Arkady Yurievich Volozh seemed to be in good spirits. It was February 11, his birthday, and the 58-year-old billionaire CEO and cofounder of Yandex, the Russian tech behemoth, was in the sort of open, engaging mood that could be called privetliviy, after the casual Russian word privet for hello. He was speaking from his car in Tel Aviv, bragging about his father—an oil geologist in his eighties who had “discovered” oil in Israel, Volozh said—as we chatted about my upcoming trip to Tel Aviv to interview him for this story.
For more than 20 years, Yandex has been known as “Russia’s Google”: It began as a search engine in 1997 and still has a 60 percent share of the Russian search market. But for the past decade, this tag has understated the company’s inescapable ubiquity in Russians’ daily life. Yandex Music is the country’s leader in paid music streaming, and Yandex Taxi is the top ride-hailing app. Millions of Russians use Yandex Navigator, Yandex Market, Yandex News, and Yoo Money (formerly Yandex Wallet) to get around, shop online, read, and spend money.
Volozh has only recently begun to make his company less reliant on its Russian business—and on the whims of President Vladimir Putin—by tiptoeing westward. Yandex Taxi formed a joint venture with Uber in 2017, and in 2020 Yandex began testing self-driving cars in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Last year, the Yandex Rover robot, something of a six-wheeled Igloo cooler, began delivering food via a partnership with Grubhub to college campuses in Arizona and Ohio, with plans to expand to 250 American campuses. Yandex had also launched delivery services in London and Paris. On the day of our call, Yandex had a $16 billion market capitalization on Nasdaq, and about 85 percent of all its shares were traded in the United States.
Most of Yandex’s 18,000 employees are still based at the company’s headquarters in Moscow. But Arkady, as everyone at Yandex calls him, Western-style, shorn of the formal Russian patronymic, now more or less lives with his family in Israel. For several years, Israel has been an R&D hub for new products, especially in the transport sector, which Yandex aimed to bring to markets in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.
On our call, Volozh asked whether there was anything in particular I wanted to see during my visit—the old city of Jerusalem perhaps? I have seen that, I told him. My goal was to spend as much time as possible with the reigning baron of Russia’s tech sector, and to try out Yandex’s new products firsthand. Yandex had recently acquired an electric-scooter business in Israel. How about a scooter ride? I asked. Of course, he said.
Volozh had seemed to master the high-wire act that all Russian moguls with global ambitions attempt: to accommodate Kremlin pressure while enticing Kremlin-leery investors and partners in the West. Self-effacing, cerebral, respectful, a soft voice in the boardroom with a salt-and-cinnamon goatee, he “does not come across as a driven entrepreneur,” John Boynton, the American chair of Yandex’s board, told me. In short, he’s the opposite of the stereotypically boastful, political knife-fighting Russian oligarch. “He is more a techie than a business magnate,” says Esther Dyson, an American angel investor and until recently a Yandex board member. In a country that still depends heavily on oil and gas exports, Volozh has been an unyielding visionary for the tech industry, imagining future possibilities—from natural language search to autonomous vehicles—and believing in his beloved Russian “geek community” to build those technologies.
His bent was to keep Yandex out of immediate political matters. But that abruptly became impossible. On the morning of February 24, two days before my flight to Israel, I received a text from a Yandex PR official. “We are deeply sorry,” the person began, but “events, which are beyond our control, create a great deal of uncertainty.” My meeting with Volozh had been postponed, until the “situation allows.”
The situation was that, hours earlier, Putin had launched the military invasion of Ukraine. “Uncertainty” barely described the existential predicament that Volozh, Yandex, and everyone in Russian tech abruptly faced. I received the text shortly before the US stock markets opened; by noon the price of Yandex shares had more than halved. In the following days, Uber announced that its three executives on the board of Yandex Taxi were resigning immediately, and the transport minister of Lithuania asked Google and Apple to remove the taxi app from their platforms.
