Russia’s Future Is Fleeing

As the Delta Air Lines flight from New York taxied toward the gate at Sheremetyevo Airport, Maria Mikhailova checked her lipstick, fluffed her hennaed hair and heaved a dejected sigh, snapping shut her mirrored compact.

“I hate my country,” the 21-year-old economics student said as she gazed with disgust toward the dimly lighted terminal. “I’m excited about seeing my family again, but I just cannot live here anymore.”

She was just back for a visit after her first three months at Harvard--an educational opportunity unthinkable for Russians not that long ago and one that has cost her hard-working parents dearly.

Her disdain for her homeland could prove to be fleeting, a natural youthful preference for peace and comfort elsewhere while Russia works through its post-totalitarian growing pains.

But if Mikhailova and thousands of other young people from the urban elite now studying abroad opt to stay there, the exodus would exact a heavy toll on Russia’s hopes for a democratic future.

The real price for their foreign education may come not in the form of a tuition bill but in the loss of the contribution that the best and the brightest could make here.

Like many members of the emerging privileged class who have come of age at a time when Russia has open borders, Mikhailova has had the chance to compare the hardships at home with the abundance abroad and has come to the conclusion that a life of sacrifice is just not for her.

“I want to live in America or England or France, but not here,” she said with finality. “I don’t believe anything good will ever be created in Russia.”

Among the first beneficiaries of Russia’s newfound capitalism, children of those who thrive in that climate are leaving the country in droves to study in security and start careers where they might be better rewarded. Disillusioned by what they see as the stunted growth of democracy and a neo-Communist drift, the teens and twentysomethings of Moscow and St. Petersburg are using their parents’ prosperity to plot an escape.

The threat of being drafted for duty in deadly Chechnya, the explosion of crime and violence in Russian cities, the corruption of their once-respected educational institutions--all are cited by the young people and their parents as reasons to give up and get out.

Already drained of its vaunted scientists and artists since the barriers to emigration fell, Russia could now be threatened with the loss of its most promising young people.

Estimates of the number of Russian students abroad are hard to come by because there is no central agency here overseeing foreign study. But more than 2,000 visas are issued for Russian students by the U.S. Consulate each year; many times that number are thought to be enrolled in private European institutions. The only deterrents for young Russians who decide to stay abroad are the legal and economic conditions they encounter in other countries.

Evidence of the exodus is mostly anecdotal, but virtually every successful businessperson encountered in Moscow argues that the best investment one can make for one’s children is foreign study to give them language skills that will be needed for the best jobs in the future.

And with terrorism spreading deep into the heartland and hostage-taking incidents in the cities almost a daily occurrence, sending young people away for their education gives many parents a sense that they are protecting them.

“Many new businessmen here are in a position to send their children abroad for education,” said Alexander A. Shevchenko, head of the Moscow office of the international student exchange program Youth for Understanding.

Even families of modest means can take advantage of exchange programs that have mushroomed since the barriers to international travel fell along with hard-line communism.

Shevchenko estimated that costs for a year of high school as an exchange student begin at about $6,000--a veritable fortune for most Russians but, in the view of many parents, a cause worth saving for. At $15,000 per year and up, a university education abroad is restricted to the minuscule percentage made up of Russia’s richest or to those who have been successful in hunting down scholarships or grants abroad.

But common among both the rich kids and the offspring of hard-working intellectuals amid the current insecurities is a weakening desire to return to try to build a better Russia.

“I don’t feel any obligation to this country,” Masha Zarakhovich, 20, a junior on scholarship at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga., said during a visit home for the winter holidays. “The only patriotic feelings I have are for my parents, for the apartment where I grew up, for my friends--certainly not for the government. I hate the government.”

Those whose expectations of freedom and opportunity were forged in the heady decade since reform supplanted repression in Russia say they feel little loyalty to a country that has been engaged in political and military folly as long as they can remember.

Anton Anixt hasn’t been back here since he left for his freshman year at Harvard nearly six years ago. One of the first young Russians in the post-Communist era to graduate from an American university, the 23-year-old has been working as a financial management consultant in New York since earning his bachelor’s degree nearly two years ago.

“Returning to Russia someday is a theoretical possibility, but it’s not an idea I’m toying with at the moment,” Anixt said in a telephone interview from London, where he was visiting his parents, who have also emigrated. “I retain a curiosity about Russia, but if you ask me if I feel a strong pull back to where I come from, I’d have to say no.”

Anixt conceded that much of the attraction is the cushier lifestyle in the United States.

“You take a lot of the conveniences for granted, like ATMs--things that don’t exist or are just dawning on Russia,” he said.

For others, it is the grime, moral corruption and criminal infiltration of society that deter youths from planning for a future here.

Dmitri Bogatyrev, who is studying civil engineering at Moscow State University, argued that the quality of higher education has suffered tremendously in recent years because the economic crisis has fostered bribery and cheating.

“At MSU, a diploma costs $10,000 [for a bribe]. Everyone knows this. At lesser schools, you can buy one for $7,000,” said Bogatyrev, who attended high school in New York while his father, a television correspondent, was working there. “These degrees used to mean something, but not anymore.”

