Russian sees U.S. repeat Soviet death of science

Mark O'Neill September 15, 2025 21:06

Roald Sagdeev was a leading Soviet scientist who saw how his government destroyed its supremacy in science. Since 1990 a resident of the U.S., he is seeing the administration of Donald Trump do the same thing.

Born in 1932 in Moscow, Sagdeev was at 35 one of the youngest people elected as a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. From 1973 to 1988, he was director of its Space Research Institute and supervised many of its key programmes. In 1984, he was awarded the Lenin Prize for his work in toroidal plasma.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet science was at its peak, developing a hydrogen bomb and putting the first astronaut into orbit, in April 1961.

“By the 1970s. we had lost our leadership in space exploration to the Americans,” he said. “At conferences, science had to obey Marxism, not the other way round. My institute was short of money. Many colleagues had excellent relations with the Communist Party but no scientific training.”

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became Party Secretary and promised major reforms in science. But he named loyalists to key scientific positions.

In 1988, Sagdeev wrote to Gorbachev to warn him that the directors of the Soviet super-computer programme were lying to him. “They pretended to be in advance of the U.S. when, in reality, they were already far behind and were soon to be overtaken by China. Gorbachev never replied. I had been excommunicated.”

The government cut funding for science and the most able scientists left the country, mainly for the U.S. “It was the most attractive place for scientists until the start of this year.” In 1990, Sagdeev himself moved to the U.S. and started teaching at the University of Maryland.

Now, under the second Trump administration, history is repeating itself in the U.S. Foreign researchers feel unwelcome in the U.S. They are the object of surveillance and harassment.

The administration has proposed severe budget cuts for the agencies that fund science, including the National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Institute of Health, and fired many of their employees.

Committees of scientific experts who advise the government have been closed down. In May, Trump said that his political nominees must approve all research financed by the government.

The magazine Nature recently published a survey which found that 75 per cent of American scientists wanted to leave the country. They are being actively recruited by Canada, China and the European Union, which has set aside 500 million euros this year for this purpose.

In July, the University of Aix-Marseilles in France held a news conference to announce the arrival of eight “scientific refugees” from the U.S.

Sagdeev said that, in history, scientific empires had collapsed, but not all at the same speed or the same reason. “This was the case in ancient Sumeria, Egypt and Greece. They declined in periods of disease, chaos and poverty.”

He gave the example of how the Soviet Union sabotaged its programme of genetics, among the most advanced in the world, in the 1920s. Then Josef Stalin handed control of this sector to Trofim Lyssenko who banned the study of genetics and fired thousands of specialists who believed in it. Some were sent to the gulag, others died of hunger or were executed.

As a result, the Soviets played no role in the discovery of DNA. “When the ban on ‘anti-Marxist’ genetics was finally lifted, the Soviet Union was a generation behind in the study of molecular biology and could not catch up.”

Adolf Hitler did the same. His purges of Jewish scientists and those who opposed his regime caused the death and flight of many scientists. This was the reason why the U.S. replaced Germany as the leader in world science.

After World War Two, American scientists won the most number of Nobel Prizes for science. They developed vaccines against polio and measles.

By the middle of the 21st century, China could become the world leader in science, as it was 1,000 years ago. After the Cultural Revolution, it has rebuilt its institutes of research and provided them with sufficient science. Their scientists publish their work frequently in Science, Nature and other prestigious journals.

“For a second time, I am witnessing the decline of a great scientific power,” Sagdeev said. “At 92, I do not intend to join those who are leaving. But I am sad to see them go,”

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.