Yevgeny Olegovich Adamov — liquidator of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, Scientific Director of the N. A. Dollezhal Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering (NIKIET) and of the Breakthrough project — talks about what lessons the industry has drawn in forty years, why fear of the atom proved stronger than the accident itself, and how closing the nuclear fuel cycle will power humanity for millennia to come.

This year marks forty years since the accident at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. For Yevgeny Olegovich Adamov, this is not merely a historical date. From May to August 1986, he worked on site, surveyed the destroyed reactor, and took part in the design and construction of the Shelter (the Ukrytiye — the massive concrete-and-steel structure erected over the destroyed reactor in 1986, later enclosed by the New Safe Confinement arch completed in 2016). In November of the same year, he became Director of NIKIET — the institute through which all the RBMK safety upgrade programmes were channelled, and where the next-generation reactors BREST-OD‑300 and BR‑1200 are being designed today.

We meet in his office. On the desk lies the master plan of ODEK — the world’s first pilot demonstration Generation IV energy complex, currently under construction in Seversk. The conversation begins with some memories.

— Yevgeny Olegovich, this year marks forty years since the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. You were one of the first people there. What, for you, is most important about that story today, four decades on?

— The most important thing is to call it by its proper name. It was an accident — a large, severe accident with serious consequences— but not a 'global catastrophe', as people still enjoy presenting it. There is an enormous difference between those words, and it bears directly on how we talk about nuclear power today.

I arrived at the plant in May 1986, during the period when the Government Commission was chaired by Yu. D. Maslyukov. I worked under three Government Commissions. Together with colleagues from the Kurchatov Institute (the NRC Kurchatov Institute — Russia’s main nuclear research centre, founded in 1943), we surveyed the actual radiation distribution throughout the reactor building. This was a fundamental question, because it directly determined the volume of the Shelter, the timeline for its construction, and the radiation doses the builders would receive. We were able to show that a significant part of the fuel had remained in the reactor shaft and the sub-reactor spaces, and this made it possible to substantially reduce the size of the sarcophagus. Less material meant fewer people who had to be sent there, and fewer doses they received.

I absorbed 50 rem at head level and 100 rem at leg level. (A rem — roentgen equivalent man — is a unit of radiation dose accounting for biological effect; 100 rem equals 1 Sievert. The liquidators' official exposure limit was set at 25 rem.) That was not heroism — it was work that had to be done by someone. Sending colleagues into such conditions, when the official dose limit for liquidators was 25 rem, was out of the question. We agreed on the maximum safe limit with A. P. Alexandrov (Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov — President of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Director of the Kurchatov Institute) and L. A. Ilyin (Leonid Andreyevich Ilyin — Director of the Institute of Biophysics and chief radiation safety authority of the USSR) — hence those 100 rem.

— When people discuss the causes of the accident today, accounts still diverge. What is the objective picture, in your view?

— The picture that has emerged from two decades of international analysis — including the work of the IAEA’s INSAG group (International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group), which published the revised report INSAG‑7 in 1992 — is clear enough. The accident was the result of a combination of three factors: an error in the physics design, the design characteristics of the RBMK reactor (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalnyy — High-Power Channel-type Reactor), violations of operating procedures by personnel, and systemic shortcomings in the organisation of plant operation.

The RBMK was a brilliant idea from the standpoint of economics and scalability — a single-loop circuit, graphite moderator, the ability to refuel under load. But it had a positive void coefficient of reactivity (when steam bubbles form in the coolant, reactivity increases rather than decreases — the opposite of most Western reactor designs), especially pronounced at low power. Combined with a flawed design in the control and protection system (SUZ — Sistema Upravleniya i Zashchity) rods — whose lower sections were graphite — this meant that in an off-normal state, when the emergency shutdown was triggered, the reactor did not shut down; it briefly spiked upward in reactivity. That is precisely what happened in the early hours of 26 April during that ill-fated test of the turbine generator rundown mode.

One cannot overlook the issue of institutional subordination. In 1986, the Chernobyl plant was under the Ministry of Energy, not even the all-union ministry but the Ukrainian one, and certainly not under Minsredmash (the Ministry of Medium Machine Building — the Soviet ministry responsible for the nuclear weapons programme and, later, the civilian nuclear industry, whose safety culture was radically different). The decision had been made on the grounds that running a coal-fired station and a nuclear station were tasks of the same kind. They are not. The safety cultures in those two ministries were fundamentally different. One of the first lessons of the accident was that nuclear plants were first separated into their own ministry and then returned to the management of nuclear specialists. It seemed a minor point — but it was in fact a systemic shift.

— And yet in the public imagination, Chernobyl is still painted as something almost apocalyptic: tens of thousands dead, poisoned land, mutations. What does the science actually say?

— Science says something entirely different. Twenty-eight people died from acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the first weeks — the firefighters of the first crews, the reactor operators, those who worked at the epicentre in the first hours. In ARS patients in the years after the accident, the main disabling factor was the long-term consequences of severe radiation burns, requiring repeated surgical procedures. Where radiation cataracts had caused a significant deterioration in vision, lens replacement surgery — fitting an artificial intraocular lens — was performed, with full restoration of sight. According to Russian specialists, of 106 patients who had previously survived ARS, 26 had died from various causes by 2016. This group also showed elevated incidence of malignant blood cancers — 5 of the 26 deaths.

That is a great deal. Every such death is a tragedy. But let us compare. Coal power alone — through air pollution and mining accidents — kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide every year. Hydroelectric power — the Banqiao dam failure in China in 1975 claimed, by various estimates, between 26,000 and 230,000 lives in a single night. The Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India in 1984 — around 18,000 dead. A train collision in the USSR in 1989: 575 dead. Almost no one remembers those.

At present, the average age of male liquidators is 73, and 52 percent of that cohort have reached that age. According to Russian statistics, only 41 percent of the male population of the Russian Federation as a whole live to 73 — indicating that the liquidators live somewhat longer than the general male population of the country.

The only proven mass health consequence of Chernobyl for the general population is an increase in thyroid cancer among those who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident and drank milk from local cows. The overwhelming majority of those affected were successfully treated. It could have been prevented by the simple, timely distribution of iodine tablets and a ban on milk consumption in the first weeks — and that is the second great lesson of Chernobyl: the skill and willingness to communicate openly with the public during a crisis.

As for the 'poisoned land': over the past forty years, thanks to the natural decay of radionuclides and the decontamination measures carried out, the radiological situation in the affected territories has fundamentally improved. Most of the formerly contaminated agricultural land in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine now meets normal background radiation levels. The Exclusion Zone remains — yes — but it is by now more of a memorial than an active public health measure. And in ecological terms it has become one of the largest undisturbed nature reserves in Europe, with wolves, wild boar, and elk in greater numbers than the European average.

As for mutants — I never encountered any in the Chernobyl zone, but you can see them at the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg. Peter the Great started collecting his famous curiosities there three centuries ago.

— Returning to the technical lessons — what did the industry actually do after the accident?

— A great deal was done, without exaggeration. And in that I see cause for professional pride — the industry did not try to bury what had happened; it improved.

At NIKIET, an RBMK modernisation programme was completed in the shortest possible time. We substantially reduced the positive void coefficient — partly by increasing the enrichment level of the fuel. The control rod system was completely redesigned to eliminate the 'end effect' (the positive reactivity spike caused by the graphite displacers at the bottom of the rods when inserted). A fast-acting emergency protection system was introduced, capable of shutting the reactor down in two and a half seconds. Modern diagnostics were installed, analogue systems replaced with digital ones, operating procedures overhauled, personnel retrained. In effect, the reactor was rebuilt by around eighty percent — it is not the same RBMK that stood at Chernobyl.

Over the decades that followed, those modernised units completed their service lives and are leaving the scene on schedule — the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant permanently shut down its first RBMK‑1000 in 2018 and its second one in 2020. They are being replaced by the VVER‑1200 (Vodo-Vodyanoy Energetichesky Reaktor — Water-Water Power Reactor, Russia’s standard pressurised water reactor design) — a Generation III+ design with passive safety systems, a double-containment pressure shell, and a core catcher (a device designed to contain and cool molten reactor core material in the event of a severe accident).

In parallel, in 1988 IBRAE was established — the Nuclear Safety Institute (Institut Bezopasnogo Razvitiya Atomnoy Energetiki), which carries out computational modelling of severe accidents. In 1994, the Convention on Nuclear Safety was signed — an international instrument establishing states' responsibility for safe plant operation. The practice of 'defence in depth' — a sequential chain of independent safety barriers — became standard. A culture of international openness took hold.

And here we come to the second great lesson — one that we are, I fear, visibly losing today. After Chernobyl, after Three Mile Island, after Fukushima, international cooperation on safety expanded enormously. Everyone shared data; everyone learned from others' mistakes. Now, under political pressure, this framework is beginning to break down in places. Beyond that — lunatics have gone so far as to shell the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. And that is dangerous: nuclear safety has no national borders by its very nature.

— You have said many times that fear of the atom is today the main obstacle to the industry’s development. Where does it come from, in your view?

— Radiophobia is not only, and not primarily, the consequence of Chernobyl. It is the consequence of decades during which no one explained to people what radiation is. They cannot see it, hear it, or feel it — so it frightens them. It reached the point of absurdity: when nuclear technology began to enter medicine, the word 'nuclear' was dropped from the name of the scanner. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance — NMR — became simply MRI. Why? Because people who have never been given a proper account of nuclear safety are afraid even of the word 'nuclear'.

And yet every one of us lives in a constant radiation field — there are cosmic rays, natural background radiation, radon in basements, potassium‑40 in our own bones. A transatlantic flight gives a passenger a dose comparable to the annual exposure limit for a resident of the resettlement zone. A single CT scan is the equivalent of dozens of such flights. No one is frightened by that, and rightly so — because it is safe. But the moment someone says 'nuclear power station', part of the audience reacts in a way that has nothing to do with the actual risk profile.

And this radiophobia carries a measurable price. In the 1990s, nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation was around 18 percent. Today, it is around 10 percent. The absolute numbers have barely changed, because new units are being built here and there — but the relative share has nearly halved. That means the world has spent the past twenty-five years expanding primarily coal and gas generation, with all the attendant consequences for the climate and the health of billions of people. That is the real price of fear — not the mythical Chernobyl millions.

The good news is that society is gradually shaking off the 'post-Chernobyl syndrome'. According to VTsIOM (the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion — Russia’s main state polling organisation), 68 percent of Russians no longer consider a repeat accident possible. Nuclear power is returning to the agenda: its role in decarbonisation is being discussed today not only in Russia but also in the United States, Britain, France, Japan, South Korea, and the countries of South-East Asia. This is a renaissance, as Alexei Likhachev aptly put it at the last IAEA General Conference (Likhachev has been Director General of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, since 2016). And precisely now it is critically important what shape we give to that renaissance.

