moscow

Two researchers in the Russian Academy of Sciences have warned that a new tax code being discussed in the Russian parliament “could kill Russian science rather than support it”.

The warning has come from Eduard Kruglyakov and Veniamin Sidorov, who work at the Novosibirsk Nuclear Physics Institute (NNPI) of the academy's Siberian branch. The institute is a rare example of a successful and self-financing Russian scientific organization, having lost only 15 per cent of its staff during the hard times of perestroika.

Unlike many research institutes, NNPI can still afford equipment and pays salaries regularly, allowing it to continue research in fundamental areas of high-energy physics, the physics of accelerators, plasma and controlled thermonuclear synthesis.

The institute stays in operation primarily through the production and sale of high-technology equipment, such as particle accelerators, low-dose X-ray machines, and instruments for studying high temperature plasma.

The money collected in this way has made up for the lack of government support. But the new tax code will treat these revenues as profit, and subject to taxation.

“It is hardly possible to equate profit which is spent on buying villas at prestigious resorts, increasing personal bank accounts, or even paying dividends to shareholders, with that which is entirely used for supporting fundamental research,” say Kruglyakov and Sidorov.

Writing in the local newspaper of Novosibirsk academic town, which depends entirely on research institutes, they argue that “when the state is unable to finance its science, it has no moral right to tax a scientific organization's profit as if it was just a commercial enterprise”.