Russia faces growing brain drain after restrictions
Citizens flee nation’s edicts
MOSCOW — For most of the last decade, Igor Gladkoborodov worked his way up in Moscow’s vibrant high-tech scene, going from Wweb developer to cofounder of an online-video startup that drew $3.5 million in local funding.
Earlier this year, he abandoned Moscow for Menlo Park, Calif., joining a growing flow of professionals leaving Russia amid recession, deepening international isolation and tightening regulation of the Internet.
“Five years ago, there was still hope that things would change for the better,” said Gladkoborodov, 32, who moved with his wife and two young sons. “Now it’s clear that Russia is facing a long, systemic crisis,” he added.
In Silicon Valley, he said he regularly meets others from Moscow who’ve left.
Official statistics show the number of Russian citizens leaving permanently or for more than nine months reached 53,235 in 2014, up 11 percent and the highest in nine years. Germany, the United States and Israel all have reported increases in the number of applications for immigration visas from Russia.
Publicly, the Kremlin has dismissed concerns about any brain drain. Still, the subject is sensitive in a country with deep scientific traditions now looking to educated workers and advanced technologies to help diversify its slumping economy from dependence on natural resources.
In June, President Vladimir Putin called for a crackdown on foreign groups he accused of “working like a vacuum cleaner” to lure scholars into emigration. Departures of academics have spiked in the last year and a half, Vladimir Fortov, president of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, told state television in March.
The outflow goes beyond the high-tech sector, which was showered with Kremlin attention and support under former President Dmitry Medvedev but has seen tightening restrictions since Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. Financial and legal professionals also are leaving, according to lawyers and consultants.
Eli Gervitz, a Tel Aviv lawyer who has helped Russian Jews get Israeli citizenship since the late 1990s, said interest in his services surged after Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea in March 2014, setting off the worst conflict with the West since the Cold War.
“More than 90 percent of those who now come to us for help obtaining Israeli citizenship are successful, wealthy people,” he said, calling the latest tide “Putin’s aliyah,” using the Hebrew word for Jews returning to the homeland.
While the flow of immigrants to Israel won’t ever match the peaks of the postSoviet flood of the 1990s, he said, “we’re already well beyond that level if we measure in terms of money” — the wealth of those leaving.
The Israeli Ministry of Absorption said applications for citizenship have doubled since the early 2000s and are up 30 percent since the last time Russia fell into recession in 2009.
Russia’s financial sector, hit by U.S. and European sanctions amid the Ukraine crisis, has seen a major exodus, according to industry officials. Vitaly Baikin, 32, gave up a job at Gazprombank, one of the sanctioned institutions, to go to business school in New York City this fall.
“Capital markets in Russia have ceased to exist,” he said by phone the day before his departure. “I don’t see how this situation can improve in the coming years.”
The number of political refugees has also grown as the Kremlin has cracked down on political opponents and independent media.
“Kremlin policy is forcing the educated class to choose: Either line up under the banner of war with the West or leave,” said Alexander Morozov, a Moscow political scientist who this year dropped plans to return to Russia after a temporary assignment in the Czech Republic and moved to Germany.
In the high-tech sector, official pressure ranges from laws allowing regulators to block access to websites to criminal probes into alleged financial misdeeds at Skolkovo, a startup incubator set up under Medvedev.
For Gladkoborodov, the economic slowdown and limited growth prospects for his company in Russia contributed to his decision to leave. As a high-tech entrepreneur, he said the tightening regulation of the Internet was particularly alarming.