Inside Putin's Failed Tech: Why Russia Can’t Build Anything Anymore

Elvira Bary

Russia once built Sputnik. Now it strips washing machines for chips. Here is what went wrong.  👉 What World Leaders NEED to Know about Russia: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6d9EIByxz1AdkmIOYUlrDd0rmByq5zSN  When you see rockets on TV and “miracle” Russian robots on parade, it’s easy to think the old Soviet tech power is still alive. In this video, I peel back the facade and show how Putin’s Russia hollowed out its own science: from once self-sufficient industries to an import-addicted petrostate, from vanishing Soviet engineers to a massive brain drain, from corrupt defense “wonder weapons” to fake microchips and stunt robots. If you want to understand why a country that launched the first satellite now scavenges parts from fridges and washing machines, and what that means for the future of Russian power, this deep dive is for you.  Video Chapters:   00:00 Inside Putin&#039;s Failed Tech: Why Russia Can’t Build Anything Anymore 02:44 From Self-Reliance to Imports 06:22 The Vanishing Engineers 09:39 The Brain Drain 13:27 Defense as a Feeding Trough 16:58 Academia: Loyalist Takeover 20:50 The Microchip Case 24:53 Is It Beyond Repair?   JOIN ME ON THE JOURNEY 👉 Sign-up for news

Transcript

00:00The Soviet Union really was a global tech power. It made its own space program, microchips,

00:07and nuclear reactors. It trained millions of engineers and built cities around research.

00:13Today, the Kremlin still tries to project that same image. Triumphant rockets, glossy prototypes,

00:23flasher superweapons, miracle robots that always seem to appear on TV but never on the factory floor.

00:33But here is the uncomfortable question. Does modern Russia still know how to build anything real?

00:41I am Liberi Bari, a writer born in the Soviet Union. And tonight we are going to look behind

00:48that aging facade and see how a country that once engineered the future now imports washing machines

00:58just to strip them for microchips. Here is our roadmap for tonight. From self-reliance to imports.

01:07How the Soviet system built a clumsy but functional tech ecosystem. And how post-Soviet Russia traded it

01:16for oil money and shortcuts. The vanishing engineers. How the last Soviet trained professionals are

01:24aging out, leaving behind equipment. Nobody knows how to design or repair. The brain drain. Where

01:33Russia's brightest minds are going. And why so few are willing to return. Defense as a feeding trough.

01:41How corruption devours research budgets long before they reach a lab. Academia. Loyalists take over.

01:52How universities lose their best talent to incompetent, politically obedient leadership.

02:00The microchip case. What Russia's sovereign processors and robots reveal when you check where

02:08they are actually made. Is it beyond repair? Whether Russian science can recover and what it would truly

02:16require. If you want to support this kind of deep dive work, you can do it through the think tank,

02:23PayPal or super things. All the links are under this video. Now let's start with the moment the decline began.

02:33The point where Russia stopped building for itself and began relying on imports to survive.

02:42From self-reliance to imports. To understand today's collapse, you have to start with

02:49what the Soviet system actually did right. It built a closed, brutally inefficient but

02:57a real ecosystem of science and industry. The USSR spent between 2-3% of its GDP on research and

03:05development

03:05comparable to Western levels of the time. There were design bureaus, test ranges and whole cities built

03:14around nuclear plants and microelectronics factories. Soviet tech was expensive and often behind the West,

03:23but it was made at home. Factories produced their own machine tools, missile components and satellite

03:31electronics. Young engineers could go from university straight into a design bureau. When the USUSA collapsed,

03:40that system went into crisis. Plans were closed, engineers were laid off, those who stayed saw their

03:48paychecks shrinking. But the key political choice was made later under Putin. Instead of rebuilding

03:57industries and research, the Kremlin bet on a simple model – sell oil and gas, buy everything else.