As the doors to the West were slamming shut, Yandex was imploding at home. On March 1, Lev Gershenzon, the former head of Yandex’s news division, posted an anguished note on Facebook addressed to his former coworkers. “Yandex today is a key element in hiding information about war,” he wrote from his home in Berlin. At “least 30 million Russian users” of Yandex’s home news page “see that there is no war, there are no thousands of dead Russian soldiers, there are no dozens of civilians killed under Russian bombings.” Gershenzon’s post included a screenshot of Yandex’s homepage that day; there was indeed no sign of carnage. Instead, the lead story highlighted Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu’s assertion that the main goal of the military’s spetzoperatziya (“special operation”) in Ukraine was to protect Russia from military threats posed by the West. “It’s not too late to stop being accomplices to a terrible crime,” Gershenzon wrote. “If you can’t do anything—quit.”
Gershenzon told me the day after his post that Volozh “is responsible for this news page.” He continued, “It’s the seventh day of the war, and we haven’t seen any statement from him.” The “great entrepreneur, excellent family guy doesn’t understand his responsibility, and the awful thing is that Yandex is participating with—is cooperating with—the Russian army ... It makes me sick.”
As the invasion stretched on, the Russian economy began collapsing under the weight of Western sanctions. On March 3, Yandex warned that it risked defaulting on $1.25 billion of debt. In 2020, the tech sector’s weight on the Moscow stock exchange had doubled to 8 percent, close to the European average, and Yandex had been its leading light. Now hundreds of thousands of Russians were fleeing the country, many tech workers among them. Russia’s broader ambitions of being a permanent part of the economies of Europe and North America were also severely chilling. “I believe Yandex’s Russian business is dead, more or less,” Gershenzon told me, since that business is “all based on the ability of the Russian people to spend money.”
It had taken Volozh 20 plus years to demonstrate to the world that world-class technology, as good as anything created in the West, could come out of Russia. Indeed, he stood out as a refutation of the common Western trope, given voice last year by US president Joe Biden, that Russia “has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else. Nothing else.” I had cited that quote on my call with Volozh, stressing the importance of hearing his story directly from him. But now, as Russia laid siege to its neighbor, his life’s work and aspirations seemed to be crumbling with each passing hour.
Born in 1964, Volozh was raised primarily in Almaty, the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan. Both his father, the oil geologist, and his mother, a music teacher, were Jewish. In the 1970s, many Soviet Jewish families, faced with persecution, secured exit visas to begin new lives in the West; this was how the family of 6-year-old Sergey Brin, the future cofounder of Google, made it to suburban Maryland.
But Volozh stayed in the Soviet system, attending a special school for gifted students in mathematics. It was there that he formed a close friendship with an equally precocious youngster, Ilya Segalovich. Both headed to Moscow for college in the 1980s—Volozh at an institute of oil and gas and Segalovich at a similar institute for geological prospecting. Volozh graduated with a degree in applied mathematics and, together with Segalovich, began launching a series of small information technology companies.
In the 1990s a newly privatized post-Soviet economy began to take shape, largely ruled by a group of predatory oligarchs. Many had Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin in their grip, amassing their fortunes through rigged privatization auctions. Volozh and Segalovich, however, were more akin to the founders of a scrappy Silicon Valley startup: tinkering with thought experiments about the possible but unproven commercial potential of the internet.
Starting around 1993, the duo set out to build a digital search program for scientific patents, the Bible, and Russian classical literature. The name, according to the company’s official history, came from Volozh and Segalovich “brainstorming around the words ‘search’ and ‘index.’” They arrived at Яndex, an abbreviation of “yet another indexer,” and soon expanded the software to be able to search the entirety of the Russian internet, then 5,000 sites and 4 gigabytes of text. Their search engine went live in September 1997, “almost a year before Google,” Volozh would proudly point out years later.
As chaotic as Russia’s economy was in the 1990s, there were still plenty of Western investors. In 2000 the private equity firm Baring Vostok, founded by the American businessman Michael Calvey, made a seed capital investment of $5 million in the young company—enough to secure a 35 percent stake. At the time, Yandex had only $72,000 in annual revenue and was losing $2 million a year.
