For eight decades, the Israeli political and security establishment has operated on a premise so deeply embedded that it is rarely stated as a premise at all: that American support is not a policy but a condition of nature, as fixed as the Mediterranean coastline. Administrations would come and go, presidents would hector and cajole, […]
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Andrei Klepach — one of Russia’s leading economists and a high-ranking economic official of the Vladimir Putin era — has published several academic works over the past six years that are packed with cosmist imagery. His drift into “energy-information cosmism” went unnoticed until Klepach was fired as chief economist of the state corporation VEB.RF — after he publicly offered a bleak assessment of Russia’s ability to compete with the West and with Ukraine. T-invariant traced the economist’s academic evolution into a cosmist and looked into the background of his mentor on the road “toward a cosmoplanetary civilization.” It also turned out that, even after Klepach’s dismissal, VEB.RF has no shortage of people developing alternative “theories of everything”: the “wave hypothesis of life,” the idea of a “Fifth Russia,” and a “noosphere economy.”
On the Way to Space-Planetary Civilization is the title [access to eLibrary requires free registration] of a monograph edited by Andrei Klepach and Vitaly Bushuev, who has been Klepach’s regular co-author for the past six years. Bushuev spent many years as a chief research fellow at the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences (JIHT RAS) and, in the 1990s, served as Russia’s deputy minister of energy.
Research into the path toward a cosmoplanetary civilization, carried out by a team of authors from the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise, leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, MGIMO University, and other respected academic institutions, may now be cut short: in August 2026, Andrei Klepach was fired from VEB.RF. According to media reports, Klepach was dismissed after a phone call from the Kremlin, following the uproar over a speech in which he described Russia as falling behind across the board. His words that spread most widely were:
We’re losing both the technological and the economic competition globally. And we’re losing it not just to China and the US — in some respects, we’re losing it to Ukraine, however unpleasant that is, even for me… In this war of attrition, we won’t win the competition…
After Klepach’s high-profile dismissal, many economists and business journalists recalled his professional expertise and his constant willingness to comment for the media. Soon, the outlet Sota pointed out that the economist and official, who from 2004 to 2014 served at the Ministry of Economic Development as a department director and then deputy minister, had put out publications speculating that life on Earth was brought by aliens.
After carefully studying Andrei Klepach’s publications, T-invariant concluded that once the COVID pandemic began, the economist — in parallel with his analysis of the structural and monetary factors of Russia’s economic growth, the sovereign economy, and macroeconomics — moved on to a broader level of generalization: together with a new circle of co-authors, he set out “to discern, beyond the current pandemic and military-political apocalypse, the future of our common cosmoplanetary civilization.”
The scale of the project becomes clear from the abstract of the 688-page monograph, published in 2023 by Energiya Publishing House — a now-defunct publisher co-owned by Bushuev, among others. Klepach himself wrote several chapters, the preface, and the conclusion. Two other employees of the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise are also listed among the monograph’s 12 authors. Here is the abstract in full.
The collective monograph of the authors – representatives of various organizations, specialists in various fields of knowledge (economists and energy specialists, information scientists and sociologists) united a common desire to show that the general hype around global warming, the Covid-19 virological pandemic, and the world military – the political crisis in Ukraine, threatening to turn into the 3rd world war of the early 20s of the 21st century, is not an accidental phenomenon, not a “black swan”, but a natural transition from the former material dominant and the dominant of the unipolar world of social development to a new ideological models of eco-socio-humanitarian civilization. At the same time, the transition is considered as a certain regularity of the turbulent (wave) development of history. This periodicity connects cosmic phenomena, known in the ancient Vedic understanding of the world, with the cyclical nature of solar activity and its reflection in the socio-natural and political processes of human society. It is shown that the current reality also corresponds to the next 35th SA [solar activity] cycle, which, by analogy with the previous history, can be called the beginning of the formation of a “new thinking” and a new policy in the field of domestic and international problems of civilizational development. This new discourse is of particular importance for the formation of the pre-election programs of the leading world powers (USA, China and Russia) in the light of the expected renewal of their leadership.
The preface to the monograph was written by Andrei Klepach himself, as indicated in the “Authors” section. We quote it at length, with some cuts. It is the text of the preface that suggests Andrei Klepach at the very least shares all the core ideologemes of his new co-author, Vitaly Bushuev. These include not only Russian cosmism but also “ancient Aryan world-knowledge,” as well as the idea that life was brought to Earth by aliens from the constellation Ursa Major.
The authors, who include economists and energy experts, sociologists and political scientists, have attempted to solve (or at least to formulate in a well-grounded way) the foresight problem of a new post-COVID world of partnership and struggle between civilizations, using methods based on the turbulence of world history, the cyclicity of socio-natural processes and technological innovation, and the unity and commonality of the energy-information laws of the Earth and the Cosmos. The relationship between solar activity cycles and people’s social passionarity (activity) [a concept from Lev Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis — T-invariant] takes on special importance in our research… At the same time, we view Russia not as a crossroads between East and West, North and South of the earthly oikoumene, but as a bridge between the Earth and the Cosmos, from which we came and to which we are bound to return.
