Nikolay B.* is a social scientist and originally comes from Saint Petersburg. Around a year after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, he and his family decided to leave their home country. After living for several years in a neighbouring country where Russian citizens are permitted to stay without a visa, he finally arrived in Berlin with his family in July 2025 \u2013 with the support of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative for Threatened Researchers. Today, he is conducting research as a visiting scholar at Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t. In this interview, Nikolay B. talks about his decision to leave Russia, his arrival in Berlin and what academic freedom means to him. *Name changed by the editors<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: Until around 2020, Smolny College was one of the \u2018more liberal\u2019 colleges in Russia. Liberal in the sense that there was still a relatively open exchange of views between students and lecturers, and critical thinking and discussion were actively encouraged. I was also very committed to this in my teaching and always tried to instil values in my students, explaining to them that war \u2013 and violence in general \u2013 is a sign of weakness and that people are allowed to have different opinions and views.<\/p>\n
I always took care to paraphrase things, rather than calling them by their proper names. But it became increasingly difficult. At some point, Bard College \u2013 which is, after all, a private Western university based in the US \u2013 was classified by the government as an \u201cundesirable organisation\u201d. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: Exactly. The only category worse than \u201cundesirable organisation\u201d is \u201cterrorist organisation\u201d. The freedoms we had at Smolny College were increasingly restricted. We had to sever all ties with Bard College. The content of the study programmes on offer was carefully scrutinised and often had to be changed or adapted, as it was assumed that we posed a \u201cthreat to traditional values\u201d. More and more of my colleagues left Russia. And although I hadn\u2019t yet been personally persecuted, the worry was always there that state officials could turn up at my door at any moment to take me away.<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: My wife had been expressing a desire to leave the country for safety reasons since the start of the war, and we discussed it at length. We were both against the war, but we agreed that we could do some good by staying and discussing our ideas and thoughts with students and acquaintances. Then the mobilisation for the front began, and we realised we could no longer stay. We left Russia shortly before a letter arrived in our postbox stating that I was to be conscripted.<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: During my time in the Caucasus, I began teaching online through the Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative. Smolny Beyond Borders was founded in 2023 by former Smolny colleagues and Bard College in response to the repression against Smolny College and the increasing restrictions on academic freedom in Russia. The initiative supports exiled students and academics from countries affected by war in continuing their academic work abroad and building international networks. You can register for free and the seminars take place online.<\/p>\n
In 2024, I attended a conference in Berlin with Smolny Beyond Borders, where I met Neda Soltani from the Welcome Centre at HU Berlin. She told us about the Philipp Schwartz Initiative. However, there was no call for applications that year, so I tried again in 2025 \u2013 and it worked out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: I\u2019d say it was relatively easy. Many of my friends from Russia were already living in Berlin, so I had a ready-made network. And my colleagues at HU also welcomed me very warmly and were very helpful. They helped me settle into everyday life at the university. HU, and Neda Soltani in particular, also supported me in areas that were initially difficult for me as a foreigner, such as visa matters. One somewhat surprising challenge at the start was opening a bank account. Banks are very suspicious of money from Russia and initially suspect money laundering. Of course, I had no intention of laundering my money, but my accounts containing all my savings, as well as my wife\u2019s, were frozen. It took me a good six months, with the help of lawyers, to get our savings back.<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: Because I already had so many friends here in Berlin who\u2019d come before me, I had something of a stable community right from the start. That was very helpful. But my goal is still to integrate more and make German friends too. I really hope that one day I\u2019ll be out and about in groups that speak not just Russian or English, but German. But of course, to do that you have to be able to speak the language, and that\u2019s something I still need to learn.<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: I can imagine it, yes. In an ideal situation, I\u2019d become a professor here, doing research, teaching and passing on my values to the academic community, to students and colleagues. In reality, unfortunately, it\u2019s not that simple. I\u2019ll try to apply for further funding programmes so I can stay on. But that would only be for a limited time as well. Here I also see a major difference between German academia and, say, Russia. There, long-term contracts are the norm. I began my career at Smolny College, in the Faculty of Liberal Arts, and stayed there for twelve years \u2013 until I had to leave Russia. That was simply a given. During my time at HU Berlin, almost the entire staff has changed in the meantime. Of course, it can be a good thing if a position isn\u2019t automatically filled for life. But this system makes it very difficult to plan for the long term.<\/p>\n
Nikolay B.: Oh, that\u2019s a difficult question! I think academic freedom is essentially no different from general freedom. It means being able to say and do what you believe is right, and not just what is permitted. In academia, that also means being free to communicate with others about whatever, whenever and wherever you wish. Naturally, this is based on mutual respect and consent. And to conduct research without fearing that powerful actors will interpret the results arbitrarily. At the same time, one should always be aware of the potential consequences of one\u2019s own research \u2013 particularly in the case of technologies whose potential is not yet fully understood, such as artificial intelligence or nuclear energy.<\/p>\n
More on academic freedom can be found at this year\u2019s Berlin-Brandenburg Academic Freedom Week. The week of events was launched in 2022 by Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t and is taking place for the third time under its leadership, for the first time in collaboration with the regional network Scholars-at-risk Berlin-Brandenburg and the Berlin University Alliance.<\/p>\n
Interview: Tabea Kirchner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nikolay B.* is a social scientist and originally comes from Saint Petersburg. Around a year after Russia\u2019s invasion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,190],"class_list":{"0":"post-78911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-berlin","8":"tag-berlin","9":"tag-germany"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116548098189073138","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}