Loren Graham Knihy

When have you gone into an electronics store, picked up a desirable gadget, and found that it was labeled Made in Russia? Probably never. Russia, despite its epic intellectual achievements in music, literature, art, and pure science, is a negligible presence in world technology. Despite its current leaders' ambitions to create a knowledge economy, Russia is economically dependent on gas and oil. In Lonely Ideas, Loren Graham investigates Russia's long history of technological invention followed by failure to commercialize and implement. For three centuries, Graham shows, Russia has been adept at developing technical ideas but abysmal at benefiting from them. From the seventeenth-century arms industry through twentieth-century Nobel-awarded work in lasers, Russia has failed to sustain its technological inventiveness. Graham identifies a range of conditions that nurture technological innovation: a society that values inventiveness and practicality; an economic system that provides investment opportunities; a legal system that protects intellectual property; a political system that encourages innovation and success. Graham finds Russia lacking on all counts. He explains that Russia's failure to sustain technology, and its recurrent attempts to force modernization, reflect its political and social evolution and even its resistance to democratic principles -- Provided by Publisher

Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

This work looks at the decline of Soviet technology and industry, as seen through the eyes of the ghost of Peter Palchinsky, executed on the orders of Stalin. It provides the story of the engineer's life and work, pointing out the mistakes and corruption he condemned in his lifetime.