The structure of this collective monograph (and it is indeed a unified, coherent work rather than a collection of separate authors’ articles) encompasses both a statement of the global challenges facing humanity today on the eve of a new “apocalypse” and the grounding of a new metasystemic scientific and methodological approach to studying humanity’s natural habitat, as well as a figurative, goal-oriented vision of the new world that is being born before our eyes and will tomorrow become our common cosmoplanetary Home — Ecos (from the Greek oikos — house, dwelling place). Here we proceed from the premise that “Russian cosmism” is not our invention, nor even a philosophical term introduced by proponents of Eurasianism at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, but our ancient Aryan world-knowledge, which has come down to us from the depths of the ages. The myths of many peoples of the world (not only the Slavs and the Aryans) have preserved the legend that people descended to Earth from various constellations of the firmament and brought into our world the common cosmic laws of existence that governed and still govern humanity.
We believe that the cause of the current crisis of human civilization may lie not on Earth but in the Cosmos. For man himself is a product of cosmic evolution, not earthly evolution. It is precisely by looking at our existence from cosmic heights that we can understand the true goals and essence of humanity’s development.
Honored Power Engineer, Energologist, Energy Cosmist
T-invariant analyzed Klepach’s profile on eLibrary and found that a lot has changed in the economist’s academic trajectory since 2020: first, Klepach developed an interest in “cosmoplanetary civilization” and the “energy-information cosmism of Russia”; second, he acquired a regular co-author — the aforementioned Vitaly Bushuev.
Bushuev is 86. He has more than 60 years of serious work in science and the energy sector behind him. He spent almost 40 years at the Siberian Research Institute of Power Engineering (SibNIIE) of the USSR Ministry of Energy and Electrification, was a People’s Deputy of the USSR serving in the Supreme Soviet, and in the 1990s built a career at the Russian Ministry of Fuel and Energy. Later, together with his former boss at the ministry, Yuri Shafranik, he founded a private company called the Institute for Energy Strategy. In addition, Bushuev worked for more than 10 years as a chief research fellow at the Joint Institute for High Temperatures (JIHT RAS).
Along the way, Bushuev also found his calling as a poet and writer. Back in 1998, the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) published his book Energy Cosmism of Russia, which, in his words, “develops the finest traditions of the luminaries of Russian cosmism.” Over the nearly 30 years since, Bushuev came to the conclusion that his field of knowledge should be called “energology,” and he kept churning out texts on Russia’s energy cosmism, gradually shifting toward “cosmoplanetary development.”
In recent years, Bushuev has also taken up writing for children. His website, for example, features “WORLD-LORE (VEDAS FOR OLDER YOUTHS AND TEENAGERS),” later included in the short story collection The Olympiad of the All-Knowing. It was probably somewhere around this stage that the creative energies of Vitaly Bushuev and Andrei Klepach crossed paths. And Vedic themes, as it later turned out, surfaced in their joint works as well.
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2020. A New Noospheric World-System or a Break with Our Natural Cosmic Roots?
Klepach and Bushuev’s first joint paper was titled “Analysis and Forecast of the Cyclicity of Socio-Natural Phenomena in the First Half of the 21st Century.” According to the abstract, the authors, “drawing on statistics of anomalous socio-natural, political, and economic phenomena collected from various sources, treat all crisis events as manifestations of a certain cyclicity, largely driven by periodic processes of solar activity.” “In this article, the authors not only analyze the rhythm of these events in the past but also, using a specially developed neural model, forecast their cyclical manifestation for the coming period — up to 2030–2050,” the paper states.
The co-authors were Bushuev’s then-colleagues at JIHT RAS: Dmitry Solovyev and Vadim Sokotushchenko. The first pandemic year offered plenty of reasons to worry about the future, but the team of three power engineers turned “energologists” and one economist turned “energologist” also found grounds for optimism. Using cross-wavelet analysis and neural-network modeling (JIHT RAS has a supercomputer called Fisher for such tasks), the authors arrived at the following forecast: “The results of the comparative forecast of solar activity, temperature anomalies, and the US and Russian economies suggest that from 2020 to 2050 a calmer situation is expected both in economic dynamics and in the dynamics of climate change.”
The “Conclusions” section reveals that, at the time of writing, the planet was “at the end of the stagnant 24th cycle, which in 2020 is giving way to the new 25th solar activity cycle, with an expected predominance of a new political cycle in the development of world civilization.” And while the authors generally stuck to the scientific terminology customary for analyzing correlations between numerical series and for mathematical modeling, cosmological imagery creeps into the conclusions:
New global challenges are associated not only with the growth of the Earth’s natural energy activity, geopolitical confrontation, the “bubbles” of the virtual economy, and the transformation of the structure of global energy, but also with the growth of the Earth’s natural energy activity [sic], as well as the influence of the Cosmos, for which the Earth is a sentient grain of sand on the waves of the cosmic ocean. The overlapping and intensification of all these factors point to an impending change in the World-System in the medium term. To what extent is the human mind, embodied in machines, social ties, books, and now digital information systems, capable of adapting to these natural and cosmic changes? Will we create a new, renewed noospheric and cosmic World-System, or will modern civilization follow the path of a widening break with its natural cosmic roots? Finding the answers to these questions is the most important task facing humanity today and the key to its future.
2022. How the Star Ancestors of Russian Hyperborea “Fertilized” the Earth’s Film
The year 2022 disproved the forecast Klepach and his team had made in their 2020 paper about a relatively calm global situation in the new phase of solar activity. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the confrontation between Russia and Europe, and the coalition of Western countries escalated, and new wars and conflicts broke out in various parts of the world.
