This essay concerns activities devoted to assisting European and Russian scientific elites (Russian emigrants of the «first» post-revolutionary wave, professors and high school teachers) who escaped from countries in Nazi-occupied Europe during the 1930s. The article uses unique and previously unknown materials from American archives, in particular the recently discovered 1939-1941 correspondence of the President of the Tolstoy Fund in New York State, Countesse A. L. Tolstoy, along with some of his friends and colleagues, with Alvin S. Johnson, the director of the «Refugee University» at the New School for Social Research. Through new materials, the author of the essay analyzes the historical problem of the «brain drain».