"There" with a return ticket

From all the materials I have read, I still don’t understand why so much effort and time was spent on the recent conference on the diaspora in St. Petersburg, as well as on existing or planned organizations to unite the diaspora...

I have always been wary of the creation of special organizations to perform special, but unclear functions. For me, such approaches are justified if a new bureau (committee, council, etc.) gets the opportunity to concentrate in one place everything that is needed to achieve a certain result, but provided that the source of resources is transparent and the mechanism of action of this organization clear and meaningful.

Just imagine: in accordance with the spirit of the times, a special Center is being created to provide readers with scientific literature on an on demand basis via e-mail. For money, of course. For example, you open an electronic catalog on your computer - for starters, let it be the National Library of Russia (which is in St. Petersburg), find the card you need, send a request to the Center, they answer you: this book in digitized form will be sent to you in a week, transfer us n rubles. It would be nice, wouldn't it? Or here’s another thing: a well-organized visa center. You download the form, fill it out, and sign up online for a specific time. Having found out (also online) how to get there, you buy insurance at the same Center, then with the number in your hands you sit in a spacious hall, watching the light board, then you hand in the papers at the window, pay for the visa + services, and then via the Internet you'll find out if everything is okay. If yes, then you come and in 10 minutes you receive your passport with a visa. (This is how I recently applied for a short-term visa, having a private invitation from my friends - once Russian scientists who have been part of the diaspora for twenty years.)

And now I need to go to Germany, where I don’t have close friends who can send me a private invitation. But I have a colleague there - also from the diaspora - and a plan for common work that cannot be realized through correspondence. What should I do?

Let’s leave aside the issue of money for now: let’s say I’m ready to travel at my own expense, but still not as a tourist. I need a library, preferably a university one, and it would be nice to live on the university campus (in the summer it is almost empty). As you know, these good intentions do not provide grounds to apply to the consulate for a Schengen visa - after all, I am not invited to give lectures or make a presentation. This is where the organizational support and mediation of the currently non-existent, relatively speaking, Russian Committee for Cooperation with the Diaspora would come in handy.

Someone from such a “Committee” would have to call the Department of Cultural Attaché and ask what cover letters to write for “Frau Professor from the Russian Academy of Sciences”, who would like to work in the library of the University of N. in order to write an article (book, report etc.) together with Professor NN of the same University. It is unlikely that the Committee would have refused me - this is not a party bureau (more about it below). And I don’t ask him for money!

So, with these letters—i.e. a kind of guarantee - and, of course, with a passport, application form, insurance, certificate of employment, etc. I would go to the appropriate visa center (that is, I would contact the consulate, which the cultural attaché department should have already notified of my intentions).

Does this idea seem strange to you? But is cooperation with the diaspora only an invitation to people from there to come here? And there?

No, of course, people go there in droves, but a reasonably organized working trip today is possible mainly for those of our scientists who are officially invited by foreign institutions, which, I note, is very promising: de jure - for everyone; de facto - just for further replenishment of the diaspora.

In the already distant years of 90 and 91 - just during the formation of this very scientific diaspora - I still managed to travel for work purposes to such different countries as Sweden, Australia, Switzerland and Germany. Moreover, it was only in Switzerland that I was officially sent to a large international congress, as part of the then Soviet delegation. I got to other places in non-trivial ways, since a private trip there for scientific purposes did not exist for people of my rank in the USSR. Although even then the rank was not so small - a professor with 35 years of work experience at the USSR Academy of Sciences.

It is worth mentioning the "mechanisms" of these trips, since they are quite typical. I went to Sweden as a “disinterested expert” to prepare (select reports) for the next conference of COL-ING - the Association of Computational Linguistics Specialists. Moreover, in accordance with the rules of this organization, travel was paid, but I had to live in Stockholm at my own expense (I described this story in the book “I Have No Time”), and only a character who was obviously not associated with COLING could invite me privately: this must was to guarantee my impartiality.

I went to Australia as a visiting professor, for the sake of a joint discussion of scientific problems with Anna Vezhbitskaya, about whose works, then still inaccessible here, I regularly wrote (we were friends with her for many years). In newly unified Germany, I was invited to a narrow symposium with a report on Vygotsky and his connections with the circle of Kurt Goldstein.

And since in all three cases I represented only myself, the opportunity to travel with a service passport depended on the party bureau of my academic scientific institute, which, of course, would not let me go anywhere. As a result (minus the trip to Switzerland), I left the USSR on private invitations, and received entry visas as a visiting professor or speaker, and not without the participation of cultural advisers from the interested countries.

My foreign colleagues called and faxed them to explain the uniqueness of the situation. After all, this was a period of mass emigration from the USSR, and, for example, the queue at the German consulate stretched for several blocks. And I was brazenly traveling on business and intended to return home fairly quickly. Apparently, this is exactly what the colleagues explained to the officials. Because the second adviser of one of the embassies even called me at home.

Twenty years have passed.

We became citizens of another country.

A generation has grown up that does not know what a party bureau is.

I work there too; and in the USA they published my monograph, my textbook “with a stamp” has already been published in Russia in its 4th edition and will be officially digitized (it has been on the Internet for a long time). Almost all former students and many colleagues graced the Russian diaspora. I can count on Seattle, San Diego, Washington, London and Barcelona - the “guys” will be happy to see me everywhere. But I need to go to Munich.

For a scientist, the need to work in libraries and talk with colleagues is an everyday matter. But it is impossible to prove by communicating with ordinary consulate officials that I will go home in a maximum of three weeks. I won't.

something similar officially But why couldn’t the above-mentioned imaginary Russian Committee for Cooperation with the Scientific Diaspora do ? Isn't collaboration a symmetrical process?