04:04In the 2000s, Russia turned into a classic petrostate, a country that lives of raw materials and imports

04:12technology. This had a direct effect on science. R&T spending hovered around 1% of GDP. By 2020,

04:22it was down to about 0.5% of GDP. And today, it dropped to 0.36%, far below that

04:33of advanced economies.

04:35Soviet leaders wanted to prove that their system could match the West in tanks, missiles and

04:42nuclear plants. Putin's elite wanted something different. Quick growth, high consumer imports,

04:50and personal enrichment. The result is an economy that is terrible at turning scientific knowledge

04:56into competitive products. Look at the Yomobil story. A Russian hybrid car was supposed to prove the

05:04country that the country could do its own Tesla. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov showed the prototype to

05:11Putin and promised cheap hybrid cars for the people. Then, he quietly sold the whole project to the state

05:19for 1 euro. Not a single serial car reached buyers. Or the Yotaphone, the double-screen smartphone dubbed

05:28our own Russian iPhone. Putin personally handed one to Xi Jinping. The company behind it even planned

05:36the US launch, but it was cancelled because of manufacturing problems. A few years later, the company

05:45went bankrupt, crushed by lawsuits and poor sales. Production long since moved to China. These cases

05:53look funny from the outside, but inside Russia, they are symptoms of the same disease. Deterioration of the

06:02chain that runs from basic research to applied labs to mass production. In the next sections, we will see

06:12what the choice did to the people who used to keep Soviet science alive and to the generation that was

06:19supposed to replace them. The vanishing engineers. The Soviet tech industry ran on a large and qualified

06:29workforce. Millions of engineers who knew every valve, every weld, every cable by heart. Some of them

06:39worked at big design bureaus and research institutes, others at factories that actually built things.

06:46These people are now dying out. When the 1990s arrived, many Soviet factories either shut down or shifted to

06:54assembling imported kits. The old Soviet model had never been profitable. It survived only thanks to

07:01massive state subsidies. Entire schools of engineering lost their base. If you no longer make your own

07:10avionics or machine tools, you also stop training people who know how to design them. Russia still

07:17has a lot of researchers in absolute numbers, but their density per million people lags behind the

07:24advanced economies. You see the result most clearly in space. Russia still flies Soyuz, a design that goes back

07:33to the 1960s. But when they tried to do something new, the cracks show. In 2013, a ProtonM rocket carrying

07:44GLONASS navigation satellites crashed seconds after launch. Investigators found that several crucial angular

07:54sensors had been installed upside down, not miscalculated, physically flipped. There is not one clumsy worker,

08:04that is a whole quality control system that has forgotten how to think. The same story plays out at the

08:12new Vastočnyi Cosmodrome. It was supposed to be a symbol of renewal, a clean, modern space port in the Far

08:20East.

08:21Instead, the project became a monument to embezzlement. Multiple criminal cases, billions of rubles stolen,

08:31unfinished or defective structures that had to be rebuilt. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is even more telling.

08:40On November 27, its only launch pad broke down right after sending a Soyuz rocket to the ISS.

08:48This is Russia's only active pad for crewed flights since Gagarin's old site was turned into a museum.

08:55For the first time since 1961, Russia cannot launch people into space on its own. Repairs are likely to

09:04take years, not weeks. It is a perfect symbol. A space program still living off Soviet legacy,

09:11where one more launch is enough to literally knock the ground out. Nuclear energy is one of the few areas

09:19that still looks strong from the outside. Rosatom exports reactors, builds plants abroad and shows glossy

09:28renderings. But here too, the core technologies are Soviet-era designs. Updated, but not reinvented.

09:37The brain drain. Now add one more thing. The people who could fix this often just leave.

09:49The first big wave hit in the 1990s. Labs and institutes suddenly lost funding. Salaries collapsed at that

09:59same time. Western universities and companies opened their doors. That's how thousands of Soviet-trained

10:06scientists in physics, math and engineering moved to the US, Europe and Israel. In the 2000s,

10:14some institutes secured funding, but the pattern stayed. If you were a bright young physicist,

10:22it made sense to do your PhD at home and then go for a postdoc in Germany or the US

10:30and stay there.

