Research Priorities in the Current Situation

The Russian bureaucracy has come to view science as an activity that is beyond immediate utility and therefore, in economic sense, located in the periphery of distribution priorities. In the early days of the reforms, the bureaucracy came up with an obviously absurd idea of making science commercially self-sustainable. Later on, the idea of reducing public financing of science led to the plans to define the so-called “research priorities” and closure of other less promising fields of research. This “childish” managerialism resulted in the underfunding of Russian science and consequently in the loss of cadres and general degradation. The article states that the idea of foreknowledge by reducing science to several key directions is fallacious in itself. Science chooses its own priorities in each period of its development. These priorities tend to change the perception of science, its possibilities and the future of society. Russian science can only survive if both decision makers and society change their attitudes to it.