In May 2022, Bushuev and Klepach released a text titled “Energy-Information Cosmism of Russia.” Russian civilization, the authors wrote, “occupies not only a special place in the history of Eurasia and the whole world, but also bears clearly pronounced features of a cosmoplanetary world. The hypothesis of the Aryan origin of many peoples of the northern continent (for all the debatable and controversial nature of various racial theories) confirms our special relationship with the cosmos as the ‘ancestral home’ of all russkie (by language) and all rossiyane (by spirit)” [ethnic Russians and citizens of Russia, respectively — T-invariant]. Bushuev and Klepach go on to quote Alexander Tulupov’s book The Clan of the North: Russian Hyperboreans, written in the genre of “Russian fantasy”: “Man traces his roots to his ancestors, but the roots of all that exists lie in the heavens”:
Nature (priroda), kinship unity (rodovoe edinstvo), homeland (rodina) — these are words sharing a common root, reflecting our deep essence, which goes back to the times of Arctida and Hyperborea… this is our earthly oikoumene, our habitat, our Eurasian home, “designed and built” according to cosmoplanetary laws and proportions. And Russia is what has come down to us as an inheritance both from the ancient cosmic settlers and from the pre-pagan tribes.
Another passage from the article is worth quoting — on how, in the authors’ view, this Eurasian Hyperborea came into being:
The earthly oikoumene… was settled by “migrants” from various star systems: the yellow race in Lemuria came from the constellation Leo, the black race in Africa from Sirius, and the white race in the polar expanses of Arctida from the Great Bear. It is no accident that this constellation (hyper — great; bor — bear) became our cosmic symbol, and the entire territory of the settled northern lands came to be called Hyperborea. These “migrants” did not fly to us on physical spaceships; they “fertilized” the Earth’s film holographically (in the form of plasma-like “angels”), giving rise here to a generation of intelligent Aryans. Representatives of the various races have preserved their original cosmic genes, inherited from their stellar progenitors.
Notably, this article was published in the journal Economic Strategies, issued by the autonomous nonprofit Institute for Economic Strategies, which is on the Higher Attestation Commission’s first-category list of peer-reviewed journals [the official Russian register of journals approved for publishing dissertation research — T-invariant]. By the time the article came out, Andrei Klepach had already been chief economist and deputy chairman of VEB.RF for eight years. He was also the academic director and chairman of the board of the VEB.RF Institute.
2025. Galactic Walls and Geotories in Space, Siberia, and the Far East
In recent years, Andrei Klepach has published several articles on the development of territories in Russia and, more broadly, in Eurasia. Among them was an entirely mainstream paper on spatial economics, “Space as a Factor of Economic Development,” which appeared in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2025. That same year, several publications came out on so-called “geotories” [a coinage from “geo” and “territory” — T-invariant] (see 1, 2). Klepach borrowed the term from his co-author Bushuev. To mark his 85th birthday, Bushuev released the six-volume series Energy of Russia (2025). In the sixth volume (Energy Cosmism of Russia), he published a chapter titled “Geotories as Earthly Analogues of Cosmic Structures,” in which he laid out a theory of how cosmic processes influence terrestrial phenomena, drawing on the works of the biophysicist and Russian cosmist Alexander Chizhevsky and the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (read it starting on page 393).
The cosmos and its objects, such as galaxies, stars, and planets, are characterized by vortex-like motions and structures. Galactic walls are cosmic structures resembling the interweaving of neurons in the human cerebral cortex. Vortices play an important role in the distribution of energy and matter in space, ensuring dynamic equilibrium and sustainable development. Spiral galaxies rotate in a vortex-like manner — for example, the galaxy M74 in the constellation Pisces, located approximately 30 million light-years (9.2 million parsecs) from Earth. Geotories can be viewed as “vortices” on the Earth’s surface, where natural resources and energy potentials are concentrated and redistributed. Like cosmic vortices, geotories ensure the cyclical use of energy and resources, supporting the economic and social development of the surrounding regions. Geotories play an important role in the infrastructural representation of Eurasia, since they are territories with special conditions for human life and activity. They are often remote and sparsely populated regions where access to energy, transport, and information links is limited.
From the Nooscope to the Noosphere Economy
At least two more people at the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise took part in developing the theory of a “cosmoplanetary civilization.” What’s more, each of them has his own, probably competing, “theory of everything.” Both hold the title of advisor at the Institute.
Oleg Dobrocheev, for one, has spent many years developing a “wave hypothesis of life,” and on top of that he offers his own concept of Russia’s development and a forecast of its future. The theory currently goes by the name “Fifth Russia,” and back in 2006 Dobrocheev published a book of the same title. On his website, Dobrocheev presents himself as a leading research fellow at the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute, lists numerous other titles, and makes a point of noting that he is the author of “seven books, a Calendar of Changes, and more than 200 articles on turbulence, history, and economics.” Most recently, he described his “wave” theory in an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in August 2026.
The other advisor, Valeriy Muntiyan, can’t match Dobrocheev in the scope of his theories but outdoes him in the scope of his career. Muntiyan is from Odesa and is even a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In Ukraine, he previously served as deputy minister of defense (December 2003–October 2004) and deputy minister of economy (2007–2009; his interview after stepping down can be read here). His main academic affiliation today is the Faculty of World Politics at Moscow State University, where he holds a professorship. In recent years, Muntiyan has been developing a theory of the noosphere economy; for example, two of his articles were included in a book published by Moscow State University in 2022.
The roles Dobrocheev and Muntiyan play at VEB.RF are unclear, whereas Andrei Klepach’s role in shaping Russia’s economic policy was far more visible for many years. In that sense, his drift toward alternative theories is genuinely a matter of public concern. That said, Putin’s entourage has traditionally included plenty of people who subscribe to pseudoscientific theories, among them Kremlin Chief of Staff Anton Vaino with his nooscope and Mikhail Kovalchuk, who has accused the West of creating “service people.”
