Lukashenko: countries with technologies able to withstand and to set the rules of the game
As part of his visit to Planar JSC, the President of Belarus is holding a meeting on the prospects for the development of microelectronics
Calling on the participants for a substantive discussion of the further strategy and tactics for the industry development, Aleksandr Lukashenko noted, “The place of our meeting is symbolic, historical. It was here, on Planar, in the 1960s that the brain, the heart – call it what you want – of the USSR microelectronics was created. Our famous fellow countryman, Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov, said that once in the 1980s he met USSR Electronics Industry Minister Vladislav Kolesnikov, who admitted that he woke up from the nightmare in a cold sweat that there was no Planar. And since there is no Planar, there is no more electronics industry in the USSR.”
The Belarusian Head of State underlined the exceptional validity of this conclusion, “When this breakthrough industry was being created, only three countries could pull it intellectually and financially: the USSR, the US and Japan. At that time, we also had related enterprises, in particular, in Russia and the Baltic States, but the brain centre was located here, in Belarus.”
Meanwhile, during the collapse of the USSR, a real threat of the loss of this heritage arose. The President recalled, “In the dashing perestroika and post-perestroika years, only Belarus managed to preserve this heritage, not even national, but global. I remember very well how they were trying to persuade me to sell, to close these enterprises. I was told that everything can be bought and imported from the West. Thank God, no matter how difficult it was, the country has preserved Planar, Integral, BelOMO, Horizont, and the Vitebsk Monolit Plant. The most important thing is the scientific infrastructure of this science-intensive industry.”
It is obvious that today the factor of possessing high technologies is of decisive importance for the development of states. Aleksandr Lukashenko made a special emphasis on this, “Thirty years have passed. And what do we see? In the struggle for the re-division of the world, technology plays a decisive role. The one who possesses them is able not only to survive, but also to establish one’s own rules of the game in the future. The so-called civilised, democratic Western world without a twinge of conscience uses technological leverage, imposing sanctions and trying to bring objectionable states, their competitors, to their knees.”
