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.

In 1993, Marina Bykova became the youngest Doctor of Sciences in the humanities in Russia. Today she is a professor at an American university and editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in East European Thought. Her professional life has been devoted to building and sustaining dialogue between the Russian philosophical tradition and the international academic community. In an interview with T-invariant, Marina Bykova reflects on why Russian academia has been paralyzed by fear, how the cultural project of the “Russian World” turned into a political ideology, and what happens to philosophy when it loses its autonomy.

The academic community has launched a signature campaign in support of the philosopher Svetlana Mesyats. She has been charged with fraud on an especially large scale, an accusation that can carry a sentence of up to ten years in prison. Svetlana Mesyats’s prosecution fits the pattern of other criminal cases targeting Russian scholars who have returned to the country. Marina Bykova, a professor at North Carolina State University, reflects on whether public support from the anti-war opposition is useful or dangerous.

Over the course of two years, several thousand scientists left Russia, sometimes entire teams were evacuated. Some of them managed not only to survive, but to be reborn in a new reality. In February 2024, the Agency for Control and Quality Assurance of Higher Education of Montenegro decided on state accreditation of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLASH), which was created by former employees of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. Teodora Shanin. And this is not the only example of how fugitive Russians are reassembling academic projects.

Has Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow broken the «negative equilibrium» Russia has been stuck in for the last twenty years? Vladimir Gelman, political scientist, professor at the University of Helsinki, and author of the book on «bad governance» in contemporary Russia, analyzes the consequences of the failed mutiny and possible alternative scenarios.

A quota set by the Czech government for the reception of Russian and Belarusian dissidents is not even half used during the year. Czech analysts suggest ways to improve the program’s efficiency, arguing that the new scholars and journalists are valuable to the country and will help restore democracy after Eastern European dictatorships.