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].
ANNEX