On May 30, 2008, Russian academicians must elect their president. However, all this has little to do with science and its progress. It is believed that Mikhail Kovalchuk is striving for power in the Russian Academy of Sciences, who at one time was already thrown "black balls" at the academy
Normally, there are three candidates: the current president is Yuri Osipov, academicians Vladimir Fortov and Valery Chereshnev. But the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences has already recommended to the general meeting to re-elect Osipov, who has headed the academy for almost 17 years. Vladimir Putin also showed his favor to Osipov by receiving the head of the academy in Novo-Ogaryovo and promising to visit the Russian Academy of Sciences the day before the vote.
Academic debt
The intrigue around the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been going on for a long time. In July 2006, Yuri Sergeevich Osipov turned 70 years old, and in December the next election of the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences was due. The then charter forbade persons over 70 years of age to hold the post of president of the academy - ironically, this point was once initiated by Osipov himself. But on September 12, 2006, the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences made an unexpected decision: not to hold elections. Officially, this was argued by the need to wait for the approval of the new charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences, without which the elections, they say, are illegitimate: they should be postponed, leaving Yuri Osipov as the head of the academy.
The Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences then leaked that these academic maneuvers were part of the government's plan to keep Osipov as president in exchange for increasing the influence of state structures on the activities of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The scientific community took the changes with hostility: in itself, the case of postponing the elections is almost unprecedented - this happened only once, in 1941, when the Germans stood near Moscow. Immediately after that meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vice-President of the Academy Gennady Mesyats even said in his hearts: “We were raped. The academy has never experienced such humiliation.” And even now, many scientists do not hide their irritation, recalling the events of 2006, considering them an attempt by the government on academic independence.
Be that as it may, Osipov was going to run for president for the fourth time. Back in 2006, a draft of a new charter was sent to the government, allowing, among other things, to bypass the age limit. Precedents with changing the statute of the Russian Academy of Sciences for a specific figure are not uncommon - at one time they canceled the clause prohibiting holding the presidency for more than two terms in a row: also - so that Osipov could run again. Scientists themselves see the rationale in the fact that officials, as Nobel Prize winner academician Vitaly Ginzburg put it, "wanted the academy to become a department of a state institution." Academician Vitaly Ginzburg diplomatically said about the upcoming elections at the end of May in an interview with The New Times: “The re-elections are too fast, this is wrong. Candidates should be given the opportunity to present programs. No one knows who will be elected, Osipov or Fortov, but both of them, of course, are worthy candidates.”
There is a version that the election of the head of the academy is a smokescreen, and the main issue is real estate. 1 It is no coincidence that RAS Vice-President Gennady Mesyats bluntly stated in the fall of 2006: "There is a conspiracy to seize land and property of scientific institutions in Russia." Academician Vitaly Ginzburg does not deny that this aspect plays a role: “Yes, there are a lot of crooks, and the academy has vast lands, there is a struggle.” And Yuri Osipov himself once admitted: “There is a very simple underlying reason behind the constant attacks on the academy, various accusations. Some people are haunted by the property that the state has presented to us for management.” 2 The names of these "some", however, were not named.
Interlocutors of The New Times from a number of academic institutions in Chernogolovka confirm: for the past five or six years, the academy has with great difficulty repulsed the constant attacks of raiders encroaching on the objects and lands of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The battle for academic real estate also involves administrative resources, including, for example, tax officials. Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Nekipelov in September 2006 told how, in a private conversation with Sergei Stepashin, he complained about the constant raids from the Accounts Chamber, but he only sighed: “Why, Alexander Dmitrievich, don’t you know where this all comes from? »
Family nanobusiness
But this is only the visible part of the iceberg. The main events, according to the interlocutors of The New Times, unfolded in 2007, when the then First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced a "nano-revolution" and plans to pump almost 200 billion rubles into the project (of which 130 billion were planned to be allocated by the end of 2007). For comparison: the annual budget of the Russian Academy of Sciences is about 20 billion rubles.
