Dictatorship and startups: how Belarus became a technological hub

Minsk, Belarus. On Friday night, Zybitskaya Street - or simply Zyba, as locals call it - turns into a grand party with hipsters in bright shirts, narrow dark jeans and black-rimmed glasses, showing how carefree you can be in a country that is called the last dictatorship in Europe .

Over the past couple of years, Zyba has become an island in the very center of Minsk - still a sterile, unfashionable city, with Soviet architecture, and people running by and afraid to contact each other. At the same time, on the Zyb crowd of friendly young people move from bar to bar, drink whiskey and coke and smoke endlessly.

Many of those who are carouseling here belong to the emerging IT field in Belarus - young, experienced, promising designers, well-read and shy engineers, and those who also want to get closer to them. According to the Belarusian government, more than 30 000 technical specialists are currently working in Minsk (2 has a million inhabitants in Minsk), many of them are developing mobile applications that are used by more than a billion people in 193 countries.

One of the Minsk tech-heroes is 35-year-old Dmitry Kovalev, an artist who worked a couple of years ago in MSQRD. This is a smartphone application that allows people to put different masks on top of their faces on selfies.

Popular Minsk bar, Kalyannaya number 1, which is part of the social scene of the city. Photo: google map

In 2016, Mr. Kovalev could not even imagine that his respect for the acting craft and ecoactivism Leonardo DiCaprio would advance the company so far. But before this year’s Academy Awards, Mr. Kovalev and his colleagues developed a program that allows users to look like DiCaprio, who holds two Oscars. Many celebrities, and even Mom DiCaprio, by the way, have tried this application, including on the red carpet. “I like what Leo does, how he plays and what he does for our planet,” said Kovalev, after DiCaprio received an Oscar. “I was rooting for him.”

10 days after the Oscars Facebook bought MSQRD. The founders, whose average age was about 25 years, moved to London or the States. Together with some of them, Kovalev developed a new startup in Minsk - AR Squad - it creates augmented reality.

One of the first masks that the company developed was the face of Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, who governs the country for more than two decades. He is known for his original antics - for example, he can collect potatoes in his estate or take his son Nicholas, who is usually called Kolya, to sit at international meetings in military uniform. Mr. Lukashenko’s mask included his signature hair and thick mustaches, but did not seem offensive to anyone. On the contrary, Lukashenko realized that the technology industry could become a magic wand that would help him stop his country's chronic dependence on Russia.

“Creating an IT state is our ambitious, but attainable goal,” Lukashenka said at a meeting of legislators and bureaucrats this summer. “This will allow us to make Belarus even more modern and prosperous, and allow Belarusians to look to the future with confidence.”

Lukashenko, who once called the Internet a “pile of rubbish,” began to utter unbelievable words for the former collective farm manager about the need to develop artificial intelligence, unmanned vehicles and blockchain technologies. The government has taken several steps to encourage the development of the technical industry, for example, granted visa-free entry to citizens of 79 countries, including all Western states. Lukashenka also wants to remove restrictions on foreign currency transfers in order to stimulate venture financing.

Belarus is promoting top-level technical talents inherited from the Soviet past, said Arkady Dobkin, who emigrated to the US in 1990's and founded a software company there.

Minsk office Viber. Photo: Facebook / Viber (Minsk office)

Dobkin is now the executive director of EPAM, who is programming for the world's leading technology companies and is considered one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world. EPAM is headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania, but its main development center is located in Minsk, with more than 6 000 specialists working here. “I think that the lack of oil made Belarus do all this,” said 57-year-old Dobkin. “Here universities produce more highly qualified specialists than the domestic market requires.”

Many locals note that the government’s talk about the growing quality of the technology center is a convenient direction for a country that depends heavily on Russia to reduce fuel consumption and political patronage.

Sergei Chaly, an economist and former government official, called Belarus "a dying country with Bitcoins."

Photo: Facebook / Wargaming Minsk Team

Politics doesn't seem like a big problem to many techies, despite the fact that young political activists use group chats in Viber - An Israeli company whose development center is located in Minsk, - to coordinate actions and plan meetings. Son Lukashenko is a fan of the game World of Tanks, multiplayer Belarusian online game in which people fight in tank battles.

With its 200 millions of registered users worldwide, it is among the top ten games in terms of total revenue. Tanks are of great cultural importance for Belarus and other former Soviet republics, where almost every family has a person who fought on the same tanks during the war. “He plays tanks, but this is all under control,” Lukashenka said about his son on a television meeting with school teachers. “One hour for tanks is 1,5 hours for music,” the president added, explaining how he controls his son’s time, which he spends on the game. “Two hours for tanks — four hours for music.” “Four hours is difficult,” Lukashenka said, “so he doesn’t play for longer than one hour.”