Gallery: A Peek Into Life in 'Silicon Forest,' Russia's Hot New Startup Scene
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Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences surround the incubator. Academics there study everything from science to humanities. Anna Bolshakova, a numismatist, reviews ancient Slavic coins she collected during a field expedition for her studies at the Institute of Archaeology.
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Ilya Surin repairs a collider in the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
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Sergey Polosatkin stands with dissambled pieces of machines that he uses in the study of plasma physics. The machine behind him is a neutron generator.
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Nikita Sokolov, 6, draws frames for a cartoon he is conceiving. The daycare and movie studio where he plays is inside the first building ever built in Akademgorodok, before the town's official beginnings in 1957.
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A cardboard cutout of a character for a mobile video game created by Playtox, an Akadempark startup, stands in the main incubator office space of the towering main building.
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A mural in the stairwell of the academy’s Institute of Cytology and Genetics.
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The main building of Akadempark lit up at night in the red, white and blue of the Russian tricolor. The 13-story buildings spans a road and towers over everything else in Akademgorodok. The top floor, accessible via a transparent skybridge, is a dedicated coworking space for tech entrepreneurs.
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Anastasia Titova wires transistors and circuits in the bowels of a San Francisco-style startup incubator called Akadempark in the middle of the Siberian taiga. Russian government officials and local entrepreneurs started building the complex – called Akadempark – three years ago in an attempt to revive a declining Soviet planned town.
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A machine is used to wind wire for transistors in the innovation center's fabrication building. Akadempark is a cluster of buildings, one dedicated to office space, one for biotechnology and another to fabricate components that are hard to acquire in the middle of Siberia.
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Marina Pilipenko watches her friends – many of them born in Akademgorodok and now attending university there – burn the effigy of a witch on the frozen waters of the Ob Sea to mark the end of winter. The town is also home to Novosibirsk State University, a pipeline of talent for the academy and now the incubator.
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A sign reading Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences marks the entrance to Akademgorodok. The academy is losing local control to a federal agency based in Moscow.
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Polina and Ivan with their daughter Vasilisa in their home.Polina studied in South Korea and speaks fluent English. Ivan programs set-top cable boxes for American and Russian televisions. It's the second tech company he has worked for in Akademgorodok.
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An apartment block in Akademgorodok at night. The town was conjured from nothing by Soviet leaders in 1957 as a meritocratic haven for intellectuals. It featured larger apartments than most Soviet towns at the time.
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An aspiring startup founder presents his invention, an automatic servo, to the judges. They grade ideas' innovativeness on a scale of 1 to 5. This entrepreneur was not among the funding winners.
