I am very often asked what my position is on the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences. So when we held a meeting with scientists last Wednesday, that was, naturally, the main topic of discussion. There were about thirty people at the meeting, the conversation was interesting, and you can read the details in the newspaper Troitsky Variant. After lengthy discussions with different groups, my position on the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences is as follows: Putin has set out to reform the Russian Academy of Sciences through a bill submitted to the State Duma this summer. To me, what is happening looks much more like a move to settle the question of who controls the property. A way, so to speak, of installing “effective management.” Take it away from them and manage it ourselves. The way this “reform” is being carried out resembles a special operation on enemy territory. The draft law was prepared in secret. The government introduced it on June 28, and just a week later the Duma passed it in its second reading. Why such a rush? Why speed through common sense with flashing lights on? The institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with all their property, are now to be transferred to some “federal executive body specially authorized by the Government of the Russian Federation to exercise the functions and powers of the owner of federal property.” The law says nothing about who will create this body or how. But Clause 14 of Article 18 says that this issue may be settled by presidential decree. Things like this should be discussed publicly and at length. Instead, one of the oldest organizations in the country (probably the oldest, if you do not count the Russian Orthodox Church) is set to be dismantled by some emergency decree pushed through behind closed doors. This smells even more like fraud when you consider that the bill is said to have been authored by Mikhail Kovalchuk
— the brother of that same Yury Kovalchuk from the Ozero cooperative (a dacha cooperative closely associated with Putin’s inner circle). Most observers are convinced that this same Mikhail Kovalchuk will ultimately be put in charge of the aforementioned “specially authorized federal executive body.” If this is not stopped, several hundred research institutes will be handed over to yet another “effective manager.” That is bad news, because we know how well Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk manages institutes. We are talking about more than 50,000 researchers, who are hardly inspired by the example of their colleagues from the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, who resigned and moved abroad after the institute came under Kovalchuk’s control several years earlier. All of this is happening for two reasons. First, because our crooks and thieves are very greedy. Second, because they cannot stand intelligent, educated people who achieved everything on their own and owe nothing to anyone. They are repelled by the very idea that some professor or academician might get to decide something because he knows more than others and because his opinion is respected by other professors and academicians. No—if you want to decide anything, you have to pay someone for that right. Our crooks and thieves, of course, do not believe that expert opinion can exist as such (as it does everywhere else in the world). It is becoming harder and harder for scientists to work. Pay is low. Decisions about which research gets funded and which does not are increasingly made not by professionals but by bureaucrats. As a result, enormous amounts of time are wasted on pointless reporting, and money goes not to those who work best but to those who are best at sharing that money around. And, as everywhere else, more and more funds are being spent on mega-projects, many of which look dubious. So it is no surprise that we are getting the results we are getting. Rockets are falling out of the sky, and new aircraft are not flying. How can this political position be formalized? Anyone can exercise their legal right to ask the State Duma to withdraw the bill on reforming the Academy. Everyone who is already registered on the Russian Public Initiative platform can vote for the initiative “To repeal draft law No. 305828-6 ‘On the Russian Academy of Sciences, the reorganization of state academies of sciences, and amendments to certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation’ (or the federal law, if adopted).” https://www.roi.ru/poll/petition/obrazovanie_i_nauka/ob-otmene-zakonoproekta-305828-6-quot-o-rossijskoj-akademii-nauk-reorganizatcii-gosudarstvennyh-akademij-nauk-i-vnesenii-izmenenij-v-otdelnye-zakonodatelnye-akty-rossijskoj-federatcii-quot-ili-federalnogo-zakona-v-sluchae-ego-prinyatiya/ That is exactly what I did.