Western tech firms were sucked into the vortex of the Kremlin’s crackdown on opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s organization in the run-up to last week’s predictably dull Duma elections. Even though Navalny has been in prison since January 2021, and while many of his key associates have since been arrested or encouraged to leave the country, the Kremlin’s hard-edged approach left nothing to chance. It was the latest demonstration of famed Russian writer Arkady Vaksberg’s private observation to one of us nearly thirty years ago: “In Russia, it’s not enough to win. You need to win with cruelty.”
Sideswiped: Apple, Google, and the Kremlin’s Make-Believe Election (Steven Feldstein, Andrew S. Weiss, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
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