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 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. 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.
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.
When she got off the phone, Venyavkin addressed her. “I hear that you are from Ukraine,” he said. “I want you to know that not everyone in Russia supports Putin and his war. I am sorry that we failed to stop him.” They talked. The woman was a chemistry teacher who happened to be in Moscow for a day when the war started. Now she was trying to make sure that her parents took her dog with them whenever they went to the bomb shelter.
After that conversation, Venyavkin and Shengelia had no doubt about whether or when to leave. 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. In the summer of 2012, when a flood destroyed the town of Krymsk, in southern Russia, and authorities tried to cover it up, Aleshkovsky quit his job as a news photographer to work as a relief volunteer. He later started a foundation, Nuzhna Pomosh (Help Needed), and a media clearing house for charitable projects, Takie Dela (So It Goes). 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 traditional place and time for such a demonstration is Pushkin Square at seven in the evening—people have been prosecuted for social-media posts announcing protests, so it’s good to have a default plan. Kremer and Babitsky went with Babitsky’s twenty-year-old daughter. The square was sealed off by police. It was dark and wet. People milled about in front of the metro, slogging through rainy sidewalks. An uninitiated onlooker might not have identified them as protesters: they had no placards and chanted no slogans. Babitsky did get detained, along with several hundred other people, but he was held only briefly. The next day, Kremer and Babitsky flew to Venice for a seventy-fifth-birthday celebration for Kremer’s father, the violinist Gidon Kremer.
They arrived in a strange state. A sense of everything happening for the last time prompted them to take a hundred-and-thirty-euro motorboat ride from the airport, rather than a thirty-euro taxi. Babitsky badgered the other attendees, who he felt weren’t sufficiently disturbed by the war. 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. But all their children—he and Kremer have six between them, ages ten to twenty—were in Moscow, and the couple’s return flight was cancelled, as were all flights between European Union countries and Russia. 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. Babitsky speaks of himself, sarcastically but self-consciously, as a normal Russian dude who never cries. But on that day he wept.
Grigory Sverdlin, the forty-three-year-old director of Nochlezhka, Russia’s foremost organization for the homeless, walked around St. Petersburg with the words “No to war” on the back of his jacket. He joined protests and pickets. This was normal for him. He’d been detained before; once, his car was towed because the slogan “Free political prisoners!” was taped to the rear window. But Sverdlin found himself acting weird: usually standoffish, he was hugging people and telling friends that he loved them. Most of all, he felt restless—as if there were no place for him in his country anymore. The only thing he could visualize was getting sent to prison. Then an acquaintance told him that he was on a list of people targeted for political prosecution. Sverdlin packed his car and went to say goodbye to his parents. He found them getting ready to have their house searched; they boasted that they’d stashed some valuables at a neighbor’s home.
Leonid Dzhalilov, who is forty-three, worked as a high-school math teacher and served as a deacon at a Moscow church. His wife, Elizaveta Miller, who is thirty-eight, was a concert musician and an assistant professor at the Moscow Conservatory. The evening of the invasion, Dzhalilov was arrested at a protest. The following morning, he and Miller took stock. They had the pulpit, the stage, and the classroom, and if they used any of those to speak out against the war they could lose their jobs, endanger their colleagues, and possibly go to jail. They had three young sons. They decided to leave.
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 March 1st, he had a new A.C. unit installed in his apartment and congratulated himself for preparing for the looming hot summer. Still, he urged his ex-wife to flee with their three-year-old daughter, so that the child wouldn’t grow up behind the new Iron Curtain. Then, 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.”
They didn’t take much with them. Primakova packed sixty-seven children’s books and a small suitcase with clothes and two pillows. Kolmanovsky brought a backpack with high-end photo equipment, a suitcase with tea and ceramic teapots, and, separately, a collection of scents. Sverdlin took a folding bike and rock-climbing equipment. Kremer and Babitsky, who had planned only for a weekend in Venice, had a few T-shirts and, for her, a velvet dress. The couple came across a square in Venice strewn with confetti ribbons in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. They picked up a few; Kremer tied hers to a buttonhole of her long black coat. Babitsky decided to collect objects that signified the start of a new life. He washed out a large crab shell that had been used to serve salad at Gidon Kremer’s birthday party and put his blue-and-yellow ribbons in it. At a pay-what-you-want used-book stand, he dug up a graphic novel about Jan Karski, the Polish officer credited with telling Western leaders about the Holocaust. Babitsky decided that the book would make a good first volume for his new library.