Klepach (whose h-index in the RSCI core [the core collection of the Russian Science Citation Index — T-invariant] is 10) publishes articles and monographs featuring cosmist and “energological” theories alongside solid expert work in academic journals. And for at least six years, neither his colleagues in the academic community nor the leadership of Russia’s largest state corporation paid any attention to the economist’s drift into cosmism.
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“Andrei Klepach belongs to the group of economists who, from the early 1990s, were critical of the liberal market reforms of that era. Unlike Soviet academicians (such as Leonid Abalkin and a few others), he didn’t try to argue with Yegor Gaidar and the other reformers in the media. He worked with numbers and tried to use data to talk to the people who were actually implementing economic policy,” says Andrei Yakovlev, a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin who served for many years as vice rector of HSE University, describing the economist. “In 1998, Klepach briefly became director of the Central Bank’s research department, and then, together with former Central Bank deputy chairman Sergei Aleksashenko, he founded the ‘Development Center’ economic research foundation. For a long time, it was an expert center independent of the state, including financially. It produced a huge amount of analysis that was in demand not only by the government but also by actual businesses. Aleksashenko was always a liberal, while Klepach leaned more toward dirigiste views, with a strong emphasis on structural and industrial policy, but he always considered the role of the private sector very important. And when Herman Gref invited him to the Ministry of Economic Development in 2004, arguing, ‘Well, you keep criticizing us — so come and try to implement your ideas here,’ Klepach joined the civil service precisely for that purpose — to do something for the country. As far as I know, he still commands great respect in industry, including the defense sector, because he really did try to do a lot of useful things. At the same time, he always argued with his bosses and said what he thought. Many people may not have liked that, but he was respected. He left government service in 2014 — the formal order was signed in June 2014, but, as was reported at the time, the decision had been made in March. I think it was connected with Crimea, since Klepach, who dealt extensively with the defense industry, was never a supporter of war. Nevertheless, VEB gave him a prestigious position as deputy chairman and board member. But he was always an awkward person to deal with: when something had to be decided, it was hard to ‘cut a deal’ with him, and so he was later shunted off to do research at the separately created VEB Institute. Klepach understood and spoke about the dead ends of the existing model a very long time ago — before the war and before COVID. And he raised them many times at internal government meetings, at the Nikitsky Club, and at similar expert forums — though never linking them personally to Putin. Still, he believed it was necessary to stay within the system in order to do something for the country — as was once the case with the ‘bourgeois specialists’ or ‘military specialists’ [prerevolutionary experts and former tsarist officers recruited by the Bolsheviks — T-invariant] in the 1920s, who worked for the Soviet government not for the sake of positions but for the sake of the country. It seems to me that his shift in worldview and his fascination with strange theories in recent years may be explained by the fact that understanding the dead ends of Putin’s system, together with the impossibility of doing or influencing anything, is exactly what led him to cosmism. It’s a purely psychological defense mechanism against being unable to change the reality around him.”
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A T-invariant source who knows Klepach well and worked in the Russian government at the same time as he did, though in a different ministry, explains the transformation this way: “He’s basically a nerd, and has been since childhood. But in recent years, a lot of nerds have been stewing in their own juices — they’re not allowed into international [scientific] conferences. Nerds crave depth. But globally — they’re banned. So the nerds drift toward the fringe. The fringe, Dugin, and all that stuff — it becomes the only outlet for thinking people.”
“At the Ministry of Economic Development, Andrei Klepach was treated with respect. He had a reputation as someone willing to make sensible compromises but not willing to play the ‘yes, sir, whatever you say’ game,” recalls the head of one expert group who worked with Russia’s economic ministries for many years.
“How could such a drift have happened? Technocratic types, IT people, often lack a humanities culture. And the reverse is true too, by the way — humanities people may lack a mathematical culture. And technocrats like that sometimes don’t understand the simplest things in life. Every other one of them has these blind spots. Scratch a technocrat and you’ll find all sorts of surprises,” the T-invariant source reflects. “It’s just that Klepach is a public figure who has been speaking out for decades. Unfortunately, he was unlucky: he publicly waded into a subject he knows nothing about, and the result is fantastical nonsense. That makes you feel sorry both for him and for all of us, because our society hasn’t built barriers to keep such things from being published as ‘scientific findings’ at all, so that they stay in the inner worlds of people who lack competence in these areas and are uncritical about the limits of their own incompetence. It’s astonishing that people with intellect and professional expertise in their own field generate ideas and constructs based on primitive conspiracy theories and magical thinking. Outsiders who aren’t part of their circle can’t even imagine what delusional ideas often get voiced there. And if you express any doubt, they’re more likely to feel sorry for you: you don’t understand simple things — for example, that the cosmos rules us.”
In the source’s view, the Klepach phenomenon isn’t about his fascination with mythological cosmist ideas per se: “it could just as well have been conspiracy theories instead of harmless cosmos.”
“The phenomenon is that technocrats haven’t received a solid education and grounding in the humanities — and there’s no expert barrier to the spread of such texts and ‘ideas.’ Look at Western, especially American, higher education.
“At good universities, the liberal arts principle usually applies to undergraduate programs: students get their specialization but are also required to earn ‘credits’ outside their major. STEM students take humanities and social science courses, while humanities students take natural sciences and math. Klepach did study mathematics, of course, but a bit of critical thinking probably wouldn’t have hurt,” the T-invariant source believes.
