Text 5. Last nail to be hammered into the coffin of Russian science

By Sergei Korotaev, D.Sc. (Phys./Math.)

Today, the dramatically shrinking, impoverished ranks of Russian scien­tists are feeling the effects of Murphy's Law: If something can go wrong, it will. This time around, the Law material­ized in the form of the “Concept of Participation by the Russian Federation in Managing the Property Complexes of State-Controlled Organizations Working in the Sphere of Science”. Technically, the concept's author is the RF Ministry of Education and Science. Yet it is absolutely clear that the operation, conceived in the era of the so-called vertical chain of command, has the blessing of the person positioned at the very top of this vertical chain. So I am taking issue not with its con­duits - Education Minister Aleksandr Fursenko or Prime Mikhail Minister Fradkov - but with President Putin himself.

On the backburner

In pre-Revolutionary Russia, funda­mental science was supported by the state mainly through the self-governed Academy of Sciences. Up until the early 20th century the Academy of Sciences was the only island of democracy in the country. The result: Although Russia's funda­mental science was not the leading science in the world, its stature and weight were quite substantial.

During the Soviet era, the principal motive of the ruling authorities was to create a war machine that could stand up to the rest of the world. That required a vibrant, cutting-edge applied military science. The coun­try's Communist leaders must be given their due: they understood that the applied results that they needed could only be produced with a high level of fundamental science. For all the atrocities of Stalin-era reprisals against the Russian people, not least against the scientific intelli­gentsia (because of its innate free-thinking), including the physical elimination of entire scientific schools, cutting off the oxygen sup­ply to fundamental science had never so much as crossed the author­ities' minds, while in the post-Stalin era they even learned to turn a blind eye to the free-thinking scientists, especially physicists. Only the most notorious of dissidents in academia were persecuted; the pressure exert­ed on others was carefully measured so that they could go on working. As a result, by the 1980s, Soviet science ranked second in the world.

Not surprisingly, the scientific community embraced liberal-democratic reforms. Moreover, the scientific intelligentsia became a main catalyst of democratic trans­formations in the country. The eco­nomic difficulties of the early 1990s hit intellectuals just as hard as they did the entire people.

Yet as of late 1993, the picture began to change. Whereas growth points emerged in most areas of activity need and privation in the scientific sector became a perennial problem. As a result, the most tal­ented people emigrated, the most enterprising went into business, while the most passive became lumpenized. The inflow of fresh blood – young scientists – stopped completely. Some college and uni­versity graduates went abroad, oth­ers start working as programmers at banks and other commercial institu­tions, while the rest took whatever jobs were available as long as they were not in science since it is the lowest paid profession.

The situation is made worse by the fact that under Boris Yeltsin, the degradation of science was sponta­neous, so to speak: The Yeltsin administration was simply indiffer­ent to the scenario. Under Putin, however, the suppression and sti­fling of science has become a calcu­lated policy: Former KGB officials remember better than anyone else where free-thinking came from and where it could come from again unless the scientific community is reduced below its critical mass.

Putin's penultimate move was to scrap the provision of the budget law setting the level of funding for scien­tific research programs at 4 percent of the national budget – a level that was never actually achieved but that was, at least, something to fight for. The latest initiative by the Putin administration, however – i.e., a reduction in the number of scientific research institutes – is, in fact, the last nail to be hammered into the coffin of Russian science. Just as in the “Yukos case”, there are two pro­nounced objectives here. The first is to destroy potential political oppo­nents. The second is to plunder valu­able assets. Strange as this may be, Russian science does have such assets: land and buildings. It is no accident that the Concept gives sub­stantial space to a detailed, almost voluptuous description of the priva­tization procedure. What is especial­ly revealing is the emphasis that is put on the “redundancy” of scientific research institutes in central Russia: Land in Moscow and the surround­ing region is particularly attractive.

