MINSK

By Aliide Naylor

In 2018, Yaroslav Likhachevsky, the Belarusian CEO of medical tech initiative DeepDee relocated his company from Minsk to The Netherlands, anticipating future difficulties.

They all came too, terribly real.

Last year, the company shut down its last research and development office in Belarus and, in January, officially left the city tech hub.

“By last summer we’d built a remote team so it was not a big deal for us,” Likhachevsky said by telephone. The consequences of both COVID and Belarusian domestic politics are hard to disentangle, but the political crisis in Belarus has undoubtedly affected business in the traditionally tech-savvy region.

In 2017, Belarus’ ‘Hi-Tech-Park’ (HTP) granted more than 1,000 domestic companies massive tax breaks. Now, the companies formerly stationed there (and to which San Francisco Bay Area companies have previously outsourced their business), are rapidly departing.

“We didn’t trust the administration of the park anymore and we asked them to let us leave, and that was it, basically,” Likhachevsky said, “They let us go in March.”

The Belarusian tech industry employs some 70,000 people in the nation of 9.5 million, but this tiny proportion substantially bolsters Belarusian GDP.

BEACON FOR CAPABLE ENGINEERS

Belarus was pitched into turmoil by last year’s presidential election, with mass protests against what demonstrators said was widespread fraud in Lukashenko’s bid for a sixth term in office.

More than 100,000 protesters staged unprecedented weekly rallies and police responded brutally, rounding up demonstrators, with accounts of beatings in detention. More than 30,000 were held for various, generally short, periods, but the protests petered out.

Lukashenko, clearly shaken, went into defensive mode, seeking assistance from Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin while stressing Belarusian “sovereignty” to guard against the country being swallowed up by Russia. In May, he ordered an aircraft flying to Lithuania diverted to Minsk and a dissident journalist on board was arrested – prompting tough sanctions by the European Union, The national airline, Belavia, was barred from EU airspace.

HTP was a beacon of hope, employing the former Soviet state’s well-educated engineers. In 2018, the IT sector contributed 5.5 percent, an increase of 4 percent since 2011. In January-August 2019, it added a further 1.1 percent growth to GDP, despite the fact that it employed under 100,000 people, according to research published in local outlet naviny.by. It boasted an all-time record of $2.7 billion in exports for 2020.  

Some of its companies that allegedly cooperate with the Belarusian government have been sanctioned by “Western” states.

DeepDee isn’t an industry giant, but it symbolises a broader trend in the Belarusian tech sector. One of Belarus’s biggest tech exports is World of Tanks, a hugely popular online video game that made its founder a billionaire in 2016 – the first from Belarus.

Now, its Cyprus-based developer, Wargaming, has offices all around the world and employees are rapidly leaving or being relocated. Belarus’s flagship Belavia airline even unveiled a World of Tanks-themed jet back in 2018.

“One friend was relocated to Kyiv by the company. A lot of my colleagues went to Vilnius, some of them went to Warsaw,” said one Wargaming employee, Julia – a pseudonym to protect her identity.

Around 80 percent of her friends and connections are leaving, or have already left, and many of those friends and colleagues were arrested during the mass protests across 2020 and 2021, with most being detained for a period of approximately 15-20 days. Employing people from around the world, the company now faces problems importing developers, as well as exporting them.

Wargaming did not take a public stance against the Belarusian government, it did not sign any written protests and generally stayed out of politics. Last summer, the tech-heavy Belarusian economy was severely impacted by internet outages in the midst of the protests, and 2,000 investors, executives, and tech sector workers signed an open letter saying conditions were such that they could not function in the country.

Wargaming kept quiet.

“Startups are not born in an atmosphere of fear and violence. Startups are born in an atmosphere of freedom and openness,” the letter’s signatories said.

Wargaming did not respond to interview requests and voiced no public solidarity with its employees. But there were suggestions that they were offered help on an individual basis.

“At a civil level some people asked, please make statements, help us, to change the situation in Belarus,” said Julia. “At that moment a lot of people were offended by the leadership team.”

That caution, as it turned out, was entirely warranted.

Last September four employees of the San Francisco-headquartered PandaDoc startup were arrested in Minsk, in what human rights activists said was an act of hostage-taking, after the company’s founders joined protests against  Lukashenko.

“Employees of the Department of Financial Investigations (DFR) interviewed more than 100 employees of the company,” a statement on a dedicated website, SaveBelarusIT said. According to the company, the quartet was innocent and “in no way connected to” any statement by the companies’ founders.

Being apolitical seems now to be a safe bet.

TECH HUB WITHERS AWAY

The once-vibrant HTP appears to be dying. Now, there are the companies based there that appear to cooperate comfortably with the oppressive Belarusian regime.

Tech company LLC Synesis, which boasts the ability to detect faces, licence plates, object features and behaviours via simple video, was sanctioned in December. It is used both by the Interior Ministry and the Belarusian security service, still known by the Soviet-era acronym KGB, and is accused of providing “the Belarusian authorities with a surveillance platform”, using its capacity for facial recognition software to aid in the repression of civil society and “democratic opposition by the state apparatus in Belarus”.

The once-HTP still boasts the Flo period tracker among its success stories. The app recently set up shop in London, opening premises near Tower Bridge.

“I permanently moved to London and we celebrated the opening of our office there,” wrote CEO Dmitry Gursky on LinkedIn at the end of June. “Now we have 30 team members in the UK and planning to grow the UK team to 80 in December.”

Flo still appears to be recruiting in Minsk, according to tech website dev.by, “to Vilnius and Minsk offices with the possibility of relocation to Lithuania”. Gursky could not be reached for comment.

“They will probably keep some loyal companies, but they don’t care about the rest,” said Likhachevsky.