Some of these émigrés are my close friends and former colleagues; others I know through work. They represent a small sample of the current exodus. It is impossible to imagine that I could now return to Moscow, my city, but if I did about four out of every five people I knew, well or at all, would be missing.
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. During a meeting in the Kremlin on March 16th, Putin apparently referred to the exodus, saying, “The Russian people can tell true patriots apart from those traitors and will simply spit them out as if they’d accidentally swallowed a fly. . . . I am sure that this natural and necessary cleansing will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, our cohesiveness, and our readiness to face any and all challenges.”
In Tbilisi, Kremer rented a room in a hostel, with a mattress on the floor. (Kremer’s three children, ages eleven, twelve, and fourteen, took a room down the hall.) Babitsky remarked that Kremer would never have tolerated this kind of setup “in regular life.” Kremer often says, “We are in Purgatory. This is as it should be.” Another phrase she repeats is “Check your privilege.” They are lucky: they are together, and they had savings—Kremer had been hoping to buy a bigger apartment. She withdrew several thousand dollars in cash before her bank cards stopped working. Two days after her kids arrived in Georgia, she handed over the entire amount to a private Russian-language school as a partial tuition payment. Babitsky wasn’t sure that it was the right call. But, Kremer said, at least the children would “be occupied for half the day, and fed, and given care at a time when I have little to give.” On the kids’ second day at the school, Kremer’s twelve-year-old daughter went to visit a new friend, and life felt almost normal.
Around the corner from the hostel, Primakova and Kolmanovsky, the couple at the center of the giant extended family, were occupying an entire ramshackle guesthouse. Its temporary occupants included two very quiet, very young people. They are among the many Russian teen-agers in Tbilisi and Yerevan, sent into exile by their parents, who may now be unable to leave. The two young people sat at a table adjacent to an attic kitchen, eating chicken soup that Kolmanovsky had prepared. One of them put their foot down into something wet and sticky: Chloe had had an accident. “Give me your sock,” Kolmanovsky commanded. “I’ll stick it straight in the washing machine.” Primakova went to get a clean pair.
Dzhalilov, the math teacher and deacon, and Miller, the musician, were staying a few blocks away. (Dzhalilov is one of Kolmanovsky’s stepbrothers.) They had already spent time in Yerevan and were about to depart for their next destination, in Montenegro, where Dzhalilov had secured a short-term teaching gig. He walked the cobblestoned streets pushing a stroller with his three boys hanging on and off it in various configurations, and, whenever he ran into an acquaintance from Moscow, he asked smugly, “What is your plan?” No one but Dzhalilov seemed to find this amusing. “I have no plan,” Primakova said. “I have no ideas, and no sense of anything.”
On their first morning in Tbilisi, Kolmanovsky took a walk with the couple’s three-year-old daughter. For a half hour, he felt that the weight of being in Moscow was off his shoulders. He could imagine living here, in this hilly, sunny city, maybe even putting down roots. But, in Telegram chats, new émigrés to Tbilisi were sharing their experiences of being turned away by landlords, hotels, and banks. Russians weren’t welcome here.
Georgia is a sentimental favorite destination for Russians, both tourists and expats. It is scenic and affordable, and allows Russians visa-free stays of up to a year. Georgia was itself the object of Russian military aggression in 2008; about twenty per cent of Georgian territory is occupied by Russia. Less than an hour outside Tbilisi, Russian soldiers are building a barbed-wire fence along a line that keeps edging closer to the capital—a process that Georgians call “borderization.” (Neighboring Armenia, for its part, depends on the presence of Russian troops to maintain a ceasefire with Azerbaijan, and this makes some Russian exiles fear that Armenia could send them back if Russia asked.)
