There are surely those among you who are scratching their heads and wondering why Doctorow makes such a big deal about the disruption of the internet communications. You may say to yourselves: my kids could profit if our internet went down.
Well friends, let me explain what you likely do not know about today’s Russia after 25 years of Putin’s overseeing its reindustrialization. The industrial and general economic landscape is in many areas far ahead of Europe and of the USA. There has been a concentration of business, or shall we call it a monopoly established in many sectors which makes this country particularly vulnerable to changes in the rules of the game, as for example the current downgrading if not outright blockage of internet services at the order of the government authorities under advice from the Security Services (aka the FSB), supposedly to prevent terror attacks and drone strikes, which are occurring with ever greater intensity and frequency nonetheless.
We all know how several of the giants of Silicon Valley and of the IT sector in America were created by Russian immigrants or sons and daughters of such immigrants. There is nothing in their DNA but a lot in the culture, in the stress on math and engineering in the society to explain this. Just think over who founded Google.
Well Russia’s population of math and programming geniuses was not cleaned out in the 1990s. Plenty of talent was deeply patriotic and was ready to swing into action when the opportunity came under the new administration of Putin at the turn of the new millennium. These are the engineers who created the world beating new strategic arms that Putin first presented to the domestic and foreign audience in 2018. But beyond military industry, there were plenty of Russian geniuses to found and develop corporations in the high tech sector. Russia’s very own Google – called Yandex – also grew from the leading Search Engine into the general engine of growth across many sectors of the consumer economy. Yandex Travel is Russia’s equivalent to booking.com. Yandex Go, its division providing taxis, scooters and other forms of mobility to the public has no peer in the USA – it holds a monopoly position in the taxi sector that it built to completion only in the past two or three years when it bankrupted or bought out nearly all local providers of taxi services across this vast land by drastic pricing wars initially, by luring away the drivers of competing companies and by introducing world leading technologies such as geolocation functions in its App so that you need not identify where you are and with the help of the system’s memory of your past trips, need only start to type where you want to go and the system fills in the rest.
The problem with this technical and business building success is that when the internet and GPS systems are restricted or altered by the authorities, Yandex Go services are voided. They send cars to the wrong address or, as is the case today in Petersburg, the system completely loses control of communications with its drivers and orders via the App and even by phone cannot be put through. Since Yandex eliminated all those little companies and freelancers at the local level who did not need the GPS to find addresses, there is no taxi service whatsoever available to the public for extended periods of time. That is not merely an inconvenience, it is a ruin-your-day experience for the public and a nightmare for businesses that depend on taxis to move their personnel around in cities.
Now if Russia’s fate as a nation depended on the severe restrictions being imposed on the communications network, then I would listen to the argument. However, it is patently clear that 1) these measures are ineffective against the Ukrainian forces and 2) Russia has the armaments to end the Ukrainian government and its attacks in a couple of days if leadership can summon the decisiveness to do what is needed.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026
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Gilbert Doctorow 