Not from Russia, but pretty close in all senses of the word. It was heavily used in my circles up to about 2010-2011, then started losing market share to other messengers (one¹ of the popular messengers was from the same company that now owns ICQ), and then Telegram came and buried it completely in no time at all.
Russian here — we used it until around 2011, which is when VKontakte introduced instant messages and soon after group chats, so everyone switched to that.
Here's the announcement: https://vk.com/blog/blog131, the title "VKontakte in ICQ mode" is telling. Oh and the contest Pavel announced at the end of that post? I won that with my shoddy MFC app :P
And dunno about AIM, but MSN took a looooong time to implement things like offline messaging. ICQ didn’t (ever?) need the double coincidence of being online. Even iMessage and its fallback SMS today are bad for this.
Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the characters.
So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that “beep” would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except myself (can’t remember if that was because I used a 3rd party client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly dropping mid convo.
> You can chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace
Was ICQ like Livejournal, where it had a lot more popularity and staying power in Russia than in the West?