Impoverishment and corruption? That's exactly what they have now, and getting out of it, as the case studies of post communist countries demonstrate, is a very slow process without guaranteed success date?
Small, highly cohesive country, with unusually religious subgroups contributing to that TFR disporportionally, while still being culturally related to the other part of the country that produces said elite science.
Most of the West doesn't have such subgroups (Amish?), while Russia is the opposite of small and highly cohesive.
Well if they insist, they can have North Korea/Iran style "prestige\military piece" outdated space program, and a bunch of Chechens and company bumping up the TFR.
Elite science requires either elite prestige (which takes time, politics and money) or top shelf high tech toys in more "material" elite science even if you have smart people (Intermarium doesn't have this kind of money to spare and won't have for a hundred years after dealing with all the mess communism left). We can check how much money it takes to prototype things like next generation nuclear reactors, SSTO spacecraft or top quality computer chips, those are truly eye watering sums, even if you have the right business environment and expert workforce, without the funding, womp womp. It's notable that quite a few countries get into that territory or expand their presence there through some direct or indirect fallout of high military spending.
Russia isn't that poor right now. Well, not much worse than Poland is. Though it is much more corrupt than Poland is.
The US also has Mormons. And Russia might have its own breeders:
Where Are Russia\'s Breeders?
As commenter Reykur recently pointed out - citing the work of the blogger denalt, there is a rather curious phenomenon occurring in a few ethnic Russian regions, where rural fertility has exploded in the past decade. There are precisely four of these regions - Arkhangelsk, Komi, Kirov, and...
www.unz.com
In any case, even encouraging normal/regular Russian families to have 3+ children would do wonders. I know of some middle-class Israeli Jews who have had 3+ children, for instance. And Chechens aren't very good for bumping up the TFR since their ability to successfully integrate into Russia isn't very good. Radical Islam combined with Caucasian tribalism and warlordism kind of does that.
Yeah, that makes sense. Interestingly enough, though, China produces a lot of elite science in spite of it being Communist, though it also has a population ten times the size of Russia's.