More than 100,000 Russians have left the country since the beginning of the Ukraine war. IT specialists, analysts, researchers, artists and actors now live abroad, including in Germany. Putin’s policies drove them away – with catastrophic consequences for Russia.
Anna Demidova ran a theater in Moscow for many years, where she was also politically active. “I did everything I could to make people understand that we have a responsibility, that we should take part in political life,” she told Euronews. But when Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade Ukraine, Demidova gave up. For them, the invasion felt like all their efforts had been in vain. At the beginning of March, she drew the necessary conclusions and left her home country. Today she lives in Berlin.
There she meets many compatriots who have done the same for various reasons. Angelina Davydova, an environmental journalist from Saint Petersburg, fled in fear. “If I want to continue my work, I can either stay in Russia and have to be afraid every day when I say something publicly, or I leave the country – I chose the latter.” According to UNESCO, 55 journalists were in Russia last year killed. With the beginning of the Ukraine war, the numbers have increased.
The two women, who now live in Berlin, are in good company. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Russians have left the country since the beginning of the Ukraine war. Experts call it the “Russian Brain Drain” because those who leave are mostly highly qualified professionals: IT specialists, journalists, scientists, artists, actors, analysts and so on. Their reasons are varied, but for most of them the Ukraine war plays a decisive role.
The Levada Center, an opinion research institute from Moscow, asked young Russians about their plans at the beginning of March. At the time, 43 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they wanted to leave the country forever. Almost half cited the economic situation as the reason – a situation that is likely to have been exacerbated by ever stricter sanctions.
Berlin is just a port of call for those fleeing. Many of them, especially IT staff, have gone to Georgia. The former Soviet republic has only four million inhabitants, but recently reported the arrival of 80,000 Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. The majority arrived in Georgia after the start of the Ukraine war. They are in demand worldwide: The USA is considering relaxing visa regulations in order to allow IT specialists to work in the country. Companies in Israel, Dubai, Germany, Lisbon and London are vying for the talent.
The “brain drain” is historically an old pattern. Time and again it has been shown that the highly qualified are the first to leave a country whose government is plunging it into a crisis. That was the case in the 1930s, when the Jewish elite in particular left Germany after the Nazis took power, including Albert Einstein, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. The same thing happened in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe and scientists and artists alike fled to the West. And it can currently be observed not only in Russia but also in Hong Kong, where highly educated people want to escape the growing influence of China.
For small neighboring countries like Georgia, the exodus is a blessing. The national currency, the Georgian lari, has appreciated by 15 percent since the end of February, and deposits in bank accounts have reached a record level. The Georgian government is hoping for a sharp increase in tax revenue and thus funds to drive the country’s change forward.
For Russia, on the other hand, the “brain drain” is a catastrophe. “In the long term, this is likely to be the biggest problem for Russia’s economy,” Nikolai Roussanov, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Business Insider. “Educated people don’t like living in a dictatorship with censorship and restrictions on human rights,” says his colleague Oleg Itskhoki of the University of California at Los Angeles. The phenomenon is not new: since Putin took office 22 years ago, around two million young Russians have left the country. The Ukraine war only reinforces this trend now.
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For Russia, this means that its economy is weakening because there are fewer and fewer young people with the necessary skills in the country to develop innovative products or advance technologies. Recently, the Russian Google counterpart Yandex complained about a wave of layoffs because the Russian government tightened the control and censorship of Internet content.
“For ordinary Russians, this becomes incredibly faithful and painful,” says Itskhoki. He reckons it may be decades before the “brain drain” stops having an impact.
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