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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...
...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...
...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...
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." (See why President Obama wants a cybersecurity czar...
...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...