Russia Plans a Silicon Valley

The Kremlin wants to engineer its own Silicon Valley. In a plan that was revealed in February, the Russian high-tech haven will come complete with new-wave architecture and all the comforts of a resort, a place for Russian geniuses to get together and invent the biggest thing since, well, the Internet. That’s the hope, anyway. President Dmitri Medvedev, who has cultivated the image of a tech-savvy liberal, is staking much of his economic vision on the plan’s success. And Russia has a resource that other nations envy: a fervid hacker culture with a reputation for excellence, or at least daring.

Since the Soviet collapse, no major platforms have emerged in Russiafor its computer experts to innovate. As a result, many of them have emigrated, while many others have turned to hacking, a field in which Russians seem to excel. In January, police arrested a 40-year-old computer whiz for hacking into a Moscow advertising mainframe and turning a giant billboard display into a clip of hard-core pornography over one of the city’s main streets. To avoid detection, the man had routed his attack through a proxy in Chechnya, a sophisticated trick. But for all his skills, the man was found to be unemployed. He told police he had done it “just to give people a laugh.” The Russian government’s idea now seems to be giving minds like his something more productive to do.

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That ambition, at least, is admirable. But for all Medvedev’s project evokes of free thinkers brainstorming in a park, it still has a distinctly Soviet feel. It relies on central planning rather than a movement of geeks in garages, and it will be managed by the state. What it reveals, experts say, is the irreconcilable conflict between the Kremlin’s new-age ambitions and age-old desire to control.

The government has clear goals. It wants the denizens of its Silicon Valley to hatch lucrative inventions that will help break the economy’s dependence on the sale of oil and gas. “The appearance of great ideas, like life itself, is still considered a miracle,” said the Kremlin’s chief ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, who laid out the project in a rare interview with Vedomosti, a Russian business daily, on Feb. 15. “There are, of course, no miracle workers among bureaucrats and businessmen, but together we need to create an environment where miracles are possible.”

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Surkov, officially Medvedev’s deputy chief of staff, said that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had approved the idea of a Russian Silicon Valley after Medvedev came up with it. Surkov said he himself had been assigned to oversee its creation, most likely on the outskirts of Moscow. It is an unusual role for him. Both under Putin’s presidency between 2000 and 2008 and now under Medvedev’s, Surkov has been widely seen as Russia’s éminence grise. He is the author of the “sovereign democracy” theory that underpins Russia’s neo-authoritarianism and the engineer of the Kremlin youth group Nashi, which uses strategic thuggery to discourage opposition. Now he has embraced his role as Russia’s innovation guru.

He has been doing his homework. In January, he traveled to MIT to take part in a two-day seminar on innovation, visiting the kinds of labs, design rooms and incubators where new technologies are born. Two weeks ago in Moscow, he hosted a delegation from the real Silicon Valley that included top executives from eBay, Twitter and Cisco Systems. The actor Ashton Kutcher also came along, and documented the visit on his Twitter feed. “Russia is building their own Silicon valley. And they want help,” Kutcher tweeted on Feb. 18. “If we rebuilt it today what would we do differently?”

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The Kremlin’s answer to that question, however, does not exactly jibe with the liberal culture of Silicon Valley. In his Vedomosti interview, Surkov acknowledged that Russia is an innovation “vacuum” in a field of dynamic economies and that it needs a breakthrough soon to avoid stagnation. But when prodded about the political openness needed to encourage that breakthrough, he snapped back into the language of control. “Consolidated power in Russia is the instrument of modernization. I would even insist it is the only one,” he said. “If you want to put the matter on autopilot and wait for squabbling liberals with their endless debates to give birth to an economic miracle, you will be waiting forever. I guarantee you that … We need the consolidation [of power] that will control the situation.”

That is in marked contrast to the American experience. Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, says the U.S. government and large corporations did provide funding and even facilities to encourage innovation, which played a major role in the industry’s success, but that “there has not been an effort to manage, to pick and choose what works,” she said in a phone interview from California. “That is certainly not the way Silicon Valley has done it in the past.”

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Another motive behind Russia’s high-tech endeavor seems to be staking out a part of the industry and a part of the Web that is distinctly Russian. This came through in a parallel initiative approved by Medvedev in November. It would allow Russian speakers to be the first to register Web addresses in their native Cyrillic script rather than in Latin letters like everybody else. Andrei Kolesnikov, the official in charge of implementing the idea and registering Cyrillic domain names, says using the Russian language online is the nation’s “birthright.” He concedes, however, that it offers “no technical difference or advantage at all.”

This points again to the old habits — the nationalism, the overbearing management — that the Kremlin is dragging into its modernization drive. Masha Lipman, a political expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, says Russia will never succeed unless those habits are left in the past. “A modern, competitive economy can’t thrive in an environment where the quality of governance is this low,” she says. “And why is it low? It is low because they seek to control everything, because they do not trust their own people, and as a result the people do not trust them.”

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Kolesnikov’s experience seems to drive this point home. In promoting the idea of a Cyrillic domain on the Web, much of his work has been devoted to calming people’s fear of the government. “As soon as people hear about this idea, they think of a state conspiracy to shove everyone into this domain, close the door and turn on the gas,” Kolesnikov tells TIME. “This makes no sense. But it is part of the Soviet person’s instinct. It is impossible to convince people it’s not true.”

In this atmosphere of distrust, it is unclear whether the Kremlin will be able to foster an open culture of innovation, which Berlin at Stanford calls the main ingredient in Silicon Valley’s success. Kolesnikov agrees. “What developed around Stanford was an entrepreneurial culture,” he says. “I don’t know how you create that. I guess it’s up to the government to set up some kinds of conditions and leave people alone, stop freaking them out. Maybe something will come out of it.”

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