The desire to see the pernicious influence of the West everywhere prevents the head of state from checking the facts

Vladimir Putin cannot be called an ignorant person. He has a tenacious memory, he listens well and easily remembers what he hears. But in today's Russia, he has to personally participate in decision-making, which in few countries reaches the presidential level. Manual control, that sort of thing.

As a result, it is becoming increasingly easier to catch a national leader making mistakes.

There is such an amazing person - Syrlybai Aibusinov. I met him when, while working as editor-in-chief of SmartMoney magazine, I awarded a prize to the person who found the most errors and inaccuracies on our pages. Syrlybai, the IT director of a small enterprise, won the competition week after week, although the competition was sometimes intense. I ended up offering him a part-time job checking the facts of our texts BEFORE publication. This was probably my best decision in that project. Aibusinov agreed - not for the sake of money, of course: fact-checking is the hobby of this most meticulous of people. Subsequently, he spoiled a lot of blood for the editors of other publications in Moscow and Kyiv, but helped them avoid hundreds of ridiculous mistakes.

So, Syrlybay, on instructions from the website Slon.ru, periodically looks for actual flaws in Putin’s public speeches. A year ago, he wrote , introducing one report on the results of this work: “Vladimir Putin rarely makes big mistakes. More often he is characterized by exaggeration and distortion.” That is, it was more about deliberate inaccuracies in the speech of a politician who was confidently promoting his agenda.

But during his recent direct line with the people, Putin was clearly unintentionally confused about economic indicators , which Syrlybai easily caught him doing. This has never happened to Putin before.

What Putin said on Thursday about the Internet and specifically about the Yandex company indicates even more clearly that the national leader is giving up.

“You know, all this arose at the first stage, at the dawn of the Internet, as a special project of the US CIA. This is how it develops,” he first said to a certain blogger who was indignant at the dominance of Americans on the Internet.

It doesn’t suit a former intelligence officer to confuse departments; Meanwhile, the history of the Internet goes back to DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Pentagon, and not the CIA. Let us assume, however, that from the height of his current position, Putin is all united: the Ministry of Defense, the CIA, the NSA - in any case, “the American is stirring up trouble”, there is no need for us to figure out which one it is.

With Yandex, however, things didn’t work out at all. “There, too, I repeat, not everything is so simple,” Putin said. “What they can do, what they can’t do, you have to ask them.” But they, too, at one time, when they were just starting their work, they were also crushed: they should have so many Americans, so many Europeans in their governing bodies, remember? And they had to agree with it.”

No matter how hard you try, you won’t find anything like this in the history of Yandex .

The Russian search engine began to be created in the late 90s in the depths of the company CompTek, which Arkady Volozh created together with his English teacher, American Slavist Robert Stubblebine. The American had a talent for sales, which was very important in the business the partners were engaged in - trading first in computers and then in network equipment.

Maybe he was from the CIA, but Volozh was unable to delve into engineering matters. In the book “Yandex Volozh: The Story of Creating a Dream Company,” Vladislav Dorofeev described, according to Stubblebine, how an American once asked Volozh: “These five bearded people who sit and invent something very interesting, about which I have no particular idea - Will anything good come out of this? And Arkady said: “Robert, don’t worry, someday something very interesting will come out of this.” Well, I just had to trust.”

Among the five bearded men was the late Ilya Segalovich , the man to whom Yandex owes the basis of its search technologies.

At the initial stage of creating the search engine, the Americans did not show any interest in it. Google, that agent of the evil empire, rejected all proposals for partnership from unknown Russians. Apart from the Pushkin scholar Stubblebine, no Americans had even a remote connection with the young enterprise. Even the English-language name, which stands for Yet Another Indexer - another indexer - was invented by Segalovich (Volozh entered the Russian letter “Ya” into the abbreviation).

The late American financier Ben Cole was present for a long time in the “management bodies” of Yandex, but no pressure was needed for his appointment as chairman of the company’s board of directors in 2000: Volozh later recalled that Cole was one of the first to believe in his startup with Stubblebine.

Subsequently, the American hedge fund Tiger Global, founded by the American Charles Coleman III, an aristocrat from Long Island and a descendant of the last Dutch governor of New York, became a shareholder of Yandex. If Coleman bought a stake in Yandex for espionage reasons, then he acquired shares in Facebook, Zynga and other Internet companies (before they entered the market) only for cover.

In fact, Coleman, the luckiest American hedge fund manager in 2011, is simply an extremely shrewd speculator who was only interested in money. Volozh was very uncomfortable with this aggressive investor, who was actively looking for an exit strategy almost from the moment he entered. Coleman annoyed Volozh until he got his way - namely, he earned about a billion dollars from the gradual sale of a stake bought for almost nothing in 2004. And now his fund still has 631,000 shares of Yandex worth about $18 million, but these are the remnants of its former luxury.

And Yandex had and still has other large foreign shareholders: Oppenheimer Funds, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and T. Rowe Price.

How could it be otherwise if the company is a global player in the IT sector?

However, if someone put pressure on Yandex, it was not them, but Alisher Usmanov , who, after the 2008 crisis, tried to gain control over the search engine - as Volozh imagined, not only on his own behalf, but also at the behest of the Kremlin. Volozh fought back from this pressure by offering a “golden share”—that is, the right to veto the sale of large shares in the company—to Sberbank, which then seemed to be the most advanced of state business structures. But even this pressure did not force Volozh to somehow adjust the “management bodies” to the circumstances: the presence of Alexander Stalyevich Voloshin on the board of directors is no more significant circumstance than the work of, say, Esther Dyson on the same board. Volozh, the permanent general director, has always controlled the company’s business himself, and this will be confirmed by anyone who has dealt with Yandex.

The story of Russia's premier Internet company is well known, and most of its witnesses, Russian and foreign, are alive. What kind of forced quotas for Americans and Europeans in the management of Yandex Putin was talking about, all of them can only guess.

Putin, who has built a system in which he is forced to monitor every little detail, inevitably begins to get confused in a gigantic economy .

He's not getting any younger. And he doesn’t have his own Syrlybay Aibusinova to maintain the texture at the proper level.

Paradoxical as it may seem, so much the worse for Runet, and for each of us. Anyone in the presidential retinue who wants to snatch something under the pretext of fighting the pernicious Western influence is finding it increasingly easier to do so, the main thing is to maintain the president’s illusion of total control. For Volozh, the presidential nonsense about his company is a danger signal: that “golden share” no longer protects him very reliably.

Putin’s Yandex: why it’s increasingly easier to catch the president making mistakes