Dissident Russian scholars find a new academic home
Last week, as news of the death, in prison, of Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, broke, Ilya Matveev drafted a statement.
“I am devastated and crushed,” Matveev wrote, placing the blame on the government of President Vladimir Putin.
Matveev, a Russian scholar and activist, ended his comments on an optimistic note: “While today feels incredibly dark,” he wrote, “I can only hope for a day when streets are named after Alexei, there is a national day of remembrance, and a memorial. This would be only fitting.”
Matveev did not pen the statement in Moscow, where he grew up, or in St. Petersburg, where he was an associate professor and deputy dean of international cooperation at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Instead, he was more than 6,000 miles away, in Berkeley, Calif., where he and another dissident Russian professor, Ilya Budraitskis, are sponsored by a group of University of California faculty members.
Matveev never intended to become an academic in exile. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, however, he knew it was no longer safe for him to stay in his country. He and Budraitskis had written essays critical of the Russian government and joined in public protests.
He also knew he was at risk for his teaching. Matveev had kept his activism separate from his intellectual work. But in present-day Russia, teaching evenhandedly about current events, as Matveev did in a course on modern Russian politics, “still was kind of a political act,” he said. “I was not pushing any ideas or political opinion in class, just discussing the state of research at the time. But it was political because of the environment, because it was in contradiction with the propaganda.”
Matveev left Russia for Turkey, where Russians can travel without a visa. He did not know what would happen next. “No one has plans anymore in Russia and Ukraine,” he said.
Matveev had befriended a pair of Berkeley professors eight years earlier when he took a course by Melanie Feakins, a professor of geography, at European University, in St. Petersburg, where she was on a Fulbright fellowship. He got to know Feakins and her husband, Alexei Yurchak, an anthropology professor, better when he spent a semester at Berkeley on a research fellowship as a graduate student.
Yurchak and Feakins thought it was crucial that Matveev and Budraitskis, who had also fled to Turkey, be able to continue their research and writing on authoritarianism and Russian politics.
“They are the future,” Yurchak told Berkeley News. “Putin’s regime will collapse. We need to have these voices. And they need to be heard in Russia and the West.”
They enlisted other faculty members and campus officials to sponsor the two academics, with help from the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund. Finally, after more than a year of red tape and visa delays, Matveev arrived in California last April.
He and Budraitskis are now writing a book, examining Russia’s war with Ukraine in the context of Russian imperialism, and they host a Russian-language podcast, Political Diary.
When his two-year appointment at Berkeley ends, Matveev said he would look for an academic job, in the United States or Europe. The brain drain of scholars and scientists from Russia is a blow for the country, he said. “It is another catastrophe, another disaster.”
Matveev, who once organized international partnerships and exchanges, added that he hopes western academics would maintain ties with individual Russian researchers, the majority of whom, he said, do not support the Russian government.