Russia boasts a deep tradition of excellence in science, math and engineering, making IT and Russia, it would seem, a perfect fit. In this episode of Bloomberg’s Ryan’s Russia—billed as “a look at the Russia you don’t know”—Ryan Chilcote examines what Russia is doing to reverse the trend of brain drain, which saw hundreds of thousands of Russia’s best and brightest migrate overseas in the 90s, by nurturing the country’s budding tech industry. Ryan also sits down with Eugene Kaspersky, the KGB-educated cryptologist who developed one of the world's most popular anti-virus systems and is helping to spearhead a whole new tech industry in Russia.
This episode begins with Ryan paying a visit to “the mother of innovation parks,” the Skolkovo Innovation Centre. Skolkovo, as it is known, is the institute tasked with concentrating intellectual capital and encouraging the development of various technologies and is often characterized as the Russian Silicon Valley. While exploring the campus Ryan discusses Skolkovo’s development with former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Edward Crawley, president of The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, the institute’s graduate research university. Crawley describes why he thinks Skolkovo is destined for success and is the right path for Russia’s development and modernization, saying, “This is a once-in-ten-lifetimes opportunity to establish a new technical university… in a place that has as rich an intellectual tradition as Russia.” Fundamentally, he says “it is the right thing to do” in order to develop Russia’s phenomenal human resources in parallel with its natural resources.
Ryan then meets with Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, developer of secure content and threat management systems and the world’s largest privately held vendor of software security products. Kaspersky Lab is a market leader in the tech industry in Russia and is currently the third largest vendor of consumer IT security software worldwide. Kaspersky explains his thoughts on why Russia produces some of the world’s finest software engineers—as well as, unfortunately, some the world’s most dangerous hackers and malware engineers. He also elaborates on the types of threats cybercrime produces as it evolves and explains why he is opposed to the development of cyber weapons and “armies” of professional hackers by national governments.
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