Council helps at-risk academics find new intellectual homes

”CARA does more than provide succour for people in need. It helps keep alive the spirit of free enquiry.” – Anti-apartheid leader Albie Sachs, later a justice in the South African Constitutional Court (1994-2009), whom CARA helped flee South Africa in 1966 and again in 1988.

“We shouldn’t allow Putin to monopolise Russian culture, Russian literature,” explained Olena Taukchi, now a professor at the University of Glasgow (UoG), who, along with her husband, fled Ukraine twice – first from Horlivka, Donetsk province, after Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, and again from Kharkiv after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“Both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were multicultural. Even my students notice that those who made significant contributions in Russian culture were not themselves Russian,” she noted.

Among the writers Taukchi teaches are Anna Andreyevna Gorenko and Boris L Pasternak. Gorenko, who is better known by her pen name Anna Akhmatova, was of Ukrainian ethnicity with Tatar heritage. Her poetry faced condemnation and censorship under Stalinist rule.

Pasternak, best known for Doctor Zhivago, was of Jewish descent. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, a recognition that provoked the ire of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ultimately forcing him to decline the honour.

“Why should we deprive ourselves of all that Gorenko and Pasternak achieved just because of Putin and his views of history and culture? Dictators come and go, but language stays, culture stays,” Taukchi said in a video call.

But how, I wondered, “do you deal with the parts of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that are out-and-out racist towards Ukraine and Ukrainians?”

Taukchi, a native Russian speaker who is teaching Russian culture at UoG as a research leave replacement, smiled wryly before saying: “I don’t teach anything about Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. I teach Russian from my perspective as a Ukrainian woman.

“The poets who are on the curriculum here, like the ethnic Pole Osip Mandelstam, were anti-establishment. Many of them left the Soviet Union; all of them had been imprisoned or, like Mandelstam, died in the Gulag.”

The beginnings of a rescue mission

Like Professor Maksym Balaklytskyi, who now researches social communications at the University of Sheffield (USFD), and Professor Olga Brieieva, a cancer researcher at the University of Birmingham (UoB), Taukchi owes her position at UoG to the London-based Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), an almost century-old organisation founded by William Beveridge.

Beveridge is best known for the 1942 Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge) Report that outlined what became Britain’s post-war Welfare State.

In April 1933, a few months after Adolph Hitler became chancellor of Germany, however, Beveridge, then the director of the London School of Economics, was in Austria, from where he watched the Nazis begin to enact their murderous programme.

“One of the first laws they passed, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, sounded innocent enough,” said CARA Executive Director Stephen Wordsworth.

“But what it was actually about was excluding non-Aryans, primarily Jews, from the public service, which, in the German system, is more than just the civil service as we understand it. It includes teaching, university teaching, and so on,” he explained.

After returning to Britain in May, Beveridge gathered together the heads of other universities and colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, the presidents of the Royal Society and British Academy, and other public figures, and set up a rescue mission to raise funds for the scholars who were going to lose their positions.

In so doing, the heads and presidents set themselves against much of the British establishment, including the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) who hobnobbed with Nazis in Europe, and press leaders like Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, who used his Daily Mail to propagandise for Hitler, not to mention Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, established a year earlier, that also supported Hitler.

The founding statement of what was originally called the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) pledges that funds will be used to provide “maintenance for displaced teachers and investigators, and [find] them the chance to work in universities and scientific institutions”.

The statement goes on to appeal to “all who are concerned for academic freedom” and to deplore the possible waste of scholars with “exceptional abilities” who are “exceptionally trained”.

From ad-hoc to permanent

AAC’s first president was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford. Three years later (1936), he explained why the AAC (now called Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, SPSL) was changing from an ad-hoc to a permanent organisation: “The devastation of the German universities still continues; not only university teachers of Jewish descent, but many others who are regarded as ‘politically unreliable’ are being prevented from making their contribution to the common cause of scholarship.”

In the six-and-a-half years before the start of the Second World War in September 1939, the AAC/SPSL helped approximately 2,000 scientists, professors and researchers leave Nazi Germany. A total of 16 went on to become Nobel laureates.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, SPSL helped academics fleeing Soviet Russia. The organisation was especially active after Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 to crush a liberalising regime and in 1968 after Russia invaded Czechoslovakia for the same reason. SPSL also helped scholars fleeing South Africa’s apartheid regime and Chile and Argentina when they were under military rule.

