Word: russia
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...resort, a place for Russian geniuses to get together and invent the biggest thing since, well, the Internet. That's the hope, anyway. President Dmitri Medvedev, who has cultivated the image of a tech-savvy liberal, is staking much of his economic vision on the plan's success. And Russia has a resource that other nations envy: a fervid hacker culture with a reputation for excellence, or at least daring...
Since the Soviet collapse, no major platforms have emerged in Russia for its computer experts to innovate. As a result, many of them have emigrated, while many others have turned to hacking, a field in which Russians seem to excel. In January, police arrested a 40-year-old computer whiz for hacking into a Moscow advertising mainframe and turning a giant billboard display into a clip of hard-core pornography over one of the city's main streets. To avoid detection, the man had routed his attack through a proxy in Chechnya, a sophisticated trick. But for all his skills...
...came up with it. Surkov said he himself had been assigned to oversee its creation, most likely on the outskirts of Moscow. It is an unusual role for him. Both under Putin's presidency between 2000 and 2008 and now under Medvedev's, Surkov has been widely seen as Russia's éminence grise. He is the author of the "sovereign democracy" theory that underpins Russia's neo-authoritarianism and the engineer of the Kremlin youth group Nashi, which uses strategic thuggery to discourage opposition. Now he has embraced his role as Russia's innovation guru...
...labs, design rooms and incubators where new technologies are born. Two weeks ago in Moscow, he hosted a delegation from the real Silicon Valley that included top executives from eBay, Twitter and Cisco Systems. The actor Ashton Kutcher also came along, and documented the visit on his Twitter feed. "Russia is building their own Silicon valley. And they want help," Kutcher tweeted on Feb. 18. "If we rebuilt it today what would we do differently...
...Kremlin's answer to that question, however, does not exactly jibe with the liberal culture of Silicon Valley. In his Vedomosti interview, Surkov acknowledged that Russia is an innovation "vacuum" in a field of dynamic economies and that it needs a breakthrough soon to avoid stagnation. But when prodded about the political openness needed to encourage that breakthrough, he snapped back into the language of control. "Consolidated power in Russia is the instrument of modernization. I would even insist it is the only one," he said. "If you want to put the matter on autopilot and wait for squabbling liberals...