Exiled Russian scholar: ‘When Putin goes, we will return home’

As a long-time critic of Vladimir Putin who publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Salavat Abylkalikov knew he may one day have to leave his homeland.

“We had to be ready and have a plan and we had to fit everything into two suitcases,” explained the 37-year-old demographer on his and his wife’s preparations for leaving Moscow quickly – an escape to the UK, via Turkey, eventually made with their baby daughter in the summer of 2023.

“I had made my position on the war clear on social media and the university told me this was a problem,” recalled Dr Abylkalikov, who held a senior lectureship at the Moscow School of Economics.

“I might not have been fired outright but it was clear my contract wouldn’t be renewed. I was afraid too that the police would arrest me at my workplace,” he explained, although his main reason for leaving was even more chilling.

“Sometimes our government punishes parents who criticise them by taking away their children. Activists are bad mothers or fathers, they say, and there is no due process or right to appeal.”

With the help of the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara), Dr Abylkalikov secured a fellowship at Northumbria University, becoming one of 67 Ukrainian, Russian or Belarusian academics who have been successfully placed in UK universities in the 1,000 or so days since bombs began falling on Kyiv in February 2022.

Yet some 300 Ukrainian scholars and 100 Russians and Belarusians have sought help from the refugee charity, which is seeking further assistance to deal with the largest exodus of European academics since Jewish scholars were forced out of 1930s Germany.

Attention has understandably focused on displaced Ukrainian scholars, yet those escaping Russia are find themselves in similar exile with perhaps even less hope of returning in the near future.

For his part, Dr Abylkalikov regarded himself as fortunate, despite being forced to abandon a stable academic job at Moscow’s top economics school for uncertain career prospects in a foreign land. “We’re privileged compared to the Ukrainian families who had to leave with nothing – at least we could plan,” he said.

“Yes, I’m someone from a poor rural background who was the first in my family to go to university and worked hard for a stable university job. But I’d rather be in a weak academic position – but with freedom – than be a political prisoner.”

Far from viewing him with suspicion, his new colleagues and British people have welcomed him warmly, he said. But, noting the grim academic job market in the UK, Dr Abylkalikov is exploring career opportunities across the UK and in other countries, commending the invaluable support provided by Cara in this respect.

Nonetheless, his long-term intentions are clear. “As soon as Putin is removed from power, we will start looking for tickets home,” he said, adding that “when the opportunity arises to start building a new Russia, I will try to contribute to it within my capabilities.”

Other Russian scholars may not have undertaken the same dramatic exit as Dr Abylkalikov but made similar moves when it became clear that their country’s pariah status in academia has made it difficult to pursue their work.

“Like many academics, I see science as a global endeavour but that’s just not possible in Russia at the moment,” said Mikhail Burtsev, who was scientific director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Moscow prior to moving to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences in December 2022, where he is a Landau AI fellow.

“Many collaborators in other groups we’d worked with refused to write joint papers with us and organisations we’d worked with were sanctioned,” recalled Professor Burtsev, who said that the suspension of Russian access to the open-source software platform GitHub was a particular blow.

Those sanctions may have hastened his departure from Moscow, but Professor Burtsev wondered exactly what they will achieve in the long term, particularly if they harm scholars like him who “are not very happy about all that is happening” more widely in Russia.

“I see no good argument for not collaborating in science – would it really help to resolve the current situation?” he asked.

Ironically, Professor Burtsev comes into daily contact with Ukrainian mathematicians employed by his institute – thanks in part to the largesse of London-based Russian businessmen such as Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who pledged £2 million in support earlier this year.

“Science shouldn’t have borders – when it does, we’re likely to miss out on solutions to problems,” added Andrei Stepanenko, a Landau junior research fellow at the London Institute since August 2023, who researches quantum computing. “When you have these barriers you might not know about someone who is working on a programme or network that is useful to you – without that communication you’re stuck,” he observed.

For Dr Abylkalikov, maintaining contact with Russian institutions is important, even for those universities that issued pro-Putin institutional statements in the early days of the conflict.

“Many young academics have spoken out and left but older academics may have stayed silent to save their institutions – they understand this political regime will not last a long time, years not decades, so they want to save the educational base that we have.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com