I find it heartbreaking.<p>I grew up in the Cold War (my father was in the CIA). Russians were considered brutish, non-creative, and untrustworthy.<p>Then, the Berlin Wall came down, and everything changed.<p>I started to see amazing creativity come from Russia. Music, technology, art, actors, dance, all kinds of stuff. I loved working with Russian engineers. They were some of the best techs I'd worked with. I have a lot of Russian music in my iTunes rotation. I've enjoyed a number of Russian shows, on Netflix. At one time, that would never have been the case.<p>It really seems as if the door has been slammed on that.
You can vote yourself into authoritarianism, but you cannot vote yourself out. And when that authoritarian you love so much makes a major blunder, invading Europe for example, he takes everyone with him, and that's by design.
Russia killed a lot more than just its tech industry. While the real impact of this won’t show up for 20 years the impact will be severe.<p>I’m pretty sure Russia will try very hard to attract foreign labor and immigration in the next years to fill some of the gaps that the country has to fill now.
The elephant in the room is how many of those Russian programmers who run away from Russia are FSB / GRU assets.<p>Even if they are not spies, their parents or grandparents are probably still in Russia, so the state has methods to blackmail them into spying.
It's only mentioned briefly but a large percentage of emigres ended up in the same place, Cyprus. My wife's Russian dev team all slipped away to Cyprus. Cyprus was once very cozy with Russia and pitched itself as a vacation spot for Russian tourists. It cost them a lot to sign on to sanctions but they found a silver lining by acquiring a whole tech sector almost for free.
There never was any real high tech industry. Everything good was done in gulags which my Russian schoolbook called "Nauki Gorods" ie science towns. Everything else was substandard garbage.<p>However under harsh military rule labor camps work well to produce high tech. German V2-rockets and Curta calculators prove that. But there is time limit for that. You will run out of people.
I'm one of those Russian engineers that fled, and I'm very grateful to my multinational employer for helping me with the relocation. I wanted to leave Putin's dominion since my freshman year, but life kept getting in the way until the last moment.
> with three-quarters of Russians still saying they support the war<p>The link that statement refers to doesn't mention that polls like that have huge percentage of people who refuse to answer. Given that expressing anti-war opinion is dangerous in Russia, most of non-supporters may simply stay unrecorded, giving incorrect share to the supporters. Supporters do not have such strong reason to refuse to answer.
The best quote is at the end:<p>> “I’m ready to come back to Russia, but under certain conditions,” she says. “I don’t want to live in a country where Putin is the president. <i>I don’t want to live in a country that starts wars.</i>”
As a russian dev who actually stayed in Russia I find it both hilarious and sad that this horrible piece of propaganda found a way to MIT Tech Review.<p>Firstly, how many IT workers fled the country is an interesting question with no definite answer. We have some figures from "ministry of IT" which Masha linked. She conveniently forgot to add that 80% of IT workers who left actually continued to work for Russia. Admittedly any number here will be a rough estimate at best. Still better than nothing. Another point is that though some experienced IT guys left the country juniors and interns are in insane competition for jobs.
Another important point left out by Masha is that the incentive program contains a guarantee that qualified (finished uni with appropriate specialisation and works in IT company) IT guys are exempted from the draft.<p>Secondly, Yandex. It is presented as if it was that democratic and freedom-driven company and national success but then the war started and it was forced to censor the content blah blah blah. This is a blatant lie. Yandex censored search and news results before. We have good reasons to believe that Yandex cooperates with FSB regarding user content (emails and yandex drive).
Moreover, IT companies in Russia are not limited to Yandex and VK. There is Sber. It is a government-controlled bank that now is more than a bank. Sber has its own ecosystem (streaming, location, delivery services, marketplace, AI department, AI assistants etc). You ain't seen nothing yet! There is a cluster of big b2b companies that work on the domestic market and CIS. Thousands of people work there but most russians don't even know that they exist.<p>Speaking of VK and social networks. Telegram is an interesting thing. It is not a Russian startup and government tried to ban it earlier. As far as I know in USA and Europe it is mostly used by people with more radical views. But in Russia everyone (I mean everyone who try to be modern, since VK is not cool) uses it now. Goverment, opposition, radically pro-Russia guys and ordinary people. It is more than a messenger now and something like social network. Telegram is a gray zone in terms of banned content.
Btw I have a strong opinion that Durov reached an agreement with the russian government.<p>While tech giant in Russia are undeniably influenced/controlled by/depend on the state and hence censor their content and spy on customers, there are no compelling arguments that "Russia killed its tech industry".
I'm sad that this kind of sentiment towards russian industries and people (as if all the brights have left the country) is the default in western media. It should be especially pleasant to think that russians are brutish, non-creative, and untrustworthy. I mean we are from jungle, and you are enlightened intellectuals living in your beautiful garden.<p>But content like this lacks intellectual honesty moreso depth. It worsenes the chances to understand each other.
I wish I read on that page about the ways how russian IT industry is not actually dead (because it's the truth). How people living in autocracy manage to do cool tech things. I wish there was an analysis of russian government attempts to control the IT industry and media that would take into account worldwide trends in goverment and big tech relations (and no, that's not "whataboutism").
Instead there was another RUSSIA BAD.
“Some 70% of the information on Yandex News was coming from state-controlled media sources pushing propaganda”<p>This article reads like US propaganda.<p>“Russia imposed increasingly restrictive laws, arresting social media users over posts, demanding access to user data, and introducing content filtering.”<p>The US performs similar actions. The Twitter files have shown demanding access and content filtering by the government with Twitter and likely other social networks. Recent arrest of left wing US citizens for criticism of the Ukraine war and social media blocking criticism or demonetizing contributors for criticizing the US role in Ukraine war. An attempt to install a Czar of disinformation into the Department of Homeland Security was thankfully stymied mainly due to the character of the individual chosen. Many other examples abound in the US of attempts to control opinions and access to social networks.
Russian news is control by the state. US/Western mass media news are control by "private company" that also have to align with the either the democrat party narrative or republican narrative. Both party must also align with the state.