What Do the Monograph’s Authors Themselves Say?
At the time of publication, T-invariant had not received comments from either Klepach or Bushuev, but did receive a brief comment from their regular co-author Dmitry Solovyev:
These publications were prepared at V. V. Bushuev’s request. My role was limited to designing the illustrations and technical editing of the text. The principal author of the concept and text of all these publications was V. V. Bushuev. As far as I know, these are popular science publications. Obviously, they are not used in the work of government bodies. I don’t know what A. N. Klepach’s role was; I don’t know him personally, but I think he is not the author of these works either. V. V. Bushuev included him among the co-authors for reasons of his own.
T-invariant has sent inquiries to the personal email addresses of Andrei Klepach and Vitaly Bushuev, as well as to the VEB.RF Institute and the press office of the state corporation VEB.RF, and is awaiting a response.
Update, October 9, 2026. The title and abstract of the monograph On the Way to Space-Planetary Civilization have been replaced with the authors’ own English translations.
The post Simply Out of This World: How Andrei Klepach Made His Way Through the Thorns of Structural and Monetary Factors to the Stars appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
President Xi Jinping is set to visit to the United States from September 23-25. His visit must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.
In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.
In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognize that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.
That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an “irreplaceable” role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from the permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.
But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or to be precise, four realities.
The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.
The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialization, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatization of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.
The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilizing cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.
Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theater.
Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.
The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.
The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.
There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognize that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.
This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.
Confrontation offers neither country a future.
Collaboration offers the world a chance.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books(New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
On Wednesday (16 September) Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a good day at the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen indicated that she would like to work with Mr Carney “on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the European Union", writes Dick Roche.
Prime Minister Carney was given a standing ovation by the Parliament’s Members. While it is not clear what ‘associate EU Membership’ means, the offer from the Commission President and the welcome by MEPs was a plus, of sorts, for Mr Carney in his battle with President Trump.
The relationship between Prime Minister Carney and President Trump was always destined to be a bumpy one. Days before President Trump was sworn in for his second term Justin Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister of Canada. As Trudeau was leaving office the president-elect repeated comments that he had made during the 2024 US elections about Canada becoming the 51st US State.
On 1 February 2025, as the contest to replace Mr Trudeau as the Liberal Party leader was getting underway President Trump, announced a 25% tariff on imports from Canada, Mexico and Canada: Canadian energy exports were subject to a 10% tariff. Trump explained the tariffs were intended to address the emergency related to fentanyl trafficking and illegal immigration.
Nine days later Trump announced a blanket 25% tariff on all imported steel and aluminium to “protect US industry and national security.” This hit Canada the biggest foreign supplier of steel and aluminium into the US market badly.
The pain for Canada did not stop there, on 26th March Trump announced his 25% tariff on all automobile imports into the US. Again, another bad hit on - most Canadian vehicle production is destined for the US market. The impact on Canadian auto producers was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that the tariff applied only to non-US content vehicle imports from Canada.
The stream of tariff announcements from the US while hurting Canada played to Mark Carney’s advantage in the race for leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party. While a "political ingénue" never having held political office or been a Member of a Member of Canada’s Parliament Mr Carney brought deep economic experience to the contest. He won almost 87% of the votes cast in the leadership election.
Mr Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada on 14th March 2025 - seven weeks into President Trump’s second term. Six weeks after his swearing in Mark Carney was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in the General Election of 28th April 2025.
From the outset Prime Minister Mark Carney invested considerable effort in improving relations with President Trump. The two leaders met in the White House on 6th May. The meeting, reportedly, went well.
Asked at the press briefing after the meeting about Trump’s suggestions that Canada should become the 51st US state, Carney responded humorously. He recalled that during the recent elections he had met the owners of Canada. They were not he said interested in ‘selling the property’, something that Mr Trump as a property man would understand. Smiling President Trump responded ‘never say never.’
At the G7 meeting held in Kananaskis, Alberta, in June President Trump and Mr Carney had another cordial meeting.
The cordiality did not last long. At the end of June the first payments on Canada’s Digital Services Tax (DST) were due to be made. The DST legislation enacted during the Trudeau Government, hit US tech companies causing fury in the White House. Trump called the tax a "direct and blatant attack on our country" and announced all trade talks with Canada would cease immediately.
Within days Carney announced that his administration would rescind the DST and halt the collection of the tax to advance negotiations with the US.
There was another flashpoint in January when President Trump reacted to reports that Canada and China were pursuing a comprehensive free trade deal. Prime Minister Carney defused the situation by explaining the talks with China were focused on adjusting existing arrangements.
While Carney faced criticism for ‘climbing down’ on the DST issue and for being too eager to placate the White House on China, his approach got US-Canada trade talks back underway.
By August 2025 there was some optimism that a breakthrough trade talks was close. On August 18th President Trump announced that a tentative understanding had been reached and as a result he was prepared to push back on the late August deadline for US tariff increases.
The talks came to an abrupt halt three days later when Carney instructed Canada’s negotiating team to return to Ottawa.
That decision came as a surprise. Walking away risked incurring the wrath of President Trump. That was a risk that the Canadian PM had clearly calibrated.
When the US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer sought to blame Canada for the breakdown Carney responded that it was the US United States that made last-minute demands which Canada considered unacceptable, including efforts to introduce provisions that would impact Canada's trade autonomy and sovereignty.
