“Their Minds Only Work Backward in Time”

Since the start of the full‑scale invasion, the Russian government’s escalating repression has affected every segment of society. Between 2024 and 2025, the number of extremism‑related cases rose by 36% (from 360 to 489). The increase in terrorism‑related prosecutions was even more dramatic: by the end of 2024, courts had received 47 such cases, compared with 266 in 2025. Charges of treason are also becoming increasingly common. According to the human rights organization Pervy Otdel, Russian courts now send two people to prison every day on charges of treason or espionage. Russia is currently issuing more convictions under these statutes in a single month than it did during the entirety of 2022.

Most of these cases remain classified, making public scrutiny extremely difficult. Still, several particularly high‑profile prosecutions have received public attention. One example is the case of physicist Dmitry Kolker, who was convicted of treason and died from pancreatic cancer on the second day of his detention. His illness was terminal, and Russian law prohibits placing seriously or terminally ill defendants in pretrial detention centers regardless of the severity of the charges. The case sparked broad public outrage and drew the attention of human rights groups and the media.

The T‑invariant project maintains its own chronicle of the persecution of Russian scientists, and the list already contains 94 names.

The forms of persecution range from being designated a “foreign agent” or fined to facing criminal charges carrying enormous prison sentences. Graduate student Azat Miftakhov, from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University, is serving time in a penal colony on fabricated charges. Ukrainian oceanographer Leonid Pshenichnov, who was illegally detained by Russian police in Kerch, is also serving a sentence for treason despite not being a Russian citizen. Nuclear physicist Ruslan Shadiev received an 18‑year prison sentence on treason charges.

The basis for treason accusations has included everything from money transfers to Ukraine or to organizations designated as extremist or terrorist in Russia to the “disclosure of classified information” during professional contacts at conferences or through collaboration with foreign colleagues. The country involved does not matter: Dmitry Kolker was convicted for allegedly revealing state secrets to China, which official Russian rhetoric describes as a “friendly” nation. Many scientists who publicly opposed the war in Ukraine were forced to leave the country due to criminal charges and police pressure.

So the question remains: what is really happening today inside Russia’s academic institutions, and what do scientists who continue working in the country think about it? To better understand this, FRFThinkTank spoke with five researchers from different disciplines.

Several of the researchers interviewed, including those employed at state research institutes, insist that there is no mass, targeted persecution of scientists as a professional group. For those engaged in civilian research without access to classified information, working conditions have not fundamentally changed in recent years. Research involving dual‑use technologies or projects directly tied to the military‑industrial complex, however, has always occupied a special position.

Andrei (name changed), a professor in the Department of Higher Mathematics and a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, believes that treason cases involving employees of academic institutions are usually connected not to science itself, but to other issues, primarily economic ones. These may involve conflicts over defense contracts, dual‑use technologies, or projects the state has deemed failures.

He cites the case of physicist Oleg Kabov as an example of what he describes as “score‑settling”. According to investigators, Kabov — a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the Heat Transfer Intensification Laboratory at the Kutateladze Institute of Thermophysics — received a 26.8 million ruble grant from the Ministry of Science in 2014 to create a prototype experimental cooling system. Investigators claimed he failed to produce the prototype, falsified reports, and used 7 million rubles from the grant to pay bonuses to subordinates, who then allegedly returned the money to him. However, independent investigators found no trace of these sums, and in court, none of Kabov’s employees confirmed receiving such bonuses.

It later emerged that, in October 2018, Kabov’s former graduate student, Karapet Eloyan, informed an officer from the Novosibirsk branch of the Federal Security Service that the prototype required under the grant had never been built. On its own, the absence of a prototype in an academic project should not have attracted the attention of security services.

However, the Novosibirsk FSB office employed Alexei Kreta, a former member of Kabov’s laboratory and co‑author on scientific publications. Kreta left the lab after a conflict with Kabov in 2017 and reportedly promised a colleague he would “return to the institute in a different capacity.” Both Kreta and Kabov later confirmed these circumstances in court. Many institute employees recall Kreta repeatedly threatening Kabov and view the case as a deliberate attempt to eliminate a competitor. According to Andrei, the overwhelming majority of treason‑related prosecutions targeting researchers involved in military or dual‑use technologies resemble precisely this: disputes between competing economic actors.

Sociologist and historian Dmitry Dubrovsky, however, argues that researchers do not need ties to the defense industry to attract the attention of the security services. He points to the case of the Novosibirsk acoustics researchers accused of treason. The core problem, he says, is not access to classified information itself, but the total lack of clarity surrounding what constitutes a state secret:

T‑invariant confirms this assessment:

In an article about the Novosibirsk scientists, BBC News quoted a defense lawyer who said that experts sometimes classify “almost textbook‑level information” as state secrets:

It is also important to note that one of the grounds for prosecuting the Novosibirsk scientists was their collaboration with foreign colleagues. In the same BBC article, the researchers noted:

Dubrovsky adds that in most cases the transfers of information, trips abroad, and professional contacts had been approved in advance by the same “First Department” that later initiated the prosecutions. At the same time, Andrei says he knows of no cases in which a person with no access to classified information was imprisoned for treason simply for interacting with foreigners.

Dubrovsky believes that the general — and perhaps intentionally created — chaos surrounding state contracts is also responsible for cases involving grants, such as Kabov’s:

Such situations can easily become grounds for criminal prosecution, which is why many scientists no longer want to accept government funding.

