Сможет ли Россия конкурировать? История инноваций в царской, советской и современной России
Interesting book about several brilliant Russian scientists and engineers who were however unable to capitalize on their ideas in Russia. This has evidently been a problem no matter what form of government is in effect, and seems to persist even in the present day and age. Many times they have emigrated to the West to make money on their ideas/inventions. This book attempts to answer the question as to why despite having an educated, talented population, Russia has never capitalized on the talen Interesting book about several brilliant Russian scientists and engineers who were however unable to capitalize on their ideas in Russia. This has evidently been a problem no matter what form of government is in effect, and seems to persist even in the present day and age. Many times they have emigrated to the West to make money on their ideas/inventions. This book attempts to answer the question as to why despite having an educated, talented population, Russia has never capitalized on the talent. There are no "hit" products Russia is associated with, although many Russian scientists, inventors, and engineers actually have had great ideas. The system in Russia - under the Tsar (capitalism) and under communism - effectively stifled the innovators.
From Chapter 1: The Early Arms Industry: Early Achievement, Later Slump
¨The [tsarist army in the early nineteenth century] was the largest in Europe, one million men strong, and the Russian Empire had proved, after the defeat of Napoleon, that it was the dominant military power on the continent. In 1814 the Russians occupied Paris. Only British naval power counterbalanced the military forces of the tsar.¨
¨From the 1830s through the 1850s, U.S. arms makers converted interchangeable-parts manufacture from an idea to a reality, and they expanded it into what became the American system of manufacture.¨
¨. [the] Springfield[, Massachusetts armory] and the Connecticut River Valley were the birthplace of the new system of production, an approach that spread from arms manufacture to the rest of U.S. industry.¨
¨The master craftsmen of [the] Tula[, Russia armory] relied on their personal skills, and they resisted any innovation that would reduce their status to the ranks of state peasants, where most of their families had started. Tula had a long history of resistance to machines.¨
From Chapter 2: Railroads: Promise and Distortion
¨. it is evident that the most important factors in promoting technological progress are not the invention of the device itself. but the social and economic stimuli that cause a certain technological innovation to be picked up and propelled further.¨
From Chapter 3: The Electrical Industry: Failed Inventors of the Nineteenth Century
¨Unfortunately, as even his admiring biographer Liudmila Zhukova wrote, [Aleksandr] Lodygin [(1847-1923)] ¨did not know anything about finances and did not want to know anything,¨ he just wanted to be ¨left in peace¨ to work on his inventions. This characteristic is one that is observable among many Russian inventors and scientists and is a result of their belief that business is ¨dirty,¨ even if sometimes one has to engage in it.¨
¨Russia at this time [1880s] had little industrial capital and did not have experience in investment and management.¨
¨Lodygin may have had a radical past [since he had been very interested in the socialist ideas of the Narodniki, or populists, in the 1870s], but he disliked the authoritarianism of [Soviet] communist rule.¨
¨The tsar´s government feared the political independence that successful entrepreneurs would inevitably attain, and [Pavel] Yablochkov [(1847- 1894)]´s association with radical revolutionaries such as [German (Herman)] Lopatin increased their anxiety. And businesses in Russia were not interested in technological innovation. Even the luxury hotel where Yablochkov lived for a while in St. Petersburg would not buy his [electrical] lamps, preferring traditional gas lanterns.¨
¨The humiliating defeats suffered by Russia in the Russo-Japanese War inflamed radicals and conservatives alike, and the workers´ movement in the capital city became increasingly militant. By early January 1905, St. Petersburg was paralyzed by strikes, and had no electricity and no newspapers. Then on January 22 (January 9 old style), ¨Bloody Sunday,¨ armed soldiers at the Winter Palace fired on peaceful demonstrators, killing hundreds. This event led to an explosion of protests and was one of the causes of the 1905 Revolution.¨
¨[Aleksandr] Popov was a typical ¨Russian intellectual,¨ actually proud of the fact that he had no commercial interests. His major Russian biographer asserted that Popov was the embodiment of the best characteristics of the Russian intelligent. of modesty and indifference to wealth, and of care only for the good of the people.¨
