Russia's War Mania Exacerbates the Nation's Cultural Paranoia
I recently quit a Moscow-based AI project to protect myself from the future of Russia

I am not sure why I got involved. All of the managerial chaos that characterized my 25-year career in marketing and communications in Russia was realized from the very first meeting, but a glutton for Russian punishment, I decided to stay because the team was made up of relatively young, anti-war IT guys.
The first significant meeting I was invited to was called a “town hall” meeting. I found this odd because the company is in extreme start-up mode, and with only about 20 or so employees, I couldn’t believe that the intelligent, modern-thinking guy I knew from a previous company was actually going to conduct the meeting in a similar format. Town hall meetings are usually opportunities for politicians to meet their constituents that allow for Q&A at the end.
The meeting began, and the young CEO and founder spoke to the gathered professionals in the manner I had heard for years in Russia. The tone was both an unctuous one but at the same time condescending. Our “dear leader” knew everything better than we did. A CEO of a company with no money, no sales, and barely a marketable product, the simple fact that he was the “boss” of the assembled group meant that everything he said was right, and every thought he had was inspired by divine intervention.
Prattling on about the most inane stuff, I found myself running the same calculations I had run countless times in other Russian companies over my many years working in Russia. Everyone on the call was being “paid” — which I found out they weren’t, but rather a wage debt was being built up — by the hour. For nearly two hours, we listened to stories that left little doubt that “Sergei” — name changed to protect the clueless CEO — was the smartest person in the room and that the rest of us had been included in the project out of the goodness of his heart. The verbal masturbation, which we all participated in, grew the company’s wage debt by about $3,000.
The CEO wanted to conclude the call because the core team had another meeting planned to discuss marketing stuff, and they were late because of the town hall meeting. When I heard that they were discussing marketing, to which I hadn’t been invited despite my title of VP of Marketing, I suggested I go to it. I was informed because I was so new, it wouldn’t make sense for me to go to a management meeting to discuss the area for which I had been made responsible.
Oh, ok. Odd, I thought and didn’t push the matter. The alarm bells, however, were ringing.
When I finally managed to set up a marketing meeting without the presence of the CEO, I was informed by everyone present that nothing on the marketing side could get done without the CEO’s direct participation, which resulted in a massive bottleneck. The company could not make a post to X (formerly Twitter) or do anything that brought external attention to the product without the “core management team” spending days debating first the necessity of such an action and next the quality of the image in the post.
I suggested that I go to this “core management team” meeting to explain both why posts on social media were necessary daily and why it was essential that marketing become operationally independent from the Talmudic discussions that torpedoed all marketing activity; there was a collective shaking of heads.
“Oh, no, there’s no core management meeting. It’s a secret chat on Slack.” In case you don’t know what Slack is, it’s similar to WhatsApp but much more conducive for work.
It turns out that there is a secret chat to which only the “trusted” employees are invited. New people like myself, even though I had known Sergei for nearly five years and worked well with him when he was just a project manager, were denied entry into the Star Chamber. Why is this secret chat important? It is there where the true Russian “anti-genius” comes out.
While meeting people discussing the marketing shortcomings before my arrival, practically every suggestion I made was met with virtual thumbs-ups, smiles, exploding bombs, flames, hearts, etc. Familiar with how Russians love to shower new people with insincere, god-like adulation, I silently laughed at the “affection.” I knew the “fake love” could dissolve into “fake hate” in seconds.
When my lone team member and I made a post without the week of meetings and debates by the Star Chamber, the entire management team reacted as if a letter with anthrax had been received. Someone in the company I used to work with reached out to me and let me know that the “secret chat” was not happy. He sent me a screenshot of the deliberations on my post, and many of the same people who days before had been showing me love and sending virtual flames were with the same virtual enthusiasm backing up the words of the CEO, who was not happy that I had dared to act without his God-ordained “Okay.”
Establishing trust and rotting minds
With one post on social media and only a few weeks in the company, my nearly three decades of marketing expertise — I have had tremendous success creating brands or taking them from the earliest stages of launch and leading them to high growth — was gone. I had become a wild card, a rebel, and it was decided, “he doesn’t understand our product.”
There is nothing to understand. It is as straightforward as it can be: You type in a conversational manner, “I would like to see a scary pumpkin,” and the AI guide generates in 5–10 minutes a series of three-dimensional pumpkins. Of the four it gives you, you choose the one that best looks like a pumpkin. While there are many potential uses, the most obvious one is for creating 3D assets for games and metaverse environments.