— And this is exactly the moment to talk about Breakthrough. How do you formulate the mission of this project?

— The mission of the Breakthrough project is to restore to nuclear power the possibility of leading, large-scale development. Not niche development, as at present, but full-scale development on a timescale of centuries.

This flows from the initiative put forward by Vladimir Putin at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, where he spoke of nuclear energy as the foundation of sustainable energy development for humanity. The initiative was originally intended to be a joint US-Russian undertaking, and all the preparatory work I was doing with my counterpart at the US Department of Energy, Secretary Richardson (Bill Richardson, US Secretary of Energy 1998−2001), had been completed. At the very last moment, the State Department intervened and demanded a halt to construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran. Explanations that there was no basis for such a trade-off — and that the new technology was no less necessary for the Americans than for us — fell on deaf ears. We had to send them packing…

At the same time, IAEA General Conference resolution GC (44)/RES/21 was adopted, and under that mandate the international INPRO project was established — on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles. I put forward this initiative at the General Conference in 2000, and fourteen countries were ready to join concrete action toward building a pilot energy complex with a closed nuclear fuel cycle. After my departure from government service, work on developing the new technological platform stalled, and INPRO was reoriented away from practical activity toward what I can only call ‘criteria shuffling'. Ten years were lost, until Sergei Kiriyenko — having finally recognised its potential — gave a powerful impetus to the federal target programme (FTsP — Federal’naya tselevaya programma), and in 2013 work on ODEK began. (ODEK — Opytno-demonstratsionny energokompleks — the Pilot Demonstration Energy Complex in Seversk, Tomsk Oblast, comprising the BREST-OD‑300 fast reactor, a fuel fabrication module, and a spent fuel reprocessing module.)

Breakthrough is the national embodiment of that concept. The idea of closing the nuclear fuel cycle using fast neutrons was developed and theoretically proven long ago. It rests on ideas articulated by Enrico Fermi as early as 1944: in a fast neutron reactor, the surplus of fast neutrons can breed more fissile fuel than is consumed — so-called breeding. To test this, in 1953 Walter Zinn demonstrated experimentally on the EBR‑1 research reactor in Idaho that the breeding of fissile material beyond what was burnt was achievable. Three quarters of a century have passed since then.

Engineers were in no hurry to implement it — held back by adequate stocks of relatively cheap uranium, by the stagnation of the entire nuclear industry, and by that very same radiophobia. In Breakthrough, we are solving a practical problem: taking the concept of cycle closure all the way to industrial realisation and proving its economic competitiveness.

— What exactly does closing the cycle solve? What specific problems?

— There are five, and each of them is critical.

The first is raw material efficiency. In today’s open cycle, we use only the isotope uranium‑235 as fuel, and its natural abundance is a mere 0.7 percent. The remaining 99.3 percent — uranium‑238 — is only partially and indirectly fissioned in the reactor as a by-product. In effect we discard 99 percent of the ore as enrichment tails. If nuclear power stays at its current scale, uranium supplies will last to the end of the century — that is not an issue. But if we want to return to the growth rates of the late 1980s, a uranium shortage — and with it a sharp rise in price — is inevitable in the second half of this century. In the closed cycle, uranium‑238 is put to work, because in a fast neutron reactor it is converted into plutonium‑239 — an excellent fissile fuel. This greatly multiplies the resource base.

By how much? Let us calculate. Proven global uranium reserves are of the order of six million tonnes. In the open cycle, that is enough for 70 to 100 years of nuclear power at current scale. In the closed cycle, those same reserves are not a hundred years but millennia. If we also account for the enrichment tails accumulated over decades — depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUHF, known in Russian as OGFU: obednyonny geksaftorid urana) alone amounts to several million tonnes worldwide — and for uranium dissolved in seawater, which becomes recoverable at moderate price increases, we are talking about an energy source comparable in longevity to solar: on a horizon of tens of thousands of years.

The second problem is waste. Today, the management of spent nuclear fuel (SNF — OYaT in Russian, otrabotavsheye yadernoye toplivo) is what the industry calls the 'deferred problem'. It has been called that for half a century, and in the meantime some 320,000 tonnes of spent fuel have accumulated worldwide. Most of it sits in at-reactor storage ponds; the rest is in centralised storage facilities. Geological repositories do not yet exist anywhere in the world. The 'deferred problem' is gradually becoming a problem with no solution in sight. Breakthrough addresses it in a fundamentally different way: after reprocessing the spent fuel — including fuel that has been irradiated in thermal reactors — the recovered nuclear materials are returned to the cycle as new fuel.

And here is the crucial point. Closure based on fast reactors reduces the biological hazard potential of the waste by several orders of magnitude. How? Through transmutation — 'burning up' the long-lived isotopes: minor actinides, americium, neptunium, in the fast neutron reactor. What currently remains as dead weight for thousands and tens of thousands of years is fissioned in the fast neutron spectrum, releasing energy in the process. The result is what we call radiotoxicity-equivalent waste management: the materials returned to the ground after a comparatively short time have the same radioactivity as the natural uranium ore that was extracted from that same ground in the first place.

The radioecologists of our project — and this work was awarded the special prize of the Chairman of Rosatom’s Supervisory Board for 2020, presented by Sergei Kiriyenko at the Rosatom Person of the Year ceremony — proved the following: if by 2100 fast reactors have completely replaced thermal reactors, the equilibrium of lifetime radiation health risks with natural background levels will be reached within a matter of centuries, rather than tens of millennia required under the open cycle.

The third problem is nuclear non-proliferation. The general public often gets confused here. No country in the world has ever pursued a nuclear weapon through civilian nuclear power — there are far shorter routes, and specialists know them well. But there is a pressure point in the non-proliferation regime: enrichment technology. What is the international community’s concern about Iran? The level to which it is enriching uranium. Fast neutron reactors do not need enriched uranium at all — they operate on a mixture of depleted uranium and plutonium. Eliminating enrichment as a widespread technology moves nuclear power to the periphery of the non-proliferation problem altogether. That is an enormous systemic advantage.

Nuclear power is already safe enough today — as the most severe accidents it has experienced have demonstrated. Safety justification for new plants is conducted through probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). Current standards require that the probability of a severe accident not exceed 10^-5 to 10^-6 events per reactor per year — meaning no more than one critical incident per 100,000 to 1,000,000 reactor-years of operation. In Breakthrough we have set a different goal: to ensure safety not at a probabilistic but at a deterministic level — to completely eliminate the possibility of accidents requiring evacuation, let alone permanent resettlement of the population. That is the solution to the fourth problem.

The fifth problem — the economic competitiveness of nuclear power — appears to be the most difficult one. Particularly today, when the cost of materials and equipment is rising rapidly. We will solve this one too, probably by around the fifth or sixth serial PEK (PEK — Promyshlenny Energokompleks, Industrial Energy Complex — the commercial-scale successor to ODEK).

— The main argument of the critics is economics. Closure is considered too expensive. What is your answer to that?

— It is the hardest of the problems to solve, yes. And it is made more difficult by the fact that even among some specialists the idea has taken root that fast neutron reactors simply cannot compete with thermal reactors on the cost per kilowatt-hour, and therefore some other application must be found for them — breeding fuel for thermal reactors, transmutation, and so forth. All of that, in my view, is sophistry.

You can indeed breed fuel for thermal reactors in fast reactors — but then the thermal units themselves would need major redesign. And all the accumulated problems would remain. That is a bad idea. As for actinide transmutation — yes, fast reactors can do that, but accelerator-driven systems and fusion neutron sources can do it too. It is not a unique function.

We therefore focused on the main objective: proving the ‘existence theorem' of an economically competitive fast reactor. We have costed the economics, and we have a team of economists tracking every stage. ODEK itself is a pilot demonstration complex — it will not be replicated, and there is no requirement for it to recover either R&D costs (NIOKR — nauchno-issledovatel'skiye i opytno-konstruktorskiye raboty) or capital expenditure (KVL — kapital’niye vlozhenniya). But through the electricity generated by the 300‑megawatt BREST-OD‑300 unit and sold to the grid, it must cover its own operating costs, including those of the entire on-site closed cycle. That is a reasonable objective for a demonstration unit.

The serial industrial energy complexes — PEK — are a completely different economic proposition: a positive one. And the key reasons for that lie in the reactor design itself, with its lead coolant.

— Service life is another point of contention. The VVER‑1200 has a design life of 60 years with the possibility of extension. What about fast reactors?

— In principle, it is unlimited: there are no components analogous to, say, the VVER pressure vessel that are considered irreplaceable. And that is an interesting, instructive story.

Remember: the first industrial reactors built to produce plutonium and tritium were designed for a ten-year service life. And when did they close? After three service lives — that is, after thirty years. The first power reactors were designed for 30 years — because no one knew how the materials would behave beyond that period. You could only model and calculate — and then see for real. Now it turns out to be not 30 or even 40 years, but 60. In Russia, materials for VVER pressure vessels have been developed with a projected 100‑year service life. I suspect that will not be the end of it.

BN‑1200M and BR‑1200 (BN — Bystrye Neytrony, fast neutrons — the sodium-cooled fast reactor line; BR‑1200 — the lead-cooled fast reactor) are being developed with an initial design life of 60 years. Today we can already predict the serviceability of materials, fuel pins (tvely — teplovydelyayushchiye elementy, fuel elements), and in-vessel components over such a period with reasonable confidence. There are some questions around steam generators and pumps — but those are all replaceable components. Service life is limited only by difficult-to-replace assemblies — for BREST that is the reinforced-concrete vessel, but even that is theoretically replaceable. So, 60 years is the initial assessment, with the prospect of extension.

And look at the world’s first reactors — now maintained more as museum pieces than power generators. They have proved the fundamental point: the serviceability of the core structural elements can be sustained virtually indefinitely, either by life extension or by replacement. Today we replace people’s hearts — pumps for circulating blood — not to mention joints. The logic with reactors is exactly the same.

— And a final question. Breakthrough is not solely a Russian task. What significance does it have in a global context?

— A global one. And it takes us directly back to where you began this conversation — to the question of what conclusions we draw from forty years of experience since Chernobyl.

