‘Russia Doesn’t Have an Electronics Industry and isn’t Trying to Create One,’ Chugunov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 11 – No country that aspires to leadership in the post-industrial world can do so without a well-developed electronics  industry, but the Russian Federation doesn’t have one and is unlikely to because the government is spending less on its development and it is on the maintenance of the State Duma, activist and blogger Dmitry Chugunov says.

            Russia is “hopelessly behind not only the most advanced countries in this sphere like Japan, Germany, the US, or South Korea but even from China which until recently bought such equipment from us,” Chugunov says (newizv.ru/article/general/11-12-2019/dmitriy-chugunov-nikakoy-rossiyskoy-elektroniki-net-i-uzhe-ne-budet).

            And Russia’s situation today was easily predictable as long as 40 years ago, he continues. At a conference in 1980, where he and his colleagues called for the development of micro-electronics, their appeals were met by dismissive laughter rather than support. The USSR didn’t need such things to survive, they were told.

            “Life itself showed who was right,” Chugunov points out; “ten years later, [the USSR] didn’t exist.”

            In support of his argument, the analyst might have cited a Soviet joke of that time, according to which a group of Russian scientists marched through Red Square carrying a sign declaring “The Soviet Microchip – the Largest Microchip in the World,” exactly the kind of thinking that prevented Soviet and then Russian electronics from developing.

             One can only hope, Chugunov says, that Russian atomic bombs do not have Chinese microchips embedded in them. “But there are no guarantees.”  And it is likely they are to be found in Russian military aviation and the fleet, a situation that has grown even worse over the last 20 years of Putinist support for extractive industries rather than electronics.

            The situation is now so dire, he suggests, that even senior officials are beginning to notice although it appears they do not understand the reasons for Russia’s backwardness in this sector. Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov, for example, blames Russia’s lag on “the ‘insane’ privatization of the 1990s.”

            But finance ministry statistics show the real reason, Chugunov says. The Kremlin isn’t investing in this critical area.  In 2019, it budgeted just 9.91 billion rubles (160 million US dollars) for the development of the electronic industry, far less than the 11.027 billion rubles (180 million US dollars) it officially spends on Duma operations.

            Other analysts like Maksim Minchenko of Minchenko Consulting agree and suggest that the future for this branch in Russia is truly disastrous because Russia is so far behind. Despite Putin’s recent suggestion that Moscow can take what the West has developed, in this sector at least, real progress depends on having an industry capable of developing on its own.

            Chugunov illustrates his comment with a cartoon that shows the pattern that the Russian electronics industry has followed with all its “reforms over the last 30 years.” It shows a simply flush toilet in 1989, and the very same toilet but fitted out with a television monitor that spits out a bill for water and sewage in 2019.