When Anastasiya Burakova fled Russia a year ago, she fled to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Burakova, a Russian lawyer, ran an organization that provided legal assistance to others facing political prosecution in Russia. After the Moscow government blocked her group’s website, Burakova learned that she herself might be the target of government persecution and moved to Kiev. Three months later, he was on the run when Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced a full-scale attack on Ukraine. Like many Russian activists, he discovered a new home in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
At the beginning of the invasion, Burakova was inundated with requests for emigration recommendations from political activists and journalists in Russia who feared the Kremlin would close the borders and receive complaints about the war. The number of flights leaving Russia was shrinking due to Western sanctions, fueling a sense of panic among opposing Russians. A few weeks after the attack, Burakova founded an organization called Kovcheg, “ark” in Russian, to help those in control escape Putin’s Russia. Since then, Kovcheg has an online clearing house. providing everything from accommodation and legal recommendation to mental counselling, language categories and placement.
“We seek to help other people integrate into the societies they live in because living outdoors is a dead end,” Burakova said. “We want them to do what they can to prevent war and push for the collapse of Putin’s regime. We hope that they will recede and become the backbone of a democratic Russia.
When Anastasiya Burakova fled Russia a year ago, she fled to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Burakova, a Russian lawyer, ran an organization that provided legal assistance to others facing political prosecution in Russia. After the Moscow government blocked her group’s website, Burakova learned that she herself might be the target of government persecution and moved to Kiev. Three months later, he was on the run when Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced a full-scale attack on Ukraine. Like many Russian activists, he discovered a new home in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
At the beginning of the invasion, Burakova was inundated with requests for emigration recommendations from political activists and journalists in Russia who feared the Kremlin would close the borders and receive complaints about the war. The number of flights leaving Russia was shrinking due to Western sanctions, fueling a sense of panic among opposing Russians. A few weeks after the attack, Burakova founded an organization called Kovcheg, “ark” in Russian, to help those in control escape Putin’s Russia. Since then, Kovcheg has an online clearing house. providing everything from accommodation and legal recommendation to mental counselling, language categories and placement.
“We seek to help other people integrate into the societies they live in because living outdoors is a dead end,” Burakova said. “We want them to do what they can to prevent war and push for the collapse of Putin’s regime. We hope that they will recede and become the backbone of a democratic Russia.
The exodus from Russia occurred in two waves: the first, without delay after the February invasion, more politicized and with many opponents; the second, after the Kremlin announced in September a partial, less political mobilization, composed basically of young people who were not willing to fight in Putin’s war. like Armenia and Kazakhstan, former Soviet republics that most Russians considered backwaters, they have suddenly become havens.
The new Russian emigration has nothing to do with the refugee crisis triggered by the invasion of Ukraine, where the United Nations estimates that more than 14 million people, or a third of the country’s population, have been driven from their homes. The wave of Russian exiles is because it includes some of the regime’s most productive Russian minds and politically active belligerent parties.
It remains to be seen what influence political émigrés will have over the course of events in Russia. Putin prefers to keep his warring sides out of the country, where they threaten to lose touch with life at home and see their political credibility diminish while the Kremlin labels foreign fools. In a March tirade, Putin denigrated those who left as “scum and traitors” whom Russia will spit like flies in an act of “self-cleansing. “
Several prominent Russian opposition politicians refused to go into exile and all ended up in bars: Alexey Navalny, who returned to Moscow in 2021 after recovering abroad from an assassination attempt with a rare nerve agent; Vladimir Kara-Murza, who returned to Russia from the United States after the invasion began; and Ilya Yashin, a fixture in Russian opposition politics who promised to remain in Moscow.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s best-known exile, said he spent 10 hours a day tracking what was happening inside the country from his home in London. An oligarch who clashed with Putin’s first term in the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky served 10 years in prison before being pardoned. and released in 2013 into exile. In recent years, Khodorkovsky supported various media and civil society projects in Russia before the government shut them down and prosecuted their leaders. After the invasion of Ukraine, Khodorkovsky co-founded the Russian Anti-War Committee, an organization of exiled opposition leaders and helped fund the Kovcheg aid organization of Burakova.
In a new e-book that has been published online in English, Khodorkovsky lays out his vision for the future, saying that in order to repeat Putin’s one-man regime and break Russia’s cycle of authoritarianism, the country will want to adopt a parliamentary style and delegate strength to its regions. To accomplish this, Khodorkovsky writes, Russians forced to emigrate would have to form a “second front” to help topple the regime.
“The new political migrants give voice to the opposition because other people inside Russia, if they accept the threat to express themselves, face severe repression,” Khodorkovsky told Foreign Policy. He noted that independent Russian media, as well as popular YouTube channels, run through Putin critics like him, all paintings from abroad. “A significant portion of those other people will return. What their influence will be is a question,” he said.
