by Stefano Caprio

The Russian academic world has been silenced. An unprecedented campaign mounted around a research project on Aristotle is even discrediting the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And whereas in 2022 scientists were the professional group most vocal in condemning the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, today their community has all but vanished from the public eye.

The term intelligentsia was coined in Russia in the 19th century, using a Russified Latin word – as Latin was then the academic language of Russian universities – to denote the class of intellectuals who sought to ‘guide the people’ and show the way even to the tsars, in order to create a modern country that respected human rights, beginning with the abolition of serfdom. Now the term has practically fallen into disuse, and it is difficult to define the status of intellectuals in Putin’s Russia.

The Polish Academy of Sciences’ project ‘Intelligentsia, Empire and Civilisation in the 19th and 20th Centuries’ (2005–2007) had used the term ‘silent intelligentsia’ in relation to the Soviet period, where, however, a significant intellectual elite still existed.

The Russian academic world, on the other hand, is today truly immersed in silence, and the phenomenon of the intelligentsia is now a thing of the past, along with the generation of the Khrushchev Thaw of the early 1960s, those who prevented Russia from falling back into barbarism: Sergei Averintsev, Mikhail Gasparov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Georgy Knabe, Yuri Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Merab Mamardashvili and many others, and it is difficult to imagine who might represent the Russian intellectual elite after the Putin era.

In today’s Russia, ideas are treated like dynamite: the values of human life, freedom, dignity and professional reputation are viewed by propaganda as Western constructs alien to Russians, undesirable in times of war. In May this year, an unprecedented campaign began to discredit Russia’s leading academic institution, with a history spanning a century: the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The pretext was the actions of the Russian Investigative Committee, which on 19 May carried out searches and arrested for questioning the director of the Institute of Philosophy and the researchers who, from 2018 to 2024, had been working on the project ‘The Legacy of Aristotle: the preparation of the complete works of Aristotle’. The project director, Svetlana Mesyats, was placed under house arrest, and the other scholars were detained as witnesses.

One of the institute’s numerous audits, underway since 2021, has brought to light irregularities in the spending of funds allocated for the salaries of state-appointed researchers. Radical “patriots” are using this affair as a pretext to take revenge on the institute and intimidate the academic world, and are demanding the closure of the Institute of Philosophy “at the people’s request”, demonstrating that the “Aristotle affair” is, in fact, politically motivated.

The attacks on the Institute of Philosophy began five years ago: in anticipation of the announcement of Svo, the special operation in Ukraine, the Tsargrad media group and the Zinov’ev club attempted to appoint one of their own associates, Anatoly Chernyaev, to replace Academician Dmitry Smirnov, the institute’s director who had been legally elected in 2020.

The entire staff of the institute, both scientific and technical, opposed his appointment, considering him unsuitable to lead an academic institute due to his lack of scientific authority and personal qualities.

The radical patriots did not accept defeat, and over the past five years their supporters have published reams of lies about the institute and its scientists, with the aim of taking control of an academic institution with an impeccable reputation and imposing their own agenda upon it, in order to turn it into a propaganda centre.

Today we are witnessing the second phase of this campaign. Unable to control the scientists, the patriots are attempting to discredit the Institute and destroy its good reputation, with fabricated accusations of theft, shoddy work, incompetence, and, as a coup de grâce, of having a liberal agenda, collaborating with the enemy West and harbouring pacifist sentiments. Svetlana Mesyats, a world-renowned researcher and student of Pjama Gajdenko, is accused by the propaganda of having given lectures in Germany and Ukraine before the war, of having always been in favour of peace, and of having spoken out against the Svo in 2022.

The Russian Academy of Sciences, the apex of the academic pyramid, which had gained freedom of expression during the years of Gorbachev’s perestroika, has now lost it completely. The first phase of the loss of autonomy was linked to the abolition of financial independence in 2013, when the Kremlin, using the ‘two-key formula’, transferred all the Academy’s research institutes (around 400) to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, leaving the Academy solely responsible for specialist activities.

The Academy’s final loss of autonomy occurred in the year of its 300th anniversary: in 2024, the Presidium asked Putin to chair the Board of Directors, making him the first Russian leader (excluding Stalin, who was elected an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939) to hold a position within the Academy.

In April 2026, the Academy’s president, Gennady Krasnikov, proposed the establishment of ‘first departments’ within research institutes, staffed by FSB officers, to ‘protect Russian scientific achievements from scientific espionage’. During the Soviet era, these departments exercised ideological control and ensured secrecy.

This move was presented to scientists as a sign of concern for their safety: the responsibility for determining what can and cannot be researched and published is now being transferred to “competent officials”.

It is unlikely that university professors and researchers, who largely constitute the “peace party” and who, before the war, served as shapers of public opinion and moral guides, will quickly regain the trust and respect of their compatriots.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the Russian academic community ranked at the top of public trust surveys, until the “conservative turn” of 2012–2014. In 2022, Russian scientists represented the largest professional group opposed to military action. 85% of the scientific community representatives surveyed had voted against it, and many members of the Academy signed an open letter of protest against the launch of the Svo.

Now in its fifth year, the Russian scientific community has virtually disappeared from the public eye, falling into total silence.

No immediate changes are expected in the near future; it is predicted that the hot war will turn into an endless ideological war, and consideration is given to the prospects for the integration of representatives of the ‘Putin diaspora’ of Russians at home and abroad into the global division of labour of the new industrial-military revolution.

Presenting himself as an ‘active pensioner’, the methodologist Petr Shchedrovitsky gives public lectures on ‘The State of the Future’ and ‘Constructive Thinking’. His main practical interest is the “Philosophy of Russia” project, which he launched twenty years ago, at the same time as the “Russian World” project: “as a philosopher, I see the key to success in returning Russia to its philosophy. National philosophy is the foundation upon which the state is built, values are established, enterprises are developed and innovation flourishes,” he stated recently.

Aleksey Kozyrev, dean of the philosophy faculty at Moscow’s leading university, MGU, echoes this view, arguing that genuine philosophical reflection is an essential attribute of a competitive culture: “It is precisely a developed philosophical tradition that serves as the intellectual foundation upon which both the cultural identity and the economic sustainability of a state in global competition are based.”

Russia is paralysed by the expectation of a period of disasters following so many wars, and no one knows exactly what will happen, when or how. The planning horizon has collapsed, and the expression “endless dead end” has taken on a literal meaning. There is hope for the rebirth of the intelligentsia, which offers the chance to start thinking for oneself again.

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