Twenty-five years ago this month, Gorbachev assumed the top leadership post in the Soviet Politburo. I had not remembered this date, but was reminded while reading an interesting article in Russian Life (an excellent magazine) about Perestroika. It was a first-hand report by Tamara Eidelman, a teacher in Moscow and the magazine’s history editor, of the changes and the impact it had on the Soviet people. What struck me the most was that the people heard on television that the Soviet “economy was not as wonderful” as they had been pretending. Gorbachev talked about the economy and the role of scientific and technical progress to the citizens of the Soviet Union. She writes that he believed that “we needed to ‘accelerate,’ that computers and robots would lead the country out of crisis.” Reflecting on the last twenty-five years, she was nostalgic about that marvelous spring of 1985. She writes, “It truly seemed possible to change everything for the better without any blood or horror. We just needed more computers.”
Although this was both a very interesting and personal account of that dramatic time in the Soviet Union, Russian people are now hearing (again) from their leaders that modernization” and “innovation” is essential to Russia’s future. Of course innovation is critical to all economies and finding ways to achieve innovation is the trick. Today, Prime Minister Putin spearheaded a new commission on innovation to “enforce its modernization agenda” and is prepared to “assign 1.1 trillion rubles [$36.8 billion], or more than 10 percent of the federal budget, for fundamental and applied sciences, higher education, high-tech medicine and specialized federal programs.” This investment is needed and signals, perhaps, a real commitment to innovation.
But not all agree. In an opinion piece in The Moscow Times, Modernization by Gosplan, Vladislav Inozemtsev cites the flaws in the approach to innovation. He highlights that the “fundamental problem in Russia’s approach to modernization is that it doesn’t seem to understand – or at least it blatantly ignores – the fact that you can’t have a centrally planned innovative economy.” He states that there is only one path – “that is the path of industrial revival based on Western technologies, the rapid liberalization of the economy in combination with gradual political reforms and a fundamental rapprochement with Europe and the U.S.”
Whether or not you agree with his assessment it is very clear that modernization is essential for Russia’s economic future and involving Western technologies and partners would be good for everyone. It would provide more business opportunities and scientific collaborations hopefully creating more jobs. Twenty-five years from now, when we look back at this important time for modernization, we hope that we won’t think as Tamara Eidelman did, that “we just needed more computers.”