The accident showed that nuclear power cannot develop blindly — scaling up for scale’s sake. It must be safe by design, not by instruction. It must realise the full energy potential of the uranium resource, close its own cycle, and not leave unsolvable problems for future generations. It must be protected against proliferation by its very architecture, not only by a safeguards regime. And it must return to the earth exactly the radioactivity it took from it, at the same level. It will be pointless unless it becomes economically competitive. Those are the principles of Generation IV, and that is precisely what we are implementing in Breakthrough.

If this work is brought to an industrial-scale result — and it will be, I have no doubt of that — humanity will have a practically inexhaustible source of energy. Not for a hundred years, as now, but for millennia. By that time, commercially viable fusion will have caught up. The new nuclear power technological platform — clean, safe, economically competitive, and strengthening the non-proliferation regime — will be the foundation for the planet’s sustainable energy future, in exactly the sense in which President Putin formulated that goal at the Millennium Summit twenty-five years ago.

That, if you like, is our technological answer to Chernobyl. Not to forget, not to repress — but to draw the full professional and human lesson, and move forward.

When, in 2028, the BREST-OD‑300 delivers its first kilowatt-hours to the grid, and, by 2034, the industrial PEKs follow, we will see the beginning of this new era with our own eyes. I very much intend to live long enough to see it — and to keep working until then.

Interview by Andrei Reznichenko

— Andrei Nikolayevich, the unusual chime of the clock in your office…

— It is a unique clock, from the nineteenth century. It migrated to Rosarkhiv from the office of the head of the Main Archival Administration of the Soviet Union, which was at the time on Pirogovka Street. After the move to the new building the clock became temperamental and stopped. It did not work for twenty years. When I took over as head of the agency I decided to have it repaired. We found a wonderful clockmaker who restored the mechanism — and the clock began marking time again. It is a symbol of the unstoppable river of time. Time flows, as does history. And we archivists preserve the nation's historical memory.

— Speaking of the flow of time: Rosarkhiv recently turned a hundred, and the starting point for the agency was Lenin's decree of 1 June 1918, 'On the Reorganisation and Centralisation of Archival Affairs'.

— That is the date when a dedicated service was established. Before 1917 there was no such service. Archives existed but were scattered. A specialised archival service was created by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars bearing Lenin's signature. Incidentally, every document touched by the hand of the Bolshevik leader is held in the federal archives. Virtually all documents of Marx and Engels are there too. And the largest collection of Paris Commune documents — also there.

Lenin signed the decree, but it was drafted by the old academicians — historians of Tsarist Russia — because they understood the significance of archival documents and the necessity of creating a service whose mission was to preserve the nation's historical memory.

The Bolsheviks gathered the history of the revolutionary movement — including the social-democratic movement — from across the world. There was famine, yet they were buying these documents for hard currency in Weimar Germany and hauling them to Moscow. Many rarities subsequently perished in the Nazi period, while ours survived — at least in copies.

— A hundred years is an enormous span: the Civil War, the Great Patriotic War, the turbulent nineties, when various forces tried to destroy documents inconvenient to them. How was the documentary heritage preserved?

— The documents held by the federal archives are thousands of years old. Archives appear alongside writing, the state, power, and society. Many ancient documents are above all instruments confirming rights of ownership: if you hold a title, you hold the right to govern territories. The oldest documents in Russia's archives date from the late eleventh to early twelfth century — effectively the archive of the Grand Princes. We hold documents from the father of Alexander Nevsky, Grand Prince of Novgorod, and treaties between the Vladimir Principality and the Novgorod Republic.

And Muscovite rarities: the spiritual testament (dukhovnaya gramota — a combined will and prayer document addressed to God, written by a ruler before a dangerous journey) of Ivan Kalita (Ivan I, Grand Prince of Moscow, died 1340, nicknamed Kalita — 'Moneybag'). What is a spiritual testament? A man addressed God in case something happened to him when facing an enemy. You were riding to the Horde to bow before the khans — no one knew whether you would return. So you wrote your will. We hold two original spiritual testaments of Dmitry Donskoy (Grand Prince of Moscow, victor at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380). The 1320s: Kalita; the 1370s: Donskoy. These unique documents are held in the collections of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA — Rossiysky gosudarstvenny arkhiv drevnikh aktov, the principal repository for documents of the Russian state before the early eighteenth century).

— Extraordinary. But how did they survive? Moscow burned so many times — so many wars and internecine conflicts — Moscow against Tver, against Novgorod, against Lithuania…

— Exactly! The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the second centre of Rus; Old Russian was its official language. Endless wars, fires, Tatar raids — everything was burned. And yet our ancestors preserved so much. How? When I first saw these documents I was astonished: 'Good God, what a heritage they have left us!'

First, our ancestors were patriots — in the good sense of the word. They loved their native land. They had a sense of duty. State documents formed part of the Grand Prince's treasury, the most valuable of possessions. When disaster struck, the first things to be spirited away and hidden were gold, jewels — and documents. Because these established the rights of rulers and the foundations of ownership.

— Did this tradition hold in later periods too?

— Of course. In 1812 the archives were evacuated from the Kremlin — they were saved. The Soviet period was exactly the same. Yes, not every document survived, but the core heritage was preserved. And thanks to this, Russia is today a great archival power.

— What does 'archival power' mean? What does it look like in practice?

— Let us compare Russia with other countries. Britain holds an enormous archival heritage — but it is an island state and at the same time the world's largest colonial empire. France was another colonial empire but did not preserve its archives — invaders came and plundered Paris. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — the largest mediaeval state of Eastern Europe, many of whose lands are independent countries today — also lost a considerable heritage. We, among the continental countries, managed to preserve the documentary treasures of mediaeval Rus, the Muscovite State, and Imperial Russia.

The Muscovite State had a Razryadny Prikaz (the Department of Military Affairs — the central administrative body that organised the noble levy, recorded military service, and managed campaigns). The army was irregular: a muster was called for each campaign. Wealthy noblemen brought more cavalry and infantry and were paid a salary for this. All of it is recorded in the Razryadnye knigi — the service registers — and we hold it. The archive of the Razryadny Prikaz — the oldest military department — is in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts.

There was also the Posol'sky Prikaz — the equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It holds ambassadorial missions, treaties with foreign states, everything relating to the staff of the department (interpreters, translators), the journeys of Russian ambassadors abroad, their salaries, and much more. An extraordinarily rich and unique documentary heritage.

— And what documents of the Russian Empire have survived?

— The documents cover the period from the Empire's foundation — the Petrine era — to 1917. All of this history is held in the Moscow and St. Petersburg federal archives. The heritage is vast: the Russian Empire was an enormous state that encompassed the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the Transcaucasian and Turkestan Governor-Generalships. Today these are independent states, but the documents relating to their history are held in Russian archives.

— And the Soviet period? The war, the blockade, the evacuation — how were the archives saved?

— During the Great Patriotic War documents were certainly damaged, but the main treasures were concentrated in Moscow — and the city was never surrendered to the enemy. Despite the Leningrad blockade, archival documents there survived.

Part of the archives was evacuated from Moscow during the war. Evacuation decisions were taken literally in the first month. In accordance with the mobilisation plans — just as in the time of the princes — the archives were moved alongside the treasury and the gold reserves.

Archives were damaged in Belarus, Ukraine, and some western regions of Russia. The Party archive in Smolensk could not be evacuated in time and largely fell into German hands, which then took it to Germany. It ended up in the Western occupation zone, from where the Americans took it after the war — and only in the 1990s did they return it to us. I was personally involved in those events and remember the return of the Smolensk archive very well.

— So the Americans understood the value of these documents — they preserved them rather than destroying them.

— They contained the membership lists of communists. For the intelligence services these were an asset. The Americans subsequently used this archive for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. Archives have always been an instrument of ideological struggle. Regrettably, that is a fact.

— How did the nineties affect Rosarkhiv? There must have been people who wanted to take things out of Russia, destroy documents, have things 'accidentally' catch fire. And on top of that the collapse of the country.

— Some call it a 'collapse'; others call it a 'revolution' — or a 'counter-revolution'. You see what different assessments emerge depending on political position. But history is history. The Soviet Union disintegrated. The Russian Federation became an independent state. And in this sense, I believe, we were fortunate — because the authorities from Yeltsin onward treated personnel with care.

In the Russian Federation, unlike in the Baltic states, Poland, and other countries, there was no wholesale personnel purge. The staff were retained — people who had undergone a rigorous training. If the same Party archivists had performed their professional duty conscientiously in the Soviet years, what was there to stop them continuing to do so in the 1990s? Of course there are isolated cases of so-called 'archival betrayal', where people sold documents for personal gain.

— What was the archival system like in Soviet times?

— The Soviet Union operated two parallel systems: state archives and Party archives. The Party archives did not answer to the state, lived by their own rules, and had a special access regime. To work in a Party archive you needed a Party card and clearance from the Committee for State Security (KGB).

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union the two systems were merged. One of the first decrees signed by Yeltsin in August 1991 dealt specifically with the Party archives: under it, the Party and state archives were merged into a single system under state control. The Party was formally 'a law unto itself', but in practice, in accordance with the well-known article of the Soviet Constitution (Article 6 of the 1977 Constitution, enshrining the Party's 'leading and guiding role'), it was the directing and ruling force. All key questions of governing the country — foreign and domestic policy, defence, security — were decided by the Party's supreme bodies, the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

— In Russia documents are regularly declassified to mark significant dates. What is the retention period? When can a 'secret' classification be lifted?

— The official term under the law is thirty years. There is a special Interdepartmental Commission for the Protection of State Secrets — a collegial body under the President of Russia that coordinates the activities of federal government bodies, regional government bodies, and other organisations in protecting state secrets. The commission's work is supported by the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC). One of its functions is the declassification of archival documents.

Today fewer than three percent of documents in the federal archives remain classified — everything else is open. Twenty-five to thirty years ago it was very different indeed. But one must not forget the legitimate security interests of the state. No one is going to explain how nuclear submarines are built, or how missiles and their engines are produced. Their blueprints and schematics are classified information, of course.

In the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks had a tradition of classifying every Party decision in its entirety — to the point of absurdity: even decisions about socialist competition (sotsialisticheskoye sorevnovaniye — the Soviet practice of setting production targets for collective workplace rivalry) were classified.

— In our time information can be found on the internet, in Telegram channels…

— Of course. In those days every rotaprint duplicator (rotaprint — the spirit duplicator widely used in the Soviet era for producing internal documents; owning one privately was treated with deep official suspicion) had to be registered. You could not keep one at home without authorisation. If anyone found out, they would assume you were printing underground leaflets. Total secrecy gave the leaders of the day what they believed was an easier means of retaining power.

— When there are many prohibitions, there are many fabrications. People want to know the truth but cannot tell it from falsehood. As a specialist you probably see this clearly.

