It took the Russian Empire three centuries to develop a caste of professional bureaucracy by mass import of foreigners into that profession. By the late nineteenth century, Russia finally replaced most Germans on the government service with natives. Still, provincial bureaucracy was famously corrupt and inefficient. Bolsheviks killed out the tsarist bureaucrats but failed to create new ones. Communist officials throughout the existence of USSR were commissars rather than bureaucrats; they relied on arbitrary commands rather than professionalism and cooperation.

In terms of professionalism, Russia has lost two generations which graduated from mid-1980s until now. The quality of education greatly deteriorated in the last twenty years with brightest students and many professors leaving universities for entrepreneurship. Russia’s universities offer very poor education now and there is no chance of changing that situation soon: there are too few good teachers to educate a new generation of professors. The diversity and complexity of modern knowledge made it very fragile. There could never be enough good teachers to staff mass education, but Russia lost the great educational potential it painstakingly developed over the previous century.