In the world as it existed before Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24th, the Vnukovo International Airport, in Moscow, was a point of departure for weekend-holiday destinations south of the border: Yerevan, Istanbul, Baku. In the first week of March, as tens of thousands of President Vladimir Putin’s troops advanced into Ukraine, Vnukovo teemed with anxious travelers, many of them young. The line for excess baggage split the giant departure hall in half. These people weren’t going for the weekend.
In a coffee shop, a skinny young man with shoulder-length hair and steel-framed glasses sat at a tall counter. “I haven’t done much in the last day,” he told someone through his headphones, sounding more nervous than apologetic. “I’ve been busy with my move. I am flying to Yerevan today, then overland. I’ll be settled tomorrow and back to work.” The flight to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, was later cancelled. Two of my friends who were also scheduled to go to Armenia that day ended up flying seven hours to Ulaanbaatar, then three hours to Seoul, ten to Dubai, and a final three to Yerevan. My friends, a prominent gay journalist and his partner, were among the Russians—more than a quarter of a million, by some estimates—who have left their country since the invasion of Ukraine.
From Moscow, it’s a four-hour flight to Istanbul. There, you could spot the recently arrived: they had the disoriented look best summed up by the Russian expression “hit over the head with a dusty sack.” Snippets of conversations I overheard in the streets concerned possible next destinations. Istanbul is easy to get to, but it’s pricey, and Russian citizens can stay in Turkey for only two months without a visa. At a low table on a restaurant terrace, a crew of Russian journalists in their twenties scrolled through their phones looking for tickets (“There are two seats left to Tbilisi for next Sunday!” “Got one!”); they tried to figure out whether they’d ever be able to access their bank accounts, which were frozen by new restrictions from both Russia and the West; and they watched as the world as they knew it disappeared. . . . Russia was fast becoming an economic pariah: the lights were going out at Ikea, H&M, and Zara. Hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs.
My world, too, was vanishing. I moved to New York from Russia eight years ago because of government threats against my family, but most of my friends had remained in Moscow. As political pressure grew, they adjusted. Journalists and academics changed professions. . . . . Now almost everyone I knew was leaving. One long going-away party flowed from house to house. “Party” is the wrong word, of course, although there was a lot of drinking. When people raised a glass to one another, they added a wish to meet again. When they toasted the host’s home, they were drinking to a place they might be seeing for the last time.
Some of the conversations—about elderly parents who couldn’t make the journey, or teen-age children forced to separate from their first loves—were familiar to me from the nineteen-seventies, when a small number of people, mostly Jews, were able to leave the U.S.S.R. But this was different. The old Russian émigrés were moving toward a vision of a better life; the new ones were running from a crushing darkness. “It’s like watching everyone you know turn into a ghost of themselves,” a friend, Ilya Venyavkin, said.
Venyavkin, who is forty, is a historian of the Stalin era. The week the war began, he and his wife, Vera Shengelia, the development director of a foundation that supports adults with mental disabilities, were at their dacha, outside Moscow. They have three kids, ages ten to eighteen, who were at home in Moscow. . . . . After two days in a stupor, he and Shengelia drove back to Moscow, to be with their children. And they started talking about leaving. . . . . They headed to Tbilisi with their two younger children on Wednesday, the seventh day of the war.
People have fled Russia because they fear political persecution, conscription, and isolation; because they dread being locked in an unfamiliar new country that eerily resembles the old Soviet Union; and because staying in a country that is waging war feels immoral, like being inside a plane that’s dropping bombs on people. They have left because the Russia they have built and inhabited is disappearing—and the more people who leave, the faster it disappears.
