The problem of identifying the leading universities in a country is rather easy to solve, one may focus, for example, on highly cited papers or other indicators of excellence. Sometimes it is more challenging to find the universities of "the second wave" which deserve to receive additional support because it may help them to become the most prominent ones, "the first". We study progress of the initial phase of such universities, named "pillar" in Russian education system. The first results, measured by 'short-distance bibliometrics', seem to be encouraging.