To get even 10 minutes worth of access to a major head of state is a gift which would make thousands of lobbyists giddy with anticipation. Dr. Andrei Korobkov, professor of political science, spoke with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for two hours at a state reception and dinner at the Kremlin on Nov. 4.
Korobkov encountered Medvedev at the fourth annual Assembly of the Russian World Foundation, which took place Nov. 2-4 in Moscow.
“The organization is actively supported by President Medvedev, who is very interested in pushing it and considers it a way to reestablish links with the Russian diaspora abroad,” says Korobkov. “Increasingly, he is getting interested in bringing back Russian intellectuals who left.”
Medvedev has poured a great deal of his political capital into the Skolkovo Project, an attempt at a Russian Silicon Valley north of Moscow. He has obtained monetary contributions from Microsoft, Cisco and several Japanese companies.
“Huge amounts of money are being invested there, but, for now, their attempts to bring large numbers of Russian academics are in vain, basically,” says Korobkov. “I have been studying this problem for a long time, so I gave the main presentation at the conference.”
Korobkov says he emphasized to Medvedev that Russian intellectuals who have achieved tenure at universities in the West will not be inclined to return to their home country, especially given the degree of interaction with the Russian government they would be expected to endure.
“To imagine that in Russia it would be possible to leave academics alone is very hard because it’s an extremely bureaucratized country, and it became more bureaucratized than it was under the Soviet regime, ironically,” says Korobkov.
Therefore, Korobkov says he suggested to Medvedev that incentives be provided to lure these Russian academics back for short periods of time so they could give top-flight graduate students crash courses that would set them on the path toward becoming the country’s new “brain gain.”
On a personal level, Korobkov says Medvedev operates as a person accustomed to having power and not shy to show it.
“He is not used to people disagreeing with him,” says Korobkov.” And a couple of times he was kind of sharply angrily asking me, ‘So what, you disagree with me?’”
Korobkov also talked politics with Vyacheslav Nikonov, the Russian World Foundation executive director, who has been a Kremlin insider for some 20 years and an adviser to both Medvedev and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Nikonov is the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, former Soviet Prime Minister and then Foreign Minister under Joseph Stalin after Stalin assumed the title of Prime Minister.
“He is a kind of shadow operator who has access to the highest echelons of power,” says Korobkov. ”Nikonov is very smart, very well educated, pretty calculating, a typical political consultant. If you look in the U.S., you can probably compare him to David Axelrod working for (President Barack) Obama or Karl Rove working for (President George W.) Bush.”
Prior to attending the Russian World Federation conference, Korobkov participated in an intense three-day gathering Oct. 27-30 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, sponsored by the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Members of parliaments, committee chairs, representatives of international organizations and the European Union, as well as academics, discussed security and stability in Central Asia and Mongolia. Korobkov says the countries of this region face great challenges due to a water shortage and governments that are either openly authoritarian or lean in that direction.
However, some of these countries, which include the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, are rich in important substances, including plutonium, platinum, oil and natural gas.
“There is a huge flow of migrants from those countries to Russia and from Russia to other parts of the world,” says Korobkov. “Second, this region is becoming increasingly the traffic route for drugs from Afghanistan.”
However, Korobkov says it would be unlikely that these countries would be invited to join NATO or the European Union as a way of protecting them from totalitarian takeovers.
“After the Georgian-Russian War, it became very dangerous to expand NATO because, in NATO, an attack against any member is an attack against every member,” says Korobkov. |
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