Exiles Cannot Save Russia

In late 2022, a Moscow court sentenced the Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin to eight and a half years behind bars. He was a prominent and outspoken member of the Russian opposition and an ally of Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny, prominent opposition figures who both met untimely deaths. Had he not been freed in last month’s prisoner swap with the United States, Yashin, too, might have met an untimely death. Now exiled in Berlin, he can do his political work unimpeded.

Yashin did not want to leave Russia. He would have preferred to stay: he told reporters at a press conference in Germany, “I understood my imprisonment not only as an antiwar struggle but also as a fight for my right to live in my country, to engage in independent politics there.” He had asserted a right that his government flatly rejected. Navalny asserted the same right when he returned to Russia from Germany in 2021, knowing full well the tribulations that he would endure.

Yashin’s desire to pursue independent politics in Russia, even after having been imprisoned for pursuing independent politics, is understandable. The country’s political future will be written not in Berlin or London or New York but in Russia itself. It will be written by those who live out the war there, whether or not they support it. To leave is to lose the opportunity to participate in the process and to abandon the country in wartime, inviting shame and stigma, especially for those who settle in the West. To leave is also to join the exiled opposition, an unstructured network far removed from the levers of power in Moscow.

Nobody expects the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin to be replaced by a cadre of Western-oriented leaders any time soon. Russia and the West are enmeshed in a long-term conflict, and the Kremlin has built its rule on hostility to the West, expelling or otherwise silencing Westernizers—that is, Russians who continue to regard the West as an exemplar of liberal democracy. But scenarios of transformation can still retain their imaginative force. They can still guide the ways Western governments approach the Russian diaspora. Instead of fantasizing about political revolution, the West should recognize the richness of that diaspora, which lies in its many forms of ability and expertise, from the academic to the journalistic to the artistic. It is in the West’s self-interest to grant political asylum to Russians fleeing Putin’s despotism and to direct funding in a manner that promotes their cultural and intellectual contributions.

SOLZHENITSYN’S REFUSAL

There was once a Western-backed Russian opposition that entirely recast Russian politics. In 1917, after years of living in exile, Bolshevik leaders returned home. Imperial Germany made Vladimir Lenin’s journey possible, sending the revolutionary by train across Europe and into Russia. A painting of Lenin arriving by train in Petrograd from Zurich is among the most iconic twentieth-century images. Reeling from the entry of the United States into World War I, the German General Staff had infected Russia with the bacillus of revolution, calculating that it would help Germany win. But by 1945, in a spectacular instance of unintended consequences, the Soviet Union had reconstituted itself as a formidable military force in Europe, had triumphed over Nazi Germany, and then, as one of the world’s two superpowers, presided over the division of Germany.

The Bolshevik example is unique in Russian history. It is the only time a group of political émigrés returned and consolidated a revolution. Otherwise, Russia, which has often been open to Western programs of modernization, has kept its émigrés at arm’s length, both at times of stasis and at times of change. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Russian intellectuals went to Europe in search of a better future, experimenting with liberal and socialist ideas. Their quests often ended in frustration—sometimes frustration with their home country’s refusal to westernize and sometimes frustration with the West itself. The exiled writers Alexander Herzen and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were disillusioned by a variety of perceived Western ills—hypocrisy and colonialism for Herzen, materialism and lack of anticommunist will for Solzhenitsyn.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war inspired new waves of political emigration. Like many Western governments at the time, the émigrés hoped for a Soviet collapse. (The United States did not recognize the Soviet Union until 1933, in part because U.S. officials were certain that the Soviet Union would soon fall apart.) The diaspora envisioned many alternative Russias. But instead of imploding, the Soviet Union became a political juggernaut, and during World War II, even an ally of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Stateless and adrift, Russian émigrés from the Soviet Union gathered into vibrant communities in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, and elsewhere. The history of modern dance, art, music, literature, and technology could not be written without mentioning such figures as the composer Igor Stravinsky, the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, or the aviator Igor Sikorski. In Western universities, Russian academics developed Slavic and Soviet studies, which before their arrival in the 1920s and 1930s, had been minimal. The Russian diaspora may not have aided Americans in overthrowing the Soviet Union, but it did much to elucidate the Soviet Union and its political culture.

Solzhenitsyn was the most famous Russian political exile. Banished from the Soviet Union in 1974, he lived in Vermont from 1976 until 1994, when he returned to live in a post-Soviet Russia. Solzhenitsyn was a symbol of anticommunist dissent, and American Cold Warriors had wanted him to serve as a cultural and political ambassador of the West. But Solzhenitsyn refused. He was a Russian rather than an American anticommunist. Within months of being elected Russia’s president in 2000, Putin met with Solzhenitsyn. He would draw on Solzhenitsyn’s belief that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are one Slavic nation—most significantly in an article on the countries’ “historical unity” that Putin published in July 2021, seven months before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

FRACTURED OPPOSITION

The war in Ukraine has heightened the pitch of authoritarianism in Russia, where criticism of the war is criminalized and opposition to the Kremlin is suppressed. Understandably, many opposition figures have fled, which is what the Kremlin wants. For Putin, the only thing better than a nonexistent opposition is an irrelevant opposition abroad, which he can vilify as the instrument of a hostile West.

