On my first night in Tbilisi, I saw another old friend, Katja Petrowskaja. She was born in Kyiv to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, went to high school in Moscow and university in Estonia, finished graduate studies in Moscow, and, eventually, with her German husband, moved to Berlin, where they started a family and she became a prominent German-language writer. Their kids grew up, and Petrowskaja and her husband moved to Tbilisi. Now Russia was bombing Kyiv, and Petrowskaja’s mother, an eighty-six-year-old retired history teacher, was there alone, refusing to be evacuated.
Petrowskaja and I met briefly: my flight landed in Tbilisi at one in the morning, and she was flying out at six. She was going to Berlin, where she would aid in an effort to secure bulletproof vests for the Ukrainian Army, organize refugee relief, and make media appearances to advocate for Ukraine. She had barely slept since February 24th. She had no patience for some of her close Russian friends, who were posting poems and soul-searching essays on the themes of guilt and responsibility. “There is no time for that,” she said. “You have to work.” That these friends didn’t share her sense of urgency, that they could be contemplative and solipsistic, struck her as a moral failure. “Space has split apart, and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to speak to any of them again,” Petrowskaja said. “They are fascinated with their own misfortune. I get it—you can go to prison for fifteen years for protesting. Meanwhile, my friends in Kyiv are, suicidally, staying there, because it’s their city, and they are working to believe that it can’t happen—as long as they are there, it won’t.”
No comparison is possible between Kyiv, a city under bombardment, and Moscow. Except perhaps this: it—the surrender to Putin’s tyranny—had already happened in Moscow. “There will be actual terror,” Primakova said. “We will be watching it from afar. There are people there willing to step into the fire. It would be easier for them if we could step into the fire with them.” Primakova is about five feet tall; Kolmanovsky is a few inches taller. They both wear glasses. They have six kids between them. Both have repeatedly faced down Moscow cops in full riot gear. “I did all I could,” she continued. “But I’m not a hero. I don’t feel guilt toward Ukrainians, because I don’t feel that what’s happening in Ukraine is being done in my name, but I do feel guilty toward the people who stayed behind in Moscow. And, every time someone I care about leaves, I breathe a sigh of relief and realize just how scared I was for them. It’s a selfish feeling, this relief, because it means I get to feel a little less guilty.”
Responsibility, culpability, guilt, shame, whether individual or collective—the many gradations of these feelings are close to the surface in each of the new exiles. “I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking for the first five days,” Aleshkovsky said. “I would have preferred to literally burn up in shame. All of us are responsible for this war. Even those who did a lot to prevent it didn’t do enough—because the war started.”
In 1968, Babitsky’s grandfather Konstantin Babitsky was one of seven people who were arrested in Red Square for protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; he served three years in internal exile. Babitsky’s grandmother Tatyana Velikanova was arrested in 1979, for editing an underground publication on political persecution. Sentenced to four years in prison and five in internal exile, she rejected an offer of amnesty during perestroika and served out her sentence. Babitsky was five when she rejoined the family in Moscow. “She was made of steel,” Babitsky said. That’s not the part of her he feels he has inherited—rather, it’s her absolute willingness to accept responsibility. “If I’m going to continue considering myself Russian, if I am going to carry Russian culture around like a jewel,” he said, “then I have to acknowledge that Russian culture contains the possibility of this war—that one can read Tolstoy, author of the best antiwar texts ever written, and do this.”
How does one live as a Russian while Russia is bombing Ukrainian homes, schools, and maternity wards? “I don’t know what I can say to a Ukrainian,” Babitsky said. “I can’t pretend that it’s Putin bombing Ukraine and I have nothing to do with it. I can’t ask for forgiveness, because forgiveness cannot be given while Kharkiv is being bombed. So what I say is that I have a giant hole inside of me, and I ask them to tell me what I can do. And that’s not fair to them.”
Kremer, a former news anchor, is a founder of a podcast company, based in Moscow, called Libo/Libo (Either/Or). Kolmanovsky had a hit podcast about science, and Babitsky co-hosted a show on ethics; the company also created programs for corporate clients. Libo/Libo existed mostly outside politics, and this was what allowed it to function. “Some advertisers would ask that there wouldn’t be a word about politics in the ads that played alongside theirs, or even in the entire podcast,” Kremer told me. Now, though, the category of “political” was expanding to engulf all of life. After Russia passed new censorship laws, on the ninth day of the war, Libo/Libo removed Babitsky’s last pre-invasion podcast episode, because it featured an interview with a moral philosopher about war, and altered one of Kolmanovsky’s podcast episodes, about canine intelligence, because he had noted, “This podcast was recorded before the war.” All three Libo/Libo founders have left the country, as have about a third of its roughly twenty staff members. All day, every day, in the common room of the hostel or at the guesthouse, Kremer was convening Zoom meetings with her co-founders, staff, and clients, trying to figure out how to keep the company going. “It’s like I keep solving a labyrinth puzzle in my brain, and every path is a dead end, but I can’t stop,” she said.