In the years prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, CARA (as the organisation was renamed in 1999) helped hundreds of at-risk academics escape the Middle East, particularly from Iraq and Syria, and troubled regions of Africa, Wordsworth told University World News.

Signs of trouble in Ukraine

Even before Russian-supported insurgents seized parts of the Donbas in 2014, Balaklytskyi and his wife, a medical research professor at Kharkiv University, saw signs of Putin’s imperial intentions.

“Back in 2014, it was clear that Ukraine, that my native city Kharkiv, was meant to be the next part of the so-called Novorossiya (New Russia) project,” he said.

“We could clearly see the provocations, for example, buses full of football fans and other radical young men brought from Belgorod, a city just across the border (20 miles away) in order to destabilise the situation. We witnessed blasts on the streets and the raising of the Russian flag at the city hall.”

Balaklytskyi said there were three reasons why, were the hooligans to take power, he would have to flee. The first two I’d heard from other Ukrainian academics and researchers I’ve interviewed for articles in these pages: Firstly, he was a professor of media studies; secondly, he was a media personality.

The third took me by surprise.

“I’m a representative of a religious minority. I’m a Seventh Day Adventist,” he said. Like other Protestant denominations, Seventh Day Adventists have historically been viewed with suspicion by the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian nationalists.

As Kharkiv remained in Ukrainian hands, Balaklytskyi and his wife opted to stay in their home city despite the dangers.

One hundred and seventy miles to the northeast, fierce fighting between Russian-backed insurgents and the ill-prepared Ukrainian army in and around Horlivka persuaded Taukchi and her husband to send their daughter to safety in the south of Ukraine as they tried to hang on.

“We found ourselves in the middle of a war zone,” said Taukchi, whose academic training was in teaching English and the history and theoretical grammar of English. “We were without electricity, tap water, money, fuel, and medications. There was constant shelling.”

When it became clear that the fighting would drag on, she and her husband, an engineer, decided to risk escaping.

“It’s not easy to leave a war zone. We could only take a couple of bags, our laptops, and our cat.

“We found a person whom we paid a large sum of money, and he agreed to take us out of the war zone. But nothing was guaranteed,” she said.

On 17 September 2014, they climbed into the man’s car. “We were not sure whether we would survive or not,” Taukchi recalled.

“The road was mined. He knew the minefields well, so we started early in the morning. It took four hours to travel the 30 km to another district,” she said.

“Did your literary background come into your consciousness while you were under fire in Horlivka or during those tense hours while you were escaping?” I asked the professor with whom a few minutes earlier I had bantered about our shared academic training in English literature and literary theory.

Taukchi answered quickly, naming Orwell’s 1984 because of the “dystopian” nature of the couple’s experiences under fire and during their escape.

“It was absolutely unimaginable, but it seemed to me that I would wake up soon and it would all be over. I couldn’t believe that it [what they were experiencing] was possible. Some of my colleagues had been killed. Some of our students had been killed just because they came to take the final exams,” she said.

As soon as they could, they headed for Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city with 2 million people.

“We found ourselves penniless, jobless, homeless. It was tough because I was well over 40 and my husband over 50. It’s not easy to start from scratch when you are as old as that and you are a refugee in your own country. Eventually, we landed jobs, rented a flat, and made new friends,” she told University World News.

Bombs raining down

The careers and lives of Taukchi and Balaklytskyi in Kharkiv and Brieieva in Kyiv came crashing down at 5 am on 24 February when Russian shells and bombs started raining down.

For six days, Balaklytskyi, his wife, and their young son took shelter in the basement of their apartment building.

“We were physically safe,” he recalled, “but the situation for their son was intolerable. “No school. No playing outside. No physical activity, just endless playing on a smartphone.”

At his wife’s urging, they decided to leave Kharkiv. Since the city’s public transit system had been suspended, Balaklytskyi contacted a pastor who risked driving them across the battle-scarred city to the train station, where they boarded a train to safety in Lviv in the far west of Ukraine near the Polish border.

Taukchi went to bed late on the night of 23 February 2022, having had a “girls’ night out” with some of her colleagues.

The sound of exploding shells that woke her at 5 am was familiar and told Taukchi that, for the second time in her life, she and her husband were in a city under attack by Russian forces. Soon she heard her smartphone spring to life as her colleagues posted their concerns on the departmental chat group.