Georgia has refused to join international economic sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine. “What choice do we have?” Zurab Abashidze, who holds the unenviable job of the Georgian government’s special representative for relations with Russia, told me. “Joining the sanctions would collapse the Georgian economy in a week, and Russia wouldn’t feel a thing. And with the Russian military right here we have a responsibility to avoid acting in ways that would complicate the situation further.” Sheltering tens of thousands of Russians on the run from the Putin regime would count as a complication.
Ordinary Georgians, meanwhile, are wary of the Russians simply because they are Russian. Online and in the streets, Tbilisi residents have accused Russians of coming to Georgia solely to escape economic sanctions. Blue-and-yellow flags seem to hang in every other storefront. At a restaurant where I met a member of the diplomatic corps, the front door featured a sign: “Glory to Ukraine! World should stop Russian aggression! Russia is an occupier!!! Putin is evil!!! If you do not agree with these statements, please do not come in!!!” The Bank of Georgia started requiring potential clients who are Russian citizens to sign a statement declaring that Russia is an aggressive occupying power and pledging that they will not spread Russian propaganda. Venyavkin, the Stalin historian, was happy to sign, but the bank rejected his application anyway.
When Miller arrived in Tbilisi, she was looking for a harpsichord, to prepare for an upcoming audition. She contacted a local orchestra that has Baroque instruments. After six days, her request was denied. When she pressed, she said, her contact implied that she had been turned down because she was Russian.
On my first night in Tbilisi, I saw another old friend, Katja Petrowskaja. She was born in Kyiv to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, went to high school in Moscow and university in Estonia, finished graduate studies in Moscow, and, eventually, with her German husband, moved to Berlin, where they started a family and she became a prominent German-language writer. Their kids grew up, and Petrowskaja and her husband moved to Tbilisi. Now Russia was bombing Kyiv, and Petrowskaja’s mother, an eighty-six-year-old retired history teacher, was there alone, refusing to be evacuated.
Petrowskaja and I met briefly: my flight landed in Tbilisi at one in the morning, and she was flying out at six. She was going to Berlin, where she would aid in an effort to secure bulletproof vests for the Ukrainian Army, organize refugee relief, and make media appearances to advocate for Ukraine. She had barely slept since February 24th. She had no patience for some of her close Russian friends, who were posting poems and soul-searching essays on the themes of guilt and responsibility. “There is no time for that,” she said. “You have to work.” That these friends didn’t share her sense of urgency, that they could be contemplative and solipsistic, struck her as a moral failure. “Space has split apart, and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to speak to any of them again,” Petrowskaja said. “They are fascinated with their own misfortune. I get it—you can go to prison for fifteen years for protesting. Meanwhile, my friends in Kyiv are, suicidally, staying there, because it’s their city, and they are working to believe that it can’t happen—as long as they are there, it won’t.”
No comparison is possible between Kyiv, a city under bombardment, and Moscow. Except perhaps this: it—the surrender to Putin’s tyranny—had already happened in Moscow. “There will be actual terror,” Primakova said. “We will be watching it from afar. There are people there willing to step into the fire. It would be easier for them if we could step into the fire with them.” Primakova is about five feet tall; Kolmanovsky is a few inches taller. They both wear glasses. They have six kids between them. Both have repeatedly faced down Moscow cops in full riot gear. “I did all I could,” she continued. “But I’m not a hero. I don’t feel guilt toward Ukrainians, because I don’t feel that what’s happening in Ukraine is being done in my name, but I do feel guilty toward the people who stayed behind in Moscow. And, every time someone I care about leaves, I breathe a sigh of relief and realize just how scared I was for them. It’s a selfish feeling, this relief, because it means I get to feel a little less guilty.”
Responsibility, culpability, guilt, shame, whether individual or collective—the many gradations of these feelings are close to the surface in each of the new exiles. “I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking for the first five days,” Aleshkovsky said. “I would have preferred to literally burn up in shame. All of us are responsible for this war. Even those who did a lot to prevent it didn’t do enough—because the war started.”
