Russia in the starting point

The main wave of emigration because of the war is still ahead. Konstantin Sonin explains how the country destroys his human capital

The emigration from Russia in 2022, caused by the war, has already caused serious damage to the Russian economy - both in the short and long term. However, there is no need to be deceived: the main emigration and the main damage is yet to come. Although in numerical terms, the scale of emigration is unlikely to reach the wave indicators caused by the revolution and the civil war one hundred years ago, this time the losses will be more difficult: in the 21st century, Russia no longer have hidden reserves of human capital.

Four months after the start of the war, I want good news, but they are not. In the absence of good news, you can at least get used to the bad and learn to “normalize” them. This is what happens: in March and April there was a lot of noise about the unheard of emigration after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and then the noise passed, and the nightmares began to be perceived as non-merciful and not testifying about anything. Meanwhile, according to the most modest - including official Russian - estimates, tens of thousands of families left the country. Even estimates of 200-300 thousand people do not look overstated.

These figures should be especially impressive if we take into account that active citizens left Russia even earlier - as political repression was tightened, which in recent years have been directed not only at opposition politicians, but also at all disagreed with certain aspects of the Putin course.

In the spring of 2022, Russia left Russia not those who had long been going to leave, but just those who, a few years before, made a conscious decision to stay.

Those who returned to Moscow after studying abroad. Those who had the opportunity to leave after graduation, but, unlike previous generations in the same specialties, did not leave, but remained.

Emigration-2022 takes place in unique conditions. The previous waves of emigration were much more complicated. It was necessary to change life, habits and professions much more. There is an actively growing market for Russian media, based abroad, there are many international media that hire Russian professionals. Emigrants used to be urgently urgently, to learn foreign languages ​​on the go, but now everyone knows them. Now the diaspora and the support network are much wider and stronger. Yes, journalists will have much more difficult than IT specialists or scientists, but to compare with any previous wave-now there are much more opportunities to preserve the profession. Do not forget that even the best Russian journalists are not related to where to live, but what to do. They cannot work by profession in Russia, they would have to retrain in Russia.

Those who have seized commanding heights in Putin’s Russia are in politics, in journalism, in science, in culture - they scream about the abolition of Russian culture in the West. Of course, there is nothing at all - on the contrary, a new wave of emigration is met by a hitherto in a hitherto sympathy for the Russians. The war clearly separated those who disgraced the Russians - evening assaults with villas on Lake Como and British citizenship, endless deputies and generals with houses in Courvel and Miami, oligarchs, old and new ones, for whom both the Louvre and Pergamon are “cleanly, but poorly,” from those who built and created Russia. Sympathy and support for real Russians - much more than ever.

And this is not just a flight. Armenia, Georgia, Montenegro, Kazakhstan and other countries where they are leaving from Russia now have appeared unique, once a century, and, perhaps, once in history, a chance. In the 1990s, Israel adopted hundreds of thousands of emigrants from Russia, highly educated and highly modified-and their full integration became one of the most important (possibly the most important) factor in the “Israeli economic miracle” of the last two decades.

Emigration-2022 has an additional advantage: not only programmers, financiers and other technical specialties are running, but also teachers and school principals, organizing circles and summer camps, application developers, psychologists, fitness trainers. The IT specialist, who moves with his family in Tbilisi or Riga, has where to send children to study, has the opportunity to go to the habitually organized cafe, for a concert of beloved Russian musicians and a lecture of their favorite public intellectual. What do new emigrants need?

Briefly, stability and security - and those countries that will understand this faster than others will pull out a unique lottery ticket.

A hundred years ago, frightened by the revolution and civil war, political terror, ideological pressure and prohibitions in the profession, Russia left the “color of the nation” - political, engineering, financial, scientific, and cultural elite. Losses of this scale would be sensitive to any country. In many areas of activity-not only in the social sciences, but also, for example, in the visual arts-from the losses of the 1920s, our country has never recovered, did not restore its level in the international arena. But in many types of activity - mathematical and natural sciences, engineering, military affairs and others that did not pose a threat or of interest to the Soviet regime - not just the restoration of the former elites, but the real birth of new ones occurred. This was facilitated, among other things, numerous prohibitions on types of activities in the USSR, who, as a funnel, directed talented girls and children in the right specialties. However, the main factor was a huge supply of unclaimed human capital - almost 80% of the population lived in a village, where access to formation above was a rare exception.

The revolution was followed by urbanization - millions of people came to large cities to get higher education for the first time in their families. All my grandparents came so to study in Moscow: three at the Economic Institute, one in a medical. It was the presence of this huge, and until then unclaimed, human capital allowed to somehow compensate for the losses caused by the revolution, civil war and political terror. The fundamental difference between 2022 of 1922 is that there is no stock of unclaimed capital in Russia. A less high -quality, less educated, less talented specialist will come to the place of each left person.

The main stream of emigration, caused by the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022, is still ahead. So far, only those who highly assess their own risks and those who are especially acutely feel responsible for the aggression and crimes of the Russian military have left. Most future emigrants are calmly looking for work and housing abroad, not yet leaving. To stop this process, proposals are already sounding to somehow limit the departure of specialists; There are already reports of unpleasant interrogations at the border. It is clear that the ban on departure is not easy to organize in the absence of a full -fledged “iron curtain”, which the USSR was fenced off from the outside world, but the movement occurs definitely in this direction.