Sergei Guriev, the rector of the Moscow New Economic School, has left Russia and is not coming back. From Paris, where he is now, he told the New York Times his story of frightening and humiliating interrogations by government investigators, who focussed on Guriev’s participation in a panel of experts that conducted an independent probe of the Mikhail Khodorkovsky affair. Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest oil tycoon, was deemed a threat by the Kremlin; he was tried and convicted in 2005 and again in 2010 on charges that included fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement, and money laundering, and has been in jail for over nine years. The panel’s report, issued in December, 2011, confirmed a broadly accepted opinion that Khodorkovsky’s prosecution was unfair and unlawful. This February, authorities began questioning Guriev; he grew increasingly alarmed. In late April, Guriev’s investigator came to his office with a subpoena for several years of personal e-mails. The risk that he’d lose his freedom felt serious enough for him to flee.

Guriev is hardly the first Russian to abandon Putin’s Russia. Some run away for fear of prosecution, many more because they can’t make full use of their talents in a home country whose government’s first concern is maintaining control. But Guriev’s case is special, and was taken by many observers as a harbinger. “Guriev’s departure causes a sense of imminent catastrophe,” a blogger wrote.

Guriev graduated summa cum laude from the best Soviet school of physics. He spent a year at the Department of Economics at M.I.T., taught economics at Princeton for a year, and came back to Russia equipped with first-rate economic knowledge and a desire to share it with his younger compatriots. He joined the New Economic School in the late nineteen-nineties and became its rector in 2004. Under his tenure, it evolved into one of the two best economic institutions in Russia, with an international reputation—an independent organization that built its own endowment at a time when endowments, in post-Soviet Russia, were barely familiar. Guriev is a top-tier academic, an indefatigable popularizer of contemporary economic scholarship. If this is beginning to sound like an obituary, it’s because his departure is a real loss for Russia.

There have been several major waves of such departures in the past hundred years. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist government got rid of the nobility and members of the intelligentsia who would not pledge allegiance to the new state. Those who didn’t die fled; many, such as Vladimir Zworykin, an inventor of early television technology, and the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, to mention just two out of scores of names, earned fame elsewhere.

In the nineteen-seventies, with the Soviet regime in a state of stagnation, defections from the U.S.S.R. became frequent news. Some of the best musicians, athletes, and dancers—Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Godunov—who had the privilege of foreign travel for tours and tournaments, seized the chance to stay abroad. When the Soviet authorities allowed Jews to emigrate, tens of thousands took this opportunity to get better lives, often hoping to give their children a better future. (Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died Monday, was instrumental in helping them enter the United States.)

In the nineteen-nineties, when the Soviet era was finally over, many Russians rushed out. Though they had freedoms now, including the freedom of travel, some did not expect that to last; others fled the turmoil and hardship of the early post-Communist years. One way or the other, they did not trust their country to become a better place.

Sergei Guriev was one of those who chose a different strategy. He readily shared his expertise with the government, serving on several boards and government-sponsored policy-making commissions. But, as a liberal and an independent-minded man, he would not conceal his disapproval of Putin’s regime, of its political monopoly and lawlessness. The independent probe of the Khodorkovsky affair was but one of the initiatives in which Guriev took part that challenged Putin’s policies.

During Putin’s first decade in power, his regime was freer and softer than its Soviet predecessors, but the guiding principles were still the same: the state must remain unchecked; rulers shouldn’t have to concern themselves with political competition. Other players had to be kept under control; the public should not mess with politics. In December, 2011, members of the public defied this arrangement and took to the streets of Moscow chanting “Russia without Putin.”

Putin responded with a crackdown. During the past year, civic activists have been jailed and prosecuted, and in the past two or three months nonprofits that receive foreign funding have come under hard pressure. Independent experts are another target; the government has harassed several others who participated in the probe of the Khodorkovsky affair. The Kremlin is waging a campaign to portray Russia as a fortress besieged by (Western) enemies seeking to weaken the nation by recruiting a “fifth column” of liberals and Westernizers. Once again, “power agencies”—the state security, the prosecutor’s office, the police, the investigative committee—hold sway. It is no wonder that, in a recent survey by F.O.M., a major polling agency, thirty-seven per cent of eighteen-to-thirty-year-old Russians said they would want to leave Russia for good. (Several days after the survey was published, the pollster, whose main client is the Kremlin administration, removed the report from its Web site.)

Those who emigrated or defected from the declining U.S.S.R. in the nineteen-seventies or left Russia in the nineteen-nineties had almost no idea of what life was like in the West. They had to learn everything from scratch—the language, life in a market economy, and how to choose their own employment, housing, or school for their children. But now, two decades of post-Communist development have produced a constituency of non-Soviet Russians on par with their Western counterparts. They are at home in the global world, have first-class professional skills, speak perfect English, and have experience working and travelling in the West. They could make Russia a better place, but Russia might not be interested. Putin’s government, like that of his Soviet predecessors, looks on indifferently as these people take their skills elsewhere. Losing Russia’s best citizens, in the politicians’ eyes, is an acceptable price for power.

Photograph by RIA Novosti/Yekaterina Shtukina/AP.