Russian Science & the World (Monthly Digest)

September
2001

Russian Science and the World
(WWW Monthly Digest)

january

Weapons scientists

ISTC provides links with leading Western scientists and conferences on how to apply for grants, said Anatoli Iskra, a leader in a project to compile radioactive waste data from former Soviet sites. The salary system sends money directly to scientists rather than to federal bureaucracies. Unlike Russian research grants, ISTC salaries are not taxed at the typical 40 percent.
"Our projects are a very good model of living in the real market economy", Russian executive director Sergey Zykov said, explaining many weapons scientists never faced the kind of scrutiny typical of Western grant-making agencies and businesses. "There is a sort of teaching by real work". However, ISTC faces the same criticism as other scientist assistance programs. It must prove its salary supplements are not furthering weapons research, something ISTC officials say they prevent with hands-on, highly accountable management.
"We can honestly say we are not proposing to do enormous things", said Peter Falatyn, who for three years has been an ISTC senior adviser. "It is still on a person-by-person-by-person basis".
And that's a good thing. In the decade since the Soviet Union fell, relations between the U.S. and Russian governments have gone up and down like dot-com stock prices. And if news of National Missile Defense and FBI spies is any indication, that won't change anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the long-hoped-for comeback of the Russian economy has not materialized, leaving once-hopeful scientists - especially weapons specialists, who were well off during the Cold War - pushing for a return to the good old days of designing new weapons.
All of this has an impact on nuclear nonproliferation programs. U.S. lab scientists who once had access to Russian closed cities now have to cancel trips or put them off for months. However, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow point out that the most tense time in recent relations, the war in Kosovo, had little impact on nonproliferation efforts.
Nonproliferation problems were much more complicated than anyone suspected 10 years ago. More nuclear materials are in more abysmal security and storage conditions than was predicted. The expected threat from rogue nations has intermingled with threats from terrorists.
But the doomsday predictions have not yet come true. Some Russian weapons scientists have tried to flee for better-paying jobs in rogue nations, as documented by nuclear think tanks, but they are few and far between. Experts now understand, however, that Russians don't have to leave their labs to work for those nations. U.S. and European visitors have seen business cards of scientists from Iran and Iraq inside Russia's closed nuclear cities. And conditions have not improved much for weapons scientists, especially in those neglected weapons cities that are home to 760,000 residents.
"There is a dangerous gap between this threat and our response", said Rose Gottemoeller, a former Energy official and analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Most of today's threats can only be met by cooperation with Russia".
In some ways, that makes nonproliferation programs more important. "Above all, it is in the U.S. interests, the shrinking of the Russian complex", said Pikayev of the Carnegie Moscow Center."If Russia changes its policy to anti-American, it would have less chances to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities".
The question of whether these programs, designed as short-term fixes, are good for long-term problems also must be addressed. The Bush administration is re-evaluating nonproliferation efforts, and preliminary reports say that review suggests at least two programs, including the Nuclear Cities Initiative, be eliminated.
"You have to ask yourself, what signal are we sending to the Russians?" said James, the Stimson Center analyst. "If you think that spending money to address these dangers is a good thing, why are we cutting back money on it?"
At least some Russian experts realize the threat and say they are working to do something about it. Officials at the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy say they are putting money earned by converting weapons-grade uranium to nuclear power-plant fuel back into transforming their weapons complex. They also are looking to two highly controversial plans to raise money: Selling a nuclear power plant to Iran and importing the world's nuclear waste for storage in Russia.
"From the Russian side, we have to solve this",said Alexander Antonov, head of conversion for the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the Russian equivalent of the Department of Energy. He said the question for the United States is, "Will it take a long time to develop this (conversion), or can we speed it up?"

