Anatoly Borisovich Chubais, head of the state-owned company RUSNANO, sent me an angry rebuttal to my post, "We admit that nothing worked for us and things were bad. Give us more budget money"
*Unfortunately, your claim that "nanotechnology people receive 30–50 billion rubles from the budget every year" is a lie, because RUSNANO has not received a single ruble from the state budget since 2012. Your claim that "they haven't achieved a damn thing with that money" is a lie, because the 57 factories built in Russia across 27 regions, which produced 227 billion rubles' worth of goods last year, prove otherwise. The same is true of the 12 nanocenters built in 9 regions of the country and the 350 startups they have created. With your lies, you will not convince the 3,266 specialists trained through our programs, nor the students of 154 schools in 54 regions participating in the RUSNANO School League, nor any of the several dozen master's graduates from MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) produced by our Department of Technological Entrepreneurship. *
The full text is here.
So that's that. It turns out nanotechnology is one of our leading industries, and we somehow didn't know it. There are 12 nanocenters, and apparently they're doing something.
And since they haven't received direct budget money since 2012, I guess the period from 2007 to 2012 doesn't count, and all of this is supposedly a lie.
I am grateful to Anatoly Borisovich for starting this discussion about why RUSNANO exists at all. We will continue the discussion; I will prepare a substantive response.
If you know something about RUSNANO that the nanotechnology crowd is hiding from the outraged public, write to us anonymously via Black Box.