Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 22 – Just as in
the years following the Bolshevik revolution, the best minds of Russia are
leaving to live and work abroad, a trend that undermines the possibility that
Russia will be able to profit from their skills across the board and that is
already having a direct and negative impact on Russia’s military-industrial
complex.
After 1917, Vladimir Malyshev
observes today, those who would invent helicopters, television, high-octane
fuel, video recorders, and major ships left Russia and put their skills to work
for other countries. Today, “once again the best minds are leaving Russia in
order to serve the glory and well-being of others” (stoletie.ru/rossiya_i_mir/talanty_dla_chuzhih_596.htm).
Then,
they left by ship; now, they go by jet; then, they were fleeing persecution,
hunger and even death; now they are going to make a better life for themselves.
And the numbers are staggering: according to some sources, as many as 800,000
scientists have left Russia since 1991 and their numbers are rising
dramatically this year.
According to the
rector of Moscow State University, Russia lost “about a third of its
intellectual potential” in the 1990s; and education ministry officials concede
that the number of people engaged in science in Russia today is “about 40
percent” of the number that were doing so in the early 1990s.
But what is most immediately troubling, the
Stoletiye.ru commentator says, is that “no fewer than 70,000 scholars and
specialists from defense research centers and enterprises” are among those who
have gone to work abroad, a loss that is already affecting Russia’s national
security.
To be sure, Malyshev concedes,
providing exact numbers on these flows is difficult: the government doesn’t
want to talk about them, and many who leave do not “formally emigrate” but
rather “simply go abroad to work on contract, although this temporary status
often becomes permanent” with time.
Most of those departing go to Europe
(42 percent) or North America (30 percent). Few go to Asia and only rarely do
they go to CIS countries. They go for better pay, more prestige, and what they
see as an atmosphere that allows them greater scope for their abilities, and
also because they sense that they are not needed or wanted at home, Malyshev
suggests.
Some in Russia don’t view the brain
drain as a problem, he continues. Vitaly
Milonov, a a St. Petersburg legislator, said recently that “Russia loses
nothing if all the so-called creative class leaves … For me, a woman who gets
up at 5:00 am to milk a cow is create because she produces something, unlike
someone who sits all day in a café and writes in a blog.”
Malyshev says there is another form
of brain drain. It involves those Russian scholars who never leave the country
but work for foreign firms or institutions. Such people may appear to remain at
home but in fact they might as well be living and working abroad for as much
contribution as they are making to Russia.
Those who do leave assuredly are not
working for Russia but for the countries to which they have gone, contributing
their skills to others. Moscow must do
far more to make Russia an attractive place for those who are still in the
country and also for those who have left but might be persuaded to come back.
The country’s development and even
national security depend upon that, he suggests.
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