To hope

Back at the Siberian test site, a mere 52-hour train ride southeast of the power players in Moscow, the geologists are celebrating the present with an elaborate meal of butter-soaked Russian dumplings, known as "pilminy", red caviar on dark brown bread and, of course, vodka toasts all around. "Perestroika was not good for science", said Victor Soloviov, another researcher at the test site, as he stood, glass raised, to make his ritual toast.
He spoke of days when money flowed, when machines ran and twice as many scientists were seated at the long food-filled table in the bunkhouse here. But he is hopeful for the future of Russian science and the test site, he said, because the research is strong and has support from the West.
Everyone raised their glasses as his voice crescendoed to the final words:"To the ISTC".
* * *
Struggles for money consume scientists
Published Sunday, September 9, 2001

AKADEMGORODOK, Russia-Andrei Arzhannikov is a thin, helpful man with a brown goatee and an earnest manner. At one point he chased a rapidly moving van several blocks through Akademgorodok's April slush when it left without his visitors.
But Arzhannikov's real enthusiasm is for science.
Arzhannikov heads a research group at the well-known Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics. With 3,000 people, it is the largest research center of the 450-institute strong Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition, Arzhannikov leads the physics department at nearby Novosibirsk State University.
As he ducked under the metal tube of his electron accelerator, nestled in the ground room of a cavernous lab building, Arzhannikov explained how short, high-pressure bursts of electrons can help scientists understand how materials change from solid to plasma. Unlike many laboratories in Russia, this electron accelerator and other nearby equipment has the cluttered, cared-for feel of a research center in any Western laboratory.
In the past 10 years, "life in our country completely changed", he said. Students don't have the opportunities they once had; even many high-level scientists have left. His mentor, a Russian physicist, now works at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
Sitting at a large round table with a wooden engraving of institute namesake Andrei Budker on the wall, Arzhannikov said his facility has managed to raise money by selling accelerators and accelerator parts. Through deft leadership that equalizes enterprise and research, it has managed to funnel a large part of that money into basic science research.
Even then, Budker's scientists spend much of their time trying to raise research money from Russian and Western agencies and writing status reports on those grants. That's something Russian scientists never had to worry about in a system that doled out money without an application process. "We spend a lot of power to collect money, to organize the grants", Arzhannikov said with a sigh. "The time for thinking decreases year by year".
* * *
'Science cities' see their salvation in brain power
Published Sunday, September 10, 2001

OBNINSK, Russia -- Anton Yanovsky said the word "Naukograd" with a reverence that in other places is reserved for religion.
For him, it means much more than "Science City". It means tax breaks for local business.
It means extra money and independence for city government.
It means recognition of knowledge harbored here.
And it means a plan to pull Obninsk, a young city of research institutes and apartments, out of its economic slump, a decline gripping much of Russia since the Soviet Union fell apart a decade ago.
Science and nuclear cities such as this one 60 miles southwest of Moscow were once helpless dependents of the Soviet state, which controlled everything from schools to street signs to salaries through the institutes and factories that were the primary employers.
In the past decade, the federal government has all but orphaned these cities. It left behind newborn city governments wobbling under the weight of debilitated apartment buildings and obligatory pension payments.
Along the way, city officials and citizens have had to totter through the messiness of an infant democracy.
They've had to learn to listen, to compromise, to deal with election upheaval, such as a spring vote that may change the direction of Obninsk's city government.
Unlike other Russian towns, science cities have a secret they hope will help them grow like the celebrated mushrooms in nearby birch forests: brain power. Entrepreneurs and U.S. development experts are convinced Russia's science and math education system, combined with a glut of low-paid lab scientists, can turn these cities into miniature versions of Silicon Valley. Obninsk was the first of a handful of science cities given special tax breaks and a small amount of funding as a naukograd. Others, such as the centuries-old military city of Krasnoarmeisk and the high-end science haven Akademgorodok, are using grants from nonprofit groups or U.S. government assistance to turn their fate around.
"We don't have diamonds; we don't have coal deposits", said Yanovsky, a young physicist turned deputy director of this city's Science and International Relations Department. "The question was what kind of industry could be developed".

