Punished
“Please tell them that it’s not us. We don’t want this,” he pleads with me with tortured eyes and I have lost count of the number of times I have heard this from Russians, who know that I am leaving the country. Some of them are taking the sanctions personally, like it is an attack on them and their character and not just on the dictator. And it is not difficult to see why they come to this conclusion. The west is taking away their university placements, the ones they had spent lifetimes dreaming about and planning and studying for in order to escape, and it is taking away their Netflix accounts, amongst other contacts with the outside world. And it is blocking their bank cards and their bank accounts, so if they do manage to escape the suppression, and get out, they are still being punished from foreign countries.
At least 30,000 have fled to Georgia. 25,000 to Turkey. 20,000 to Armenia. Others are scattered wherever they managed to book that late flight to.
“I booked a flight for the next day and just left. It was one of the last flights. I don’t know anybody here. It’s hard to set up a bank account. My company are helping me for the first month and I am grateful for that. But I just don’t know what is going to happen.” says Egor, formerly an extremely friendly, very warm young man from Siberia, who is now twitching nervously, his face a portrait of anxious despair as he sits in a room in Baku, Azerbaijan. He left behind his Grandmother, who he had saw several times a week and was very close to, as well as his parents, and his friends, and family.
“It is terrible.” says Katerina, another intelligent, talented young Russian woman, now a refugee, who has had her life turned upside down by Putin and is now living in Armenia. “I am trying to help the Ukrainians. Many of my family are Ukrainian. I am volunteering with them online to help them find somewhere to live and what they need, I’m trying to do what I can. We can’t use bank cards in Russia anymore. We can’t use anything. My friends here are helping me with money because I can’t access any of my savings. At least I feel a bit more relaxed now that I am here. Everyone is anxious back home. All my friends are trying to leave. We are all just living day to day. It’s all we can do.”
“Everything changed in only one day.” Egor tells me. “I remember the shock on everyone’s faces in the hours after the invasion was announced. You could feel the horror and surprise in the street. Nobody expected it. Nobody had any idea it would happen. He just doesn’t care what people think.”
Almost all the young and educated Russians are against this. The shame of their government’s actions is all too evident in their faces, as they question their personal identity and nationality and character, and what it means to be Russian when you hate the government and what they stand for as much as they do. They feel helpless. Scared to protest, and even when they do, without Navalny and a figurehead, the movement lacks the organisation and courage to gather en masse and do what is needed. A few of them may go to small, scattered protests, but they are instantly removed and caged. Or they shut up and stay silent as they sink into the blackness of absolute authoritarianism. Or they escape, if they can.
It is not fair that they are being punished for something they completely disagree with. If they stay in Russia, they will suffer. Some of the most anti-Putin men are being forcibly conscripted into the armies. The totalitarian, apocalyptic-like Z signs are becoming more prominent. And the new Soviet crackdown on “traitors” is gathering speed.
But that is also the lottery of life, and the cold fascist place they were born into, could have been any one of us. And could still be yet, if Putin and fascism has their way.