Russia’s recent history is replete with examples of political migrants, many of whom die in exile, some returning home triumphantly. Vladimir Lenin, undoubtedly the greatest winner, sneaked into Russia after the abdication of the last tsar and led the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The result The civil war created Russia’s first primary wave of political emigration, with up to 3 million more people fleeing the new Soviet government.
However, the exodus is unprecedented in recent times, said Mikhail Denisenko, director of the Vishnevsky Institute of Demography in Moscow. Russia in the chaos that followed the fall of communism. Because much of the knowledge about emigration is incomplete or unreliable, and it is difficult to distinguish visitors from migrants in border statistics, Denisenko’s “conservative estimate” is that 500,000 Russians left the country this year. And he didn’t come back.
The case of political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann illustrates this ambiguity. When she left Russia after the invasion to seek a one-year scholarship to the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, Schulmann said she did not consider herself a political emigrant. But the Russian government has since designated her a “foreign agent,” a prestige that virtually forbids her to continue her educational paintings in Russia. From his position in Berlin, Schulmann has continued to provide lively and scholarly observation on Russian politics and now has more than a million YouTube. subscribers, the maximum of them in Russia.
Historically, Russian emigrants have been reluctant to shape exile communities and have tried to assimilate, Schulmann told Foreign Policy. Large nations don’t typically shape diasporas, he said, and Russians have been a disparate organization with no unusual symbols or traditions around which to unite. . What distinguishes the new Russian emigrants is that they are more homogeneous.
“Many other people left in a short time. Socially, they are very much and left for many reasons. We see social, but not political, structures emerging. No one has political legitimacy,” Schulmann said. “A unifying force could have simply been Alexey Navalny, had he not been in prison. “
Sergey Lagodinsky, a member of the European Parliament for Germany’s Green Party, has known Navalny for more than a decade. “I just couldn’t believe his paintings, his active political life, outside of Russia. What Navalny did not expect was that the Kremlin would destroy his political organization in Russia, Lagodinsky said, turning any dissent into a thief’s offense.
Lagodinsky’s own circle of relatives left Russia in 1993, when Germany was receiving Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He is now leading an effort to help Russian political migrants unload humanitarian visas from the European Union.
Russia’s democratic opposition has rarely spoken with one voice, with Navalny, Khodorkovsky and others representing rival centers of gravity. Because of this diversity of opinions, Lagodinsky said, Russian émigrés don’t want so much a political organization as a network that helps them communicate with Western leaders. One idea, as yet unfinished, is for the warring parties of the Kremlin to identify a workplace in Brussels or Berlin.
Regardless of the divisions that exist in the opposition, Lagodinsky said his biggest challenge is that the Kremlin has absolutely isolated Russian public space, preventing Russian civil society from making internal changes in the country. Therefore, the purpose of Russian emigrants in Europe is to prepare for the post-Putin era, he said.
“It will be vital, and complicated, to provide a viable democratic option to a much worse one when things change. We will have to take seriously an anti-democratic option, worse than Putin,” Lagodinsky said. “You want faces, strong leaders and politicians who offer themselves as options. “
One such face may be Lyubov Sobol, a best friend of Navalny’s who became a protest leader 3 years ago after he was barred from running for Moscow City Council. He fled Russia last year when it is no longer imaginable that he will continue his opposition. activism in the face of increasing pressure from the authorities. “After Navalny’s arrest and until I left, not a day went by without Russian law enforcement contacting me, searching my house, interrogating me or detaining me,” Sobol said. She is aware of five instances of criminals opposing her in Russia.
Long before he was jailed, Navalny mastered using social media to bypass state television and speak directly to his supporters, and even now, his team in exile helps him keep his Twitter and Instagram accounts active. channel with 3 million subscribers, the main platform of the opposition. “Our two goals are to diminish Putin’s legitimacy and increase confidence in our democratic movement,” he said.
The political landscape in Russia lately is marked by instability, said Schulguyn, who predicts that each of the men will be alone once there is regime change. “There will be a lot of political turmoil after Putin. “But having the resources of a last name, media and fans is helpful. “
Khodorkovsky, who was first jailed in 2003 and is now 59, said his potential role in a long-term government diminishes as Putin remains in power. Khodorkovsky resigned himself to the choice that Putin’s regime would last at least another three years. He questioned his ability to take a leadership role, as governing Russia, whose establishments Putin has completely emptied, will be a 24/7 task.
Reforming Russia may well be the task of a new generation. “We are waiting for the regime to fall,” said Sobol, 35. “We are actively working on this and need to get there as soon as possible. “
Lucian Kim is a journalist who has been covering Russia since 2003, most recently as NPR’s Moscow bureau chief. Most recently, he is a global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington. Twitter: @Lucian_Kim
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