They lined up at ATMs, desperate for cash after Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia, exchanging information about where they could get dollars. In Istanbul cafes, they sat silently studying Telegram messages and Google maps. They organized support groups to help other exiles find housing.
Tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Turkey since Russia invaded Ukraine last month: outraged by what they see as a criminal war, worried about military recruitment, tense about the possibility of closing the Russian border or the fact that their livelihoods are no longer viable.
They are just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of people traveled to countries such as Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, best known as sources of emigrants to Russia. At the land border with Latvia — only open to European visa holders — travelers reported waiting hours.
While the exodus of an estimated 2.7 million Ukrainians from their war-torn country has focused the world’s attention, the escalation of authoritarianism in Russia has caused many residents to lose hope for the future. This created a flight — albeit much smaller than in Ukraine — that some compare to the 1920s, when more than 100,000 opponents of the Communist Bolsheviks during the civil war took refuge in what was then Constantinople, now Istanbul.
“There has never been anything like this in peacetime,” says Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago. “There is no war on Russian territory. As a single event, it is very big.”
Some of those who fled are bloggers, journalists or activists who feared imprisonment under Russia’s draconian new law, which criminalizes what the state considers “false information” about the war.
Others are musicians and artists who see no future for their craft in Russia. And there are workers in technology, law and other sectors who have seen the prospect of a comfortable middle-class life — not to mention any possibility of moral acceptance by their government — dissipate overnight.
They left behind jobs, family and money sitting in bank accounts they can no longer access. They fear being seen as Russians abroad as the West isolates the country because of the invasion, and they falter at the loss of a positive Russian identity.
“They didn’t just take away our future,” Polina Borodina, a Moscow playwright, says of her government’s war in Ukraine. “They took away our past.”
The invasion triggered a tectonic shift. For all of President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown, Russia until last month was a place with extensive travel connections to the rest of the world, virtually uncensored internet that provided some platform for independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class art scene. Elements typical of the western middle class (Ikea, Starbucks, foreign cars) were widely available.
When they woke up on February 24, however, many Russians saw that it was all over. Journalist Dmitri Aleshkovski, 37, got into his car and drove to Latvia. “It became clear that if that red line was crossed, nothing would stop it anymore,” he says of Putin. “Things will only get worse.”
In the days following the invasion, Putin forced what remained of independent media in Russia to shut down. He planned a brutal crackdown on protesters, with more than 14,000 people arrested since the start of the war, including 862 in 37 cities on Sunday, according to the OVD-Info group.
Certainly many Russians support the war — and many of them are completely unaware of the extent of the conflict because they trust state television news. But others flocked to places like Istanbul, which, as in the 1920s, was once again a refuge for exiles.
While most of Europe has closed the skies, Turkish Airlines takes off from Moscow up to five times a day; together with those of other companies, more than 30 flights arrive from Russia on certain days.
“History moves in a spiral, especially Russia,” says Kirill Nabutov, 64, a sports commentator from St. Petersburg who fled to Istanbul with his wife this month. “She goes back to the same place—to this same place.”
Nabutov’s mother’s cousin was an 18-year-old sailor in the Crimea when he was evacuated with Commander Peter Wrangel’s fleet to Constantinople in 1920. Now, a generation of exiles face the daunting prospect of starting over from scratch. And they all face the harsh reality of being seen as representatives of a country that has launched a war.
In Georgia (where, according to the government, 20,000 Russians have arrived since the Ukraine action began), exiles face an intimidating environment, filled with anti-Russian graffiti and hostile comments on social media.
Many Georgians see clear parallels between the current invasion and Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia. While most welcomed the newcomers, some do not distinguish between dissidents who fled for moral or security reasons and those who support Putin.
In neighboring Armenia, whose government says several thousand Russians arrive daily, exiles said they were better received. Davur Dordjeir, 25, says he quit his job as a lawyer at Sberbank, Russia’s state bank, organized his finances, made a will and said goodbye to his mother. He flew to Yerevan worried that public comments he has already made against the government could make him a target.
“I realized that from the beginning of this war I am an enemy of the State.”
Some exiles are trying to organize mutual aid efforts and trying to combat anti-Russian sentiment. Aleshkovski says he cried every day at the beginning of the war and had panic attacks. “So I pulled myself together and realized I needed to do what I know how to do.” He and colleagues are organizing an initiative called “Russians OK” to help those who are forced or want to leave and to produce media content in English and Russian.
Mikhail Khodorkovski, an exiled oil tycoon who spent ten years in prison in Russia, is funding a project called Kovcheg (ark), which provides housing in Istanbul and Yerevan and seeks out psychologists for emotional support. Since its inception, on the 10th, there have been more than 10,000 consultations.
The pain of leaving it all behind has been terrible, many said — along with the guilt of perhaps not having done enough to fight Putin. Anthropologist Alevtina Borodulina, 30, joined more than 4,700 Russian scientists who signed an open letter against the war. As she walked with friends on the Boulevard Ring in central Moscow, one of them pulled out a bag that said “no to war” and was immediately arrested.
Borodulina flew to Istanbul on March 3, met like-minded Russians at a protest in support of Ukraine and is now volunteering with the Kovcheg project to help other exiles. “It was like I was seeing the Soviet Union,” she says of her last days in Moscow. “I thought people who left the Soviet Union in the 1920s probably made a better decision than people who stayed and ended up in camps.”