In 1968, Babitsky’s grandfather Konstantin Babitsky was one of seven people who were arrested in Red Square for protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; he served three years in internal exile. Babitsky’s grandmother Tatyana Velikanova was arrested in 1979, for editing an underground publication on political persecution. Sentenced to four years in prison and five in internal exile, she rejected an offer of amnesty during perestroika and served out her sentence. Babitsky was five when she rejoined the family in Moscow. “She was made of steel,” Babitsky said. That’s not the part of her he feels he has inherited—rather, it’s her absolute willingness to accept responsibility. “If I’m going to continue considering myself Russian, if I am going to carry Russian culture around like a jewel,” he said, “then I have to acknowledge that Russian culture contains the possibility of this war—that one can read Tolstoy, author of the best antiwar texts ever written, and do this.”
How does one live as a Russian while Russia is bombing Ukrainian homes, schools, and maternity wards? “I don’t know what I can say to a Ukrainian,” Babitsky said. “I can’t pretend that it’s Putin bombing Ukraine and I have nothing to do with it. I can’t ask for forgiveness, because forgiveness cannot be given while Kharkiv is being bombed. So what I say is that I have a giant hole inside of me, and I ask them to tell me what I can do. And that’s not fair to them.”
Kremer, a former news anchor, is a founder of a podcast company, based in Moscow, called Libo/Libo (Either/Or). Kolmanovsky had a hit podcast about science, and Babitsky co-hosted a show on ethics; the company also created programs for corporate clients. Libo/Libo existed mostly outside politics, and this was what allowed it to function. “Some advertisers would ask that there wouldn’t be a word about politics in the ads that played alongside theirs, or even in the entire podcast,” Kremer told me. Now, though, the category of “political” was expanding to engulf all of life. After Russia passed new censorship laws, on the ninth day of the war, Libo/Libo removed Babitsky’s last pre-invasion podcast episode, because it featured an interview with a moral philosopher about war, and altered one of Kolmanovsky’s podcast episodes, about canine intelligence, because he had noted, “This podcast was recorded before the war.” All three Libo/Libo founders have left the country, as have about a third of its roughly twenty staff members. All day, every day, in the common room of the hostel or at the guesthouse, Kremer was convening Zoom meetings with her co-founders, staff, and clients, trying to figure out how to keep the company going. “It’s like I keep solving a labyrinth puzzle in my brain, and every path is a dead end, but I can’t stop,” she said.
Babitsky’s main source of income, aside from his podcast, was an editing gig for a book publisher. “It’s a good nonfiction publisher, and I can’t imagine what its future might hold,” he said. Primakova, who has a stake in a market-research company that her mother owns, was still fielding calls from large corporate clients, but, she said, they would soon realize that there was no market left to research. These jobs had the advantage of being portable, but the world to which the exiles could telecommute was becoming a mirage. “Right now, people are talking about where they are going to go and how they are going to get money out of their Russian accounts, but soon people are going to start returning,” Kremer said. “They left in protest, because it felt unbearable to stay. But you need a lot of money to sustain this kind of protest.”
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.
In Moscow in December, Irina Shcherbakova, a historian of the Gulag, took me on a tour of a show that she had curated at Memorial, Russia’s first and biggest history and human-rights organization. One of the show’s exhibits was a faded blue dress, patched and mended an uncountable number of times, one of those material objects which captured the vicissitudes of the Soviet century—its owner had worn it to the theatre, where she was arrested, and then to a year’s worth of interrogations in prison. Now Shcherbakova was in Tel Aviv, hoping to travel soon to Germany. Memorial had been ordered closed by the courts on February 28th and was ransacked in a police raid on March 4th. The same day, the Sakharov Center, a museum and educational institution named for the dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner, closed to the public. Its director and his family fled to Europe by way of Tashkent.
“I want to go back and wake up in my own bed,” Kremer said. “But all my people are gone.”
On March 12th, a couple of thousand newly arrived Russians gathered in front of the building that used to house the Russian Embassy in Tbilisi. (Georgia severed diplomatic relations with Russia in 2008.) They held aloft a giant blue-and-yellow flag and chanted, “No to war!,” “Peace for Ukraine, freedom for Russia!,” and all the Russian protest chants from the time when Russian protests still had chants: “Russia will be free!” “Russia without Putin!” The chants sounded half-hearted; each died out after a few repetitions.
