Since the summer of 2022, Sergei Gouriev has been taking French lessons. Intensives. It has been ten years since he fled Russia, but even in Paris, the former rector of the New School of Economics in Moscow had kept the habit of speaking English even in the lecture halls of Sciences Po, where half of the students of the Parisian establishment are now foreigners. In July, he was appointed, at age 50, director of training and research, in reality “super number two”, of the Institute of Political Studies (IEP). So, even if he is still waiting for the French passport which will replace his residence permit, he must now speak French.
Rare smile, strict costume (far from the dandy exuberance sometimes in vogue at the direction of rue Saint-Guillaume), Sergei Gouriev rolls the “r” and lets no emotion filter behind his thin metal glasses. If he was born in the Caucasus (in Vladikavkaz, capital of the Republic of North Ossetia), he is Russian through and through. His accent resembles those of the Soviet spies inOSS 117, of President Viktor Petrov in House of Cards and all the archetypes and clichés of the Western imagination.
His nomination, a symbol
His position was tailor-made by the school’s director, Mathias Vicherat, who is not an academic himself: “I wanted to work together and supervise our 280 teacher-researchers and our 4,600 temporary teachers. » After an international call for tenders and the hearings of more than a dozen candidates by a committee placed under the leadership of historian Marc Lazar, Mathias Vicherat chose this “dissident” new generation “with a global academic reputation and experience in university management”. He was also amazed by his audience on social networks: nearly 350,000 subscribers to his YouTube channellaunched in 2019, and 164,000 followers on Twitter (“more than Sciences Po”, let the interested party escape).
Entrust the job of number two to an economist in a school where half of the permanent teacher-researchers are political scientists (followed by sociologists and historians), it is already a mini-revolution. “Be careful, Gouriev does not work against other social sciences”, insists Marc Lazar. Evidenced by his latest book, Spin Dictators. The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press), an untranslated essay that dissects the profile of modern autocrats. Guriev is able to talk about fake news (the theme of one of his works) as well as the economic history of China, on which he publishes in prestigious journals. Few people know – including the management of Sciences Po – that he has participated since the invasion of Ukraine, alongside Ukrainian, American and G7 government officials, in the group responsible for developing economic responses. and diplomacy against Russia – the continuation of the ninth “train” of sanctions is scheduled for February 5.
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