by PAUL GOBEL
If modernization does not take place over the next few years, a senior Kremlin advisor says, Russia will suffer a massive “brain drain” and the departure of much of its businesses, the largest to the West and the small and mid-sized to Kazakhstan, leaving it an “uninteresting” bridge between China and Europe.
But despite that prospect, Aleksandr Auzan, a member of the Presidential commission on modernization and technological development of the economy of Russia, concludes sadly, the possibility that Russia will choose to modernize is relatively small, a reflection of short-term thinking and confusion between inertia and stability (www.nr2.ru/chel/328413.html).
Auzan, a professor at Moscow State University, says that this brain drain is already starting: “half of his students, elite specialists, are leaving to work abroad and not even thinking about returning.” In their wake “business is departing, big business toward the West and small and mid-sized toward Kazakhstan.”
In this case, the economist says, Russia will have a future like the one described in Vladimir Sorokin’s novels: It will be a country “across which will pass a 15-lane highway between China and Europe.” That won’t be a complete tragedy, he adds, but Russia will “simply be a country of little interest,” one from which all talented people will leave.”
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