President Trump reacted immediately to Canada’s decision. Using a section of the Tariff Act 1930 that had never been used previously Trump imposed 50% tariffs across US$20 billion worth of Canadian products exported to the US.
Carney announced that Canada would hit US exports to Canada with “dollar for dollar” retaliatory measures. These would come into effect immediately after Labour Day 7th September –the day when the starting gun for US mid-term elections is ‘fired’ to get into full swing.
Asked at the press conference whether Canada was starting a trade war with the United States, Mr. Carney responded: “you’re at war when you get attacked—we got attacked.”
In a televised address, Carney acknowledged that the steps he was taking would come at a cost but argued that U.S. actions had left him with little alternative. He characterized the measures being taken by the United States as an attempt to hurt and divide Canadians. That, he suggested, was a miscalculation. Rather than weakening Canada, U.S. pressure would, he said, bring Canadians closer together.
All of indications suggest that Prime Minister Carney was correct in his assessment.
The leader of the Conservative Party Canada, Pierre Poilievre who previously accused Carney of being too willing to concede to Trump, strongly supported the decision to walk away from those trade talks.
Mr Poilievre was not alone, with one exception the Premiers of Canadian Provinces publicly supported Prime Minister Carney’s stance.
The Premier of Ontario Canada’s most populous province, Doug Ford, an open critic of the US President, encouraged PM Carney to respond to Trump “tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar.”
The Quebec Premier, Christine Fréchette, was particularly supportive of Carney’s refusal to make concessions to Trump on Quebec’s cultural protections.
Other Premiers have encouraged Carney to “fight back,” praised “team Canada,” criticised US tariff threats as unjustified, promised “full support,” and urged that Canada not accept a ‘subordinate economic relationship’ to the US.
The Premier of Alberta where a referendum on a range of questions including Alberta’s future within Canada is to be held on 19th October was the lone outrider, cautioning against celebrating retaliatory tariffs and expressed the hope that negotiations be resumed.
Public support in Canada for the position taken by Carney has been positive. Reuters referred to the tariff dispute encouraging a ‘rally around Canada’ effect that will likely dampen support for Alberta separation from Canada.
Ten days after the Canadian negotiating team abandoned the trade talks in Washington Carney’s Liberal Party received a very tangible indication of voter support when it won three by-elections for seats in the Canadian House of Commons including a seat in Quebec that had previously been held by a Conservative Party Member.
Opinion polls since the Canadian team walked away from the negotiations also show strong support for the position taken the Carney government.
An Ipsos poll taken on August 26-27 indicates support across party lines for Canada standing up to the US - even if it resulted in higher costs and job losses: 63% of those surveyed felt Canada was right to stand firm in the negotiations. Just 18 per cent said Canada should have made additional sacrifices to get a deal.
An Angus Reid Institute poll taken on 22 and 23 August immediately after the talks were ended found that 76% supported the line taken by the Canadian government.
A third poll by Abacus Data one of Canada’s most cited polling firms found that 60% approved of how the Carney government had handled the dispute while 18% disapproved.
In the US, unsurprisingly, positions on the trade war with Canada splits along party lines. Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the Trump’s position arguing that tariffs cost consumers and businesses.
On 9th September a group of nine Democrat Senators from states with close business ties with Canada issued a joint statement attacking President Trump’s “senseless trade war” with a key trading partner, primary export market and most enduring defence partner, pointing out that the President’s actions would force Canada to “diversify away from the US and deepen trade ties with other countries including China.”
Republicans generally, but not universally, support Trump’s position, arguing that Trump’s tariff stance is ‘putting America first.’ Concerns have been flagged in the Republican ranks that the tariffs will be an issue in the November mid-terms, particularly in competitive Senate and House races.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the US state most exposed to the tariff dispute with Canada, who is facing a tough re-election contest in November has labelled the tariffs on Canada ‘a mistake’ pointing out that Canadian retaliation could cost Maine up to $170 million in export losses. The Republican governor of Vermont has also been openly critical.
The position for President Trump is considerably less positive than that of Prime Minister Carney. The Canadian Prime Minister enjoys the public and political support that President Trump conspicuously lacks. As this week's appearance in the European Parliament demonstrated Mr Carney’s support is not confined to Canada; he has international support which, President Trump again conspicuously lacks.
At the moment there is no obvious ‘off ramp’ to facilitate a return to the negotiating table. Politically and temperamentally it will be harder for President Trump to pull back from the position he has taken in the tariff war than it will be for Mark Carney. Mr Carney has more political support for his position, at home and internationally than President Trump. He has also played an infinitely better game than Mr Trump. For the moment the ball is very much in Mark Carney’s court.
Dick Roche is a former Irish Minister for European Affairs and former Minister for the Environment.
Background image from CBS News. BRICS 2026 Image Source.
by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News
As I reported earlier this week, the Yemen takeover of the Red Sea has changed everything in the Middle East, and things are moving fast now.
CBS News published photos of destroyed U.S. bases in the Middle East yesterday for the first time since the Iran War started, claiming that the photos were sent to them by “active service members on condition of anonymity.”
New photos obtained exclusively by CBS News reveal for the first time the widespread damage and destruction of buildings and vehicles at multiple U.S. positions across the Middle East, as a result of Iranian missile and drone attacks.
The images were sent to CBS News by active service members on condition of anonymity because of rigid media restrictions within the military.
“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News.
