Russia Is Not About Vodka Anymore, It’s About Hackers. Should Russians Be Offended?
February 25, 2009 |
Yesterday an author of Ecommerce Journal published an interesting article about doing online business with Russian people supposedly based on the author’s own experience and it is no wonder that today all the Russian publications – both online and traditional media outlets – are full of reactions to that article as it suggests there’s a totally new perception of Russians now: my country is now associated with our coders, developers and hackers more than it traditionally is with fur hats and alcohol. But unfortunately after reading the article myself I can’t help but feel that an old lie is replaced with a new one for no apparent reason and there’s nothing really positive in trying to make a shift from bad to even worse.
Working for the last 3 years in online business myself, most of the time from my apartment in the middle of Siberia, I think I’ve tried many times to prove to everyone willing to listen that my country is not as barbaric as people in the US and frequently in the Western Europe tend to think about it. I don’t know exactly how many times I’ve explained that we actually have internet access in our homes – even those of us living far from Moscow – and that we don’t have bears walking the streets – even those of us living in the middle of Siberia. So I guess it’s not bad that people have finally realized that Russia is now a noticeable player in IT, not only in vodka manufacturing, but it does not feel good that everything we are supposed to do online is hacking everything we can and stealing money from credit cards owned by innocent people in the US or Europe.
Basically the author of the article replaces one set of stereotypes – “Vodka, frost, bears, matreshkas, hats with ear-flaps” – with a new set – “Carders, phishers, hackers, cheap scripts, shady schemes, exchangers, WebMoney”. And unfortunately I can’t help but feel it’s not quite fair to replace innocent things like matreshkas and ear-flaps with illegal phishing and hacking. True, many people in Russia do have unique skills in IT and apply them with enough talent to get noticed, and as with any skills these can be used for good or for bad and not all Russian coders apply such skills to create malware – some of them come up with impressive projects of their own while others work in well-known internet and software giants and it is pretty difficult to imagine exactly how many Russian developers work behind the scenes in companies like Google or Microsoft.
Really, I don’t know why it was necessary to come up with something that is supposed to make Russians happy – admitting our unique IT skills and our noble nature and ancient traditions – but refusing us the right to be a diverse nation with both good developers and hackers as well as entrepreneurs that don’t differ from entrepreneurs doing business in any other country – with the only exception being that we’ve been through a financial turmoil of this or that kind so many times that we are now creative enough to survive any new crisis the world economy can make us face.
Unfortunately after reading the description the author provides for a Russian partner in an internet business, I have a feeling that he only had one partner from Russia and simply does not have enough experience to judge us. No, we don’t really expect profits of 50% minimum or we won’t even consider working with you. And yes, we do use ICQ for communications with our local friends as ICQ is traditionally the most popular IM protocol in the former Soviet Union countries but we use Skype, Google Talk and whatever else you may need if we do business online – we are very early adopters in everything, communications means included.
What’s more, I think it is simply rude to talk about our New Year vacations lasting for 10 days and accusing us of forgetting about the priority you give to Catholic Christmas. Of course when you begin the new year on the 2nd or 3rd of January you won’t find your Russian partners online and working but we are simply doing exactly what you’ve been doing just days before that – celebrating our holiday. After all, we do not expect you to work during your Christmas vacations so why don’t you let us have ours for the holiday that we celebrate the most – New Year? Who exactly is to blame for the fact that the two vacations don’t coincide and you have your days off before the New Year while we enjoy our vacations in early January? We don’t try to insist you should work exactly when we do and we respect your own schedule so why don’t you respect ours?
Honestly, it may be a good idea to try and change the stereotypes from vodka to something else but is it really necessary to replace it with something negative like hackers and cybercrime? It now looks to me that whatever the Russians do – online or offline – there’s one huge idea in the conscience of people in the US: Russia is the country to be afraid of, no matter how much people from Russia pretend to be normal.
So it is no wonder that a Russian hacker now looks like a new Russian soldier or nuclear missile – it is the new weapon that is supposed to threaten the world from the East. As a Russian I don’t think it’s really that bad when the rest of the world is afraid of you – at least it restrains this “rest of the world” from attacking you. But on the other hand do we really have to serve as a menace to the world? We are not that dangerous, we are normal people with normal business ideas – some of us with excellent programming skills in addition – and we are not really that difficult to do business with. But the most important thing is that we are all different: same as you don’t expect all Americans to have the same habits and manners you should not really consider all Russians to be the same. And when we learn to deal with people based on their personal attitude and character instead of their nationality, we will finally reach the truly global internet where people will do business together without bothering about exactly how many thousands of miles separate the partners.