From Chapter 4: A Frustrated Master, a Deformed Industry
¨The Soviet aviation industry that developed before World War II bore the imprint of political authoritarianism.¨
From Chapter 5: Soviet Industrialization: The Myth that it was Modernization
¨Among the best known of these engineers educated before the Revolution who began to work with the Soviet government were I.A. Kalinnikov, Iu. V. Lomonosov, P.K. Engelmeier, R.E. Klasson, L. Ramzin, N.F. Charnovskii, S.D. Shein, V.I. Ochkin, and P.A. Palchinsky. Perhaps the most outspoken was Peter Palchinsky, a talented and energetic mining engineer who was convinced that the mineral wealth of Russia destined the country for industrial greatness if only rational and fair policies for the exploitation of this wealth were drawn up and pursued by the government.¨
¨[According to Palchinsky] An investment in education promoted industrialization more than an equivalent investment in technical equipment since an uneducated or unhappy worker would soon make the equipment useless.¨
¨Long-distance transmission lines, [Palchinsky] . warned, involve huge transmission costs and declines in efficiency.¨
¨In the United States, [Palchinsky] . noted, the steel mills were not located near the rich iron ore deposits of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota or the Marquette Range in Michigan but hundreds of miles away, in Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh--all cities with large labor forces, the first three connected to the sources of ore by water and the last located near enormous coal deposits.¨
¨In each of these cases--the building of the gigantic hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River, the construction of the world´s largest steel mill in Magnitogorsk, and the digging of the White Sea Canal--the recommendations of the local Russian engineers were overruled by the Soviet government.¨
¨The Soviet Union, Palchinsky warned, must have a goal beyond the construction of heavy industry for symbolic and ideological purposes; it must also aspire for a society where all human needs were economically fulfilled.¨
¨Palchinsky was executed without trial, and almost all of the engineers who questioned governmental industrial policy were arrested.¨
From Chapter 6: The Semiconductor Industry: Unheralded and Unrewarded Russian Pioneers
¨Texas Instruments first placed a transistor radio on the market in 1954. But few people in the West are aware that a pioneer in semiconductor research was a Russian, Oleg V. Losev, who in 1922, a generation earlier, built working sold-state radio receivers and transmitters in Leningrad.¨
¨After an early period of economic militancy in which all private enterprise was eliminated the Soviet authorities relented a bit; during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, from 1921 to 1927, some independent economic activity was allowed to flourish, especially small stores and enterprises.¨
¨However, a few years later a crackdown on private enterprise began. ¨
¨. by the 1930s private industry simply did not exist in the Soviet Union.¨
¨[Losev] . eventually died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad. He was thirty-nine years old. "
¨Russia today is a giant in theoretical physics, including semiconductor physics, but it is a midget in industrial high technology on the international level. No more dramatic illustration of the gap between Russian scientific achievement and industrial technology can be found than in the field of semiconductors.¨
¨Today no Russian company ranks among the world´s largest computer or computer chip manufacturers. The worldwide electronics industry based on the transistor is one in which Russia plays a surprisingly small role.¨
¨The invention of the transistor was announced by Bell Labs, a part of AT&T, where both William Shockley and Walter Brattain worked .¨
From Chapter 7: Genetics and Biotechnology: The Missed Revolution
¨However, this outstanding [Russian] school of biology was wiped out by a political campaign in the Soviet Union headed by Trofim Lysenko, who did not accept modern genetics. Backed by the power of the government and police, Lysenko suppressed modern genetics in the Soviet Union.¨
From Chapter 8: Computers: Victory and Failure
¨A more serious political threat to the development of computers in the Soviet Union came with the energence of personal computers. The Soviet authorities liked computers so long as they were big mainframe machines in central governmental, military, and industrial offices but were less enthusiastic when computers moved into private apartments, where they could be used for the rampant dissemination of information by ordinary citizens. In an effort to control information, the Soviet authorities had long banned the private possession of printing presses and copying machines. A personal computer with a printer was the equivalent of a small printing press. What should the Soviet authorities do about this?"