“We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
One photo, taken at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia, shows a direct hit on the back half of a Boeing E-3 Sentry four-engine aircraft, its tail severed from the charred fuselage that also supported a rotating radar that is essential for collecting midair intelligence.
Similarly grim pictures were captured at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, a major staging area for U.S. Army ground troops, armored vehicles and some aircraft; the post is located in a remote desert region far northwest of Kuwait City.
The Defense Department’s inspector general this week released a fresh report on the war in Iran that revealed “equipment losses” worth up to $3.7 billion — including nearly 60 aircraft.
In a first-of-its-kind mandatory report to Congress, the inspector general added that U.S. Central Command reported Iranian strikes at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan.
“These are not ‘squirters’ getting through,” the service member added, referencing language used by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after the deadly March 1 attack on Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait that killed six U.S. troops.
“We’re not defending these bases. We’re just watching them get destroyed.”
As I write this on September 16, 2026, Saudi Arabia is currently exporting ZERO oil. This is the country with the largest oil company in the world, Aramco, which was started by the United States and today employs tens of thousands of Americans in Saudi Arabia.
There were reports earlier this week that Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), was under house arrest, but he appeared in public yesterday in a state visit to Egypt, dispelling those rumors.
But that doesn’t mean that there is not currently chaos in the Royal Al-Saud family, and even the possibility that the Al-Saud family could be in danger of being able to hold on to its power in Saudi Arabia. The original name of this area was just “Arabia”, and included what is today called “Yemen.”
Here is a short interview with international journalist Pepe Escobar that was published just before MBS appeared in public in Egypt yesterday, explaining how damaging the Yemen takeover of the Red Sea has been to Saudi Arabia.
Here is another good 20-minute interview with Professor Mohammad Marandi from inside Iran, discussing the question: Is Saudi Arabia Heading for Collapse?
Pepe Escobar has also published a couple of articles on the Yemen situation, but as of this writing I have only found one in German, and one in Spanish, but nothing in English yet.
Here are some excerpts from the Spanish and German articles that were translated online.
Yemen Shakes the Gate of Tears
by Pepe Escobar
geoestrategia.euExcerpts:
Ansarallah now has the luxury of installing a tollbooth — possibly multi – layered — at Bab al -Mandeb, if they so wish.
No less than 25 years after 9/11, the Angel of History strikes another powerful blow. Five years ago, we witnessed the stunning imperial humiliation in Afghanistan , accomplished in a matter of days.
Now, we are witnessing the stunning humiliation of Saudi Arabia—a vassal of Epstein’s Syndicate—in Yemen, also accomplished in a matter of days. Series of humiliations now follow the Empire like a plague.
The widespread collapse of Saudi mercenary groups in Yemen is happening so rapidly that even Epstein’s Syndicate’s mainstream media has been forced to acknowledge it.
Ansarallah’s “Rolling Storm” is taking cities and islands; capturing thousands of thugs; freeing all prisoners—and granting them amnesty; seizing control of countless American tanks and weapons—a “reissued Afghanistan”; and being hailed as liberators of Yemeni land across the tribal spectrum.
And, of course, Ansarallah has now officially assumed full control of the mega-strategic Bab al-Mandeb, or “Gate of Tears”.
The intelligence that underpinned Ansarallah’s Operation Rolling Thunder—described as the largest mass capture operation in modern warfare—was carefully coordinated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The Axis of Resistance was fully aware that, following the devastating Iranian attacks on bases in Jordan, the United States was limited in its ability to assist the Saudis in preventing a Yemeni offensive.
The US Navy had already been effectively driven out of the Red Sea by Yemen’s advanced military capabilities, including hypersonic missiles manufactured entirely domestically.
It seems Riyadh hasn’t learned its lesson.
At the Asian level, Iran’s dual control of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (through its allies in Ansar Allah) is being staged one day before the opening of the momentous BRICS summit in New Delhi—which is geopolitically linked to the previous Shanghai Group summit (12 days earlier) and the trip of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Egypt (11 days earlier).
During the BRICS summit, the reverberations of the dual control of the Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb straits were felt with the special treatment given by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who also received deferential treatment from Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
In my opinion, Ansar Allah’s hold on the Red Sea will depend, to a large extent, on the results of the BRICS summit in New Delhi —which could play an optimal mediating role between two of its members (Iran and Saudi Arabia)—and on the crucial APEC summit in Shenzhen 67 days later, where the three leaders of China, Russia, and the US are highly likely to meet.
In Shenzhen, quite possibly, a New World Order could be established , following the pattern of a Vienna Congress 2.0, where the US would attend as the ‘loser’ in its two wars, in Ukraine and Iran—more so than a Yalta 2.0, which was about ‘three winners’.
Pepe Escobar: History in Motion: BRICS, Yemen, Hormuz, China
by Pepe Escobar
Uncut NewsExcerpts:
In less than 72 hours, the course of history accelerated due to a confluence of events that would normally unfold over several years.
Following a lightning offensive, the Yemeni Ansarallah movement now controls the entire Red Sea coast from the port of Hodeidah to Bab al-Mandab, including Mayyun Island, a volcanic rock outcrop in the middle of the “Gate of Tears”.
Saudi Arabia’s east-west pipeline –the only bypass around the Strait of Hormuz– has been shut down for at least a month following a combined attack with drones and ballistic missiles.
It remains unclear where the attack actually came from: from Iraq, from Yemen, from both countries, or was it a “false flag” operation?
Diplomatic sources in Moscow and Tehran confirmed that Russia and Iran acted as a coordinated duo in New Delhi and were in complete agreement in their rejection of Washington’s war against Iran and the sanctions architecture.
