Finally, the shortage of material, financial, and personnel resources available to top managers of state-directed projects and programs remains a major barrier to achieving new success stories. Russia was and still is a second-order country in terms of its degree of socioeconomic development, and its stated intentions to become a global space leader (in the case of the Soviet space program) or a leading international center of high technology (in the case of Skolkovo) were hardly feasible in the long term. Top managers, in turn, respond to these constraints by using an overconcentration of resources. The costs of success stories are high, implementing top-priority projects requires mobilizing almost all available specialists, and meeting deadlines turns into a sequence of hasty activities, often at the expense of quality of implementation. Despite the high costs, overconcentrating resources may sometimes help achieve one-off successes, but the problems stated above can become aggravated over time. Successes, once achieved through overconcentrating resources, become more difficult to maintain, especially given the competition between projects within the country and in the international arena (as in fact happened with the Soviet space program). In essence, overconcentrating resources bleeds other projects and programs that lack priority status. This is why plans of secondary importance may be ignored or forgotten because of little interest from the top leadership (as the failure of OGAS tells us). Multiplicative effects become even less feasible, and negative incentives for outsiders, who now have no chance to produce success stories, become even stronger. As a result, the success of the few causes the failures of the many: overconcentrating resources leads to draining the pool of potential targets for disseminating best practices beyond pockets of efficiency.
To summarize, one might argue that success stories in Russia (and several other countries) face numerous barriers, both structural ones caused by a shortage of resources and institutional ones related to agency-driven incentives under conditions of bad governance. Nevertheless, in cases where there is a winning combination of the policy priorities and patronage of political leaders and strong and effective policy entrepreneurs who can achieve quick and visible performance in their projects and programs, even these institutions and incentives may contribute to certain success stories despite unfavorable conditions. Yet the same institutions and incentives may close the path to multiplicative effects of success stories and dissemination of their best practices beyond narrow fields prioritized by the authorities. Rather, as the experience of both the Soviet space program and the Skolkovo project suggests, success stories may lose their excellence over time and no longer maintain their special status. The Russian state and its top officials create with their own hands the same syndrome of unfavorable conditions for implementing top priority projects and programs that were outlined by Loren Graham in his historical analysis of barriers to innovation in Russian businesses47—excessive costs of projects, inefficient state regulations, and weak potential for multiplicative effects. This is why many success stories in Russia are not exceptions that still conform to the overall rules of bad governance, but rather an integral part of this politico-economic order. The high achievements of success stories do not only legitimate political leaders and their patronage. Their demonstrative effects and compensatory functions also legitimate the mechanisms of these achievements against the background of the numerous pathologies and ineffectiveness of the Russian state. However, one should not consider success stories to be only short-term initiatives by political leaders that have negligible impact on the development of the country and/or sectors of its economy and territories.
The Anatomy
of
Success:
The
Higher School
of
Economics
A number of factors that have contributed to the achievement of certain success stories in Russia are not particularly country-specific, whether within the context of post-Communist transformations48 or in other parts of the globe.49 Overall, effective policy entrepreneurs, thanks to the patronage of the political leadership, are able to maintain organizational autonomy of their projects, programs, organizations, or territories, and due to quickly achieving positive outcomes, attract more resources and effectively invest them into new successes. These actions lead to increasing returns and successful maintenance of organizational autonomy and further institutionalization and organizational continuity despite changes in top management and the political leadership. However, in Russia’s case, this recipe works imperfectly given the contradictory features of authoritarianism and bad governance; and this is why some success stories should be analyzed with a number of reservations.
One case of systematic construction of a success story in post-Soviet Russia that may be considered exemplary in this respect is the Higher School of Economics (HSE; a National Research University since 2009).50 The university was established from zero in November 1992 when acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar signed a decree on the creation of a new economic training center for personnel working under the conditions of a market economy. The founding rector, Yaroslav Kuzminov, established the core of the HSE’s team in relatively short order and attracted almost all the prominent market-oriented economic experts and many officials from the government.51 The figure of Yevgeny Yasin, an authoritative economist of the older generation who served as minister of economy in Russia and later took the post of academic director of the HSE,52 was representative of this recruitment pattern. In 1999–2000, Kuzminov and other representatives of the HSE were at the center of the development of the Strategy 2010 program of socioeconomic reforms adopted by the Russian government, and subsequently the informal status of the HSE was greatly elevated.53 It became the major brain trust of liberal reformers,54 and policy-oriented projects ordered by the government and other state agencies became a visible part of the HSE’s activities and an important source of its revenues.55 Under the influence of the HSE, a number of policy innovations were launched in various fields, such as implementing the Unified State Exam.56 Kuzminov became a prominent public figure, often considered a prospective candidate for various posts in the government, but kept his job at the HSE; however in 2014, he was elected to the Moscow City Duma (a legislative assembly), and in 2015 became a cochair of the Moscow branch of United People’s Front, a major pro-Putin organization. Kuzminov’s wife, Elvira Nabiullina, served as minister of economic development and then as a chair of the Central Bank of Russia; in other words, their personal union was intertwined with top-level political connections. Kuzminov was also at the center of a network of economic experts closely linked to the Russian government and often labeled “systemic liberals” in the media. He was the codirector of development of a new governmental program, Strategy 2020,57 and actively participated in preparing several of Putin’s decrees on issues of socioeconomic development. At the same time, top state officials served as the HSE’s trustees, regularly gave talks at its annual conferences, and supported this organization in various forms, ranging from state contracts to new office buildings. While the HSE initiated several state-directed projects and programs, it also became one of its major beneficiaries, both directly and indirectly.