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Chronicle of Higher Education
March 25, 2002
Russia Announces Plans to Overhaul Its Research
Institutes, Increase Government Support
By BRYON MacWILLIAMS
Moscow
The Russian government has announced a sweeping agenda of reform for science that would revamp the country's ungainly system of research institutes.
The plan would reform the institutes by rewarding research disciplines that adapt to the free market and contribute to the country's wealth, and by cutting off support to those that don't.
Until 2010, money would be channeled to nine fields of research and several dozen spheres of technology that were identified as crucial to the country's interests during a meeting last week of the State Council, the Security Council, and the Presidential Council on Science and Technology. The last time a meeting of such scale took place was in 1974, in the Soviet Union, according to Ilya Klebanov, the minister of science, industry and technology.
Presentations at the meeting brought to light a host of salient facts: The number of researchers in Russia has fallen by half since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as a result of brain drain. An estimated 200,000 researchers have emigrated during the past decade. The average age of Russian scientists now is 56.
The reforms being proposed would emphasize innovation -- particularly in academe -- and coordinate the scientific research in government institutes with the research on college campuses.
"Today governmental support of science is completely ineffective ... and poorly organized. This is the first step toward a sensible, self-regulated departure from the senseless scattering of resources," Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, said in a Kremlin address to the country's most influential figures in science.
The plan would quintuple the money for research in fields such as telecommunications and electronics, aviation and space, new materials and chemistry, advanced armaments, production technologies, energy conservation, and transportation. The government would also increase spending on the sciences from 1.7 percent to 4 percent of the federal budget, a move already required by a 2001 law.
Moreover, salaries would be raised for scientists under the age of 35, while pensions would be increased for those of retirement age, in an effort to encourage senior scientists to make way for new blood.
"Everyone is declaring that they are on the path of innovation, but nothing, or almost nothing, has been done in real terms," Mr. Putin said. "The choice of a path of development for domestic sciences is, as a matter of fact, a choice of the prospects for our nation."
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