Desherevskaya used to share a desk with a woman who’s now in Japan. Her best friend went to Australia. Another colleague works in Scotland.
Hopes for new Silicon Valley
Though under pressure from the government, the Academy of Sciences has been resolute in resisting reform. So the government has decided to work around it.
Under President Dmitry Medvedev’s direction, billions have been budgeted for a high-tech center called Skolkovo, an attempt to create a Russian Silicon Valley. The Kurchatov Institute, which developed the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, is an independent center that is in great favor and has branched out into a whole variety of fields. Once the workplace of physicist-turned-dissident Andrei Sakharov, it is now run by the brother of one of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s closest cronies.
At the same time the Ministry of Education and Science is trying to create research centers at Russia’s universities, on the Western model — though the universities themselves are cumbersome, bureaucratic monoliths.
So far, the money hasn’t bought much prowess. In 1998, Russian scientists published about 27,000 articles in international journals; since then, the number has remained stagnant. That means that Russia’s share of global articles has dropped by 30 percent. (The head of the Kurchatov Institute, Mikhail Kovalchuk, scoffs at this, and says the answer is to start up more Russian journals to publish Russian research.)
In 1994, there were more than 1.1 million people working in research and development here. In 2008, the last year for which there are good figures, there were 761,000.
Russia has two universities among the top 500 worldwide, according to a ranking performed every year by a group at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; the United States has 156. Moscow State University, the leader here, has seen its overall ranking slip from 66th place to 74th between 2004 and 2010. In science, specifically, it has been on a decline compared with the rest of the world, dropping more than 10 places since 2007, even as the government has been trying to turn it into a leading research center.
Scientists wonder where all the money goes — though they have an idea.
In the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse, Russia set about building an open and honest system to support science. It created two grant-making foundations, similar to the National Science Foundation in the United States, and invited labs to submit applications.
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