"I see it as my goal to make people feel and believe that if they work hard and are ready to change the world around them, while acting within the law, they have every chance to succeed,” President Dmitry Medvedev said at Stanford University last week.  

With this, Medvedev has embarked on a quixotic, but not necessarily doomed, effort of building a high-trust society among people who have historically had little trust in government.

Medvedev understands that trust in government is a vital prerequisite for building an innovative economy, and this distinguishes his modernization program from previous attempts in Russian history.

It is a general rule that high-trust societies have more innovative economies, with China and to some extent Brazil being exceptions.

Russia is still a highly atomized society in which an ineffective and intrusive government is often seen as public enemy No. 1. Russians’ social trust generally does not extend beyond their immediate families. It is difficult to speak seriously about innovation in a country where people place criminals and the police in the same category.

Many have ridiculed Medvedev’s decision to create a special legal and tax regime at Skolkovo, where he plans to build its “Innovation City.” Wouldn’t it be much better to take a larger perspective and create a business-friendly environment for the entire country and not limit it to a small enclave?

But this criticism misses the point. You cannot impose an effective government on a huge low-trust society. You need to build both effective institutions and higher levels of social trust simultaneously. This means you have to start in a localized setting first and then extend the best practices of government and social behavior to other parts of the country.

Medvedev’s Skolkovo project is more than an innovation center. It is the hub for fostering a new high-trust social culture in Russia, much like St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great to make a clear break with the ossified culture of Moscow that shunned any type of technological and social innovation.

It will also become a new front line in the battle between two competing social and economic models — democratic capitalism, characterized by competition between private companies and independent political actors, and state capitalism, characterized by the dominance of state-owned companies and state-dependent political actors.