Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh updates his entrepreneurial bio. Russia shrinks to marginal mention.

Arkady Volozh, a co-founder and former CEO of the now-divided IT giant Yandex, has updated his entrepreneurial biography — and Russia is vanishing from his story.

The news outlet Agentstvo points out that the bio posted on the tech mogul’s website is careful not to mention Russia as the country where Volozh flourished as a tech innovator. Instead, he is described as “a Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor, and philanthropist.”

The same bio describes Yandex as “one of the largest internet companies in Europe” without so much as mentioning its Russian origins. Although CompTek (the Volozh-founded Russian company that first incubated Yandex) is mentioned among the executive’s achievements, its connection with Yandex is absent from his bio.

Meduza has reported extensively on Yandex, its role in suppressing the freedom of information in Putin’s Russia, and its part in enabling digitized mass surveillance. The independent media Proekt has recently included Volozh in its guide to the billionaires complicit in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Independent monitors at OVD-Info have recently noticed an ongoing tug-of-war over the English Wikipedia article about Volozh. A single user, whose IP address places him or her in Tel Aviv (where Volozh himself lives), keeps purging references to Russia from the billionaire entrepreneur’s biography. This also happens to be that user’s only contribution to Wikipedia.