moscow

The Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, has expressed concern that the continued exodus of scientists — and the resulting decline in the strength and prestige of Russian science — has become a threat to national security.

Presiding over a meeting of the Security Council in Moscow last week, Yeltsin pointed out that about 50 of the country's 100 best known scientists had left Russia.

“The ‘brain-drain’ still continues, although not as intensively as earlier,” he said. “This is leading to dangerous consequences, both economic and political, since our intellectual and spiritual resources are being exhausted.”

Yeltsin's concerns are based on the fact that, although a growing number of students and postgraduates are being temporarily sent abroad by the government to study at foreign universities, many postgraduates and researchers at Russian universities are choosing to leave the country permanently.

Yeltsin is reported to have started to discuss the brain-drain problem spontaneously — it was not on the agenda of the Security Council meeting. In an address lasting almost two hours, he also expressed concern that Russia's education system does not produce enough scientists. He warned members of the council that Russia may lose its technological independence as a result.

Yeltsin said he was dissatisfied with the efforts of federal ministries and other government bodies to reform science. He demanded that all scientific organizations immediately be paid all the money owed to them by the state, even within the present restricted budget.

A report prepared for Yeltsin by the Science Statistics Research Centre of the Ministry of Science and Technologies says that Russia is continuing to lose its strategic scientific potential at an increasing rate.

Since the beginning of the decade, 2,000 individuals engaged in science and education have left the country each year, and overall Russian science has lost about 40 per cent of its top level researchers.

Unesco estimates the cost to Russia of this brain-drain as US$30 billion. But the country no longer has the ability to restore such intellectual losses, as its universities receive only 5 per cent of government funds allotted for science.

This, in turn, means that public interest in science is low. A survey by the statistics centre showed that only 2 per cent of scientists expect young researchers to join their laboratories. And half of those questioned had not heard about recent scientific achievements such as cloning.

Commenting on Yeltsin's remarks, Vladimir Aleksandrov, deputy rector of Moscow State University, admitted that 10 per cent of its scientists are now abroad.

According to Vladimir Kryuchkov, former chief of the KGB (State Security Committee), “unofficial sources and unpublished information” to which he had access indicated that 200,000 scientists left the former Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991.

Vitaly Goldansky, a counsellor to the Russian Academy of Sciences, challenged this figure, suggesting that there were only “a few tens of thousands” of such people. But he admitted that “it is not the figure that matters, but the fact that they were the most able and talented scientists”.