent State University in Ohio. He posted his answer on MathOverflow, a forum where mathematicians put questions to one another, and where Nazarov has been answering his colleagues’ questions for many years under the username fedja.

Mathematicians have tried reformulating Chui’s conjecture for Hilbert spaces (that is, spaces equipped with an inner product). In this setting, there has been significant progress. In 2020, Evgeny Abakumov (Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée), Alexander Borichev (Aix-Marseille University), and Konstantin Fedorovskiy (Bauman Moscow State Technical University and St. Petersburg State University) posted an important paper, “Chui’s conjecture in Bergman spaces.” They proved Chui’s conjecture in weighted Bergman spaces for a broad class of weights: the minimum is attained if and only if the charges are evenly spaced. But some cases remained open, and the authors listed them explicitly at the end of the paper.

It was precisely this set of problems that Randé proposed to Miftakhov. The first page of his manuscript opens with the words “Let us assume” and contains the statement of the theorem and the beginning of the proof. He looks at the case where the charges lie strictly inside the disk rather than on the circle itself. And what he proves is not an inequality but an exact equality: the energy of any configuration equals the energy of the regular-polygon configuration plus an explicit nonnegative term that vanishes only when the charges form a regular polygon. If Miftakhov has indeed proved this, then Chui’s claim (for Bergman spaces) follows as a corollary. The original Chui conjecture, however, remains open.

On March 5, 2026, three mathematicians from the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Mathematical Institute — Evgueni Doubtsov, Anton Tselishchev, and Ioann Vasilyev — posted the preprint “Weighted Chui’s conjecture.” Their work follows Newman’s line of attack: they generalize his bound to arbitrary positive charges and to spaces of any dimension. At the end of the paper, the authors pose several open questions, the first of which is what happens when the charges lie not on the circle but inside the disk.

On March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received Miftakhov’s manuscript, in which the charges likewise lie inside the disk. These are different problems, but the setup is the same — and so is the timing.

The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “In October 2025, Solidarité FreeAzat, together with the Navalny France team and the organization La Libre Pensée, held an evening in Paris devoted to writing letters in support of Russian political prisoners. Among the participants was Bernard Randé, a mathematician, a former teacher in the preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and a member of our association. Instead of an ordinary letter of support, he decided to give Azat what he misses most — a real mathematical problem.”

Getting mathematical formulas into facilities run by the FSIN [Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service — T-invariant] is a challenge in its own right: such letters often never reach their recipients. A long wait followed, and on March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received a reply from Azat via Solidarité FreeAzat. The letter opened with the words: “And so your problem, which brightened my days and cost me many hours of sleep, became a breath of fresh air for me. Thank you so much for that!” Attached to the letter were six handwritten pages containing the solution to the problem Randé had posed.

The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “Azat worked under exceptionally harsh conditions. Over four months in detention — with no scientific library, no internet access, no chance to discuss mathematics with colleagues, and only a few hours a day with pen and paper — he managed to solve a problem that was open at the time.” Here we have to take their word for it, since we have not yet seen Miftakhov’s paper. Still, the fact that the paper was published is a strong signal in itself.

Averil Aussedat, a member of Solidarité FreeAzat and a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at the University of Pisa, proposed that her university officially invite Azat to present his result. On July 23, 2026, Azat Miftakhov’s wife, Elena Gorban, received an official letter from the University of Pisa inviting Azat to speak at a research seminar to be held in April 2027. If Miftakhov is not allowed to present his work in Pisa in April 2027, one can only hope that on September 3, 2027, when his latest sentence ends, he will be released and able to engage with colleagues and work under normal conditions.

Chui’s problem has been around for 55 years. Today it is being worked on by Abakumov in Paris, Borichev in Marseille, Fedorovskiy in Moscow, Doubtsov and his colleagues in St. Petersburg, and Nazarov in Ohio. Now one more participant is joining the conversation — from a prison in Dimitrovgrad, from the Polar Owl penal colony [a special-regime prison above the Arctic Circle — T-invariant], in a letter written on FSIN letterhead. Not as an object of pity or a media story, but as a colleague — with a new theorem.

The post Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Exactly 35 years ago, on August 21, 1991, the coup attempt by the self-proclaimed State Committee on the State of Emergency collapsed. The Soviet Union itself had four more months to live, but after those three days in August, a completely different life began for millions of Soviet citizens. The changes touched everyone, but scientists were among those whose old lives fell apart especially fast — and on the ruins, new ones began to take shape. Institutes were left without money or staff, and entire fields of research lost their funding. Yet at the same time, the borders opened, and it became possible to work at universities and research centers abroad. Some left for a few months and never came back; others emigrated right away. How did these scientists discover the world of Western science? What did they have to go through? What did it cost them? And why did a temporary departure turn out to be permanent for so many of them? T-invariant presents the stories of how they left and the new lives they built.

How to avoid becoming a professor’s mistress, survive impostor syndrome despite your success, and bring Soros to Russia

As told by Tatiana Tatarinova, professor of computational biology at the University of La Verne. She is known for her work in plant genomics and genetics, as well as in medical and population genetics. She holds a black belt in karate and is also a scuba diver, poet, songwriter, and rescuer of stray dogs.

I graduated from MEPhI [Moscow Engineering Physics Institute — T-invariant] in the early ’90s. My mother worked in the defense industry, on radar systems for detecting missiles in flight. Her job was considered prestigious: a huge research institute and plant, NIIDAR, on Preobrazhenskaya Square. But in those years, almost the entire plant was leased out as warehouses and retail space. Out of the whole NIIDAR building, the scientists were left with exactly one floor, just so the institute wouldn’t formally lose its research status; everything else went to offices and banks. It was utter devastation: a hideous, filthy restroom with no water or toilet paper, a hellish stench, and three ladies on the verge of retirement who simply had nowhere else to go. That was the state of virtually all of Russian science back then. Some people, of course, managed to land European grants, but corruption was rampant. Through my work, I once came across a nuclear energy project. I was offered a side gig, and I took it. But they told me point-blank: “We’re putting you down for a salary of $1,000 a month, but you hand two hundred of it back to us in cash.” A kickback! The corruption was absolutely shameless. Naturally, I told them where to go, using every colorful word the Russian language has to offer. There’s no way I could have lived and worked in a system like that.

Back then, though, Western universities were happy to take Russian students: if you were from Russia, you weren’t even asked to take exams or prove your English. Nothing at all was required. You could show a clumsy translation of your diploma certified by the dean’s office, and that was enough to get a full scholarship. It was believed — and perhaps rightly so — that our education, at least at MEPhI and other strong universities, was very good. On top of that, we studied for six years, so when applying to grad school we were competing with people who had only a four-year bachelor’s degree behind them. Naturally, we knew a lot more. We were readily hired to lead recitation sections and lab classes and to grade homework: in terms of preparation, we were two years ahead of the local students. It wasn’t even that our education was “better” — it was just different. We didn’t have the Bologna system yet, and our programs didn’t include general education courses (as in the US) either.

So in our fifth year at MEPhI, a real craze took hold: practically our entire class was writing to American universities, getting several offers each, and picking the best ones. At the same time, I applied for a Soros Foundation fellowship and got it. The fellowship covered a plane ticket to the US and a year of health insurance. But then something pretty wild happened to me. By that time, people were buying passports for foreign travel left and right through shady outfits. I was afraid to do that, since I was a very law-abiding girl. So I went the official route, through MEPhI’s First Department [the security office found at every Soviet institution that handled classified work — T-invariant]. Back then, you needed permission to get an exit visa and a passport. And suddenly MEPhI tells me they won’t let me leave!

I went to the head of the First Department to sort it out. And he says to me: “How can we let you go? What if you start working as a prostitute over there?” I was offended to the core! My mother was an ordinary engineer, my parents had divorced when I was three, and my father had nothing to do with me. For all four years at the institute, I wore the same single pair of jeans and a sweater made of dog hair. And honestly, I reeked of dog, because my mom knitted those sweaters from the fur of our Newfoundland, and that dog was incredibly smelly. So there I am, standing in front of him in that sweater, and he’s holding forth on my “potential” as a prostitute!

Then I thought: What if I went somewhere other than America? I wrote to various places and got an invitation from South Africa. It seemed like a good option: the professor there was originally from Russia, and he wrote directly to our dean’s office asking them to send me to work with him. That did the trick. The First Department couldn’t do anything against a direct official request from a foreign university — they could hardly tell the university I was going to become a prostitute. But when I arrived in South Africa in 1992, it turned out that the professor and I had completely misunderstood each other. After a while, he told me flat out that what he needed wasn’t a Russian grad student but a Russian woman. Absolutely insane! In the end, I switched to another professor, but my entire stipend, which had been paid out of the lecherous professor’s funds, went up in smoke. I had to scrape by on a tiny salary for teaching lab sections, and in the evenings I moonlighted as a singer in a restaurant. I sang there for six months.

Meanwhile, I got in touch with the Soros Foundation, which had earlier given me the fellowship for the ticket to America. I asked whether my fellowship would be reinstated if I moved to the States. They assured me it would. I wrote to the American university in Salt Lake City that I had turned down before and honestly admitted: “I hope your department will take my word for it: I’ve suffered at the hands of an evil regime here and have decided to come to you.” They didn’t really believe me, of course, but they took me anyway.

That’s how I ended up in grad school at the University of Utah. We had a terrific group, including several people from Leningrad Polytechnic. And then I hit a crisis. It probably happens to almost every grad student: I was overwhelmed by impostor syndrome. I felt dumber than everyone around me. It didn’t even help that in my very first year, I managed to publish a paper in one of the most prestigious physics journals. I still considered myself talentless. I was comparing myself with people who had been in grad school for several years and, before that, had worked on the same topic in Russia. Naturally, they knew more than I did. Unfortunately, there was no one around back then to support me and explain this, and I fled back to Russia. I defended my master’s thesis in the US and left.

After returning to Moscow in 1995, I got a job on projects run by the CDC (the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the World Health Organization (WHO). I worked as their regional representative. I didn’t find that position right away: first, I spent several months as a secretary for a Turkish businessman. Then he sent me along with his pregnant mistress to see a gynecologist. I was supposed to make sure she got an abortion. I was mad as hell, but the girl simply needed someone to support her. While waiting for the appointment, I got talking with a young woman from an employment agency and told her I didn’t want to work for that a**hole anymore. She gave me her work number and asked me to call in a week. And a new job came through! I was one of the people who helped Alex Goldfarb during George Soros’s visit to Moscow and organized training programs for Russian scientists. We also brought over American research teams to teach our compatriots Western standards in biostatistics and modern disease reporting. There was a joint CDC–WHO project to study tuberculosis. The topic mattered a great deal to America as well. In the US, tuberculosis was found in high concentrations only in poor neighborhoods of New York. So the Americans looked for “Third World” countries where tuberculosis was rampant and studied it there. In Russia, especially in prisons and among the homeless, the epidemiological situation at the time was critical. That was the beginning of the notorious “biolabs” [a nod to the Russian propaganda narrative about secret US biological laboratories — T-invariant].

I organized those projects, but after a while I found myself desperately missing pure science. During one of my business trips to the US, I simply walked into the University of Southern California (USC). The Human Genome Project was underway, and USC scientists were among the pioneers of bioinformatics. I went to their math department and said straight out: “I really want to study with you — please take me.” To my utter astonishment, by the time I got back to Moscow, a letter was already waiting for me with an offer to join their PhD program on a full scholarship. Can you imagine? I just walked in off the street, had a conversation, and they took me. It was pure luck!

That’s where I earned my PhD in applied mathematics, and then I went to work, first at a biotech startup (Ceres, Inc.). When its funding ran out, I returned to academia. I worked at Loyola Marymount University first, then moved to the UK, to the University of South Wales (formerly the University of Glamorgan). After that, in 2012, I came back to the US, spent four years at USC, and then was invited to take an endowed chair at the University of La Verne. There’s practically no equivalent of this position in Russia. It’s when a major foundation earmarks money for a specific professor, and that money pays their salary and funds their research. I was offered the chance to head the Computational Biology Laboratory, which I’ve now been running for nine years. So that’s my path.

I never had much desire to return to Russia. I went back for conferences, and in the early 2000s I had the persistent feeling that Russian science was catastrophically behind. For example, I was once asked to give a lecture on “the latest in science” about a technology that at our American startup we considered routine — outdated, even. Funding was so meager that basic microarray gene expression analysis, which any second-rate university in the States could do, was something few in Russia could afford.

I saw how my colleagues who had stayed in Russia struggled: dreadful working conditions, professors without even their own lab benches, several people crammed into a single office. And how is an experimentalist supposed to work without money for reagents and equipment? Mathematicians can still write formulas at their dachas with nothing but pen and paper. But experimentalists constantly have to humble themselves, beg for pennies, and plead for permission to buy every single consumable.

Things started to improve during the “changing of the guard” between Putin and Medvedev. That’s when Skoltech [the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, a research university near Moscow founded in 2011 in partnership with MIT — T-invariant] appeared. I was working at USC at the time, and Skoltech representatives came to us trying to persuade faculty to go work in Russia. I went. We organized an international conference on the human genome at Skolkovo, launched joint projects, and I genuinely loved it! I started getting invited on expeditions to study the small indigenous peoples of Siberia, and I began working closely with Russian universities and giving lectures. I became an associate professor at Siberian Federal University (SFU), supervised grad students at the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and at SFU, and lectured and advised thesis students at MIPT [Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology — T-invariant]. It was all wonderful, because back then good money was being allocated under Project 5-100. Universities needed ideas, world-class advisors, and publications — and we delivered all of that. And this whole wonderful story ended in a single day, when the war began. I was fired from everywhere almost instantly, and quietly at that — no one even bothered to tell me. I never received any official paperwork. They just deleted a line on a website, and that was that.

It was actually pretty funny: I was lecturing at MIPT, and after the war started, I made a point of appearing on Zoom with a Ukrainian flag behind me. Word got around to SFU. For some reason, they decided I had been lecturing their students in front of that flag, even though I wasn’t teaching any classes at SFU that semester. Nevertheless, they cooked up a collective complaint on behalf of “offended students” who had supposedly been insulted by the Ukrainian flag in my background. A total circus. I found out I’d been fired by accident: they had been paying me some token base salary, and six months later I simply noticed that the transfers to my Russian bank account had stopped.

A couple of years ago, I went to Moldova and Romania to lecture, and there were lots of students from Ukraine there. They asked me point-blank: “Why did you keep going to Russia and lecturing after 2014?” I told them: “Guys, what kind of neighbor do you want next door? A wild, ignorant one who ‘charges’ water in front of the TV [a reference to late-Soviet televised faith healers who claimed they could imbue water with healing power through the screen — T-invariant], or an educated one who understands how the world works, doesn’t want any war, and shares basic humanist values?” They thought it over and agreed: “Yes, of course, we need educated and kind neighbors.”

That’s why I kept going. It was real, live human contact. Right now there’s an enormous amount of mutual misunderstanding, but I believe that we — the professors who came to Russia with ideas and lectures — simply didn’t finish the job. We should have stepped in sooner, spoken up louder, and pulled Russian education out of the hole it had fallen into. I don’t know whether we could have changed anything on a large scale. But if instead of a handful of enthusiasts there had been a whole army of scientists who cared, maybe no tanks would have rolled into Ukraine.

How to shed the sack in the sack race, bomb your first interview, and still land your dream job

As told by Eugene Koonin, senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the National Library of Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health. A renowned expert in evolutionary and computational biology, he has the highest h-index of any scientist of Russian origin: 256.

In the late 1980s, being a passive and not particularly brave person, I didn’t even think about leaving. It was too much hassle: the complicated exit paperwork, trips to district Communist Party committees, and so on. But once those barriers disappeared, conferences started happening right away, contacts emerged, and with them came the idea of going to work for a while somewhere real science was being done. My first serious trip abroad was to the International Congress of Virology in West Berlin in August 1990. It was an interesting time: the Wall was coming down, and you could walk up and chip off a piece as a souvenir. But far more important, I got to meet serious researchers from the US. Because my work involved computer analysis, we managed to do some joint research literally on the spot, without even leaving the poster stand at the congress.

As a result, I was invited to come work with them for four months. I spent the spring of 1991 in Texas, in the middle of nowhere, at a university right in the center of the state. Despite considerable everyday hardships and a lack of money, I liked it. There was meaningful, fairly serious work, cleanliness, order — and lots of good, varied food, which turned out to be affordable even given how poor I was at the time. All of this made a very strong impression on me. The mood around me was optimistic: the Gulf War had just ended in victory.

The access to information was striking, too. This was before the internet. In the Soviet Union, nothing came easy. It was a kind of “sack race”: you could accomplish a lot, but always late and only after overcoming obstacles. American science struck me as the same race, only without the “sack.” Everything happened on time and without needless obstacles. Submitting a paper to a journal was very easy, even though everything was still done the old way, on paper. It was no problem at all to read something published the day before, and your own manuscript could reach the editors the very next day.

