TBILISI, Georgia – “Wake up, Sonya, the war has begun.” These were the first words I said to my girlfriend on the morning of February 24, when Russian missiles rained down on Ukraine. The words I never thought I’d have to say.
No one in Moscow believed there could be a war, even though it is painfully obvious now that the Kremlin had been preparing for it for years. Were we, the millions of Russians who openly or secretly opposed President Vladimir Putin’s regime, just silent witnesses to what happened? Worse, did we endorse it?
New. In 2011, when it was announced that Mr Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and sparked war in the Donbas, we held huge anti-war demonstrations. And in 2021, we took to the streets again across the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after returning to Moscow.
I want to believe that we have done everything we can to keep Mr Putin in check. But it’s not true. Although we protested, organised, lobbied, disseminated information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: we failed. We have failed to avert a catastrophe, and we have not been able to change the country for the better. And now we have to bear that failure.
The Russians who oppose the war are now in a terrible condition. It’s not just that we couldn’t stop this senseless and illegal war – we can’t even protest against it. A law passed on March 4 makes expressing anti-war sentiments in Russia punishable by up to 15 years in prison. (Some 15,000 people have been detained for anti-war actions since the invasion began.) Thousands have faced an unbearable future and have fled the country. Those who stayed have lost much of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.
It is as if we are considered criminals not only by our own state, but also by the rest of the world. Yet we are not criminals. We didn’t start this war and we didn’t vote for the people who did. We didn’t work for the state that is now bombing Ukrainian cities. Time and again we raised our voices against government policy, even as it became increasingly dangerous to do so.
It wasn’t easy. Over the past decade, a plethora of repressive legislation has quelled public protest, decimated the free press, censored the internet and suppressed freedom of expression. Independent outlets were blocked, journalists were labeled ‘foreign agents’ and human rights organizations were shut down. Thousands were detained and beaten. Prominent critics were exiled or killed. mr. Navalny was imprisoned and could remain in prison for many years. We paid for our resistance.
Still, it’s up to us to start the conversation about what happened. The invasion of Ukraine definitely marks the end of Russia’s post-war era. For the 77 years since World War II, Russia – regardless of what other perceptions it may have had – has been regarded as the country that helped save humanity from the greatest evil the world has ever known. Russia was the heroic country that defeated fascism, even though that victory forced half of Europe to 45 years of communism. Not anymore. Russia is now the nation that has unleashed a new evil, and unlike the old, it is armed with nuclear weapons.
The primary responsibility for this evil rests entirely at the feet of Mr Putin and his entourage. But for those who opposed the regime, in ways big and small, the responsibility also lies with us. How did it happen? What have we done wrong? How do we prevent this from happening again? These are the questions we are dealing with. Wherever we are – in Moscow, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Riga, Istanbul, Tel Aviv or New York – and whatever we do.
Responsibility is key. There was much good in the country where I grew up, the country that ceased to exist two weeks ago. But responsibility was what we lacked. Russia is a highly individualistic society, in which people, to quote the cultural historian Andrei Zorin, live with a ‘leave me alone’ mentality. We like to isolate ourselves from each other, from the state, from the world. This has allowed many of us to build vibrant, hopeful and energetic lives against a grim backdrop of arrests and prisons. But in the process we became lonely and lost sight of everyone else’s interests.
We must now put aside our individual concerns and accept our collective responsibility for the war. Such an act is primarily a moral necessity. But it could also be the first step towards a new Russian nation – a nation that could talk to the world in a language other than wars and threats, a nation that others will learn not to fear. It is towards the creation of this Russia that we, disowned and exiled and persecuted, must bend our efforts.
Mediazona, an independent website devoted to criminal proceedings and the criminal justice system, has a haunting slogan: “It’s going to get worse.” For the past ten years, that has been a starkly accurate prediction. As Russia bombs Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine that things could be anything but terrible. But we have to.