Isolated, forward-thinking communities have been around in Russia for quite some time. There were the foreign compounds in Russian towns from the 16th- to the 18th-centuries, the foreign industrial concessions in the 1920s to 1930s, and the secret research and development laboratories for convicted scientists (sharashka) in the Gulag system under Stalin. The science towns followed in this tradition, as does Moscow’s Skolkovo project today, where, instead of modernising the whole countrys political system and economy, the authorities have created another isolated hi-tech compound.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 23:43:27 +0000