Lonely Ideas

When have you gone into an electronics store, picked up a desirable gadget, and foundthat it was labeled "Made in Russia"? Probably never. Russia, despite its epicintellectual achievements in music, literature, art, and pure science, is a negligible presence inworld technology. Despite its current leaders' ambitions to create a knowledge economy, Russia iseconomically dependent on gas and oil. In Lonely Ideas, Loren Graham investigatesRussia's long history of technological invention followed by failure to commercialize andimplement.

For three centuries, Graham shows, Russia has been adept at developingtechnical ideas but abysmal at benefiting from them. From the seventeenth-century arms industrythrough twentieth-century Nobel-awarded work in lasers, Russia has failed to sustain itstechnological inventiveness. Graham identifies a range of conditions that nurture technologicalinnovation: a society that values inventiveness and practicality; an economic system that providesinvestment opportunities; a legal system that protects intellectual property; a political systemthat encourages innovation and success. Graham finds Russia lacking on all counts. He explains thatRussia's failure to sustain technology, and its recurrent attempts to force modernization, reflectits political and social evolution and even its resistance to democraticprinciples.

But Graham points to new connections between Western companies andRussian researchers, new research institutions, a national focus on nanotechnology, and theestablishment of Skolkovo, "a new technology city." Today, he argues, Russia has the bestchance in its history to break its pattern of technological failure.

Loren Graham, often described as the leading scholar on Russian science and technology outside that country, is the author of The Ghost of the Executed Engineer and other books. He is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at MIT and Research Scholar at the Davis Center for Russia and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.