With Putin's blessing, Russia eyes U.S. tech

Anatoly Chubais, the mastermind of Russia’s first privatization program, is now leading a charge by Vladimir Putin to emulate Silicon Valley’s success by investing in high-tech firms, many of them American.

Chubais, who helped organize the state-asset sales in the first post-Soviet decade that created Russia’s oligarchs while most citizens sank into poverty, is buying up stakes in research-and-development companies in Europe, China, Israel and especially the U.S. as chief executive officer of Moscow-based OAO Rusnano, the former state-funded Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies.

A finance minister under Boris Yeltsin who ran the electricity monopoly under Putin, Chubais has “a direct phone line with the tsar,” Michael Fonstein, co-founder of Cleveland BioLabs, a Rusnano investment, said in reference to Putin. “You can’t have an ally in a better position.”

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