On 10th March 2022, Grigory Sverdlin loaded a sleeping bag, a couple of rucksacks and a folding bike into his car and drove from his home in St Petersburg to the Estonian border. He messaged a group of friends to explain his sudden departure: “In recent days I have been warned by various sources that they will soon come for me. I’ve been speaking out too loud.”
Sverdlin, who is 43 years old, was the director of a homelessness charity and a prominent figure in St Petersburg civil society. He had not been afraid to criticise Vladimir Putin’s government before the invasion of Ukraine and didn’t intend to stop. But he also didn’t want to go to jail. New laws threatened prison terms of up to 15 years for the spread of “misinformation” about the war, for which the legally stipulated term is “special military operation”.
“I won’t stay silent. You can’t tolerate the intolerable,” Sverdlin said in his farewell message. He took the path trodden by hundreds of thousands of Russians this year, and millions of dissenters against repressive Kremlin regimes in previous generations: exile.
The invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by a brutal crackdown on political liberties in Russia. That doesn’t mean there is equivalence in victimhood. Ukrainians are the ones under fire, indiscriminately murdered by Russian forces. But Putin’s war directs violence inwards too. The ultra-nationalist doctrine that inspires atrocities abroad demands the extermination of the very idea that Russia could be a free and open society.
For those of us in the west who have Russian friends, who speak their language and admire their culture, the submission of the country’s identity to the fascistic cult of Putin is another dimension to the tragedy unfolding on Europe’s eastern boundary.
My Russian contacts are liberals, Anglophiles and democrats. They are members of the urban middle class that provides what vocal domestic opposition there has been to the war. They have been pessimistic about their country’s future for a long time, but now the despair is total. They see no path to a different kind of nation through the fog of lies and insanity that is pumped out of the state organs of power and eagerly inhaled by millions. To believe in another Russia is to retreat to that place of private psychological sanctuary that Soviet dissidents called “internal emigration”. The other option is to leave.
There is no accurate number for total emigration in 2022, but it is estimated at more than 700,000. Travel websites have crashed under the demand for tickets. Queues at land borders have snaked for miles. Grigory Sverdlin ended up in Georgia. Armenia and Kazakhstan have also taken in thousands upon thousands of Russians.
Not every emigration is a principled protest against the regime. Western sanctions persuaded many young Russians that their only economic future lay elsewhere, while the biggest driver of flight overall has been fear of the draft; in September, Putin announced a “partial” mobilisation of 300,000 reservists. Chaotic and corrupt regional administrations went on a press-ganging spree, summoning any men they could find and bussing them off to war without training or weapons. Panic and exodus ensued. In the first weeks of mobilisation, more people fled the country than signed up to fight.
More would flee if they weren’t restrained by family obligations or lack of money. One old friend, whom I’ll call Vlad (some names in this article have been changed) tells me his elderly mother won’t travel and he can’t leave her. Another, Anya, has moved to western Europe but is worried about a brother back in Moscow, whose wife wants to stay. A third, Ivan, has a daughter at university who is committed to the anti-war struggle at home. She has been arrested twice at marches and spent a week in jail for attending an illegal gathering. Ivan is torn between pride in his daughter’s defiant spirit and fear for her safety. He tells me: “In the future, people will ask us all what we did to prevent what is happening now. I can’t tell her not to go to the demonstration.”
When that reckoning comes, the majority will say they didn’t know what was really going on in Ukraine. But the facts are available to anyone with the will to look for them online. It isn’t hard to circumvent the Kremlin’s crude attempts to wall off the internet, although the barrier is high enough that older, less digitally savvy audiences rely on official media for their information.
State TV broadcasts an alternate reality whereby heroic Russian soldiers were sent to liberate their Ukrainian brethren from a neo-Nazi junta. This enemy is propped up by Nato as part of a plot to complete the dismemberment of Russia that began with the end of the Cold War.
“A lot of people have taken psychological asylum in those stories,” says Daniil Beilinson, co-founder of OVD-Info, a human rights charity. “It’s easier for them than accepting the truth, which is that their compatriots are committing war crimes.” Beilinson was driven out of Russia by a campaign of official harassment. OVD-Info was branded a “foreign agent”, a designation used to clamp down on non-governmental organisations and independent media with any overseas funding. Even then, he was determined to stay, adjusting to each tightening of the screw and hoping it would be the last. But then, in late 2021, OVD-Info’s website was blocked on the grounds that it had been “promoting terrorism”. That was a cue to get out fast.