10:31If you were a programmer, you aimed for London, Berlin or California. The domestic system could not

10:40compete on either money or freedom. Then came 2014. Sanctions and tighter control over universities.

10:49And finally, 2022, the full-scale invasion and mobilization. That turned the slow leak into a

10:56burst pipe. Since February 2022, around 1 million people have left Russia, with many staying abroad long

11:05term. Many of them are IT workers, engineers, scientists and young professionals. They decided

11:11not to risk being sent to the front or live under growing repression. For IT alone, Russian industry

11:18groups and the government admit the scale. The Russian Association for Electronic Communications

11:25counted 50,000 to 70,000 IT specialists leaving in the first months after the invasion.

11:33By the end of 2022, the Digital Development Minister openly said that around 100,000 IT workers,

11:42about 10% of the total, were abroad and had not come back.

11:49For a country that wants digital sovereignty, that is a disaster. State banks and big companies

11:55rush to raise salaries for programmers to stop their exodus. Giants like Sberbank

12:01offer double-digit pay hikes just to keep their tech people. But money cannot fix the deeper problem. People do

12:10not want to build their careers on sand in a place where tomorrow you might wake up with a closed

12:17border,

12:18blocked websites and summons from the draft office. Imagine you are a 28-year-old AI researcher in Moscow. You

12:27have

12:27an offer from a lab in Zurich with decent pay and excellent working conditions. At home, your project

12:35can be killed by a new censorship rule or a boss who wants military applications only. You can be drafted

12:42and sent to their trenches in no time. Or arrested for reposting a meme. Choosing to live is not betrayal,

12:50it is self-preservation. That's how anti-diasporas of talent form. Communities of Russian scientists and

12:58engineers who now live and work in Boston, Tel Aviv, Berlin and here in Southern California. I've watched it

13:05happen with my own eyes. Five years ago, hearing a Russian spoken on the streets of Orange County was

13:12unusual. Today, it is unusual not to hear it. Their publications and patents now strengthen

13:19the research and innovation of their new countries. Not Russia. Defense as a feeding trough

13:29The Russian defense sector is one of the most closed parts of the economy with almost no public oversight.

13:37But public scandals happen often, revealing a pattern of fraud, fake contracts and embezzlement. One of

13:46the loudest was the 2012 Oberon service. Assets were being sold off at knock-down prices through

13:53shell companies. The money that should have gone into barracks, training grounds and infrastructure

14:00quietly turned into elite Moscow real estate. Defense minister Anatoly Serdukov lost his job.

14:08His aide, Evgenia Vasilyeva, was later convicted of fraud and money laundering in a scheme worth around

14:15$100 million. In the nuclear arms complex, fraud is deeply rooted as well. In one case alone,

14:25investigators found nearly 200 million rubles stolen from a contract to build a seismic monitoring site

14:32in Krasnoyarsk region. They listed other schemes totaling at least $160 million. These are not isolated

14:41bad apples. This is how the system works when no one expects a real war. The full-scale invasion of

14:48Ukraine tore the cover off. Over the past two years, Russian authorities have launched a wave of cases

14:56against senior defense officials. Former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov has been sentenced over

15:04the embezzlement of roughly 4 billion rubles from construction projects for the army. Other

15:11multi-million rubles schemes involved cables, property services and uniforms. At the same time, Russian

15:18soldiers going to Ukraine say that they had to buy their own body armor, medical kits and even basic

15:26gear before deployment. Now, there are the wonder weapons that were supposed to terrify Nader.

15:33But never left the showroom. The Tsifutin Armada was sold as a super tank.

15:40And men turned stealth. Crew in a protected capsule. In practice, it turned into a showcase project

15:49with tiny production runs, years of delays and price tags around $5-9 million per tank.