— This is one of the most difficult challenges for archivists. We operate within the law — there are regulations, there are statutes. If something is classified, only those with clearance know it. That is what they receive high salaries for; they must be aware of their responsibility. And this is not unique to Russia. If anyone thinks that in the West all documents are in the public domain, they are mistaken. I have worked in many foreign archives. The people who work there also undergo vetting and know what they may and may not do. The state must ensure protection of information that falls within that category.

— Are there important documents that could shed light on contemporary conflicts in the post-Soviet space?

— Here is a vivid example. The second half of the 1980s — the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. I was working in the Central Committee of the CPSU at the time. People came from Yerevan, where the Communist Party of Armenia was in power, and from Baku, where the Communist Party of Azerbaijan was in power, with a request to copy and hand over the documents showing how the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast came into being — created in July 1923, when Stalin was People's Commissar for Nationalities and the chief specialist on the national question. The documents were copied and handed over.

— The same documents?

— Yes. They received identical sets of documents — identical in every respect. But when they got home, the conclusions they drew were diametrically opposed. And it has been going on ever since. That is what you might call the difficulty of translation — the interpretation of historical sources. The fight against untruth must always go on. If documents exist that show what actually happened, they must be published. But that does not mean everyone who reads them will draw the right conclusions. Those who want to hear — those who have the necessary scholarly and cultural foundation — will hear.

— Do you cooperate with colleagues from other countries? After 2022, much must have changed.

— We cannot be outside politics — it was always so, even in the time of the great princes of Moscow. Today contacts with unfriendly states are reduced to a minimum. Perhaps only with our Hungarian colleagues do we continue to work. We recently published a volume on the construction of the metro systems in Moscow and Budapest — the Budapest metro was built drawing on Soviet experience, with our assistance.

— Let us talk about Russia's friends. I understand there is a very interesting Russia–China project in the pipeline.

— Russia–China relations today are of strategic significance. We are implementing a fascinating project with Chinese archivists. In accordance with the instructions of President Putin and Chairman Xi Jinping, we are preparing the collection I. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong: Correspondence, Telegrams, and Other Archival Documents, 1943–1953 — within the framework of the Russia–China Sub-Commission for Cooperation in the Archival Field, under the Russia–China Commission for Humanitarian Cooperation.

This is a project of the Federal Archival Agency and the political party United Russia, initiated by party chairman D. A. Medvedev. The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI — Rossiysky gosudarstvenny arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoy istorii, the principal repository for Communist Party of the Soviet Union records) are participating in the work. It is in this archive that the 1945–1953 correspondence between J. V. Stalin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Central People's Government of the PRC, is held.

Working with the archival documents has given me many professional revelations — particularly in my understanding of Stalin's figure. Stalin and Mao, their actual dialogue, are the most captivating element of the collection. I believe its publication will be a landmark event for Moscow and Beijing.

In the course of work on the collection the archive identified hundreds of documents characterising the full spectrum of USSR–PRC relations in the political, economic, military, and diplomatic spheres, including questions of foreign policy coordination and the Soviet Union's contribution to the founding of the PRC, the development of its economy, and the building of China's armed forces.

In addition to the original letters and cipher telegrams of Stalin and Mao, the collection will as an appendix include transcripts of the conversations of A. I. Mikoyan (Anastas Mikoyan, Politburo member and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers) with Mao Zedong and the first Premier of the PRC's State Council, Zhou Enlai, held during Mikoyan's visit to China in early 1949.

On their side, the Chinese archivists demonstrated a high degree of openness and proposed for publication more than 300 documents held in the Central Archives of China relating to various aspects of Soviet-Chinese cooperation.

— Tell us about the recent exhibition at the Tauride Palace — it was an interesting project.

— With pleasure! On 27 April 2026 it was 120 years since the opening of the first State Duma (Gosudarstvennaya Duma — Russia's first elected legislative assembly, which convened for the first time on 27 April 1906 in the Tauride Palace). We presented 15 rare original documents from 1906 showing how Russia's first parliament came into being. First the idea of a consultative assembly — the famous Bulygin Manifesto (named after Interior Minister Alexander Bulygin), signed by Emperor Nicholas II in August 1905. Then, under the pressure of revolutionary events, the October Manifesto of 1905 — already declaring a legislative body with power to pass laws, drafted by Prime Minister Witte (Sergei Witte) and his circle.

We showed the subsequent course of events: how the decision was taken for a bicameral parliament (the State Duma and the reformed State Council as the upper chamber), and how the first session proceeded. The leadership of our parliament — Valentina Ivanovna Matviyenko, her deputies, the leadership of the State Duma — all visited the exhibition. Vladimir Putin came to see it too.

— What was his reaction?

— He has a fine human weakness: he loves history. He has an excellent grasp of it and loves reading archival documents. It is only a pity that there is rarely enough time for it.

— When archival documents go on exhibition, what does that involve technically?

— It is a labour-intensive process. Documents are brought and exhibited with an escort; our representatives maintain observation at the display cases, and all necessary security measures are in place.

— These exhibitions are guarded just like exhibitions of works of art!

— Of course. How do you think the Mona Lisa is transported? Security must be provided, the premises must meet the required climatic standards, a precise temperature-and-humidity regime must be maintained. The same requirements apply to the exhibition of documents.

In late 2025 we held a large-scale exhibition at the Manege (the Manezh exhibition hall next to the Kremlin) — 'The Great Victory' (Velikaya Pobeda), which we organised together with the Patriarchal Council for Culture of the Russian Orthodox Church. The President was there, the Patriarch was there. 120,000 people visited. Everything was organised to the highest standard — security, specialist display cases — because the core of the exhibition consisted of original archival documents on the history of the Great Patriotic War.

— Are there still blank spots in the history of the Great Patriotic War?

— I cannot say there are no blank spots — but they are no longer of the first order. Since 2018 the Russian archival service has implemented a series of exhibition projects on the background and history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War. In addition, on the President's instruction, we created a collection of digital copies of archival documents — available on the Presidential Library website. For the first time the entire background to the Second World War was explained in detail, beginning with Munich (the 1938 Munich Agreement). The documentary exhibitions covered: 1939 — the Non-Aggression Pact; the world on the eve of war; and 1941 itself.

We showed the full truth about the war — including the secret protocols (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's secret additional protocols dividing Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence, the existence of which the Soviet government denied until 1989): Ribbentrop's visits to Moscow, Molotov's visit to Berlin in November 1940, and the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. All of these subjects have generated so much controversy and continue to attract attention today. The archival documents demonstrate: the idea that everything was decided by the will of two individuals — 'Hitler and Stalin' in quotation marks, as our Western 'friends' like to write — is complete nonsense. Events of this kind are not set in motion by the will of individuals. And direct accomplices in the outbreak of the war include the Western countries — France, Britain. The policy of appeasement is not an empty phrase.

I will say more: after the Red Army entered Germany, we removed archival documents from there as compensatory restitution (kompensatornaya restitutsiya — the removal of cultural property from defeated Germany by the USSR as compensation for wartime losses, a subject of ongoing legal and diplomatic dispute). Among them were documents from French archives — because the Germans had taken these valuables when they entered Paris. We subsequently returned the documents to France, but not before making copies. The French documents of the Warsaw Embassy and France's military attaché for 1939 show how the Poles behaved on the eve of the war — how they obstructed the conclusion of an alliance between London, Paris, and Moscow against Hitler. We even managed to co-publish with German colleagues a substantial volume on this subject — before 2022, in German. It has been bought up by every German organisation that professionally studies the history of the Second World War. These documents cannot be disputed.

— What other topical subjects have you addressed?

— Two important subjects. The first is collaboration. It was precisely the Russian archival service that published a three-volume work on the treachery of General Vlasov (Andrei Vlasov — Soviet general captured by the Germans in 1942, who subsequently led the Russian Liberation Army fighting alongside the Nazis). We placed a full stop on this question: whatever fine intentions and beautiful words you use to cover cooperation with the Nazis, you are a traitor.

In the West Vlasov is often regarded as justifiable — supposedly as an ideological fighter against communism. But France somehow stays silent about its own national hero Philippe Pétain — the First World War commander who in 1940 signed the capitulation of France with Hitler and headed a collaborationist government (the Vichy regime). The French are ashamed to speak of him. Classic double standards: a traitor at home, but in Russia — an ideological fighter!

Incidentally, some professional historians have attributed the Smolensk Manifesto to Vlasov — utter nonsense. He only signed it; it was drafted by German intelligence. More than forty Soviet generals were taken prisoner. Only a handful became collaborators. Vlasov was taken in hand from the start. He turned out to be the most well-known traitor, and was needed as a figurehead for demoralising the Red Army. The Germans ran a planned, purely propaganda campaign — 'Operation Vlasov'.

— And now, unfortunately, these heroes of collaboration are being celebrated in some places — including Ukrainian ones…

— People who collaborate with the devil cannot, by definition, be clean or worthy of respect.

— And the second subject?

— The project 'No Statute of Limitations' (Bez sroka davnosti — the large-scale Russian initiative to document Nazi crimes on Soviet territory and to gather evidence for the legal recognition of genocide). We continue to publish the key documents relating to Nazi crimes, the trials of Nazis and their accomplices. An enormous body of historical evidence has been assembled — we publish it and continue to expand it. It served as the documentary basis for the recognition of the genocide of the Soviet people. The main documents on Nazi crimes have been published; the research continues. People must be reminded of the past — especially the younger generation. Archivists have done enormous work in this regard. It is work one can be proud of.

— Posterity will appreciate it.

— I believe it will.

Introduction: The Invisible Architecture

There are forces that permeate our lives so deeply we cease to notice them. Air. Language. Trust. Every morning, getting into a car or a bus, we silently trust thousands of strangers: the people who designed the roads, calibrated the traffic lights, built the bridges, and are driving toward us without crossing into our lane. Walking into a shop, we almost automatically assume the product matches the label. Depositing money in a bank account, we expect it to still be there tomorrow. The entire architecture of modern society rests on precisely this invisible but absolutely real material: trust.

Philosophers, sociologists, and economists have long debated the nature of trust. Is it an innate instinct or a social construct — rational calculation or an emotional impulse? But on one point the debate is almost impossible: the importance of trust is enormous. Where it is high, societies become more resilient, wealthier, and freer. Where it has been destroyed, life becomes harder, more expensive, and more dangerous — in the most literal sense.


What Is Trust?

Trust is the willingness to accept vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. In trusting, we relinquish full control and accept risk: another person, institution, or system may behave quite differently from what we expect. And yet it is precisely this vulnerability that paradoxically makes us stronger. It allows people to cooperate, to build, to create, to move beyond individual survival.

