It’s rare that museums open, especially large ones: for a while, any new museum will be the most modern, interesting and striking one around, because it’s had the chance to digest everything that’s gone before and take a step forward.

What I’d like above all is for visitors to the Polytech to sense the pleasure of learning, feel a “wow” factor, and experience the joy of discovery. For some people this might mean a new interest in something they thought they knew all about. For others, it could be an interest in how what surrounds them is structured. Well, I think it’s always interesting for people to find out about themselves and the world around them. And now we’re doing things with our presentations, exhibitions, displays and approaches that are unlike anything else.

I see my role and the phase we’re in as being about start-up. It’s a strange term for a museum that’s been around for 140 years, but we are in a start-up phase and we’re undergoing a complete relaunch — but this is a process, in that it’s a project that’s unfolding gradually.

And how the museum will work once it has a system and a structure that’s supposed to be stable, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m the right director for the next phase. I’ve got a completely different vibe. I’m all about crisis, in a positive sense.

A leader is someone who takes responsibility for getting everyone to a particular goal they’re heading for. A visionary is a different type of person: it’s someone who gives birth to an idea and carries it forward. It’s not that I’ve never given birth to ideas, but I think I’m more of a leader.

When you’re sure of what you’re doing, even if you’re not right, it’s not hard for you to lose part of an old team on the whole, because you think they’re fools. Now I’d probably do things differently. Ten years have gone by. Now I’d be gentler: I’d make bigger compromises, be better prepared, have more conversations, try to persuade people more, and so on. But back then I thought that there wasn’t time for that. The museum was in such a bad way that it hardly existed; there wasn’t even anything to clear out: if you touched anything it would just fall apart.

The museum is very much a team enterprise, and a very big one. I can’t say we have one single principle. If you look at the team that’s come together over the years, we’ve got all sorts of people. There are two people who’ve each worked at the museum for fifty years. One of them, Stella Gurgenovna, is the real heart of the museum. Everyone loves her; she remembers everything and knows everything about the museum, and she’s also the glue that binds us all. And then there are people who joined us completely by chance: they were walking down the street and popped in, and then they stayed! There are also people we found through head-hunters, who we don’t often use, but that’s the tried-and-tested method we used with them.

There are two aptitudes that I particularly look for in people. These are the ability to champion your own point of view and being able to work in a team. The first iteration of my team was a group of individualists: they were bright, tough, and completely focused on themselves. This didn’t work out well for us: at a certain point, things blew up, and all these people exploded and went their separate ways. It was because they had built up so many grievances against each another and had virtually no ability to work in a team, listen to colleagues they didn’t like or agree with, and then take part in things they hadn’t come up with themselves. Being able to do that is a very important skill and you can’t develop it overnight: either you have it and if you’re motivated you can somehow build on it, or you just don’t have it and there’s nothing you can do.

You’ve got to remember that the Polytech relaunch project began eleven years ago. It was a period when everything new was flourishing. We quickly brought together a board of trustees. We were working on a concept with Skolkovo and we were having a huge number of meetings with the government about both projects at the same time. Back then, everyone was convinced that Russia needed something new and modern when it came to science; it needed education and it needed popularizing. You didn’t have to convince anyone of that; it was easy. At that point everyone was very happy to invest in this field; they couldn’t do so fast enough.

I think it would be very difficult now. Firstly, things have become a lot more conservative and secondly there’s less money around. Thirdly, it was normal a decade ago to plan fifteen years ahead, but now — and this has nothing to do with the pandemic — we can’t plan anything for three years in a procedural and regulatory sense. Back then, you’d come along with a project that was going to open in eight to ten years’ time and it was easily sold as a quick project. But now there’s a general view that anything that can’t be done in a year isn’t worth doing.

For Moscow, the Polytech has history and a great tradition and it’s my ambition to revive it. After all, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, for around forty years, the museum was a cult location that everyone wanted to be a part of. This wasn’t just about education, new knowledge, socializing or the poetic and musical avantgarde. It wasn’t just progressive members of the public who wanted to go there but the middle class and people who had come from the countryside.