The now viral photo of Lavrov, Wang Yi and Araghchi standing together like old friends only tells part of the story.
Yemen’s advance on the Red Sea is the maritime half of the same story.
Russia and Iran agreed on three points: condemning the US war, rejecting the sanctions regime as a whole, and resolutely opposing the secondary sanctions associated with US Treasury Secretary Bessent, that despicable former henchman of Soros.
In New Delhi, there were indications that the original RIC (Russia–India–China), as conceived by the late, great Yevgeny Primakov, might be revived – now as RIIC, supplemented by Iran.
In spite of the success of Yemen forces to take over the Red Sea and bomb Saudi Arabia’s oil production offline, there is no sign that the U.S. or Israel are close to admitting defeat.
On the contrary, it has been reported this week that the U.S. is preparing to sell 60,000 highly destructive, 2,000-pound (907kg) bombs to Israel in a multibillion-dollar package which will be funded by American taxpayers, a move that is almost unprecedented in modern history.
US set to approve 60,000 heavy bombs for Israel: What that means
by Yashraj Sharma
AljazeeraExcerpts:
United States President Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to sell 60,000 highly destructive, 2,000-pound (907kg) bombs to Israel in a multibillion-dollar package which will be funded by American taxpayers.
US media has reported that the Trump administration has approved the sale, which features some of the most destructive munitions in Western arsenals, and has informally notified Congress.
This is one of the biggest US munition packages to Israel and comes after nearly three years of genocidal war on Gaza, ongoing pogroms by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and a mighty assault on southern Lebanon – which together have killed tens of thousands and displaced millions in the region.
It also comes as the US’s own munitions stockpile has been depleted due to its war on Iran, with the crisis worsened by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Washington is reported to be on track to deliver a munitions package to Israel that is believed to include 60,000 warheads, including 20,000 MK-84s, 20,000 BLU-117s and 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator.
The sale is worth $2.8bn, the majority of which will be paid for by the US’s Foreign Military Financing scheme, wherein Washington pays Israel from its own taxpayers’ funds to buy American-made weapons and military equipment.
Together, 60,000 2,000-pound-class bombs weigh 54,400 tonnes.
That is about the weight of the entire steel skeleton of New York’s Empire State Building. Or seven times the weight of the iron structure of the Eiffel Tower.
Its mass also far exceeds the most infamous single conventional air raid of the 20th century. The March 1945 Tokyo firebombing, which killed more than 80,000 people in one night, used roughly 1,600 tonnes of bombs.
On a broader scale, 54,400 tonnes is nearly the total weight of bombs dropped on Berlin throughout World War II, and also roughly one-third of all bombs that fell on Japan’s home islands.
Here are a couple of other stories I am monitoring that were posted on our Telegram Channel.
Drone Strikes Cripple Half of Russia’s Top Diesel Refineries
From OilPrice.com
Excerpts:
Three of Russia’s six largest diesel-producing refineries are now either shut or operating at roughly one-quarter capacity after Ukrainian drone attacks damaged plants that together form the backbone of the country’s fuel system.
The six refineries—Omsk, Kirishi, Taneco, Volgograd, NORSI and Perm—account for roughly half of Russia’s diesel production, according to Reuters calculations based on market data. Kirishi is completely offline. Volgograd and NORSI are running at about 25% of nameplate capacity.
Taneco was struck Sunday. The extent of the damage there was still being assessed Monday.
The attacks have become routine. The International Energy Agency estimates a Russian refinery was successfully struck by a drone once every three days during the first eight months of 2026.
Russia has already restricted exports of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to preserve domestic supply. Diesel exports fell below 1 million metric tons in June, according to trader estimates cited by Reuters. Combined diesel and gasoil exports totaled about 1.8 million tons.
A year earlier, Russian refineries were shipping roughly 2.5 million tons of diesel each month, or 3.3 million to 3.4 million tons including lower-quality gasoil. Turkey and Brazil had been taking at least half of available Russian diesel cargoes before Moscow imposed the restrictions.
Those missing barrels are landing in a global diesel market already short on fuel from the Middle East. U.S. diesel prices crossed $6 per gallon last week for the first time, while refining margins have climbed as product inventories shrink.
Saudi Pipeline Outage Hits an Oil Market Running Out of Buffers
From OilPrice.com
Excerpts:
The war in Iran that had to be over and won by the United States in about six weeks is now in its seventh month and the oil markets are starting to crack.
Gone are most of the cushions the market had in the early weeks and months of the Middle East conflict.
The oversupply from early this year has disappeared as oil on water was drawn down quickly when the Strait of Hormuz was closed to tanker traffic in March.
Record stock releases led by the International Energy Agency (IEA) depleted strategic inventories in developed economies, including in the United States, where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) now holds the lowest level of crude oil since the early 1980s.
China, which strategically slashed its crude oil imports by about 4-5 million barrels per day (bpd) in May and June, has started to gradually ramp up purchases, removing a significant demand-side balancing mechanism that had prevented oil prices from spiking to record highs in the spring.
With few buffers left to absorb the six-month-long disruption of oil flows at the Strait of Hormuz, the last thing the market needed was an escalation that put a key non-Hormuz flow valve at risk.
But here we are: the vital East-West oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia, which helped the Kingdom bypass the Strait of Hormuz and export most of its crude oil from the Yanbu port on the Red Sea, is now out of service – possibly for weeks – following drone attacks at the end of last week.
This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)
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