It is not known for sure how many Russians have left the country since the start of the war in Ukraine. Some say more than a million, others less. But perhaps the exact number is less important than the caliber of those leaving. Many of the emigrants are part of the more educated population: writers, computer scientists, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, academics, actors, etc.
Some leave because they have no other alternative. Journalists who criticized the war (such as Yevgenia Albats, editor of Los Nuevos Tiempos magazine) had to flee lest they be arrested for spreading "false news" or being "foreign agents". Others leave because life in Putin's Russia has become unbearable for them.
Olga Smirnova, prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, moved to Amsterdam, declaring that she "never would have thought" that she would be "ashamed of Russia", but that the war made it impossible for her to stay. Hundreds of thousands of young men fled ahead of the recent "partial mobilization" ordered by President Vladimir Putin, lest they be sent to fight in a war they did not ask for.
A friend of mine in Moscow told me that those who could leave did so already are more than those who chose to stay. But some leading figures who oppose Putin's war remain in the country for a variety of reasons: because they don't want to leave their families; because they do not see a way to continue working elsewhere; because they want to be witnesses of what happens in Russia. Freelance journalist Dmitry Muratov made this promise: "We will work here until we feel the cold barrel of the gun on our feverish forehead."
These decisions are never easy. People have already faced similar dilemmas in other times and in other countries (eg Nazi Germany or Communist China). Those who leave run the risk of becoming irrelevant in their own country and of being unwelcome abroad. The one who stays can end up in prison (or worse).
Those who leave are often branded as cowards or traitors; while the dissidents who remain end up in a crossfire between foreign powers and the local government. Russians who love their country but hate war are in the same position as patriotic Germans who despised the Nazis: they can count their friends on the fingers of one hand.
The choice between leaving and staying invariably provokes an exchange of reproaches. Those who are safe outside the country, protected from the brutality of war and dictatorship, often insist that those who stay must show that they oppose the government. At a conference in Riga, former world chess champion and political activist Garry Kasparov declared that Russians who want to be "on the right side of history should pack their bags and leave the country"; in his opinion, those who do not "are part of the war machine."
Film director Kirill Serebrennikov endured years of harassment from the Russian government, but insisted on staying, until the war was the straw that broke the camel's back. He has expressed the problem very well for Russians who oppose Putin: "This is the war of a president and politicians I did not vote for, but many see me as an unwitting accomplice."
Thomas Mann, the greatest German writer of his day, fled Nazi Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. He had no choice: he was married to a Jewess and had views that would have earned him arrest. During the war, the BBC broadcast his vicious attacks on the Hitler regime. At the end of the conflict, Mann assured that all Germans were stained by the crimes of the Nazis. And he considered that the writers who had bowed their heads were also stained.
This provoked an outraged response from writers such as Frank Thiess, who was not a Nazi but had chosen to stay in Germany. It was he who coined the expression "internal emigration," referring to intellectuals who withdrew from public life to avoid trouble. In Thiess's view, people like Mann were cowards who turned their backs on their suffering countrymen.
Thiess even claimed that those who stayed had shown more courage; he spoke for those many Germans, and he never fully forgave those who left, like Mann or movie star Marlene Dietrich.
The bitter fracture between people who should be on the same side but made different existential decisions is one of the triumphs of oppressive regimes. It further weakens the possibility of opposition.
Every time the Chinese government releases some famous dissident and lets them go to the West, it is celebrated as a victory for human rights. But in reality, this kind of banishment is an effective way of getting rid of critical figures, who within the country will soon be forgotten or branded as disconnected and irrelevant. The price of freedom abroad is often the solitary life of those who criticize those who stayed.
The exodus of the cream of the crop from Russia may end up being a blessing for the scientific, artistic and academic institutions of the West. And it will certainly hurt Russia's long-term economic prospects. But Putin probably won't mind, as long as he can stay in power.
The Russians who remain will suffer the long-term consequences of Putin's militarism, perhaps even more than the Ukrainians who are currently enduring the ravages of war. In the words of Ilia Kolmanovsky, a famous journalist specializing in biology and science, who ended up leaving Russia because of the war, "over time, people will understand that Putin's invasion was also an attack on Russia."
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Translation: Stephen Flamini
Ian Buruma es autor de The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin, 2020).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