Russia was an authoritarian state before the war, but with some pretence of pluralism. There were tame critics in the media and a theatre of diverse opinion could be found in a Potemkin parliament. Now the style is full-bore totalitarianism. The worse things have gone for Putin on the ground in Ukraine, the more paranoid and hysterical the official messaging has become.
The “liberation” myth has been hard to sustain when Ukrainians have put up such a fight against re-absorption into the greater Slavic motherland. The military setbacks are too conspicuous to be denied, but no one dares impugn the judgement of the president. Instead, official channels permit denunciation of incompetent commanders, who are then replaced.
The biggest threat to the credibility of the official narrative is conscription, since it exposes too many families to the cruelty and corruption of war. For audiences following the fighting on state TV, bellicose patriotism is a more enjoyable blood sport when it is someone else’s child whose blood is being spilled. It also hasn’t escaped ordinary Russians’ notice that well-connected families have dodged the draft.
Aside from the tactical demand for cannon fodder, mass mobilisation was meant to galvanise a collective sense of national purpose. It was supposed to be a revival of the spirit of the “Great Patriotic War”, as the Russians describe their 1941–45 battle with Nazi Germany.
It hasn’t worked. Organic cultural allegiance to Putin is depleted by military failure, which prompts official media to dial the nationalist rhetoric to ever-greater heights of deranged fanaticism. Celebrity news anchors and newspaper editorials call for the “liquidation” of Ukrainian elites, the “destruction” of their country and “brutal punishment” of those who will not submit to Russian control. Incitement to genocide passes for mainstream punditry.
The more unhinged the official language gets, the harder it is for exiles and dissidents to retain any sense of belonging to a place—or even an idea—called “Russia”. They feel more self-conscious speaking their language abroad and are burdened by guilt at not having done more to resist the regime in the years before resistance came to seem futile. “We will be pariahs in Europe,” Ivan tells me. “And we’ll deserve it.”
That degree of self-flagellation is far removed from mainstream Russian opinion, even among those who are sceptical about the war. It is hard to measure the mood in a country where people are reluctant to be candid with pollsters, but support for the “special military operation” has clearly tumbled from its peak of around 80 per cent in March 2022. In July, it was still thought to be above 50 per cent. In November, a leaked private survey for the Kremlin put the figure at 25 per cent, although there are complex shades of opinion.
The political scientist Kirill Rogov divides support into three broad categories. First, there are “total warriors” who have fully bought into the cult of Putin. They see the war as an existential battle to save Russia and want it pursued to the bitterest end. Second, there is a less ideological segment that buys the propaganda fiction of a “just war”—a targeted intervention to protect Russians and Russian-speakers in eastern regions of Ukraine (annexed, but not controlled, by Putin). Third are the “conformists” who aren’t necessarily convinced by official lines but see themselves as patriots and feel a duty to get behind the flag and “our boys” in the army.
Bellicose patriotism is more enjoyable when it is someone else’s child whose blood is being spilled
The “conformists” would be glad to see the war end, but aren’t swayed by moralising arguments. If anything, they are alienated by the anti-regime protest movement that is depicted by the Kremlin as an agent of western sabotage and a harbinger of chaos. Their belief that Russia would be ungovernable without a strongman leader runs deep.
Conscription was a shock to the less zealous pro-war camp, but not sufficient to turn the tide of opinion. “Two tendencies are now doing battle for public consciousness,” Rogov told Meduza, an independent Russian news website based in Latvia. “There is Putin’s efforts to widen the base for total war and there is the shock that shatters the worldview of moderate supporters.”
Military failure is one obstacle to Putin’s capture of more hearts and minds. Another is the increasingly outlandish, millenarian intensity of his creed. It is a hybrid doctrine, evolved over many years. It contains an element of retro-Soviet statecraft, but also a large dose of pre-Bolshevik Russian imperialism. It weaves in emblems of Tsarist autocracy and reactionary religious social conservatism from the Orthodox church, whose clerics sermonise about the Ukrainian campaign as a holy war against western moral degeneracy. Alexander Dugin, a prominent pseudo-philosopher of the Russian far-right who is said to have influenced Putin over the years, describes the war as “an apocalyptic, eschatological battle of Orthodox Christian Russia, Holy Russia, against the anti-Christ.”
