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| What a difference a war makes. | 一场战争可以带来如此剧变。 |
| Just a few months ago, Yandex stood out as a rare Russian business success story, having mushroomed from a small start-up into a tech colossus that not only dominated search and ride-hailing across Russia, but boasted a growing global reach. | 就在几个月前，央捷科斯(Yandex)还是一个罕见的俄罗斯商业成功故事，它从一家小型初创企业迅速成长为科技巨头，不仅在俄罗斯的搜索引擎和网约车领域占据主导地位，而且在全球的影响力越来越大。 |
| A Yandex app could hail a taxi in far-flung cities like Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Oslo, Norway; or Tashkent, Uzbekistan; and the company delivered groceries in London, Paris and Tel Aviv. Fifty experimental Yandex robots trundled across the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, bringing Grubhub food orders to students — with plans to expand to some 250 American campuses. | 央捷科斯应用程序可以让你在科特迪瓦的阿比让、挪威的奥斯陆或者乌兹别克斯坦的塔什干等偏远的城市叫到出租车；该公司还在伦敦、巴黎和特拉维夫从事日杂生鲜的配送服务。在俄亥俄州立大学哥伦布分校，50个实验性机器人在校园里穿梭，运送学生在Grubhub上的点餐，公司计划将该业务扩大到全美250个大学校园。 |
| Often called “the coolest company in Russia,” Yandex employed more than 18,000 people; its founders were billionaires; and at its peak last November, it was worth more than $31 billion. Then President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine. | 央捷科斯经常被称为“俄罗斯最酷的公司”，雇用了逾1.8万名员工；它的创始人都是亿万富翁；在去年11月的巅峰时期，公司市值超过310亿美元（约合2100亿人民币）。然后，俄罗斯总统普京发动了入侵乌克兰的战争。 |
| Almost overnight, as Western investors bolted from Russia and Western governments imposed harsh economic sanctions, its value dropped to less than $7 billion. The Nasdaq stock exchange suspended trading in its shares. | 几乎在一夜之间，随着西方投资者撤离俄罗斯，西方政府实施严厉的经济制裁，公司市值降到了不足70亿美元。纳斯达克暂停了该公司的股票交易。 |
| The sudden distaste for most things Russian prompted the company to shutter various international businesses, including the delivery services in London, Paris and Columbus. | 随着人们对俄罗斯的很多东西突然心生厌恶，公司关闭了各种国际业务，包括它在伦敦、巴黎和哥伦布的递送服务。 |
| Thousands of employees — nearly a sixth of the total — fled the country. Its founder, Arkady Volozh, and his top deputy stepped aside after the European Union imposed sanctions on both, accusing them of abetting Kremlin disinformation. | 数以千计员工（占总数的近六分之一）逃离了俄罗斯。在欧盟对公司创始人阿尔卡季·沃洛日和他的高级副手实施制裁后，两人辞去了职务。欧盟指责他们支持克里姆林宫提供虚假信息。 |
| The company is not facing insolvency. But its sudden change of fortune serves not just as a cautionary tale for investors in an authoritarian country dependent on the whims of a single ruler. Yandex is emblematic, too, of the problems Russian companies face in a radically changed economic landscape and of the growing divisions over the war in society at large. | 这家公司并未破产。但是，在一个取决于独裁者心血来潮的威权国家，对投资者来说，它的命运突变不仅仅是一个警示。对于俄罗斯企业在经济格局发生根本性变化的情况下所面临的问题，以及整个社会对战争的分歧日益加剧，央捷科斯都具有代表性。 |
| Established as an internet search engine even before Google, Yandex offered myriad services, including e-commerce, maps, music streaming, cloud storage and self-driving cars. Foreign investors loved it, and to Russians it was a virtual genie — a combination of Google, Uber, Amazon and Spotify all rolled into one. But the company had an Achilles heel, one that was obscured until the Ukraine invasion. | 央捷科斯作为搜索引擎的历史甚至比谷歌还要久远，它提供多种服务，包括电子商务、地图、音乐流媒体、云存储和自动驾驶汽车。外国投资者喜欢它，对俄罗斯人来说，它是一个虚拟的精灵——集谷歌、优步、亚马逊和Spotify于一身。但该公司有一个致命弱点，直到俄罗斯入侵乌克兰才暴露出来。 |
| Its success as a search engine and service provider was founded, as is Google’s and that of other social media giants, on public trust. Before the war, around 50 million Russians visited its home page every day, where a list of the five top headlines was a main source of information for many. | 就像谷歌和其他社交媒体巨头一样，它作为搜索引擎和服务提供商的成功，建立在公众信任的基础上。战前，每天大约有5000万俄罗斯人访问它的主页，上面列出的五大头条新闻是许多人获取信息的主要来源。 |
