Now it's their boxcar

Rico says that, many years ago, he tried to get Apple interested in what he called the Boxcar Project (after the one used to ship Lenin into Russia). Now, of course, the money's running the other way, as Andrew Kramer's article in The New York Times explains:

A group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who bet on companies like Skype and Facebook are taking a look at another long-shot proposition: that Russia can diversify its economy away from oil. The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, has elevated diversification to a centerpiece of his economic policy and is building a sprawling technology park outside Moscow referred to as Russia’s Silicon Valley.
The American venture capitalists’ visit to Russia on Tuesday offered a first look at how heavyweights in technology investing viewed this ambitious project. At a meeting with the investors, Mr. Medvedev spoke of his commitment to commercializing Russia’s scientific heritage, but acknowledged it would not be easy.
Russia’s boom-and-bust economy now swings wildly with the price of commodities like oil and metals, which make up eighty percent of the country’s exports. Government advisers have said that a lesson of the most recent crash was the urgency of diversification, despite rebounding commodity prices, as an inoculation against the next downturn.
Drew J. Guff, managing director of Siguler & Guff, an $8 billion venture capital fund, said he had committed a $250 million investment to a data center in Russia, encouraged by Kremlin support for information technology as symbolized by the new science park, also sometimes called Inograd, Russian for Innovation City. “We’re committed to Inograd and a new, technological Russia,” Mr. Guff told Mr. Medvedev at the meeting. “We believe our investors are satisfied investors.”
A Russian state-backed fund for investment in nanotechnology, Rusnano, organized the trip with AmBar, a trade group for Russian-speaking professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rusnano is looking for co-investors in a start-up created to commercialize Russian technological advances that are languishing at scientific institutes or university laboratories because the country has never had venture capital investors to bring them to market.
Russia is the world’s largest energy-exporting country and so does not lack capital for investment in business. The sovereign wealth funds are bulging. Instead, the strategy has been to attract expertise in incubating high-technology ventures, rather than simply money.
Rusnano’s director, Anatoly Chubais, one of the architects of Russia’s immediate post-Soviet privatization, who has now joined the effort to diversify, said in a statement that the goal of the visit was to “bring together the country’s most promising innovative projects with the world’s smartest money.”
The venture fund investors met earlier Tuesday with Viktor Vekselberg, the commercial director of the project to build the new scientific city. He had asked their views on the ambitious undertaking.
The technology city should become a stimulus for countrywide reforms to ease the emergence of small and medium businesses, including technology companies, Mr. Guff said he told the Russians, and not a goal in itself. Still, it could become a signal of Russian commitment to high technology development, he said, and might draw back to Russia some of the scientists and programmers who abandoned the country in the post-Soviet brain drain. “Inograd is not a physical location but something virtual,” he said.
David Kronfeld, the chairman of JK&B Capital, praised the government’s focus on nanotechnology, intended to leapfrog the semiconductor technology that Russia was far behind in anyway. But he added that Russia’s grim reputation among American investors would keep many away for now.
Mr. Medvedev said he was aware of investors’ negative mood toward Russia. The government was trying to improve policy, he said. But if those gathered at the table conveyed Russia’s commitment to tech development, he said, the image might change. “Businessmen trust their colleagues,” he said.