Most likely, Vasilyev's new novel "The Technician of Greater Kiev" can also be considered cyberpunk, though it has a fair bit of fantasy in it. Six months after publication it is now clear that it's indeed the same Russian cyberpunk, blindly feeling for direction in the surrounding genre crowd.
Given these examples it is not hard to understand the difference between the classic American cyberpunk and it's Russian counterpart. The American one is, first and foremost, postmodernistic, a semantic superstructure on top of the text, coupled with an umistakable sense of the future, often outright gloomy. Russian cyberpunk, in this sense, is simpler and more traditional; in essense it's same old science fiction and only the terminology can help tell whether it's cyberpunk or not. To me, that's growing pains - Russian cyberpunk is still very young, it's only developing it's traditions and settling the frontiers. But even now one can see a certain shift towards ideology: Russian cyberpunk is moving away from complete reliance on terminology and starting to develop certain characteristics not present in tranditional sci-fi. This can be seen in "Maze of Reflections", "The Free Hunter", and now, as far as I can tell, in "The Technician of Greater Kiev". Although Bruce Sterling, one of the pillars of Western cyberpunk, during his last visit to St. Petersburg, when asked whether there are young American writers who could be classified as belonging to this branch of sci-fi, said simply and clearly: "No. Cyberpunk belongs to our generation, to those who were starting out in the early 80's. The current generation has yet to find it's own style." So should it be any surprise at all that Russian cyberpunk, consisting mostly of people 10-15 years younger than Gibson and Sterling, differs from the classic American one?
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