The fate of a non-resident

Dear editors!

Our life is filled with good and different events, sometimes there are more good ones, and more often there are different ones. We recently threw off the yoke of the long-standing mayor Luzhkov, under whom his wife, corruption and traffic jams flourished in Moscow, and received in return a new, modern mayor - Sergei Semenovich Sobyanin. Wow, what a mayor he will be - even his party colleagues were amazed at how quickly he gets into the swing of things! This, of course, is good news, and even excellent.

Just during the mayoral exchange process, news came from Stockholm that the Nobel Prize in Physics had been received by immigrants from Russia - Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. This news, of course, is also good, on the one hand, but, on the other, it can also be classified as miscellaneous. After all, the laureates, of course, come from Russia and are students of our, the most advanced education system in the world, but they live and work far from their homeland, and they have only half of Russian citizenship between them. But everything could have turned out differently.

So it’s not even clear whether to rejoice or be sad here - the country lost them, and they lost the country and now until the end of their days they will hang around in varying degrees of remoteness abroad.

In general, how many of our former scientific people are scattered throughout all the nooks and crannies of the globe! People not only left their homeland, but also lost the most important, intimate connection with it - they lost Russian citizenship. Previously, they were citizens of our great country, which, in case of danger, could, if it wanted, bring down all its nuclear missile power to protect their interests. Is it now a question of what New Zealand or Austria can do in this case?

And the citizen himself finds himself in an absurd position: having lost his passport, he ceases to be a resident and becomes a non-resident. And in order to enter Russia, he, like any foreigner, needs a visa.

“I drank birch sap in the spring forest,” - all that remains is for the emigrants to sing this song. And we can walk through the forest near Moscow at least every weekend. Black bread, kvass, Russian vodka - this is expected there as an expensive gift, and every day we can go to the store, buy all this and drink as much as we want.

Is there snow in Campinas? Is it possible to go skiing in Singapore? But here, winter stretches for almost six months, and we can enjoy frosty sunny mornings, icicles on the roofs and ice under our feet for several months a year.

I'm not even talking about what they see, including TV. Some petty politicians like Sarkozy and Schroeder (or whoever they have now instead of him), Lulu da Silva or Obama. Republicans and Democrats, greens and blues (yes, yes, they have gay pride parades there) - some kind of mishmash. Some replace others, everyone promises and lies before the elections. It's the same with us. You turn on the TV, and there is the national leader who raised Russia from its knees, and his successor, there is “United Russia” without any nails.

It is in France that the right and left alternately increase and reduce allocations for science, forcing scientists to go on strike. And here we always hear and know about the firm, constant and unchanging course of the Party and the Government towards the development of science and education. That Russia will become the leading nanotechnological power in the world, and Russian national and federal universities will soon displace all the infidels from the top ten universities in the world. Yes, it’s not always easy and there’s not enough money, but there is a course, you just need to tighten your belts a little and follow it. And so it will be.

And the Nobel Prizes... Well, of course, it’s nice. Of course, honor and respect, money. Maybe, working for us, Novoselov and Game would not have received these bonuses. But they would have been awarded other high awards, and not by some Swedish queen, but by our Russian President. And not just anywhere, but in the Kremlin, a solemn award ceremony would take place in the Kremlin! Over time, they would be elected members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, first, of course, as corresponding members, and then as full members. And they would receive a monthly 50,000 ruble academic scholarship. Given that they are young, over many years of life these payments would cover the payments of the Nobel Committee.

And finally, I don’t want to talk about sad things, but we will all someday pass on to another world. But only great people living in Russia can be buried at the Novodevichy cemetery, where, no doubt, a place would be reserved in advance for the Nobel winners as for young, promising scientists.

Yours Ivan Ekonomov