Treason cases do not affect only the scientific community. Since the start of the full‑scale invasion, ordinary citizens have also faced such charges — for example, for sharing publicly available information about Russian troop movements in border regions with relatives or neighbors. Andrei believes that many cases involving scientists and charges of treason, terrorism, or extremism are connected to science insofar as the defendants happen to be scientists.

The actual trigger, he says, is usually either a person’s public anti‑war activity or political views — as in the case of Azat Miftakhov, who was accused of attacking an office of United Russia, or Leonid Kats, who was charged over a donation to a charity helping Ukrainian children.

Russian science was tightly controlled even before the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine. According to many of our interviewees, the presence of officers from the FSB and the so‑called Center for Combating Extremism inside research institutes has been somewhat of an “open secret” for years.

One of her colleagues agrees:

Dubrovsky agrees that “things were heading south long ago,” but argues that, as in many other spheres affected by growing state control, the situation has escalated:

At the same time, Andrei insists that there is still no formal ban on participating in international conferences, noting that he himself recently returned from one. In his view, the main problem is not FSB pressure but the drastic reduction of funding for all science except research directly serving the military machine. Other interviewees agree.

So, does that mean there is no real persecution of scientists and that science in Russia continues to develop, albeit in a more autonomous form?

Not exactly.

First, there is a fundamental difference between STEM research and the humanities. On the one hand, STEM fields still receive the largest grants and retain access to funding. On the other hand, nearly all treason cases connected to the actual content of scientific work involve STEM researchers. This is understandable, as discoveries in physics and other exact sciences may have dual‑use applications and can therefore easily be interpreted as sensitive or classified information.

Still, Andrei clarifies:

In the humanities, there has not yet been a single criminal case directly tied to the content of a dissertation or academic publication. However, there are many examples of politically active researchers involved in public education projects or who have openly opposed the war being pushed out of the institutions where they worked or labeled as foreign agents — including Dmitry Dubrovsky himself and social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova.

All of the researchers we interviewed, regardless of discipline, identified the absence of a clear and verifiable regulatory framework as one of the central problems of the contemporary academic environment. This uncertainty has become not a side effect, but an independent instrument of pressure.

If ambiguity in STEM disciplines is usually connected to issues of secrecy, clearance, and the possible dual‑use nature of research, then in the humanities, the danger zone shifts toward language, interpretation, and public visibility.

Formal bans may not exist, but the boundaries of what is acceptable are constantly shifting and vary from institution to institution. A phrase considered academically neutral today may become politically sensitive tomorrow, without any legal changes. This uncertainty manifests at every level, from course titles and research topics to conferences, publications, and public education projects.

As a result, scholars often abandon potentially controversial topics, formulations, or projects in advance — not because they are explicitly prohibited, but because the consequences are impossible to predict.

Gender studies and history — particularly the history of Russia and the Soviet Union — are amongst the fields most affected by this self‑censorship.

Gender studies encompass a broad range of disciplines that examine gender as a social construct: the expectations, norms, roles, and patterns associated with people perceived as male or female. These studies belong to cultural studies, sociology, and history rather than biology. Certain areas also include queer and LGBTQ history and culture. After LGBTQ people as a whole were suddenly declared an “extremist organization,” the official publication of such work became effectively impossible.

Yet, as often happens with self‑censorship, attempts to anticipate the desires of state authorities and eliminate “incorrect” vocabulary from public discourse began long before that. This is how Ella Rossman describes the situation:

The word “gender” itself is increasingly being removed from public discourse and replaced with euphemisms.

Her colleague confirms this:

One interviewee has repeatedly failed to defend a thesis on contemporary Russian drag culture:

There are also paradoxical situations in which posthumanism becomes associated with “queerness,” preventing people from defending dissertations on the subject.

At the same time, while anything connected to LGBTQ culture or gender performativity faces severe censorship, feminism itself — especially in a historical context — and research into femininity do not yet provoke the same level of hostility. Still, they too suffer from censorship.

Another potentially explosive subject is the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, especially topics involving mass repression, deportations, forced resettlement, and the Second World War. Historical scholarship has long served as a propaganda tool — and not only in the USSR. But in recent years, the situation has become increasingly tense, and since the beginning of the full‑scale invasion, it has edged close to criminal liability. Russian authorities react nervously to any ideas associated with “separatism.”

As part of efforts to impose a unified ideological narrative, the state introduced a special course titled “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.” The course is mandatory for students in all disciplines, both technical and humanities‑based.

In 2022, the human rights organization Memorial was shut down by court order in Russia, and in 2024 the Gulag History Museum closed. These are clear signals from the state about how Soviet repression and the Great Terror are expected to be interpreted. Nevertheless, scholars have not entirely abandoned work on these subjects, although it has become far more difficult: access to FSB archives is now impossible.

For many people still working in academia, the question of whether to leave or stay remains unresolved. People live in this suspended state for years: with open résumés, half‑packed suitcases, temporary contracts, and the feeling that no decision is ever final.

She believes the goal of current state policy is “to get rid of all of us so we stop being an eyesore with our inconvenient research.”

For some, leaving is a way to preserve their profession. For others, it is an attempt to save the remnants of the work they managed to complete before censorship intensified. In both cases, the decision is driven less by ideology than by practical necessity.

Andrei, however, views the situation more optimistically and has no plans to emigrate:

Russian STEM researchers face particular difficulties finding work abroad, Dubrovsky notes, even though their expertise is in demand:

He views the future of Russian science inside the country with little optimism: