Ah, the Valdai Discussion Club – that wonderful time of year of ponderous navel-gazing over the future of Russia’s unfulfilled potential, a moment of generous ignorance over the country’s more serious systemic problems.  Neil Buckley at the Financial Times snags down some of the most basic ideas being exchanged so far … which may not be all that surprising.

Piotr Dutkiewicz, a professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University, notes that Russia’s traditional “coercive-intensive” model of modernisation may have had some successes under Tsar Peter the Great, for example, and under Stalin. But while it may be a good way of building smelters and steelworks, it is not suited to developing an economy based on innovative products and technologies. And the ex-Soviet scientific base has already deteriorated; Russia submitted about as many new patents last year as the US state of Georgia. (…)