Actually, the plot of the current elections is twisted around the division of the “nanopie”. And everything is done almost for a specific person - Mikhail Kovalchuk. The name of RAS Corresponding Member Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk became widely known when it became known that the Kurchatov Institute had been declared the head center of nanotechnologies. Which is formally (at 0.25 rate) and part-time headed by the director of the Institute of Crystallography, Corresponding Member Mikhail Kovalchuk. He was not involved in nuclear physics, but, according to the Kurchatovites, he showed remarkable commercial ingenuity, transforming a number of "redundant" premises of a scientific institution into a car dealership. In early 2007, government officials made it clear to the academicians that they wanted to see Kovalchuk as the top manager of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the administrative field, this is a strong player with very powerful connections in government agencies. If only because his brother Yuri is a person close to Vladimir Putin, a member of one of the influential "St. Petersburg" groups. Yuri Kovalchuk has known Putin since the time when he was in charge of foreign economic activity in the St. Petersburg mayor's office. Together with Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Yakunin (the current head of the Russian Railways) and Andrei Fursenko (Minister of Education and Science), Yuri Kovalchuk co-founded the Ozero dacha cooperative. Together with Yakunin, Kovalchuk participated in the re-establishment of Rossiya Bank, the post of chairman of the board of directors of which he now holds. The New Times has already written about how investors who approached Vladimir Putin could get the "go-ahead" for their project only on the condition that everything had to be carried out through "Russia" (No. 45, December 17, 2007). As of mid-2003, Kovalchuk owned 41 percent of the bank's shares (a lower figure is now being quoted). This year, the name of Yuri Kovalchuk first appeared on the Forbes magazine's list of billionaires: the fortune of Putin's friend is estimated at $ 1.9 billion. Since April 2006, Yuri Kovalchuk's son Boris has been heading the department of priority national projects of the Russian government. This is how the business turns out, almost “family” ...
Kovalchuk starts and...
The building of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow
Mr. Kovalchuk cannot yet head the academy: he is a corresponding member, and only an academician can be the head of the RAS. In 2006, Kovalchuk ran for full membership, but scientists rolled his candidacy at the selection stage. The further combination of Kovalchuk's promotion is as follows: at the beginning of June 2007, he was made Sergey Ivanov's deputy in the government council for nanotechnologies, and on June 26 of the same year, bypassing the charter, the presidium of the academy appointed Kovalchuk acting. Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences! The action continued to develop according to the nanoscenario: on December 19, 2007, the general meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences reorganized the Department of Information and Computing Systems into the Department of Nano-Information Technologies - specifically for Mikhail Kovalchuk, evil tongues say. The new department gained the right to put forward additional applicants for academic robes - due to the fact that it selected vacancies from a number of other natural science departments. And all sorts of nano-specialties, as if by magic, began to multiply in other departments. The new RAS will have at least 126 academicians and corresponding members directly dependent on Kovalchuk's nanoprograms. The latter, as a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, will already be able to claim the presidency when Osipov leaves. And few doubt that Osipov is an intermediate option that facilitates Kovalchuk's infiltration. Along the way, academician Vladimir Fortov is removed from the presidency.
The attitude towards Kovalchuk in the scientific community is wary: although he is respected, he is considered the manager and “nano-agent” of the government. “I have known Kovalchuk for many years, and I have nothing against him,” said Vitaly Ginzburg. - They will elect him now as an academician - and thank God. But I don’t see any reason for him to run for president, he’s not of that scale, he can’t be compared with either Osipov or Fortov.”
It is not so important how exactly the authorities will push through their top manager, but the trend is obvious. Maybe it's for the best. As academician Ginzburg told The New Times: “For many years our government did not care about science, but now it has realized that science is needed. And they gave a lot of money for all sorts of nanotechnologies.” Only now, the domestic practice of recent years gives rise to vague suspicions that the scientific community will be assigned the role of a “washing machine” for pumping and laundering colossal funds. In a private conversation with The New Times correspondent, one of the major Russian mathematicians expressed the same idea: “It’s just a Panama, the money is colossal, the scientific effect is nanoscale, but you know whose family business it is... That’s the whole intrigue.”
On May 28, 2008, 46 academicians are to be elected at the general meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 13 of them in nanospecialties. Of the 119 newly elected Corresponding Members, 34 are also specialists in nano issues.
_____________ 1 The RAS includes 454 academic institutions, which use almost two million sq. m of premises and four thousand square meters. km of land.
2 Rossiyskaya Gazeta, June 28, 2006.