“They kept asking what was happening. What does all the noise mean? They didn’t know because they didn’t have the same experiences I did,” Taukchi said.

Tens of thousands of Kharkivans, including Taukchi’s students, sheltered in the city’s subway system – many for months. When the air raid sirens wailed, Taukchi and her husband spent up to 12 hours a day safe in what she called a “bunker”, a relic of the Stalinist period when, in expectation of the next war with NATO, air-raid shelters were routinely built under apartment buildings.

In their apartment, even though they had electricity, they had to observe a blackout at night. Worse, she recalled: “it was really cold, -10 or -15 Celsius. But there was no heating and no water”. Food was scarce. With sardonic humour she told how she risked her life queuing at the local supermarket to get chicken to feed her cat: “That was my role; I was scared to death.”

The bunker had internet, so Taukchi could get news from around Ukraine and abroad. Access to the outside world led to more than a few instances of cognitive dissonance: seeing people in cities in Western Ukraine and New York and London going about their lives, unheeding of exploding bombs and shells.

Reaching out for help

Night after night in the bunker, Taukchi sent out her CV to universities and research institutes in the United States, Canada, the EU, and Britain, as well as to CARA. From their shelters in the basement in Kharkiv and subways of Kyiv, Balaklytskyi and Brieieva also sent their CVs.

“In this situation of chaos, panic, and fear,” Brieieva wrote in an email to University World News, “I received an email detailing dozens of laboratories around the world offering support and placements to Ukrainian researchers. My attention was drawn to the laboratory of Dr Martin Higgs from the University of Birmingham. Its research was close to my interests.”

Brieieva contacted Higgs and, after several online meetings with him and CARA, she began “the process of securing this position, including preparing all the necessary documents”.

Eight months after contacting CARA, Taukchi received the email she was waiting for. At the end of the summer in 2022, she travelled to Moldova alone – because her husband is an engineer, he was not allowed to leave – and, after a three-month visit to her adult daughter in Germany, she arrived in England.

“It may sound weird, but when I arrived in the UK, I was euphoric. It was professional euphoria because I’ve never been to an English-speaking country, and being a teacher of English yourself, you can understand I was dreaming about that. I was just happy to have people speaking English all around me,” Taukchi says.

Balaklytskyi’s first stop was Bournemouth University, where he arrived in the summer of 2022. Later he received a two-year CARA fellowship at the University of Sheffield.

CARA, Wordsworth explained, does not itself extract at-risk academics; in, for example, the case of Afghan scholars helped by CARA, they left Afghanistan by land border. Nor does CARA facilitate contact between scholars and professors or others who have placements for displaced scholars, though it provides academics seeking help with lists of possible placements.

Scholars who contact CARA often don’t know very much about the British system and, Wordsworth said, CARA shows applicants to universities how the British system and British universities work.

When necessary, CARA is a financial sponsor; many universities choose to pass the funds for fellows they are supporting through CARA because it avoids complications about employment law and taxes, Wordsworth said.

“We work with universities to help people get away from wherever they are, but always with the idea that one day they can go back and help rebuild their own societies,” said Wordsworth.

Current research

Balaklytskyi’s research at USFD focuses on the effect of Russian disinformation on Ukrainian refugees in the EU.

The impact is complex, he explained. For the most part, their social media shows that they are pro-EU and Pro-Ukraine. “But still there is a kind of quiet sympathy for Putin because he is a ‘good leader’ of his people,” he noted.

These varying views can exist among different people and, he said, even within an individual depending on the question asked because of the “blurring of identities”.

In addition to teaching Russian culture from a Ukrainian perspective, Taukchi has designed a course in Ukrainian culture that she hopes will be offered next September.

The course will cover the origins of Ukraine by the Kyivan Rus in the late 9th century, the history of the Cossacks (13th-17th centuries), women writers in the 18th and 19th centuries, modern Ukrainian literature in the early part of the 1900s, post-Soviet Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian culture at war, and multilingual Ukraine.

The course is meant as a supplement to the courses in Russian literature and Russian language, in which most of the students, Taukchi said, need to know about Ukrainian history because they are doing degrees in international relations, history and science.

In her email to University World News, Brieieva expressed her satisfaction at being “granted access to high-quality, modern equipment and methods”, as well as how much she was learning from her colleagues.