The political scientist Robert Putnam, in his foundational work Making Democracy Work (1993), distinguished two types of trust: particularised trust — trust toward one’s own people, relatives, friends, members of a close group — and generalised trust, that is, trust toward strangers and society at large. It is generalised trust that becomes the social cement without which neither developed democracy nor a modern economy can exist. In a world where it is impossible to verify everyone and everything, trust is what allows us to act rather than being paralysed by endless, helpless caution. Without trust, quite literally, every interaction would require costly verification, protracted negotiation, and endless guarantees — which would still not be accepted as one hundred percent certain.


Trust and Social Capital

In his book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), Francis Fukuyama demonstrated that countries with high levels of interpersonal trust have historically been able to create large and effective organisations. Conversely, low-trust societies tended to rely on family-based business structures and struggled to achieve complex cooperation.

Putnam developed this argument by analysing the differences between northern and southern Italy. Despite comparable formal institutions, the northern regions — with their dense networks of civic associations, sports clubs, and choral societies — showed far higher levels of governmental effectiveness and economic development than the southern territories, where social bonds were confined within family clans. The logic ran as follows: civic engagement generates trust, trust triggers cooperation, and cooperation produces prosperity.


Trust and Democracy

Democracy does not function without trust — indeed, it functions least of all without it. Elections make sense only when citizens believe in the honesty of the process. Courts are effective institutions only when they are trusted as independent arbiters. Parliament works only when society is convinced that legislators represent the interests of voters rather than exclusively their own.

The collapse of institutional trust is one of the most destructive processes in contemporary politics. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, the average global trust level in governments stood at around 51 percent; in NGOs at 59 percent; in business at 62 percent; and in the media at only 46 percent. In a number of countries, trust in state institutions has nearly halved over the past two decades. When people cease to trust institutions, they begin searching for substitutes: charismatic leaders, populist movements, radical ideologies. The history of the twentieth century demonstrated too convincingly that it is precisely on the rubble of trust that authoritarianism most readily takes root.

The link between social trust and people’s physical wellbeing has long been confirmed by epidemiological research. As early as 1995, Ichiro Kawachi demonstrated that American states with higher levels of interpersonal trust had noticeably lower mortality rates. The COVID‑19 pandemic made this dependence almost tangible: studies published in The Lancet and other medical journals showed that countries with high institutional trust were far more successful in achieving vaccination rates and compliance with restrictive measures.


The Russian Philosophical Tradition on Trust

Western sociology and economics began to take trust seriously as an analytical category comparatively late — only toward the end of the twentieth century. The Russian philosophical tradition had approached this subject much earlier, however: through the ideas of sobornost, the moral law, communal life, and personal responsibility.

Alexei Khomyakov, one of the founders of Slavophilism, developed in his writings of the first half of the nineteenth century the concept of sobornost (sobornost' — a key concept of Russian Orthodox theology and Slavophile thought, often translated as 'conciliarity' or 'communal unity'; it refers to the free unity of people in truth and love, based not on external compulsion but on mutual trust and shared spiritual rootedness) — the free unity of people in truth and love, grounded not in external compulsion but in mutual trust and shared spiritual identity. Khomyakov contrasted sobornost with Western individualism: where the West constructs bonds through contract and law, the Russian tradition seeks the organic mutual trust of the community. In a sense, contemporary sociologists who speak of 'generalised trust' as the foundation of social capital are merely rediscovering a thought Khomyakov formulated long before them.

Vladimir Solovyev approached the problem of trust through moral philosophy. In The Justification of the Good (1897) he insisted that social order cannot be built on law and compulsion alone — its foundation must be moral trust between people, growing from recognition of the dignity of each person. Relationships built exclusively on calculation and self-protection he regarded as a sign of the degradation of civic life.

Pyotr Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), offered perhaps the view closest to contemporary science. He argued that mutual aid and cooperation — not competition alone — are the most powerful drivers of evolution and historical progress. Medieval guilds, peasant communes, and cooperative artels appear in his work as systems in which collective trust generates economic effectiveness unachievable by individuals. It is remarkable how closely these ideas anticipated the later conclusions of evolutionary game theory.

Nikolai Berdyaev posed the question still more sharply: trust is possible only where there is freedom. Compelled unity — state collectivism or a community imposed from above — does not create genuine trust, only its simulation. Today this thought reads almost as a challenging commentary on sociological data: interpersonal trust in post-Soviet Russia has been chronically low partly because decades of Soviet collectivism destroyed organic networks of trust, replacing them with surveillance, control, and fear. The Soviet person was trained not to trust — neighbour, colleague, state. And that mistrust was passed further down the historical chain as an innate cultural code.

Alexander Chayanov occupies a special place in this tradition. In his theory of the peasant economy he showed that the Russian artel (artel' — a traditional Russian cooperative work association, common in crafts, trade, and construction) and cooperative operated on principles that modern economics would call relational contracts. Participants acted not so much on the basis of formal agreements and hard sanctions as through reputation and mutual accountability within the community. This is precisely why such economic forms were often resilient: transaction costs within the trust circle were incomparably lower than in dealings with outsiders.


The Old Believers: A Living Model of the Trust Economy

The Russian Old Believers (Staroobryadtsy — Russian Orthodox Christians who maintained the pre-Nikonian liturgical practices after the 1666−1667 Church Council and were subsequently persecuted by the state and official church) are perhaps the best-documented example in Russian history of religiously rooted intra-group trust being converted into economic advantage. After the schism of 1666−1667 the Old Believers found themselves a persecuted minority — denied access to state service, restricted in their rights, and subjected to a double poll tax under Peter I. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century they controlled, by various estimates, between 60 and 75 percent of the textile industry of central Russia, as well as a significant share of trade and finance. The Morozovs, Ryabushinskys, Guchkovs, Konovalovs, and Soldatyonkovs — the greatest industrial and merchant dynasties of pre-reform and post-reform Russia — all came from Old Believer backgrounds.

The mechanism was simple and yet profound. The Old Believer community was built on absolute mutual accountability: every member was known to the others, reputation was his principal capital, and expulsion from the community meant not only religious but economic catastrophe. In conditions where state courts were hostile or inaccessible, the Old Believers developed their own dispute-resolution mechanisms through the authority of community elders. Contracts between members were honoured without notaries or bailiffs — because to break one’s word before a brother in faith meant losing everything.

Economic historians — notably Vladimir Kerov in his monograph on confessional factors in the formation of the Old Believer business mentality — have shown that Old Believer entrepreneurship rested on several trust mechanisms. First, compulsory mutual aid: a successful community member was obliged to support a newcomer. Second, informational transparency: a merchant’s reputation was an open book to every member of the network. Third, a long-term time horizon: an orientation toward otherworldly reward and reputation in eternity made short-term fraud irrational even from the standpoint of cold calculation.

The German sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, described a similar mechanism for Protestant sects in Europe and America: membership of a strict religious community served as a signal of reliability to business partners — even to strangers. Russian Old Belief operated by the same logic, and in the Russian conditions of the nineteenth century produced comparable, and in some respects superior, results.

For contemporary economic theory, the Old Believer experience is a natural experiment demonstrating that intra-group trust, supported by strong norms and reputation mechanisms, can dramatically reduce transaction costs and secure competitive advantage even under conditions of systematic state discrimination. Paradoxically, it was precisely the persecutions that reinforced Old Believer trust: external threat coheres a community and makes internal norms inviolable. Alexander Auzan, in describing the 'trust trap' of contemporary Russia, is in effect pointing to what Russia lacks: such communities with inviolable internal norms and genuine reputational mechanisms — but no longer confessional ones; civic and institutional ones instead.


Trust in Crisis

The contemporary world is experiencing a crisis of trust — and this is no metaphor. Social media has fragmented the information space into bubbles where everyone inhabits their own version of reality. Deepfakes undermine the very possibility of trusting one’s own eyes. Political polarisation turns fellow citizens into suspects. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of Americans who agree that 'most people can be trusted' fell from roughly 46 percent in the early 1970s to around 30 percent in the 2020s. And the paradox is this: by demanding ever-greater transparency and accountability, society frequently receives not a growth in trust but an expanding bureaucracy, a diffusion of responsibility — and a new spiral of mistrust. Trust is not created by decree. It grows out of practice — from consistent, honest, and competent action.


Trust as an Economic Resource

Western economists long ignored trust because it fitted poorly into the model of the rational agent. But it eventually became clear that ignoring it was impossible. Trust directly affects productivity, investment, transaction costs, and growth rates. Douglass North developed transaction cost theory — the theory of the costs that participants in economic relationships incur beyond the direct price of a good or service: costs of searching for information, negotiating, concluding contracts, monitoring performance, and litigation. In a low-trust society these costs become colossal. According to various researchers, in low-social-trust economies transaction costs may absorb between 25 and 45 percent of GDP.

One of the most-cited studies in this field remains the paper by Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1997. Analysing data from 29 countries in the World Values Survey, they found a robust relationship between the level of interpersonal trust and economic growth rates. Their calculations showed that an increase of 10 percentage points in the trust index is associated with an acceleration of GDP growth of approximately 0.8 percentage points per year. Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales showed in 2004, using data from Italian regions, that where social capital and trust are higher, financial markets function more efficiently, households make greater use of cashless instruments, and investment is more active.

The Scandinavian countries provide an equally telling example. According to the World Values Survey 2022, the share of residents who agree that 'most people can be trusted' stands at around 74 percent in Denmark, around 73 percent in Norway, and around 68 percent in Sweden. These are precisely the countries that consistently appear at the top of rankings for GDP per capita, quality of life, and competitiveness. The correlation is too persistent to be coincidental.


The Financial System and Trust

The financial system is one of the most vivid examples of how trust becomes economic value. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, the immediate consequence was not simply the bankruptcy of one bank but the instant evaporation of trust. The interbank market virtually froze: banks stopped lending to each other even overnight, because no one knew who would be next. The result was the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Direct losses to global GDP in 2009 alone were estimated at approximately two trillion dollars.

There is also a less obvious but well-documented channel through which trust affects the economy: the cost of borrowed capital. Research by Luigi Guiso and colleagues showed that in Italian regions with higher social trust, companies borrow at lower interest rates. The yield differential between German bonds and the government debt of eurozone peripheral countries at the height of the sovereign debt crisis of 2011−2012 exceeded 5−7 percentage points. That was the price of trust and mistrust.


