Russia has never been a technological superpower. The downsizing of the scientific budgets in the 1990s killed much of what was left of Soviet tech potential centered around closed scientific towns. Subsequent attempts to spur government-induced innovation, in particular under former President Dimitri Medvedev — a young Western-looking technocrat who’s now the chief Russian hawk — failed. Top-down tech ventures such as Rusnano and Skolkovo Center ended up as Potemkin villages, incapable of producing a fraction of the R&D output of American, European, or Chinese scientific clusters. ...But these diversions mask a broader collapse of Russian imports. Even though Russia’s...