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High-quality machine tools are at the core of a modern economy, but not only did Russia fall behind when the industry took off in the 1980s; following the collapse of the Soviet Union it simply missed out on two more technological revolutions. The Kremlin now wants to revive the industry.
Russia’s sanctions soft underbelly: precision machine tools
make Sputnik V in large amounts has been painfully slow. By the end of May Russia had met only 8% of its export orders despite the vaccine having been approved in over 60 countries and orders for hundreds of millions of doses worth billions of dollars.
Since then the production bottlenecks are slowly being circumnavigated. As of the middle of June Russian factories have been cranking out 30mn doses
a month and are beginning to be able to meet the demand. But it has taken longer to build the factories than it has taken to develop the drug in the first place.
There are two problems that have held back a faster rollout of mass production: the lack of qualified staff and the lack of the basic machine building technology to manufacture the intricate machines needed to produce a complicated drug like Sputnik V.
Russia is famously bad at making anything other than space rockets
and fighter jets. The Soviet Union had exploding tellies and opaque sunglasses. Quality consumer goods didn't exist.
The irony is the Russia revolution
was built on the back of an industrial revolution powered by a huge machine tool industry under Stalin that embraced mechanisation and transformed the Russian empire from a bucolic backwater to an industrial superpower by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Machine building and the revolution were synonymous. “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country!” went the famous slogan. Soviet machine building exploded in the 1980s, but the USSR quickly fell behind after the advent
of more precise “numerical” machine engineering – pioneered by the Japanese and Germans. Even the US struggled to keep up with this first innovation.
Since then machine tool production has taken several more technological leaps upwards, thanks to the advent of the computer and now the internet. Today it's all about “mechatronics” – a marriage
Ben Aris in Berlin
The West has been struggling to change the Kremlin’s behaviour and hold it to account for the annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and a host of other misdemeanours with a sanctions regime that has proved to be almost entirely ineffective. Oligarchs have been targeted; visa bans and
asset freezes doled out; Russia’s debt made out of bounds for international investors. Yet thanks to President Vladimir Putin’s fiscal fortress, all these measures have slid off the Kremlin’s back like water off a duck's back.
However, there is one place that Russia is truly vulnerable. It imports almost all of its precision machine tools and the majority of them come from Western Europe and the US, as its own once legendary machine tool sector was destroyed in 1991 and never rebuilt.
Machinery and tools remains by far Russia’s largest import category, but precision tools are more important than just the money they cost. High-quality machine tools lie at the heart of Russia’s efforts to modernise itself. It can’t build
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an autonomous competitive economy without precise machine tools and they are also the wellspring of innovation. Without access to quality machine tools Russia would still earn money from oil, gas and metal exports, but all the Kremlin’s ambitions to develop a modern highly competitive economy would be badly hobbled and nigh on impossible.
Collapse of the machine tool industry
At the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic Russia covered itself in glory. The development of the Sputnik V vaccine, which appears to be one of the safest and most effective in the world, was developed with amazing speed. The rollout of a mass inoculation programme began in December 2020 when most other vaccine candidates were still in trials.
Russia is good at the science. It put the first man into space under a totalitarian regime. Where it has always fallen down is on high-quality production. The vaccine's development was fast, but the construction of the factories to