For many years endless conversations about modernizing the economy, implementing innovations, using nanotechnologies etc. have been heard in Russia. However, the concept has yet to move beyond mere words, and this can be easily explained. One can hold forums with big names like “Russia is Calling!” or “Go, Russia!” all that one likes. However, if the system in a country is built on pumping natural resources out and distributing profits from their sales between oligarchs and corrupt officials, modernization becomes unnecessary. The system simply rejects it.
It also rejects fundamental science as the most important element of modernization. Thus, the Nobel Prize 2010 laureates in physics Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov — graduates of once powerful Soviet Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology that provided cadres for all former Soviet republics — didn’t find any application for their skills in contemporary Russia. For many years they have been working at the University of Manchester in Great Britain, not in Russia. There are many scientists like this in the sphere of mathematics, physics, and chemistry outside today’s Russia, and the number of those who leave Russia does not decrease.
A project with the sonorous name “Skolkovo” was yet another attempt to bring back those scientific cadres who left Russia, and at the same time to radically re-equip, with their help, the whole rotten material structure of the Russian economy. Actually, this settlement near the Moscow Ring Road, according to the plan of its organizers, was to play the role of a Russian Silicon Valley — analogous to the famous Silicon Valley in California. It was planned that there, in that Moscow district, scientific laboratories equipped with cutting-edge technology, which work on the most critical projects and neighbor research-engineering production sites, where the achievements of respectable scientists would immediately be implemented in industrial models ready for mass production.
The trip of the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, together with his famous guest, the actor and governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, to this settlement, which was broadcast by all channels of Russian television, was the peak of the publicity campaign called “Project Skolkovo.” As a result of all this, a question arises: what is next?
And next, though it will hurt many to hear this, the hopes for a “Silicon Valley near Moscow,” given our country’s dependence on the raw material export model, will hardly produce any results; at most Skolkovo can become “Oskolkovo” (broken into splinters), where some achievements of international import can be achieved. But the problem is that they will not be spread beyond Skolkovo and will not find wide application in the rest of Russia, which is busy producing and exporting oil, gas, and coal.
Random, even successful activities will not save The Day. For example, one of the recent issues of the major newspaper Izvestiya wrote that the project “Skolkovo” could be realized only if it were a grand project: if there were global investments in education, science, and relevant fields.
Certainly, without enormous investments in the advanced fields one should abandon the idea of moving forward. But let me disagree with fellow journalists: even such global investments into the mentioned spheres may not be sufficient, with all their significance, without any major changes in the Russian economy and society. For one simple reason: they can be made just once and can sink like in a bog, without the expected effect, if they are not demanded by the entire economic and social environment. This is the situation we face in Russia today.
The Silicon Valley in California became a major source of scientific ideas and Nobel Prize laureates because the economic environment of the United States surrounding it is innovative, and scientific discoveries are in demand. No wonder the abovementioned Nobel Prize laureate Geim states that the project “Skolkovo” does not interest him, that this project does not have a future, and generally he has nothing to do in Russia. Perhaps it is a brusque statement, but we should ponder this assessment by the Nobel Prize laureate, so that more money and brainpower is not wasted.