Trust Within Organisations: Labour Productivity

Trust operates not only at the level of countries and markets but also within organisations. Paul Zak, in research published in Harvard Business Review in 2017, showed that employees of high-trust companies experience 74 percent less stress, demonstrate 50 percent higher productivity, and are approximately 40 percent less likely to leave. According to Gallup estimates, low employee engagement costs the global economy approximately 8.8 trillion dollars per year — around 9 percent of global GDP. A significant part of this enormous sum is connected to the deficit of trust in the working environment.


Corruption as Anti-Trust

Corruption is institutionalised mistrust. When an official takes a bribe, they violate not only the law. They destroy the very belief that rules are the same for everyone, that justice can be obtained without money, that effort and competence matter at all. According to IMF estimates, corruption costs the global economy approximately two trillion dollars annually. But direct losses are only part of the story. Improvements in the perceived integrity of institutions are linked to growth in investment attractiveness and capital inflows. The difference between countries with high and low corruption indices is therefore not merely a difference in reputation but a difference in the cost of development.


The Digital Economy and the New Trust

The twenty-first century has introduced a new form of economic dependence on trust: the platform economy. Airbnb, Uber, and marketplaces exist only because millions of people are prepared to admit strangers into their homes, get into a car with someone they have never met, or buy goods from a seller on the other side of the world. The mechanism that makes this possible is reputational systems: ratings, reviews, identity verification. This is, in essence, technologically organised trust. Airbnb, valued at 47 billion dollars at its 2020 IPO, can be understood as a vast infrastructure of trust between strangers.


Alexander Auzan: The Trust Trap

Among Russian economists who have most consistently studied trust in the context of contemporary Russia, Alexander Auzan occupies a special place. His works — from The Economy of Everything (Ekonomika vsego) to Cultural Codes of the Economy (Kulturnye kody ekonomiki) — attempt to combine rigorous economic analysis with cultural studies and social psychology, in order to answer the painful question: why does the Russian economy repeatedly fail to realise its own potential?

Auzan’s central thesis is blunt and clear: Russia suffers not so much from a shortage of resources or formal institutions as from a critically low level of social trust, which makes reforms either impossible or prohibitively expensive. He describes Russia’s situation as a 'trust trap': low trust generates high transaction costs, high costs push business into the shadow economy, and the shadow economy undermines trust in formal institutions — completing the circle. According to estimates Auzan has cited in public lectures, the share of the shadow economy in Russia held at 30−40 percent of GDP for a long time.

Drawing on cross-cultural research from the World Values Survey, Auzan demonstrates that Russia consistently belongs among societies with high 'survival values' and low 'self-expression values'. This means an orientation toward security, caution, and risk-avoidance — at the expense of initiative, trust in strangers, and readiness for open cooperation. Auzan does not regard this as an immutable fate, but emphasises that such cultural codes change slowly — over generational timescales, not electoral cycles.

Auzan has repeatedly spoken of the concrete economic costs of mistrust. Where a routine transaction in Denmark or Germany takes weeks and costs a fraction of a percent of its value, in Russia it may stretch over months and cost many times more — due to multi-level counterparty checks, risk insurance, and comprehensive legal support at every stage. This is no longer abstract cultural analysis but the bare price of mistrust.

Another important concept of Auzan’s is personalised trust as a specifically Russian norm. People are willing to trust someone they know — a friend, a relative, a 'familiar' entrepreneur or official — but not an institution, a procedure, or a stranger. This model can function at small scale but barely allows the construction of large, complex, impersonal systems: corporations, developed financial markets, innovation ecosystems. The result is an economy that risks fragmenting into a network of local 'feudal domains' rather than consolidating into a unified competitive market.

Auzan’s position is not fatalistic, however. He emphasises that trust can be produced through institutions — but only if those institutions are genuinely independent and genuinely function. A court that delivers predictable rulings according to law produces trust. A court that acts on a phone call produces mistrust — even if it formally preserves every outward attribute. A regulator that protects consumers strengthens trust in the market. A regulator that serves favoured players destroys it. Auzan’s ultimate conclusion is not so much pessimistic as demanding: a cultural code is not a sentence. But it cannot be changed by a slogan. It requires honest acknowledgment of the problem, patience, and consistent institutional policy sustained over the length of generations.


How Trust Is Built and Destroyed

Trust does not arise from nothing. Its formation requires at least three interrelated conditions. The first is competence: a person or institution must genuinely be able to do what they promise. The second is good faith: they must want to fulfil their promise rather than pursue a hidden interest. The third is consistency: trust is built not by a single admirable act but by the repeated practice of reliable, stable behaviour. Even neurobiology shows that trust is literally inscribed in human experience. Oxytocin, the neurotransmitter associated with social bonds and attachment, is released in response to signals of trust and, in turn, enhances readiness to cooperate.

Destroying trust is far easier than building it. Psychologists call this the negativity bias: bad information carries more weight than good. A single episode of deception can cancel out dozens of examples of honest behaviour. This is precisely why political, corporate, and institutional scandals strike so hard. When Enron collapsed in 2001, it was not simply the failure of one company. It was a blow to trust in the financial reporting of an entire market. Within months the market capitalisation of American corporations fell by hundreds of billions of dollars, because investors asked the most dangerous question: who else can no longer be trusted?


The Political Economy of Trust

Trust, then, is not a soft value or a romantic abstraction. It is a hard economic reality that can be measured in GDP growth percentages, in the cost of capital, in billions of dollars of transaction costs, and in labour productivity levels. A high-trust society is one in which the costs of mutual monitoring and self-protection fall sharply. It is a world where contracts are honoured not because an army of lawyers stands over every deal but because breaking one’s word is regarded as unacceptable. It is an economy where investment is possible without triple insurance, where people do not hide money under the mattress but put it to work, where strangers can cooperate without the constant expectation of a catch.

Trust can be measured, analysed, and built. Which means that investments in trust are by no means expenditure on fine words. They are investments in making every transaction cheaper, in extending planning horizons, in the capacity to cooperate with strangers and to create complex forms of shared life. In other words, they are investments in society’s very capacity to become wealthier, freer, and more resilient.

Andrey Nikitin — Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation

Let us remember: not long ago many digital solutions seemed remote to us, and now they have become routine in Moscow. The regions are catching up. The capital sets the tone — a genuinely exemplary digital ecosystem for public transport has been built there, and colleagues share the experience with other federal subjects. In St. Petersburg you can already pay for the metro by biometrics; driverless trams are appearing on the streets; Russian-developed artificial intelligence is being actively embedded in urban electric transport.

The Moscow-St. Petersburg high-speed main line (VSM‑1 — Vysokoskorostnaya Magistral, High-Speed Main Line) is about a new transport reality. What matters to us is not simply how long a passenger spends in the carriage, but how long the journey takes door to door. The picture looks like this: a person leaves home in Moscow, goes down to the metro, boards an electric bus or tram — and is already at the station. Then the high-speed train. In St. Petersburg a connection to city transport, and you have arrived. Fast, comfortable, without stress or delays. That is the system we are building toward.

Russia has been talking about high-speed trains for half a century or more. In 1972 a programme was adopted to raise speeds between Moscow and Leningrad. A year later the prototype ER200 proved that speeds above 200 km/h were achievable in our climate too. The 1990s saw the development of the dual-system Sokol‑250; in the 2000s the Sapsan was adapted to Russia’s 1,520 mm broad gauge.

Speed is an acute issue for Russia. With our distances, it simply cannot be dispensed with. Fail to address it and we will fall out of the global economic race — and quality of life will follow. Building HSR is one of the answers. Over distances between 300 and 1,000 km, a high-speed main line objectively outperforms civil aviation when measured door to door.

We are now building the first line, Moscow-St. Petersburg, and testing unique technologies as we go. Will other routes follow? Yes — the President has spoken about this, and all the routes are in active development. The HSR to Minsk, for instance, could become the Union State’s (Soyuznoye gosudarstvo — the political union of Russia and Belarus established in 1999) flagship project: journey time could potentially be cut from the current seven hours to two and a half. We are looking at a line to Adler — which would bring the southern resorts to within eight hours instead of a day’s travel. And another key link: Moscow-Kazan-Yekaterinburg, which would knit Central Russia together with the Volga region and the Urals.

We are now building the first line, Moscow-St. Petersburg, and testing unique technologies as we go. Will other routes follow? Yes — the President has spoken about this, and all the routes are in active development. The HSR to Minsk, for instance, could become the Union State’s (Soyuznoye gosudarstvo — the political union of Russia and Belarus established in 1999) flagship project: journey time could potentially be cut from the current seven hours to two and a half. We are looking at a line to Adler — which would bring the southern resorts to within eight hours instead of a day’s travel. And another key link: Moscow-Kazan-Yekaterinburg, which would knit Central Russia together with the Volga region and the Urals.

But there is no need — and no case — for building a dedicated HSR line on every route. There will certainly not be one from Moscow to Vladivostok: over distances above 1,000 km the aircraft is more efficient. Which is why, in parallel with building the high-speed main line, we are also developing both high-speed rail and motorway networks.

Truly large-scale state projects that change the quality of people’s lives always require the right moment. In the case of HSR, everything converged: political will, the maturity of industry and science, and an enormous public demand for a new quality of everyday life. In 2024 the President took the historic decision to build the first high-speed main line between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Today, with the project in full swing, it is clear that the country is ready for challenges of a new order.

The main benefits of VSM‑1 will be felt by ordinary people. Construction is already creating jobs across several regions; and once it opens, the line will reshape the labour market and business activity. Two hours between the capitals means a business trip becomes a single working day without overnight stays. The growth in tourism will breathe new life into small businesses and historic towns along the route. Once the first line launches, the operating pattern for the Sapsan and Aurora trains will change too — they will be redistributed to other routes, giving a boost to transport development in places that are currently operating at full capacity.

But for HSR, time is not only a passenger category — it is an economic one. The high-speed main line will absorb the high-speed passenger traffic and free existing infrastructure for freight. The Moscow-St. Petersburg corridor will gain additional freight capacity of approximately 30 million tonnes per year. In effect we are gaining a new freight artery without laying additional track — a colossal saving of resources. There is another critical point: without relieving the St. Petersburg node it is impossible to grow freight flows northward — toward Arkhangelsk, Karelia, Murmansk, and the Arctic ports. VSM‑1 becomes the key to developing an entire strategic corridor.

This is how transport policy becomes the management of time — in concrete numbers.

In 2026 it would be hard to find anyone who seriously disputes that time is our principal, most valuable resource. Mobility has become the most important driver of the economy. This is a basic reality, and it must be worked with now — managing time effectively, and at times getting ahead of it. Setting a new rhythm: for ourselves and for future generations.

Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, General of Justice of the Russian Federation A. I. Bastrykin

The establishment of a new state body was not merely a complex undertaking, it was an important landmark in the evolution of Russia’s law enforcement system. The country’s leadership’s decision to revive the model of a separate, independent investigative authority — first applied in the era of Peter the Great — was no accident. It was driven by the need to elevate criminal investigation to a higher standard and to adequately respond to the new challenges confronting the state at the present historical moment.

My colleagues and I understood clearly which tasks were the priorities: protecting victims' rights and securing compensation for the harm done to them; combating corruption; reducing the number of unsolved crimes from prior years. These were the areas where we concentrated our principal efforts. We began analysing investigative practice and taking organisational decisions informed by the prevailing crime situation.

Approaches to handling citizens' complaints were fundamentally overhauled. The most important thing is genuinely to hear people, understand their difficulties, and do everything possible to help. Therefore, we made the process of submitting complaints simpler for people, improved the data processing system, and paid greater attention to crimes in the social sphere. This includes the rights of orphans, the dilapidated housing problems, defrauded property buyers (or ‘dol'shchiki' in Russian, people who paid in advance for flats in off-plan property development and were left without either property or money when developers defaulted), wage arrears, and the list is long. This approach has raised the level of public trust in the Investigative Committee of Russia, as confirmed by independent surveys.

One of the Investigative Committee of Russia’s responsibilities is to develop measures to improve the regulatory framework. Over the years, drawing on the analysis of specific problems, the agency has proposed amendments to existing legislation: a series of changes to the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure (the principal statute governing criminal procedure in Russia) concerning victims' rights, the rules for conducting investigative actions, the recovery of damages, and the criminality of certain conduct. Proposals have been submitted on combating corporate raiding, migrant crime, and a number of other areas. All of this has contributed to improved law enforcement effectiveness.

Our achievements would be impossible without professional personnel. When the Investigative Committee of Russia was established, both highly experienced and young officers joined the service. But we knew that we should cultivate a talent pool. We therefore set about building a departmental education system. Today we have our own departmental academies and cadet corps that train specialists for the Investigative Committee to meet our specific professional requirements.

We do not stand still. Analysis of the agency’s work with a view to improving its effectiveness is a continuous process. New challenges and threats are taken into account, and proposals for improving core activities are drawn up, accordingly. This is the only way to achieve actual results and make progress with confidence.

Over 15 years, the Investigative Committee of Russia has referred almost one and a half million criminal cases to the courts. In those cases, 1.6 million defendants have been brought to justice. At the investigative stage alone, damages amounting to more than one trillion roubles were recovered. To guarantee compensation and the enforcement of sentences, assets worth nearly 900 billion roubles were seized from defendants. These results show that, in a relatively short time, we have succeeded in building an effectively functioning system of investigative, forensic, and expert units.

Since 2014, the Investigative Committee of Russia has been investigating crimes against the peace and security of mankind committed by representatives of the Kyiv regime. In that time, nearly 10,000 criminal cases have been commenced against 2,411 individuals: among them the military and political leadership of Ukraine, personnel of Ukrainian security forces, and foreign mercenaries.

Our investigators have documented the deaths of 7,572 civilians as a result of the crimes committed by the Ukrainian armed formations. Other 22,000 people were wounded. 132,000 people have been recognised as victims in the criminal proceedings. Damage from the destruction of civilian infrastructure in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye Region, and the Kherson Region exceeds 560 billion roubles; in the border and rear-area regions, it exceeds 148 billion.

The Investigative Committee of Russia has already completed investigation of 1,021 criminal cases, in which 1,336 Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen, nationalists, and foreign mercenaries, who fought on Ukraine’s side, are named as defendants. Courts have heard the merits of 860 cases and brought in the verdicts of guilty against 1,129 Ukrainian servicemen. They were convicted of murdering civilians, mistreating the civilian population, and participating in hostilities as mercenaries.

The growth of crime in information and communications technology is, in essence, the flipside of technical progress, and the situation demands that law enforcement continuously improve its means to counter such crimes. There is a clear trend: general criminal offences, primarily property offences, are migrating increasingly into the online environment. Since 2022 alone, the Investigative Committee has investigated 34,500 crimes committed using information technologies. The majority — 9,096 — were thefts. Second were economic crimes (5,854), and third were drug offences (4,040).

Criminals exploit the ability to commit offences from outside the Russian Federation, hiding in unfriendly countries and using anonymisation tools. The newest challenge we face is the use of artificial intelligence: criminals are already counterfeiting a person’s voice and video image in phone conversations with victims (so-called deepfake fraud).

To solve these dangerous offences, we deploy a range of technologies to de-anonymise internet users. The specialised cybercrime investigation unit of the Main Investigative Directorate has its own facial recognition software; we are capable of analysing large data arrays, conducting open-source intelligence, and tracing digital footprints. We make active use of the Rosfinmonitoring (Federal Financial Monitoring Service, Russia’s financial intelligence unit) programme, which assists in tracking cryptocurrency transfers. We have also established contacts with the largest Russian IT companies; jointly with them, we are developing solutions to the complex technical problems that arise in the course of investigations. And we are going to further develop this area.

Since the agency had been established, people have turned to the Investigative Committee far more frequently. Whereas 245,600 complaints were received in 2011, that figure reached 650,000 by 2024. Over that period, the number of complaints directed to the Central Office grew almost fourfold, from 69,000 to 259,000. In total, over its years of operation, the Investigative Committee of Russia has processed 5.5 million complaints, of which 2 million have been handled by the Central Office.

I have always told my subordinates: you must engage personally with people’s problems, receive citizens in person, listen to them, and truly hear what they are saying. Citizens can visit the Investigative Committee of Russia in person and therefore meet a manager of any level. The most frequent issues people bring are social matters. But there are also many complaints concerning the rights of servicemen and the rights of crime victims. In addition, 7,586 crime reports have been registered from media sources, including the internet and social media, resulting in the opening of more than a thousand criminal cases. We do everything in our power to help people. That is my principal requirement imposed on my subordinates.

Following the reform of the investigative bodies, our agency received a body of unsolved criminal cases, about 200,000 of them, from the Prosecutor’s Office. We had to build a systematic approach to solving them, draw in experienced investigators and forensic specialists, and deploy the latest technologies. To this end, inter-agency analytical investigative and operational task forces were created, specifically focused on solving non-obvious (crimes in which the perpetrator is unknown, and the connection between suspect and offence is not immediately apparent) serious and extremely serious crimes committed in prior years. These task forces analyse the materials of shelved cases, examine physical evidence, and commission fresh forensic examinations of remaining traces using modern techniques.

Over the agency’s entire period of operation, 94,000 such cold-case crimes have been solved, and those responsible brought to justice. Among these crimes are 10,000 murders, 5,000 cases of grievous bodily harm resulting in death, and more than 6,000 sexual offences.

The Investigative Committee’s forensic system has been developing actively over 15 years. We are continuously bringing new equipment into use; we keep on refining methodologies for investigating various types of crimes and conducting specific investigative actions. Today’s forensic investigators have at their disposal all the technical means they need to work a crime scene and to detect virtually any trace evidence: forensic light sources, endoscopes, geo- and hydroacoustic detection equipment, metal detectors, explosive component detection tools, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and much more.

CCTV footage is now widely used in solving crimes, as is well known, but objects are not always clearly distinguishable in the recordings. Our personnel use specialised video analytics tools to enhance image quality, which assists investigations a lot.

Applying the most advanced methodologies, our forensic specialists provide practical investigative support at crime scenes following the numerous strikes on civilian infrastructure in Russia’s new and border regions (the new regions of Russia are the four territories that acceded to Russia in 2022: the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye Region, and the Kherson Region), in criminal cases involving man-made disasters, crimes against persons, and terrorism. In all such cases, the skilled, highly professional use of forensic and specialist equipment enables agency personnel to effectively locate, record, and recover traces and items of evidential value.

Full-fledged units of the Investigative Committee of Russia are now operating in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye Region, and the Kherson Region. The investigative directorates and their departments are equipped with everything necessary for effective work, and enhanced security measures are in place.

The backbone of these directorates was formed by our own personnel who had previously served in other regions: 653 people relocated to their new postings. There are also graduates of our departmental academies: eight chose to begin their careers in Donbass. More than 700 people now serve in these four constituent entities of the Russian Federation, of whom 350 are investigators. Many have been provided with accommodation; families get assistance in enrolling children in nurseries and schools and organizing recreational activities.

Those who have come here understand perfectly: this is not simply service under difficult conditions. For many, it is a special mission: to protect the people of Donbass and to restore justice. And our experience shows that the most cohesive teams are formed in such conditions where difficulties must be overcome.

Over 15 years, the Investigative Committee’s personnel have been substantially renewed. Many young officers have joined, while at the same time, there are a considerable number of experienced investigators and managers who have served since the agency’s establishment and have become mentors.

As already noted, we now train our own personnel for the agency. The Investigative Committee operates three academies and five cadet corps, based in Moscow, St Petersburg, Volgograd, Sevastopol, and Lugansk. Across the country, more than 200 specialist cadet classes are also in operation, with local managers tasked with establishing a minimum of ten such classes in each constituent entity.

The agency operates a system of continuous industry-specific education. Future investigators are actually prepared from school age. In the cadet corps, students study law-related subjects, the history of the investigative bodies, and the procedures of service. On completing their cadet corps or cadet class education, students may continue their studies at the Investigative Committee’s own higher education institutions. A total of 893 graduates of our educational establishments are already serving in the investigative bodies of the Investigative Committee of Russia.

We make every effort to help children who have lost their parents obtain a sound academic background, and we support the families of our servicemen. The Investigative Committee of Russia’s educational institutions currently have 1,232 cadets enrolled, of whom 340 are orphans and 269 are children of the SVO (Special Military Operation) participants. There are also 1,177 officer cadets, among them 229 orphans and 113 children of the SVO participants. In addition, to provide social support to SVO participants themselves, our academies offer the opportunity to obtain a higher legal education in both intramural and extramural courses.

— Which areas of St. Petersburg’s cooperation with EAEU countries do you consider most promising today?

— Today St. Petersburg is in practical terms becoming one of the key platforms for Eurasian integration. The President of Russia has for several years running made our city the venue for EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) summits. And beyond these summits, delegations from these countries are given special attention here.

Among the most promising directions for the Northern Capital’s cooperation with EAEU states, I would highlight several interconnected tracks. First and foremost, industrial cooperation. For seven consecutive years the industrial production index (IPP — indeks promyshlennogo proizvodstva) in St. Petersburg has outperformed the national average. Over the past five years the city’s industrial growth has reached 60 percent. We are home to advanced competencies in mechanical engineering, energy, pharmaceuticals, radio electronics, and instrument-making. In the new environment, the distributed production model within the EAEU — where value chains are built across several countries — is especially in demand. This applies to components, engineering solutions, and joint R&D alike.

