The Kremlin Assault on Merit

обществу пытаются завязать глаза.

“The problem is not that we might get closed down and be forced to look for a new job. The problem is that they are trying to put a blindfold on society.”

Alexei Levinson, a senior employee at Levada Center, which has been accused of being a foreign agent. (Bolshoi Gorod)

Having waged campaigns against street protesters and foreign-funded NGOs, the Kremlin is apparently worried about other forms of independent thought, namely researchers and intellectuals who value scientific merit above political needs.

Prosecutors have attacked the independent group of sociologists at Levada Center, the only pollster in Russia that is not directly state-funded and publishes near daily survey results. According to official prosecutor warnings, publishing polls about domestic politics is “political activity,” and Levada must register as a “foreign agent” under the contentious new law on NGOs, because it has done polls for foreign companies. Levada, a respected and successful company, said it may close due to this political pressure, though at press time it is continuing to publish polling results on various current issues and asking Russian citizens for private contributions so that it can begin polling ahead of Moscow’s mayoral elections.

Another Russian pollster, FOM, was caught red-handed when it deleted its own study from its website, one that showed that 37 percent of Russians under 30 want to leave the country for good. An independent blogger exposed the self-censorship, having unearthed the deleted page from server caches. bit.ly/FOMstudy

The desire to control research has spread beyond sociology. In a move that received next to no publicity, the government changed the rules regulating the way grants from abroad are doled out to Russian scientists. Foreign grants now have to jump through a multitude of bureaucratic hoops, such that foreign funders essentially need to petition the Russian government for permission to fund any research, then wait for a decision.

The move is likely to drive those young scientists still working in Russia out, to avoid humiliation, biologist Ivan Shatsky told gazeta.ru. “What pushes young people out of the country is not so much the financial aspect, but the growing bureaucratic pressure and a perception of growing stupidity,” he said. “Controlling foreign grants is another example of cretinism and impudence.”

When Education Ministry official Igor Fedyukin began a campaign against the ingrained practice of issuing fake and plagiarized dissertations, a cancer on Russia’s science community, he received such a counterattack from various politicians (who often pad their resumes with such “degrees”), that he was pushed to resign. Vedomosti called it “The victory of imitators” over true scientific merit and professionalism.

Finally, a recent incident shows that it may actually be dangerous to draw expert conclusions that do not agree with current political need. Sergei Guriev, a successful economist, and one of the most often cited Russian scientists and dean of the acclaimed New Economic School, has fled the country. His crime? Issuing an expert opinion on the case against jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as commissioned by the Kremlin in 2011, when Dmitry Medvedev was still waxing poetic about modernization. After crossing the border and announcing that he would stay in France for the foreseeable future, the moderate Guriev told a story of humiliating searches, threats, and seizure of personal emails, all because he and other experts concluded that the case against Khodorkovsky was unfounded.

“Those specific people who want to work honestly, not march to one tune, to freely travel and feel like individuals rather than part of a grey mass — it’s time for them to think about the fate of the country and their own future. If someone files them under liberals — they are doomed,” wrote columnist Semyon Novoprudsky.