In accordance with the Regulations of the George Gamow® Award, established by the Russian American Science Association (RASA-America) in honor of the distinguished Russian American physicist Professor Georgy Antonovich Gamow (1904–1968), and to recognize members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora for outstanding achievements widely acknowledged by the scientific community, the 2026 G.A. Gamow Prize is awarded to Natalia Berloff and Mikhail N. Epstein.

Russian mathematics is losing ground, scientists are leaving, and international ties are fraying — yet the government’s new Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 presents all of this almost as a force of nature. The number of researchers has “declined,” access to global science has been “restricted,” and the country’s competitive edge is at risk of being “lost.” Who restricted what, where the scientists went, and why Russia is losing influence, the document hardly explains. T-invariant read the Concept and found a striking picture: global mathematics appears in it as something like a warehouse to which access must be “ensured” — preferably along with additional funding.

T-invariant presents the latest regular report Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 37, dated September 30, 2026. The Russian government has approved the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036. One of the key issues the Concept highlights is restricted access to international scientific and technical information. Below, we briefly comment on what access to foreign journals looks like today and what is at stake.

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.

Our interviewee today is not allowed to give interviews — under the terms of her employment contract. The senior position she holds at an American university obliges her not to make her political views public and to exercise the utmost caution in public statements. But the changes now taking place at American universities are so far-reaching that she agreed to talk with T-invariant about the serious challenges facing higher education. Her experience as a department chair and dean, and later as a vice president, helps her today to map the critical points in the development of the academic environment: how the new presidential administration is affecting university life, how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has split it, how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching and its administration, what the shrinking of university budgets leads to, and, most importantly, how the very logic by which higher education works has changed.

Russian-American Science Association strongly condemns the decision of the Russian authorities to designate our colleague Tatiana Tatarinova, a distinguished bioinformatics scholar and professor at the University of La Verne, as a “foreign agent.”

Andrei Klepach — one of Russia’s leading economists and a high-ranking economic official of the Vladimir Putin era — has published several academic works over the past six years that are packed with cosmist imagery. His drift into “energy-information cosmism” went unnoticed until Klepach was fired as chief economist of the state corporation VEB.RF — after he publicly offered a bleak assessment of Russia’s ability to compete with the West and with Ukraine. T-invariant traced the economist’s academic evolution into a cosmist and looked into the background of his mentor on the road “toward a cosmoplanetary civilization.” It also turned out that, even after Klepach’s dismissal, VEB.RF has no shortage of people developing alternative “theories of everything”: the “wave hypothesis of life,” the idea of a “Fifth Russia,” and a “noosphere economy.”

On July 23, the U.S. Department of Defense published a new list of organizations it considers a potential threat to U.S. national security. The list includes Moscow State University (MSU), Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the Higher School of Economics (HSE), Ural Federal University, and several other Russian universities and research institutes. American scholars and universities receiving Pentagon funding are advised to terminate cooperation with these institutions. T-invariant examines how this new list differs from sanctions laws and what consequences it may bear for Russian and American science.

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.