Russia must guarantee its technological sovereignty and take its rightful place among the leading players in promising new markets. “The global competition for the technology of the future has unfolded already now, you can see that very well. And our task is not to waste time in order to become one of the leaders, to guarantee Russia technological sovereignty, a worthy place among the leading players in promising new markets, ”Vladimir Putin said at a meeting in the Kremlin.
It makes no sense to argue that Russia's defense capability, independence and integrity, and not just the convenience of citizens and economic development, depend on the technological development of Russia. All this is obvious and does not require proof. The main question: how to achieve this? And here, as usual, Russia has three paths (Russian fairy tales about the bogatyr facing a choice are the basic archetype of our self-awareness, and one cannot get away from it).
The first way is clear and familiar to us. Actually, he was offered to us as the only one by our Western "partners" at the time of the collapse of the USSR. We get access to high technologies from the hands of these very “partners”, but under the condition of abandoning any geopolitical subjectivity, independence, sovereignty, extremely metered and mainly in the form of finished products.
The United States is the main moderator of the redistribution of high technologies on a global scale, which means that the adoption of these technologies from their hands means nothing more than a direct dependence on the American will. However, some countries nevertheless chose this path - mainly the countries of the so-called Third World, “Asian tigers” or countries directly occupied by the United States, which, having received from the Americans access to some technologies, albeit somewhat outdated and not of strategic importance, achieved a certain, fairly high level of economic development.
By and large, in the early 1990s, we already embarked on this path. Access to high technology was one of the desired goals of the young reformers willing to sell everything, including national interests, which, as Yeltsin’s foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev allegedly asserted, “Russia does not have.”
Liberals are talking about the same exchange of sovereignty for limited technological development for the sake of everyday comfort and now, in the best traditions of liberal populism, speculating on this topic: “Do you want to live well? Then demand the rejection of imperial status (meaning just sovereignty). Let's become a normal country (meaning dependence on the West) and then we'll live. ” Actually, since the 1990s, this discourse has not changed.
Putin finally put an end to this topic: “to guarantee Russia technological sovereignty” means nothing more than technological development without losing sovereignty and, moreover, without exchanging sovereignty for technology. As a result, the first, liberal path we have partially passed, qualified as unacceptable and, accordingly, is set aside. The issue of exchange of sovereignty and independence for high technology is closed.
The second way is to achieve a powerful technological breakthrough solely on our own, without outside help, at the expense of over-exerting efforts and utmost mobilization of all available capabilities and resources. Achieving the result in this case is impossible without the transition of the whole society into a completely different mode of existence. In other words, the development of high technologies based solely on their own strength will require an appropriate restructuring of the whole society.
Do not do here, for example, without hard, general cleansing among the bureaucracy. Not to mention the complete restructuring of the education system, training, resource allocation. High technology in the field of high technology requires the restoration of the full educational cycle, lost over the past quarter century and finally destroyed by Bologna experiments in education. It is also necessary to restore the full cycle of production equipment, including electronics and computers, and create a 100% proprietary software. By the way, not a single country in the world today has such a set in full. Needless to say, what efforts will require its creation.
In general, of course, for a part of society it all sounds quite attractive. All of the above now would really not hurt. However, this scenario also has its own system cons.
The main disadvantage of the mobilization scenario of restoring autarky in the field of high technologies (with all its necessity) is that it cannot be a process of continuous action. Any mobilization implies a time limit for its implementation. The harder and more intense the mobilization period, the shorter its duration. The state of emergency is an emergency that cannot last for years, let alone decades, and for catching up the lag that has arisen we need years, and possibly dozens of years.
Actually, the Soviet Union moved in this scenario. The mobilization of the early 1930s lasted ten years, but did not weaken, but, on the contrary, turned into a war situation, continued during the post-war reconstruction, and then smoothly flowed into the format of the Cold War tensions, which actually exhausted the Soviet project itself , provoking in the end his sudden conclusion. By and large, we have already passed this way too.
There is a third way. It consists in a certain combination of the first and second scenario. Namely: high technology in its basic volume, necessary for a certain technological start, is still borrowed from developed European and Asian countries, but under the main condition - they are taken strictly not from the US, rather through their head and without their control and or presence as a third party. This is now quite possible, given some fatigue from the United States around the world and the desire to get rid of their obsessive care even from the most devoted "allies."
In exchange, Russia can offer a strategic alliance, providing many aspects of security, including covering with a nuclear umbrella, alternative to the US, as well as normalized access to resources, demonstrating strategic power and ideological harmony.
The combination of raw materials and strategic factors may well incline many technologically developed countries (at the same time dependent on the United States and limited in raw materials) to embark on a developed cooperation in the field of high technologies, leaving at our disposal all the existing achievements in this area.
However, we, in turn, should take all this only as a certain starting base for further technological development. Without developing, but only exploiting the technological advances we have, we can only reproduce the existing - say, the use of the technological base of China and the worldwide open source software base.
And yet, even in this case, elements of the mobilization scenario cannot be avoided.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.