The technological decline of Russia, according to industry experts, now partially emigrated abroad, is due to disastrous choice to bring the country back to the nefarious ideas of the past: autarchy, poorly enlightened technological sovereignty, control of information and obviously the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine have generated a blob that is investing and encompassing everything. Its density can be deduced from a recent survey published by MIT Technology Reviewthe reference publication of the homonymous US university.
“You have to accept the new rules of having no rules in Russia,” he said Vladimir Belugin, ex chief commercial officer di Yandex. Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, he was forced to abandon Moscow, move to Cyprus and resign from the largest and most prestigious tech company in the country. Yandex is a kind of Google, with a leading search engine and almost a hundred related services. A giant with a turnover of over 3 billion dollars, which has been forced (according to former executives) to feed propaganda by telling 14 million daily users of Yandex News news coming 70% from state-controlled media sources. Tigran Khudaverdyan, executive director and deputy CEO of Yandex, paid the consequences: first with sanctions from the EU for having withheld information related to the war and then with his resignation. The Nasdaq meanwhile it has stopped trading Yandex shares.
But the stories of Belugin and Khudaverdyan are not isolated because according to i data provided by the Russian government itself in 2022 around 100,000 information technology specialists, equal to 10% of the sector’s workforce, moved abroad: not only to the West but also to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia and Turkey. A hemorrhage that a 2021 Gartner report perhaps he had already foreseen, estimating that by 2025 in Russia the number of missing skilled digital workers will exceed one million units.
This explains the meaning of a billboard that appeared in Times Square in November with a rather explicit claim in Cyrillic: “It’s time to go home!”. An invitation to expatriate IT specialists in New York to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the special economic status zone of Alabuga, in the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan. Yes, precisely the land of the Tartars of Buzzati’s memory.
The war seen from the other side
The case of Yandex, the Russian Google that could fail due to US sanctions
by Emanuele Capone
The technological world halved
The guerra it has convinced more than a thousand foreign companies to reduce all activity because of the sanctions or to sell everything and leave the country. Yandex itself by the summer will be split in two. The Russian side with all the main activities in its belly will be taken over by a consortium made up of 3 leaders of Yandex and Putin’s economist Alexei Kudrin, but according to Belugin, cooperation with the government will not help it: “I think there is no future”, he said. The other part, owned by former parent company based in the Netherlands, sold its news and editorial content platforms to VKontakte (VK), the country’s most important social network, in September, obtaining a food delivery service in exchange. History repeats itself because the VK platform itself was nationalized after the ousting of its founder, Pavel Durov, in 2014 (he is the one who then created Telegram).
And VK executive, who preferred to remain anonymous, confessed to the MIT Technology Review that technology was one of the few sectors in Russia capable of opening up, attracting international funding and fostering some meritocracy. But in the last 10 years there has been an overflow: first the control of the Internet, then the control of tech companies and finally the invasion of Ukraine, with further restrictions on freedom of speech and information. Not to mention the experimentation of RuNet, the sovereign Internet service detached from the global network.
to memory, one of the watersheds for Russian tech was 2011, the year of the harshest anti-government protests, facilitated as in every country by social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The Kremlin reacted with increasingly restrictive rules, arresting people on the basis of trivial posts, restricting access to user data and introducing content filters.
Starting since 2016, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have given up and in 2020 they have been bannedtoday only YouTube survives: “If some banks are too big to fail, some applications are too big to block – argues Nu Wexler, former head of communications of Meta, Twitter and Google – By banning an app so popular in the country , The Russian government he is aware that it would generate a backlash”.
Misinformation monitor
Verified Misinformation: Blue-checked Twitter accounts flood the platform with false claims
a cura di Macrina Wang, Valerie Pavilonis, Zack Fishman, Jack Brewster
Isolation as a strategy and side effects
Isolation has become a strategic choice, according to Ruben Enikolopov, an assistant at the Barcelona School of Economics and former rector of the Russia New Economic School. And on the economy it was like pulling the emergency brake on a moving train: between 2015 and 2021, Russian IT was responsible for more than 30% of GDP growth, exceeding 47.8 billion dollars, although it was worth only 3.2% of total GDP. After that, the sector almost stalled, if we exclude the initial advantage of no longer having foreign competition in the domestic market.
To make matters worse, according to a study by the National Research University Higher School of Economics, founders of Russian unicorn startups leave the country more easily than in others. So much so that Durov himself now claims that Russia is “incompatible with the Internet business“.
The further confirmation is in the apparent shipwreck of the Skolkovo technology park projecton the outskirts of Moscow. Inaugurated in 2010 thanks to a modernization program initiated by former president Medvedev, it was supposed to favor tech entrepreneurs, offer training and funding, make spaces available and much more. Initially Google, Intel, Nokia and Siemens came forward, MIT itself signed a cooperation agreement with the Institute of Science and Technology, Skoltech, but then there was a slowdown again. Ilya Ponomarev, opposition member of the Duma and advisor to the president of the Skolkovo Foundation, was supposed to replicate technology parks of this type throughout the country.
But in 2014 by voting against the ratification of the annexation of Crimea to Russia, he was forced to flee and now that he lives in Kiev he is on the Kremlin’s black list: “Everything related to entrepreneurship and venture capital is something that requires many international operations and participations, and you cannot limit them to one country only. This is exactly what happened in Russia,” according to Ponomarev.
Since the beginning of the war i international collaborators, including foreign venture capital, have disappeared. Investment in Russian companies is estimated to have decreased by 57% in 2022, to $1.1 billion. Medvedev said in December that Skolkovo would “reform its activities,” but US sanctions came in February: the only hope it is in cooperation with countries outside the NATO perimeter, mostly in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Looking far, in short, despite some manifest short-sightedness problems.