¨. after. the Soviet Union disappeared . all controls over communication technologies were abandoned (but not controls over mass media such as television).¨
From Chapter 10: The Exceptions and What They Prove: Software, Space, Nuclear Power
¨In a few cases, such as Kaspersky Lab, by the time the company becomes visible to authorities and criminals it is already large enough and dispersed enough that it can protect itself better than a startup retail establishment or a normal small business operating in an easily identified location."
From Part II: What Are the Causes of the Problem?
¨In all these cases the early promise was not fulfilled. Instead, we have witnessed what can only be called massive failure in sustaining earlier excellence. Today, Russia is a minor player in the world high-technology market. Once again, Russian leaders are forced to repeat what their predecessors from Peter the Great on have proclaimed: Russia must modernize its industry.¨
From Chapter 11: The Attitudinal Question
¨In recent post-Soviet years the connection of successful businesspeople, especially the oligarchs, with corruption has only deepened suspicion of business operations. We should recognize that many Russians simply do not want a Western, liberal, competitive, open-market system. They have often desired to go their own way, maintaining they are pursuing ¨higher values.¨
¨Russia was affected by this [pro-trade, pro-capitalism] idea much later than most of Western Europe. To the end of the tsarist empire, the strengths of the monarchy, the nobility, and the church were greater than those of a rising bourgeoisie. Prestige was linked to strength, and merchants and entrepreneurs did not have high social standing. Protestantism was largely absent. "
¨The Marxist revolutionaries who took over Russia in 1917 were modernizers, but they saw the state, especially a state planning apparatus, as the key to modernity, not the efforts of individual entrepreneurs.¨
¨There are some signs lately of a nascent attitudinal change in Russia toward the commercialization of technology.¨
From Chapter 12 - The Political Order
¨The political problem has been, in a word, one of authoritarianism. The tsars, the leaders of the Communist Party, and now the leaders of post-Soviet ¨sovereign democracy¨ (which is not democracy at all) have determined the policies that govern technology development, often ignoring market forces and ¨best practices¨ that, in at least many instances, governed the development of technology elsewhere.¨
¨China is . the greatest challenge to the basic thesis of this book, that technology is most creative and successful in a democratic, law-governed society.¨
¨Militarization has distorted Russia´s technological development.¨
¨Even today, Russia suffers from brain drain and capital flight as scientists and investors seek better conditions abroad.¨
¨The Soviet Union achieved an impressive industrialization, but the effort was severely distorted by politics.¨
From Chapter 13 - Social Barriers
¨At the time of the revolutions of 1917 the system of propiska, or mandatory residency permits, was abolished, but it was reinstituted in 1932, and vestiges of the system remain even today, in post-Soviet Russia. During Soviet times all citizens were required to have internal passports in which their residences were listed. Different types of propiska existed (such as ¨permanent,¨ ¨temporary,¨ and ¨service¨), but mobility was controlled. Often a person could retain residency in a desirable place (such as Moscow or Leningrad) only so long as he or she continued to work for a certain economic entity (factory, ministry), which also often provided the apartment in which the person lived. The thought of quitting one´s place of work in order to do something more innovative in a different place or for a different employer was usually out of the question. One would lose both one´s apartment and the right to live in that city.¨
¨People can still be stopped on the street by the police and asked for their passports and residence registration. ¨
¨Mobility of place and status are much more limited in Russia than in most other modern societies. This restriction in outlook and practice remains an obstacle to innovation.¨
From Chapter 14 - The Legal System
¨The tsar and his close advisers feared the independent power that a truly successful entrepreneur or industrialist would inevitably possess. For this reason the tsarist government never recognized ¨patents,¨ only ¨invention privileges.¨ It never signed on to international patent conventions.¨
