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The Paradox of Open Borders: Why Physical Freedom Doesn’t Liberate the Mind. An Interview with Marina Bykova

In 1993, Marina Bykova became the youngest Doctor of Sciences in the humanities in Russia. Today she is a professor at an American university and editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in East European Thought. Her professional life has been devoted to building and sustaining dialogue between the Russian philosophical tradition and the international academic community. In an interview with T-invariant, Marina Bykova reflects on why Russian academia has been paralyzed by fear, how the cultural project of the “Russian World” turned into a political ideology, and what happens to philosophy when it loses its autonomy.

Does Silence Save? Philosophers Launch an Open Letter in Defense of Svetlana Mesyats

The academic community has launched a signature campaign in support of the philosopher Svetlana Mesyats. She has been charged with fraud on an especially large scale, an accusation that can carry a sentence of up to ten years in prison. Svetlana Mesyats’s prosecution fits the pattern of other criminal cases targeting Russian scholars who have returned to the country. Marina Bykova, a professor at North Carolina State University, reflects on whether public support from the anti-war opposition is useful or dangerous.

Academic Freedom Under the Pressure of War and Authoritarianism: Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine through the Lens of Science at Risk

Science at Risk has released its latest monitoring reports on the state of academic freedom in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. These reports are based on incident monitoring, interviews with scholars, and analysis of open sources. T-invariant compares these reports with one another and with the global Free to Think (FTT) 2025 report on academic freedom, an analytical overview of which we published last year. The new SAR documents provide a more detailed account of the processes unfolding in the three countries affected by war and authoritarianism, allowing us to trace the mechanisms of academic freedom’s degradation.

Academic Freedom is Eroding Even in Democracies: New Report from Scholars at Risk

Each year, the organization Scholars at Risk (SAR) releases the Free to Think report, which acts as a global barometer for academic freedom. The latest edition, published on October 1, 2025, highlights a troubling trend: since 2018, declines in academic freedom metrics have emerged not just in autocracies but also in long-established democracies. The report, covering July 2024 to June 2025, documents 395 attacks worldwide. Although the total numbers show only a modest increase from the previous year, incidents threatening the physical safety of students and faculty have nearly doubled.

Russian Books in Exile: Secret Routes and Bookish Heroes

Following the start of the war, dozens of Russian-language small presses sprang up beyond Russia’s borders. Recently, their representatives — Aglaia Asheshova (“Turgenev Library”), Igor Ivanov (Skaryna Press), Yakov Klots (Tamizdat Project), Evgeny Kogan (“Babel Books,” Tel Aviv), Maxim Kurnikov (“Echo Book”), and Alexander Gavrilov (Vidim Books) — gathered for a panel discussion at the “Prague Book Tower” book fair (Sept’25).

Russian academia in exile

Over the course of two years, several thousand scientists left Russia, sometimes entire teams were evacuated. Some of them managed not only to survive, but to be reborn in a new reality. In February 2024, the Agency for Control and Quality Assurance of Higher Education of Montenegro decided on state accreditation of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLASH), which was created by former employees of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. Teodora Shanin. And this is not the only example of how fugitive Russians are reassembling academic projects.

Mutiny P.S.: nobody is ready to defend the existing political order

Has Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow broken the «negative equilibrium» Russia has been stuck in for the last twenty years? Vladimir Gelman, political scientist, professor at the University of Helsinki, and author of the book on «bad governance» in contemporary Russia, analyzes the consequences of the failed mutiny and possible alternative scenarios.

They will not be in power forever

A quota set by the Czech government for the reception of Russian and Belarusian dissidents is not even half used during the year. Czech analysts suggest ways to improve the program’s efficiency, arguing that the new scholars and journalists are valuable to the country and will help restore democracy after Eastern European dictatorships.

Creating Russia outside of Russia

The coming down of the Iron Curtain makes it more difficult to understand what is happening in Russia, and there is a growing need for specialists in Russian studies in Europe. Historian Marek Příhoda spoke about the new Russian-language Master’s program at Charles University and the specifics of the Czech vision of Russia.

How codes of the underworld leads to military aggression

Peacetime sociology cannot yet explain how a full-scale war became possible in twenty-first-century Europe. Sociologist Svetlana Stephenson discusses the reasons for the failure of democratic transition in Russia and the emergence of an aggressive militaristic state.

War and Language: The Russian Master’s Program in Prague

Charles University opens a Master’s program in Russian. Why it was in demand amidst the war, explains Zhanna Nemtsova, co-director of the Boris Nemtsov Academic Center at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.