Russia may develop a technological center, but it won't be a "Silicon Valley"

Fortune has discussed Russia's annual Open Innovations Forum with the headline "In Russia, an attempt to build its own Silicon Valley on the Moskva River."

But by the time you've finished reading the first paragraph, a quote from Dmitry Repin illustrates the error in the headline.

“There’s foreign media, there’s industry, there’s government—it’s all here.”

While Silicon Valley in the USA certainly includes a confluence of people, government is (at least outwardly) absent. Remember my post from last year that quoted Chamath Palihapitiya?

If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid.

Would YOU want to be the Russian startup head that tells Putin that things would be better if he did nothing?