¨. the general principle that the right to market a product was not allied with a property right possessed by an individual but instead was a special favor bestowed by the government and serving the government´s purposes.¨
¨The secretary of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Finance, A.N. Gur´ev, openly advocated in the 1880s a policy of illicitly copying the best Western technologies under government protection, a policy that membership in international conventions on patents would have contravened.¨
¨Soviet Russia was opposed to private property, and therefore the concept of ¨intellectual property¨ belonging to an individual was alien.¨
¨On June 30, 1919, the new Soviet government issued what was called Lenin´s Decree on Inventions, which declared all innovations to be the property of the Soviet state. A few years later, under the more permissive and temporary New Economic Policy, this decree was supplanted by a more lenient one, but that law was soon replaced by yet another, which again banned ownership of intellectual property by Soviet citizens.¨
¨. Soviet inventors were given no period of monopoly use and could not start a business.¨
¨As the economist Joseph Berliner observed, the fatal flaw of the Soviet economic system was its inability to promote creativity and innovation.¨
¨. although Russia has made great progress in the last twenty years in developing laws on patents, intellectual property, and the commercialization of technology, the legal system is still weak and poorly understood, the patent laws are still untested, and there are even unresolved contradictions between them and the rest of the legal system. It is easy for everyone--businesspeople, university professors, government officials-- to abuse the rules since no one knows quite what they are.¨
¨The fact that the whole legal system in Russia is subject to political influence and that judges are not truly independent raises questions much larger than laws on patents and intellectual property.¨
From Chapter 15 - Economic Factors
¨Tsarist Russia did not have an investment class, Soviet Russia banned the existence of such a class, and post-Soviet Russia has a very weak one.¨
¨Innovation economics places technological change and its resultant increases in productivity at the heart of economic growth. Capital accumulation, so often stressed by economists in the past as the key to growth, is seen as less important than innovation.¨
From Chapter 16 - Corruption and Crime
¨Russia is among the most corrupt nations in the world.¨
¨According to some polls, about half of the adult population of Russia admits to have given bribes. Protection money became a common obligation for the new private businesses that sprang up in Russian cities and towns after the fall of the Soviet Union. Gangsters and sometimes the police themselves would warn merchants that unless they paid for protection, some unforeseen disaster might strike their stores, such as smashed windows and stolen goods. Most people took the safe way out.¨
¨Corruption is not only a drain on the Russian economy, it directly affects its ability to compete in high technology, blunting the excellence that is needed to survive in world competition.¨
¨Although crime is not as rampant in Russia today as it was in the early 1990s, it is still widespread.¨
¨. in Russia, crime and corruption affect entrepreneurship . more than in many other nations. Any successful entrepreneur becomes a likely target for criminal groups.¨
¨A favored tactic of the Putin government in suppressing trouble-makers and critics is to accuse them of economic crimes, illustrated most dramatically by the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but there are many other examples.¨
From Chapter 17 - The Organization of Education and Research
¨In the post-Soviet period the major figures in industry often also occupied positions in government as well, so they had both political and economic power. They often had offices in the Kremlin.¨
From Part III - Can Russia Overcome Its Problem Today? Russia´s Unique Opportunity
¨Although in a globalized world the concept of ¨national¨ companies is much less clear than it once was, Russia has a long way to go to win its place either among the giant international companies that now bestride the globe or as a birthplace of exciting startups.¨
From Chapter 18 - Creating New Foundations and Research Universities
¨. much of Russian research is still centrally funded and directed.¨
¨Private philanthropy is new to Russia, but it is emerging. However, private philanthropy has very limited influence in science and technology.¨ . more