Russia's Science Crisis

__"Rough Times in Russia: Post-Soviet Science Faces a New Crisis" by Dan Vergano, in Science News (May 10, 1997), 1719 N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.__

American scientists may bemoan the tighter research budgets of the post-Cold War era, but their plight is nothing next to that of their Russian counterparts. "Of all the people reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union," writes Vergano, a science writer, "scientists rank among those who have fallen the furthest in terms of pay, prestige, and professional opportunity."

In 1991, the Soviet Union boasted a scientific work force of 1.5 million people, and a big research budget, as much as 80 percent of it for military projects. Since then, the number of working scientists, Vergano reports, has plummeted by an estimated 600,000, or 40 percent.

Western security analysts had feared an exodus of Russian scientists to other nations, he says, but "an internal brain drain" has taken place instead. Economist Irina Dezhina, of Moscow’s Institute for the Economy in Transition, estimates that for every researcher who leaves the country, 10 have jumped into businesses such as banking or computer sales. The Soviet Union probably had three times as many scientists as necessary, says Harley Balzer, a regional specialist at Georgetown University, but it is largely the "creative" ones who are getting out of the field. "Russian science is deteriorating faster than I can write about it," he claims.

U.S. and other Western aid has helped to keep Russian nuclear scientists from taking their knowledge to hostile nations, Vergano notes. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, for example, supports some 2,000 former weapons scientists in an effort to direct their research into other fields. The International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, funded by the U.S. State Department, has spent $121 million for the same purpose.

For most Russian scientists, however, the situation is grim indeed. One-fourth of the country’s 4,500 science institutes received no funding from Moscow at all last year. In some locations, scientists went on hunger strikes. The director of a nuclear weapons laboratory, reportedly despondent over his inability to pay his researchers, killed himself.

The science institutes are sometimes part of the problem. "Horror stories abound," Vergano writes, "of scientists who win rare grants, only to see the funds disappear to pay utility bills or even, as many suspect, to line the pockets of administrators."