Of course, contact with colleagues mattered too. Although on that first trip, my professional networking wasn’t going all that well yet. And not because I couldn’t speak English. As I said, this was the pre-internet era, and building connections beyond your own university wasn’t easy. Still, I got very lucky. During that trip, I came across an announcement in a scientific journal about the launch of a new center for computational biology. It was the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the NIH (the US National Institutes of Health). A little later, I read a full-fledged research paper — one of the first published by its staff. The paper was really good; I liked it a lot. And I thought the place seemed tailor-made for me. That impression proved decisive. I overcame my natural shyness and wrote to that very center. I asked some scientific questions, offered my services, and attached my CV. They were immediately interested and invited me for an interview. It went extremely badly for me, because I didn’t know how to give a talk. Had it gone well, they would have offered me a permanent position right away; instead, I got a two-year temporary contract. Still, that was enough to get started.

You can’t go back to the country I left — it simply doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t even consider crossing the Russian border (like other members of the Anti-War Committee, Eugene Koonin faces a criminal case opened against him in Russia. — T-invariant). And, forgive me, but why would I leave a place where I have rewarding, well-supported work and a normal life? For a while, the new Russian regime was relatively “vegetarian” [a Russian expression for a comparatively mild regime — T-invariant] and made some attempts to develop science. The situation during the “Medvedev thaw” wasn’t all bad or hopeless. The megagrants [a government program launched in 2010 to bring leading scientists to Russian universities — T-invariant], for all the system’s flaws, were a decent idea. But I never felt any desire to take part. After Medvedev, though, after that abomination that came to be known as the “castling” [the 2011 Putin–Medvedev job swap, named after the chess move — T-invariant], everything went to hell. Science and everything else.

How to split $1,000 among 30 employees, win a lawsuit against a corporation, and launch a scientific career in the US

As told by Alexander Kabanov, distinguished professor and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-director of the Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine. He specializes in the delivery of drugs and other biologically active compounds using polymeric nanomaterials.

I graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry at Moscow State University (MSU) in 1984. By then, the war in Afghanistan was in full swing, and the Soviet Union was gradually heading toward collapse. But apart from Andrei Amalrik, who fifteen years earlier had written his prophetic (and therefore banned in the USSR) essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, few people realized it. I finished my Candidate of Sciences dissertation [the Soviet equivalent of a PhD — T-invariant] extremely fast: I had everything done in a year and a half, and a little over two years in I had already defended. My advisor, Karel Martinek, an outstanding physical chemist and Lenin Prize laureate who by then had already moved to Czechoslovakia, kept pushing me to hurry. After the defense, I wanted to stay at MSU. According to Karel, they were bound to keep me: I had been a Lenin Scholarship recipient both as an undergraduate and in grad school. So I was counting on a junior research fellow position in the Department of Chemical Enzymology, where I had studied.

Unfortunately, just a week before my defense, Ilya Berezin, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences who headed the department and was my main boss, died suddenly. I defended my dissertation successfully, but all of a sudden there was no chance of staying in the department as planned — there was no one left to go to bat for me. At the time, Moscow’s Communist Party boss was Boris Yeltsin, who had just launched an aggressive campaign against cronyism and nepotism. And my father, Viktor Kabanov, was a very well-known scientist who headed another department in the same Faculty of Chemistry. But he and I had firmly agreed that he wouldn’t intervene or put in a word for his son. So, thanks to Yeltsin — and I really should thank him for this — I started looking around, and that shaped the rest of my scientific life.

My father advised me to go see Evgeny Severin. He ran a large institute built partly on the ruins of Lev Piruzyan’s scientific empire. The institute reported to the USSR Ministry of Health and was overseen by the ministry’s Third Main Directorate [its classified division serving the defense and nuclear industries — T-invariant]. They did top-secret work there. It was a restricted-access facility, with KGB men carrying submachine guns at the entrance. But Severin was eager for scientific novelty and international recognition, and he tried to hire young, open-minded people. Interestingly, the KGB didn’t even bother vetting me. They said: “No point checking him out — we know everything about that family.” My father, on the other hand, really had been vetted at the very highest level because of his position and his security clearance. He didn’t work at that institute, but he and Academician Rem Petrov sat on the relevant national scientific council.

So I went to Severin, and he hired me on the spot as a lab head. It turned out that a talented young scientist from the Serbsky Institute [Moscow’s leading center for forensic psychiatry — T-invariant], Vladimir Chekhonin, later a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had been using a technique from my undergraduate thesis in his own research. His work was built on a chemical modification of proteins (specifically, antibody fragments) that I had proposed, which allowed them to penetrate directly into the brain. At the time, this looked like a phenomenal breakthrough: delivering drugs across the blood–brain barrier. I didn’t even know about it, but Severin’s institute had already heard. That’s how I became the first — and nearly the only — employee at that institute without a security clearance. It was there that I met the man who would be my closest friend for many years (sadly, he has since passed away): Valera Alakhov.

Valera showed up to our first meeting pretty drunk and several hours late, while I waited patiently for him. I didn’t know then that he’d gotten married the day before — for the second time — which was why he was late. So there we sit: him rumpled and not entirely sober, me all dressed up in my only wool suit and a tie. At first we couldn’t stand each other, but eventually we started working together and became best friends. Valera played an important role in the story of how I left, and in my life in general. And I in his.

Soon, Yuri Kuzyakov, dean of the MSU Faculty of Chemistry, was told that I was leaving for Severin’s institute. Let me stress again that my father and I hadn’t asked for anything. But the faculty had known me since my student days — I was top of my class. With such a legendary father, I simply had no choice. In fact, in all my years of study I got only one B, in military training, because I forgot the words of the military oath. It meant absolutely nothing to me, so I started going around in circles repeating some phrases, and they slapped me with a B. The faculty leadership declared: “We can’t let him go. He was a Lenin Scholarship recipient as a student and in grad school — he’s our number one.” And they immediately created a junior research fellow position for me in the Department of Chemical Enzymology. After Martinek left, the lab was headed by Andrey Levashov (who at the time was still just a Candidate of Sciences). So I became, at the same time, a junior research fellow at the MSU Faculty of Chemistry, where I still had my own grad students, and a half-time lab head at the Institute of Applied Molecular Biology of the USSR Ministry of Health. There, I was immediately put in charge of several people.

The atmosphere at the Health Ministry institute was amazing. I was the youngest lab head; the next youngest, Kolya Porodenko, was only two years older. A whole constellation of talented young people had gathered there, mostly from MSU. They were tackling extremely hard problems, and I was basically told: “Well, go ahead, work on delivery.” So I started working on what would later be called nanomedicine and targeted drug delivery. For about two years, it was all very generously funded. We had all the cutting-edge equipment we could dream of. I had never worked closely with biologists and physicians before, and now they let me loose like a fox in the henhouse (in a good way): whenever an idea came up, we put it into practice right away.

Back then, we came up with things that shaped the field for decades. Nowadays, whenever I’m nominated for something, people always mention that it was in those years that I came up with the idea of using polymeric micelles to deliver drugs to the brain. We did that work together with that same scientist from the Serbsky Institute, Volodya Chekhonin, thanks to whom I ended up at Severin’s. I’m enormously grateful to him. Around the same time, by the way, my father and I came up with polyplexes — complexes of DNA with polycations. Shortly before us, several groups around the world had used a natural polycation, polylysine, linked to protein ligands, to deliver DNA into cells via cell receptors. Without yet knowing about that work, we showed that synthetic polycations can form nanocomplexes with DNA that deliver it into cells and allow it to be expressed there without any receptors at all. Today this is one of the most widely used approaches for delivering nucleic acids into cells, alongside the lipid nanoparticles that underlie modern RNA vaccines. Back then, in the late 1980s, we had a real explosion of discoveries. But because we lacked experience in modern biology and didn’t know how to publish internationally, we ended up in lower-tier journals than these results deserved. If we had been promoting this work in the US, with access to the top journals, it would have been a worldwide triumph. But it was still very cool.

I became head of a department and in 1990 defended my Doctor of Sciences dissertation [Russia’s higher postdoctoral degree — T-invariant], just three years after my Candidate of Sciences. That same year, I went to America for the first time and began traveling abroad in general: the Pasteur Institute in Paris, an AIDS conference in Switzerland, lectures and seminars in Germany… That’s when I realized that people in the West are a lot like us. As a product of the Soviet system, I used to think I could never survive in the capitalist world with its brutal laws of competition. But now I realized: I think I can.

It looked like a bright future lay ahead. I was a laureate of the Lenin Komsomol Prize [a prestigious Soviet award for young scientists — T-invariant], the youngest Doctor of Chemical Sciences in the USSR, and a welcome guest in many academic offices. But the system was coming apart at the seams. Until the very end, I believed I had a duty to stay in my homeland. By the time I defended my doctorate, absolutely everything had vanished from store shelves. In December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. And shortly before that, Valera Alakhov had gone to Canada on a research fellowship. I don’t know how on earth they let him out, with the pile of security clearances he had — but the security apparatus was already breaking down.

And in these hard times, I’m running the department Severin used to head. I have three labs under me, about thirty people in total. One day Severin and I are sitting there drinking tea, and he says, matter-of-factly: “Sasha, keep in mind: starting January 1, we won’t have any money at all.” At first I didn’t take it seriously, but sure enough, one day the thirty people working with me were left without a penny.

Shortly before that, in the fall of 1991, Valera wrote to me from Canada that a Canadian businessman of Russian origin named Oleg Romar was coming to Russia. He wanted to adopt two children from an orphanage — a brother and his little sister — and was looking for access to official channels and medical support through our institute. Those were murky times, and Oleg badly needed people he could trust. We met and instantly became friends (we’re still partners today). The first place he brought the adopted children was my apartment. The kids were miserable and frightened; they came from a family of alcoholics. They had been treated horribly since birth. It shook me to the core. Oleg and his wife, Isabella, made a deep impression on me too. They went on to raise the children safe and sound in Canada.

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Of course, Oleg and I also talked about science and my work. Eventually, those conversations gave rise to the Moscow Institute of Biotechnology. Oleg sent money from Canada, and I distributed it among our staff as grants. In 1992, I was splitting roughly $1,000 a month among thirty people. That came to about $30 per person on average, but I weighted each share by the person’s contribution. In those hungry times, it was an incredible, lifesaving supplement to people’s salaries. The idea of attracting Western investment for our discoveries had come up even earlier. In December 1991, on my way home from New York, at Oleg’s insistence, I met with a leading biotech expert, Pradeep Banerjee, who was then working in Manhattan at Coopers & Lybrand Consulting. After talking with me for an hour, Pradeep gave Oleg a glowing assessment of our work. About me, he said: “This guy will find a job anywhere.” Oleg, Valera, and I decided to start a company in Canada. I was supposed to go to Canada for a year to help Valera set up a base lab, while the main research, as we planned at the time, would continue in Moscow.

In the spring of 1993, just before I was due to leave, a severe political crisis erupted in Moscow. Khasbulatov [Ruslan Khasbulatov, then speaker of the Russian parliament — T-invariant] and Yeltsin were going at each other on television, and civil war was in the air. My wife, Tanya, was pregnant. Oleg called me: “Sasha, take Tanya and fly out right now. If she gives birth in Moscow, you won’t be going anywhere.” I walked around that eerie, seething Moscow, went to see my father, and said: “Dad, you know… I think I may never come back here.” My father was very upset, even hurt: “How can that be? We supported you and Valera in everything here, and now you’re not coming back?” Back then I had a silly, grandiose notion stuck in my head. After all, by birth and talent I had been given a great deal. And I believed that if I were going to leave, I had to be the last to go, after everyone else had been saved. But in the end, our daughter Dasha was born in Canada a month after we arrived.

On October 4, 1993, tanks of the Taman Division fired on the House of Soviets, the seat of Russia’s parliament. Photo: ITAR-TASS

We lived very modestly, on the edge of poverty. It turned out that the lab we were setting up had no real money. On top of that, a conflict broke out between Oleg and the board of directors of the Canadian medical association he chaired, which had originally invited us for the project. The conflict wasn’t about us: at its core was the sale of another company the association had created. Enormous sums were at stake, by the standards of that time and even today’s. They tried to use us. In the course of the conflict, representatives of the board came to Valera and me and asked us to testify against Oleg so they could accuse him of a conflict of interest — claiming he had illegally used his position as chairman of the association’s board. In exchange, they offered to hand over, at last, the million dollars that had long been promised for the lab’s work in Canada. We told them where to go. Politely but firmly. And after that, a real war against us began: they declared that everything we had invented belonged to them, tried to strip us of the rights to our own technologies, and tried to block us and Oleg from developing those technologies in North America. It was tough — our own lawyer was apparently working for them. We had no money. But we managed to find another lawyer who agreed to take our case on contingency. His name was Pierre Fournier. He was a tough guy, and when we told him our story, he said our rights had been violated. Within just a few months, he actually won an arbitration on one key issue. But the fight went on.

As things turned out, I was the one who took responsibility for our decisions in this fight. Of course, I consulted Valera on everything. It was a life-or-death battle. There I was with a baby, no salary, living on $100–200 a week in borrowed money. In October 1993, leaving my wife and six-month-old daughter in Montreal, I flew to Moscow on business, right in the middle of that October’s political crisis. I even wrote a poem about that time: “A strange specter is haunting the town, / While all Russia lies cowering, trembling; / Over crowds, a pretender self-crowned / Urges all to advance on the Kremlin.” [a reference to Alexander Rutskoi, whom the parliament had declared acting president — T-invariant]. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get back to Canada. I made it back.

A few months later, my father flies in to see me in Montreal. We’re sitting in the kitchen, we open a bottle of vodka, and I say: “Dad, I’ve made a decision. I’m not going back to Russia. I’m going to look for a professorship in the US.” I was bracing myself for his reaction. And my father exhales: “Sasha, what a relief… I didn’t know how to tell you that you must not, under any circumstances, come back to Russia.” In fact, my father understood where things were heading much earlier than I did, and he accurately predicted what Russia would become today, even though he’s been gone for twenty years now.

But back to the early ’90s. Soon we settled all the litigation, secured good funding, and founded our first pharmaceutical company, Supratek Pharma. It was the world’s first company to begin clinical use of polymeric micelles for delivering anticancer drugs. Valera became its vice president of research, and I became a consultant. Even earlier, I had landed a professorship at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and begun my academic career in the US.

The early ’90s were the hardest period of our lives. The stress of the Canadian lawsuit gave me a stomach ulcer, which a few years later nearly killed me: I started bleeding heavily right on a plane over the Atlantic. For ten days I hovered between life and death in a New York hospital. But having gone through that hell — no money, in a foreign country, locked in a legal battle with the association — I realized that I now stood entirely on my own. After all, my father couldn’t help me in any way: not in a Canadian court, not in getting hired by an American university, not in my later career. That sense of independence meant a great deal to me.

After that, things took their natural course. I built a successful career in the US, created the country’s first nanomedicine research center, and organized the first international conference in the field, which has now been running for a quarter century. I’ve trained nearly a hundred grad students and postdocs, and more than twenty of them have become professors. I hope the best is yet to come.

How to make a KGB colonel stand at attention, change American law, and become the first US professor who was still a citizen of the “Evil Empire”

As told by Sergei Mirkin, biologist and endowed professor at Tufts University. He is known for his research on the structure and function of DNA, in particular on how genomic instability caused by repetitive DNA sequences and by collisions between transcription and replication contributes to human genetic diseases. He has received a number of prestigious scientific prizes and awards.

Truth be told, I should never have been allowed out of the Soviet Union. I was completely barred from traveling abroad. That lasted until 1988, when perestroika really picked up speed. And as luck would have it, just before that, Viktor Lyamichev, Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii, and I had discovered a new DNA structure called H-DNA — a form of DNA in which three oligonucleotide strands wind around one another to form a triple helix. We published two high-profile papers in Nature, in 1987 and 1988, and I was first author on one of them. At the time, I didn’t even fully grasp what it meant to be first author on a Nature paper. And at around the same time, thanks to the efforts of our Czech colleague Emil Paleček, I was allowed to go abroad for the first time — to Czechoslovakia.

I worked there at the Institute of Biophysics in Brno. An international conference was taking place at the same time, with lots of American scientists in attendance. It was the first time I’d ever seen Americans in the flesh. As I now realize, many of them were assistant or associate professors — roughly the equivalent of a docent in our system. In other words, they were still a long way from being luminaries of American science. And they all started telling me, “What are you fooling around for? Start looking for a job in America or Europe right now.” I was very surprised, because the Soviet system worked completely differently: a person was born, lived, and died in the same city, joined a lab, and worked there at least until their advisor died. And then, with any luck, they became lab head themselves.

One of these young scientists, Terumi Kohwi-Shigematsu, said, “Why don’t you come work in my lab for a little while and see how everything works?” She arranged an invitation for me through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). At the time, she was working at the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation, in the northern San Diego suburb of La Jolla. She set up the invitation through the Fogarty International Center, which operated under the NIH umbrella. And in late 1988 or early 1989, the invitation arrived. Keep in mind, the Soviet Union still existed, with its entire bureaucracy intact. The NIH’s partner in the Soviet Union was the Ministry of Health. But I worked within the Academy of Sciences system, at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The two were completely separate worlds that had nothing to do with each other. The Ministry of Health minded its own business, and the Academy of Sciences minded its own. Still, I sent my paperwork to the Ministry of Health, asking for permission to travel. Naturally, it got stuck there for good. They must have been baffled: who is this guy, and why is he coming to us if he isn’t even one of ours?