A dismal outlook

It is difficult to make any forecasts as there are simply no precedents here: No state in the world has ever made it its policy to do away with national science. Clearly, no sensible criteria, no reliable guidelines can be worked out and effectively applied to select scientific research institutes for transformation as “state auto­nomous non-profit organizations”. Chances are that they will be select­ed as a means to appease some big shots in science, who will be allowed to retain control of these organiza­tions, in order to preempt their resis­tance to the Concept's implementa­tion. Arbitrarily pulled from the sci­entific environment, such islets, in place of the sunken mainland, will be unviable. In the best-case sce­nario, the inhabitants of these isles will be able, in cooperation with their foreign colleagues, to make some contribution to world science, but they will not be in a position to impact the development of their own country in any way. The last stage will be a general technical and social degradation.

Here is just one example: One high priority area of research throughout the world (not least in Russia) is the phenomenon of quan­tum non-locality. One possible field of its application is the creation of a quantum computer. A primitive model has already been developed, but there is still a long way to go before such a real computer can be built. Yet, when it is built, mankind will have made a technological breakthrough comparable to the one that it accomplished when the “traditional” computer was built. Industry, production and manage­ment technologies, and of course the military sphere will change beyond recognition. Today there are just a few dozen people of near-pen­sionable age in Russia who under­stand the problem and know what it is all about. Only a handful of them at the very best will live long enough to see the technological breakthrough. There will simply be no one in Russia to apply the world's revolutionary technology in prac­tice. Even if by that time we pre­serve our nuclear bludgeon, we will remain nothing but hopeless blud­geon-wielding cave dwellers.

United we stand

Predictably, the Concept's Preamble contains some argumentation concerning the non-viability of the sci­entific research sector, such as, e.g., “the low effectiveness of scientific organizations”. Paradoxically, bad as the present situation may be, this effectiveness is, as a matter of fact, extremely high. Thus, the citation index per $1 of salary in Russia is at a record level (source: the unflag­ging energy and fanaticism of Russian scientists). True, the num­ber of patents is not as high as it could be, but this is not a problem of fundamental (or even applied) sci­ence, but the problem of industry's primitive orientation toward the raw materials sectors which does not generate demand for inventions and innovations.

Of course, there are serious inter­nal problems in the organization of Russian science. Its administrative-managerial apparatus – from the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences (let alone the Ministry of Education and Science) to almost every scientific research institute – is self-centered, acting on self-interest. Competitive bid­ding on the allocation of funds within the Russian Academy of Sciences and the ministry, which is required by law, is seldom imple­mented. It is a purely bureaucratic procedure – in fact, a private divvying-up within a narrowly cir­cumscribed circle of directors and government officials. The distribu­tion of grants at the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Re­search Projects is more fair. As a matter of fact, these grants are the only source of livelihood for science today. But the volume of these funds is simply negligible: A mem­ber of a research team working on a grant gets 1,000 to 2,000 rubles in addition to his regular wage of 2,000 to 3,000 rubles a month.

The few recipients of foreign grants may be luckier, but even these funds are ridiculously small. The self-styled patriots in the Party of Power are undaunted by the fact that these grants are no longer com­ing only from the United States and Western Europe but also from for­mer socialist countries (e.g., Bulgaria) and the Baltic republics.

To straighten out the fund alloca­tion procedure, the existing system must be overhauled and en­trenched practices uprooted. Thus, it would be critical to stop the siphoning off of funds by the top academic bureaucracy, seeing to it that the money goes from the gov­ernment directly to researchers. The trouble, however, is that under no circumstances can the fate of sci­ence be entrusted to such time­serving conduits of the state's verti­cal chain of command as Aleksandr Fursenko or Mikhail Fradkov. Even though it sponges off rank-and-file research associates, the academic bureaucracy is very well aware that without them it will have no raison d'etre.

An internal reorganization of the scientific sector may only come sec­ond – after the state has drastically revised its science policy, in particu­lar boosting budget spending on sci­entific research programs. The pre­sent government, however, will not do this under any circumstances.

Scientists are not in a position to stand up to it by exerting political pressure that could force the gov­ernment to make some changes: They do not have a political party. Therefore, the only way out is to create a party. There is no other alternative [8, p. 10].

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