Statement by member of YABLOKO’s Political Committee
July 4, 2013

Grigory Yavlinsky

The attempt to force the reform of the Academy of Sciences is another striking example of the government’s complete disrespect for the citizens and an insurmountable rift between the state and society.

The government proposes to rearrange one of the oldest systemically important for the nation institutes radically as if it’s a matter of an administrative reform in an unprofitable private business. At the same time, not only members of the Academy, but all the academic community and the Russian society as a whole are put in a position of rightless guest workers whose masters don’t find it necessary to consult with them.

It’s clear why the reform is conducted this way: the power-holding corporation continues the policy of attack and oppression of all more or less and even potentially independent people and civil institutions in Russia.

Mercenary interests of court business attracted by the opportunity to get new resources are used as an irreplaceable engine of such reforms. The use of financial interests of the “liberal” or “state” business for political lynching is a technique which is being practised since the mid-1990s and became a usual practise after the reprisal of NTV.

The society is humbled and its interests are as usual of no importance to the authors and initiators of the reform of the Academy of Sciences.

Everybody knows that the Academy has problems as well as all the other fields of society. But instead of solving the problems the government actually proposes to get rid of the subject of the problem. The situation is quite familiar: no man, no problem.
The references to difficulties in discussion and the academicians’ inability to come to an agreement are demagogic. The authorities have put themselves in the position when few people believe them. If professional academic communities don’t want to discuss anything with the government and the government cannot come to any agreement and can act only surreptitiously using the absence of control then no one needs this government.

It doesn’t seem serious to discuss the prospect that supposedly some presidential council and in fact Vladimir Putin himself will appoint the directors of academic scientific institutions, appraise the subjects of their research and the volume of financing as well as operational economic management of the estate of the Academy by the elected but not confirmed president of the Academy of Sciences Vladimir Fortov for the next three years. Such a situation requires very clear and brief non-printable definitions which we cannot give in the present statement.

These measures can be compared only with the most deplorable historic analogies by its destructive and irreversible results and the scale of the government’s short-sightedness causes misunderstanding.

The Academy of Sciences is the institute of national significance. A successful perspective reform of the Academy can be only the result of an open public discussion and debate within the academic community. In the present political situation it’s not possible and therefore a real reform of the Academy of Sciences could take place as a result of a the most serious and deep changes in the state and the society when and if responsible political forces will shape the policy of the country and whose actions will be based on morality, competence and respect for the people.

Grigory Yavlinsky
Chair of the NEA Expert Council for Economic Reforms
Doctor of Economics
Professor of the Higher School of Economics
Deputy of St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly

See also:

Bureaucratic reform of the Russian Academies is inadmissible

Alexander Korbinsky: “German scientists still feel the damage Hitler did to scientific schools”