The Hunt for a Russian Silicon Valley

When Petty officer 3rd Class Pamela J. Manns took a photo of the Russian Federation Navy Missile Cruiser Varyag on June 20, it proved quite a sight. Small Coast Guard boats provided a seemingly unnecessary zone of security around the vessel as it powered its way into the San Francisco harbor, its impressive launch tubes prominent to each side. Visits to the vessel were subsequently made by an assortment of American officials – the photogenic San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose marble smile is hard to stifle, was one of the first to go on board. The relevant delegation then moved on Pier 7 for a ceremony with former US Secretary of State George P. Schultz and the Russian Ambassador. The Russian sailors, in the meantime, busied themselves with emptying an assortment of liquor stores.

The vessel’s presence has constituted a broader Russian push into California as part of a high powered advertisement drive. The Russian Premier Dmitry Medvedev is on the hunt for investment models on the west coast of the United States. While the Russian state might have abundant capital and cash, it lacks the equivalent of a ‘Silicon valley’. A long standing dream is creating a technology hub in a Moscow suburb.

His views were aired publicly in a visit to Stanford University on Wednesday, the first by a Russian premier since Mikhail Gorbachev ventured on campus in 1990 to declare that the Cold War was ‘behind us’. The day provided a digest of various technologies for the Russian leader, with a meeting with Apple founder Steve Jobs and a tour of Cisco Systems. Previously, Medvedev had made a quick visit to the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter where he sent his first tweet.

The Russian Premier, motoring along in advertising mode, was keen to sell his country while praising his hosts, themselves steeped in the brine of technological self-promotion. ‘I wanted to see with my own eyes the origin of success.’ A host of illusions came with that package. Make-believe is something the Californian landscape engenders. The dream factory, with its public relations apparatchiks, is all pervasive, the boutique of reconstituted realities stuffed with merchandise. One salesperson of the Silicon valley dream was Condoleezza Rice, who greeted Medvedev on campus and advised him that he had to be ‘free to fail’ in order to taste success.

Medvedev was receptive, speaking of the various pointers of democracy he knows an American audience laps up like warm milk. ‘Russia is a young democracy. We’ve come a long and very rapid path and our political system is constantly developing.’ A democratic political system based on constitutional law was a ‘work in progress’ and had to take place without foreign interference. Russian citizens had to have an improved education to realize their potential. He promised to improve the authority of Russia’s judicial system, something which is bound to take time. (Strong-arm democracy can surely not function well with a strong-arm judiciary, but political theory was hardly a vital part of the message.) Then there was the continuing need to develop Russian natural resources and high tech companies.

Medvedev then extolled the state’s openness and an invitation for all to work with Russia. ‘Russia is trying to become an open country. Open for partnership.’ That will prove difficult to sell: investors are wary of putting capital in a state where crony capitalism is king. Venture capitalism is a distant second. The Russian brain drain has become all too obvious.

Then, a remark by Anton Chekhov to close: ‘we must work, work, work, for happiness is something only for our distant descendants.’ The good world, it seems, is never in the present, but awaiting the very distant future. Despite the statement by Medvedev that the ‘mentality’ of Russians needed to change, the realities unvarnished by the Californian fiction, as his own reference to Chekhov suggest, may tell us a different story.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently in San Francisco. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com.

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