To celebrate a recent national holiday, Dmitry Medvedev, once considered a liberal voice in Russian politics, delivered a deranged diatribe about the country’s military mission in Ukraine being communicated by God, “to stop the supreme ruler of Hell, no matter what name he uses—Satan, Lucifer or Iblis.” This grotesque fundamentalism expresses panic at the strategic dead end where Putin has led his followers.
For many years, ideology was just a cover for kleptocracy (as had also largely been the case in the later, decrepit years of the Soviet Union). Putin’s power base for the first two decades of the 21st century was a combination of tame oligarchs and siloviki—security service heavies. It was part resuscitated Soviet bureaucracy, part mafia-style family.
The pitch to ordinary Russians was that Putin could end the endemic lawlessness of the Boris Yeltsin era. It was a popular one: he didn’t even need to steal his first elections (although he didn’t take any chances). A semblance of order was achieved by nationalising the criminality. Oligarchs of an independent political inclination were shut down, jailed, driven abroad or murdered. The rest could continue siphoning Russia’s resource wealth into their pockets as long as they paid tribute to their political boss in the Kremlin.
Over time, the siloviki became the dominant faction. Economic stagnation and discontent compelled Putin to be more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad. Provoking the west enabled him to cast Russia as a victim of Nato conspiracy, and his domestic opponents as fifth columnists.
The invasion of Ukraine was a natural culmination of that process, but one that shocked the more pragmatically venal section of the elite. It ruined the mutually convenient hypocrisy that kept dirty Russian money flowing through western capitals even when diplomatic relations with the Kremlin were frosty.
Sanctions against Russian crony capitalists have not yet loosened Putin’s grip on power. Nor has the brain drain of young middle-class professionals, in whose skills lay the only hope for the country’s economic modernisation. Instead, the regime makes a virtue of its isolation as an opportunity to cleanse the nation of polluting foreign influence.
In March 2022, Putin used a televised address to attack “traitors” who “earn money here with us, but live there.” This was meant not “in the geographical sense but according to their thoughts, their slavish consciousness.” The enemy within was identified as anyone with an inclination to western tastes and mores: “oysters and gender freedoms”.
Slavic exceptionalism and Europeanisation have pulled Russian culture and politics in opposite directions for centuries. The current ideological lurch into quasi-mystical anti-western nationalism is part of that long cycle. The strongest countervailing force is youth. The post-Soviet generation, especially its Moscow and St Petersburg cohort, is better travelled than its parents’ and digitally saturated in global culture. Teenagers and most twentysomethings have known no Russia other than the one Putin has built for them, and they find it suffocating. They are the base of support for Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner who survived an assassination attempt by military intelligence agents in 2020 and is now in jail.
The Kremlin is hoping to stop the liberal rot with mandatory ideology classes for university students and schoolchildren. Each Monday morning, pupils must take part in a session called “conversations about what is important”, the purpose of which is “strengthening traditional Russian spiritual-moral values and inculcating patriotism.”
The regime makes a virtue of isolation—it’s an opportunity to cleanse any polluting foreign influence
Barricades against foreign culture are harder to police now than they were in the Soviet era, but anti-western rhetoric can still be effective for discrediting exiles in the eyes of the patriotic mainstream. It is relatively easy to blur the boundary between political opposition, sedition and greed when the image of Russians abroad has been defined more by swaggering magnates than defiant artists and human rights activists.
That is the enduring legacy of the toxic 1990s, when Yeltsin’s hold on power was secured by the transfer of state assets and media to the first generation of oligarchs. That grubby decade discredited democracy in Russia, stoked Soviet nostalgia and emboldened nationalists who claimed that liberalism was an alien concept that couldn’t survive transplant to Slavic soil.