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The paperwork went off — and then silence. A month went by, then two, three, four — nothing. I figured that was that: I wasn’t going anywhere. And then, purely by chance, I ran into a colleague, Victor Koteliansky, at a party with friends. At the time, he was working at the All-Union Cardiology Research Center of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, headed by Academician Yevgeniy Chazov. The center included an institute devoted to basic, largely theoretical research, and that’s where Victor worked. In the course of our conversation, it came out that the director of his institute, Vladimir Smirnov, was collaborating with the director of my institute, Yevgeny Sverdlov. Victor suggested I talk to Sverdlov about my problem with the Ministry of Health. Sverdlov, in turn, advised me to come to the short joint lab meeting he held with Smirnov and bring it up with him there, as if by chance.

So that’s what I did. The whole thing was set up in a very interesting way: first came the talks, then a little tea — although, strictly speaking, what they were drinking wasn’t exactly tea. When it was over, our director, Sverdlov, said to Smirnov, “Vladimir Nikolaevich, here’s the thing — could you help Sergei out?” And Academician Smirnov, as it turned out, remembered me from the seminar run by the famous Soviet mathematician Israel Gelfand. On top of that, Sverdlov was now vouching for me.

It was around four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and every Soviet office would soon be closing for the weekend. And Smirnov says, “Right, let’s go!” We drive to the ministry in his official car with a flashing light on the roof, and that’s where an incredible story begins — one that’s impossible to believe today. The building was a restricted-access facility, with a guard posted at the entrance.

Smirnov walks up to him and says, “I’m Academician Smirnov; my colleague is with me.” We get past the checkpoint and head straight for the Foreign Relations Department. And I, like every Soviet person, knew perfectly well which agency the people in the foreign departments of restricted institutions actually worked for. Smirnov opens the iron door without knocking. Inside sits a KGB colonel, who snaps to attention the moment he sees the academician. And when Smirnov asks why my paperwork isn’t being processed, the colonel, obviously a seasoned operator, replies, “What do you mean, not processing it? We’re processing it right now, as we speak!” He presses a button, and a lieutenant comes out of the next room. The colonel says to him, “Lieutenant So-and-so, what’s the holdup?” And Smirnov adds, “Hurry it up, because he has to fly to America — to save our country from AIDS!” And right then and there, literally in front of me, they process the paperwork!

That’s how I got permission from the Ministry of Health to go to America on a three-month exchange. This was September 1989. There were a few hiccups: there were hardly any direct flights, and tickets were impossible to get… But somehow I made it, someone met me at the airport, and I started working in Terumi’s lab, where I seriously honed my skills in chemical DNA footprinting. And everyone around me kept insisting, “Find a permanent job.” At first I had only three months; later I managed to extend my stay to six, but that was still far too little time to find a permanent university position. Thanks to Valery Soyfer, who had become a professor at Ohio State University after emigrating from the USSR, I was able to hang on for another four months in a temporary position in his lab.

So I started looking for an assistant professor position. And I had no idea how the American academic system worked — these days I know it inside out. Objectively, my chances weren’t great: I was a complete outsider, and a citizen of the “Evil Empire” to boot — that’s still how the USSR was seen back then. But I did have one advantage: at the time, America was enormously interested in the USSR and in people from there. For the first time, scientists of a normal working age were coming out of Russia, rather than gray-haired academicians. Everyone was insanely curious. I got a great deal of help in my search from Igor Roninson, who had been a year ahead of me in the MSU biology department. Igor emigrated from Russia right after graduating, finished grad school and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and then landed a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Without him, of course, everything would have been harder: he went to bat for me, and he was at the height of his fame at the time, having cloned the multidrug resistance gene from cancer cells, so his standing at the university was very high. The position I applied for was a standard one: there was an open search, I came in to give my seminar, other candidates came in… In the end, two candidates — me and Angela Tyner from Princeton — were offered positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago. To be fair, I also had an offer from Oklahoma State University, but Chicago seemed like a far more attractive place to build a life in America.

But then came the final twist in this detective story. I got the offer, the department head sent the paperwork up to the university administration, and it was approved. But this was a public university, and the position was tenure-track. The year was 1990. The USSR still existed. Because the university was public, every position at that level had to be approved by the Board of Trustees. And the board said, “Oh, but he’s a citizen of the ‘Evil Empire.’ We have no precedent for this, except for émigrés or political refugees.” But I hadn’t defected: I had left the country legally. In short, the Board of Trustees dug in its heels: we can’t give a position to a citizen of the Soviet Union. The department head, Richard Davidson — a major scientist, now retired — threw up his hands: “I don’t know what to do.” Davidson was a fairly wealthy man, which isn’t exactly typical for a scientist, and a serious art collector. He lived in a very upscale building in Chicago, right on the lakefront. And living in that same building was Illinois Senator Paul Simon.

So in the middle of all this uncertainty, Richard runs into Paul Simon in the elevator and says, “Listen, we’ve got a problem with a Russian scientist. Is there anything that can be done?” Remember, this was the summer of 1990 — budget season in America: the president sends his proposal to Congress, and that’s exactly when the votes on appropriations bills take place. It all happens amid complicated political bargaining, and senators and representatives tack their own amendments onto the bills, along the lines of “Okay, we’ll vote for this budget, but only on such-and-such a condition.” Simon heard Richard out and said, “No problem. If you vouch that he’s a good scientist and a decent person, I’ll write in an amendment.”

And he added it to the bill — I believe it was actually the defense budget. The amendment said that American universities were allowed to give faculty positions to citizens of the “Evil Empire.” The bill passed and became law. After that, my appointment was finally approved. On July 1, 1990, less than a year after arriving in America, I became an assistant professor at the University of Illinois. A couple of months later, my wife and daughter, whom I hadn’t seen for a whole year, joined me, and our new American life began.

So that’s the story, and both halves of it — the Russian and the American — are equally unbelievable. Just a year later, the Soviet Union collapsed, and hundreds of Russian scientists headed to America and Europe to look for positions. That no longer surprised anyone: the Cold War was over, and the legal obstacles were gone. But my case set a precedent. In 1990, if memory serves, only three people from the USSR got faculty positions in the United States: I became an assistant professor, and two outstanding theoretical physicists, Alexander Polyakov and Alexander Migdal, became full professors at Princeton. Princeton may be a private university, but even there, nobody had known until then whether it was allowed to hire people from the Soviet Union.

When I left, I was driven by two things. First, I wanted to understand what a truly democratic country was like. In that respect, America made a stunning impression on me, above all because people weren’t afraid to say what they thought. I had come from the Soviet Union, where people kept their mouths shut and never discussed anything important over the phone, even with close friends. Perestroika, of course, changed that radically, but my formative experience came from before perestroika. This turned out to be extremely important to me: I realized I wanted my children to grow up in that kind of environment, not in a place where you constantly have to watch what you say and how you say it. And here’s the irony: 36 years have passed. Just yesterday I was talking on WhatsApp with some good friends who stayed in Russia. And they said, “Oh, this isn’t something to discuss over the phone.” Once again, everyone is afraid of being listened to and getting into trouble. In that sense, Russia has come full circle: from wild freedom right back to total unfreedom. People are being jailed for nothing at all, just for talking.

The second reason I left and had no plans to return was that molecular biology in the Soviet Union had never been among the world leaders. This was a direct consequence of the destruction of genetics after the 1948 session of VASKhNIL [the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, where Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscientific doctrine was declared official and genetics was effectively outlawed — T-invariant], from which Soviet biology never fully recovered. The blow came during the crucial years when molecular biology around the world was advancing at an incredible pace. In Russia, meanwhile, genetics was effectively banned for 20 years — roughly from 1948 to 1968. That gap was never closed. There was some outstanding work here and there, but overall the level simply couldn’t compare with America’s.

I was very curious to test myself: could I succeed in this global system? Which is better: to be a small fish in a very big pond, or a big fish in a very small pond? As it turned out, working in this system gave me a great deal. I built up a wide network of scientific contacts and collaborations. As a result, we did some truly excellent work that simply couldn’t have happened in 1990s Russia — both because of the lack of direct contact with Western colleagues and because Russian science simply had no money. Without false modesty, this was foundational work for a new field of science, and it made my name in America. It was published between 1992 and the early 2000s. And my lab, now at Tufts University, continues to actively develop this field. Over time, beyond science, I became Americanized in general, although I still speak English with a heavy accent. Of course, I haven’t forgotten my Russian, but my mentality has changed. I traveled to Russia many times while that was still possible; I still had both professional and personal ties there. But I never again felt any desire to go back to that life.

As for Putin’s 2000–2008 period, his first “reign,” a lot of things already worried me back then. I understood what was being done and why, because as a matter of principle I distrust people who come out of the KGB. From the very beginning, I thought nothing good was likely to come of it. But at some point it became obvious that Medvedev, although he held the office of president, wasn’t really running the country. And that’s exactly how it turned out: after a single four-year term, Putin returned, and from 2012 on, everything went downhill very fast.

Why did things turn out this way? I don’t know; I’m not a politician, I’m a molecular biologist. The simplest explanation is that perhaps the mentality of a large part of society didn’t measure up to the standards of freedom of the 1990s and early 2000s. On the other hand, I recently watched Pavel Talankin’s documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin. What makes it so interesting is precisely that it doesn’t show Moscow or St. Petersburg: the filmmaker talks to all kinds of people in the provinces. And among them, there’s only one person who fiercely supports what’s happening in Russia today. The rest aren’t exactly against it — they’re more indifferent. It seems to me that this is the central cause of Russia’s tragedy. Decades of Soviet rule, especially the Stalin era, apparently beat out of people any belief that they could change anything on their own. There were brief flare-ups: the early days of perestroika, when people poured into the streets, at least in the big cities; Bolotnaya Square in 2012; Navalny’s movement. But none of it ever grew into a nationwide movement. Perestroika was driven largely from the top. Navalny’s movement was quickly crushed — also from the top.

I’ve lived in America for 37 years. I rarely go to Russia, and for the last 9–10 years I haven’t been there at all. Maybe all my reasoning is just the musings of an amateur. Here in America, we’re also going through a fairly difficult political period, tied to Trump and the elections. But the US has an independent judiciary that pushes back relatively effectively against his unlawful actions. Neither the Soviet Union nor present-day Russia has an independent judiciary. And without one, there’s nobody to challenge the decisions of the executive branch. Nor are there free elections, as was just demonstrated when the Yabloko party [a veteran liberal opposition party — T-invariant] was removed from the race. That’s a huge difference from the US, where I’m all but certain the upcoming midterms will bring a Democratic victory. How to change the grim situation in Russia, given the absence of democracy and the passivity of most of the population, is completely beyond me. I console myself with the thought that it’s no longer my business: let Russians sort it out themselves.

How to trade one PC for plane tickets to America for the whole family, avoid getting fired for “absenteeism,” and start a new life at a ripe old age

As told by Andrey Kalinichev, a chemical physicist and geochemist, professor, and group leader at Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique (France). Until 2022, he was a chief research fellow at HSE University’s International Laboratory for Supercomputer Atomistic Modelling and Multi-scale Analysis. He is known for his work on atomistic computer modeling of the structure and properties of geochemical fluids and their interactions with mineral surfaces.

I was born in Orenburg and finished school there. I competed in academic olympiads, including one all-Union olympiad in math. After school, I went to Moscow to apply to MIPT. My entrance exam results weren’t brilliant, but they were perfectly respectable. To this day, I consider the A I got on the oral math exam one of my greatest intellectual achievements. Even so, MIPT didn’t take me. Instead, based on those scores, I was offered admission without any additional exams to the thermal physics department of the Odessa Technological Institute of the Refrigeration Industry. At first, I figured I’d study there for a year and then transfer or try for MIPT again. But in the end, I got my degree in thermal physics engineering in Odessa. People used to joke that engineers would look down on us because we’d never designed anything more complicated than a gearbox, and physicists would look down on us because we hadn’t studied and passed the whole Landau–Lifshitz course, only half of it.

After my fourth year, I landed an internship almost by chance at the Institute of Experimental Mineralogy (IEM) of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Chernogolovka [a science town near Moscow — T-invariant]. Based on how it went, they decided to hire me, which was fairly unusual at the time: I wasn’t from a university in the capital, and my field wasn’t even geology. Still, by the time of job assignments [under the Soviet system, graduates were assigned to mandatory jobs — T-invariant], the dean’s office had an official letter from the USSR Academy of Sciences: “We request that Andrey Kalinichev be assigned to the Institute of Experimental Mineralogy in Chernogolovka as a research trainee.” That’s how I ended up there in the fall of 1979.

I was one of only two or three physicists at our institute, working on what you might call the application of physical methods to geochemistry and experimental mineralogy. I modeled the properties of geochemical fluids at the extremely high temperatures and pressures found deep in the Earth’s crust and mantle.

I’d been fairly active in research since my first year of college. First I modeled heat and mass transfer in cooling systems for electronic equipment, then switched to the thermophysical properties of substances. That work, including my internship at IEM, produced a couple of papers before I even graduated. Within a year of graduating, I had published five papers in what would now be called VAK-listed journals [journals approved by Russia’s Higher Attestation Commission, which oversees academic degrees — T-invariant] — respectable Soviet academic journals that were also published in English translation. In principle, I could have written a dissertation and defended it right away.

But our institute was very small and had never had its own dissertation council. Our staff usually defended in Moscow, either at the MSU Faculty of Geology or at the Academy’s Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry. There, however, I was told that my topic was too far removed from mainstream geology and geochemistry, and besides, I had no formal training in those fields. Chernogolovka also had the Institute of Chemical Physics, which in principle was very close to my area. They studied the properties of matter at high temperatures and pressures in combustion and explosions. But they, too, found my results outside their scope — for the opposite reason: too “geological,” with too little actual physics.

Chernogolovka, though, is a pretty small village where everybody knows everybody. My advisor had a friend, Vladimir Fortov, then a young Doctor of Sciences and later an academician and president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In my very first year of grad school, at some conference at Medeu [a mountain resort near Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan — T-invariant], my advisor, Kirill Shmulovich, brought me over to Fortov: “Volodya, Andryusha here has such-and-such results on equations of state. Is that enough to defend in chemical physics?” Fortov gave me a skeptical look, scratched the back of his head, and said: “Well, let him calculate the structure and properties of water at high pressures and temperatures using the Monte Carlo method — that would be a solid new physics result, worthy of a defense.” I had never worked with the Monte Carlo method at all — I’d only used other people’s results in my approximations! And there was practically nobody in the USSR to learn it from, especially at a geology institute. I ended up spending another three years writing code from scratch and calculating the properties of what later became popularly known as supercritical water. At the time, I really was one of the first in the world to do this. Finally, in 1986, I defended my Candidate of Sciences dissertation in chemical physics in Chernogolovka. Ever since, I’ve been enormously grateful to Fortov for nudging me toward atomistic computer modeling of materials for all kinds of interesting applications, reaching far beyond purely geochemical ones.

Our institute was fairly advanced for its time. Even in the Soviet era, it had well-developed international academic ties — we corresponded with foreign colleagues and exchanged publications, though very few people could actually travel abroad. After my defense, colleagues advised me to apply for a Humboldt Research Fellowship in West Germany. One of our researchers had just spent a year there on this fellowship and strongly encouraged me to apply too. On top of that, our director was in charge of the Academy’s cooperation programs with West Germany at the time, and he also suggested I give it a try. That mattered back then: on my own, I might not have dared, at least not right away.

So I wrote a research proposal, got the necessary forms from the Academy’s Foreign Relations Department (UVS), filled them out, attached English translations of my papers, collected recommendation letters, and sent everything off to the Humboldt Foundation. Almost a year went by, and in the fall of 1987 I received an official letter from the foundation: my project had been approved, and I could go to West Germany. But by then I had just taken on the translation of a big book for Mir Publishers — a famous Soviet publishing house that put out translations of Western scientific books. A few colleagues and I had agreed to translate a very useful American monograph that had just come out — good for science, and a way to earn some money. I wrote to the Humboldt Foundation explaining the situation and asked them to postpone the start of my fellowship by a year because I had to finish the translation project I’d committed to. And they agreed!

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That turned out to be a stroke of luck, because 1988 was nowhere near as momentous as the year that followed. In August 1989, I finally turned in my part of the translation to the publisher, and in September I left for Germany. I took the train to East Berlin, crossed from East to West Berlin at Friedrichstraße, and spent the night at the famous “Berlin Zoo” station — Berlin Zoologischer Garten. The Berlin Wall fell just a month and a half after I arrived. And a year later, I even managed to chip off a couple of pieces of it myself.

