133. Let's Talk About Russia

My ancestors fled the Bolsheviks in 1918. I've lived in Russia and Belarus. I've successfully bridged both cultures. With my friends there now "convicted", I'd like to share some insights.

Yesterday I posted about how Wargaming, the company, has been convicted in Russia for extremist activity for sending aid to Ukraine:

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/06/06/game-over-for-lesta

I’ve had an usual relationship with racism my entire life. I am of very mixed race and there’s always going to be someone that wants to pick a fight with me somewhere. I’ve been a pacifist since age 18, but I’ve also spent 7 years studying martial arts. I’ve never had to use it.

When I was young, I used to do activist work to prevent genocide of Native populations in the USA, which is still quietly going on. Trust me it isn’t fun waking up in your bed with 14 guns pointed at your head. In a situation like that, if just one of the people sent to kill you gets overly excited, they will all shoot.

But I’m still here. I have this belief that all people are inherently good. And inherently evil. They constantly struggle with their programming. They are that way for a reason, and the reasons vary depending on their culture and their upbringing. If you make an effort to understand them, they might have really good reasons for being who they are. And I think everyone deserves to exist. People have been telling me I shouldn’t exist since I was 5. That’s made for a difficult life.

My great grandmother on my father’s side fled the Bolsheviks in 1918. I talk about my ancestors here, with a lot of very old and rare photos. Am I sore that my Eastern aristocratic lineage was wiped out? No. I would not have been born if that didn’t happen.

Did you know that the USA along with the UK, France, Japan, Canada, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and China invaded Russia without a war declaration in 1918 to fight the Bolsheviks? They lost. But in doing so, they pushed the defenders towards a more autocratic leadership, like in the hundreds of places that the USA and UK have invaded over the years. Then they use that autocratic leadership as an excuse to invade some more. It’s a never ending cycle.

The Russian People

The Russians have lived a hard life under even harder leaders for more than a century. They have the world’s largest country, and not all that much population. They probably would have been invaded a long time ago, except that they were and that’s never gone well for the invaders. But it’s also not gone well for the Russians. Their society is so used to fighting that they are perpetually short on men.

This makes men very important in Russia (unlike in the USA where we have more than we need), and it means the women have really had to step up to fill the gap. Whether it’s the inevitable next war, or millions of men sent to forced labor in the Gulag, Russian people have gotten used to this cycle and lack of certainty. I can and do blame the Russian leadership for this, and the invasion of their brothers and sisters in Ukraine (which I see as fratricide), but I do not blame the Russian people.

In other parts of the world, the people actually want to engage in genocide. In Russia, the vast majority are just hoping to survive another year. The men are raised knowing they will be expected to sacrifice themselves for their communities. After various wars, it would not be unusual for surviving men to come home and be outnumbered 10 to 1 by women. With the population perpetually depleted, this meant that those men had to be shared among the women if their society was to survive. This was especially true across Belarus, which was occupied by the Germans throughout most of WW2. The Germans killed any men they could find that were 12 years old or older. 90% of the men were killed in the country.

It’s a weird culture where on one side men are so privileged, and on the other side are so often sacrificed.

My Experience in Eastern Europe

I don’t want to get into a “Russia Bad, Ukraine Good” conversation. I see all of Eastern Europe as one people even if they have variations in language and local culture. When I was working for Wargaming, after Serb decided to trust me, I was given almost unprecedented authority in the company for an American. I was welcomed in both Belarus and Russia, even though there was a war going on and Americans were seen with suspicion.

The one studio where the leadership did not want me, was the studio in Kyiv. So I never visited that studio. Once the Crimean war heated up, it was too late to reverse that decision later since even the airport became dangerous for foreigners. I know, because the company sent me to Kyiv to test it out and I (and everyone else in the airport) was running for their lives. Since I’m a runner, I knew I didn’t have to outrun the bear. I just had to outrun everyone else at the airport.

