Still, the company strove for normality. When I spoke to Boynton on the phone on March 8, he told me that “everyone can handle it” at Yandex. A source in Moscow who could know told me the company was planning a “big party” for its employees to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, always a big celebration in Russia.
And while the US and European governments imposed sanctions on other Russian businessmen with ties to the Kremlin, Yandex executives were seemingly spared – that is, until March 15, when the EU issued an asset freeze and travel ban on Khudaverdyan. The official EU magazine quoted Gershenzon’s post about Yandex’s “hiding of information” and revealed that on February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the deputy CEO of Yandex and other Russian business leaders met Putin in the Kremlin to to discuss a plan of action in the wake of Western sanctions. Khudaverdyan immediately resigned.
VI
With the Russian shattered economy and Putin quickly all that was left of a free internet, the tech worker brain drain became a frenetic mass exodus. Thousands of those who could afford it fled a country that “flew into an abyss,” as a Russian tech executive told The Financial Times, escape to Cyprus, Armenia, and beyond. Some 25,000 Russians reportedly arrived in Georgia in the first two weeks after the invasion. For the many others left behind, including countless thousands of Yandex workers, there is the very real prospect that the Russian economy and technology sector will be isolated for years or decades, leaving them with no income.
One conceivable way for Yandex to protect and retain at least some of its employees could be to move them from Moscow to Israel. The country has a thriving tech industry and it doesn’t seem like it wants to limit Yandex’s business activities there. Israel could also be a base for Yandex’s effort to deepen its presence in the United Arab Emirates, with which Israel maintains friendly relations and which has so far imposed no sanctions on Russia. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Yandex had approached the government to bring in more than 800 workers, but a spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry told me, “It appears that no such requests have been made by the company.”
The company could still stabilize in an increasingly isolated Russia, even if its global ambitions falter. With Apple Pay closed to some Russian customers, Yandex Pay could gain market share, and the same could be true for other services where Yandex no longer faces foreign competition. A Chinese buyer can make an offer for parts of the company or even for the whole. Alternatively, a Kremlin-controlled company like Sberbank could take it over, a fulfillment of the Kremlin’s apparent plans to have Yandex in fact a national security property. Yandex may sell Yandex News to a Kremlin-friendly Russian buyer: There are reportedly talks of a sale to the social network VKontakte. Even more ominous, Russian officials could bring a trumped-up case of tax fraud or the like against the company, as they did against Khodorkovsky and Yukos years ago, and then push for the forfeiture of Yandex’s assets to the state.
On March 11, I heard from Yandex that Volozh, who had been silent for 16 days, wanted to talk. A spokesperson arranged a Zoom call with him that day. Twelve minutes before the call was due, the spokesperson texted me to postpone the meeting. “Something urgent has intervened,” she said without going into further detail. Since then there has been no more word.
I spoke to Strebulaev a few days after he resigned from the board, and I asked if he thought it was all over for the company. “I don’t know,” he replied. But Volozh, two years before 60, could move forward with a new venture, he said. “If Arkady decides to do something else, maybe in Israel,” Strebulaev told me, “I think he will be successful. People love him. People believe in him” and “people will follow.” He thought back to his first meeting with Volozh, over a two-hour luncheon in London in 2018, and the conversation culminated in Volozh’s fervent interest in Israeli archaeology. Volozh is “always full of ideas,” Strebulaev said. “He kind of lives in the future.”
Volozh reportedly holds a Maltese passport and an Israeli passport; it is now likely that he will live the rest of his years outside of Russia. Yet his career and even his life can be classified as ‘the one that was left behind’. He could have joined the brain drain from the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and tried to make his fortune in the West. Instead, he made one in Russia, and now he’s in danger of losing a good chunk there. The duality he so long sought to maintain, both Russian and Western, has collapsed – always at risk in the implicit agreement he made with Putin’s Kremlin.