First I spent two months at a language school at the Goethe-Institut in Mannheim, and then I worked in Mainz at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Something funny happened back in Moscow while I was arranging the trip through the Academy of Sciences. The Humboldt Foundation offered to pay for four months of language courses followed by a year of research. Great! But the UVS told me flatly: “No, no, we don’t approve foreign assignments longer than a year for anyone. If you want four months of language, you’ll have only eight months left for science.” I agreed to a compromise: two months of language and ten months of research. Although, once I was in Germany, I asked the foundation to extend the fellowship by almost another year. That’s how my first “Western journey” began in 1989.

The work was fascinating — a dynamic international group, lots of new ideas and colleagues. And then the Berlin Wall came down (Andrey Kalinichev described his memories of that time in detail in the newspaper Troitsky Variant — Nauka. — T-invariant). It also so happened that 1989 was the first year Academy of Sciences employees were officially allowed to take long-term assignments together with their families, including in the West. Before that, the system was very rigid: even if you managed to go abroad for more than six months, either you could come home for a short vacation, or your wife was entitled to visit you for a week at the Academy’s expense — and bringing the children was out of the question. In 1989, Gorbachev lifted these restrictions, and we were able to go as a whole family — my wife, our two kids, and me. The kids were eight and three and a half at the time.

We had a wonderful two years in Germany as a family. Our older daughter had gone to school in Chernogolovka for a couple of years and then spent two years at a German elementary school. The younger one had just started daycare in Chernogolovka and then went to a local kindergarten in Germany. When the fellowship ended, we came back. We could have extended it, but I was already being called back to Chernogolovka. That was 1991. We returned at the very end of May — on the 31st, to be exact. We managed to spend a month’s vacation with relatives in Odessa and came back to Chernogolovka — and then came the coup by the self-proclaimed State Committee on the State of Emergency and everything that went with it.

Around that time, Chernogolovka was beginning to open up to foreigners, and I was asked to look after a Belgian visitor at our institute. Before that, foreigners hadn’t been allowed into Chernogolovka at all — not even into our perfectly peaceful mineralogy institute. Since I was practically the only person at the institute who could speak English more or less fluently, I helped him out and explained what was going on. Naturally, he was badly frightened by the declaration of a state of emergency and utterly bewildered by what was happening in the country, and I tried to calm him down. But on the third day of the coup, I couldn’t stand it anymore: I got myself together and headed to Moscow toward evening. Chernogolovka isn’t that far from Moscow — an hour by bus to Shchyolkovskaya station, then the metro. I naively expected to find people already celebrating the victory over the coup plotters. I got to the White House [the seat of the Russian parliament and the center of resistance to the coup — T-invariant], and they were announcing that it wasn’t over yet: another assault was feared that night, and they were asking everyone who could to stay and keep defending the White House. So I spent that entire third night standing in a fairly dense crowd, until at dawn they announced that Gorbachev had been flown back from Foros [his vacation residence in Crimea, where the plotters had held him under house arrest — T-invariant]. The coup plotters had surrendered. So I got to take part, at least a little.

While I was in Germany, I got to know another Humboldt fellow at the same institute in Mainz, an American from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was a bit older than me, but our kids were about the same age. Our families spent time together, and we quickly discovered shared research interests. We even started discussing joint projects while we were both in Mainz but didn’t manage to get much done: I left in May, and he went back to the US in July. Then suddenly, after the coup, sometime in September, I got a long handwritten letter from him — there was no email yet — sent from Urbana to Chernogolovka. He wrote: “Andrey, I hear strange things are happening in the Soviet Union, everything’s falling apart. How are you doing? As it happens, I have some money freed up — my postdoc left early for another job. If you’re interested, you could come on what’s left of the grant. You could work here for a year and meanwhile write new joint proposals on the topic we came up with back in Germany.” I went to my director: “Vilen Andreyevich, I’ve been invited to America.” He threw up his hands: “What do you mean? You just got back from abroad! Let someone else go.” But I was the one being invited! Still, I didn’t want a conflict. The fall of 1991 went by, and the USSR was falling apart before our eyes. In December, the director convened the academic council. He had just returned from the Presidium of the Academy and told us that the Academy’s future was completely uncertain, there was no funding, and nobody knew how we would keep functioning over the next few months. After the meeting, I went up to him again: “Vilen Andreyevich, given the circumstances… I’m not asking for anything — they’re inviting me, and there’s a grant. If anything, my going will save money here.” And he agreed.

But back then, you couldn’t just go out and buy a ticket to America. First, exit visas had either not yet been abolished or were only just being phased out. Second, a private individual simply couldn’t buy tickets to America for rubles — it had to be paid by bank transfer between organizations. And obviously not at the Academy’s expense. All the Academy did was allow a US visa to be put in my official passport, the one we had recently used to travel to Germany. But we still had to get to Urbana, Illinois, somehow…

January 1992. The country had collapsed, but private business was beginning to emerge. Many academic colleagues left their institutes and went into business. They had nothing yet except boundless entrepreneurial enthusiasm. So we struck a deal with some of these former-colleagues-turned-entrepreneurs: I would give their company the computer I had just bought in Germany — a brand-new, fully loaded PC AT 386 — and their little company would pay by bank transfer for Moscow–New York–Moscow plane tickets for my whole family. On paper, it looked as if they were sending us on a yearlong business trip to do “market research.” Personal computers, especially good ones, were in terribly short supply back then and cost a fortune, so it was a perfectly fair deal that benefited both sides.

At the end of February, after two layovers, we finally landed in New York. From there, it took another full day on a Greyhound bus via Chicago to reach Urbana. I spent three productive years as a postdoc in Illinois. It was the only time in my life when I did serious physics experiments with my own hands — we measured the elastic properties of some rather exotic ferroelectric crystals. Meanwhile, on our second try, we got a grant for the project we had started developing back in Mainz. Things were falling into place!

But then Chernogolovka started calling me back again — this time to a different lab, an experimental one I had only collaborated with a little before. At IEM, I had done nothing but computation, molecular modeling. But my experimentalist colleagues in that lab were measuring the very structure of water at high pressures and temperatures that I had been trying to predict. Their setups were one of a kind, but their electronics were old and falling apart.

I should explain that the Humboldt Foundation allows its fellows, at the end of their stay in Germany, to request an additional equipment grant for their home institute so they can continue the research they began in Germany. Fifty thousand Deutsche marks was a pretty decent sum at the time. But for my computer modeling, I simply didn’t need that kind of money: I had bought myself a PC and planned to leave it at that. So I suggested that my experimentalist colleagues take advantage of the opportunity and use Humboldt money to order a new semiconductor detector for their X-ray setup to measure the structure of liquids. They placed the order, but by the time the German embassy and the foundation had approved and processed everything, I had already left for America. They took delivery of the detector themselves. And now the head of the experimental lab was writing to me in America that he’d had a serious falling-out with the director and the lab might be shut down altogether. The director was willing to keep it only if I came back and ran it. It sounded a bit like blackmail. I’m exaggerating and simplifying somewhat, but I still have all the correspondence, so the details could be reconstructed. The idea itself was perfectly sensible and appealing: to bring experimental research on the properties of geochemical fluids and their molecular modeling even closer together in a single lab.

This was 1994. There was no such thing as megagrants in Russia yet; the Soros Foundation was only just getting off the ground. But my wife and I talked it over and decided it was worth accepting the offer and going back. I first flew to Moscow and recruited two grad students to carry on in Urbana with the project that had finally received US funding. And we returned on October 11, 1994 — the very day that went down in history as “Black Tuesday,” when the ruble crashed. I had a knack for turning up at the most “entertaining” moments in history.

Remember my story about the translation fee from Mir Publishers? I turned in my translation in September 1989 and immediately left for Germany for two years. Under the rules, half of the fee was paid on submission and the other half when the book came out. By the time I got back in 1991, inflation had shrunk the first half, sitting in my Sberbank account, to pocket change. Meanwhile, economic hardship had delayed the printing, and by the time the book finally came out in 1993 — in a noticeably smaller print run than originally planned — I was already in America. The second half of the fee was duly transferred, but when I went to collect it in 1994, there was practically nothing left of that either. Still, the book proved useful, and as far as I know, it’s still used to teach students at the MSU Faculty of Geology.

So we were back. The kids went to school in Chernogolovka. All the time we were moving around Germany and America, we hadn’t actually planned to emigrate — these were just temporary contract jobs. Abroad, my wife kept up our older daughter’s Russian and math with Russian textbooks. Thanks to that, she barely fell behind. She rejoined her old classmates in Chernogolovka and four years later graduated with them. Our younger daughter, though, had to start one grade lower. She had already started school in the US and learned to read and write in English before Russian, so her written Russian was a bit shaky. But she caught up quickly.

During those four years in Chernogolovka, from 1994 to 1998, another memorable thing happened. The institute’s deputy director for research fell seriously ill, and an election for a new deputy director was scheduled for the spring of 1996. Two candidates were nominated: one was the institute’s scientific secretary, and the other was a senior research fellow who sometimes stood in for him. The ballots had already been printed, and both candidates had been discussed at length. Then, right before the vote, one of our grand old lab heads stood up and said: “Why are we choosing between only two candidates? Andrey here came back recently and is already a lab head — he’d make an excellent deputy director.” This came as a complete surprise to me, and probably to everyone else on the academic council, but people started seriously discussing the idea. Of course, people at the institute had known me for a long time and thought well of me, but still… Then the deputy director himself, the one stepping down due to illness, stood up and said: “You know, of all the candidates, I think I’d support Andrey too.” Next, one of the original candidates stood up and said: “I agree that Andrey should be added. I’d support him myself.” They literally wrote my name in by hand on the printed ballots — luckily, there weren’t too many of them. In the end, out of 26 council members, 12 unexpectedly voted for me, seven and six respectively voted for the other two candidates, and one ballot was spoiled. My colleagues started congratulating me: hooray, you’ve been elected!

And then — dead silence. One week went by, two, three — nothing happened. Our director was simultaneously the academician-secretary of the RAS Department of Earth Sciences in Moscow and also taught at MSU. He came to Chernogolovka maybe once a week, if that, usually on Mondays. About a month passed. I wasn’t angling for any position myself — they elected me, fine, so be it. I stopped by the director’s office about some routine lab matters during one of his visits to Chernogolovka. We went over the lab’s business, I was about to leave, and then he said: “Oh, Andrey, about the recent election…” And he delivered a line in classic impersonal Soviet bureaucratese: “A decision has been made that your appointment as deputy director is inadvisable.”

How grateful I am to him for that decision now! Though I only realized it many years later. At the time, I was pretty hurt. Not so much by the decision itself as by the fact that nobody had ever discussed it with me, anywhere, in any form whatsoever. Of course, I can only guess whose purposes my appointment was “inadvisable” for back then. But over time, it became perfectly clear to me that the appointment was inadvisable for me as well. Many years later, a member of the institute’s leadership told me that the director had said something along these lines: “Yes, of course, Andrey could have made a good deputy director. But then it would have been a different institute.”

If my appointment as deputy director had been approved, I would almost certainly have stayed in Chernogolovka for good and had less time for actual science. As it was, during the four years I headed the lab, from 1994 to 1998, my colleagues and I managed to win practically every research grant available at the time: two Soros grants, several from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), two INTAS grants, and a grant from the American foundation CRDF. By American — or, for that matter, any international — standards, which I knew well by then, these were very modest sums, but for Chernogolovka in those years it was huge money. We were able to supplement staff salaries by $200, which often multiplied their pay several times over! With that money we bought equipment, computers, printers, lasers, fixed things ourselves, and traveled abroad for work.

In 1997, I was invited to a conference in America, and afterward I stayed in Urbana for a week to finish a joint paper. That’s when another professor from the same department asked me to join his new project. He was also a good experimentalist, and his team needed a computer modeling specialist. “We haven’t advertised the position yet, but if you’re interested and willing to take it on, we won’t look for anyone else.” The topic was new to me but very interesting. No especially high temperatures or pressures, but very complex, poorly understood processes in the interactions of multicomponent solutions with mineral surfaces and inside mineral nanopores. And that covers an extremely wide range of both fundamental and applied problems — from basic geochemistry to technologies for radioactive waste disposal, water purification and desalination, the behavior of heavy metals in soil, and even the origin of life on Earth! Plus, working with brilliant experimentalists was, once again, a big bonus.

But there was a dilemma: our older daughter had just one year left before finishing school in Russia. Where she would go to college was still up in the air. I needed to talk it over with the family. I asked the Americans to push back the start of my contract by a year so she could finish school in peace. They agreed. My daughter spent the whole year running around to tutors, choosing between the MSU Faculty of Psychology and the Russian State University for the Humanities. But we decided that if we went to America, she could study at the university where I’d be working. Exactly two weeks after her graduation, we flew off to America again. The plan was for just a year at first. Things were going well at the Chernogolovka lab, and my idea was to come over, settle into the new project in Urbana, and then split my time 50/50 between Chernogolovka and Urbana, which had convenient access to much more powerful supercomputers — a big advantage for all the projects, on both sides.

But things didn’t go quite as planned. Our second departure for America came in July 1998. Just a month later, Russia defaulted. The university agreed to take our older daughter only on shaky, provisional terms. Although she had passed the TOEFL back in Moscow, at that point she was essentially just a foreigner with a Russian passport. And foreigners have to apply to a university at least a year before classes begin. As a result, during her first semester she attended classes simply as an auditor. But she did very well on all her exams, and since by then I was officially employed by the University of Illinois, she was allowed to enroll as a regular student, with in-state residency.

Our younger daughter went back to a local school. All in all, life in America was settling down, though I was still officially head of the Laboratory of Physical Research at IEM RAS in Chernogolovka. I regularly wrote plans and reports, managed the grants still running there, and coordinated the team remotely. A year later, my US colleagues and I received very substantial multiyear funding from the US Department of Energy to continue and expand the research I mentioned. After that, I finally asked to be relieved of my duties as head of the Chernogolovka lab and kept on simply as a leading research fellow on extended unpaid leave abroad. They kept me on as a senior research fellow instead, but that didn’t matter: I still sent my plans and reports to Chernogolovka every year, listed my IEM affiliation on all my publications, and took part in joint projects — luckily, computer modeling can be done remotely, from almost anywhere. Around the same time, we decided to apply for green cards after all. In June 2001, we put together and submitted all the paperwork, and two months later came the September 11 attacks, after which processing of all immigration applications in the US was frozen for a long time. Instead of the standard six months, the process dragged on for more than three years. Meanwhile, the grant work was going well, and we were gradually settling into life in Illinois — we even bought a house. But legally, I was still an IEM RAS employee on extended unpaid leave abroad, which I had to renew every year with official permission.

Then, around 2004–2005, the RAS launched yet another wave of dismissals of staff who had been working abroad for long periods — and with the humiliating wording “for absenteeism.” There had been talk like this before, but this time it all looked a little too serious. I found it extremely distasteful. IEM RAS was the only employer listed in my employment record book [the official document recording a person’s work history in Russia — T-invariant], and I absolutely didn’t want to be fired from there for supposed absenteeism. During my next vacation, I went to Chernogolovka and simply resigned of my own accord. That officially ended my career in the Academy of Sciences system.

By then, our entire research group had moved from the University of Illinois to Michigan State University. Our American life was going along as usual: our daughters had grown up, the younger one was finishing college, and the older one had long since started working. Our project with the Department of Energy had been going strong for more than ten years when, out of the blue, I received an offer from Nantes, from the École des Mines de Nantes. To be honest, I had never even considered France as a place to live and work: quite simply, I didn’t know French, and I still don’t speak it very well. But the terms were very tempting, and the problems to be tackled were perfectly tailored to my research interests and to exactly the experience I had built up over the previous 12 years in America. If I had set out to define my ideal research topic myself, I couldn’t have done it any better.

On top of that, several other favorable circumstances lined up. The kids were grown and living on their own. And a few months before the invitation, we had become US citizens. Before that, traveling the world on a Russian passport, even with a US green card, was incredibly difficult because of the endless visa procedures. In 2009, I made about five trips to Europe and Russia without any visa hurdles. Then, in November, I flew to Europe again, this time to Nantes. I gave a seminar talk there, discussed possible joint research with colleagues, and everything really did look, as they say, too good to be true.

My wife and I thought long and hard about the offer; we even flew to Nantes together once more to get a better sense of how we might set up our life in France. We decided it would be a sin to pass up such a rare opportunity. After all, if something in France didn’t work out the way we imagined, we could always just go back to America. So we sold everything we owned in America and flew to France with six suitcases. In our fifties, we started a completely new chapter of our lives. We’ve now been here for sixteen years and have never once regretted it, professionally or personally.

As for my “academic romance” with Russia, it turns out that in my lifetime I left twice and came back twice, but the third time I didn’t come back. At some point, Russia launched its megagrant program, and I was actively courted several times. But under the megagrant rules, a lab head had to spend at least three months a year in Russia. My job in France didn’t allow for that. Later, however, the Higher School of Economics set up international laboratories with more flexible terms as part of Project 5-100 [a government program to boost the global competitiveness of Russian universities — T-invariant]. These required only two months a year of on-site presence. That was still a bit much for me, but we found a solution that worked for everyone. Together with the colleagues who had invited me into the program, whom I had known for many years by then, we applied to set up one of these international labs at HSE and won the competition. And to meet the requirement for time spent in Russia, I agreed to split it evenly with a colleague — another Russian scientist working in the US.

