One of the reasons my friend is in the position he’s in now is because he built a really good relationship with a couple people from the university of Tokyo when he was a grad student in Hawaii.

I mean, the Soviets didn’t offer them any guarantees. But I think that’s more of a byproduct of how they held leverage over the specialist, and more of a difference in how the two cultures choose to motivate employees.

Despite this, the affected specialists and their families were doing well compared to citizens of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Zone, apart from the suffering of deportation and isolation. The specialists earned more than their Soviet counterparts. The scientists, technicians and skilled workers were assigned to individual projects and working groups, primarily in the areas of Aeronautics and rocket technology, nuclear research, Chemistry and Optics. The stay was given for about five years.

Yep, my buddy is finally on a tenure track at a really nice school and it’s the accumulation of like 15 years of stressful work that might have never really paid off.

You have to be good at getting published, attending conferences, creating conferences, building relationships with different universities and that’s just to keep up with the competition. I think what seals the deal is not only getting funding for yourself, but showing universities how employing you would actually be a sound investment.

The US is all about realpolitik

Not to excuse the US’s history of foreign diplomacy, but I think it would be naive to believe that there exists any major power who doesn’t treat geopolitics with the same level of pragmatism.

The Soviets hated the Nazi even more than the US did and yet they still had their own version of paperclip. Operation Osoaviakhim brought almost double the number of Nazi scientists into the Soviet Union.