Description: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the Riussian academy has been undergoing a set of colossal challenges and losses. Chief among them is the brain drain or academic emigration (Ismail-Zadeh, 2004). A large percentage of Russian academic emigrants (approximately 50%, according to the present study) is comprised of academics who identify themselves as Jews. A major, if sometimes hidden, cause of emigration among Russian Jews has been their experience of Soviet anti-Semitism. Although they have left the country forever, Russian Jewish academics have brought those painful memories with them. These memories still continue to constitute the emigrants' cultural space and to impact in specific ways on their identities. The paper interrogates the claim made by the Soviet higher education system that it was open to all people of talent. The major policy documents relating to HE from the 1960s to the 1980s show that the Soviet Union promoted a vision of itself as a multi-ethnic and international state, providing open access to all its nationalities to educational opportunities, including those in the Academy (Pinkus, 1988). On the other hand, there is an unofficial and under-examined history of covert or implicit discrimination, especially discrimination against Jews (Pinkus, 1988), which effectively prevented them from entering elite Universities and especially the academic profession. Access to the Academy was guarded through discriminatory practices at the point of entry to elite colleges, through the refusal of access to postgraduate programmes and through slowing down academic recruitment from the qualified Jewish population. The paper explores, through examination of specific cases and drawing on literature on identities and academic work, the contributory factors that made it possible to create such barriers within a framework that claimed an ideological platform of equality and democracy in the Soviet Union. It is of relevance and value in understanding the emigration of Soviet Jewish academics from Russia since the fall of communism, and in understanding the ways in which racism and other forms of prejudice may operate within the Academy in Russia and beyond. Methodology: The study draws on the narratives of eighteen academic emigrants from Russia. The material used here is about their perceptions of Soviet Russian politics toward academic Jews in Moscow. The emerging stories mostly reflect a range of experiences that produced paralysis or despair in accommodating to the system, and that seriously inhibited career development. The paper shows the interplay between individual gatekeepers or academic executives and more central and official forces. In the course of recalling the most painful experiences, the participants construct metaphors that clearly illustrate the power of the gatekeepers. The life history methodological approach draws on the works by Coffey (1996), Denzin (1989) and Riessman (1993). Conclusions: As part of a wider enquiry into Russian Academic careers in the context of globalisation, this particular paper will offer consideration of the relationship between ideologies of national identity and the construction of the others, and discuss the extent to which Jews in Russia have always carried the "outsider" status despite their major contribution to academic knowledge. The paper will contribute to the developing literature on identities and nationalism and connect these ideas to the specific location of Russian higher education in the Soviet era.