#Yandex image drivers#
The tech industry was not Russia’s biggest, but it was one of the main drivers of the economy, says Enikolopov. Isolation became a strategic choice, he says. “The Russian leadership chose a completely different path of development for the country,” says Ruben Enikolopov, assistant professor at the Barcelona School of Economics and former rector of Russia’s New Economic School.
#Yandex image free#
Experts MIT Technology Review spoke with say Russia’s war against Ukraine only accelerated the damage that was already being done, further pushing the country’s biggest tech companies into isolation and chaos and corralling its citizens into its tightly controlled domestic internet, where news comes from official government sources and free speech is severely curtailed. For more than a decade, the government has attempted to put Russia’s internet and its most powerful tech companies in a tight grip, threatening an industry that once promised to bring the country into the future. For a time, the Kremlin seemed to embrace this openness too, inviting international companies to invest in Russia.īut cracks in Russia’s tech industry started appearing well before the war. The industry also maintained a spirit of openness: Russian entrepreneurs won international funding and made deals all over the world. In Russia, technology was one of the few sectors where people felt they could succeed on merit instead of connections. Alongside those exits, more than 1,000 foreign firms curtailed their operations in the country, driven in part by the broadest sanctions ever to be imposed on a major economy. According to government figures, about 100,000 IT specialists left Russia in 2022, or some 10% of the tech workforce-a number that is likely an underestimate. In the months after the invasion began, Russia saw a mass exodus of IT workers. The war meant that everything would change in Russia, both for him and for his company, Belugin said from his new home in Cyprus: “You have to accept the new rules of having no rules at all in Russia.”īelugin was far from the only tech worker to leave. Not long after that, he resigned from his position as chief commercial officer for small and medium businesses at Yandex, Russia’s equivalent to Google and the country’s largest technology company. Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Belugin packed up his and his family’s belongings, canceled the lease on his apartment in Moscow, withdrew his kids from kindergarten, and started a new life outside of Russia.
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