AFK Sistema chairman Vladimir Evtushenkov (front) tries to convince Russian Presdient Vladimir Putin (center)that hi-tech in Russia is taking off.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Vladimir Putin in the Silicon Lemon Valley
Russian President Vladimir Putin went to the Sitronics firm in the city of Zelenograd yesterday for a meeting on high technology and to hear a proposal by scientists to introduce state planning in private business. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov noted that president listened to the proposal, but not very attentively.
Journalists' acquaintance with Sitronics' products began in the bus that took them to Zelenograd, not far from Moscow. Members of the AFK Sistema press service (Sitronics is a Sistema affiliate) solemnly passed out cardboard packages containing a press release with a glowing description of Sitronics and a Sitronics cellular telephone. The phone was an upscale model to judge by the packaging, so it could be refused with pride.
Sitronics officials who met us at the exhibition set up at the central office told us that “Zelenograd was the Silicon Valley of the Soviet Union. Now things have changed. Now it is the Silicon Valley of Russia” and that Sitronics products are sold “where we see people's need for us,” that is, Russia, the CIS, Central Asia and Africa.
Company employees displayed great enthusiasm for the company logo, which is the word “Sitronics” with a lemon replacing the O. Lemons were piled in bowls on every table of every room. But company president Evgeny Utkin wore a tie with limes on it. Dozens of them. I asked a passing employee what they do with all those lemons. Casting a disgusted glance at the nearest bowlful, she hissed between her teeth, “Oh, we eat them. We eat them, you know, little by little.”
But the lemons had distracted me from the technology. I looked over at the milling machine that, its developers said, has a special microchip to read the mind (and probably the soul) of its operator. “The brain of the person responds and helps it understand what is required of it,” a company executive was saying.
Sitronics consulting director Ilya Gandzeichuk showed us an electronic notebook that would soon change our very conception of such simple people as agronomists. “Of course,” he laughed, “I don't carry a pitchfork, but I need one too! Using the satellite antenna, I will control the harvest, till the field [apparently the magnetic fields] and control the vector of the equipment's movement. With the help of this device,” which was actually a typical GPS device, “we will reduce the cost of the harvest by 20 percent and increase the harvest itself by 20 percent.” And the device costs 180 rubles per hectare to use.
Then we were shown the “manager's smart terminal,” which will “stimulate the development of the credit system, and the place for the “inspector from the tax bodies,” which will “stimulate the transparency of the business” and most likely impede the development of the credit system.
“One kilogram of our products requires 70 tons of oil,” Gandzeichuk concluded with pride.
Soon Sistema chairman Vladimir Evtushenko and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov showed up. The mayor did not display much enthusiasm for satellite-controlled agriculture. But then the president appeared and began to look.
“For the first time, a milling machine will be able to turn out detail work,” they told the president.
“Great!” he said.
Putin walked down a white corridor, glancing in little windows to watch people in white lab coats and face masks working on microchips. Everyone had been given blue lab coats to wear, although Luzhkov indignantly refused to put his on, maybe imagining what the television cameras would do to his stout figure in such a getup.
When the meeting began, the president spoke of the need for serious revision of the system for financing high technology.
“Why is that?” he asked rhetorically. “The state has always concentrated on defense, which doesn't need mass production. But we do! We need to develop the domestic market and conquer the external market!”
Then Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Nikipelov gave a report that seemed to boil down to the Academy's epic struggle with the Ministry of Education and Science, and the ministry's efforts to reform the ironclad Academy.
“There is nothing unnatural about the system for financing the Academy of Sciences,” he averred. “It's called financing at arms' length.” Without so much as a glance at Education Minister Andrey Fursenko, he continued, “I am bewildered by some of my colleagues' sincere conviction that success can be attain by the simple method of orienting financing toward results. Naive belief in the omnipotence of competitive procedures leads to what is now being called the hacking' of budget funds.”
Almost every speaker who followed Nikipelov said a few kind words in support of competitive procedures.
Bureau chief of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Alexander Shokhin asked that private business be exempted from VAT on research and development.
Minister Fursenko supported the idea of reducing R&D costs for private business. To his credit, he did not comment on Nikipelov's words.
Director of Krylov Central Scientific Research Institute Valentin Pashin opened the audience's eyes to what was happening at Sakhalin 1 and Sakhalin 2, where the developers were giving expensive research projects to foreign centers, with scandalous results.
“The foreigner did projects on shock load and ice load and we thought they were useless. We are redoing them,” Pashin said tragically. He concluded by expressing his approval of Gazprom's decision not to share the Stockman deposit. “We would have had to pay with our own resources,” he huffed.
The president wrapped up the meeting with another look at reformation of hi-tech financing. It seems he took Pashin's words to heart, since he then acknowledged the need for protectionism. “But it has to be said straight that it should be healthy protectionism” that would help domestic business.
If only there were something to protect…
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 18, 2006
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