In the 1990 s, the process of adapting Russian science to the conditions of a market economy was accompanied by significant transformations in the social status of scientists. Despite the Federal Law «On Science and State Scientific and Technical Policy» adopted in 1996, in reality, the professional rights of Russian scientists, in particu-lar, the right to carry out scientific activities in favorable conditions, the right of scientists to improve their standard of living and creative self-realization, and others, turned out to be socially unprotected. Under these conditions, Russian science has fully felt the extreme relevance and acuteness of the phenomenon of brain drain from Russia abroad. The statistics of irrevocable emigration that existed in the 1990 s had its «technical flaws», but they were not so significant as to prevent a rough estimate of the scale of the brain drain and thereby oppose them to the «horror stories» of hundreds of thousands of emigrated scientists. One of these horror stories: «…according to statistics, 70–90 thousand sci-entists aged 31–45 leave Russia every year, that is, the most promising intellectual layer». It is noteworthy that the author of these lines refers to some statistics, and even «with age gradation», which simply did not exist. If we follow the logic of this «statistics», then for the 1990 s all Russian scientists of this age group should have been outside Russia for a long time, which, fortunately, did not happen.
Russian science; brain drain; rights of scientists; per-manent and temporary migration of scientists; scale and statistics of emigration.