Peter Baker @peterbakernyt
Russia is witnessing its greatest mass exodus since the revolution. A social media channel offering advice on “emigration from Russia to the free world” already has more than 100,000 members.
www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/opinion/russian-migrants-putin-war-ukraine.html
They’re Willing to Risk Ruining Their Lives.’ Putin’s War Is Driving Russians Out.
Boris Nikolsky, a classics professor, spoke to me from the Armenian capital Yerevan, where he had fled with his family. “The plane from Moscow to Yerevan was packed with people I knew,” he recalled. “Lots of young people — the future of Russia is leaving.” Mr. Nikolsky said he left because he didn’t want his kids to grow up in an atmosphere of repression. “I remember Soviet times,” he said, “and this is much worse.” Last year, Mr. Nikolsky and his son were detained at one of the protests that erupted after the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny returned to Russia. As a result, Mr. Nikolsky told me, he lost his job at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. He said he will not go home until Mr. Putin is out of power. He hopes that the disastrous war in Ukraine will bring about Mr. Putin’s downfall. “All our hopes are with the Ukrainians,” he said, adding in a later email: “I ask for their forgiveness. The guilt for what happened lies with all of us, all citizens of Russia, and my departure doesn’t relieve me of this responsibility.”
About that demographics issue...
The United States and Europe have limited tools at their disposal to support dissidents within Russia, but they can control how they receive those who manage to escape. Just as the West is rightfully opening its arms to Ukrainian refugees, it must also accept Russians who are against Mr. Putin’s rule and support them in continuing their opposition from abroad.
So whats our policy and position on this...
It has been less than a month and the situation is evolving fast, but new émigrés do not expect to be greeted as warmly as their Soviet predecessors once were by the West. Even before Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, some Russian dissidents were illegally crossing into the United States from Mexico. Many Russian political émigrés would prefer to land in the United States or Europe but are likely to remain in former Soviet states at least for the immediate future, for visa reasons. These destinations offer their own complications. In Georgia, which fought a war with Russia in 2008 and is understandably concerned about another attack, some locals refuse to rent apartments to Russian new arrivals and have expressed hostility to Russians in the streets.
On social media, many Ukrainians and some Western Europeans and Americans (including a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul) have argued that ordinary Russians did not do enough to stop Mr. Putin’s aggression. Russian ballet companies have had their tours canceled simply because they are state companies, not necessarily because of the views of individual dancers. American and European universities are canceling partnerships and events with Russian institutions and scholars, even as they are inundated by requests for positions from Russian academics who have fled Russia or hope to leave. New Yorkers have expressed their outrage at Mr. Putin by pouring out vodka, despite the fact that many popular brands are not produced in Russia, and by boycotting Russian restaurants, though sometimes the owners are not Russian at all. These private boycotts have contributed to a fear among newly exiled Russians that they will become pariahs on the grounds of their nationality.
Nazification...
Many Russians now departing in haste belong to the tiny minority of Russians who have turned out to street protests in recent years. Mr. Putin’s savage war on Ukraine and corresponding repressions at home are emptying his neo-Russian empire of its remaining free thinkers and opposition movements. The result is likely to be a more ideologically homogeneous Russia, one with even less access to truthful media and channels of political resistance, and one deprived, whether by arrest, assassination or emigration, of many of its most outspoken and brave opposition figures.
There is no future for those left behind....
The St. Petersburg poet Aleksey Porvin told me that it was unrealistic for him to get a passport because the migration services were so overloaded. Besides, health, family and financial reasons excluded the possibility of sudden emigration. “It is difficult to leave Russia at the moment of its catastrophic descent to the bottom of world history,” he wrote in an email. “So I’m staying here and I’m going to look at all this decay from the inside.” Given the new laws, he is likely to have very few options for legal publication of his work.
Many of the people I spoke to said that it was no longer possible to make plans more than a few weeks ahead — perhaps only a few days. For them, Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine marks a clear rupture with the past, an end to everything familiar. The future has been foreclosed. To help change the course of Russian history for the better, the United States and Europe should offer Russia’s exiled opposition another future, as they once did for Soviet dissidents.