Russia's "Brain Drain" May Help the West

In a dictatorship such as Putin's Russia, loyalty to the dictator and blind obedience to the ideology mandated by the regime do not lend themselves to independent thought or creativity which can all too often bring unwanted attention and ultimately inprisonment or worse.   This phenomenon is not new and has plagued Russia ever since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 which saw a massive exodus of the most educated and talented from Russia.   The Soviet regime's solution was to bar people from leaving the country, but even then free thinking and creativity were stiffled.  For a few years after the fall of Soviet rule, an openness and changed attitude to intellectual freedom and creativity began to flourish, but Putin has steadily pushed the country back to the Soviet model save for closing the borders for emigration.  With the invasion of Ukraine, many of Russia's most talented have decided the time has come to leave either to avoid conscription into the military or a return to the wose days of the Soviet past.   Many of those leaving are in the IT field which Russia desperately needs.  Pieces in the Washington Post and New York Times look at the much less covered exodus from Russia.   The Times piece sums things up this way:  

For Putin to drive away some of his nation’s greatest minds is lunatic. But as someone once said, never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.  

The piece in the Post looks at the IT worker exodus in particular.  Here are excerpts: 

RIGA, Latvia — In his two-bedroom Moscow apartment, 35-year-old start-up wizard Pavel Telitchenko spent years mulling a move from Russia, fearing the gradual rise of a police state. Then, three days after the Kremlin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, he made the hard choice — packing up his young family, along with his prized vinyl-record collection, and joining a historic exodus that includes a massive outflow of Russia’s best and brightest minds in tech.

I could not raise my son in a country like that,” said Telitchenko, who resettled in neighboring Latvia in March with his wife and 3-year-old son. . . . . “The war made me realize that Russia will not change,” he said.

Western attention is focused on the millions of refugees who have fled Ukraine since the Russian assault began on Feb. 24. But Russia is also in the midst of an emigration wave that is upending its spheres of arts and journalism, and especially the world of tech.

The Russian Association for Electronic Communications told the lower house of Russia’s parliament last month that 50,000 to 70,000 tech workers have fled the country, with 100,000 more expected to leave over the next month — for a total of about 10 percent of the sector’s workforce.

[S]ome of those leaving are opposition activists, artists and journalists — people whom President Vladimir Putin is probably happy to see go, and whose departure could reduce active dissent within Russia. But nearly half of those leaving hail from tech — a highly transient, globally in-demand workforce that includes many who fear Russia’s global isolation, newly adverse business climate and near-total authoritarianism.

Experts on global migration and Russian population are calling the current exodus Russia’s single fastest since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when millions of intellectuals and economic elites fled the rise of the Soviet Union. . . . “We’re talking about a lot of people in a very condensed period, a matter of weeks. In 1917, Russia was in the midst of a civil war. But this is happening at time when there is no war within Russia itself.”

Returning to the Times article, the losses are not confined to IT workers:

Putin may be betting that as long as a strong majority of Russians support him, he can afford to lose the malcontents. He may even be glad that some are going. The autocrat is not erecting barriers to keep the intelligentsia from leaving, although he has offered tax breaks, subsidized mortgages and postponement of conscription into the armed forces to keep tech workers at home.

He may live to regret his nonchalance. “There is no doubt that there is long-lasting damage. The whole wave of recent emigration is the most productive slice of the Russian society,” said Konstantin Sonin, an economist with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy who moved from Russia.

“Putin has a very specific worldview” that opposes globalization, Sonin told me. Putin believes “that an autarkic, centralized economy is sort of a strong economy. When Russia is cut from the international trade, when people are leaving, it seems to him that this is going in the right direction, the acceptable direction.”

If Russia achieves political stability by ridding itself of smart people who oppose Putin’s rule, Sonin said, “the stability will be achieved at a very low level of production and consumption.”

Russia has suffered from brain drain for at least a century, in part because it produces top-notch university graduates, yet usually hasn’t had an economy capable of putting their skills to good use. The United States and other countries have long benefited from immigrants from what was the Russian Empire . . . . In the United States that includes such giants as Igor Sikorsky, a pioneer in helicopters; Simon Kuznets, a Nobel laureate in economics; artists and composers such as Irving Berlin, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Nabokov, and businesspeople such as the Wonskolaser brothers, better known by their Americanized name, Warner Brothers.

Starting around 2010 the brain drain eased because the Russian economy was performing well. . . . But the invasion of Ukraine has once again yanked the plug out of the drain hole.

[T]he Biden administration asked Congress last week to suspend for four years the requirement that Russian scientists applying for H1-B visas have a sponsoring employer. The measure would apply only to Russian citizens with master’s or doctoral degrees in science or engineering fields such as artificial intelligence, nuclear engineering or quantum physics. They would have to undergo security vetting.

That’s a smart move. Western nations are making a mistake if they don’t hold the door open to Russian scientists because of opposition to Putin . . . . “If they’re leaving, they’re the best and the brightest and the bravest,” she said. “It’s important not to brand all the Russians as the baddies in the world.”