Sanctions against Russian science: mental-resource damage

Foreign sanctions have dealt a serious blow to the viability of Russian science. Firstly, they have disrupted the usual communications with the outside world, made it difficult to acquire and maintain scientific equipment, and complicated access to consumables and scientific and technical information. Secondly, they have caused mental harm, demoralizing part of the scientific community, which could not but affect the effectiveness of research. Mental-resource damage and its components form the subject of this work, which uses the results of surveys of the scientific community “Science Policy of Russia” conducted in 2021–2024. Such components of mental harm caused by anti-Russian sanctions as a violation of the internal balance of a significant part of the scientific community, including the attitude to the new reality and the identification of an individual model of behavior in science, and the incentive for an additional 15% of researchers to emigrate are considered. Three factors of Russian researchers’ termination of work in science under pressure of foreign sanctions were analyzed: moral and volitional attitude, material and resource conditions and salary. As the survey results showed, despite the worsening of the situation compared to the pre-sanction period, the first two factors do not have a decisive influence on the decision to leave science. At the same time, high sensitivity to salary dynamics was established: its potential reduction can lead to a reduction in the corps of researchers in the limit of up to 80%. At the qualitative (psychological) level, the mental and resource damage caused to the scientific community by sanctions can be compared with a state of mild depression. It is emphasized that the current anti-crisis policy in the scientific and technical sphere is one-sided and aimed mainly at eliminating material and technical problems, ignoring the need to prevent mental damage, which presupposes systemic ideological work with the scientific community, which would compensate for the negative effect of the potential deterioration in the material support of scientists and their working conditions.