So for five years starting in 2017, I once again had a Russian affiliation, as chief research fellow at the international lab at HSE. We were very productive: I had both master’s and PhD students there. I came to Moscow twice a year, and the rest of the time we talked by video. Fortunately, computer modeling makes that perfectly workable. But of course, after February 24, 2022, I resigned — this time for good, with no going back. We maintain good professional and personal relationships with former colleagues, keep discussing scientific questions, and are wrapping up projects we started earlier, but I no longer find any form of official cooperation with Russian institutions acceptable. You could say this was my third attempt to “return” to Russia, this time as a visiting Western professor. But it didn’t last either.

Do I want to go back to Russia? No, that’s impossible. And more to the point — why would I? The country has been heading into a dead end for many years. That was noticeable a quarter century ago. Back then, though, it seemed that different forces were pulling in different directions, that there was some kind of internal struggle, with the pendulum swinging one way and then the other.

I always followed the situation closely through independent Russian media, whose numbers have shrunk markedly over the years. For instance, I was, and still am, the only foreign-based member of the editorial board of the newspaper Troitsky Variant — Nauka, going back to its founding in 2008. I tried to write columns for it and helped however I could, though I never sought to lecture people working in Russia from abroad — I don’t think I have the right to impose my opinions and judgments on anyone, but I don’t see any point in hiding them, either. Today, that work has naturally shifted to the T-invariant project.

When I agreed in 2017 to take part in the international lab at HSE, it was already after “Krymnash” [“Crimea is ours,” the slogan celebrating Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — T-invariant]. The events of 2014 were an unambiguous signal to me that the country was plunging into an abyss. It became absolutely clear to me that the point of no return had been passed and completely irreversible processes had been set in motion. Especially after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) and the way state propaganda started lying about it shamelessly and cynically. Until 2014, it still seemed possible to change things. After that, the slide toward catastrophe, deep internal division, and war began. Science simply can’t survive under such conditions. The priorities of the state and society inevitably shift toward basic survival, and science, especially fundamental science, becomes an unaffordable luxury and is the first to die. And science doesn’t just decline — it’s deliberately strangled. The so-called “RAS reform” of 2013 is a vivid example. And remember how, in 2015, Dmitry Zimin’s Dynasty Foundation was added to the register of “foreign agents”? That was an incredibly sad and shameful episode. From there, things only snowballed. The “foreign agents” list long ago passed the thousand mark, and many of those on it are researchers or faculty at leading universities, including HSE itself. And how many more have been imprisoned for alleged espionage and treason…

One of the reasons I got involved with the international lab at HSE in 2017 was that I wanted to try to push back against these processes myself. At the very least, I didn’t want to remain a bystander; I wanted to see it all with my own eyes. Before that, I had been coming to Russia at most once every couple of years for a week or two. I no longer had any long-term projects back home, and I had long since left my academic institute. I wanted to spend more time in Russia, more often, and to have whatever influence I could. From abroad, catastrophe had long seemed inevitable. In the end, I was only proven right. The disintegration was simply unfolding a bit more slowly than it looked from the outside. But the worst, I’m afraid, is yet to come. We haven’t even seen the worst-case scenario yet.

I remember flying in for a conference in Suzdal in the summer of 2018 and then spending the following week at HSE in Moscow. It was during the World Cup. I took the Lastochka express train from Kursky Station to Vladimir, and the car was packed with foreign fans heading to Nizhny Novgorod. Everywhere there was an atmosphere of tremendous celebration and unexpected international openness. It seemed that HSE was still creating new international labs, new foreign professors were arriving and even being officially hired, and an international supervisory board was up and running. It seemed that different tendencies were competing in the country, and I tried to support the ones I considered constructive and useful. Unfortunately, the people trying to preserve open science and an open society in Russia proved to be critically few. Since I could always compare the Russian news agenda with the American and French ones, I didn’t have many illusions. But there was still hope. It was clear that everything was heading toward the end. Of course, I couldn’t have predicted a full-scale war, but I understood that a profound internal crisis was inevitable. It hasn’t fully broken out yet, but I’m convinced it will very soon.

So I have nowhere to go back to, and no reason to. This fall I’m officially retiring in France, but I’ll keep doing science as a professor emeritus. I still have colleagues in Russia, and we’re finishing papers from earlier joint projects through personal channels. But actually working there… It’s not even a question of money or equipment, but of quality of life, the social environment, the ability to feel like a full-fledged member of society. I have nothing in common, and can have nothing in common, with the society that has taken shape in Russia today.

You know, while working in Germany and America, I kept coming back to Chernogolovka with ideas, projects, and the hope of doing something useful. For example, I proposed: let’s use our experimental institute as a base for small-batch production of unique laboratory equipment, export it, and put the proceeds toward funding fundamental science. I had seen how effectively this model works in the US. And I watched China go down this path in the 1990s. In the thirty-plus years I’ve been working in the West, China has made a fantastic leap — from a deeply backward, semi-artisanal state to a mighty industrial and scientific superpower that competes with America and Europe on equal terms today.

I was convinced that exactly the same scenario could play out in Russia. I would come to Chernogolovka and propose concrete steps, but I kept hitting a brick wall. People were suspicious of my initiatives: they thought I was trying to push someone out of their job or angling for some petty personal perks… And yet there was a time when our institute was even written up in Nature, and Western colleagues quite seriously suggested following our institute’s example (Keeping up with Russians)!

But even then it was obvious that nothing would work without a deep overhaul of how science as a whole is organized. I thought about this a lot back then, wrote articles, and gave interviews. My pieces appeared from the late 1990s through the 2000s in Moscow News, the RFBR Bulletin, and on science websites.

Admittedly, my proposals often seemed too radical and didn’t win broad support. For instance, I said openly that to build truly competitive, world-class science, the staff of inefficient research institutes had to be cut roughly fivefold, with the freed-up resources redirected to creating and supporting strong, globally competitive labs. A reform like that could have been carried out gently and humanely. But it needed to happen at least 20–30 years ago. In the end, it all happened by itself, without any reform — simply through years of the system’s decay. So today there’s no point in reopening that conversation, either scientifically or personally. I no longer see any future for Russia as a country or for Russian science. Not just no good, bright, wonderful future — no future at all. In 1991, I clearly saw a future and came back full of hope, even though the Soviet Union was falling apart before our eyes. In 1994, I also saw prospects — and came back despite hyperinflation, “Black Tuesday,” and all the other delights. Even after 2014, some hope still remained. But not anymore. I see nothing good ahead, and I’m afraid no one has the power to change that anymore. We can try to help and rescue individual people. And that absolutely has to be done! But the country, and the science in it, are beyond saving.

How to leave “until things get better at home,” teach philosophy in an unfamiliar language, and stay in America

As told by Marina Bykova, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, North Carolina State University, a specialist in German idealism, and editor-in-chief of the international journal Studies in East European Thought; and Andrey Kuznetsov, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the same university’s College of Engineering, Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), associate editor of the Journal of Porous Media, and a member of the editorial board of Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Marina Bykova: I defended both of my dissertations at the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy: my Candidate of Sciences dissertation in 1985 and my Doctor of Sciences dissertation in 1993, becoming the youngest Doctor of Sciences in the humanities in Russia. Both were devoted to Hegel: the first to the problem of thinking, the second to subjectivity. Before I left Moscow, where I worked at the Institute of Philosophy, I had published three books. Two of them grew out of my dissertations but were substantially reworked, and I co-authored the third, The Absolute Idea and the Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s Philosophy, with my colleague Andrey Krichevsky. That book was probably the most unusual of the three: the two of us read Hegel in completely different ways. My co-author’s interpretation was strictly theological: he understood the absolute spirit as God. Mine was grounded in a logical paradigm and saw the absolute spirit not as a transcendent God but as the result and highest expression of the inner self-development of the Hegelian concept.

My husband had also defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation by then and was working at the Mechanical Engineering Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the nineties, the institute started cutting its employees’ salaries: first by sixty percent, and then it stopped paying them altogether. Officially, this was called a delay in wage payments; it dragged on for nine months. It got to the point where we started selling off our belongings, and that was hard.

Around the same time, the Institute of Philosophy launched a project to publish a bilingual edition of Kant’s works. Two teams were working on it: ours, led by Nelly Motroshilova, and a team in Marburg headed by Burkhard Tuschling. Since I knew Kant, spoke fluent German, and had a good sense of what my Moscow colleagues could do and what they needed, Professor Tuschling invited me to Marburg. There I was offered a university position and the job of coordinating the project; the choice, in essence, was obvious.

Besides, my husband and I could see that his institute’s situation was getting steadily worse: there wasn’t enough money for salaries, or for the equipment without which researchers in his field simply can’t work. I persuaded him to apply for a Humboldt Foundation fellowship. I had received one myself back in 1988 and, as I was told at the time, became the first humanities scholar from Russia in the program. That stay in Germany eventually grew into my Doctor of Sciences dissertation. Later, Andrey became a Humboldt fellow too, and we went to Marburg together: I took up my university position, while he spent four months there studying German, which was part of the fellowship program, and then moved to Bochum, where he worked on a grant. When we left, we had no intention of emigrating or staying in Europe — it felt like we were leaving only for a while, until things got better at home: we’d do some research abroad, get some more training, and come back.

Andrey Kuznetsov: In 1994, I received a postdoctoral fellowship at Ohio State University in Columbus, one of the largest universities in America. Our son was born there, but my position ended when he was two months old, so we went back to Moscow as a family of three.

Marina Bykova: We went back, though, already knowing that Vienna was waiting for us: while in the US, I had received a Lise Meitner Fellowship — the Austrian counterpart of the Humboldt — and Andrey had been invited to spend a year as a postdoc at the Vienna University of Technology. A year later, his contract was extended, while I, as a fellow, found a home at the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Philosophy and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The money wasn’t much, but the position gave me access to the library and university resources and, most importantly, the chance to work in a German-speaking environment, which felt very comfortable to me after my time in Germany, first as a Humboldt fellow and then on the staff of the University of Marburg. My vocabulary was pretty good; I had written my Candidate of Sciences dissertation working from Hegel’s texts in the original German. And yet, when I first arrived in Germany on the Humboldt program, I couldn’t understand even simple announcements on the train. The passive knowledge of the language we’d been taught just wasn’t enough… But in Cologne, I was soon speaking freely. And naturally, by the time we got to Vienna, I had no language problems at all. We spent three years there, and all that time Andrey was already looking for a position in America.

Marina Bykova and Andrey Kuznetsov (1993). Photo: personal archive

Andrey Kuznetsov: My professorship in America began on January 1, 1998. Things never got better at home: the money never came back to the Mechanical Engineering Research Institute. What’s more, talented scientists started leaving the institute — some emigrated, while others went into industry and never came back.

Marina Bykova: In the meantime, we very nearly moved to Japan for three years: Andrey had received a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, but it was clear there would be nothing for me to do there, since I didn’t know Japanese and had never worked on Eastern philosophy. So when Andrey was offered a professorship, we moved to America — again, with no thought of staying for good. We figured we’d work for a while and then go back, to Russia or to Europe, especially since we still feel European to this day.

The early days were tough: Andrey had a work visa, while I had a spousal visa, which let me stay in the country legally but didn’t give me the right to work, not even temporarily. Fortunately, a year and a half later, Andrey was granted outstanding researcher status, which qualified him for an expedited green card and allowed me to get a work permit as well. So I had a work permit — but no work.

But I got lucky: fellow philosophers who knew me from my publications helped me land a temporary adjunct faculty position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching an introductory philosophy course. Chapel Hill is 25 miles from our home, and we have no relatives in America, so it wasn’t easy with a small child. But the biggest problem was English. As I mentioned, my first foreign language — and, until I came to the US, my only one — was German. In my first few years in America, I had, of course, picked up some basic English, but it was nowhere near enough to teach in. Imagine being handed a course to teach in, say, Japanese, a language you’ve never studied in your life, with the first lecture three days away. And philosophy isn’t engineering, where you can just write out a formula; it demands a high level of language proficiency.

I walked into every lecture as if I were going to the gallows. I knew what I wanted to say, but I knew it in Russian and German, not in English — the language was completely foreign to me, and for the first few weeks I literally memorized my lectures word for word. I have to give credit to the students, who were remarkably understanding. I warned them right away: “If you don’t understand something, stop me and correct me.” And they did: they corrected me and helped me with my pronunciation, and they were kind about it, but for me it was still torture. That’s how the semester went, and to my surprise, the students gave me the highest possible ratings in their course evaluations. To this day, I can’t understand how or why that happened. Although I did try very hard.

I started my second academic career as an assistant professor, even though by then I already held a Russian Doctor of Sciences degree. I was almost forty, and in effect I had to build my professional life all over again. But I got tenure not after the six years that are standard in the American academic system, but after just three, and three years after that I became a full professor. Andrey and I got tenure in the same year, and even on the same day: that meant not only a permanent position but also a promotion from assistant to associate professor. Our work had been recognized. And that’s when we realized we wouldn’t be going back to Russia: our professional lives were here.

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The post Sometimes They Don’t Come Back: Stories of Émigré Scientists 35 Years After the Soviet Collapse appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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A little over a month into his term, far-right President Abelardo de la Espriella continues to advance a security agenda that often conflicts with certain rights historically won by Colombians.

This time, De la Espriella has signed a decree allowing police access to university campuses. In several Latin American countries, the prohibition of police access to universities has been established through student struggle to prevent abuses by authorities against student movements.

Thus, universities have historically become places where students seek refuge from repression, arrest, and regroup during times of intense social mobilization.

This was evident during the 2021 protests, known as the “National Strike,” in which students, workers, left-wing political parties, young people, and others took to the streets to protest against the right-wing government of Iván Duque. The mobilization, which lasted several months, was considered a true “social upheaval,” and many experts have seen in it the consolidation of a democratic alternative (the government of Gustavo Petro) to decades and decades of right-wing rule.

During these protests, universities became hubs of popular mobilization, driven primarily by the youngest members of society. On university campuses, protesters were able to regroup, defend themselves against police repression, and coordinate new demonstrations – among other things – always protected by the fact that police are barred from entering university grounds.

De la Espriella calls popular protests “terrorism”

Clearly, De la Espriella seeks to nip this possibility in the bud – that is, to prevent universities from once again becoming coordination centers for the protests. Many have speculated that the president is signing this decree precisely because he knows that his radical neoliberal agenda could spark major protests, and in this way, he hopes to proactively undermine the protest movement.

Read more: One month of De la Espriella’s administration in Colombia

Whether or not this is De la Espriella’s primary intention, only time will tell. What is certain is that the president views university autonomy as an obstacle to the implementation of his security agenda, which also includes curtailing the ability of informal opposition political groups to participate in public life.

“Under no circumstances will I allow public universities to continue to be sanctuaries of violence. I respect and guarantee peaceful protest, but I will not allow universities to continue to be used as sanctuaries of vandalism and crime,” said De la Espriella on X.

Furthermore, true to his combative rhetoric, he compared social protests to terrorism – a common trope in the historical discourse of the Colombian right: “University autonomy is not a blank check for impunity: I have issued precise instructions for a national protocol of action that allows us to distinguish between the legitimate exercise of protest and acts of violence, flagrant offenses, danger, or extraordinary disturbances of public order that require intervention by the authorities. The university is for knowledge and ideas, not to serve as a refuge for violence and terrorism.”

A violation of the Constitution

However, the opposition has viewed this decision as a serious attack on university autonomy. Ana Erazo, a member of the House of Representatives from Valle del Cauca, wrote: “It is an ATTACK ON UNIVERSITY AUTONOMY and a direct threat to the young people at the country’s public universities. With this, Mr. Abelardo de la Espriella is beginning to reveal what could become a BRUTAL RETALIATION against the student movement, against its ability to organize and mobilize, and against thousands of young people who historically have not supported his political agenda.”

Some universities have joined in this criticism. One of them is the National Pedagogical University, whose academic council stated that in the past, “the serious consequences of resolving conflicts within public universities through militarization have been demonstrated on repeated occasions.” Furthermore, the council stated that university autonomy is one of the pillars of Colombian democracy, along with freedom of thought and research, among other things. Losing autonomy means jeopardizing these values of the republic, it stated.

For his part, former presidential candidate Iván Cepeda said that De la Espriella’s measure contradicts Article 69 of the Constitution, which guarantees university autonomy. Regarding the announcement, Cepeda also said: “Such an announcement is not only an affront to university autonomy. It also demonstrates, once again, the authoritarian and despotic nature of De la Espriella, who seeks to stigmatize, persecute, and violate the rights of Colombian youth and the university community. Colombia has not forgotten the victims of police abuse during the National Strike, nor the history of security forces intervening on university campuses, resulting in student deaths. Young people cannot once again be persecuted or treated as an internal enemy and an enemy of the state.”

