This is the Russian Demotivator poster that some of my Russian friends have passed around Facebook as a joke about Skolkovo, the Kremlin's vaunted "Silicon Valley" type "innovation" outfit and "start-up incubator".

It shows– like a failed Soviet project where people didn't fulfill the plan — an empty field with plow marks and a sign in the distance for Skolkovo, and then says as the tag line, "At the Epicenter of Innovation". In fact, it's even goes further and makes a word "innovatsionnost" out of the Western-borrowed Latin-rooted word "innovation" which means something like "innovationness" as a kind of satire.

I think most people familiar even slightly with Russia understand that you can't really expect to get "innovation" if you have the state run it and run it from the top down, with a few trusted and precious elites. It's not clear who has been cut into Skolkovo, and what form their loyalty has taken, although the story could probably be researched in time, starting with a talk with Igor Ponomaryov, who has been involved in the foundation of Skolkovo, is a deputy in the parliament and on the technology and innovation committee, and has been part of all this and also part of the mass demonstrations criticizing Putin. Then I think he got some kind of reprimand or something and he has been quiet or travelling or something lately. The whole opposition have kind of been clubbed, jailed or scared into submission and talking inanely about dialogue and cooperation with Putin. This is what happens when a club comes down on your head, as I keep saying, it works every time. And it will even be made to look sort of hipsterish in today's Russia.

Amb. Michael McFaul, Obama's envoy to Moscow, after not tweeting for a bit sent an apparently approving link to TechCrunch's article "Moscow's Tech Mojo is Working — and Awakening". It's like one of those flurry criticism-free pieces that TC increasingly does about all the gadgets and favourite start-ups of their incestuous Silicon Valley world. Just gushing.

The whole back story of why TC goes to Russia and not other places (Israel?) that are known for a start-up culture now is opaque to me. Part of it, of course, is thanks to Jared Cohen leading the #russtechdel which I wrote extensively about at the time. Jared was trying to get a soft touch on human rights and not rile the Kremlin hosts while he tried to impart the same "better world" approach that wealthy American technology entrepreneurs to their careers. It floundered when it crashed up against the cynicism of the startupshchiki, who were in a completely different world/class/country than both old and new human rights activists. But at the end of the day, it was enterprising Russian kids breaking free of the bounds of the bureaucrats, and people telling the human rights story anyway, that made it — in spite of the foreign intruders.

Fortunately, I don't have to do anything here, as in the comments, everybody pretty much takes the author to task. For one, there was his silly claim that the ugly Stalin gothic high-rises — the vysotki, which is the word for "high-rises" literally — are called "The Seven Sisters". But they are never called that, as he claimed. I mean, no one tries to scrub the "Stalin" out of it. "Stalin's" is what they are called.

The Ukraina is a monster. You could go up and down the stairs there for days on end and still never find the various little coffee shops and buffets, as they are called, that you ate in last time. It's a lot like the Shining in there.

Hey, I wonder if that old doorman from the UPDK is still standing at the front of the Ukraina, guarding it from farstovshchiki,
black marketeers. He was there in the Soviet era; he was there even
after Yeltsin stood on a tank. I remember marvellilng again he showed me
his ID — his little korochka still proudly said UPDK, the department
that the KGB used to take care of/spy on foreigners — even though that
body was supposedly "no more". I bet it still exists. I bet he's still
there.

Mikhail Demidov, the RBC journalist, has a great line there, "Hey, are you kidding me? Criminals are civilised and start work as VCs, it's ok."

The article mainly cuts and pastes from Kremlin press releases. Munford crows about the fact that "a Russian edict" (!) requires that companies invest 1% of their profits in R&D. This is the same kind of accounting trick as in the US, taking an actual sunk cost leading nowhere and converting it back into an "asset".

“This is probably the largest R&D project in the world and we are
building something that will last for generations. Skolkovo Moscow is
incubating more than 700 start-ups but also attracting serious foreign
investment from Cisco, IBM and Siemens as well as Russian companies such
as oil giant Rosneft.

All of these billions of investments or promised investments were made WHILE Jackson-Vanik was in place, and in spite of the pending Magnitsky bill — there's something about these Silicon Valley companies that make them salivate over Russia, even though it's hard to understand what they see as a return of investment. Internet penetration is 30 or 40%.

I was shocked looking at Mary Meeker's lastest Internet analysis this year that Russia's smart phone mobile penetration as a percentage of subs, which I thought was bigger, was only 9 percent. There are a lot of phones with SMS capacity, but those are the dumb phones, not the smart phones. (BTW, Meeker puts Russia's Internet users at 70 million and penetration at 49%). Even so, there are 22 million smart phone users; and growth is among the highest (44%). If there are so many millions of people with Twitter capacity then…why aren't things better? Oh…

“We are creating a VC-friendly environment that positions Moscow as
the place for foreign companies to invest and a legacy for Russian kids
so they become entrepreneurs and stay in Russia, not seek their fortune
elsewhere,” said Conor Lenihan, VP External Economic Relations,
Skolkovo.

Of course, one of the open secrets explaining the drive to fund Skolkovo is the brain drain of Russian programmers to Silicon Valley. First, there were several waves of emigration to the US during the Soviet and early post-Soviet period, including many Jewish mathematicians and physicists and computer programmers who found jobs in tech — and also helped support children in the sciences. Then came even more waves of non-emigres, but people on work visas to fill up the Big IT companies. Unlike the emigration waves, who tended to be more anti-government, with even the experience of being refuseniks or political prisoners, or having experienced anti-semitism or other forms of harassment, the newer waves are pro-Kremlin or neutral and hostile to Americans critical of their country and merely see this move as a kind of lifestyle choice. So Medvedev made a special effort to try to win them back home by offering them big salaries and start-up facilities to play with.

But every time I ask any Russian actually in the current tech world or working on start-ups in Moscow and other cities, including even some who came to TechCrunch Disrupt last May, they get this little smile on their face. You know, patronizing. Like, "How can anything come of that, it's top down, it's the Kremlin."

I keep thinking of the Russian word "Kreml" which means "fortress" and the word for "Silicon" which is how Russian's translate "Silicon Valley" — "Kremnieyvaya Dolina" and I think of Skolkovo as "Kreminievaya Kreml" — the Silicon Fortress. It's not innovative. It's a government bastion.

One of the companies is making 3-D models with Sketchup and Autodesk, Vizerra.

I asked in an earlier TechCrunch piece why Pavel Durov, the CEO of Vkontakte, wasn't on the speaker's list. Shouldn't the largest Russian social networking site, the competitor to Facebook, be in the lineup? And I got snark from Russians in the comments who seemed to think this was the right posture for him to take. What, super nationalism? I'm blocked by Durov for confronting him as to why his service deleted the 8,000-strong support group page for Andrei Sannikov after he was imprisoned two years after the failed presidential elections where he was among the opposition candidates. I also critiqued his wacky utopian political plans for getting "his people" to appoint judges and run things under the guise of populist online voting. The guy's an ass, and a powerful ass.