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The Russians Fleeing Putin's Wartime Crackdown - Masha Gessen
Link to tweet
…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.
More at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/the-russians-fleeing-putins-wartime-crackdown
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.
More at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/the-russians-fleeing-putins-wartime-crackdown
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