15:57Rostek's own CEO admitted that Armada wasn't used in Ukraine because it was too expensive and the old T-90

16:05was more efficient. Kurganiz-25 and Boomerang followed the same script. Shiny prototypes on parade.

16:15Promises of mass production next year. Then endless postponements and near zero presence at the front.

16:23The Su-57 fifth-generation fighter is a boutique fleet of a few dozen planes that the military is

16:31scared to lose near Ukrainian air defenses. And at the very top we have the Sarmad ICBM Saturn II,

16:41once a symbol of unstoppable power. Now, it's more of a symbol of failure. In November,

16:50it blew up again, for the second time in a year, during a test over Jasny.

16:57Academia. Loyalist takeover. Universities should be the place where a country builds its science.

17:06In Putin's Russia, they turned into another lever of control.

17:10In the 1990s, Russian academics enjoyed a lot of real autonomy. Rectors elected by staff

17:18joined projects with foreign foundations. Wild but genuine academic freedom. That period ended

17:28step by step after Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. A tightening of foreign agent and undesirable

17:37organization laws hit independent research centers and foreign-funded projects.

17:42The final break came with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On March 4, 2022, the Russian Union of

17:49Rectors published an open letter supporting the war, repeating the Kremlin's language about

17:57demilitarization and denisification of Ukraine. It called on universities to instill patriotism in young

18:04people. The address was signed by the heads of more than 300 universities, including Moscow State

18:12University. That letter was not just propaganda. It was a loyalty test. If you want to stay rector,

18:21dean or head of a big institute, you sign. Academic leadership became directly tied to political obedience.

18:30Below the top layer is everyday corruption. Between 11 and 19% of Russians admitted paying bribes to

18:39enter university or pass exams. Families could spend up to 30 to 40% of their income on informal payments

18:47for a supposedly free education. If you normalize paying for grades, you should not be surprised when

18:55people later pay for academic titles. The Dissernet project revealed a whole market of dissertations for

19:04sale, ghost-written theses, and bought doctorates. Since 2013, this volunteering network has been running

19:14plagiarism checks on doctoral dissertations by officials and professors. In the first three years,

19:21they flagged thousands of plagiarists, including about one in nine members of the State Duma. Today,

19:30their database lists over 40,000 people involved in various forms of academic misconduct. Out of this,

19:41around 1,700 degrees were formally reworked. Some stories are simply absurd. One regional politician

19:48offered a dissertation that copied a thesis on the chocolate industry almost word for word. It was only

19:56chocolate mechanically replaced by beef to create a new study of the meat sector. That's what happens to

20:05academia when it is run by people who own their position not to research prowess, but to connections and

20:15work. Once they are in place, they reproduce the same logic downwards. Those who are loyal or keen get

20:25posts, grants, and degrees. Those who object are pushed out or simply not hired. For science, this is poison.

20:34Talented students see that honest work and publications matter less than having the right patron. They learn to

20:41keep their heads down, switch to safer, apolitical subjects, or leave for foreign labs. The microchip case.

20:54If you want one simple test of a country's technological health, look at its microchips. Can they design and

21:02manufacture competitive chips at home? In Russia's case, the answer is very clear. On paper, Russia has its own

21:11processors. The Elbrus and Baikal lines were promoted as domestic alternatives to Intel and AMD. They even

21:20got orders from state agencies after new rules forced government bodies to favor Russian-made electronics.

21:28But in truth, both Elbrus and Baikal chips were designed around foreign architectures and produced at

21:34foreign pubs, primarily TSMC in Taiwan. Russian companies simply had no modern process nodes to make them

21:43inside the country. When Western sanctions hit, they cut off access to those outsourced lines. Russia suddenly

21:51discovered that its sovereign processors depended on a supply chain it did not control. The domestic manufacturing

21:59base is tiny. The main microelectronics plant, Micron in Zelenograd, publicly talks about 90 nm and 65 nm

22:11production, with some experimental works at 28 nm. That is technology from the mid-2000s. For cutting-edge

22:20smartphones and advanced military routers, the world has long since moved on to 7 nm and below. The numbers are

22:29just as bleak. Russia's key weapons systems from cruise missiles to modern tanks and air defense radars

22:37are packed with Western chips from the US, Europe and East Asia. Even after sanctions, new Russian missiles

22:45and drones recovered in Ukraine still contain components from big American and European brands

22:51routed through third countries. And when sanctions bite, you see absurd workarounds.