The 1990s happen also to be the years when I made my closest friendships as a Russian student. My peers were children of the long Soviet stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev. Their teenage years were coloured by the thrill of new permissiveness ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev’s experiments with economic reform (Perestroika) and political openness (Glasnost). When Gorbachev died in August, a friend in St Petersburg messaged me: “I was really lucky that his reign coincided with my youth. Under him it got easier to breathe. We wanted to live, to dream, to feel all the ups and downs. Now that has all gone, and so has he.” But for many Russians, Gorbachev is the fool who sold them out to the west.
There is enough failure in Russia’s botched transition to democracy for everyone to get a portion of the blame. A big factor was western arrogance in its post-Cold War victory parade, dictating terms of economic surrender, mandating a form of capitalism that felt like mass expropriation. Another error was the failure to grasp the resilience of pride in a Soviet identity, even among people who had craved freedom while behind the Iron Curtain. It was possible to hate Communist party rule but also feel humiliated and heartbroken by the disappearance of the USSR, the country you had always called home.
Putin’s rise to power was fuelled by that disorientation and resentment. The delusion expressed through the invasion in February 2022 was in thinking Ukrainians felt it too, despite two decades of independence. More stupidly, Putin expected them to convert a fading, vintage post-Soviet identity into an extreme brand of specifically Russian nationalism.
In trying to expand the boundary of Russianness into the old Soviet space, the president achieved the opposite, shrinking the parameters of his own nation. Russian identity in the 21st century is a complex bundle of contradictions and tensions. At its core is unresolved ambivalence towards the USSR, which was both a successor state to the Russian Empire and a submersion of Russian history into the ideological narrative of Marxism-Leninism.
The invasion of Ukraine was meant to rehabilitate and consolidate Russian power and self-esteem. It has instead revealed a brittle, pinched and paranoid country. That doesn’t mean there is a coherent alternative concept of the nation being curated in exile; the émigrés still struggle for relevance in their forsaken motherland. Navalny understood that when he returned to Russia after treatment in Germany for the poisoning that nearly killed him. He knew he would be imprisoned, but in the Russian imagination, time in a penal colony is a credential of authentic opposition in a way that safe haven overseas is not.
Émigré communities also tend to be divided between radicals and moderates; between those who focus on the prospect of regime change in the old country and those who move on and start a new life abroad. “On one hand, I can’t look back, I have to leave that life behind,” Grigory Sverdlin, who feels that division himself, tells me from a flat in Tbilisi. “But on the other hand, I can’t just erase the fact that it’s my homeland, that I have people I love there. It’s part of who I am.” And what about the prospect of one day going back to a better Russia? “If I try to be optimistic I can think about the collapse of the Putin regime, maybe reform of Russia… But we still have to go through more upheaval, more dark times to get there.”
Kremlin-watchers are not optimistic that Putin will be deposed any time soon, although they see cracks appearing in the regime as his judgement is called into question. Even if the president is somehow toppled, the succession will be contested by factions formed under his tutelage. The odds are stacked against any liberal democratic renaissance. A post-Putin government might exhibit more predictable realpolitik in dealings with the west, but it won’t repudiate the nationalist rhetoric. It won’t admit the atrocities in Ukraine.
It is a bleak horizon that makes it hard for the regime’s opponents to think further than a day at a time. It is difficult for them to know what Russia they are trying to redeem from the past or what idea of Russia could serve as a foundation for the future. What can be salvaged from the moral wreckage of Putinism and the complicity of their compatriots?
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a psychological mechanism that allowed citizens to distinguish themselves from the crimes of the state. Everyone had been a victim of the Communist party in some way or other, which enabled a mass denial of complicity. There was little acknowledgement that the cruelty was something Russians had done to each other, to themselves. The charities and human rights groups that emerged to chronicle Soviet crimes have been shut down by Putin.
That absence of collective atonement had consequences that were foreseen decades earlier by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. He wrote: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.”
Putinism is the harvest of a vindictive cruelty that was sowed when Russian politics recoiled from any sustained reckoning with the crimes of the Soviet Union. In place of atonement and reconciliation was built a cult of victimhood and vengeance. The hope for a different Russia is in those people who remember the truth and pass it on to their children, whose defiant grip on reality holds out against the totalitarian abyss. They are the resistance to Putin’s nihilistic war, and they are relatively few and powerless today, which is why their voices need to be amplified. Their courage—their very existence—has to be illuminated because, without them, the future of Russia is only darkness.
