I'd like to open this thread, ironically, with a quote from a story written by a Russian author, Isaac Asimov, which may sound familiar to you. It goes something like this:
>You are just a machine; an imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
The irony in this quote is that Russians themselves are incapable of innovating. In the last 118 years, everything that has emerged from Russia has been a crude imitation of a Western design.
For more contemporaneous examples, see the Russia social media giant, VKontakte and Russian search engine and satellite service, Yandex; both are direct clones of Facebook and Google, respectively. Furthermore, Yandex is powered by Glonass, which is a Russian analog of GPS.
The entire Russian auto industry is based on early 20th century Fiat automobiles licensed from Italy to be produced within the Soviet Union. Some American cars have also been illicitly copied by the Soviets, as well as the famed Italian Vespa scooter.
In the arts, the story is predictable. The famous children's fairy tale, Pinocchio, was crudely plagiarized and refashioned into the Russian Buratino. Even Pepsi cola, which the USSR licensed from Pepsi, was in fact imitated into a nearly-identical drink called "Baikal".
Today, the USSR is gone but that hasn't stopped the Russians from continuing to copy Western products, including trying to make analogs to Western computer processors and trying to ape Western cinematography for their domestic market. In fact, Russians make it a point of pride to produce "their own" products, even though they are copied entirely from foreign designs, while they look down on America because "everything is made in China", even if Americans designed it.
So tell me Antons: why do you think Russians are incapable of creativity and innovation? Could it be genetic? Perhaps it is a result of the Asian admixture in their ancestry.
