Once-Pampered Intellectuals Get a Hard Lesson

After long days in the emptying institutes of this birch-shaded Siberian enclave, the academic elite of post-Communist Russia can be seen loosening their ties and reaching for buckets and shovels.

The gardens, which surround this city full of think tanks, offer a bucolic escape for some weary professors, such as aerophysicist Anatoly Kharitonov. He finds working in the dirt and sun the perfect antidote to his frustrations over his institute’s brain drain and dwindling budget.

But for others, like organic chemistry professor Vladislav Vlasov, the boom in gentleman farming here represents the ultimate degradation of the intelligentsia, a forced return to the peasantry to ensure that their families will eat.

As is the case throughout the distant provinces that are the true laboratories of Russia’s experiments with democracy and capitalism, the fate of its intellectuals is difficult to gauge. But more than prosperity, what scientists here have lost in this nation’s economic transition is prestige, and many fear that they will not recover professional glory in their lifetimes.

Assignment to the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences was as hallowed an honor as an academic could wish for in the Soviet era. When laborers elsewhere were crammed into dehumanizing communal apartments, scientists--then engaged in the all-important race for space and the Soviet quest for military supremacy--were accorded rarefied perquisites such as spacious offices and private housing. In those days, shops in this prestigious research enclave were better stocked than those in Moscow and the cosseted residents had priority for purchasing everything from plane tickets to televisions.

Today, about the only perks that survive are the fresh air and country atmosphere that distinguish this settlement from the sooty centers of industrial production.

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But even amid the deep funding cutbacks inflicted by a cash-strapped federal government, some inhabitants hail their country’s defection from central planning as a liberation of the best minds of Russia. “If you look elsewhere in the world, market economies produce a much higher standard of living than planned economies,” Kharitonov says. “We can expect this eventually, even if the benefits are not visible now.”

He points to his own college-educated children who have left for business opportunities in Smolensk and Moscow as examples of how scientists in the capitalist age are more likely to be integrated into a corporate structure than ensconced in isolation at remote government campuses such as this one.

The halls of Akademgorodok’s 80 research institutes are, indeed, less traveled these days, as the number of academics has tumbled from 56,000 in the 1980s to 33,000 today. The population is also graying as younger specialists leave to go to private business. Since state funding began to shrink in 1991, the average age of the scientists has risen by 10 years--to 57.

Purists like Yuri Shokin, the Siberian academy’s acting director, mourn the reductions in and graying of the experts here as evidence of eroding values in this country; he sees them as proof that the emphasis now is on commercial activities, not on science and education.

“Science, in any society, depends on financing from the government, and our country’s efforts to reorient the economy carry significant risks,” says Shokin, who has lived here since Akademgorodok’s founding in 1957.

He cites research into health care and environmental protection as two spheres suffering for lack of funding, which he says has dropped to one-twelfth of its Soviet level.

But those young people still plotting careers here believe that academia will survive, even flourish, once the national economy improves.

“Everything will be fine. We live in a beautiful place, and we both have jobs,” insists Natalya Dyachenko, a newlywed scraping by on $200 a month from her child-care job and her husband’s research post at the Biotechnology Institute. “You only have to look at the changes that have made life better in the bigger cities to see what’s ahead for us.”

The disillusioned elders of Akademgorodok tend to overlook the cushions that have been put out to break the funding free fall for science. The Open Society Institute, bankrolled by philanthropist George Soros, has spent $100 million on projects in Russia. Akademgorodok has been a favored recipient, from housing privatization aid to a new Internet center on the campus, says Semen Musher, director of Soros communications projects.

He sees an irreversible, if arduous, course toward recovery for Russian science but warns against discounting the fears and frustrations of those older than 40. Middle-aged and older Russians often feel that they have too much invested in the old system to blithely give up on it as a failure.

While there is support for the young and ambitious, Musher concedes that he cannot think of a single program designed to assist the elderly anywhere in the country. They are the most frequent victims of Russia’s economic transition. “This group is especially vulnerable and the most difficult to help,” Musher says. “They have the impression they worked their whole lives for nothing and, now that the country is onto a new track, that nobody needs them.”

Indeed, in any conversation here, it is clear that intellectuals are deeply distressed about the effects on their professional life of Russia’s disengagement from its dependence on an all-powerful state. But the transition was less traumatic for some disciplines than others.

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At the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Deputy Director Eduard Kruglyakov boasts that his researchers were “the first capitalists in the socialist camp.” As far back as the late 1960s, the institute was allowed to keep a small percentage of the profits from sales of its accelerators to foreign manufacturers of products as diverse as aircraft, water purification systems and pipelines.

“We’ve been carrying out profitable research for years,” says physicist-turned-salesman Kruglyakov. “But, obviously, the transition has been easier for institutes like ours, with services and products to market, than for those facilities engaged in more theoretical activities.”

Perhaps, ironically, because so many scientists here have become opponents of the transition, Akademgorodok was the intellectual incubator for the economic reforms that have been shaking up Russia for nearly a decade. It was from the Economics Institute here that former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev drafted Abel Aganbegyan in 1985 to design a strategy for shifting Russia away from the economic dictates of communism that were driving the country into ruin.

But from the flower sellers outside the Scientists’ Club to the deans of the vaunted institutes, few here blame the architects of perestroika for the shambles that they see in modern Russia.

“It wasn’t the reforms that were wrong but the way they were carried out,” says Kruglyakov, singing a refrain that can be heard across Russia. “A criminal network has been allowed to fill the void of Communist power in the country, rather than the democrats we thought we were electing.”

Like millions in the provinces, he has given up on the Kremlin and the federal government to put the country’s economy in order. “Russia is too big to be managed effectively,” he says. “We just have to take charge of our own little pieces and do the best we can to get around the obstacles. This is the way things always have been done in Russia.”