Surkov Is Building a Silicon Valley: While I have the chance, I’d like to invite readers of Vedomosti (a Russian business daily) to come up with a name for and design our Silicon Valley using crowdsourcing—or, as people used to say, a “people’s construction project.” Send your ideas, plans, and concepts to the newspaper’s website. We will study all of them. The best ones, in summarized form, will serve as the basis for the project, which will be approved at the very highest level. — Has the region been chosen? — Various regions are being discussed. Many believe it should be built somewhere in the near Moscow suburbs. The scientific, technical, and financial potential is higher there, after all. But there are other interesting options as well—Vladivostok, for example. — Will the land have to be leased? How large will the area be? — There is still some federal land available. There are plots that ended up under the control of state banks as a result of the crisis. We will aim to make this part of the project cost the state almost nothing. The size of the territory is still under discussion; there are various proposals, including radical ones—up to several thousand hectares. I take a more restrained view of that. *////// My prediction: They’ll build the whole thing in Skolkovo. Because “there are already innovations there anyway, and lots of people even speak English.” A decisive factor in the decision-making will be that it’s convenient for Shuvalov to drive there from his dacha (country house). They’ve already dug a tunnel for him (under the slogan “Everything for Skolkovo”). Now it’s Silicon Valley’s turn. Everyone is tired of Rublyovka (an elite residential area west of Moscow). Time to build something new. How long can you keep looking at red faces, “Hummers and Rottweilers,” and all those red-brick fences? It would be much cooler to have a neighborhood full of sweet, bespectacled nerds. You sit on the veranda, drink homemade berry juice, watch them, and think: my, how funny these scientists are. There he goes, muttering something under his breath. Probably inventing some technology.