An open Obninsk

Think of it as the ultimate company town.
"In reality, it was built as an institute, and around the institute a city developed", Yanovsky explained from his shared office in Obninsk, a city founded in 1954 where medium-rise apartment buildings are nearly indistinguishable from offices and labs.
During the city's early days, its 110,000 citizens were shut off from the outside world by tall fences and strict visitation rules. This was the Soviet version of security, replicated in dozens of other cities with nuclear and military knowledge. Many cities, including 10 formerly secret nuclear weapons sites, remain closed. Obninsk has been open to visitors and its residents have been free to travel for almost 20 years, but the past decade brought new challenges as city government took responsibility for things such as health care and potholes, once the responsibility of the prominent research institutes here.
Yanovsky and many others worked for years to get the official "science city" designation in 2000. It gives the city five years to attract businesses and create new ones, relying in large part on a wealth of underpaid and underemployed workers at its 12 federal research institutes.
The designation spurred a large influx of grants from the U.S.-sponsored Eurasia Foundation, which is interested in creating the underpinning of civic organizations noticeably lacking in post-Soviet Russia. One grant funded Yanovsky's economic development plan; another put the city budget on the Web; a third set up a business park.
"It was not funding of academic institutions. It was funding for adaptation", explained Eurasia's Irina Pilman, who manages the 15 Obninsk grants -- an experiment in focusing on one city.
This project still leaves the city far from its goals. It wants to start businesses, privatize hundreds of apartments and increase incoming revenue. "We are just in the beginning of this", said Victor Latynov, a former city official who uses a grant to train entrepreneurs.

New responsibilities

The mayor's office in Krasnoarmeisk is in a sturdy 1870s brick building with tall windows and rare wood floors, itself almost a century older than Obninsk. But the two cities face many similar difficulties.
This 27,000-person town northwest of Moscow was a 14th-century village with a strong local textile industry, whose main factory is still marked by tall metal gates. That industry drew the military during World War II and hence closed the city to visitors. Before long two- thirds of its residents worked for the factory and four military research institutes designing artillery. They owned schools, gardens, 96 percent of apartments and the cultural center.
Krasnoarmeisk elected its first city government in 1991, just two years before it was handed responsibility for crumbling apartments and offices, heat and water, education and health care, and no money to do anything about them. In 1994, the population paid only 6 percent of its utilities, and the city was responsible for everything else, said Vitaly Pashentsev, the city's straightforward mayor.
Pashentsev, a man with salt-and-pepper hair whose eyes crinkle as he talks, said he and fellow city officials have been learning democracy the hard way. Financial fixes needed to turn these problems around have been a hard sell to citizens, who don't understand why they should pay rent or utilities. The city wants residents to pay 80 percent of their utilities this year. With the help of a foundation created by billionaire American investor George Soros, these officials have taken their message to local talk radio, town meetings and focus groups.
Soros' money paid a consultant to turn what residents say into a strategic plan. And they've had some success. Last year, a new perfume plant was built here. Through sometimes painful negotiations, the institute has given up several buildings and land for scientific development.