By 2003, the global tech world was well aware of Yandex's prowess in search, particularly in natural language processing and in calculating the distance between searched keywords. That year, Google founders Brin and Larry Page visited Volozh and Segalovich in Moscow and proposed to buy Yandex for $100 million. It was a tempting offer, but the pair decided they would rather keep control of their company than effectively become Google employees. When Google later tried to enter the Russian market, Yandex still performed better at capturing the idiosyncrasies of the Russian language, such as the fact that the same word can have many different endings.
By 2009, Yandex had a 56 percent share of the Russian-language search market, more than double Google’s. The Russian economy had stabilized, and ad revenues poured into the company’s coffers. Yandex quickly expanded into email, maps, online shopping, and the spam blocker Spamooborona. There was a good deal of truth in Volozh’s boast that no other company in the world has competed with Google “and survived and beat it.”
Yandex also grew, in part, by managing not to alienate Vladimir Putin, who became president at the end of 1999. Under Putin’s rules, business figures and companies were expected to be loyal to the Kremlin. If not, they had the choice of being arrested and having their assets confiscated or leaving Russia. In one striking example, the oil baron Mikhail Khordorkovsky, then the richest person in Russia, was arrested in 2003 and jailed, and his company, Yukos, was taken over by the state. The reasons remain murky, but they were thought to include his support for opposition politicians and pro-democracy causes.
Volozh and Segalovich, by contrast, largely kept a low profile. Occasionally, they even helped Putin cultivate his everyman image with the Russian public. In 2006, Yandex hosted a live chat with the president, unscripted and televised to the nation. A participant asked Putin, “When did you have sex for the first time?” The president replied, “I don't remember, but I certainly remember the last.”
Still, there was room at the margins for dissent, and though Volozh and Segalovich were both politically liberal, they responded differently to the Kremlin’s relentless efforts to establish control over Russia’s politics. In 2011, Segalovich, but not Volozh, took part in public protests against the results of parliamentary elections that delivered a majority of seats in the Russian Duma to Putin’s United Russia party. (The European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Putin’s party had rigged the election.) Some Yandex employees joined Segalovich in the demonstrations. “Ilya was seen as the beating engine of the company, the heart,” says Gershenzon, who joined Yandex in 2005. Segalovich, he says, was “charismatic by example” and set the “moral standard” for Yandex. Volozh, by contrast, made “too many compromises” with the Kremlin, Gershenzon says. “When good people have a lot of business with awful people, they start to try to understand them. It’s like a disease.”
Others see the distinction between the two founders less starkly. “Ilya was not radical,” but he “supported the opposition” to Putin, says Alexey Sokirko, a software engineer who worked at Yandex from 2005 to 2018 and attended political rallies with Segalovich. He added, “Arkady within the company contrasted him a little, urging everyone not to politicize Yandex.”
Their differences were also in part a function of their roles at the company; Segalovich served as chief technology officer, Volozh as the CEO. As with any Russian CEO of the Putin era, it was Volozh’s job to oversee business strategy and to develop personal relationships with officials in and around the Kremlin. (Alexander Voloshin, a former chief of staff to Putin who resigned from the government around the time of the Yukos saga, serves on Yandex’s board.) Such relationships proved beneficial when Yandex needed help warding off an anticipated takeover attempt in 2008 by a metals oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, who was looking to expand into tech.
In 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in a public offering on Nasdaq—then the biggest IPO since Google’s. Peter Loukianoff, a Russian-American whose venture capital firm Almaz Capital had been an early investor in Yandex, told The New York Times that the moment signaled a new era “of intellectual wealth creation in Russia”—an era that Volozh and Segalovich had given birth to. “Russia now has a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,” Loukianoff gushed. But even at the time, his comment was a reach. In its public offering prospectus, Yandex explicitly warned that “high-profile businesses in Russia, such as ours, can be particularly vulnerable to politically motivated actions.”