Babitsky’s main source of income, aside from his podcast, was an editing gig for a book publisher. “It’s a good nonfiction publisher, and I can’t imagine what its future might hold,” he said. Primakova, who has a stake in a market-research company that her mother owns, was still fielding calls from large corporate clients, but, she said, they would soon realize that there was no market left to research. These jobs had the advantage of being portable, but the world to which the exiles could telecommute was becoming a mirage. “Right now, people are talking about where they are going to go and how they are going to get money out of their Russian accounts, but soon people are going to start returning,” Kremer said. “They left in protest, because it felt unbearable to stay. But you need a lot of money to sustain this kind of protest.”
Years ago, I found a picture in my great-grandfather’s papers. It was taken in 1913, a year of unprecedented prosperity in Russia. My great-grandfather, then a prominent political journalist in his mid-thirties, was with a group of people, all dressed in white linen, all looking as though they had invented friendship and good living. Most of that group emigrated during the decade of wars and revolutions that followed. My great-grandfather stayed, found ways to work in and around publishing while keeping out of politics, and lost everything he owned and clawed his way back to relative prosperity at least twice. Through the rest of the century, his family lugged around redwood furniture, fine china, and silverware from the glorious past—not as family heirlooms but as objects of use in a country that no longer made such objects. Now Russia was entering another era when things—clothes, furniture, cars—would come primarily from the past.
In Moscow in December, Irina Shcherbakova, a historian of the Gulag, took me on a tour of a show that she had curated at Memorial, Russia’s first and biggest history and human-rights organization. One of the show’s exhibits was a faded blue dress, patched and mended an uncountable number of times, one of those material objects which captured the vicissitudes of the Soviet century—its owner had worn it to the theatre, where she was arrested, and then to a year’s worth of interrogations in prison. Now Shcherbakova was in Tel Aviv, hoping to travel soon to Germany. Memorial had been ordered closed by the courts on February 28th and was ransacked in a police raid on March 4th. The same day, the Sakharov Center, a museum and educational institution named for the dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner, closed to the public. Its director and his family fled to Europe by way of Tashkent.
“I want to go back and wake up in my own bed,” Kremer said. “But all my people are gone.”
On March 12th, a couple of thousand newly arrived Russians gathered in front of the building that used to house the Russian Embassy in Tbilisi. (Georgia severed diplomatic relations with Russia in 2008.) They held aloft a giant blue-and-yellow flag and chanted, “No to war!,” “Peace for Ukraine, freedom for Russia!,” and all the Russian protest chants from the time when Russian protests still had chants: “Russia will be free!” “Russia without Putin!” The chants sounded half-hearted; each died out after a few repetitions.
A group dispersed and gathered again, like mercury: Venyavkin and Shengelia, Babitsky and Kremer, Primakova and Kolmanovsky, and assorted kids and grandparents. “I can’t chant anything,” Primakova said. “What is the point? I understood the point when we were taking a risk, when we were surrounded by riot police, and when the drivers honking in support were taking a risk, too.” As hard as it is to talk about guilt and responsibility, it’s harder to figure out what the people who used to make up Russia’s civil society should do now that they are no longer in Russia.
Sverdlin, the director of Nochlezhka, the organization for the homeless, spent his first few days of exile in Tallinn, helping other people flee Russia by arranging seats on flights chartered by tech executives. He held a Zoom meeting to tell his staff that he was resigning; remaining at the helm would put the organization at risk. He planned to drive through Eastern and Southern Europe to Georgia, where many of his friends had ended up. “I believe that I will return” to Russia, he said. “I am mindful of all those people who left in 1918-1919, thinking they’d be back in a couple of years, and then it was seventy years later. But I think the regime is in agony now, one that is very painful for the patient and for the world around him, but I think it will end in a couple of years and I will return.”
Aleshkovsky, who landed in Vilnius, also planned to make his way to Georgia, where he has spent a lot of time. He had resigned from his foundation in December, after struggling with depression and burnout, but now, it seemed, he had no choice but to start another N.G.O., to help other exiles. “I saw that everyone else—the Ukrainians, the Belarusians—had their own diaspora, while the Russians are coming with nothing and then can’t even access their savings,” he said.
He wasn’t looking far into the future. “Who knows if there is even going to be a Vilnius or a Tbilisi in a couple of months?” he said. Putin, he went on, “is threatening nuclear war, and these are not empty words—these are words uttered by a man who is waging war.” I asked him, Why not go someplace like Zanzibar? Aleshkovsky responded, “My favorite place in the world is the Chatham archipelago,” off the coast of New Zealand. “But, even assuming that it wouldn’t be affected by nuclear war, a life with the knowledge that everyone you loved perished in a nuclear war and you did nothing to stop it wouldn’t be worth living.”
Venyavkin, to his surprise, found himself growing optimistic. He had spent the previous decade running education projects—summer schools, debate clubs, lecture series—outside the official university system. Like the other exiles, he had worked to create a small, humane alternative world inside the vast Putin autocracy. Now that this parallel society was gone, Venyavkin could think only of the future, which had become strangely clearer. “I refuse to look at this as some kind of personal disaster,” he said. “Disaster is what’s happening in Ukraine.”
