The eyes of the world are focused on the millions of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s brutal invasion. But Russians are fleeing their own country too, at a speed most likely not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are running not from foreign bombs but from their own government. Rumors of impending martial law, closed borders, conscription and punitive military service have fueled panic. Amid state shutdowns of almost all of the last major independent media outlets and the announcement of draconian punishment for any coverage or criticism of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, tens or even hundreds of thousands of members of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia and political opposition are scrambling to escape.
Many have already headed to Georgia and Armenia, two major visa-free destinations accessible now that Russian airlines have been banned from most Western airspace. Some have gone to Central Asia, where they are packing hotels in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, or to the Asian and Middle Eastern countries that do not require visas. Others lucky enough to have Schengen visas have rushed west by car and train. The number of routes out of the country is shrinking, and the price of plane tickets has risen. A social media channel offering advice on “emigration from Russia to the free world” already has more than 100,000 members. Some Russian passport offices appear to be overwhelmed.
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.”
Many of the antiwar Russians I have spoken to over the past two weeks are struggling, like Mr. Nikolsky, with the question of collective responsibility. They believe that Mr. Putin’s attempt to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation demands a strong international response, including economic sanctions, even though such measures treat ordinary people as collateral damage in an effort to pressure a government to change its behavior. But it is an unavoidable reality that sanctions have made things harder for those who wish to flee. How to obtain cryptocurrency is a frequent topic of discussion for Russians hoping to leave, especially now that Visa and Mastercard have stopped servicing Russian bank cards. In a recent public plea, a group of antiwar Russians begged for a reversal of the policy, saying: “Just imagine yourself being unable to rent a place to sleep, unable to book a ticket. You cannot live and you cannot move away.”
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.
In the 1970s, the Soviet dissident and linguist Igor Melchuk wrote that there were only two ways to avoid supporting the Soviet regime: go to prison or emigrate. At that time, dissidents were allowed to exit only with a special visa and a paltry sum of cash in their pockets. They arrived in new countries to find the physical evidence of their past lives reduced to a handful of possessions — the topic of the émigré Sergei Dovlatov’s 1986 work of fiction “The Suitcase.” A famous photo of the poet Joseph Brodsky before his forced departure from Russia in 1972 shows him at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport, sitting on his own suitcase.
Exile was often emotionally and financially difficult, as it is for refugees and dissidents from any country. But high-profile Soviet dissidents and intellectuals were usually greeted enthusiastically in the United States and Western Europe. Mr. Dovlatov published his works in The New Yorker, and Mr. Brodsky had a successful career in the United States as a professor and writer, eventually receiving a Nobel Prize.
For some, a central reason for emigrating was to share Soviet dissident experiences and perspectives with the outside world. The poet and scholar Tomas Venclova, a founder of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, the first human rights group in Soviet-era Lithuania, was forced to leave the U.S.S.R. in 1977. His status as a spokesman for the Helsinki Group dissidents “was what justified his emigration” from a moral perspective, said Yasha Klots, an expert on Soviet émigré literature and a former student of Mr. Venclova’s at Yale. Mr. Venclova fulfilled this role with great success, but, Mr. Klots explained to me, the task wouldn’t have been possible if American publications and institutions hadn’t given him the chance to speak out. “The U.S. used to do everything it could to make such opposition possible, at least outside Russia,” he told me. The question now is whether the United States and Western Europe will offer similar support to the new Russian dissident émigrés at a critical moment in history.
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.
“Collective blame is an easy way to channel rage,” Maria Stepanova, a prominent Russian poet, told me. But the impulse to punish Russians on the basis of national identity is a misguided one. Ms. Stepanova told me that many emigrants are driven by a feeling of pure moral indignation, a sense that emigration is the only remaining avenue for political protest. “They simply don’t want to breathe the air here,” she said. “They want to cut all ties with their country.… They’re willing to risk ruining their lives out of this feeling of disgust.”
Russia’s authoritarianism has steadily intensified since 2011, when many thousands took to the streets to protest against the falsified 2011 legislative elections and demand freedom for political prisoners. These demonstrations, among the biggest since the 1990s, triggered Mr. Putin’s longstanding fear that Russia would experience a pro-democratic “colored revolution” like Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution.
In response, Mr. Putin’s government essentially eliminated the right to protest, while persecuting opposition politicians. Independent press, NGOs and activists are now targeted primarily through a law against “foreign agents.” Many journalists and dissidents had already left the country by the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, often because they were in danger of imminent arrest on false pretenses.
Now anyone who dares to speak the truth about the war faces a level of repression that has not been seen since the Soviet Union. Thousands of Russians continue to be arrested at antiwar demonstrations, and some are determined to remain in Russia to struggle against the government. But the space for protest has narrowed even further.
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.
Yevgenia Baltatarova, an independent Buryat journalist from Ulan-Ude, in Siberia, spoke to me from Kazakhstan. After she wrote about the war on her Telegram channel, 15 government officers came to search her home, confiscating her possessions and those of her parents and nephew, she said. “The propaganda machine worked,” she said. “Now they have demonstrations with the new swastika” — the “Z” that has become the symbol of government-sponsored pro-war demonstrations that feature youths pumping their fists and chanting pro-Putin slogans.
Not all who would like to leave can, no matter how much they want to. One woman I spoke to in Moscow was desperate to flee: She had been arrested at a protest, she wrote me, and she wants to raise her family in peace. But the father of her children refused to give his permission for them to leave. “He thinks it’s safe in Russia,” she said bitterly.
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.
Sophie Pinkham is the author of “Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine” and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
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