Ilya Segalovich was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2012 and died the following year, at age 48, leaving behind his wife and five children. “Ilyusha and I have been friends since school; we sat at the same desk for four years,” Volozh wrote on a Yandex page that collected memories of Segalovich. “I don’t know what can replace his encyclopedic [knowledge of] technology and clear vision of the product.”
Segalovich’s death marked the start of a new chapter for Volozh, bereft of his childhood friend and closest business partner, and Yandex, bereft of the man whose “ethical standards,” as Volozh wrote, “set the standard for all of us.” In a 2017 Moscow Times op-ed, Russian journalist Elizaveta Osetinskaya wrote of this new phase: “Yandex’s company culture has changed as Russia’s political momentum has gravitated towards conservatism and isolationism.” Putin’s implacable opponent, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, had complained that Yandex News was hiding reports about his activities from its news feed. Yandex, Osetinskaya wrote, insisted that “its results are automatically generated by algorithms.” (The Navalny movement has long posed a challenge for Yandex. In 2011 the Federal Security Service had required the company to disclose details about financial contributors to Navalny through Yandex’s money service.)
The environment Yandex operated in was also becoming increasingly nationalistic. In 2014, after months of protests in Ukraine forced a pro-Russian president out of office, Putin engineered the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and stoked a violent separatist movement in the country’s Donbas region. In this darkening climate, dissent from the Kremlin line was more unwelcome than ever.
At a media conference a few weeks after Crimea’s annexation, Putin famously told reporters that the internet was a “CIA project.” He singled out Yandex for being “developed with Western influence” and suggested that its registration in the Netherlands was “not only for tax reasons but for other considerations too.”
Not long after, Sergey Petrenko, the head of Yandex’s operation in Ukraine, the company’s second biggest market, went on “indefinite leave” after posting on Facebook his support for what he called a “purge” of pro-Russian separatists from his home city of Odesa. Petrenko later posted on Facebook that during Russia’s takeover of Crimea he had “called Arkady and said literally ‘This is a war between our countries, we need to do something, we need to go out and say that it can't be done, we have an audience of millions who need to know this.’” But “nothing happened afterwards.”
To mark the company’s 20th anniversary in 2017, Putin visited Yandex’s Moscow offices, as Volozh’s guest. “I don’t have friction with the state,” Volozh told Wired UK several months before the visit. “Just like I don't have friction with the weather.” Ahead of Putin’s arrival, employees were reportedly told not to take bathroom breaks, and the Kremlin recommended they dress casually, to appear “as close to real life as possible,” sources told the Russian outlet Kolokol (The Bell). Sokirko, the software engineer, who had publicly vowed to spit on Putin if given the chance, was asked by his supervisors not to come to the office that day. “It’s not all that important,” he wrote on Facebook at the time. “I have a pretty good job.”
Indeed, despite the Kremlin’s growing presence, as Osetinskaya noted in her Moscow Times article, the ambiance at Yandex remained largely congenial: “As is the norm at other leading tech companies, Yandex staff enjoy a free atmosphere of creativity, informal dress code, open-space offices, and hip cafés where employees play video games.”
Putin’s visit, during which he chatted with Alisa, Yandex’s voice assistant, and watched a demo of Yandex’s self-driving technology, certainly looked like the bestowal of his blessing on Yandex and its leader. Yet the president remained wary of his country’s largest tech company.
In 2019, after arduous negotiations with the Kremlin, Yandex put in place a new corporate governance structure. As The Financial Times reported, the Kremlin initially demanded veto power over Yandex’s entire board and control over its Dutch holding company. It ended up settling for two seats on the board and a Kremlin-friendly foundation with a “golden share” in the company that, the FT wrote, gave it “the power to block transactions and temporarily remove Yandex’s management if it deems it in the national interest.”
“It was sort of a deal with the devil,” says Esther Dyson, who joined the Yandex board in 2006. (She stressed, though, that Yandex had been transparent throughout the process, and that the company issued a public statement on the restructuring.) Though Volozh rarely so much as hinted at frustration with the state, he must have found these negotiations unpleasant. One can only speculate whether Segalovich, had he been alive, would have pushed back against the golden share deal. But Segalovich was gone, and Putin’s grasp was only tightening.
