Putin

And in fact Putin saw just such a solution—nanotechnology. First theorized in 1959 in “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” an article by the madcap Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, nanotechnology has been defined as the “ability to see, manipulate and manufacture things on a scale of 1 to 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.” This is the level of molecules and atoms. In 2007 the Russian government allocated $7.7 billion for the development of nanotechnology over the next eight years. Often called Russia’s most hated man, the survivor of four assassination attempts, former privatization chief Anatoly Chubais, his signature red hair less vivid with age, was chosen to head up the nano project, with the actual work done by the prestigious Kurchatov Institute, which had played a critical role in the development of the Soviet atomic bomb. “Nanotechnology is an activity for which this government will not grudge funding,” said Putin. “The only question is that this work should be well organized and effective, yielding practical results.” There were many possible practical applications, with, as Putin stressed, “super-effective weapons systems” not least among them.

Hopes ran high. “Nanotechnology will be the [foundation] for all institutes in a science-driven economy,” proclaimed Mikhail Kovalchuk, director of the Kurchatov Institute and described by Wired magazine as “expansive to the point of dreaminess.” “Nanotechnology will be the driving force of the Russian economy,” he added, “if it can overcome the legacy of the recent past.” An enormous if.

Like a third-world country leapfrogging from pay phones to cell phones, Russia would, to use a Soviet expression, “overtake and surpass the West.”

The Soviet educational system was a formidable machine that mass-produced engineers and scientists. The hard sciences like physics and mathematics—unlike, say, history and economics—had posed no challenge to Marxist ideology. This is not entirely true either, for some sciences, like cybernetics, were for a time viewed as inherently bourgeois, and under Stalin genetics was effectively hijacked by a charlatan named Lysenko, who preached that acquired characteristics could be inherited, leading the great nuclear physicist Igor Tamm to publicly challenge him by saying, “If that is so, why are women still born virgins?”

The hard sciences also of course had their very practical applications—Sputniks, Kalashnikovs, H-bombs—and were always well supported, the luminaries numbering among the elite. That changed with the fall of the Soviet Union. Science was barely funded by a government that could itself barely make payroll. The brain drain was so severe that it even became a national security issue for the United States, which began paying Russian nuclear scientists to stay at their jobs in their own country and not sell their expertise to rogue nations like Iran and North Korea.

In the new dispensation defined by mere survival at one end and get-rich-quick at the other, science wasn’t sexy and didn’t pay. Wanting to change that, nanotech head Chubais declared at a video conference with eight technical institutes: “As the industry expands to annual sales volumes of 900 billion rubles [$28 billion], which is our target, we will need 150,000 positions to be filled.” One hundred people had graduated with degrees in nanotechnology in the previous year, 2008. Chubais did not mention where the other 149,900 specialists were going to come from. Like Kovalchuk, he too seemed to be suffering from a certain “dreaminess.” Questioned about his progress by Putin in April 2009, he replied:”The prospects make one dizzy!” He did go on to list some areas in which some initial work had been done, satisfying Putin, who agreed that these “technologies have brilliant prospects…. Now, I see you are really making progress.”

Fast-forward to 2013 and a grand scandal à la russe. Of the original $5 billion to $7 billion of state money, $40 million had vanished into shell companies, and another $450 million was spent on a silicon chip factory that proved inoperational. All told, something like $1.5 billion had gone down the rabbit hole. The joke about nanotech was, the more money you invest in it, the smaller the result. Russians who still hated Chubais from the shock-therapy privatization campaign of the early nineties were now calling for his head. Putin defended him, though tepidly, saying ineptitude was not theft, while also hinting darkly that some of Chubais’s aides and employees had been CIA operatives seeking to disrupt scientific progress in Russia.