I would single out shipbuilding and maritime technologies separately. Our city possesses a unique engineering tradition and production base in this field. For EAEU countries it represents an opportunity to build joint competencies — from the merchant fleet to ice-class shipbuilding and services for Arctic trade routes.

St. Petersburg’s prospects in EAEU logistics can hardly be overstated. Our city has always been Russia’s 'maritime gateway', but today we are a node on new Eurasian routes — vital for the reorientation of trade flows. This includes sea access for Belarusian exports through our deep-water port of Bronka, and the reorientation from West to East and South, including toward the Caspian region. It is no coincidence that the new logistics realities were discussed here in April at the first International Transport and Logistics Forum — held on the banks of the Neva by decision of the President of Russia and attended by around 6,000 participants from 82 countries. Multimodal solutions are particularly important for St. Petersburg: port infrastructure, railway hubs, dry terminals, and integration with international transport corridors.

I would note the strong prospects in education too. St. Petersburg’s universities are globally recognised centres for shaping a common Eurasian personnel space. Joint programmes, engineering training, exchanges, and research consortia are all becoming part of our long-term integration.

St. Petersburg is also successfully addressing the objectives set by the President of Russia on technological sovereignty. Cooperation in IT, microelectronics, artificial intelligence and its applications, and transport platforms is therefore a question of the strategic resilience of the entire EAEU.

— Can you give examples of projects already being successfully implemented by St. Petersburg together with EAEU member states?

— The city’s key partner is Belarus. The direction of our rapprochement is set by the Presidents of our two states. The Republic of Belarus accounts for more than half of St. Petersburg’s external trade with the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries.

In the interests of food security and import source diversification, St. Petersburg is conducting targeted work to increase supplies of Belarusian food products, which in recent years have become a cost-effective, high-quality alternative to products from unfriendly states. Reliable Belarusian equipment — purchased by our city for passenger transport, urban landscaping, and road maintenance — is making a substantial contribution to the infrastructure development of the Northern Capital. Belarusian enterprises are actively involved in renewing our electric transport fleet. This year we received 100 large-class serial overnight-charging electric buses of the MAZ‑303E23100 model — the largest single delivery of such vehicles to any Russian region. The key feature: near‑100% localisation within the Union State (Soyuznoye gosudarstvo — the political union of Russia and Belarus). All components are manufactured in Russia and the Republic of Belarus.

Products of the Nevsky Lift company — a joint venture with Mogilyovliftmash (the leading Belarusian lift manufacturer) — are in high demand on the St. Petersburg market, accounting for more than half of all equipment installed during major lift refurbishment work in St. Petersburg apartment buildings.

We are actively expanding trade and industrial cooperation with Uzbekistan. A joint list of priority investment projects has been approved. To promote the products of St. Petersburg companies, a St. Petersburg Business Centre will open in Tashkent this year. Work continues on the project to create a 'St. Petersburg Quarter' in New Tashkent — a concept approved by President of Uzbekistan Sh. M. Mirziyoyev — and a number of St. Petersburg construction companies have expressed interest in participating.

Cooperation with Kyrgyzstan is gaining momentum, with digitalisation as one of the leading drivers. Last year St. Petersburg transferred free of charge to the Republic a licence for the Antinar software — a comprehensive regional drug situation monitoring system. Dialogue has been established with the Presidential Administration and the Ministry of Digital Development of the Republic on transferring St. Petersburg’s experience in creating situational centres. Following a visit by a Kyrgyz specialist delegation and a series of meetings with St. Petersburg software developers in March 2026, preliminary agreements were reached on the Kyrgyz side acquiring our digital solutions.

— What do the words 'openness' and 'trust' mean for St. Petersburg today? Has the city’s own understanding of its 'internationalism' changed in recent years?

— St. Petersburg was never defined solely by its contacts with the West. The East has always been present in our city. This is recalled by the mosque on the Petrograd Side (Petrogradskaya Storona — the historic district on the northern bank of the Neva) — not the northernmost of major mosques, built with funds from the Emir of Bukhara. Visit the Hermitage, the Ethnographic Museum, the restored Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum (the imperial palace complex west of St. Petersburg, whose Chinese Palace of 1768 is one of the finest examples of chinoiserie in Russia).

We remain committed to the values that connected us with Europe in the time of Peter the Great: centuries-old Christian traditions, openness to fair and free trade, the inviolability of private property, and Russia’s participation in international alliances on equal terms. The West has moved away from those values. But the 'internationalism' of St. Petersburg and of our country is not defined by belonging to a single geographical orbit. We are capable of building stable relationships with very different centres of power.

St. Petersburg’s openness today means above all a readiness for equal partnership. The city remains a space for dialogue — of cultures, technologies, business, and science. Only this dialogue has become more multipolar.

In the light of recent events around the world, trust is acquiring special value today. In an era of global turbulence, it becomes the foundation of long-term projects — investment, infrastructure, and humanitarian. And St. Petersburg has historically known how to work in precisely this logic: through reputation, the quality of institutions, engineering culture, and the educational environment.

— How is the city overcoming the negative situation in exports caused by the departure of Western companies from St. Petersburg and the imposition of unprecedented sanctions against our country?

— We are strengthening partnership with friendly states, deepening the traditional EAEU directions, and working actively with countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. We are expanding our network of contacts, creating new formats of interaction and new logistics chains. We are also building new air connections: in 2025 the international passenger flow at our Pulkovo airport grew to 4.9 million people. At the transport and logistics forum mentioned earlier, agreements were reached to prepare direct flights to Sri Lanka.

St. Petersburg currently trades with 202 states. Friendly countries account for around 84 percent of our trade turnover. Since the city produces an extraordinarily wide range of goods, our exports are significantly diversified — mechanical engineering products, power engineering equipment, electronics, medical instruments, pharmaceuticals, light industry, and food processing. Many sectors of non-commodity, non-energy exports are showing strong positive momentum. According to customs data, non-commodity non-energy exports in St. Petersburg rose by almost 30 percent in 2025, driven by industrial output — including high-technology products — which grew 27.4 percent with support from the city and the federal centre.

We observe a clear trend here: directional diversification is increasing, and business is adapting to new conditions — finding and accessing new markets even against a backdrop of a planned cooling of the economy. New opportunities are being opened precisely by the transformation of global trade routes.

Broadly speaking, St. Petersburg’s 'internationalism' has ceased to be purely an external characteristic. It is now largely defined by the city’s internal resilience — our capacity to preserve competencies, develop modern production, create our own technologies, and remain open to the world at the same time.

— Is St. Petersburg experiencing growing interest from Global South countries — India, the Gulf states, Africa, South-East Asia?

— This interest is already moving from the stage of declarations into the stage of practical projects. For Global South countries our city is not simply a major Russian metropolis — it is also an important point of access to the vast Eurasian market.

For India, logistics, pharmaceuticals, education, the IT sector, and power engineering are of particular importance. The Gulf states are actively looking at infrastructure investment, port logistics, food security, and high-technology projects. South-East Asia shows interest in industrial cooperation, transport routes, and scientific collaboration.

Africa deserves separate mention. Following the second Russia-Africa Summit held in St. Petersburg in 2023 with our President’s participation, the formation of an entirely new architecture of engagement began. St. Petersburg is entering the markets of the African continent and is operating as a platform for personnel training, medical projects, engineering education, urban technologies, and industrial partnership. The number of contacts is growing; their quality is changing. This is a transition from isolated episodes to systematic presence — the opening of representative offices, joint programmes, long-term contracts.

In many respects St. Petersburg is today becoming one of the symbols of the new geography of the world economy — more distributed, less dependent on a single notional centre, and based on a network of regional partnerships.

— Which infrastructure projects are fundamental to the city’s future within the EAEU and the world economy at large? Ports, railways, dry terminals, international corridors?

— Of primary importance is the modernisation of the port system and the entire logistics ecosystem around the Baltic. Dry terminals (skhiye porty — inland container terminals handling customs and freight consolidation away from the seaport), distribution centres, and the integration of sea, rail, and road transport. For St. Petersburg this is an opportunity to become the largest North Eurasian freight redistribution hub.

The development of railway infrastructure is critically important — above all in the direction of the North-South International Transport Corridor (the major multimodal route linking Russia and the Baltic with Iran, India, and the Gulf via the Caspian) and the eastern vector. A new map of global trade is effectively being drawn, and St. Petersburg must be embedded in it as one of the key nodes. This will be served by the construction of the Latitudinal High-Speed Highway (Shirotнaya Magistral' Skorostnogo Dvizheniya — the planned high-speed ring road circling St. Petersburg), which will accelerate freight movement toward Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and via Vologda eastward. And, of course, the implementation of Russia’s first high-speed main line Moscow-St. Petersburg, initiated by our President.

The digitalisation of logistics is a separate subject. Competition is no longer only for the depth of ports or the volume of warehouses, but for the speed of data processing, customs procedures, and freight flow management — where fully deploying artificial intelligence is essential. The cities that prevail are those capable of offering a comprehensive and technologically advanced logistics environment. Infrastructure projects today are investments not only in transport but in the competitiveness of the Northern Capital.

— St. Petersburg has always existed at the intersection of civilisations and trade routes. What historical role do you think the city is beginning to play now — in the era of a new world order taking shape?

— In the twenty-first century our city is returning to its historical mission: to serve as a reliable pillar of Russia in securing its national interests, and to connect different economic, cultural, and civilisational frameworks.

Here, on the banks of the Neva, the interests of North and South, East and West, industry and science, logistics and culture all converge. This is not only a matter of geography. St. Petersburg has historically known how to work with ideas, technologies, education, and engineering. It is precisely such cities that become especially valued in the era of the rejection of the unipolar world and of globalisation dictated by the West.

We see how the focus of people’s interest everywhere is shifting from the uniformly similar to local and regional products — both material and cultural. The world economy is beginning to be structured around large macro-regions, new transport corridors, and technological alliances. Within this system, St. Petersburg is capable of taking on the role of Eurasia’s intellectual, industrial, and logistical centre.

We have many competitive advantages here — and let me emphasise again: not only geographical ones. St. Petersburg possesses a rare quality: the combination of deep historical identity and openness to everything new and advanced, and the capacity to adapt quickly to new conditions. This makes it not simply a participant in change, but one of the metropolises where the new architecture of international relations and the world economy is being formed.