Lev Gershenzon left Yandex in 2012, one year after its IPO, using the proceeds from the sale of his stock options to start a tech company in Berlin. He departed in part because he thought that Yandex was overly preoccupied with its business in Russia, at the expense of opportunities abroad. The company, he says, “wasn’t ready to aggressively penetrate foreign markets and invest in global expansion.”
But though it might not have been fast enough for Gershenzon, change was happening. Volozh had been slowly making Yandex into what he called a “trans-local company,” bringing products proven in Russia into markets where competitors were weak. Yandex set up its first international office in 2005, in Ukraine, and in the following years it expanded into Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. In 2009, it established its first toehold in America, opening Yandex Labs in Palo Alto, a 10-minute drive from the Googleplex. The idea, in part, was to hire 20 or so engineers who could share with Moscow the latest trends in Silicon Valley.
Like many of his California peers, Volozh more recently got interested in autonomous transportation. In 2018, Yandex launched what it called “the world’s first robo-taxi service,” in Russia’s high-tech city of Innopolis. The 4,000 or so residents of the city could hail one of Yandex’s driverless taxis free of charge. “Everything which is easy to automate should be automated,” Volozh said in a speech in Armenia the following year.
In an early sign of its designs on the American market, Yandex demonstrated a self-driving vehicle in 2019 at CES, the annual consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas. And in 2020, the company announced the selection of Ann Arbor as “the perfect testing ground for innovations in transportation,” with the city’s “wealth of research and engineering facilities and many bright young minds.”
Volozh framed his vision of Yandex’s global expansion in terms of target metropolises, not nations. For services like taxis, scooters, food delivery, and ecommerce, “you analyze the market by cities,” he told an Israeli interviewer last November. For Yandex the key cities were Paris, London, Tel Aviv, and Dubai.
In January, ahead of my expected meeting with Volozh in Tel Aviv, I had lunch in Concord, Massachusetts, with John Boynton, president of the investment firm Firehouse Capital and chair of the Yandex board. He told me he had become interested in the Soviet Union on a trip to Moscow and Leningrad in the early 1980s with his Concord High School classmates. He met Volozh in 1990 and was one of Yandex’s first investors. Volozh “operates on a very high plane,” says Boynton. And because “Arkady is typically several steps ahead” of everyone else at Yandex, part of Boynton’s job has been to “help translate” Volozh’s vision into action.
That vision, Boynton was eager to tell me, was rapidly materializing in America and beyond. Press coverage for the Rover robot had been a PR dream. In a local Tucson news segment called “Ordering the Future,” a University of Arizona administrative official gushed about “students taking selfies” with the Rovers and “kind of pet[ting] them as they go on their way.” Yandex’s fourth generation of autonomous vehicles—Hyundai Sonatas equipped with the company’s own software and sensors—were being tested on the streets of Ann Arbor. In the global race for preeminence in self-driving, Yandex was betting on its proprietary lidar sensors, the latest of which, developed to cope with Russia’s often frigid, unforgiving driving conditions, could develop a real-time image of the road up to 550 yards ahead. Yango Deli, Yandex’s 15-minute delivery app for produce and snacks, was up and running in Paris and London. In November 2021, Yandex had announced a partnership with the Middle Eastern operator for the French global grocery chain Carrefour to make deliveries to Carrefour customers in Dubai using autonomous robots.
This global game plan “was clearly driven by Arkady,” Ilya Strebulaev, a professor at Stanford Business School and until recently a Yandex board member, told me.
Perhaps, though, the strategy was belated. Yandex leaders were realizing that the company’s growth prospects in Russia were limited. For one thing, Yandex increasingly faced competition in Russia’s information economy, not least from government-controlled Sberbank, which is run by German Gref, a Putin associate and a former Yandex board member. Sberbank’s major focus is transport, including self-driving cars—exactly the business Yandex was trying so hard to develop. With its government ties, Boynton told me ruefully, Sberbank could draw on more or less unlimited resources; the company was luring talented Yandex workers with offers to triple their pay.
