Milk without the cow

JUST ACROSS THE mighty Volga river from Sviyazhsk, an island fortress built by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 to help him conquer the Khanate of Kazan, stands a brand new city. It is the first to appear on Russia’s map since the fall of the Soviet Union. Innopolis, 820km (510 miles) due east of Moscow, was founded in 2012 as an IT park and a model for the sort of modernisation that Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister and before that its president, had proclaimed a main priority. Now two years old, it is the smallest town in Russia, with the large ambition to launch the country into a high-tech era. Designed by Liu Thai Ker, the chief architect of Singapore, it has a university where 350 students are taught in English. Just half an hour’s drive away is Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, an oil-rich republic that has recently adopted a new 15-year strategy to turn itself into a hub of creativity and growth. “We are competing not with Russian regions but with the world. Our new oil is human capital,” says Vladimir Gritskikh, a former physicist who co-ordinates the programme.

Innopolis has comfortable town houses, playgrounds with Wi-Fi and a large swimming pool. Igor Nosov, its manager, holds an American MBA. The city’s free economic zone is dominated by a circular office building for high-tech firms. There is just one thing in short supply: the firms themselves. So far the building has only about a dozen occupants. “Well, we’ve built a collective farm. Now we need the farmers,” quips one of the Tatar officials. Whether those farmers will come depends on a range of factors mostly outside Tatarstan’s control.