For our city, the Polytech has to become a place like that again. In another city, a science museum could bring something else. So, for London, conversely, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum pay tribute to history and give a glimpse into the past. For Moscow, the Polytech is about progress and looking into the future.

Working with government and officials is difficult, and it’s always been a challenge for me to know how to overcome hostility, rage and irritation. I don’t mean my own: I’m talking about accepting and finding potential advantages and cooperating.
I’m in touch quite a lot with colleagues abroad who are directors of various museums around the world. Whenever you have a large institution and large-scale projects, a big budget and lots of expectations, everyone encounters more or less the same issues of agreements, different opinions and uniting interests. Here the challenge could be bureaucracy, but for American colleagues it might be funding.

What’s probably most difficult is a certain contemporary Russian trait. We’ve even come up with a name for it — the Three Things formula: everyone knows how a museum should be built, how it should be arranged, and what sort of gift shop you need. The problem is precisely that everyone “knows” these three things — everyone’s a specialist — and that’s what’s most tricky.

There are many, many talented, interesting and enthusiastic young people. But as soon as someone like that learns English and starts to write it, and stops being afraid of presenting their ideas, they leave. It happens in a flash, right in front of me, virtually every week. It’s very upsetting and frustrating.

But on the other hand, modern science has no borders. If you take fundamental physics, there’s the Breakthrough Prize, which is financed by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, and the year before last, two thousand scientists in all received the prize, because they were all studying the same problem. That’s how modern science works in general: data is stored in completely accessible databases. Scientific research institutions don’t hold onto their work; they share it, because otherwise their work wouldn’t any make sense. So the Blue Brain project, which is happening in Lausanne, is gathering data on the brain from more than twenty-four locations around the world.

When my science deputy departed in December 2019, it was a big personal upset for me and I still feel bad about it. I thought we were like musketeers and that whatever happened, we wouldn’t abandon each other. But on the other hand, I now understand why scientists try to work in stable conditions.
Why aren’t there scientists who travel, for example, or who live their lives in an unplanned way? Because it’s important to them to have a secure, assured and stable environment as a base. Any stress can massively disrupt the conditions that actually allow them to be scientists. That’s evidently what happened.

There’s no science without routine. Engineering and medical practice are the same: there are a huge number of fields we’re used to that wouldn’t exist without routine. There are a huge number of failures in scientists’ work, which they hate, as well as squabbles, quarrels and so on — science is a lively and fascinating world with all sorts of different things going on in it.

But the main thing, as we now know, is that just as anyone can run a marathon, anyone can be a scientist. There are no borders in science; it’s a matter of being interested and involved.

We definitely want science to be the new black. Whether scientists themselves want that is another matter. If you invite new people — scientists — as well as actors, bohemians and artists, they’ll talk differently, discuss different things and use different expressions. They’ll bring new people with a different agenda. That will really diversify the intellectual environment. But they don’t want to come! The scientific community here is probably one of the most snobbish in the world.

The situation here isn’t changing yet, but in the world as a whole it’s changing quite noticeably. With the advent of new sciences there’s also a growing demand for collaboration and interdisciplinarity, which no longer puts people in boxes and tells them “you’re a physicist and only a physicist”. You can’t be “just” a physicist, because you won’t have a career or any other kind of success. These days you could simultaneously be a chemist and a biologist and also do some writing; you know about psychology and you may also have gathered an odd group of say, artists around you, who you’ll be doing some project at the intersection of art and science with at the same time. The scientific environment has started to be fuelled by that diversity in action.

Apart from the energy sector, the most money is being invested in studying the brain. After that, it’s the genome in all its forms. That’s the prospect and business development we can expect — it’s the fight against ageing and for knowledge about ourselves.

I’d really like to learn freedom from children. I dread taking that away from them. It’s the freedom that lets you master anything easily, whenever you want to, to watch, to agree — and just to do things easily. I’d really like adults to learn that, as well as the artlessness, honesty and straightforwardness you get when there’s nothing to hide and no ulterior motive. Open communication has many effects — interesting, educational, and stimulating — all sorts. It lets you do things together instead of competing.

I worked for the Polytech for eleven years. And in any lengthy project you have to find new ways to motivate yourself. These always vary; in recent times, for me, it was self-development within the project.