| Executives at Yandex, and its users, had come to accept the Kremlin’s curation of news sources, but considered it a limited slice of a sprawling, groundbreaking tech empire. With the invasion and the Kremlin’s crackdown on any public discussion of the war, however, Yandex quickly became the butt of jokes. | 央捷科斯的高管及其用户已经接受了克里姆林宫对新闻来源的管控，但他们认为这并非一个庞大的、具有开创性的科技帝国的全部。然而，随着俄罗斯入侵乌克兰，以及克里姆林宫禁止对战争的公开讨论，央捷科斯很快就沦为了笑柄。 |
| Online, some users mocked its longstanding slogan of “Yandex. You can find everything,” as “Yandex. You can find everything but the truth,” or “Yandex. You can find everything but a conscience.” | 在网上，一些用户恶搞它长期以来的口号，把“上央捷科斯，你什么都可以找到”改成了“上央捷科斯，你什么都可以找到——真相除外”，或者“上央捷科斯，你什么都可以找到——良知除外”。 |
| “Yandex was like an island of freedom in Russia, and I don’t know how it can continue,” said Elena Bunina, a math professor whose five-year tenure as Yandex’s chief executive ended in April, when she emigrated to Israel. | “央捷科斯曾经就像俄罗斯一座自由的孤岛，我不知道它如何维系下去，”今年4月结束央捷科斯首席执行官五年任期并移民以色列的数学教授埃琳娜·布尼娜说道。 |
| Interviews with 10 former and current employees of Yandex reveal a portrait of a company stuck between two irreconcilable imperatives. On one side, it needs to satisfy the demands of a Kremlin determined to asphyxiate any opposition to what it veils as its “special military operation” in Ukraine. On the other are Western governments, investors and partners horrified by Russia’s war, as well as the more worldly segments of its own Russian audience. | 对十位央捷科斯前任及现任员工的采访，揭示了这家公司如何陷入了不可调和的分歧之中。一方面，克林姆林宫坚决压制任何反对其所谓乌克兰“特殊军事行动”的声音，而央捷科斯必须满足这一要求。另一方面则是对俄罗斯的战争感到恐惧的西方政府、投资者与合作伙伴，以及央捷科斯那些更具普世眼光的俄罗斯受众。 |
| “They need to find a way between these two, and it is kind of impossible,” said Ilia Krasilshchik, who resigned from running Yandex Lavka, its speedy grocery delivery service, after facing criminal charges for posting pictures of the Bucha massacre by Russian troops. “In any other situation, it would be a perfect company, like Google, like any tech company. But Yandex has a problem since it is a Russian company.” | “他们得在夹缝中求生存，而这几乎是不可能任务，”伊利亚·克拉西尔希克说，她因发布俄军布查屠杀的图片而面临刑事指控，并辞去了在央捷科斯Lavka——该公司旗下的极速百货配送服务——的运营职务。“换做其他任何时候，这会是一家完美的公司，就像谷歌、像所有科技公司一样。但央捷科斯存在问题，因为它是俄罗斯企业。” |
| Founded by two math wizards in 1997, it has long claimed to generate around 60 percent of the web searches in Russia. (Google has about 35 percent, Dr. Bunina said.) | 这家由两个数学奇才在1997年创办的公司一直宣称拥有俄罗斯境内60%的网页搜索量。（布尼娜称谷歌占到大约35%。） |
| Before Yandex, Russian taxis consisted of random drivers trying to earn a few rubles. Uber tried to muscle into the market, but eventually relented and became a partner with Yandex in Russia and numerous former Soviet states. Yandex Taxi has expanded to about 20 countries. | 在央捷科斯诞生之前，俄罗斯的出租车行业由只想赚点小钱的非正规司机构成。优步试图打入其市场，但最终选择放弃，成了央捷科斯在俄罗斯和许多前苏联国家的合作伙伴。央捷科斯出租车(Yandex Taxi)服务已经扩展到大约20个国家。 |
| Like many successful companies in Russia, particularly those involved in news in any format, Yandex soon caught the eye of the Kremlin. Mr. Putin’s image keepers inevitably noticed that news critical of Mr. Putin was featured frequently on Yandex.News, the company’s aggregator. During street protests in 2011 and 2012, and then the assaults on Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, Kremlin officials sought to edit the list of acceptable news sources and sometimes even individual headlines. | 与许多成功的俄罗斯企业——尤其是那些涉及到新闻业务的企业——一样，央捷科斯很快就引起了克里姆林宫的注意。普京的形象维护者无可避免会发现，央捷科斯上经常出现批评普京的新闻。新闻本就是这家公司的用户聚合器。在2011年和2012年的街头抗议、2014年俄罗斯袭击克里米亚和乌克兰东部期间，克林姆林宫官员要求由其编订可接受新闻来源清单，有时甚至会修改个别新闻标题。 |
| Yandex tried to push back by explaining that an algorithm generated the list automatically from thousands of sources based on popularity. | 央捷科斯试图抵抗，解释称该清单由算法生成，而算法的依据是成千上万新闻来源的受欢迎程度。 |
