IT phenomenon or collaborator?

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The status of a market giant requires a certain position in relation to the authorities. Ever since the times of the giant US monopolies, it has become clear that dialogue with the political regime is necessary for the successful promotion of big business. Sometimes a business becomes so large that it even begins to threaten the state, and then the state is forced, like Franklin Roosevelt, to introduce strict antitrust rules.

In an authoritarian state, the rules for the coexistence of the state and business are established not by the law, but by personal relationships and informal procedures. This dependence seems to be mutual to some researchers , but the rules of loyalty are set by the authoritarian leader.

For Putin, loyalty appears to be more important than informal procedures. He accepted the challenge posed at one time by Mikhail Khodorkovsky personally and dealt with the rebellious oligarch.

The political loyalty of business giants has been a condition for success since the very beginning of the Putin regime, but for the most part this applied to those businesses that were created from the ruins of state property - primarily oil and gas companies. The situation was different with those companies that developed in direct contradiction to the policy of petroeconomics, that is, they did not extract rent from mining, but created a digital product solely by the power of imagination and talent. We are talking about IT giants, and above all Yandex. Its feature from the very beginning was independence from the state, and its employees - unlike the former “red directors” associated with the Soviet oil and gas industry - were mostly young, liberal-minded people, often Western-educated.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Yandex, a giant of the domestic IT market, the “Russian Google” with dozens of services, tried for quite a long time to maintain the image of a liberal company. One of the founders of the company, Ilya Segalovich, allowed himself not only to come to work with a white ribbon, but also to openly participate in the activities of the opposition during the mass street protests.

The authors of a recently published study of Yandex’s corporate policy, Olga Solovyova and Alexandra Bristow, write that the atmosphere in the corporation changed dramatically after 2014, when Segalovich’s death coincided with the annexation of Crimea and a general change in the political climate in the country: “It was a peace treaty with the enemy, within the framework of which the leaders of “Yandex” exchanged their active liberal position for the state’s permission to exist.” This agreement allowed the IT giant to maintain some freedom - however, it was already clearly limited by opaque agreements between management and the presidential administration.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed this treaty. After February 2022, the company's shares collapsed by 70%, many employees, including top managers, quit and left the country, including CEO Elena Bunina. Another top manager, Lev Gershenzon, the former head of Yandex.News, posted a post on Facebook on the sixth day of the war in which he directly pointed out the responsibility of his colleagues for the obvious censorship of the Yandex news feed: “Yandex today is a key element in concealing information about the war." At the same time, many Yandex employees interviewed by Meduza were “little embarrassed” by the new “face” of Yandex exclusively with pro-state news . As one of the respondents said: “Nothing personal, just business, we’re not like that, life is like that.”

Under obvious pressure from the state, part of Yandex went to the state-controlled VK Group, and with the personal participation of Putin, Alexey Kudrin became a “corporate development advisor” to the corporation, leaving the Accounts Chamber. Yandex was faced with a choice: follow the apparently censorship “military” laws that were introduced in early March 2022 and fall under Western sanctions, or fall under Russian state sanctions without following them. Yandex chose the first one and immediately paid the price. In June 2022, one of the company’s co-founders, Arkady Volozh, came under EU sanctions with a comment that he not only supported Putin’s policies, but was also responsible for promoting the official position of the Kremlin, downgrading and deleting “content with any criticism of the Kremlin,” including including “related to Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

Yandex is not the first IT giant in the world to suffer from authoritarian rulers. In 2006, when the Putin regime was still called “hybrid,” that is, combining democratic and autocratic features, Google came to China, a classic autarky, which at first calmly accepted the censorship bans of the local Communist Party, but in the end practically left the country .

The obvious difference here is that Google was and remains a global player, and Yandex actually ceased to be one, having turned from the “Russian Google” into the “Russian Baidu” (the most popular Chinese search service. - Kholod’s note ) . Yandex stopped producing news (this service was sold to VK Group and merged with Dzen.ru) and remained a search engine without a news feed, which caused “a lot of criticism from all sides . ”

Even such a formally non-political tool as Yandex.Taxi recently found itself at the center of a scandal : it turned out that the company must provide data about all clients, including their foreign trips, to the FSB. Volozh himself, who fell under sanctions, had been living in Israel since 2014, but publicly condemned the war only on August 10, 2023, and now calls himself “an Israeli entrepreneur born in Kazakhstan.” Obviously, this departure from the “policy of neutrality” became possible only after Volozh said goodbye to the Russian part of Yandex, and was largely caused by European sanctions.

By deciding to “stay neutral” and “stay out of politics,” Yandex became part of official policy and ultimately lost. The future of the company can hardly be assessed positively. The deglobalization of Yandex, its division into the international and Russian parts, where only the latter remains Yandex, is taking place under the direct control of the state and the informal leadership of Kudrin, who has already come under US sanctions precisely for this work. This does not create conditions for a technological breakthrough of the remnants of the company, which was once the leader of Russian IT and aspired to international recognition.

A separate issue is the corporate responsibility of Yandex and the political responsibility of its leaders for the obvious support of the war within the framework of that very pro-Putin “neutrality.” Political philosopher Ilya Budraitskis called this a manifestation of the “permanent moral catastrophe of capitalism.” Budraitskis predicted to Yandex the future of the Krupp concern (a German industrial giant, which during World War II was the main supplier of military equipment for the fascist army - Kholod's note) or Swiss banks, which calmly made do with "apologies instead of atonement."

Yes, collective responsibility is contrary to the principles of law, and yes, many of the technology giants of the Third Reich that supported Hitler and even ensured the Holocaust continued to exist successfully after the war. So far, the moral responsibility of companies for cooperation with aggressive regimes is not a general requirement, but perhaps recognition of such responsibility is a matter of the near future and this will be one of the results of Russia’s war with Ukraine.

The author's opinion may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.

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