One of the explicitly stated goals of anti-Russian sanctions was to trigger a “brain drain,” the country’s best educated skilled labor leaving for greener pastures. This tactic worked before on Russia, but is it working now? Well, let’s think about it.
I write this on my phone as we leave Moscow by train for the day – I will reveal where later – but for now, we passed through the outer rings of Moscow and are now in the country side.
Back to the brain drain. Here are my thoughts.
Russia is by far not the only victim of brain drain. Even countries the US is allegedly on friendly terms with suffer from it, like India. Our oligarchs and corporations entice doctors, engineers, IT techs, and countless other precious professionals to leave their homelands and come to the USA in search of higher wages. Not only do these countries lose their specialists to us, remember that most countries, even “developing” countries, offer some quantity of free and low cost public education, the graduates of these institutions promptly take their new skill sets and leave for the USA. This is what happened to the USSR after loosening their exit visas, and what continued to happen to Russia in the 90s.
Ironically, Americans are also victims of weaponized brain drain. 4-8 years of university now can cost $100 or even $200 thousand. These American graduates are then forced to compete with foreigners who received those same degrees for free, don’t have crippling debt, so are willing to work for less, driving wages down and putting Americans in a forced economic equilibrium with Mexico, India, Pakistan, Ukraine, and the dozens of other countries we use brain drain to extract labor from.
But today in 2022, attempts to inflict a brain drain on big bad Russia have failed. Even the most rabid Russia haters like Julia Ioffe have had to admit that failure. Ultimately, this failure had two causes:
1) Most of the people who departed Russia in the February-April time frame did so out of panic that their industries (mostly techie fields like crypto) would become inaccessible, so fled to immediately adjacent countries, like Uzbekistan. Almost all of these people have since returned to the motherland.
2) The EU, UK, and USA squandered any chance of inflicting inflicting a brain drain with their massive Russophobia and punitive sanctions against Russian citizens personally. Cut off from his finances back home, and visas to the “enlightened west borderline impossible,” how is a Russian supposed to emigrate, even if he really wants to?
If the intent was to cause a Russian brain drain, it was pretty stupid to make it difficult for Russians to leave, right? But I don’t think western oligarchs are stupid. I have a theory that certain people in power knew it was unlikely they would succeed in causing a brain drain, and that wasn’t their actual intent.
The West is not trying to CAUSE a brain drain, they are trying to PREVENT one.
A few months ago I was complaining how annoying and difficult it is to travel to and stay in Russia, and access my money because of Biden’s anti-Russian sanctions. To which she said “it sounds like you are the one being sanctioned.” This is particularly funny to me because since then, I have griped to several other people and they all say the same thing. The most recent was an Australian guy I am taking Russian courses with in Moscow. Biden punishing Russia by sanctioning Americans is a bit of a running joke now, but it is serious, especially for the EU.
In this university I’m attending, roughly half of the international students are educated young people from western Europe, and most of them are here learning Russian for the same reason, to work and hopefully stay here permanently. The alternative would be to go home and deal with skyrocketing crime, out of control inflation, and the gradual collapse of their economies.
Could we see the beginning of a brain drain? I guess we will find out.
Ian Kummer
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I have the feeling that Russia is more in need of skilled people, not less.The sanctions are forcing firms to produce locally and substitute imports. It already happened after the 2015 sanctions.
There’s a site I usually read (with the help of a translator) where you can partially confirm this trend:
https://sdelanounas.ru/
Russian STEM education is historically good, what they need, like any developed country, or any country period, are jobs with good wages. If they needed more skilled labor, they could relax their immigration policies (which are still very strict for people outside the former USSR bloc
Strict immigration policies is a must.
Racial/religious/cultural cohesion is the basis of any functional society, but particularly with Caucasians who raise the bar higher than all others in their intrinsic qualities.
Odd enough, what we need is qualified labor) locals are unwilling to go to vocational schools, immigrants don’t have actual skills, but i see measures being taken to make labor more prestigious. My mom came from a family of workers and peasants, and I would never underestimate those professions. It’s time we all appreciate those again.
I’ve been reading about extreme Russian brain drain in the (Western) press but this whole thing has always looked suspicious to me, for the very reasons you mentioned, ie. very serious restrictions to Russians’ travel, hysterical Russophobia, the (almost) impossibility to do any financial transaction with Russians, etc. They mentioned outlandish numbers like 60-70 thousand experts just in the field of IT, who were supposed to have left Russia by the end of March.
Now the reverse brain drain angle is interesting. Even I was thinking about emigrating to Russia (I’m an IT professional). My generation learnt Russian in school, and anyway, the cultural barrier is much lower to us, Eastern Europeans. The cities and suburbs look like ours (with obvious but superficial differences), etc.
I mean, in fairness, it IS possible 60-70 thousand IT professionals left Russia in March, but all evidence points to the vast majority of them returning.
If you do end up moving or traveling to Russia I would be interested to hear how that works out for you
Hi Ian, are _you_ planning to stay in Russia? I’m really curious. (My travel plans have been drastically affected by first covid and then the war. For all this talk about freedom and liberty and democracy, I can’t even read Russian sites in the EU. And these people talk about how oppressive the Eastern Bloc was… What a strange reversal…)
I used to read Fabius Maximus, and I wonder what happened to it. It ended quite abruptly, without much explanation. You have similarities to Larry (to whom, I suppose, you are related) but marked differences as well. (I have to tell you, Larry blocked me for expressing disagreement about his views on climate change, and our infrequent exchanges were not really friendly.)
Anyway, good to hear from you.
It’s a PITA but you can get around that by manually setting your DNS servers to cloudflare: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
Thanks. Name resolution is fixed 🙂 Apparently, there are other restrictions beside this.
Yes the *PLAN* is to stay in Russia permanently, though that is going to be quite a process. As of right now, I am not even considered a resident.
Just a bit of anecdotal evidence… most of the Russian speakers in my last company in fact came from Ukraine. Easily outnumbering the Russian Russians 3 or 4 to 1.
When I would be in the situation to consider moving to Russia, I would start with going towards Mariupol or the like and contribute to the rebuildung – thousands of roofs need to be thatched, hundreds of thousands of windows need to be changed. Whatever practical skill one have could be brought to use. And in return, I imagine, the “self declared” (didn’t the US self declare them back in 1776? And many others ofc.) Republics would be easier to obtain residence permit. But they don’t need that much IT guys (for now), just real skills
Mariupol used to be live industrial city, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be one again. So, IT people will be needed too. IT is an integral part of modern infrastructure.
Therefore I wrote “for now”. As long as people and businesses don’t have normal electricity, what kind of IT can be applied? Abaccuse algorithms? I’m confident, there aren’t much job offerings for IT guys right now in M. But a huge number of others … War always shuffle priorities.
Right now of course no. Immigrating to Russia is complicated ’cause to get anything better than a tourist visa (work permit/temporary residence permit > residence permit> citizenship) one needs a certificate of passing a specific language test. As a Russian, I approve of this requirement, but it is tough.