Science business

In cities big and small, one of the most promising hopes for economic development is Russia's massive science infrastructure. The economic downturn that orphaned fledgling cities also left thousands of scientists looking for jobs.
In, Akademgorodok on the Siberian plains 1,800 miles from Moscow, Alexey Alexeev can tell you minute-by-minute movements of the Nasdaq, and how each dip might affect his computer software company.
Alexeev, a small man with straight blond hair and a neat suit, has hired dozens of former scientists at Siberian Information Technologies to write computer programs for Western companies. He charges about $40 an hour, a pittance for U.S. programmers used to making $120 or $130, but a fortune for Russians often earning $80 a month.
Besides the lure of low prices, Alexeev hopes Western business will be interested in the pedigree of these scientists, especially in math and physics. He says Russian programmers are better equipped than those in India, a predominant computer outsourcing powerhouse, to tackle complex problems. People don't think of Russia, said Serguei Simonov, who runs a technology park and collaborates with Virtual Pro of San Ramon to draw computer business to Russia.
"Siberia is not only a frozen area", he said, flinging his arms for emphasis and nearly losing his metal-framed glasses. "In fact, it is a big (site) for intellectual resources".
Back in Moscow, the U.S. Department of Energy is joining with the Kurchatov Institute to retrain the institute's nuclear weapons scientists to work in industry.
Ten years ago, this federal institute employed 12,000 people. Now only 5,000 people work there, most earning less than $100 a month. To stem a potential exodus of scientists, the department's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention is linking 17 computer modeling experts with a Philadelphia-based phone company.
The biggest challenge, said Boris Stavisski, director of the institute's business park project, isn't the science but teaching programmers how to work for Western companies.
"The technical risk is very low", said Victor Alessi, a former Energy official who now works for the U.S. Industry Coalition, a group encouraging business investment in weapons scientists' technologies. "But it still has the problem that doing business in Russia is not easy".
Nearly nonexistent Russian patent and contract laws, along with an economy in shambles, have kept most Western businesses away. Those problems, along with marketplace naivete, have kept many Russian entrepreneurs from success. "(Western) companies need to be wary, but they need to understand that there is a lot more going on in Russia than what you hear in the press", said Virtual Pro's Martti Vallila, who began working with Russian software companies in 1993. "There are steps being taken to create stability".
Yanovsky, the author of Obninsk's economic development plan, is optimistic that stability will be part of the city's future. When Yanovsky remembers the naukograd plan and all the hard work that went into it, he remembers the funders with a toast that has become a tradition: "To the American taxpayer".
* * *
Russia struggles to revive its past renown in science
Published Sunday, September 11, 2001

Scientists' salaries plummeted after the Soviet Union's collapse; many left for the West or abandoned the field

DUBNA, Russia -- As he walks darkened hallways toward an acclaimed particle accelerator, Yuri Lobanov remembers the early 1960s, when he arrived at this science city.
That's when science was a high priority for the Soviets, a point of pride in a decades-long competition with the United States. The space race and Cold War were in full swing, and money flowed. Patriotism and prosperity attracted the best students to work in what was considered the highest calling.
This lab, part of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, was built as a communist counterpart to Western scientific partnerships. "It was a place of culture", says Lobanov, as he walks into a control room for an accelerator whose exciting results in recent years include creating new elements on the periodic table, but whose sturdy black dials and silver switches now have the distinct feel of a 1950s science fiction movie. "It was like an island". Ten years after the Cold War's end, Russian science scrimps for every ruble. Researchers get by with old equipment and dim hallway lights to save electricity. Once among the most pampered members of society, scientists have seen their salaries plummet below those of Russian secretaries because of massive decreases in federal funds for science. Some of the most talented, especially young, promising students, have left science or left Russia to seek better-paying jobs. "If you're a hotshot engineer at an institute, 98 percent would say they would like to go abroad", says Glenn Schweitzer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, author of "Swords into Market Shares," which is about Russia's economic and scientific prospects.
There is, however, a hint of change. A decade-long decline in college science majors is reversing. Officials at the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences are considering plans to put more money toward young scientists' careers and encourage older ones to retire.
Scientists in Dubna, a quiet city of tall trees and low brick buildings 75 miles north of Moscow, are lucky. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research has a 40-year tradition of collaboration with international researchers, something stifled in many institutes in a formerly closed Russia. Those connections give researchers a chance for grants to supplement average $100-a-month salaries.
Scientists at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, for example, have created previously unseen elements in intense competition with German and American groups. They have a longstanding partnership with Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientists that brings money and prestige to both. "We can't come back to the former organization of our science", says Vladimir Fortov, a vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "It is impossible because the economic system and the social system is quite different".

