There have been diasporas ever since the Old Testament, and, leaving aside their tragic nature, no two mass exoduses have been alike. In the 20th century, the world witnessed Jews escaping from pogroms, the Bolshevik revolution, and then Hitler; African Americans migrating en masse out of the Jim Crow South; and Vietnamese fleeing a war-torn country. In this century, Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans have fled failed liberations and brutal sectarian wars; Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans have been walking away from poverty and violence; and, now, millions of newly arrived Ukrainians in Europe and elsewhere are wondering when or even if they will ever go home.
For some countries, diasporas are also not new. Just ask the Russians. For three-quarters of a century, Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, and its successor, the KGB, kept close tabs on expatriate Russians, constantly worrying about the threat they might pose. And now, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security service, the FSB, is continuing the tradition. According to recent FSB estimates, almost 4 million Russians left the country in the first three months of this year.
Obviously, FSB statistics are hard to verify, but the sheer magnitude of this year’s departures is striking. Compared with the first quarter of last year, Russian arrivals in Georgia and Tajikistan increased fivefold, and they grew fourfold in Estonia, threefold in Armenia and Uzbekistan, and twofold in Kazakhstan. Moreover, Latvia and Lithuania together took in about 74,000 Russians, and popular tourist spots like Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey welcomed just under 1 million. Nearly 750,000 people crossed into the Georgian region of Abkhazia, one of Putin’s vassal territories.
Illustration: Lance Liu
While some of these traveling Russians doubtless returned home, the total number of departures in the first quarter is remarkable. It represents nearly 2 percent of the country’s population, and that does not even count the Russians who have left for Europe or other parts of the world.
The FSB is not tracking these departures just to pass the time. From the October Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian diasporas were flies in the ointment of the worker’s paradise. While Russians had already started to flee in the wake of the failed 1905 revolution, these numbers surged when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 and during the subsequent civil war. “Little Moscows” cropped up across Europe.
This history was repeated in the 1990s, but with a twist. Not only did the collapse of the Soviet Union leave 30 million ethnic Russians outside Russia’s borders (primarily in the Baltics, Kazakhstan and Ukraine), but several million more emigrated to Europe, Asia and North America, producing the second major diaspora in the space of 100 years.
Do such large expatriate communities really matter? That depends on your point of view. In the 1920s, exiled Russian monarchists, rightists and assorted military veterans — the losers in the five-year-long civil war — continued to conspire against the Bolshevik regime. However, they continued to embody all the divisiveness that had led to their earlier defeat. Likewise, in 2011, the German historian Karl Schlogel said that today’s Russian exiles lack the political structures to organize, and thus have little potential to effect change in their home country.
However, Schlogel also identified an important difference between the emigrants and refugees of the 1920s and Russia’s 21st-century expatriates: Today’s diaspora includes the most dynamic and entrepreneurial elements of Russian society, from business managers and information-technology (IT) specialists to scientists and artists. Their flight abroad represents a major brain drain.
Russia Deputy Minister of the Interior Igor Zubov warned of this problem last month, when he asked the Russian parliament to allow more foreign IT workers to enter the country. In his testimony, he said that Russia was short about 170,000 IT workers, contradicting official claims that most of those who left had already returned home. The Russian Association for Electronic Communications has painted a similar picture. Industry insiders forecast that 10 percent of Russian IT workers might leave this year.
It is not just techies. As in the 1920s, hundreds of Russian journalists, writers, actors, filmmakers and artists have also fled abroad, often resuming the same work in their countries of refuge. Investors and entrepreneurs, too, are leaving. Henley & Partners, a British firm that brokers citizenship deals for wealthy clients seeking to change their nationality, reported that 15,000 millionaires were expected to leave Russia this year. Most will try to domicile in Malta, Mauritius or Monaco, where inviting beaches and lax tax laws welcome immigrants who come with cash.
Whether skilled professionals and Cristal guzzlers are leaving because of their opposition to Putin or for personal economic reasons, what matters is that they are depriving Russia of critical talent and capital. That is why US President Joe Biden’s administration has proposed legislation to loosen visa requirements for Russian IT workers and scientists with advanced degrees. Other countries and companies are making similar efforts to harness the benefits of the new Russian diaspora.
However, these efforts will yield mostly private economic and financial gains, while the political potential of the diaspora remains untapped. If Western countries want to support Ukraine and confront Russian aggression, they ought to be doing more to bring together Russia’s expatriate intellectual and financial capital, forming a real community abroad that can communicate with, and potentially influence, Russians back home.
A century ago, about 300,000 Russians — businesspeople, writers, artists and others — created Europe’s leading “little Moscow” in Berlin, and by the mid-1920s, the city had about 150 Russian political journals and 87 publishers. Some of these were Soviet enterprises, but most were not. As Schlogel noted, the Russian exiles were attracted not only by Weimar Germany’s freedom, but also by its strategic location. It was a place where books, magazines and political tracts could find their way into the new Soviet state.
In today’s wired world, this episode in the history of print may sound quaint, but that is only because we have exponentially more powerful tools with which to disseminate information. Ultimately, only Russians can shape their country’s fate, but the West has ample means at its disposal to help those who want change in their homeland.
Kent Harrington, a former senior CIA analyst, served as national intelligence officer for East Asia, chief of station in Asia and the CIA’s director of public affairs.
Copyright: Project Syndicate.
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