Understanding Russia’s Brain Drain in the 2010s

ABSTRACT

This article is based on a study that sought to understand the ways in which the highly skilled and young professionals who emigrated from Russia in the 2010s explain and narrate their decision to leave the country. I draw on interviews with these professionals to map out their strategies of presenting and explaining the choice of specific developments to be cast as the turning points on their trajectory toward emigration. As the study demonstrates, most of them saw their personal circumstances as embedded within the broader political and social context they experienced in Russia. An important dimension of the story is their sense of what they present as inability to change their personal circumstances in Russia and the lack of prospects for broader changes.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dmitry Oparin and Daniel Kashnitsky for the wonderful experience of jointly conducting field research, and I appreciate helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Experts estimate (Vorobyeva and Grebenyuk 2017) that twice as many Russians went abroad in the 1990s as the official statistics would lead us to believe. These estimates do not include Russian citizens who went abroad to study or work on a temporary contract and did not return.

2. I conducted semi-structured interviews. The guide included such sections as Biography, Traveling Abroad, Living Abroad, Transnational Practices, Russia Abroad, Problems That Encouraged Departure, Vision of the Future. For each set of topics I asked open-ended questions. At the end, I returned to the question about the reasons for emigration that the informant deemed important for him/her.

Additional information

Funding

The article was prepared in the framework of a research grant funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (grant ID: 075-15-2020-928).