Russian oppositionists in exile face nearly insurmountable challenges. They lack ideological unity, they lack a political party, and, unlike the Bolsheviks, they lack a clear sense of purpose. Indeed, what is commonly referred to as “the opposition” is fragmented and prone to endemic squabbling. Russian dissidents abroad share no consensus on what a post-Putin Russia should look like. It is difficult to imagine this splintered and scattered opposition arriving at a consensus anytime soon.

Within Russia, the oppositionists’ challenges are far greater. A viable opposition needs a domestic constituency. The Bolsheviks had workers, peasants, disillusioned soldiers, and progressive intellectuals; they also had the wind of protest behind them in 1917 and a crumbling government before them. The contemporary Russian “opposition” has no apparent constituency. The intellectuals of Russia’s large urban centers cannot mobilize the general population. Nor can they contend with the state’s powers of coercion and violence. Even if the Putin regime collapsed and exiled opposition figures rushed home, they would struggle to secure power. They would have to deal with officials and institutions—the military and the security services in particular—ready and willing to crush them.

The West has much to gain from the influx of Russian émigrés.

In the West, advocating for Russia’s defeat is a prerequisite for entry into mainstream intellectual and public life. Russians who criticize Western sanctions or make any kind of nonnegative reference to those fighting on the Russian side face serious pushback. After his release from prison, Yashin drew sharp criticism from Ukrainians when he called for a reconfiguration of the sanctions regime to apply pressure on the authorities while sparing Russian citizens. The Toronto International Film Festival recently canceled screenings of “Russians at War,” a documentary by a Russian Canadian filmmaker, as the festival organizers fended off critics complaining that the documentary humanized Russian troops sent to fight in Ukraine; the decision to cancel was later rescinded. Yet the political positions that Russian exiles tend to embrace in the West, either out of conviction or to avoid censure, imperil their political credibility in Russia. Perhaps Russia’s defeat in the war would reveal that large groups of hitherto silent Russians were eager for their country to lose, but that is unlikely. According to polling by the independent Levada Center, anti-Western sentiment is high among Russians in Russia, and anti-antiwar sentiment has substantial traction. No aspiring post-Putin politician can afford to articulate a desire for Ukraine’s victory in public or to equate Russian troops with war criminals.

Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region of western Russia and the recent uptick in drone attacks on Russian infrastructure have further complicated the picture. Now more than ever, the state can cast the opposition’s antiwar stance as treasonous. Those who oppose the war, the Kremlin can more easily argue, are indifferent to the integrity of the country’s borders and the lives of Russian citizens. This tension might not matter in the West. But it matters greatly to opposition leaders who hope to one day reenter the fray of Russian politics.

A CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL GIFT

Western governments have largely welcomed the Russian dissidents but have naively projected their own beliefs onto them. Going forward, they should bear several truths in mind. One is that the opposition has no chance of acquiring power in Russia in the foreseeable future. Its prospects were dim before the war, and they are even dimmer now. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have left the country in the last two years; for the Kremlin, the war has been a cleansing of the body politic. A related truth is that Western governments cannot hope to use the Russian opposition to engineer a transformation of Russian politics. This tactic, deployed by Germany in Russia in 1917 and by the United States in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, is unfailingly counterproductive.

Western governments should make a conscious effort not to fold the Russian opposition into Western projects and schemes. Western governments might wish to fund independent Russian opposition groups, but they should not seek to align them with Western interests, whatever these might be. Russian opposition figures cannot resolve the West’s problems with Russia, which are historically rooted and geopolitical.

Still, the West has much to gain from the influx of Russian émigrés. At a moment when people-to-people contact between Russia and the West is more constricted than it was during the Cold War, emigration from Russia is a cultural and intellectual gift. Within it resides a capacity not to reconstitute Russia from without but to understand Russia from within. Western governments and civil society should encourage the creative potential of Russian exiles, from the social scientists and journalists making sense of Putinism to the poets writing sonnets and the painters producing still lifes. Western officials should apply no litmus test of political attitude toward the Russian diaspora. They should write no script in which the Russian opposition abroad is assigned a messianic role. Instead, they should lift the tyranny of high political expectations. Doing so would open the door to the surprising and illuminating contributions that émigrés often make to their adopted homes.