A dismal decade

The second-floor classroom is humid and filled with healthy houseplants, a sharp contrast to the still-wintry April air of Akademgorodok in southwest Siberia. Ten high school students, boys with short haircuts and blazers and girls in ponytails and skirts, scribble notes as the gray-suited teacher writes the familiar "Aa+Aa = a" of a basic genetics lesson.
His deep voice holds their attention. They giggle as Gregory Dymshits ribs them about chicken heredity and their grandparents' eye color.
Granted, these aren't typical students. They're attending an elite physics and math boarding school for Siberia's best students in this science city created by Stalin to rival intellectual centers in Moscow and St.
Petersburg. And Dymshits isn't a typical teacher. He's a professional genetics researcher who has taught high school for 35 years. Ten years ago, he was chosen as one of Russia's best high school science teachers. That entitled him to a salary supplement from the International Soros Science Education Program, a fund set up by billionaire U.S. investor George Soros to keep Russian and other regional secondary schoolteachers, college professors and graduate students in science during a time when many were leaving to feed their families.
That exodus was a big change for a country where science was among the most respected professions and a common career choice for smart young people. Communists saw science as a vital competitive tool and a way to prove the Marxist ideal. They rewarded its practitioners with well-paying jobs and hard-to-get apartments and cars.
That commitment was mirrored in a Russian education system that emphasized science, especially physics and math. The result: a massive science infrastructure that at one time employed as many scientists as the United States, although this country's population is smaller by nearly 100 million. After the financial and political fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, salaries for these elite professionals fell from the equivalent of a U.S. scientist's salary to nearly nothing. Now a full professor at Moscow State University, Russia's top institution of higher education, earns $100 a month, and those at other schools earn $50 or less. High school science teachers are paid less than $30. Scientists once earned twice the average salary, which is now about $60 to $80 per month.
That shocking dip created an equally disturbing departure from science. The most talented researchers, with good reputations and Western contacts, could leave for research jobs elsewhere. Many did, especially young people. Others left for business, which seemed a quick way to discover the joys of capitalism.
Most Russia experts assumed the downturn would be just a blip while the economy recovered. An initial influx of Western philanthropy, most notably from Soros, who donated $70 million from 1994 to 1997, aimed to support the best scientists and science teachers for a short time by paying salaries and buying scientific journals. But in recent years, that support has begun to wane as few signs of an economic recovery have emerged. The Soros science program has halted programs to pay high-profile retired scientists and has severely cut back on salary supplements. "We can't stop it, but definitely, we helped a lot", says Lydia Ryabova, a friendly former engineer who runs the funding programs for Soros professors.
Federal and local Russian governments have not picked up financial support for Soros programs, as some had hoped. The government now spends less than half of what it spent on research 10 years ago, about 1.06 percent of its gross domestic product, or $2 billion - even less than New Zealand or the Czech Republic. Few Russian businesses are motivated or financially strong enough to fund research.
Remaining scientists often stayed because of family commitment, patriotism or a lack of opportunity abroad. Many work part-time jobs, as translators,computer teachers or drivers for visiting reporters, so they can continue in science. Others, such as physicist Alexander Bukin, spend months each year researching or teaching in Europe or the United States, earning enough to live the rest of the year.
Each year for 13 years, Bukin has traveled from Akademgorodok almost 6,000 miles to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where he works on high-energy physics experiments.
It is difficult to leave family to come where you feel uncomfortable with the language, he says, sitting in the SLAC lobby in June with fellow Russians, including a first-time scientific visitor and a UC Berkeley student.
"Many people choose to stay ... and not go abroad", Bukin says as he ducks down, uncomfortable with his perfectly passable English. "It is a quite personal decision".
One of those who don't want to leave is 17-year-old science student Alexander Kurgan who is in Dymshits' biology class. Kurgan, from the Ural Mountains, understands that salaries might be better elsewhere, and many fellow students want to leave. But Kurgan, whose father is a policeman and whose mother works in a state insurance company in a town 750 miles away, is patriotic and wants to work here after he has his degree in physics, or maybe computers. "The future depends on us, " he says.

