Devastation in the heads

When reading the article by Mikhail Zelensky about the state and prospects of science in Russia, some kind of dual feeling did not leave me. On the one hand, the author once again with the numbers in his hands convincingly shows that, according to the objective bibliometric indicators of scientific activity and productivity, Russia in recent years has been “close to Venezuela, Bangladesh and Burkina-Faso”, and there are no prerequisites for improving this situation in the near future. This is far from the first and far from the only study of this kind, but the author, firstly, analyzed the really huge global array of data for 190 countries, and secondly, found new visual ways to express the results of his analysis. Graphs in Fig. 1 and especially Fig. 4 speak for themselves.

On the other hand, the presence of some kind of porridge in the head of the author, who can easily forget his own results of the analysis for the sake of the red word and the completely unjustified “pouting of cheeks” in great-power rhetoric, at the same time contradicting it, is depressing. It would probably not have been worth writing about it if such a rhetoric had not been quite common in modern Russian journalism, even among the most advanced and scientifically savvy authors. It seems to me that this is a direct manifestation of the successes of Soviet chap -keeping propaganda, the results of which are still alive and easily reproduced even in the lips of many completely educated and globally thinking people. Without deliberately abandoning these long -standing propaganda cliches in its thinking, it is completely impossible to adequately assess the place of Russia in the modern world - not only in science, but also in economics and culture; Therefore, it is completely impossible to look for reasonable realistic ways to get out of the difficult situation in which we are. Figure 4 from the article by Zelensky clearly shows that plans and scientific and technical forecasts divorced from reality are characteristic not only for individual homegrown analysts, but also for serious state programs and presidential decrees. Meanwhile, it would have long been time to take off the great -power glasses distorting reality from your nose and try to look at yourself and the world around a sober naked look.

The Great Russia, ” writes M. Zelensky,“ the heiress of the superpower ... takes a modest place just below the tiny Taiwan (the territory is 650 times less and the population is 15 times smaller than ours). It is as if the author does not know that the greatness of the country and its influence in the world has long been determined at all the size of the territory and not the population, but how successfully the country uses and develops its own human potential (and attracts external), including scientific. The author discovers Russia in his analysis next to Venezuela, Bangladesh, Burkina-Faso, Guinea and Mauritania, even finds confirmation of this with a half-forgotten thesis of Russia as a upper volt with nuclear missiles, but immediately patronizing rhetorically pats his rating neighbors, they say, it only causes a surprise that some science even exists there.

The author is horrified that soon, according to the absolute number of publications, we will be catching up with the bananas-lemon-lemon Singapore, but meanwhile Singapore has long ceased to be just bananas lemon. Since writing the cited song of Vertinsky, the National University of Singapore (NUS) has grown from the small colonial medical faculty with 23 students to one of the largest universities in Asia, which stably occupies the upper lines of not only Asian, but also world ratings. It has long been called “Asian Mit”, and professors and students from around the world seek to work and study there and study there.

He finds some consolation to the very unenviable position of Russia in the scientific trends analyzed by M. Zelensky in Zelensky that things are even worse, for example in Ukraine, in Belarus, Moldova and Kyrgyzstan. The explanation of this is simple: our scientists in the CIS, after all, fluttered from the cozy nest of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Like Russian science, it would be worth adding. Like Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. But who would have thought! -In its trends, Estonia is among the scientific-developed countries. If the author looked more closely at his own data, he would have seen there nearby Latvia with Lithuania. Somehow they managed to achieve very significant successes from the same cozy nest of the USSR Academy of Sciences over the past 20 years. Does the author really believe that this was achieved by returning to the successful, in his opinion, practice of Soviet times, when the results should be asked not only with scientists, but most of all from the scientific authorities ? Are the positions of scientific chiefs in the Baltic states have now become “shot”? Maybe the author should also at least ask how the Academy of Sciences there changed?

I’m not saying that the term “shooting position” itself will be very difficult to translate and explain to any leader of a scientific project from any other country discovered by the author with developed science. Somehow they all manage to motivate not at all by the presence of both a real whip and a real gingerbread, namely, the desire to satisfy their own curiosity at the expense of the state. Just there, states are able to use the satisfied curiosity of individual scientists to the benefits of the whole society so successfully that they are even ready to pay seriously for this. But if the role and responsibility of the scientific chiefs is so great (up to the shooting!) And it was in this, according to the author, the success of the science management in Soviet times was really, then why, as the main reason for the current, such a depressing position of science in Russia, he calls the feudal system of the distribution of resources from above - first his, then worthy? Is this not a direct heritage of the same Soviet successes?

Such a view of the world and in the place in it of Russia allows you to incomprehensibly combine sincere indignation of the opinion (supposedly widespread in the West) that in Moscow, bears walk through the streets, and at the same time boldly declare that the very thought of science in countries as Saudi Arabia or Serbia seems unnatural. I am in no way a supporter of the feudal regime of Saudi Arabia, but I would like to tell M. Zelensky that the Saudi Scientific Fund (King Abdulaziz City For Science and Technology, Kacst) is a kind of analogue of the Russian An international-recognized scientist around the world (with the support of the American Association for the Promotion of Science, AAAS), identifies grants for 2-3 years according to the results of such a competition in size, quite comparable with the American NSF (about $ 100-150 thousand per year), and, before allocating the last tranche of funding, sends a draft for a second international examination. I think the author has enough experience to compare this with the practice of the RFFI.

In 2007, the king of Saudi Arabia started an extremely ambitious project to create a completely new Western -type university near Jidda - King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kaust. For two years, despite the global economic crisis and a strong drop in oil prices, the main source of Saudi revenues, the new university campus on the Red Sea shore was mainly built and accepted the first students from around the world. Teaching there is conducted in English, and the professors were scored by an international competition, which was not even held by the university itself, but was entrusted to the most authoritative educational institutions in the world, such as MIT, Columbia University, Imperial College London, University of Texas, University of Calphornia At Berkeley, University of Illinois, etc. (by the way, there are several of our former compatriots among the professors who are in this way). Now about a thousand students are already studying at Kaust, at the disposal of which are spacious laboratories, modern equipment, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The master's student scholarship is about $ 20 thousand there per year with free accommodation and medical insurance. Kaust openly proclaims the goal of becoming an “Arab Mit” over time and, apparently, is confident to this.

In March 2010, President Medvedev announced the creation of the Skolkovo Russian MIT. I would like to wish him success in this, but, be that as it may, in the person of Nus and Kaust, Skoltech already has worthy examples and very serious competitors. One could agree with M. Zelensky that the correlation of the country's political structure and the state of science is very distinct. Simply put, which country is such a science. But the same examples of Singapore and Saudi Arabia (both China, Brazil, India, Turkey, Estonia ...) show that everything is much more complicated. And the sooner in Russia they abandon the old-fashioned, who have come into the brains of propaganda cliches, the sooner the understanding of all this complexity of the modern world and the true place in it of its own country and its science comes, the more successful its development, whether it concerns fundamental scientific publications, the implementation of innovative scientific and technical projects or simply a more calm and comfortable life for its citizens. Otherwise - complete Turkmenistan Russia.

Andrey Kalinichev ,
Member of the Redso Council of the TRV-HOW