Yandex Founder Calls Putin "Barbaric"
One of Russia's few publically-traded companies just became the latest enemy #1
If you have been to Russia, you know that Yandex is everywhere. You also understand that Yandex does everything: food delivery, taxi, dating, maps, video, and of course search. In typical Russian un-creative fashion, it copied the world’s first popular search engine, Yahoo — Russian businesses don’t like to be risky with creativity, so they copy successful Western companies.
Today, Yahoo would love to have half of Yandex’s success. Everyone in Russia uses it and has even made inroads into Europe. As much as I have personally never liked the Yandex suite of products (not intuitive, direct copies of Google products, and they once took an idea my team created for them and never paid us), I admit that Yandex has been a rare example left over from the free-wheeling, there-is-hope-for-Russia 1990s of both business acumen and managerial success — albeit very Russian management practices.
Since the launch of Russia’s war of genocide on Ukraine, Yandex has struggled to abide by the increasing state censorship and to filter out third-party content that could be offensive to the Kremlin because it is truthful.
The co-founder of Russia’s biggest internet firm has condemned Moscow’s “barbaric” invasion of Ukraine, offering some of the strongest criticism to date by a prominent Russian business figure of the Kremlin’s military actions.
Arkady Volozh, who co-founded Yandex in Russia in 1997, said: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it.”
In the statement, published on Thursday, he said: “I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine — many of them my personal friends and relatives — whose houses are being bombed every day (Co-Founder of Russian Tech Giant).”
What next?
As I said, Yandex is everywhere, like the Lenin statues of yesteryear. During COVID, the yellow boxy backpacks with the black swirl on them labeled “Yandex Eats” were as plentiful as the fluffy, poplar seedlings that float down in June, turning the back streets of St. Petersburg into a snowy, sneezy but hard-to-describe postcard. All hours of the day and morning, the flashing of some iteration of the Yandex brand was tantalizing the retinas.
As much as they probably don’t like their predicament, Yandexis Russia and Russia is Yandex. Mail.ru, another search engine commonly used in Russia, is also a force but much more entangled with the government and so less free to throw down the kind of gauntlet that Volozh has.
Yandex went public on the US Nasdaq stock exchange in 2011. Volozh stepped down as chief executive and left the board of directors after the EU included him on its list of sanctions against Russian individuals and entities in June 2022.
In its statement at the time, the EU wrote that the company was “responsible for promoting state media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Volozh, who has lived in Israel since 2014, called the EU’s decision “misguided (Co-Founder of Russian Tech Giant).”
Yandex is trying to recreate itself and focus on shifting its key revenue-making streams out of Russia. However, it still is a child of the Putin era, one that has been well-behaved, if not complicit, in making Putin’s lies become an accepted and believable narrative for most Russians. Even Russians against the war struggle to criticize Putin by saying, “Well, the truth is never as clear-cut as it seems.” Yandex, at least its co-founder, is trying to become a problem child for the Kremlin’s family.
Volozh has even done something that few Russians ever dare to do. He is taking some responsibility for his country’s crimes.
This week Volozh described himself as a “Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur” on a personal website, leading to criticism by pro-war figures and Kremlin critics for playing down his links to Russia.
“Although I moved to Israel in 2014, I have to take my share of responsibility for the country’s actions,” he wrote on Thursday. Volozh holds Russian and Israeli passports (Co-Founder of Russian Tech Giant).
Seeing how the Kremlin reacts to this public shaming will be interesting. Will it send the dogs to the Yandex offices in Moscow? Will we see the balaclava-wearing cowards lugging boxes and computers out of the company’s cool offices — they have a typical “Silicon-esque” type office with beanbag chairs and ping pong tables, etc.? Does Putin pretend that nothing was said and then sic his killers on the Yandex management in Russia? There are tens of thousands of Russian immigrants in Israel, harming Volozh there is possible.
It will be interesting to see how Yandex handles the change of heart of its co-founder. Will they imperceptively begin to cast doubt on the Kremlin narrative? Will they start to deliver burgers and bowls of cold Korean soup to Kremlin employees at a slower rate, making them all “hangry?” Will we see Yandex become a leader in the anti-Putin movement? (I doubt this!)
The searches on Yandex will likely not shine any light on the above questions, but there is Google that can help us with that — and Yahoo. Another oligarch with a world-leading online search engine and ecosystem now seems determined to wage some kind of informational war against Russia’s evil.
That’s always good for the forces of light.