Saving science

Keeping Kurgan and those like him will be a determining factor in whether science can survive and thrive in Russia. Some think Russian science just needs money to quickly recover. That's a partial solution, but the "youth problem" is the most serious issue, says Schweitzer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. "It used to be that being a professor was it. ... It is so much tied to financial status now", he says. "I think (the challenge) is convincing the young people that if they go into science they have a chance of making a living".
Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin did little to acknowledge this or other science problems, but Vladimir Putin has mentioned science in several speeches, an encouraging sign for those hoping for restoration of money to science. In his large, picture-filled office overlooking the Moscow skyline, the Russian Academy of Sciences' Fortov says he will ask Putin to give more money to young scientists. His plan would allocate 10 percent of Russia's science budget to 10,000 promising young researchers, money they can use to buy equipment and hire graduate and post-doctoral students.
"If the talented will be inside the country, we will find a solution", says Fortov, a large, serious man with a picture of himself and U.S. physicist Edward Teller in their younger days on the wall. "If they leave the country, nothing will help us".
Russia has already implemented a competitive grant-based funding system, called the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. This, more than theoverarching funding of the past, may allow the country to prioritize funding on research with the highest potential for success.
Others think Russian business itself may one day save science. Two young businessmen, including the governor of an Eastern province, have promised millions to research.
The young, dark-haired executive director of Soros' science education programs in Russia, Vladimir Zarnitsyn, says that won't happen until the tax code changes; money for science from philanthropists is taxed upwards of 40 percent.
Zarnitsyn received his doctorate in physics from one of Moscow's most prestigious scientific colleges and has seen most classmates leave Russia or science. That, combined with what he sees as governmental failure to address the problem, leaves him less optimistic about the future.

Pushing ahead

Back in Dubna, Flerov lab scientists have lofty plans to build a new accelerator, announced with a colorful diagram to those entering the sturdy brick building's front door. They hope to explore the nature of an atom's nucleus with this new machine, continuing their international collaborations despite problems.
"I could not say that the salary and the general resources strictly determine the results", says Yuri Oganessian, the Flerov lab director. "If you are a painter or a writer, if we pay you 10 times more it does not become 10 times better". The most successful part of Russian science is small labs such as his that raise their own funding, both from Russia and abroad, and produce good science, Oganessian says.
"The scientific level is not made by the big institutions", he says. "The small groups are really the diamonds".
* * *
Earth-shaking machines may help monitor test ban treaty
Published Sunday, September 9, 2001

BYSTROVKA VIBROSEISMIC TEST SITE, Siberia - The shaking starts as a twitch in your toes and gradually escalates to an ear-rattling rumble.
But the most important jarring is happening 600 miles away in Kazakhstan, where shaking detectors that may one day monitor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty can feel the smallest jolts made by these immense vibrating machines. In this muddy field surrounded by rolling hills and fishing streams, dozens of devices let scientists test the seismic sensors that monitor both explosions and earthquakes and map the ground around them. This combination of basic science and practical application has attracted international funding from a group that employs former weapons scientists.
The machines shake the ground in a rhythmic pattern that distinguishes itself from the shaking of earthquakes and explosions. This lets scientists see the differences in the ground around the sensor and better trace the source of nuclear explosions or earthquakes. "In principle, it would be possible to realize the global (structure) of the earth", said Boris Glinsky, the project's director.
The two-story-tall yellow machine shaking with 100 tons of force is filled with two heavy T-shaped weights that whip in opposite directions. This clockwise and counterclockwise movement of the side-by-side weights cause an up-and-down motion that shakes the ground like a constant small earthquake. Another machine, looking like a giant sewer pipe lying on its side in the April snow, creates its reverberation by lifting, then dropping 50 tons of water with an air-filled spring.
This design could be easily expanded to immense sizes -- there are plans for a 10,000-ton machine that could fill a mine shaft -- or be moved in the bed of a big rig, Glinsky said. This portability is what drew the interest of scientists 6,000 miles away at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. They oversee the part of this project funded by the International Science and Technology Center, an organization dedicated to employing former weapons scientists for peaceful purposes.
The Livermore lab scientists are particularly interested in the machines' potential usefulness in testing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, said Bill Dunlop, head of the lab's nonproliferation programs. The treaty is controversial in the United States, where last year it was shot down partly because some senators argued current technology could not ensure other countries were not violating the provisions.

Digest continuation for September 2001 (part 3)