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.”
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.