Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 4 – At a meeting in Kazan to mark the 85th anniversary of the Kazan Scientific Center, leaders of a dozen other scientific centers from across the Russian Federation called for the creation of an association of their institutions to share information and to press Moscow for more attention to and support for their work.
This idea was first proposed in 2019 but was shelved because of the challenges arising from the covid pandemic. Now, the leaders of these regional scientific centers believe that such an association is absolutely necessary given that Moscow has largely ignored them and failed to adequately fund them (business-gazeta.ru/article/681960).
The leaders of these centers said that they were distressed by the fact that the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Ministry for Science and Education had not brought them together “for many years” and so they have decided that they must take steps in that direction on their own.
One of the consequences of this lack of attention and funding from Moscow is that the regional scientific centers seek funding from and thus work more closely with businesses who see the regional groups as an important support for their development of new products and are prepared to provide them with more funding, speakers at the Kazan meeting said.
If the regional scientific centers are able to realize their goal, this has at a minimum two consequences that may change the balance between the regions and Moscow as far as science is concerned. On the one hand, this is a remarkable instance of the kind of horizontal ties which the Putin regime has done what it can to block.
But on the other – and this may be an even more important result of such an effort – the regional centers may devote even more attention to cooperating with Russian industry in order to get funding, making them rather than Moscow the places where science will become applied and help develop the Russian economy.
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