The town of Akademgorodok, nestled among birch and conifers 3,400 kilometers east of Moscow, is becoming a hub for 21st century Russian innovation and entrepreneurship. You’ve heard of Silicon Valley. This is Silicon Forest.
Visual journalist Grant Slater recently traveled to the remote Siberian city to document the tech boom and create a broad portrait of the people driving, and caught up in, the changes.
“Initially, I was just curious to see what the inside of a Russian tech incubator looked like,” he says. “As I spent more time there, I became interested in the character of this town as a whole.”
Akademgorodok has a storied past when it comes to innovation but only recently became the center of Russia’s tech world. The town, founded in 1957 by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was the result of a plan by Nikita Khrushchev to huddle the Soviet Union’s sharpest minds. At its peak, Akademgorodok (which translates as ‘Academy Town’) was home to a university, 35 research institutes, a medical academy, and 65,000 scientists and their families.
Immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Akademgorodok experienced a massive brain drain as engineers fled to the West. Novosibirsk University remained an important institution, but citizens of nearby Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, transformed Akademgorodok into a bedroom community.
Its rebirth began last summer when President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin ordered a federal takeover of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Science with the intent of once again making Akademgorodok a technological centerpiece, this time focused on start-ups instead of nuclear science. The push toward a very 21st-century culture was something of a culture shock, and long-time professors, engineers and physicists took to the streets in protested.
“I wanted to explore how the legacy of Soviet state-driven science clashed or coalesced with the ideals and values of startup culture,” Slater says of his choice to shoot young techies and scientists in the established institutes. “I’m interested in the way technology or—the idea the future—manifests itself. One of the interesting aspects of that is the way different cultures view innovation.”
Nowadays, the main institution in Akademgorodok is a 13-story startup incubator called Akadempark. It is home to Playtox, which makes games for mobile web browsers; Winkcam, an app that lets you take photos with your phone even when it’s locked using the accelerometer; and Genetic Test, a company that uses genetic traits in biometric access and analysis. Start-ups win a place at Akadempark by successfully pitching their ideas during winter and summer academies.
“When I was there, one of the recent winners was [a start-up developing] an improved version of the infamous Russian dash-cam with extra sensors to help prevent accidents, a bit like a dumbed-down version of the Google self-driving car,” says Slater.
If you need excess gases cleaned from anesthesia machines, or a personal-trainer webcam consultation for distance training, you’ll be no doubt calling on products developed at Akadempark.
Start-ups are given a one-year runway to turn a profit at their company. It’s early days for all involved.
"Everything is just now getting started,” says Slater, who thinks that the glass floors and skybridge of the incubator as compared with the Soviet functionalism of the old institutes depicts the conscious effort to present Russian technology and science as that of the future, not the past. Akadempark and Akademgorodok generally are headed in the right direction but it’s a long way from Silicon Valley.
“Russian officials view these projects as a way to diversify its economy away from oil and gas,” says Slater, “but it is far from becoming a 21st-century economy that pumps out tech startups.”
