“IDN_cha14” — 2010/12/20 — 17:44 — page 225 14 Within Two Tyrannies: The Soviet Academic Refugees of the Second World War MARINA YU. SOROKINA I N THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Russia survived three revolutions, two world wars, civil strife, and several changes of political regime—from empire and soviet to federation. 1 These social and political cataclysms strongly influ- enced the development of the Russian academic community, which dated only from the eighteenth century. Russian academics were among the first to join in the ‘Great Socialist Experiment’ in the Soviet Union. In the two decades that followed the 1917 October Revolution, Russian Bolsheviks and Russian scientists collaborated in building one of the most advanced scientific sys- tems in the world. 2 At the same time, the logic of an ideology of class warfare led to the displacement, repression, exile or even death of large numbers of scholars and scientists as representatives of the ‘bourgeois class’. The forced migration of intellectuals took place in three major waves: between 1917 and 1921 they fled the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War; between 1945 and 1952 the Second World War and its aftermath created the second wave; while after the Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1985, many academics left Russia, most of them for economic reasons. In addition to these main waves there was a constant circulation of refugees, migrants, returnees, and (re)settlers, such as the highly public expulsions of dissidents during the Brezhnev era. Despite its importance, there has been no scholarly treatment of Russian academic migration, whether external or internal, that has grappled system- atically with the topic on the basis of archival research. For many years refugees, veterans, and dissidents were ‘hidden groups’, ignored by the Soviet authorities, civil society, and public memory. With Perestroika and the break- up of the former Soviet Union (1991), however, there has been a revival of 1 The official titles: Russian Empire (until 1917) / Russian Republic (1917–1922) / the USSR / Soviet Union (1922–1991) / Russian Federation since 1991. 2 Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ, 1997), pp. 11–30. Proceedings of the British Academy 169, 225–238. © The British Academy 2011.