He also blamed the sorry state of Russian higher education on the nation’s lack of support for it. “How can the government keep the best professors when they pay $30 or $50 a month?” he asked.

The declining prestige of Russian higher education is only part of Bogatyrev’s desire to secure a scholarship to study in the United States. He echoes the concerns of most who have had the chance to experience life elsewhere--that Russia is too unstable to give graduates confidence that hard work and ability are enough to enable them to succeed.

“For the next 10 or 20 years, nothing will change here,” said Bogatyrev, who changed his last name from a more recognizably Jewish one because he felt it was an obstacle to success in increasingly nationalist Russia.

Foremost among the fears fueling the outflow of students is the Kremlin’s campaign against separatist Chechnya, where an estimated 20,000 people have been killed in the past year. Russian conscripts--the 18- and 19-year-olds obliged to serve two years in the army--are making up an increasing share of the casualties.

Larissa Makhotkina wanted her son Lyubomir, 17, to learn English and have the chance to study without the threat of army service hanging over his head. She first sent him to successive summer sessions of Boy Scout camp in Maine and now has him lodged with a Gloucester, Mass., family while he finishes his senior year of high school.

“I never wanted to be a martyr. I wasn’t ready to die for the cause of ‘global revolution,’ ” the 38-year-old travel agent recalled mockingly of the Communist-era concept of patriotism. “And I don’t want my son sacrificed either.”

If Russia ever gets through its tumultuous transition and creates a more secure social environment, “then all these people will come back,” Makhotkina predicted of her son and other young people now living abroad.

Aside from the security concerns, Makhotkina said she admires the American educational system for the self-confidence it engenders and the more positive role models to which her son will be exposed.

“I don’t want him to develop the attitudes toward women that Russian men have,” she said.

Students such as Lyuba Khomskaya, 20, a senior at Hanover College in Hanover, Ind., confirm that cultural differences tend to be an attraction rather than a barrier.

“There is so much more sexism here than in America! I never noticed before,” she said during a recent visit to her homeland. “I worry that if I do come back, I won’t get the job I want right away, in part because I’m a woman.”

Nevertheless, she said she would like to return to Russia to find work at an international law firm after completing her undergraduate education and law school.

“I think the problems are temporary. This is only the first stage of capitalism,” Khomskaya said. “As people acquire capital, they will want to protect it, so they will push for more law and order.”

Her father is a successful theater director, her mother a well-known actress. Although they say they cannot foresee leaving Russia, they accept that their daughter will make her own choices.

“In some respects, I feel better when she is in America, because she is so much safer,” said Natalya Kindinova, Khomskaya’s mother. “I’m a nervous wreck when she’s home to visit and stays out late at night.”

Random crime has soared in the volatile years since Russia threw off hard-line communism, but the more heinous attacks have been aimed at the newly rich.

“For the very wealthy and successful, having their children away in Europe or America is not just prestigious, it’s a matter of comfort,” said Shevchenko, the exchange program director. “They don’t have to worry about them being taken hostage.”

That concern is a prime motivation for banker Alexander Grebnev, whose son has been attending a private British boarding school in preparation for study at Oxford.

“When my son is here, I have to have him accompanied by armed guards at all times,” the self-made financier said from his opulent office in a prerevolutionary mansion. “Whereas in England, he can drive himself to school and go wherever he wants without having to watch around him.”

Security, both physical and financial, also rates as the major concern among parents of more modest means.

Viktor Grigoriev, a Moscow lawyer, couldn’t afford to send his son Vadim, 17, to the United States to study, so he has enrolled him for a three-year course at the American Tourism College in Cyprus, where the training mixes classes with paid work in hotels, restaurants and bars. After the trade school, Grigoriev hopes his son will have the savings and language skills to get an economics degree in Britain.

“I would prefer that he came back here to start his career, but for that we need the right of ownership and all the legalities that are still missing in our system,” the lawyer said.

He described the uncertainties clouding Russia’s business future as “childhood illnesses” that will probably pass with time, perhaps even in the five years or so his son will be away studying.

While parents hope for improvement and students ponder contingencies, Russian education officials acknowledge the risk and consequences of a youthful brain drain.

“Of course we are concerned,” said Mikhail Myasnikov, chief of the foreign relations department of the State Committee for Higher Education. “It always hurts to lose something that belongs to you, especially your young people and their idealistic values. But once we decided to become a democratic country, we had to come to terms with this problem.”

Myasnikov blames crime, insecurity and the war in Chechnya for hindering the growth of a sense of commitment to Russia among the young.

“When television shows Russian soldiers in a war zone and themselves not understanding why they are shooting at other citizens of Russia, this hardly encourages a sense of patriotism,” he said.

Parents of Russians studying abroad concede that the country will lose much of its promise for the future if the most privileged and educated youths decide against returning. But they justify relocating their children as a parent’s natural protectiveness overpowering the amorphous goal of rebuilding the country.

“I believe there is a lot of opportunity here,” said Makhotkina, the travel agent. “But my son is not a guinea pig. I’ll let him make his own decisions.”