A quadcopter drone hovers high above an endless sea of birch and pine, swooping over the treetops before coming to rest in the hands of Kirill Yakovchenko. He’s standing on the roof of a gleaming orange ziggurat that rises out of this forest in the middle of Siberia like a monument from some techno-Mayan civilisation. It’s a startling thing to see erupting through the tree canopy, which otherwise extends for miles, punctuated only by the occasional industrial shed and shining metal chimney.
Inside this conjoined pair of tilting 14-storey towers sit teams of engineers, huddled over laptops and sprawled on beanbags, working on everything from smartphone apps and portable MRI scanners to new methods of producing compost with earthworms. This is the Academpark, a fluorescent pyramid of innovation at the heart of Russia’s “Silicon Forest”, President Putin’s unlikely weapon in the global tech race.
“It’s very special to be among this group of cutting-edge specialists, right in the middle of nature,” says Yakovchenko, who first came here for a summer school last year and has since founded Optiplane, a startup company focused on developing drones for cargo deliveries. “We’re working on long distance,” he says. “We hope to be able to carry goods over 100km in under an hour, in any weather.”
He’s in the right place to be working on long distance and extreme weather. Located in the middle of the Eurasian landmass 3,000km east of Moscow, with a climate that ranges from 30C mosquito-ridden summers to -40C snow-drenched winters, this isn’t the most obvious place for a tech startup hub. “It can be hard to convince people to come here,” says Yakovchenko. “But when they do, they often end up staying.”
The Academpark is not some random outpost in the middle of nowhere, but the latest part of a plan to revive Akademgorodok, the Soviet science town that was established here in 1957, and long since left to languish. The brainchild of mathematician Mikhail Lavrentyev and then premier Nikita Khrushchev, the “Academy Town” was conceived as a way of huddling the country’s sharpest scientific minds together in one place, away from the distractions of Moscow, to work on fundamental research. Sited deep in the forest 30km south of Novosibirsk city, it was built as a woodland campus for Novosibirsk State University along with 15 institutes for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, ranging from nuclear physics and geology to cytology and genetics. At its peak, it had accommodation for up to 65,000 scientists.
Its far-flung location in the Siberian woods meant that life here was blissfully distanced from the ideological meddling of the central party apparatus. Scientists were drawn by the promise of spacious apartments, lively intellectual debates in the bars and social clubs – and the lure of an artificial beach. Created by dumping hundreds of tonnes of sand along the edge of the Ob reservoir, the beach became a popular place for picnics and nude-bathing “seminars”.
A sense of intellectual and social freedom reigned. The House of Scientists, the campus’s modernist cultural centre, put on exhibitions of banned Soviet artists, held risque poetry evenings, and hosted provocative travelling bards, activities unheard of elsewhere in the Soviet empire. Scientific investigations blossomed in areas previously forbidden: Lavrentyev was instrumental in saving both cybernetics and genetics, which had been dismissed as dangerous pseudoscience in Moscow. As Gersh Budker, a physicist who developed one of the world’s first subatomic colliders here in the 1960s, put it: “It’s great to have a place that the bigwigs don’t visit – and we don’t permit the little ones to join us.”
The sylvan dream wasn’t to last. Freedoms were severely curtailed in the 1970s during the Brezhnev era of stagnation, which saw science reduced to being a servant of the economy and the military. Then, in the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a massive brain drain, when many of the best minds fled to the west. Having been a vibrant centre of experimental thought for 30 years, Akademgorodok became a sleepy backwater, where a handful of scientists struggled on in the wilderness in their crumbling concrete labs.
Walking the town’s wide, tree-lined streets today, it feels as if there’s a new energy in the air. Students lounge on the wooden deck of Travelers’ Coffee, a Siberian Starbucks recently set up by an American entrepreneur, while others flock to the beach, boomboxes and remote-controlled drones in hand. The place has the feeling of a scientific Center Parcs, with low-rise institute buildings set back from broad avenues, along with decrepit sheds containing lasers and colliders, now mostly put to use on projects for foreign companies. Bearded professors scurry through the forest between their labs along meandering pathways, switching to a network of underground tunnels in winter.
Nothing much happened here until 10 years ago when, on his return from visiting tech-savvy India, Putin declared that Akademgorodok would be the country’s new cradle of innovation. IBM, Intel and Schlumberger had already opened outposts here, taking advantage of the pool of cheap programming expertise spawned by the university, but the official diktat has led to a mix of federal and private money pouring in, with total investment reaching around $1bn (£680m).
The most visible beacon of this influx is the mad monument of Academpark, its twisted archway looming like some slightly sinister portal to another dimension. Looking, from some angles, like a doppelganger of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building in Beijing, it is the work of Novosibirsk architects Space Structure, built to the requirements of the former governor of the region. “He wanted a memorable landmark,” says Dmitry Verkhovod, director of the facility, sitting in his office at the top of the building, looking out at the precipitous glass-floored bridge that joins the two towers. A Silicon Valley calendar hangs on the wall, above a shelf of 3D-printed trinkets and a photo of him showing Putin around the building. “It was originally going to be all-glass,” he adds, “but we needed a warmer touch to brighten up the deep Siberian winters.”
As we tour the building, dropping in on some of the 300 companies working on everything from nano-ceramics to motion graphics for the American entertainment industry, Verkhovod explains how things work. “We provide the physical infrastructure, so companies don’t need to buy all their own equipment. It makes it more attractive for investors, too. When you invest in a company here, you’re investing in the people.”
Up and running since 2011, the companies now employ almost 9,000 people between them, generating an annual income of 17bn roubles (£175m). It’s impressive, but it pales in comparison to what’s happening in Skolkovo, a gigantic tech hub on the outskirts of Moscow. Skolkovo, a $4bn state project that has lured the likes of Microsoft, Cisco and Google, and which boasts annual revenues of $1bn, is clearly a sore point.
“Skolkovo gets a huge amount of publicity because everything in this country is Moscow-centric,” says Verkhovod. “But when a group of students from Skolkovo’s university came to visit us here, half of them stayed.”