Yandex also faced the perpetual problem of Russia’s best young tech minds leaving for jobs in the West. To try to keep them, Yandex had developed its own training and education programs in conjunction with Russian universities, and in Moscow the company paid salaries high enough to compete with Western companies like Google. If a Yandex worker did leave for a job abroad, Boynton told me, Yandex went to considerable effort to understand “exactly why.” In Volozh’s vision, a Yandex job in Moscow should be on par with a position in Silicon Valley.
In the first week of the Ukraine invasion, Gershenzon was not the only former or current Yandex employee to denounce the company for “hiding information” about the war. “I celebrate the deafening silence of Yandex. What a blessing that Ilya Segalovich doesn’t hear this,” wrote Sergey Petrenko, the former head of Yandex Ukraine, in a sarcastic Facebook post on February 28. Three days later, he posted again about his former employer: “All I’m going to say is that among the human vices, I believe cowardice is one of the main ones.” When I reached out to Petrenko a few days later, Odesa was under the imminent threat of assault from Russian forces, and I received no response.
In a note announcing his resignation, Ruslan Musaev, a project manager, wrote on Facebook, “I consider the company’s actions a crime and complicity in war and murders and I don’t want to be a part of it.” Sokirko, the former Yandex engineer, told me that probably “90 percent of Yandex employees are against the war.” He had been jailed for his participation in antiwar protests in Moscow and then released.
By March 5, ten days into the conflict, there had still been no public word from Volozh. I sent him an email. It was a Saturday in Israel. “Shabbat Shalom," I greeted him. "I cannot begin to imagine the circumstances you now face. I am reaching out now in hopes of engaging in a conversation.”
The questions I planned to ask him were obvious enough. Why was he maintaining a public silence? How did he respond to Musaev’s post branding the company complicit in “wars and murders?” Had he communicated his views on the war to anyone in the Kremlin? What was Yandex’s future in Russia and beyond?
I imagined him frantically working through the night with his team in Moscow to keep Yandex from collapsing. Just six days into the war, Forbes reported, the market capitalization of Yandex had plunged from its November 2021 peak of $30 billion to below $7 billion, while Volozh’s net worth, recently as high as $2.6 billion, was down to $580 million. (Nasdaq has halted trading in Yandex shares since February 28.)
Meanwhile, Western partners were continuing to undo ties with the company. Grubhub terminated its partnership with Yandex. The future of the self-driving research operation in Ann Arbor was uncertain. DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that had sourced its results in part from Yandex’s index, paused its partnership with the company. In the UK, a spokesperson for the Liberal Democratic party compared Yandex to Huawei in China and said “any company that is in any way propping up the Putin regime is potentially on the sanctions list.”
Then Dyson and Strebulaev resigned from the board, releasing a joint statement: “In the current political environment in Russia, it has become impossible for the team to continue to provide a free and open platform for information for the Russian public without breaking the law and putting the company and its employees at risk.”
While Volozh remained silent, Yandex’s Moscow-based executive director, Tigran Khudaverdyan, who had been Volozh’s number two since 2019, assumed the role of the company’s voice. “What is happening is unbearable,” he wrote on March 2 in a Facebook post. “War is a monstrous thing. Today, many people are demanding that the company immediately get up on top of an armored car and loudly state its position. I believe that any actions we take should be dictated not by emotional impulses, but by key priorities.” The two most important ones, he said, were “employees’ safety” and “keeping key services for Yandex users operational.” Services like search, taxis, and food delivery, he argued, were “as essential” to Russians “as electricity and water supply.” (On March 4, the Russian government blocked Russians’ access to both Facebook and Twitter, and passed a law that criminalized the use of words like “war” and “invasion” to describe its attack on Ukraine.)
Still, the company strived for normalcy. When I talked to Boynton on the phone on March 8, he told me that “everyone is coping” as best they can at Yandex. A Moscow source in a position to know told me the company was planning a “big party” for its workers in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, always a major festivity in Russia.
