On social media, many Ukrainians and some Western Europeans and Americans (including a former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul) have argued that ordinary Russians have not done enough to stop Mr Putin’s aggression. Russian ballet companies have canceled their tours because they are state-owned, not necessarily because of the opinion of individual dancers. US and European universities are canceling partnerships and events with Russian institutions and scientists, even as they are inundated with requests for positions from Russian academics who have fled Russia or hope to leave. New Yorkers have expressed outrage at Putin by donating vodka despite the fact that many popular brands are not produced in Russia, and by boycotting Russian restaurants, although sometimes the owners are not Russian at all. These private boycotts have contributed to fears among newly exiled Russians that they will become pariahs because of their nationality.
“Collective guilt is an easy way to channel anger,” Maria Stepanova, a prominent Russian poet, told me. But the impulse to punish Russians on the basis of national identity is misguided. Ms. Stepanova told me that many emigrants are driven by a sense of pure moral indignation, a sense that emigration is the only remaining avenue for political protest. “They just don’t want to breathe the air here,” she said. “They want to sever all ties with their country… They are willing to risk ruining their lives by this feeling of disgust.”
Russia’s authoritarianism has steadily increased since 2011, when many thousands took to the streets to protest the rigged 2011 parliamentary elections and demand freedom for political prisoners. These demonstrations, one of the largest since the 1990s, sparked Mr Putin’s long-standing fear that Russia would experience a pro-democracy “colored revolution” like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
In response, Putin’s government essentially abolished the right to protest, while persecuting opposition politicians. Independent press, NGOs and activists are now mainly targeted by a law against ‘foreign agents’. Many journalists and dissidents had already left the country at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, often because of the threat of arrest under false pretenses.
Anyone who dares to speak the truth about the war now faces a level of repression not seen since the Soviet Union. Thousands of Russians are still being arrested in anti-war demonstrations, and some are determined to remain in Russia to fight against the government. But the space for protest has narrowed even further.
Many Russians who are now hastily leaving are among the small minority of Russians who have turned into street protests in recent years. Mr Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine and accompanying repression at home are draining his neo-Russian empire of its remaining freethinkers and opposition movements. The result is likely to be a more ideologically homogeneous Russia, one with even less access to truthful media and channels of political resistance, and one deprived, either by arrest, assassination or emigration, of many of its most outspoken and brave opposition figures.
Yevgenia Baltatarova, an independent Buryat journalist from Ulan-Ude, Siberia, spoke to me from Kazakhstan. After writing about the war on her Telegram channel, 15 government officials came to search her home, confiscating her belongings and those of her parents and cousin, she said. “The propaganda machine worked,” she said. “Now they have demonstrations with the new swastika” – the “Z” that has become the symbol of government-sponsored pro-war demonstrations where young people pump their fists and chant pro-Putin slogans.