By Tom Moore
Special to CNN Interactive

The Soviet Union's science community was once a mighty engine of technological prowess. But the Cold War is over and the U.S.S.R. has been dismantled. Where are the scientists?

No hard numbers exist on the extent of Russia's brain drain. But those studying the issue say that perhaps only 10 percent of scientists in the former Soviet Union are still at work on research there.

Alexei Kojevnikov, a senior research associate at the Institute for History of Science and Technology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, says Russian science is now "idling," largely due to lack of funding.

Glenn Schweitzer, director of the office of Eastern Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. National Research Council, says many Russian lab scientists are doing anything but science now.

From research to business

"They're still in Russia because they basically have nowhere else to go, but these are very smart people," he says. By turning in their lab coats for business suits, "they have sort of risen to the top among the survivors in Russia."

Loren R. Graham, a professor of science history at Harvard and MIT, has written a new book on the subject: "What Have We Learned About Science and Technology From the Russian Experience?"

Graham says there is no one field that former Soviet scientists have moved into.

"A lot of them have gone into what you might call technical business areas: computers, technical consulting; they start their own little firms if they can. Some of them have gone into straight business, gone into the stock market, banking, and things of this sort," Graham says.

Those who have entered the business world have abandoned their scientific training. "Even if they're going into computer businesses, there's a big difference between trying to sell computers and trying to develop them," he says.

Most former Soviet scientists went to work for Russian companies, he says. But non-Russian firms are scooping up Russian workers as well.

"Boeing has a very advanced facility right in downtown Moscow," he says, "and they do things like design landing gear, design airfoils, design control systems. The Russian aeronautical engineers are particularly good on the theoretical side, so a lot of the work that they're doing has to do with computer modeling of airflow over airfoils and over airplane surfaces, and that's all highly mathematical, and they're very good at that."

Thousands move to U.S.

While many research scientists have remained in Russia, academic scientists in fields such as math and physics have been scattered to the wind, Kojevnikov says.

"The number of Soviet Ph.Ds who took jobs in U.S. research and development will be counted in thousands," he says, with hundreds of them obtaining positions at federal government labs or full professorships at U.S. universities.

Physicist Alexei Abrikosov found a home at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. He left the Soviet Union in 1991, and "since then," he says, "I have never returned to Moscow."

Back in the Soviet Union, Abrikosov was director of the Institute for High Pressure Physics and chair for theoretical physics at the Moscow Institute for Steel and Alloys. Now he continues his work in condensed matter theory and leads the Theory Group of Argonne's Materials Science Division.

"Although I had nothing to complain about my work in the Soviet Union before arriving here," he says, "now the conditions for scientists in the (former Soviet Union have) drastically deteriorated, and I am extremely happy that I was wise enough to accept the offer from Argonne."

While the influx has made an already tight U.S. job market even tighter, U.S. scientists have received the Russians with open arms.

"We welcome talent," says Brian Mangum, a math professor at Barnard College in New York. "People tend to like all these ideas.

"Russia had a completely separate mathematical tradition," Mangum says. "There's all this buzz now about comparing notes, what we can accomplish."

France also hired a significant number of Soviet mathematicians. Many other Soviet scientists headed to Israel, Kojevnikov says.

Science teachers moonlighting

Schweitzer says one large group of scientists is still at work in Russia: university and high school science teachers. They continue their work even as many of them now have to hold down second jobs -- such as repairing household electrical appliances -- to make ends meet.

Membership in the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences, which admits members of the "fundamental" sciences -- physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics -- has dropped by about a fourth, Graham says. "They're hanging on, although their situation is not very good: they sometimes don't get paid, they have almost no money for equipment, but they're hanging on."

While the scientific community has been thinned out, "it's not fair to say there's nothing left there," Schweitzer says. "Good people are still in place; they're just not as obvious as they used to be.

"In almost all fields, there are still spots out there of people who are hanging in, whether it be physics or chemistry or math or biology or geology," he says.

"I think in almost all branches of science there is a limited number of people who somehow have managed to obtain support either at home or abroad, often abroad, who are continuing to do their thing. It's just that the number is very much reduced. And the interaction with colleagues is very much reduced" because of the combined impact of the brain drain and the lack of funding.

Abrikosov agrees. He says that in physics, all important work has come to a halt in Russia: "The best scientists are out of the country, and the rest have at best only money for survival."

He says Russia's science woes mirror larger troubles in the country. "I suspect very strongly that Russia is facing a collapse not only in science but in everything," he says.

Lack of civilian sector hurt

Schweitzer says Russian science in particular is collapsing because no civilian research sector existed to back up the military effort.

"In the U.S.," he says, "a lot of advances were made in the civilian sector. Initially, the Defense Department gave them a push, but then later on, it was the civilian sector spinning into the Defense Department."

Case in point: Early on, the military paid for basic research in electronics, which led to the private-sector development of the integrated circuit. The U.S. electronics industry flourished, and now the Defense Department is able to buy many of its electronic parts off the shelf.

"In Russia, it was just the opposite," Schweitzer says. "Anything that was sophisticated was in the defense industry, but it never spun out, and that's why the civilian products were so poor."

The Soviet Union put all of its eggs in the military basket, agrees Kojevnikov.

"As a country with much more limited resources, (the U.S.S.R.) could only compete in few selected fields, which, because of the Cold War, was primarily military technology," he says. "But even there, the level of sophistication was on average much lower than in the U.S."

While the United States spent massive amounts to build up its military during the Cold War, the effort had a far smaller effect on the U.S. economy. Voters never would have put up with the deprivation that Russia's buildup caused, Kojevnikov says.

"The Cold War was draining so much of the resources that it was possible only under dictatorship," he says. A democratic system "could not have sustained such a level."