soid

The day when my ex-employer Yandex went through an IPO in 2011. We were watching online streaming from New York in our headquarters in Moscow; YouTube streaming was not a thing back then. Unlike the common belief that the neoliberal wave after the Soviet collapse made Russians apolitical, it was not the case back then: our office was very much politically active. But very much politically misdirected. The common debate of the time in the office kitchen was whether Medvedev would run for the second term. Optimists argued he would, and then it's fine that a single-party rule for over a decade – happens in many places; pessimists pointed out that it didn't really matter because Putin was the real master behind this show. By revelations in 2022, we know Putin's men were already actively tightening the screws behind the scene working with the top management. It was not even at the level of conspiracy that something like that was happening. Snowden's leaks came out only in 2013 – before that, the Internet was in its infancy, when everything revolved around itself, and nothing, it seemed, could contain it.