IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 14

also pioneer inventors in the railroad and airplane
industries, and in the fields of semiconductors, lasers,
biotechnology, and computers. Sometimes they predated the Edisons and Marconis; and other times their
inventions were parallel, simultaneous. Yet one never
encounters products with the label "Made in Russia".
The reason, Graham demonstrates, is that for technological innovation to work, a society requires a social
infrastructure that must include the basic elements of
democratic freedom. These are: social mobility, a rising middle class, and protection of companies, patents, and entrepreneurs by the law. For these aspects
to flourish, society must respect human rights, including the sanctity of property and person; and the individual profit motive, accordingly, has to be allowed
and respected as legitimate. Neither the Tsars, nor the
Communists, nor the present regime promulgated any
of these political and social reforms. Society was governed by fiat from the top down; wealth was (and is)
monopolized by a powerful oligarchy. Russian inventors were rarely able to retain title to their inventions,
or to derive profit from them. They also were not able
to work with industry to manufacture them on a mass
scale. The inventors often emigrated or fled, and some
who did not ended their lives in prison. Inventions that
might benefit or empower the average person, and
thereby enable greater individual freedom, threatened
the power structure.
Sikorsky invented a passenger plane, and Nicholas
II duly inspected it. But the Tsarist autocracy, which
had sold off Russian holdings in Sonoma County a
few decades before because the brilliant bureaucrats in
St. Petersburg were certain nothing would ever come
of California, were of the opinion that commercial air
travel was a pipe dream. And there was no independent company in the country to evaluate the invention
and perhaps decide otherwise. So Sikorsky moved to
Connecticut and manufactured his helicopters there,
instead, and a happy Russian community flourishes
there still (you can see the golden onion domes from
the road as you drive past Hartford).
The book is full of good and telling anecdotes that
illustrate Graham's points. Yablochkov's bulbs gave
Paris its sobriquet, the City of Lights, yet he is now
forgotten. Russia and America both developed steel
mills in the far north, far from coal supplies and in an
inhospitable climate: the American industry learned
from experience and moved south, but the Russians
stayed put, proving their point and losing money. Russians invented their own computers and are still fine
software developers, but the Soviet state, which did not
like personal typewriters much and prohibited private
ownership of photocopying machines, did not allow
computers outside a very limited number of concerns -
and there was no business sector worthy of the name.
Where the Russians succeed, it is in enterprises of great
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symbolic importance or immediate need requiring a
huge, directed collective effort: the space program,
arms manufacturing, hydroelectric dams, etc. Yet even
the Kalashnikov rifle (whose inventor recently passed
away at age 94), the AK-47 - the world's most popular and durable automatic weapon - was not manufactured under patent and has benefited from scant
research and development in Russia itself. So most
AKs are manufactured elsewhere; and the Russianmade guns rely on a niche market.
I have written in this journal about motorcycles
(review of S.L. Thompson, Bodies in Motion: Evolution and Experience in Motorcycling, IEEE Technology & Society Mag., vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 8-10,
Spr. 2011). I can mention parenthetically that the
manufacturers in Izhevsk of the only major Russian
motorcycle, the Ural - a tough, simple knockoff of a
1930s BMW - hang on by a thread to a niche market, again, since they produce most of their bikes with
sidecars - a comfortable and pleasantly old-fashioned alternative to riding pillion, squashed behind
the driver. Ural could do better and interesting things
with their bikes, but they don't. I've met two-man
Aussie companies making nifty helmet locks, a little
band of Jewish Russians from Massachusetts who
have invented a new kind of headlight, a small operation from the Southwest bottling an anti-fog spray for
visors, all with booths at the International Motorcycle
Show in New York, all smiling, all ready for business.
But the scowling boyars of Izhevsk are not there, this
year or any year.
Graham makes another critical point. Many Russian inventors and scientists, now as in the past, have
contempt for practical business sense, and the desire
for profit and personal advancement in industry.
These qualities are seen as vulgar and unworthy of
true intellectuals. So, it is not just an oppressive feudal state that retards Russian industry, it is the mindset of many of the innovators themselves, at least the
ones who do not leave the country and change their
attitudes, like Sikorsky. One observes that such views
would be shared, also, by craftsmen, who are masters of every aspect and phase of the manufacture
(the word originally meant "making by hand") of an
object, be it a painting or a gun. With the assembly
line and mechanical reproduction, the growth of bourgeois capitalism and the destruction of the stratified,
aristocratic society of old Europe, artists and craftsmen found themselves without a place. In a review
of Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger and Other Stories
(NY Review of Books, Sept. 3, 1970), the poet W.H.
Auden focused on the way Mann's characters embody
the social alienation and distress these changes caused
in Germany in the industrial age. Fascism was soon to
employ its atavistic myths of race, nobility, and soil
to enlist the disaffected. Communism attracted the
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014