Text 2. Smart Russia

Check your comprehension

~ What are the results of US National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 report

~ When was the Russian Academy of Sciences founded?

http://olexandrisayev.com/2010/science-in-russia

http://library.by/portalus/modules/english_russia/referat_readme.php?subaction=showfull&id=1188910373&archive=&start_from=&ucat=28&

Owen Mathews

«Newsweek», May 18^th, 2010

Medvedev’s vision of Russia’s future is about brains, not the power of oil, bombs, or the Kremlin.

When president Dmitry Medvedev speaks about restoring Russia’s greatness he talks about building an “innovation city” in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo, where the state will leave the nation’s best minds free to pursue the scientific and technological breakthroughs that are the bedrock of a 21st-century “knowledge economy.” Medvedev’s vision is designed to liberate Russia from what he calls a “humiliating” reliance on oil and gas exports, and to revive the greatness of a nation once known for scientific and technological achievement. “The success of the ‘Smart Russia’ movement is a question of life and death for Russia,” says Zhores Alferov, the only Nobel Prize winner still living in Russia, who was chosen by Medvedev last month as overall head of the Skolkovo project. “The idea of Skolkovo is like Noah’s ark – all our ideas of hope and survival are pinned on it.”

Whether Russia reemerges as a great power may well be determined by Medvedev’s campaign to revive its smart side. For all its inefficiencies, the Soviet state was a generous supporter of science and technology, building the world’s first artificial satellite and the capsule that put the first man in space. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, state support for the sciences collapsed, scientists fled for posts overseas, and the state itself evolved into a predator – committed in theory to the free market, but too often in practice to plundering private enterprise for profit. In the generation that separated Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight from Putin’s election in 2000, Russia’s GDP and industrial production fell by nearly 50 percent, and with them investment in science fell from 6 percent of GDP to just 1.5 percent, where it stagnates today. The brain drain began in the 1970s as educated Soviet Jews – like the parents of young Sergey Brin, who went on to become a co-inventor of Google – headed to the free West. By the turn of the century it had robbed Russia of more than a half million of its most talented people. Putin and Medvedev both believe that the state can solve Russia’s problems – but while Putin sees the bureaucracy as the source of his power, Medvedev sees it as a corrupt obstacle to creating a post-oil economy.

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