Is the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 the end of Russia as a brand? That's what one of the most successful Russian professionals in the tech industry, Max Skibinsky, thinks. He has a point: Whoever is really responsible for the tragedy, it's the perception that matters.
A Moscow-trained physicist, Skibinsky is a serial entrepreneur associated with the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz LLC. Although he has spent the last two decades in the United States, people in Silicon Valley see him as a Russian — an identity he worries may turn into a stigma. As he put it in a lengthy blog post:
Personally I'm thinking of calling myself Euro-Slavic instead of "Russian." It's a flimsy defense, yet Russian brand, after already being tainted with gulag and the rest of its toxic legacy, is now synonymous with mass murder of innocent civilians. Nothing of value is left to recover.