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Wednesday, March 23, 2022 6:32:10 PM
The Russians Fleeing Putin’s Wartime Crackdown
Resisters are leaving Russia because the country they worked to build is disappearing—and the more people who leave, the faster it vanishes.
By Masha Gesse March 20, 2022
March 28, 2022 Issue THE NEW YORKER
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 travellers, 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 “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. Independent media outlets, now blocked in Russia, were deleting their Web sites and hiding YouTube videos and social-media posts to protect staff members who could face prosecution under new censorship laws. At home and abroad, Russians were wiping their social-media accounts to shield themselves and those who had liked or left comments on antiwar petitions, or even posts simply containing the word “war”—acts that were now punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. 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. Activists replaced organizing with charity work. But there remained a community of homes open to one another, an endless series of meals shared, and a conversation that had lasted decades. I missed this world desperately, and in the months since COVID restrictions began lifting I had visited often. 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.
Ilya Venyavkin, a historian of the Stalin era, left Moscow for Tbilisi with his wife and children on the seventh day of the war. “What I see is the insanity of one man, Putin,” he said. “I am refusing to internalize his madness and to feel defeated by it.”Photograph by Dina Oganova for The New Yorker
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. On Thursday morning, when Venyavkin checked Meduza, an independent Russian-language publication, he saw the word “War” on its home page. He and Shengelia didn’t say anything to each other, no “Did you see?” or “How awful.” Venyavkin felt like a blender had been switched on inside his body. His outer shell existed, but couldn’t move. After two days in a stupor, he and Shengelia drove back to Moscow, to be with their children. And they started talking about leaving.
Time slowed and sped up in the first week of the war. Each day stood apart from the previous one, as though it were a distinct historical era. On February 27th, Venyavkin and Shengelia felt that they had to do something, go somewhere. It was the seventh anniversary of the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. With their ten-year-old son, Goga, they bought flowers and went to the bridge where Nemtsov was killed. Police had sealed off the pedestrian pass with barricades; people could move through only a narrow corridor, in a slow, steady trudge. “I don’t want to go,” Goga said. “It feels like we’re being led to prison.” On the other side of the bridge, Goga demanded to be taken to McDonald’s as compensation. (McDonald’s suspended its operations in Russia two weeks later.) There, a young woman at the next table was talking nervously on the phone. It seemed that she was speaking to her relatives in Kharkiv, the second-largest Ukrainian city, which was being shelled by the Russian Army.
Much More
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/the-russians-fleeing-putins-wartime-crackdown?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Resisters are leaving Russia because the country they worked to build is disappearing—and the more people who leave, the faster it vanishes.
By Masha Gesse March 20, 2022
March 28, 2022 Issue THE NEW YORKER
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 travellers, 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 “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. Independent media outlets, now blocked in Russia, were deleting their Web sites and hiding YouTube videos and social-media posts to protect staff members who could face prosecution under new censorship laws. At home and abroad, Russians were wiping their social-media accounts to shield themselves and those who had liked or left comments on antiwar petitions, or even posts simply containing the word “war”—acts that were now punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. 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. Activists replaced organizing with charity work. But there remained a community of homes open to one another, an endless series of meals shared, and a conversation that had lasted decades. I missed this world desperately, and in the months since COVID restrictions began lifting I had visited often. 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.
Ilya Venyavkin, a historian of the Stalin era, left Moscow for Tbilisi with his wife and children on the seventh day of the war. “What I see is the insanity of one man, Putin,” he said. “I am refusing to internalize his madness and to feel defeated by it.”Photograph by Dina Oganova for The New Yorker
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. On Thursday morning, when Venyavkin checked Meduza, an independent Russian-language publication, he saw the word “War” on its home page. He and Shengelia didn’t say anything to each other, no “Did you see?” or “How awful.” Venyavkin felt like a blender had been switched on inside his body. His outer shell existed, but couldn’t move. After two days in a stupor, he and Shengelia drove back to Moscow, to be with their children. And they started talking about leaving.
Time slowed and sped up in the first week of the war. Each day stood apart from the previous one, as though it were a distinct historical era. On February 27th, Venyavkin and Shengelia felt that they had to do something, go somewhere. It was the seventh anniversary of the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. With their ten-year-old son, Goga, they bought flowers and went to the bridge where Nemtsov was killed. Police had sealed off the pedestrian pass with barricades; people could move through only a narrow corridor, in a slow, steady trudge. “I don’t want to go,” Goga said. “It feels like we’re being led to prison.” On the other side of the bridge, Goga demanded to be taken to McDonald’s as compensation. (McDonald’s suspended its operations in Russia two weeks later.) There, a young woman at the next table was talking nervously on the phone. It seemed that she was speaking to her relatives in Kharkiv, the second-largest Ukrainian city, which was being shelled by the Russian Army.
Much More
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/the-russians-fleeing-putins-wartime-crackdown?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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