“Liberal” Russians

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The influx of Russians into the EU has been unexpectedly hard to deal with since the war began.

There’s the unfairness of it. Most Ukrainian families can’t move because few would leave their menfolk behind. Many Ukrainians I talked to have told the same story: over the past few months their offices are filling up with more and more Russians, while almost zero Ukrainians are being hired.

Then there’s how the overwhelming majority of Russians act. Even those who claim to be “liberals” and “against the war” leave much to be desired. I often hear things from them about how “Russians are the real victims”, insinuations that “all of this” could have been avoided if Ukrainians would have just accepted their place, repeating Kremlin talking points that Ukrainians are all just Nazis or hate Russian-speakers, or using outright offensive language about Ukraine.

The general feeling I get is that the majority of them see nothing wrong with the entire Russian imperial project of subjugating neighboring countries, eradicating their languages, their histories, their cultures. Putin is just a bad czar because he’s too blunt. They’d be entirely happy if someone like Navalny, a respectable face for Russian imperialism, were in power and doing precisely the same things.

In the rare moments I do talk about politics at work, I’ll ask what they thought of Crimea in 2014. There’s a lot of “Well, come on, we all know Crimea is really Russian, but we’re against the war.”

And the worst of it is that there’s this expectation that I’m supposed to be grateful to them as if they are some sort of heroes for being “against Putin”. Mentioning any apprehensions about this situation gets you branded an extremist, guilty of discrimination.

I’m civil. I’m polite. I have no problems using Russian as means of communication, in fact about half of all my office conversations are in Russian.

But it’s a struggle. While Ukrainians are nervously checking their phones, worried whether friends and family back are alive after the latest volley of missiles, whether their homes have been destroyed, we’re surrounded by well-off Russians, almost exclusively from St. Petersburg and Moscow with absolutely zero connection to any of this war — the upper classes from the capitals don’t fight. Their suffering has been the loss of travel destinations and Ikea.

I’ll never forget how during the early days of the war, the Russians I knew were in a downright panic about trading currency and making sure their relatives bought clothes from Western brands before the stores closed. There was no point in mentioning that the house Tania and I had bought in Kyiv now had a rocket in it or the constant worry of having relatives in harm’s way and friends off to the front. None of the Russians I knew would have had the least bit of empathy.

I’m left with mixed feelings. Every Russian male not in Russia is one less person to join the army. But there’s also something deeply unfair in seeing European swarming with Russian economic migrants and tourists. I don’t want to hate, to be angry. But it’s not easy to overcome that. In fact, I almost think it would be easier to deal with regular Russians high on Kremlin propaganda. I can feel sorry for them realizing they are simply deluded. The cold indifference of Russian liberals is hard to accept.

This thread by Toomas Ilves is what got me thinking about this, and it’s a good read to understand the apprehensions that many from Ukraine, the Baltics and other parts of Eastern Europe having right now. It’s also why nobody from Eastern Europe is particularly enthralled with any Russian liberals nor ever thought much of Navalny.

If you do want to follow an original and progressive Russian thinker, have a look at Kamil Galeev. The problem is that I don’t know any Russians in real life who agree with him about removing the privilege of Moscow and Petersburg and dismantling the imperial agenda. I suppose that’s also selection bias. The poor and the ethnic minorities being shipped off to die in Ukraine aren’t the same people swooping in on tech jobs across Europe.