Since the start of the full-scale war, Russian science has lost key ties with Western universities and research centers. Yet four years of sanctions have not led to a collapse. Instead, Russia rapidly reoriented toward China, other parts of Asia, and the Middle East, while the Kremlin firmly integrated higher education into its system of military priorities. These are the conclusions reached by Olga Orlova, head of T-invariant, in her report Transformation of Science and Education in Russia under Sanctions 2022–2026, which examines changes in Russian academia over the past four years.

The author stresses that what is happening is not simply isolation, but a transition to a dangerous new model. The report examines not only the initial shock of sanctions but also a profound systemic restructuring: total control over international contacts, an accelerated push for “technological sovereignty,” and the subordination of science to the needs of the war economy.

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The break with the West has affected different fields unevenly. The exact and natural sciences, as well as military technologies, have received strong state support and found an alternative partner in China. By contrast, the social sciences and humanities have been devastated. Cut off from the global academic community and international mobility, they have faced enforced isolation and systematic ideological purges.

The result is what the report calls “selective internationalization.” Russia now develops international ties only where they serve the state’s military and strategic interests. The long-term consequences of this pivot are far more dangerous than the sanctions themselves: the country is replacing Western partnerships with near-total dependence on a handful of eastern allies, while the entire academic system is being transformed into an instrument of state security.

You can read the report Transformation of Science and Education in Russia under Sanctions 2022–2026 here.

The post Science After the Break with the West: How War and International Sanctions Reshaped Russian Universities appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Our interviewee today is not allowed to give interviews — under the terms of her employment contract. The senior position she holds at an American university obliges her not to make her political views public and to exercise the utmost caution in public statements. But the changes now taking place at American universities are so far-reaching that she agreed to talk with T-invariant about the serious challenges facing higher education. Her experience as a department chair and dean, and later as a vice president, helps her today to map the critical points in the development of the academic environment: how the new presidential administration is affecting university life, how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has split it, how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching and its administration, what the shrinking of university budgets leads to, and, most importantly, how the very logic by which higher education works has changed.

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The economics of structural deficit

T-invariant: You spent more than ten years in administrative work: first as a department chair, then as a dean, and now as a vice president. What changes have you observed over this time, in funding, in administration, in relationships within the faculty, in university politics?

— The most obvious and the most constant thing: there is less and less money. When I was just starting out as a chair, my institution could end the year with a surplus, and that money made it possible to fund special projects. Now many universities are already approaching a state of structural deficit.

It’s important to understand here that American universities are very different, and their funding is structured differently too. There is, for example, the Carnegie Classification by level of research activity. It currently distinguishes R1, R2, and Research Colleges and Universities. For R1 the threshold is at least $50 million in research spending per year and at least 70 research doctoral degrees; for R2, at least $5 million and 20 research doctoral degrees. The next category begins at $2.5 million in research spending. Five million is quite an attainable sum for a small college: the total budget of such an institution might be, say, around $150 million.

R1s are especially vulnerable right now because of cuts to federal research funding. A significant part of their research budgets comes through the NSF, the NIH, and other federal agencies. When those grants are cut, such universities face very serious budgetary problems.

And a grant brings the university money not only for the research itself. What matters here is overhead: the funds the university receives and uses to maintain its infrastructure and its other operations. This is a very significant part of grant funding, sometimes 50 to 60 percent of the entire grant. So R1s, but also R2s and other research universities, depend very heavily on that money.

As I see it, this process began long ago, around 2001: federal research funding started to shrink gradually. Under Obama it was no longer being cut at the same pace, but it did not return to previous levels and did not grow along with inflation. So the financial pressure on universities built up over years.

I myself never worked at R1 universities. For public universities at the R2 level and below, a different source of money matters: state appropriations, that is, ultimately, tax revenue. These too were either cut or stayed at roughly the same level and completely failed to keep up with inflation. At the same time there is strong political pressure not to raise tuition. And now the number of students is falling as well. Even if enrollment were not declining, with this kind of financial structure we would still find ourselves in a very difficult situation.

T-i: And what changed on other levels, for instance, in the university and administrative environment itself?

— A huge change is online education. This is a separate and very complicated topic. Even before the pandemic there were MOOCs, which exist partly outside the traditional university system. Some universities moved very aggressively in this direction and made online education massive and accessible. Then came the pandemic and the total shift online, and in the last two or three years AI appeared as well, and the interaction between online education and AI has created a completely new set of problems.

But there is a deeper change that I think about a lot. It seems to me that the very model of liberal arts education, which is very specific to the United States, is becoming unsustainable.

For someone who received their education outside the United States, the concept itself looks rather strange at first. American higher education rests on the idea that college education should be formative rather than narrowly preparatory: it should teach people to think critically, write well, understand how the world works, and be civically engaged. This idea is very deeply embedded in the American university system.

Historically, this model grew stronger over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: even institutions that began as teachers’ colleges gradually turned into broad-based universities with courses in history, philosophy, anthropology, literature, political science, theater, and other fields.

But it seems to me that the economic conditions that allowed this model to exist in the United States in the twentieth century have now disappeared.

This model was especially viable as long as the United States had a very strong and well-off middle class in which really only the father of the family earned money. In the popular image of the 1980s and 1990s, a single salary could support a suburban house and a family, while four years of college let a child spend several years exploring history, philosophy, or anthropology without having to answer immediately what income that degree would bring. This kind of economy made possible the idea of education as an extended period of exploration before choosing a career.

Today far fewer families can afford this luxury. A student wants to understand in advance what they will do after graduation. So, especially after the pandemic, career readiness has become a much stronger focus: how to connect a major with a specific career, how to build a career map for a student, how to explain the value of a specialization in history or sociology.

There is another feature of the American system that looks rather unusual to someone from Europe or Asia. In many countries you can enter a professional program right after school and train to become a doctor or a lawyer. In the United States, medicine and law belong to the next level of education: before applying to medical school or law school, you need to earn a bachelor’s degree. So the path to a profession turns out to be much longer.

At the same time, professional schools are usually built into a large university. Few independent teachers’ colleges remain today, and medical schools too are usually part of universities. Even engineering schools, where you can go straight into professional training, frequently exist inside universities that also have departments of history, philosophy, and anthropology. So the American university has to sustain this whole broad structure of liberal arts, even if a significant share of its students come there for a quite specific profession.

T-i: And how is this shift in student demand now affecting the university’s structure?

— In the big cities of the United States dozens of colleges and universities exist side by side, and many have their own departments of history, philosophy, anthropology, literature, political science, and theater. Every department needs students who will major in one of the subjects it offers. When the number of such students falls, the old structure stops being sustainable.

And the problem is broader than just a crisis of the humanities. Until recently, accounting and computer science were considered almost ideal career-oriented fields. Now AI is making even these trajectories less obvious. A university cannot simply replace an “impractical” humanities major with one that is guaranteed to be practical: the labor market changes faster than curricula.

Over the past decades, independent research institutes have also been disappearing. This was especially noticeable in biology: as federal funding was cut, many of them became financially unstable and either closed or were absorbed into universities or hospital systems.

T-i: What consequences has all this had, for teaching loads, for instance?

— Teaching load is fairly complicated, because you usually can’t simply increase it. It is fixed either by university bylaws or, in many public universities, by collective bargaining agreements with unions. Those also set the pay scale. So one of the main ways to save money looks different: when a tenured professor retires, their position is increasingly just not reopened.

It’s important to distinguish between different periods here. In the mid-2010s, universities were already under chronic financial pressure, but there were still plenty of students. In the big cities of the United States there was, at the same time, a large market of people with PhDs in history, philosophy, and other disciplines who were looking for academic work. Universities could hire them as part-timers for individual courses for far less money than tenured professors.

Gradually a whole layer of career adjuncts emerged. An instructor might teach at one university on Tuesday and Thursday, at another on Monday and Wednesday, and offer courses in the fall, spring, and summer. Some accumulated a very heavy load this way and essentially lived on teaching alone. In public systems, with a maximum teaching load and a benefits package, you could even reach a fairly decent annual income, but at the cost of an enormous number of courses and giving up research almost entirely.

For a long time I thought this replacement of full-time faculty with part-timers (what’s called adjunctification) was happening in more or less the same way across the country, because I worked in a big city myself. But then I realized how much this model depends on geography. It works well where there are many universities and many people with doctorates nearby: in the big cities of the United States a person can teach in several places at once and doesn’t have to move for a single course.

In rural America the situation is completely different. If a university is in a small town and needs a specialist, a person with a PhD won’t move there for five thousand dollars a course. There simply isn’t a large enough local market for academic labor. So adjunctification was a very uneven process: in the big university centers it could reach enormous scale, while in many rural areas the model barely worked at all.

And now, in many places, the trend has reversed. There are fewer students, and it is extremely difficult to dismiss faculty on permanent contracts. Moreover, in the United States age discrimination is prohibited, and you can’t simply push older professors toward retirement.

The pandemic changed this situation even more. Everyone learned to teach online, and now an older professor sometimes doesn’t need to come to the university regularly at all. I’ve seen professors well past eighty who calmly log onto Zoom twice a week, teach their usual courses, and continue to receive a full professor’s salary. If there are medical grounds that qualify for an accommodation, they can secure the right to teach remotely. In public universities this sometimes slows the renewal of staff even further.

At expensive private colleges the pressure runs strongly the other way: students are paying in part for the in-person experience and react very negatively if an instructor tries to replace on-campus classes with Zoom sessions. So the ability to move fully to remote teaching depends heavily on the type of university.

As a result, when a budget has to be cut today, the first vulnerable group is now the adjuncts themselves. Some of them built their entire professional life on this work over many years, stopped doing research and publishing, and are now at a serious disadvantage when a tenure-track position opens up somewhere. I’ve seen units where, before the pandemic, adjuncts taught half of all courses, and now only one or two of them are left.

It turns out to be a rather sharp historical reversal. First, chronic underfunding combined with large student numbers encouraged the mass use of adjuncts, especially in big cities. Now enrollment is falling, the tenured faculty remains protected and is aging at the same time, and universities are economizing above all on the very layer of adjunct faculty that they themselves created over the previous decades.

Overcoming inertia

T-i: Is the number of permanent professorial positions still shrinking, then?

— Yes, it is. When a professor retires, it is much easier not to reopen their tenure-track line. That is exactly how the cuts happen: you don’t necessarily have to fire anyone, you can simply leave positions unfilled for years. Hence the aging of the faculty and the gap between disciplines that are still hiring actively and those where the department is gradually shrinking.

In 2022–2023 we had a brief reversal at our college. Thanks to federal stimulus funds and the ability to justify new hiring in terms of social mobility, we managed to hire many new full-time faculty on tenure-track lines, including replacing some of the adjuncts. We argued that students from low-income families, of whom we have many at our university, should also have direct access to full-time faculty who are based at the university, do research, and can properly mentor them. It was a very good period, but then funding tightened again.

T-i: And what is happening with the positions of ordinary staff? Are they being cut too?

— Interesting things are happening here. I’ve long had the sense that computers took over the world, but in a way that makes sense for computers: they made us perform more and more tasks we had not performed before, because it became technically possible to create them. What used to be done in the 1990s with a single paper form now turns into several electronic forms, reports, approval systems, and databases.

Hence a strange effect: software, fast internet, Wi-Fi, platforms, specialists for each system — all of this raises the cost of the university. And you need more people, not fewer. We once thought the internet would reduce paper use; the opposite happened. It’s a similar story with staff. Every automation gives rise to new operations and new duties, and in the end the digital infrastructure itself feeds the budget crisis.

AI so far doesn’t look like an exception. It can automate a particular task, but at the same time it creates new demands for oversight, reporting, training, and academic integrity.

T-i: And what changes have there been in what students want, and in how the university responds?

— Over the last two years I’ve seen a fairly rapid retreat from online education, especially among undergraduates. For my students, online courses were very appealing at first. I worked at a public university where many students come from low-income families and work while studying, so the ability not to come to campus every day solved a real problem for them.

But a contradiction soon became apparent: students want online learning, but many of them simply don’t succeed in an online environment. I had students who logged into class while working a store cash register or sitting at their workplace. Formally they were present, but in practice they couldn’t fully participate. Such students began to fall behind, and many of them eventually dropped out of the university altogether.

So now I see a reverse movement: students themselves more often choose traditional in-person courses. The online format, of course, isn’t going anywhere: it’s too important for working students. But the idea that it by itself solves the problem of access to education turned out to be too optimistic. Access to a course does not yet mean the ability to actually learn.

The arrival of AI has added another problem. In an online environment it becomes ever harder to tell whether a student is really doing the work themselves. AI imitates human text very well, and almost any technical measure we try to use against academic dishonesty can be circumvented. So the return to in-person classes is also connected with a very practical question: how to make sure the student is actually learning.

T-i: What changed after the current federal administration took office?

— There are two obvious shifts. The first is rhetorical: from Washington we increasingly hear the idea that higher education is overrated and that what society really needs is vocational and technical training, short programs, and non-academic online courses.

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The second is a sharp reversal around DEI policy. For the last twenty or thirty years, the development of DEI was one of the central paradigms of the American university. Offices, programs, grants, and strategic plans were built around it; universities sought to increase diversity among students, faculty, and staff.

When I came to American academia from a different educational system, the point of this policy was not self-evident to me. I was strongly influenced by conversations with colleagues and students. One colleague put it this way: if a society has systematically discriminated against a particular group for a very long time, simply declaring formal equality is not enough, becauseeconomic inequality and a culture that has built up over centuries will still remain. Society is better off when social groups are not locked into a social environment where poverty, criminalization, and drug addiction thrive.

Now an almost 180-degree turn has taken place. Programs built around DEI are losing funding and have been outlawed; legal offices are demanding an inventory of anything that might conflict with the new federal rules.

There is no systematic response to these changes yet. There is a lot of confusion, attempts to understand the limits of what’s permissible, and a desire not to attract unnecessary attention. In more liberal states, universities feel some political protection, but even so they are much more careful about what they put in writing.

My own approach to diversity was always fairly moderate: make searches for job candidates and students as broad as possible, avoid labeling, resist stereotypes, and make the university welcoming for staff and students of different backgrounds. But even that isn’t enough. You have to train campus security and support staff so that they don’t begin an interaction with staff or students on the basis of their appearance or accent.

T-i: What changes of recent years do you see in the students themselves?

— The way students communicate has changed. Before the pandemic, instructors complained that students talked to each other too much in class and couldn’t sit still. After the pandemic I sometimes observe almost complete silence. One recruiter asked me: “Why are all your students whispering?” They find interpersonal communication very stressful, but at the same time they crave it. So sometimes effective pedagogy today consists literally in making them talk to each other in an organized way.

T-i: Why does academia, seeing these threats, change so slowly?

— Because academia is structurally conservative, and I don’t mean politics here. Because of financial constraints, universities hired too few young faculty for many years, and the faculty is aging. Curricula are aging too. Articles that were an intellectual revelation for me in graduate school I still want, out of habit, to assign to students, even though they are now twenty or thirty years old.

I often think of the Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass: “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” which means that to get somewhere you have to run twice as fast. Technology and the labor market change at enormous speed, while curricula and ways of teaching are conservative and dogmatic. That’s why hiring younger and early-career faculty matters not only as a question of fairness in the labor market. It is one of the ways to renew the content of education.

The university and “big” politics

T-i: Is there any political or social force beyond academia that is seriously interested in the development of American higher education?

— My short answer: I don’t see such a force. None of the political parties makes higher education a priority on its agenda. The Democrats have many social programs; among Republicans there is now strong criticism of universities. For governors and Congress, higher education competes for funding with healthcare, transportation, housing programs, support for people with disabilities, environmental projects, schools, and many other areas.

University presidents, of course, lobby governors, Congress, the federal administration. But they aren’t the only ones lobbying; everyone does. From inside the university it seems obvious to us that our funding, specifically, is critically important. From the outside, we are just one of many groups, each of which can present a convincing list of public needs.

Outside the big cities in America, transport and social infrastructure are very weak. Between small towns there may be almost no public transport: train service is infrequent, if it runs at all, the bus network is weak, and without a car it’s hard to reach even the nearest town. You come across poor towns with empty houses and a very limited set of jobs.

That’s exactly why a university there acts as an economic anchor. It brings in hundreds or thousands of students, hires faculty and staff, and around it develop rental housing, cafés, sports facilities, schools for employees’ children, medical services, and cultural events. Often it is the only place in the county where an educated middle class is consistently present. If such a university disappears, it can leave an economic desert behind.

So the question of closing a small public university is at the same time a question of regional policy, even if in university budgets it isn’t called that.

T-i: Then what can universities actually do themselves?

— Public universities retain a strong resource: they can provide high-quality education at a comparatively low price. There is demand for this, and there is a public payoff too. So public universities have a convincing return on investment, ROI: their graduates on average earn more in the labor market, while tuition there is far lower than at expensive private colleges. Our weak point is that we are often bad at telling families and high-school students about this.

We will have to take the demand for career readiness more seriously, work more actively with local communities and schools, and explain better what a university does. Popularizing research is also becoming part of the mission: historians, philosophers, political scientists, and physicists go on YouTube and make short videos explaining their research to a broad audience. Academia long considered such work secondary; now it is becoming a matter of survival.