For my success in the project, I realized I needed to get into the secret chat. The new person has to establish trust, which means they have to not fight for what is right professionally but what makes the CEO happy. If, for instance, a new person closes their eyes to what is professionally the best solution to a problem and expresses the right amount of “likes, “flames,” and “happy faces” to the hyper-micromanagement of the CEO, that person will eventually be “onboarded” into the “secret chat.” By making the post on social media, I had “proven that CEO right that I was not yet trustworthy.” I am paraphrasing here. His exact words were more nuanced, but Russians knew what he meant.
The moment he declared me “professionally unfit,” which we know means not ready to join the personality cult that is a bridge to security for most Russians, it was fair game to ignore my recommendations for how to create market interest in the project.
Privy as I was to the “secret chat,” thanks to my former colleague’s disgust with the project, I could see the anger and distrust for me, which was ultimately the opposite in the more “public” chats. Posing questions I already knew the answers to, thanks to my reconnaissance, the CEO would treat me like nothing had happened. He was respectful and interested in hearing my suggestions, but at the same time, each time I asked for a concrete plan of action, he would ghost me.
This style of management, the way the calls are run, and the way adult professionals behave themselves is perversely Russian. On February 23rd, 2022, most of you knew nothing about this truly Russian management style and“leadership.” After the invasion, however, when people like me and others started unraveling the riddle inside the enigma, the cultural reasons why Putin sat rambling on, occasionally scolding his underlings, suddenly became more apparent.
Some of the tales that explain the Russian soul involved one about “doors,” one about negative creativity or “smekalka,” “tsar-batyushka” and most recently about “slippers.”
This project could be a successful one given that their product is potentially one of the best on the market, but Russians are horrific managers, maybe worse. If you doubt that my professional experiences are proof enough, look at how poorly Russia has conducted this war. It’s a shitshow, plain and simple, and an ROTC battalion from the United States is more professionally adept than Russia’s leading generals.
But then again, there might be some good generals, just like there are good managers in the project I just left. The problem, however, is what happens when one of them gains power, and others are dependent on that power. The CEO, three years ago, was an IT guy with one of the sharpest minds I had come across in my years in Russia. He was, and for the most part still is, a lovely guy. Well-educated and polite, I have never even heard him use profanity.
And yet, in ways similar to the extreme dysfunction of Russia’s current pro-war, pro-genocide mentality, he too has become a “mini Putin.” He does not realize this has happened to him because, like Putin, he justifies his absurdity by saying, “They don’t understand” the project. Everyone else’s professional opinions and expertise are declared “untrustworthy” because of a failure to agree with his misguided opinion. Other professionals have left the project or been pushed out, but many stay despite the toxic environment because they hope to gain something — if not just the back salary owed to them.
Sergei, the CEO, does not realize that his secret little management chat is not unlike Putin’s tables around which he sits, distancing himself from the world and diverging opinions, safely leading his company to ruin.
Almost every company I worked in Russia had a “table” at which the CEO sat and psychologically destroyed his professional managers. Doling out the pain that has left grown men and women with ulcers and running for shots of vodka after the eight and nine-hour meetings from hell, everyone at these meetings would have their day when they were the hero only to at the next meeting be made the scapegoat.
My most extreme example of this was working at a company in Moscow from 2002 to 2005. We were the leading salted-snacks company in Russia. Meetings began at 8:30 on Friday morning and ended around 6 p.m. Ever in a race to get to the airport to fly back to St. Petersburg for the weekend, my boss would begin playing with me from around 3 p.m. — “Would I beat the traffic and get to my plane or need to fly on a later one.” His abuse of me and everyone present is precisely what Putin does to all of Russia and, sadly, what the Sergeis of Russia are doing to their companies.
Four years ago, Sergei would not have acted this way, I am sure. Russia’s war mentality, however, and the sense that the whole world is — rightly — against Russia is leading to extreme paranoia.
Competent professionals with an understanding of the extent to which Russia’s fascist revolution is ruining the country’s future have abandoned the nation’s future. Many more are still trying to escape. Sergei is abusing the brain drain. He is using people less motivated or less capable of leaving, and he has turned his little nothing of a company — which could be something if he got out of the way — into another Putin-style table whose primary purpose is to f*** with people.
A fascinating look into the Russian mind, B. Such a management 'style' could only survive in a closed society, isolated from competition from a wider world. It's pretty clear, though, that the Moscovy Empire cannot stay insulated from the rest of the world for long. Meanwhile, they destroy themselves, anything they touch and anyone they can influence - including other countries. The sooner they collapse from the weight of their own hubris, the better for themselves and the rest of the world.