Socialize the Data Centres!

Iwas born in 1984, in the Minsk region of Belarus, in a new mining town called Soligorsk, founded in the late fifties. More or less the whole labour force was brought in from outside, and there’s little sense of national belonging. My father’s family came from the north of Russia; my mother, who was born near Moscow, arrived in the seventies with a degree in mining from Ukraine. The town is dominated by one huge state-owned enterprise that mines potassium and produces fertilizers which sell very well on the world market: it’s still the most profitable company in Belarus. My entire family worked for it, from grandparents to uncles and aunts. The ussr dissolved when I was seven, and while there may have been all sorts of problems with living in a small city like Soligorsk, they were not linked to the ussr’s disappearance. Under Lukashenko, who came to power when I was ten, Belarus was officially bilingual, but Russian was the dominant language, and growing up in Soligorsk felt just like being in a province of Russia. We were much more connected to events in Moscow than in Minsk. Initially there was no Belarusian television; the national media were not very strong, so the newspapers we got, and most of the tv programmes we watched at home, were Russian. People in Kaliningrad probably felt more cut off than I did in Soligorsk. Later, Lukashenko realized that if he didn’t control the flow of media in the country, he could lose the ability to make a case for Belarus to exist as an independent state, however pro-Russian. So he started limiting Russian programming to three or four hours a day, and mixing in some local news and Belarusian programming. But then people like my parents bought satellite dishes and continued watching Russian tv, not particularly because they mistrusted Lukashenko’s politics, but because the local stuff was so boring.

My cousin was lucky enough to have studied for her bachelor’s degree in St Petersburg, before moving to Holland. So there was an expectation in my family that I might be able to do something outside the country. I wanted to spend a year in a high school in the us, but that didn’t work out. The next best thing was to go to the American University in Bulgaria, which had been set up in the early nineties with Soros and usaid—and maybe some State Department—money, in a former school for communist leaders in a small town called Blagoevgrad, near the border with Macedonia and Greece. Like Soligorsk it’s a small town, of 70,000 people; an odd, poor place, where a lot of the students came from the former Soviet bloc or adjacent countries: Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia. Many, like myself, were on scholarships. There was a lot of ethnic tension on the campus when I arrived, in 2001, soon after the Kosovo conflict. I spent four years there, and learnt far more about the former Soviet Union than I ever did in Belarus.

The mission statement of the university was to educate the future leaders of the region, its alumni set for political careers in government or civil society. Some did that, but its graduates mostly found themselves working in business—in consulting, auditing or accounting firms. I ended up double-majoring in business administration and economics. My initial ambition was to work in an investment bank. What saved me from that was a ten-week internship at JP Morgan in Bournemouth, of all places, making sure all the trades went through; so if any of the traders mistyped ‘0’ as ‘1’, you would have to catch it. I never understood why they couldn’t just automate the process. I realized investment banking was probably not for me.