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.
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Anton Nikolenko makes adjustments to a particle collider that he uses for experiments at the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
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Sasha Vasiliev, 6, prepares before a violin recital in one of Akademgorodok's oldest buildings.
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Audience members applaud the winners of the winter startup accelerator. Akadempark fosters new companies and finds new talent in two accelerators each year.
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Feofil Zhuravel, a retired professor of mechanical physics, ices fishes on the Ob Sea on a sunny day. Though many academics left with the fall of Soviet Union, those that stayed hope that Akademgorodok will not lose its intellectual and quirky character to become just another sleep Russian suburb.
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An atomic device dismantled in an ante chamber of the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
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Anatoly Chernov fabricates components for inventions in Akadempark that are difficult to acquire in the middle of Siberia.
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Inside the annex of the Institute of Archaeology and Paleontology, a building on the outer edge of Akademgorodok.