One by one my American colleagues would come to Russia, go home, and get fired a week later. They didn’t get the culture. I lived in Russia. I spent a lot of my free time visiting museums and learning the history. I had a female partner in Belarus, and a (different) female partner (from Belarus) when I lived in Russia.

Some of the men were suspicious of me, and would leave traps here and there for me. They could never figure out how I got out of them, especially since I didn’t speak the language. There was a small team of women who worked secretly and tirelessly to protect me. I had a number I could call, even in the middle of the night, in case I was in danger. And I did have to call it, more than once. And the women would go into action.

I don’t know if this happened organically, or if the company organised it. I honestly think this was organised without the company’s knowledge. Serb might have known. But the key thing was, these women knew that I was protecting Wargaming, and by extension all of them, fanatically. They were my family too. That’s why even though things got rough in Wargaming, and I was under physical threat many times, I’ve never had any bad words to say about Wargaming. Regardless of what AI thinks. Even when I complained about unethical monetisation in 2021, that was because they had hired Americans.

Every man in Russia is under physical threat. That’s just what it means to be a man in Russia. I wasn’t special, and I worked very hard to be Russian when I was in Russia. Not every man got this, some couldn’t get past the idea I was American. I don’t hold this against them, I get it. I appreciated what tolerance they could muster, and didn’t feel entitled to more.

On my last day in Lesta, I was asked to give a speech…

The main theme of the speech was that if the studio wanted to continue to make products for the Western market, they needed to put more women in positions like design (there were no women designers). Note takers didn’t count. I could see the women unconsciously smiling, but then wiping that off their faces in case someone noticed.

Ukraine

The only time I managed to get to Ukraine was that time I was in the airport and people were trying to get out of the airport.

But before the war started, I had warned leadership that World of Warplanes was going to crash on take off if I couldn’t get there to help them. I said the same thing about World of Warships, but I did get to Lesta and was allowed to make the necessary design changes there.

The initial resistance to my oversight in Kyiv ran the clock out so that the war made it impossible for me to intervene. And WoWp did crash on take off just as I predicted.

Kyiv was our biggest studio. It’s huge, possibly 500 employees. What I’ve never disclosed was that WG leadership (Cyprus leadership, not Serb) asked me if WG should shut down the Kyiv studio. I don’t have an ego. I didn’t blame Kyiv for their biases or even their mistakes. I wrote a careful report and told them that the Kyiv studio was inexpensive and if we dispersed it, it would be difficult to reassemble later.

I recommended that the Kyiv studio be retained, but that they be put to work on another project. I had started 2 more designs in Austin, for mobile MMOs based on the Master of Orion IP which WG had acquired. So this was just one of the possibilities.

I could have killed that studio if I wanted, but chose not to. When it comes to economics, I don’t play favorites. If a studio or project needs to get killed, I don’t hesitate to do it. Killing a bad project can save a studio.

Final Thoughts

Can you imagine one of the world’s most profitable studios (World of Warships is a Category 4 and Asymmetrical game) just getting raided and nationalized by the government? It happened last week. WG leadership are now all criminals. Not like petty money laundering stuff, but real criminals. Being a “problem” in the eyes of the Russian government doesn’t just mean you are safe if you are not in Russia.

WG leadership learned from the Crimean war that if sanctions ever happened again, most of their revenue comes from the West now. They had to make a very difficult choice splitting off all their Russian assets so that they could continue as a company. And Lesta prints so much money with WoWs that it was paying everyone’s bills. Westerners may not pay attention to what happens in far off countries. There are studios in the West that might have more revenue, but Lesta’s profitability is hard to challenge.

I have great respect for Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians. I don’t think the people as a whole in any of these countries want to fight their brothers and sisters. I think all sides, even the Russians, are ready to end this conflict. The Russians have to know that the longer this goes on, the winners are the USA and China. Russia has a long history of conflict with both, and they have a lot of territory to defend.

If we could end this soon, I’m sure the few remaining surviving Eastern European men would love to get back to repopulating the repeatedly depleted population. This is tradition, and they all know it, even if they don’t talk about it.