I don’t really believe that the main survival strategy will emerge from a nationwide or transnational coalition of universities. American institutions are too different: public ones are funded by the states, private ones compete for students, grants, and donors, and there are also religious universities and military academies. It’s useful to meet and talk, but real solutions are usually region-specific.

T-i: Have political conflicts between faculty become sharper in recent years?

— Political differences have always existed and often ran along disciplinary lines: roughly speaking, a finance department might be more Republican, while a sociology department might be very liberal. But in recent years I really have seen extremely sharp conflicts around Israel and Palestine. Sometimes at chairs’ meetings I genuinely feared the argument would come to blows.

As a dean I tried not to show my own political views. So for a while both pro-Israeli and anti-Israeli colleagues were convinced I was on their side, and they took turns coming to my office to complain about one another. In the humanities and social sciences it’s hard to separate a personal position entirely from teaching; it shows in what a person says in class and what they support publicly.

What amazes me most is something else: faculty can mobilize emotionally far more around Middle Eastern politics, which the university can barely influence, than around their own budget and the future of their institution. They merely complain about the lack of funding, but when they discuss the conflict over Israel they’re ready to shout at each other for hours.

T-i: And don’t unions and collective protests give faculty a channel of influence?

— Unions can indeed be active in the fight for funding and contracts, but the protests themselves are often surprisingly small. I went to major rallies in defense of funding for the natural sciences, and each time I was struck by how much smaller the turnout was than I had expected.

There are many reasons for this. A tenured professor has a protected contract, good insurance, a relatively decent salary; the budget crisis isn’t always felt as a matter of life and death. Besides, the bloated bureaucracy keeps people constantly busy with small tasks. On a day off, a person chooses between a rally that probably won’t change anything and their family.

Younger faculty, in my observation, are not necessarily more active than their elders either. Sometimes they are in a much more vulnerable position and are afraid to take risks; sometimes they are simply overloaded. To really understand this, you’d need a separate, sociologically grounded conversation with people about why, on a given day off, they do or don’t go to a protest.

There are internal conflicts too. The same union can represent both full-time and adjunct faculty, whose interests don’t always coincide. Some unions took very hard positions on Israel, which made some Jewish faculty drift away from them. When yet another political agenda is added to a rally in defense of science, you inevitably push away some of the potential participants.

T-i: Do the political divisions among students look the same?

— In the big cities of the United States, the student body is global. The conflict over Israel and Palestine made student politics very visible for the first time in a long while. The division was palpable and did not disappear in a single academic year.

The reaction to immigration policy, meanwhile, looks different. Vulnerable students are often simply afraid, while part of the local student body can be fairly conservative on immigration. At first glance it’s strange that there is intense campus activism around an international conflict and much less around domestic immigration policy, but these issues probably affect different groups of students.

University leadership in recent years, in my experience, tries to take as neutral a position as possible: not to issue loud political statements, not to invite deliberately provocative speakers, to emphasize academic work. The logic is roughly this: don’t draw unnecessary political attention to the university.

T-i: Did the conflict over Israel and Palestine change the composition of the student body itself?

— In some large urban universities, my impression is that after the sharpest campus conflicts the number of Jewish students declined. Some families preferred quieter private institutions, perceived as more openly pro-Israeli or simply more controlled. I can’t turn my own observations into nationwide statistics, but locally the change was noticeable.

[[socialnetworks]]

T-i: We’ve barely talked about international students. What has changed here?

— In the late 1990s, international students were more often described in the terminology of “attracting talent”: the university brings in strong people from all over the world. Later, for many institutions, this also turned into a business model. International students pay higher tuition, so universities began actively recruiting them and building special support systems.

Now visa restrictions are sharply reducing this flow. For some universities this is both a loss of the international environment and a direct blow to the budget. It’s especially noticeable when a large share of international students historically came from one or two countries, and now, in those countries, visas have suddenly become significantly harder to get.

T-i: Do you think that, with all these constraints and difficulties, the American university is able to preserve the quality of its education and research?

— The future is hard to predict, but I believe in the resilience of the model of affordable, quality public education. Enough people still need it, and the mission of social mobility hasn’t gone anywhere.

About research I’m more anxious. The slowdown didn’t begin yesterday: since the early 2000s, individual research institutes have been closing or being absorbed, and federal funding has been shrinking. It seems to me that the United States is gradually losing part of its technological advantage, including in biology and biomedicine, and increasingly importing technologies and ideas from East Asia and Europe. This is a long trajectory, not a consequence of the policies of this presidential term alone.

In education the consequences are less clear-cut. Professors like to say that students “aren’t what they used to be,” but I’ve had very strong groups even in recent years. They just need to be taught a little differently. If you adapt teaching methods to how they take in information today and interact with each other and with us, you can get good results.

T-i: So it turns out that the principles of tenure and shared governance both protect the university and prevent it from restructuring quickly?

— Yes, there is a constant tension here, but it is built into the system itself. Faculty can unite, object, slow things down, or change decisions. Sometimes they defend what seems to me outdated; sometimes it is precisely they who keep the administration from making a catastrophic decision.

Over my years in university administration, relations between faculty and administration moved in waves between conflict and cooperation. It depends on the financial situation, on personalities, and on the specific issue. I don’t consider the tension itself a defect. A university is built around tensions among competing interests: financial sustainability, academic autonomy, and concern for students’ interests. What matters is that all these opposing interests and views actually help us move forward rather than stand still.

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The post “None of the political parties makes higher education a priority on its agenda”: American higher education through the eyes of a university administrator appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Abelardo de la Espriella has now been in office for one month. The far-right president won the election by a narrow margin over leftist Iván Cepeda (less than 1% of valid votes), despite allegations of irregularities made by then-President Gustavo Petro.

However, De la Espriella dismissed the allegations of irregularities and began his administration by attempting to demonstrate military strength, an overt religious faith (for which he had to issue a public apology), and a clear alignment with Washington’s political doctrine.

The earthquake and the return to a state policy of war

However, just three days after he took office, a powerful earthquake struck the western part of the country, leaving more than 300 dead and nearly 5,000 injured. The government’s actions drew controversy. His supporters applauded the government’s response, while critics accused the administration of exploiting the tragedy to boost his public image and giving certain countries – such as Israel – priority in search-and-rescue efforts, while denying entry to rescue teams from other countries.

Added to this is the rhetoric of a return to all-out war against subversive armed groups and criminal organizations that De la Espriella already put forward during his election campaign. But this has not been merely a matter of rhetoric. Since taking office, the executive branch has ordered a series of attacks against positions held by these groups, some of which were engaged in peace talks aimed at their demobilization.

In fact, De la Espriella canceled the peace negotiations, which had been resumed by the Petro administration as part of his “total peace” policy.

Read more: President De la Espriella cancels peace talks in Colombia

In addition, the government’s death-defying political communication strategy has caused quite a stir. In some videos, the president can be seen walking among the bodies of alleged “bandits and terrorists” (as the government calls them), which, according to the Executive Branch, number 40, in addition to the capture of nine people allegedly linked to illegal organizations.

But the bombings have also drawn significant domestic criticism. In the Guaviare Department, three minors were reported killed following the bombings ordered by the president, which were part of a series of attacks that left a total of about ten people dead. And while De la Espriella said that armed groups are responsible for the deaths of the minors, he has not been able to escape criticism from human rights organizations that view indiscriminate bombing as a dangerous threat to innocent people and the civilian population.

A return to neoliberalism

Ultimately, the contrast between Petro’s and De la Espriella’s administrations seems so evident that many wonder whether it is precisely this political distancing that serves as the compass guiding the new government – or whether Colombia is, in fact, attempting to establish a new form of state.

To understand this transformation, BreakThrough News spoke with Danilo Urrea, philosopher at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, who sees in this first month a clear shift toward a return to a state policy of war – one that had previously been implemented with negative results: “In Colombia, this was historically known as the era called ‘La Violencia,’ which was one of the worst periods the country has ever experienced in terms of the barbarity it generated.”

“The president presents the killing of people to the country as a success,” he added. “But he also does so with an aesthetic and a semiotics that portray death, murder, and the like as a possibility for the country. And in a context like Colombia’s – where we have the highest death toll on the entire continent, surpassing even the combined death tolls of all the region’s dictatorships – this shows us that it is a step backward in terms of the possibility of building a country based on dialogue and reconciliation.”

Urrea also says the current government is trying to push the idea that the country it has inherited is in a disastrous financial situation, which is why it must promote a radical neoliberal policy: “We’ve identified efforts to promote a supposed economic turnaround for the country through old formulas that have already been tried and proved disastrous for social cohesion, for the territories, and for the relationship between humans and nature – with negative impacts on the communities living in the very places where this return to an extractive economy is once again being proposed.”

Furthermore, he warns that in the short time De la Espriella has been in office, there has been a setback in environmental and labor matters: “He has also come under attack during this first month, as he has begun to dismantle the gains made in terms of wages, recovery, overtime pay, and certain labor protections … which had been restored under President Petro’s administration through reforms and which this administration is now once again rapidly undoing with the stroke of a pen, supposedly to improve economic conditions. That, in very general terms, is what we’re seeing and what’s projected: the deregulation of all social benefits, of all the hard-won gains; the complete dismantling of all reforms; and the surrender of the country – in the areas of health, education, food, and all fundamental rights – to privatization processes primarily for the profit of transnational corporations.”

A new (old) geopolitical doctrine

Following the Petro administration’s attempts to defend the Palestinian people against Israel’s onslaught, as well as its various clashes with Washington’s hemispheric geopolitical agenda, Urrea asserts that Colombia has joined a regional strategy of control orchestrated by Washington: “The rise of the far right, which is well known … Through this administration, Colombia has become yet another outpost of U.S. imperialism’s advance across the region. And obviously, this has far-reaching consequences for the geopolitics of Latin America and the Caribbean in particular.”

WATCH: Colombia’s new president declares ‘colonial allegiance’ to US & Israel

Furthermore, Urrea highlights the historical importance Colombia – a country with access to both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea – has held in the United States’ geopolitical strategy to control natural resources: “From a geopolitical standpoint, conditions are being created for Colombia to once again become one of the countries that facilitates U.S. military control – but above all, control over the natural resources and assets that are so coveted in this era of challenges for the United States in terms of its economic capacity, its dispute with China, and everything related to critical minerals.”

What is the opposition doing?

Urrea notes that, for now, the opposition parties have not managed to formulate a clear response to De la Espriella’s project. First, he points to a certain caution regarding a state policy that promotes violence and war: “There is obviously a great deal of fear regarding the actions I mentioned earlier – this language of violence, death, and murder. And obviously, in a country like Colombia, this has repercussions for the ability of those opposed to the current regime to act. Furthermore, because there has been an increase in the targeted killings of social leaders in various parts of the country, especially in areas most affected by geopolitical disputes as well as conflicts over economic and commercial control, illegal economies, and so on.”

However, Urrea notes that a coordinated opposition to the popular sectors could emerge, and the people might offer a peaceful and better-coordinated response: “We should consider an opposition that stems more from the popular sector, and there, I believe, there is also fear about how to react in the face of a violent scenario, a dangerous scenario, and manipulation. But I believe that organizations are now focusing on analyzing what the main peaceful and strategic causes might be to address the current situation. It seems to me that one of these fundamental aspects will undoubtedly be, and is already taking shape in the country through popular organization and mobilization, the defense of the environment, the defense of territories that are already being targeted for the control and exploitation of natural resources by transnational corporations, and the issue of fracking.”

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While Slovak politicians calmly keep their academic degrees for copied theses thanks to convenient loopholes in the law, far less visible violations are taking place inside the universities themselves. Dozens of scholars appear to be linked to purchased authorship, data manipulation, and publications in predatory journals. The Plagiat-Navigator project tried to determine how deeply academic fraud has penetrated Slovak science.

In recent years, Slovakia has faced a series of high-profile academic scandals, mostly connected with plagiarism in the dissertations of senior politicians and officials. In September 2025, a scandal broke out around Pavol Gaspar, director of the Slovak Information Service, the country’s main intelligence and counterintelligence agency. His master’s thesis on corruption, defended in 2011, turned out to have been copied by roughly two thirds from uncited sources. In response to the plagiarism allegations, Gaspar said that his work had passed all the required formal checks as part of the defense procedure, after which he was awarded a master’s degree. That same year, member of parliament Marian Kery, who had previously publicly accused other politicians of plagiarism, was himself caught in a similar violation. His 2004 master’s thesis, “The Image of Man in Pushkin’s Belkin Tales,” copies almost verbatim a thesis defended four years earlier by student Martina Brodnanova.

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In 2020, leading journalists from the newspaper Dennik N carried out a broad review of the theses of the country’s top officials. It turned out that plagiarism had been found in the works of several representatives of the ruling coalition’s upper ranks, including the education minister, the speaker of parliament, and the prime minister. The scandal led the Slovak parliament, at the end of 2020, to pass a law allowing academic degrees to be officially revoked for plagiarism. But a significant loophole remained in the law: it is not retroactive and applies only to works defended after 2020. As a result, all the senior officials whose work was found to contain plagiarism, including the intelligence chief Gaspar and MP Kery mentioned above, kept both their degrees and their positions.

Dissertation scandals involving the country’s first-tier officials and other senior figures are only the visible part of a much larger problem. These high-profile cases received broad public attention thanks to targeted journalistic investigations, but in their shadow remains a significant layer of violations of academic integrity among Slovak scholars, professors, and university lecturers.

Here one should mention Petr Jakubek, a Doctor of Sciences in economics and a member of the governing board of DTI University (Dubnicky technologicky institut). In 2019, he received a Doctor of Sciences diploma after defending a dissertation at Chernihiv Technological University in Ukraine. As later became clear, a substantial part of Jakubek’s dissertation text coincides verbatim with the text of the dissertation of his opponent, Svetlana Natroshvili, defended in Kyiv in 2016. Below is an example of improper borrowing on one page of Jakubek’s dissertation.

But the problem is not only the absence of citations: even if they had been present, they would not have resolved the issue. In the text, Jakubek mechanically replaced the National University of Physical Education and Sport of Ukraine, which appeared in Natroshvili’s work, with Chernihiv Technological University, while leaving all quantitative indicators unchanged.

The practice of defending a dissertation in another country and then having the diploma nostrified at home is widespread in Eastern Europe and across the post-Soviet space.

If dissertation plagiarism in Slovakia is at least partly documented and discussed by journalists, a much larger problem is developing outside public view. It is a system in which a scientific career can be built not on genuine research, but on purchased articles, fabricated data, and artificially inflated indicators.

In May 2026, the major academic online platform Research.com published lists of top researchers based on h-index and citation metrics. In the field of plant science and agronomy, Professor Marian Brestic, one of the highest-ranked Slovak researchers at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, placed 213th in the world. His colleague, Associate Professor Marek Zivcak, placed 1,511th globally, becoming Slovakia’s second-highest-ranked scientist in the field. As a result, the university took 253rd place worldwide in this scientific area and second place among the seven Slovak universities included in the ranking, losing the top national spot only to Comenius University in Bratislava.

Yet back in 2022, Leonid Schneider, an independent science journalist known for his high-profile investigations into academic ethics, devoted an entire section of his For Better Science issue to Brestic and Zivcak. By that time, these Slovak authors, together with colleagues from Middle Eastern countries, had accumulated nine papers with negative reviews on the post-publication peer review platform PubPeer, some of which had already been retracted. Schneider links this to the purchase of co-authorship on the Asian market — a shadow industry where authorship is sold as a commodity. In some of these publications, experts found distorted phrases and terms, or “tortured phrases”: a characteristic trace of machine paraphrasing used to conceal plagiarism. The image below shows one such example in the journal Microorganisms, on the left, alongside an earlier source text by other authors, on the right, from which the “paraphrase” was made.

Since then, the number of problematic publications has grown. Today, PubPeer lists 34 publications by Professor Brestic with critical comments, some of them co-authored with Associate Professor Zivcak. The reasons for criticism, and in some cases for later retraction, included not only plagiarism or conflicts of interest, but also the substitution of authors at the final stage of publication, after all the reviewers’ questions had already been settled. Such substitutions are considered one of the characteristic signs of papers circulating on the purchased-authorship market.

These scandals, retractions, and exposés, however, have almost no effect on rankings. Even if all the disputed papers by Brestic and Zivcak are officially retracted, their citation counts and h-indexes will remain in the databases. These data are not recalculated retroactively after retractions. Formally, the scholars have already taken their places in the global tables, and no later revelations can dislodge them. A victory in the rankings obtained through paper mills and purchased citations formally remains a victory.

The mechanism of these rankings has a direct financial expression. Under the methodology of Slovakia’s Ministry of Education, every publication that falls within the top 1 percent of the world’s most cited papers automatically brings its author 3,000 euros from the state budget, and the same amount to the university. Thus, an artificially inflated citation index means not only a place in a prestigious ranking, but real money. In such a system, artificial citation inflation acquires a direct financial value: high bibliometric indicators affect not only academic status, but also the distribution of public funds. It is worth noting that Slovakia is not alone here: a similar system of monetary rewards for publications in high-ranking journals has long existed in Russia.

