Over five years ago, Russia started an ambitious Go Russia! project to take on Silicon Valley with the ambitious goal of housing 50,000 researchers and technologists in a town called Skolkovo by 2020.

I was immediately skeptical and in a meandering blog post titled Russia to Duplicate Silicon Valley? Good Luck With That I referenced the fact that antisemitism in the country and likely countless other types of discrimination forced some of the best minds out of the country. Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin for example had his family forced out of the country due to antisemitism.

Fast forward five years and the project turned out to be a disaster. People and companies are leaving the country in rapid numbers. The billions of dollars allocated to build the area up not surprisingly became the target of corruption and of course Putin has greatly reduced the amount of Internet freedom in the country which you might imagine didn’t bode well for companies in the tech space.

According to Foreign Policy:

Looking back, Witlin argues, Medvedev’s approach to creating a liberal, tech-oriented society was “conventional” by Russian standards — a government-led megaproject without any particular grassroots initiative. That left both Medvedev and the Skolkovo plan straitjacketed, reliant on support from the very system of government that he was ultimately attempting to reform. “Medvedev has proved unable to escape gravity, the structure in which he has governed,” Witlin said.

This is what I said in 2010:

China has done a great job of growing its technology base by forcing companies outside the country to partner with local companies and share proprietary technology. This is generally a condition to getting access to the Chinese market. Moreover the country has worked on proprietary wireless and other standards to help local industry.

But let’s face it – when you end up manufacturing virtually every piece of technology in the world it is quite easy to launch a slew of knockoffs for almost any product meaning you are launching new companies and an entire new economy by “borrowing” the intellectual property of the entire world’s best and brightest.

Russia can’t do these things… Their markets are smaller and they have a history of making life difficult for foreign investors. Many Russians come to the U.S. to study because of our open and free society with minimal corruption. They come here because anyone can make it and if you have talent and drive you can become a billionaire.

We all knew about the corruption and discrimination still tolerated in Russia… What I didn’t foresee was the annexing of Crimea which made the country virtually toxic to foreign investment. The good news for the bright minds in the land of Putin is these people are being welcomed with open arms in places like the U.S. and Israel where they are able to rapidly contribute to the existing and thriving tech communities already in place.