A group dispersed and gathered again, like mercury: Venyavkin and Shengelia, Babitsky and Kremer, Primakova and Kolmanovsky, and assorted kids and grandparents. “I can’t chant anything,” Primakova said. “What is the point? I understood the point when we were taking a risk, when we were surrounded by riot police, and when the drivers honking in support were taking a risk, too.” As hard as it is to talk about guilt and responsibility, it’s harder to figure out what the people who used to make up Russia’s civil society should do now that they are no longer in Russia.
Sverdlin, the director of Nochlezhka, the organization for the homeless, spent his first few days of exile in Tallinn, helping other people flee Russia by arranging seats on flights chartered by tech executives. He held a Zoom meeting to tell his staff that he was resigning; remaining at the helm would put the organization at risk. He planned to drive through Eastern and Southern Europe to Georgia, where many of his friends had ended up. “I believe that I will return” to Russia, he said. “I am mindful of all those people who left in 1918-1919, thinking they’d be back in a couple of years, and then it was seventy years later. But I think the regime is in agony now, one that is very painful for the patient and for the world around him, but I think it will end in a couple of years and I will return.”
Aleshkovsky, who landed in Vilnius, also planned to make his way to Georgia, where he has spent a lot of time. He had resigned from his foundation in December, after struggling with depression and burnout, but now, it seemed, he had no choice but to start another N.G.O., to help other exiles. “I saw that everyone else—the Ukrainians, the Belarusians—had their own diaspora, while the Russians are coming with nothing and then can’t even access their savings,” he said.
He wasn’t looking far into the future. “Who knows if there is even going to be a Vilnius or a Tbilisi in a couple of months?” he said. Putin, he went on, “is threatening nuclear war, and these are not empty words—these are words uttered by a man who is waging war.” I asked him, Why not go someplace like Zanzibar? Aleshkovsky responded, “My favorite place in the world is the Chatham archipelago,” off the coast of New Zealand. “But, even assuming that it wouldn’t be affected by nuclear war, a life with the knowledge that everyone you loved perished in a nuclear war and you did nothing to stop it wouldn’t be worth living.”
Venyavkin, to his surprise, found himself growing optimistic. He had spent the previous decade running education projects—summer schools, debate clubs, lecture series—outside the official university system. Like the other exiles, he had worked to create a small, humane alternative world inside the vast Putin autocracy. Now that this parallel society was gone, Venyavkin could think only of the future, which had become strangely clearer. “I refuse to look at this as some kind of personal disaster,” he said. “Disaster is what’s happening in Ukraine.”
He went on, “It’s a black-and-white time now. One might say that postmodernism is over and history is back. Either Russia will be scorched earth or we are going to have to do a lot of very complicated work of reckoning.” He didn’t feel demoralized. “Things are awful,” he said. “Some people are feeling existentially crushed. But what I see is the insanity of one man, Putin, who has flooded a huge number of people with shit. I am refusing to internalize his madness and to feel defeated by it. If a pipe bursts in your house, you don’t consider yourself defeated by the sewer. You fix the pipe.”
Golubok, the lawyer, knew as soon as the invasion began what he wanted to do. He is one of only a few Russian nationals certified as trial participants by the International Criminal Court, in The Hague. He wants to be in the court, in whatever capacity, for cases resulting from the war. During the second week of March, he sent me regular text messages, updating me on his journey, and the court’s. “We are going to go to Oslo soon,” he wrote from Tallinn. “The prosecutor of the I.C.C. has asked for warrants for the arrest of three Russian citizens,” for alleged war crimes during the Russian invasion of Georgia, in 2008.
“The prosecutor has made a statement on Ukraine,” Golubok texted the next day. “They are moving very fast—that’s very unusual! We are in Stockholm. It’s a quick layover.”
He texted next, “I’m planning to go to The Hague next week. I don’t have any insider information, but I can tell you that they are moving at unprecedented speed. They’ve already sent a group of investigators to Ukraine.” And if he couldn’t make himself useful in The Hague, Golubok told me, he’d find something else to do with the rest of his life. ♦