An equally telling case of image manipulation was documented in the work of an associate professor at Comenius University. In a joint 2024 publication in the journal Nano-Micro Letters, Dmitry Medvedev, a professor at Ural Federal University and Doctor of Chemical Sciences, and Martin Motola, an associate professor at Comenius University in Bratislava, together with co-authors from China, manually redrew the scale bar on images of nanoparticles obtained using a scanning electron microscope. The article claimed that the particles under study measured tens of nanometers. The microscope’s technical specifications, however, indicate that the real particle sizes were many times larger (see the image below).

In other words, the scale in the images was simply adjusted to fit the desired result. But that was not the end of the matter. In the same article, experts on PubPeer raised well-founded concerns about other data as well, including graphs. This was not an isolated case: in recent years, experts have identified a whole series of Motola’s papers with problems in the data and in their graphical presentation. The regular appearance of such problems in Motola’s articles can hardly be attributed to simple inattention on the part of the authors.

Publications by scholars from Comenius University also contain direct borrowing of visual materials without references to the original source. A telling example is an article by Professor Peter Mikus and Veronika Mikusova on chitosan nanoparticles, in which some illustrations were copied from an earlier publication by Iranian authors.

In papers where experts identify gross violations of publication ethics, links to Asian paper mills can often be traced. These mills specialize in producing ready-made publications and then distributing them through online platforms.

On the shadow market of paper mills, authorship is not the only thing for sale. Another sought-after commodity is citations. References to one’s own work, like references to the work of others, have long since become a valuable asset. In June 2025, the editor of Chemical Engineering Journal retracted a publication by the aforementioned Associate Professor Motola and his university colleague Muhammad Hanif for artificial citation inflation. Between the original publication and the final version of the article, the number of references to Hanif’s work rose from 2 to 19, and references to Motola’s work from 2 to 10.

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Particular concern is raised by the rapidly spreading practice of publishing review articles under the names of fictitious scholars. The purpose of such works is to introduce numerous citations of articles by people who paid intermediaries on the shadow market for this service into the legitimate scientific record. Thus, the publication portfolio of Beata Gavurova, a professor at the Technical University of Kosice, has raised serious questions among the expert community. “More than 40 scientific articles a year — one every nine days — is a pace that defies rational explanation,” Leonid Schneider notes, following a journalistic investigation published by the Slovak online outlet Dennik N. According to him, dozens of Gavurova’s publications appeared in outlets deemed unreliable or predatory, and some of the journals in which she published have already been removed from scientific databases. At the same time, the researcher’s numerous co-authors represent various Asian countries, which, in the experts’ view, points to the purchase of authorship through networked paper mills.

According to Dennik N, up to one third of papers by Slovak scholars are published in dubious predatory journals.

Yet the external signs of questionable publication behavior are only part of the problem. Gavurova’s own papers contain inconsistencies between the text and graphical data, problems with chemical formulas, and dubious spectra with signals of unnatural shape. Some of these articles have received retracted status.

The next case provides direct evidence of purchased authorship in publications distributed by paper mills. Earlier, the Dissernet community drew attention to the interaction of Slovak researchers with a Moscow company that provided article placement services. A telling example is the case of Boris Sturc, an associate professor at the University of Economics and Business: a preliminary offer posted by this exchange was first documented (see the image below), and later a paper with the title listed in the offer appeared in the International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, with Sturc as first co-author. Analysis shows that this was not a one-off: Sturc’s publication list includes other commercially acquired works as well.

Over time, the shadow academic industry is transforming: centralized exchanges selling papers appear to be losing influence. Their place is being taken by decentralized private intermediaries — individual entrepreneurs, or “paper millers.” Technological progress is helping this shift along: modern AI tools make it possible to fabricate scientific texts in the shortest possible time, without involving large teams of specialists from different fields of science. Offers from “paper millers” are easy to find in open internet channels. Traces of this market can also be found in the publications of Slovak researchers. Below are specific episodes involving Slovak scholars in joint publications offered by “paper millers” from Germany, Ukraine, Montenegro, and Middle Eastern countries.

“Olga Golubnitschaja is the editor-in-chief of EPMA, the European Journal of Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine, and at the same time a co-author of many articles in that journal, which is normal. What is surprising, however, is that for many articles in which she is a co-author, very little time passes between submission and acceptance. In some cases it is only a matter of three to five days. Below are several examples from the past year,” says a review of one article involving her. Such short timelines raise the question of whether full scientific peer review was possible — a process that usually includes selecting independent experts, preparing comments, revising the manuscript by the authors, and reassessing the changes made. Olga Golubnitschaja, a professor at the University of Bonn, often appears as a co-author of problematic papers by Russian and Slovak scholars; some of these works later became the subject of criticism for violations of publication norms.

An expert review of a joint article by authors from Slovakia and Ukraine revealed repeated sections in experimental spectra. Among the co-authors of the article, one figure stands out: Taras Kavetsky, an associate professor at Drohobych Pedagogical University in Ukraine, who was found to have used identical schemes of spectral-data fabrication in other scientific works as well.

[[socialnetworks]]

Stanislav Dudic, a Doctor of Sciences at Comenius University and a specialist in international economics, industrial engineering, trade, and investment, appeared as a co-author of a publication that raised serious questions. The paper, written together with the Montenegrin co-author Velibor Spalevic, concerned a modified copper-containing metal-organic framework, and experts detected signs of artificial modification of experimental data. It is worth noting that a number of works by Spalevic himself, a professor at the University of Montenegro, have also been criticized on the PubPeer forum.

Professor Natalia Krivinska, head of the Department of Information Systems at the Faculty of Management of Comenius University, is a vivid example of how formal co-authorship with dubious partners can undermine trust in a scholar. Her article on combating DDoS attacks, prepared in co-authorship with Saudi colleagues through machine paraphrasing, was retracted. But Professor Krivinska’s problems are not limited to a single publication: in her works, experts have found a whole bouquet of tortured phrases, bibliographies unrelated to the subject of the paper, and even direct borrowing of illustrations, all of which calls into question the quality of her entire academic record.

Another case of questionable scientific practice involves the Institute of Construction and Architecture of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Its employees, Professor Martin T. Palou and Associate Professor Taher Tawfik, were listed among the co-authors of an international paper with Egyptian and Iraqi colleagues, but a review showed that the images presented in the article had undergone impermissible processing, casting doubt on the reliability of the entire work.

The overwhelming majority of the episodes listed above led to no sanctions against the authors. Journalistic investigations and the volunteer work of experts on PubPeer help reveal problem after problem, but real institutional consequences in Slovakia’s academic sphere are barely visible. Retractions do not affect citation indices, and the law allowing academic degrees to be revoked for plagiarism does not apply to works defended before it came into force. As a result, buyers of authorship keep their positions in rankings and universities.

This is the central paradox. Under the Ministry of Education’s methodology, universities receive 50 percent of the state bonus for each highly ranked publication. This means that, in the race for rankings, the universities themselves become interested parties: the more “outstanding” publications their employees have — even if they were bought on the shadow market — the more public funding the university receives.

At the same time, Slovakia’s system of state funding for science, which generously rewards publications in top-percentile journals, effectively creates a “green corridor” for the shadow market. Cash payments to an author for an article they purchased on the shadow market are resources stolen from science. Public funds intended to develop research instead flow into the pockets of shadow intermediaries.

As long as the academic system continues to measure the quality of science primarily by the number of publications and citations, paper mills will be able to turn manipulation of these indicators into academic status and real money. In the age of AI, when producing texts that look scientific is becoming ever cheaper, the problem of how to evaluate scientific work is only becoming more acute.

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Estonia spent years building a reputation as being at the forefront of science, but scandals involving violations of research ethics are becoming increasingly common. Professors sharing authorship with falsifiers; associate professors hiding data behind a “confidential” label; mathematicians publishing “math salad” — all of this reflects today’s challenges: the spread of paper mills and the uncontrolled adoption of AI. Sociologists found that more than 40 percent of Estonian researchers had used “gift” authorship. More in the latest installment of the Plagiat-Navigator project.

In February 2024, the prestigious scientific journal Nature published the article WNT signalling control by KDM5C during development affects cognition. The researchers were trying to understand why mutations in the KDM5C gene cause intellectual disability. The author team brought together researchers from Boston, Oxford, and universities in Australia and China, along with a single Estonian representative from the University of Tartu — Professor Katrin Ounap, a specialist in medical genetics. A year after publication, experts found multiple deliberate manipulations of illustrations in the paper. The figure below shows the same fragments of nerve-cell processes, or dendrites, reused after mirror reflection, 180-degree rotation, and partial retouching. “Such different transformations of individual image fragments are difficult to explain as a simple mistake,” one expert commented. Some images in the paper also bear a striking resemblance to images from earlier publications by other authors.

It turned out that a group of co-authors from Harvard Medical School in Boston, led by Professor Yang Shi, had been using similar methods for at least a decade. In a paper published in early 2016, fragments of dendrite images were likewise copied from another publication and modified through mirroring and scaling.

Professor Ounap’s contribution to the Nature paper was clinical: she provided fibroblast samples from patients. Her co-authorship with the Boston group, however, dates back to 2015. This does not prove that she knew about the falsifications, but in academia co-authorship entails responsibility for the entire content of a paper. The argument that the professor merely supplied biological material does not absolve her of responsibility for the final result fabricated by her colleagues.

While investigations into international publications can drag on for years, within Estonia’s national system universities sometimes demonstrate an ability to act quickly and decisively. The following case is a telling example. In 2013, Andres Menind, an associate professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, defended a dissertation on biotechnology for energy production. Soon after the defense, it emerged that the work contained at least three lengthy plagiarized passages, in both the theoretical and research sections. A procedure to revoke his academic degree followed. It was the first case of its kind in the university’s history. The university leadership acted promptly, without delays or bureaucratic evasions. The university did not publish a percentage of textual overlap, stressing that the decision was based on expert assessment of the nature and significance of the borrowings rather than on a formal similarity score exceeding some arbitrary threshold.

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But Estonia’s academic immune system does not always work. In 2002, Valery Korb defended a doctoral dissertation in St. Petersburg that had been copied in its entirety from an earlier work by someone else. Today, the Estonian politician Valery Korb is a member of the supervisory board of Ida-Viru Central Hospital in Kohtla-Jarve. All attempts to strip him of his academic degree have come to nothing.

Manipulation of images in scientific publications often ends in retraction — the formal withdrawal of a paper by a journal. The process is usually slow and can take years. The Nature paper remains under question, but a 2022 publication in Adsorption Science & Technology has already been officially retracted. Its authors included researchers from Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as an Estonian representative, the young University of Tartu scientist Ivar Zekker. The illustration below shows how the same image was used repeatedly, with only its scale, color, and placement changed.

That paper was retracted, as was another publication by Zekker, for serious violations of publication ethics, including nonexistent bibliographic references, unattributed borrowing, and the use of artificial-intelligence tools in preparing the article without disclosing that use, in violation of the journal’s editorial policy. These are not isolated episodes: experts have accumulated concerns about a whole series of Zekker’s papers. In 2021, his publication output increased by dozens of times, while researchers from Middle Eastern countries began appearing among his co-authors with increasing frequency. This pattern often points to the use of paper mills — shadow Asian markets where ready-made papers and fictitious co-authorship are sold.

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In 2023, the University of Tartu conducted and later published an anonymous survey of 354 Estonian researchers. Among other things, they were asked whether they had observed signs of research misconduct in the actions of colleagues. More than 40 percent of respondents said that colleagues had accepted “gift” authorship, while more than 10 percent had witnessed colleagues falsifying data in scientific work. These figures reflect not so much precise statistics as the troubling environment in which Estonian researchers work today.

The University of Tartu is far from the only Estonian research institution where questions have arisen about the reliability of published images. One of the most prominent figures in such cases is Sabarathinam Shanmugam, an associate professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. According to the post-publication peer review platform PubPeer, roughly one in five papers involving him has become the subject of critical discussion.

One publication by Shanmugam is especially revealing. Experts found manipulation of figures in the paper. After concerns were raised, the authors replaced the illustrations several times, each time apologizing and attributing what had happened to an “unfortunate mistake.” Yet every new version again contained signs of manipulation. Eventually the exchange reached a dead end: the authors never provided convincing explanations, and discussion of the apparent fakes simply faded away. In a later paper, Shanmugam and his co-authors chose a different defense strategy, stating: The data that has been used are confidential. That position effectively deprived independent researchers of any opportunity to verify the reported results.

The story does not end there. A number of Shanmugam’s publications were later retracted after journal editors discovered that the author list had been replaced at the final stage of preparing the papers for publication. Such author substitution is considered one of the characteristic signs of papers circulating on the purchased-authorship market. While one set of “dealers” pushes a manuscript through the journal with a credible author list, another takes orders from people wishing to buy co-authorship in the almost-published paper. At the final stage, once all reviewers’ questions have been resolved, comes the climax: in the last version of the manuscript, the names of the original authors are quietly replaced, without the editors’ approval, by those who responded to the offer in time and paid. The editor, unaware of the switch, publishes the paper. The newly minted co-authors receive a publication to which they did not contribute a single line and which they most likely never even read.

Finally, Tallinn University and one of its employees, mathematics professor Jorge Eduardo Macias-Diaz, also deserve attention. In recent years, specialists have increasingly encountered papers prepared with generative artificial intelligence. In mathematics, such publications are often betrayed less by stylistic roughness than by gross errors in formulas and proofs. To a non-specialist, the text may look entirely convincing, yet mistakes already appear in the first stages of the calculations, rendering everything that follows meaningless.

Mathematics is an exact science. If the third line of a calculation contains the wrong sign, the final ten pages lose all meaning, no matter how many formulas they contain. The image below shows examples from four relatively recent papers by Macias-Diaz in which such errors appear literally in the opening lines of calculations or theorem proofs.

“Math salad” is the term specialists use for texts that look scientific on the surface because they contain an abundance of formulas and technical terminology, but on closer inspection turn out to be internally contradictory or contain errors that make their conclusions unreliable. Naturally, artificial intelligence is “to blame” for everything: the author simply gave the neural network a task and then copied the result into the paper without even checking it.

A curious manifestation of this practice emerged in a case that went far beyond university offices. Tallinn Administrative Court fined a group of plaintiffs who had cited “authoritative scientific studies” on the harms of clear-cutting in their filings. There was only one problem: both the studies and their authors had been entirely generated by a neural network. The court treated this as fabrication of evidence and fined the plaintiffs.

To conclude, here is a curious case in which nonexistent Estonian researchers appeared not only in materials before a Tallinn court, but also on the pages of scientific journals. In a paper by Chinese authors on estimating fuel-cell parameters using the metaphor-based “Grey Wolf” optimization algorithm, a co-author from Tallinn University of Technology suddenly appeared: Tekle Demsas. Apparently, adding a mysterious Estonian scientist to the author list was meant to give the paper greater weight. The deception did not last long. After checking the author’s credentials, the editors established that no such researcher actually existed. The paper was then retracted.

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Estonia, which spent years building a reputation as being at the forefront of science, is now confronting the underside of the global crisis in academic ethics. The cases involving Ounap, Zekker, Shanmugam, and Macias-Diaz are not merely isolated scandals, but reflections of today’s challenges: the spread of paper mills, the ethics of co-authorship, and the uncontrolled adoption of AI. The results of the University of Tartu survey show that these problems are systemic.

The central problem for Estonian science is not that violations occur, but how institutions respond to them. Universities often prefer to look the other way, outsourcing the role of “academic police” to journal editors, courts, and volunteers on PubPeer. In the twenty-first century, a reputation as a scientific center can no longer be taken for granted. Maintaining zero tolerance for falsification requires daily work. And the sooner Estonian universities recognize that responsibility, the fewer reasons for sarcasm they will leave to those watching them.

The post Estonian Academic Solitaire: How AI and Paper Mills Are Undermining Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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Russian-American Science Association strongly condemns the decision of the Russian authorities to designate our colleague Tatiana Tatarinova, a distinguished bioinformatics scholar and professor at the University of La Verne, as a “foreign agent.”

Tatiana joins a growing number of Russian-speaking scholars and members of the RASA community who have been subjected to political persecution, intimidation, and restrictions on their academic and civic freedom. These measures have nothing to do with the quality of their scholarship or their professional activities. They are part of a broader campaign to silence independent voices and to suppress international academic ties.

We stand in solidarity with Tatiana and with all our colleagues who continue to face repression for exercising their fundamental rights to think, speak, conduct research, and communicate freely.

RASA will continue to defend academic freedom and to support scholars subjected to political persecution, wherever they are.

The post RASA Statement in Support of Professor Tatiana Tatarinova appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Depois de ter atacado sete Estados da região, será que Israel pensa agora em atacar o que foi, há muito, o seu principal aliado? Há vários meses que Telavive multiplica as ameaças contra Ancara, e o tema do «inimigo turco» faz parte dos eixos centrais da campanha eleitoral para as eleições legislativas de 27 de outubro próximo. Em 17 de fevereiro de 2026, o antigo primeiro-ministro Naftali Bennett resumia o estado de espírito de muitos dirigentes do seu país ao afirmar que «a Turquia é o (…)