22:59In 2022, Western media reported how Russian manufacturers and repair facilities were literally

23:07stripping microchips from imported household appliances – washing machines, fridges – to use them

23:14in military equipment. US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Congress that Ukrainian officials had found

23:24such parts in captured Russian tanks. This is not what a confident tech power looks like.

23:30You see, the same pattern in drones. Russia talks loudly about expanding domestic drone production to hundreds

23:36of thousands of units a year, but teared-down reports of Landsat or Lantan. And the New-Gran type

23:44systems show that key parts are Western-made – microcontrollers, navigation models, radios,

23:54power management chips – all of this is important. In civil industries, the situation is even worse. They face bigger

24:03scarcities of parts and skill alike. That's how we get hilarious failures of Russian robots. A video of one

24:11such robot stumbling and collapsing on the stage recently went viral. It was Adel, Russia's first

24:19humanoid robot robot robot robot, with AI. Supposed to freely move around and manipulate objects. It

24:26toppled over when trying to wave at the audience. Back in 2018, Russia presented another high-tech

24:35android – robot Boris. It could walk, talk and dance, wowing the audience. But the media quickly discovered

24:44Third, it was a commercially available costume called Alyosha the robot with a man inside.

24:52Is it beyond repair?

24:57Here's how Russia went from the country launching the first footnik into space to the country

25:04importing its tech and failing every time it tries to reproduce a chip at home.

25:10That's the harsh lesson. A country that treats science as decoration and scientists as disposable

25:18cannot stay competitive. It can threaten, bluff, mobilize and smuggle for a while.

25:25But it cannot build a stable modern future. Not nuclear safety, not decent healthcare,

25:33not normal civilian technology. Can Russian science recover at all? Yes, but not inside the current

25:42system. To make such a recovery happen, you need three things. First, a political change that restores

25:50the basic rule of law and real autonomy to labs and universities. Second, a long-term money commitment.

25:57Not one flashy national project, but boring, predictable funding for teams with grants given on merit.

26:07Third, reconnection with the outside world. Joint projects, two-way knowledge sharing,

26:15a clear signal to the diaspora that they are welcome back with real positions.

26:21That is a 10 to 20-year project, not a 5-year plan. But without these steps, any talk of

26:31a Russian scientific

26:32breakthrough is just another Potemkin village built on top of a collapsing structure.

26:38Before we wrap up, I want to hear from you. Every country has its strengths, its blind spots,

26:45its quiet crisis. And one of the clearest warning signs isn't broken machinery. It's when the people

26:55who once kept things running start to walk away. So, tell me this. What is one field in your country

27:03where you've watched talent quietly slip away? And what changed because of it? Medicine, engineering,

27:12teaching, journalism, anything. Your answers helped me understand the world we are living in. Just as

27:19this story helps explain the one I came from. If this deep dive helped you see the bigger pattern

27:27behind Russia's failed tech miracle, please like, share, and subscribe. It's the simplest way to support

27:35independent analysis. And if you'd like to go behind the scenes into the research, the character work,

27:41and the story threads going into my upcoming novel, The Snow Queen's Spring, you can join my newsletter,

27:48Facebook, or Instagram using the link below. I share early chapters, private notes,

27:54and the discoveries I can't yet say on camera. We can also support my work directly through the

28:00think tank, buy me a coffee, PayPal, or super things. Every gesture strengthens this channel and keeps it

28:08independent. And I am deeply grateful for that.

Category

Transcript

Comments

Recommended