And while the US and European governments were sanctioning other Russian business figures with Kremlin ties, Yandex executives were seemingly spared—that is, until March 15, when the EU slapped an asset freeze and travel ban on Khudaverdyan. The EU’s official journal cited Gershenzon’s post about Yandex “hiding information” and revealed that on February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the Yandex deputy CEO and other Russian business leaders had met with Putin at the Kremlin to discuss an action plan in the wake of Western sanctions. Khudaverdyan resigned immediately.
With the Russian economy in shreds and Putin rapidly closing anything left of a free internet, the tech-worker brain drain was becoming a frantic mass exodus. Thousands of those who could afford to were fleeing a country that was “flying into an abyss,” as one Russian tech executive told The Financial Times, escaping to Cyprus, Armenia, and beyond. Some 25,000 Russians had reportedly arrived in Georgia within the first two weeks of the invasion. For the many more left behind, including untold thousands of Yandex workers, there’s the very real prospect that the Russian economy and tech sector will be isolated for years or decades, leaving them without a livelihood.
One conceivable way for Yandex to protect and retain at least some of its workers might be to bring them from Moscow to Israel. The country has a bustling tech industry, and it does not appear to want to restrict Yandex’s business activities there. Israel might also be a base for Yandex’s bid to deepen its presence in the United Arab Emirates, with which Israel has friendly relations and which has so far not imposed sanctions on Russia. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Yandex had approached the government about bringing over 800 workers, but an Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson told me, “it seems no such requests were submitted by the company."
The company could still stabilize in an increasingly isolated Russia, even if its global ambitions are dashed. With Apple Pay now shut off to some Russian customers, Yandex Pay could gain market share, and the same might go for other services where Yandex no longer faces foreign competition. A Chinese buyer might make an offer for parts of the company or even all of it. Alternatively, a Kremlin-controlled firm like Sberbank could take it over, a fulfillment of the Kremlin’s apparent designs on Yandex as, in effect, a national-security property. Yandex perhaps will sell Yandex News to a Kremlin-friendly Russian buyer: There are reportedly talks of a sale to the social network VKontakte. More ominous still, Russian officials might stage a trumped-up case on tax fraud or the like against the company, as they did against Khodorkovsky and Yukos years ago, and then insist on the forfeiture of Yandex’s assets to the state.
On March 11, I heard from Yandex that Volozh, who’d been silent for 16 days, wanted to talk. A spokesperson arranged for a Zoom call with him that day. Twelve minutes before the call was supposed to begin, the spokesperson texted me that she’d have to postpone the meeting. “Something urgent has come up,” she said, without elaborating. There has been no word since.
I spoke with Strebulaev a few days after he resigned from the board, and I asked whether he thought it was all over for the company. “I don’t know,” he replied. But Volozh, two years shy of 60, could move on with a new venture, he said. “If Arkady decides to do something else, maybe in Israel,” Strebulaev told me, “I think he is going to be successful. People love him. People believe in him,” and “people will follow.” He reflected on his first meeting with Volozh, over a two-hour lunch in London in 2018, the conversation spilling over into Volozh’s avid interest in Israeli archaeology. Volozh is “always teeming with ideas,” Strebulaev said. “He kind of lives in the future.”
Volozh reportedly has a Maltese passport and an Israeli one; it’s now likely he will live the rest of his years outside of Russia. Still, his career and even his life might be framed as “the one who stayed behind.” He could have joined the brain exodus from the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and tried to make his fortune in the West. Instead he made one in Russia, and he now stands to lose a big portion of it there. The duality he tried for so long to maintain, as both Russian and Western, has collapsed—always the risk in the implicit bargain he made with Putin’s Kremlin.
As to whether his apparent passivity in the face of the war in Ukraine amounts to a moral stain on his reputation, history and his own conscience will judge. It is tempting, though, to offer him the sort of line from Russian classical literature that the Yandex search engine was invented to find. “Shtob umno postupat', odnovo uma—malo,” Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment: “It takes more than just intelligence to act intelligently.”
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