Dmitry Aleshkovsky is one of the leaders of Russia’s volunteer movement. . . . . When news of the war broke, he knew that this was the end—not of Ukraine, but of Russia. Aleshkovsky, who is thirty-seven, has spent a lot of time thinking about the Gulag. (His great-uncle Yuz is a labor-camp survivor who has described the experience in novels and songs.) Long ago, he concluded that if Putin ever wanted to re-create Stalinist terror there would be nothing to stop him. If he was bombing Ukraine now, he would imprison more of his people before too long. The morning after the war began, Aleshkovsky got in a car with his wife, the film director Anna Dezhurko, and their toddler daughter and drove west, to the Latvian border.
Alexandra Primakova, a forty-two-year-old marketing researcher in Moscow, woke up at seven that Thursday to get her kids ready for school. She saw the news and decided to let her husband, Ilya Kolmanovsky, a forty-five-year-old science educator, sleep a bit longer. Kolmanovsky had been having panic attacks about the possibility of a full-scale war in Ukraine. For a year or so, the couple had discussed leaving the country; both of them had been active in anti-Putin protests. Now they called a large family council in their apartment. By the end of the following week, thirty-three people in their immediate and extended families had left Russia, flying to four different countries. This group included journalists, academics, natural scientists, a developmental psychologist, a doctor, a musician, and a Russian Orthodox deacon.
Lika Kremer, a forty-four-year-old media executive, and her partner, the thirty-eight-year-old podcaster and editor Andrey Babitsky, attended a protest in Pushkin Square on Thursday night. Babitsky had been detained at a protest in September, and a second detention in less than six months could lead to a prison sentence. But they couldn’t not go. . . . . The next day, Kremer and Babitsky flew to Venice for a seventy-fifth-birthday celebration for Kremer’s father, the violinist Gidon Kremer. . . . . He was growing convinced that his family had to leave Russia immediately. Under this new wartime regime, he would either end up in prison or drink himself to death. . . . Ultimately, Kremer and Babitsky went to Riga and then to Tbilisi and arranged for the children to leave Russia with Babitsky’s ex-wife. That group flew out on the eleventh day of the war.
Sergey Golubok, a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer in St. Petersburg, had resolved to stay. He had moved back to Russia ten years earlier, after several years of studying and working in the U.K. and France. He had represented many political activists. . . . on the ninth day of the war, Russia blocked the Web sites of virtually all remaining independent media outlets. If there wasn’t going to be any reporting, Golubok reasoned, he wouldn’t be able to make any difference in the courts. He decided to leave.
They flew. They drove. Golubok and his family walked across the bridge from Ivangorod, in Russia, to Narva, in Estonia—they were once one town. When Primakova, Kolmanovsky, their children, and their French bulldog, Chloe, landed in Yerevan, someone asked, “Are you here for the show?” The person explained, “I assumed there must be a dog show, with so many people coming with dogs.”
Many of those who have left Russia are I.T. professionals; a number of them appear, at least temporarily, to be staying in Yerevan, a regional tech hub. Others are journalists, academics, and N.G.O. leaders, who are landing in Berlin, Tbilisi, Tallinn, and Vilnius. Their departure accelerates a long-running process of shutting down Russia’s civil society, without the state having to persecute and imprison people individually.
Years ago, I found a picture in my great-grandfather’s papers. It was taken in 1913, a year of unprecedented prosperity in Russia. My great-grandfather, then a prominent political journalist in his mid-thirties, was with a group of people, all dressed in white linen, all looking as though they had invented friendship and good living. Most of that group emigrated during the decade of wars and revolutions that followed. My great-grandfather stayed, found ways to work in and around publishing while keeping out of politics, and lost everything he owned and clawed his way back to relative prosperity at least twice. Through the rest of the century, his family lugged around redwood furniture, fine china, and silverware from the glorious past—not as family heirlooms but as objects of use in a country that no longer made such objects. Now Russia was entering another era when things—clothes, furniture, cars—would come primarily from the past.
Sadly, many who want to leave lack the funds to do so or are tied down with elderly parents. Ever since 1917, everyday Russians have been betrayed time and time again by their dictator leaders. Putin seems to want to revive the worse from that past.
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