| “The pressure has been ramping up on us since 2014, and we have done everything we can to preserve a neutral role,” John W. Boynton, an American entrepreneur and the chairman of its board of directors, said in a June interview. “We do not get involved in politics, we have never wanted to.” | “自2014年以来，我们面临的压力越来越大，我们也已尽一切所能保持中立，”央捷科斯董事会主席、美国企业家约翰·W·博因顿在6月的一次采访中表示。“我们不参与政治，我们从来都没有这种意愿。” |
| But Yandex was too big not to be enmeshed in politics, and the Kremlin kept chipping away at its independence. New laws forced news aggregators and search engines to use officially endorsed sources, while the government wrangled more control over the company’s management structure. | 但央捷科斯规模太大，不可能避开政治，克里姆林宫也一直在削弱其独立性。新出台的法律规定，新闻聚合与搜索引擎必须使用官方认可的消息来源，政府则在该公司的管理架构中争夺到了更多控制权。 |
| “They were just making it easier to pull the strings if they wanted to,” said Esther Dyson, one of two Americans who resigned from the board when the war started. It became clear that the Kremlin “was going further toward complete control,” she said. | “他们让随心所欲的操纵变得更容易了，”乌战开始后辞去董事会职务的两名美国人之一埃丝特·戴森说。她表示，克里姆林宫很明显“朝着完全控制更进了一步”。 |
| After the Feb. 24 invasion, Mr. Putin quickly signed a law making it a crime to spread “fake news” about the military, subject to jail sentences of up to 15 years and hefty fines. What had been a manageable problem, fending off the Kremlin while maintaining an image of independence, suddenly became a crisis. | 在2月24日的入侵之后，普京迅速签署法律，将传播与军方相关的“假新闻”定为犯罪，最高可判处15年监禁和巨额罚款。在保持独立形象的同时抵御克里姆林宫的影响本是个可控问题，但突然之间就变成了一场危机。 |
| Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader, wrote on Twitter: “Don’t forget that the main propagandist of the war is not TV at all, but the Russian IT giant @Yandex.” | 被监禁的反对派领导人阿列克谢·A·纳瓦尔尼在Twitter上写道：“不要忘记，这场战争的主要宣传口根本不是电视，而是俄罗斯IT巨头@Yandex。” |
| In its first sanctions against one top executive, the E.U. cited online accusations of disinformation made by a former head of Yandex.News. | 在对一名高管的首批制裁行动中，欧盟援引了央捷科斯新闻(Yandex.News)前负责人发布在网上的虚假信息指控。 |
| The company responded to the accusations that it spread disinformation by saying that Russian law tied its hands, and that it wanted to preserve the livelihoods of its employees and the interests of its investors. | 对于传播虚假信息的指控，该公司回应称，俄罗斯法律束缚其手脚，而它希望保护员工的生计和投资者的利益。 |
| For now, Yandex executives say their main concern is to continue to innovate while the heart of the company remains in Russia, cut off from most Western technology. | 目前，央捷科斯高层表示，持续创新是他们的主要关注点，而公司仍将核心业务放在与西方大多数技术隔绝的俄罗斯。 |
| “Since the war, we have put all our initiatives to take our services global on hold,” said Mr. Boynton. | “自战争以来，我们已经暂停了与业务全球化相关一切举措，”博因顿表示。 |
| Some 2,500 employees who left Russia remain outside, Dr. Bunina said, and the pace of departures from the company is accelerating. | 布尼娜称，离开俄罗斯的约2500名员工仍在国外，而该公司的人员流失正在加速。 |
| Yandex is further bedeviled by a growing split between the employees who stayed in Russia and those outside, which makes even conversation difficult, much less collaboration. Those inside anxiously refuse to discuss the war or the world, sticking to IT, while those who left in disgust often want nothing more to do with their native land. | 俄罗斯境内外员工之间日益加深的分歧令央捷科斯更加进退两难，连交流都变得困难，更不用说合作了。不安的国内员工拒绝讨论战争或世界局势，只愿关注IT工作，而带着厌恶离开的员工往往不想再与祖国有任何瓜葛。 |
| “Whether you leave, or whether you stay, these are such different worlds right now, so you will not understand each other,” Mr. Krasilshchik said. “This is not only about Yandex, Yandex is like the country in miniature.” | “无论是走是留，他们如今所处的环境已经全然不同了，所以无法相互理解，”克拉西尔希克说。“这不仅是央捷科斯的问题，央捷科斯可以说是这个国家的缩影。” |
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