This is Akademgorodok, or Academic Townthe Soviet Unions answer to Americas Silicon Valley.
The Academpark Technopark at Akademgorodok.
Photo credit:gelio.livejournal.com
Akademgorodok is situated in the middle of a forest 30 km south of Novosibirsk city.
At its peak, Akademgorodok was home to 65,000 scientists and their families.
Scientific research in areas dismissed as dangerous pseudoscience in Moscow, such as cybernetics and genetics, flourished.
Nikita Khrushchev, foreground center, visits Akademgorodok during construction in the 1950s.
Living standards in Akademgorodok were also higher than in the rest of the country.
Shops were stocked with subsidized foodstuffs not easily obtainable elsewhere, and apartments were well-furnished.
But the utopian vision of no bureaucratic interference proved impossible in the Soviet Union.
Freedoms got severely curtailed in the 1970s during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev.
From USD 10 million in 1997, this rose to USD 1 billion by 2015.
Its current population stands at over 100,000.
