Russian Computer Scientists: Technocrats, Migrants and Hackers

Russian computer scientists have been much in the news recently, with allegations of hacking and of interference in the US presidential election. This book explores the social background of Russian computer scientists. It considers the excellent education system of the Soviet Union which greatly encouraged computer science, highlights the different development path taken by computing in the Soviet Union/Russia compared to the path followed in the West and examines the post-Soviet migration of many Russian computer scientists, many of them Jewish, to other parts of the world. It discusses the difficulties many of these Russian computer scientists have had in assimilating in their new countries, both in work and in their wider situations, and reveals the existence around the world of many autonomous enclaves of highly intelligent, globally-minded people, with a huge capacity for high impact technical innovation and no allegiances to existing national, corporate and social structures or ideologies.