The secret network that saves Russian dissidents from war

The three young women, participants in an anti-war chat group, were falsely accused by one of its members of conspiring with him to bomb a military enlistment office.

The trio quickly went underground, hiding out at a friend’s house in their hometown of Vladivostok in the Russian Far East as they searched for a way to escape the country and possible long prison sentences. So they came to a group called In Transit, which is part of a vast clandestine network that is rescuing hundreds of Russians who have been persecuted for expressing their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine or even their sympathy for the Ukrainian refugees.

His flight to freedom would eventually end in Kazakhstan a six-day odyssey in six different cars over 6,000 kilometres, the equivalent of driving from New York to Alaska. They weren’t told the route they would take, the names of the drivers or the meeting points until they reached each new town.

“We were scared,” says one of the girls, all 16, 17 and 19-year-old students, to the point that they avoided talking to people on the street when they changed cars for fear of informants and surveillance cameras.

In Transit, the group who organized his escape, it is one of five organizations that help dissidents leave Russia, usually acting one step ahead of the law. Working out of the country, they plan escape routes which may include cars, travel money, safe houses, border crossings and visas.

“In a situation where everyone is against you, including your own relatives, who consider you a traitor and are ready to hang you at the nearest post, I was very pleased to find that there are people who don’t know you, who don’t has ever seen you and is ready to help you,” says Oleg Zavyalov, 31. She had just been tearfully reunited with her older brother, Vladimir, months after the two fled to several countries from the western Russian city of Smolensk.

In Transit is the brainchild of three women from St. Petersburg, Russia, who realized that people trapped in the mass arrests of anti-war protesters following last February’s invasion would need help to get out . For security reasons they settled in Berlin. For the same reason, the New York Times does not reveal the names of the founders and grants anonymity to fugitives who request it, as well as details on the paths followed.

After the European Union largely stopped issuing visas to Russians last year, some countries – mainly Germany, Poland and Lithuania – have extended a humanitarian visa programoriginally intended for Belarusian dissidents, Russian opponents of the war.

The number of Russians facing the most common charge for criticizing the war – discrediting the Russian military – peaked in early March last year after the law was passed, rose again after the announcement of the mobilization in late September, and then stabilized, according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights organization that follows the crackdown.

Since last spring, the three countries have issued more than 3,800 such visasaccording to government officials. Facing criminal charges is not a mandatory criterion, but people’s actions must go beyond participating in some anti-war protests.

Irina, a 60-year-old economist, was given a German visa after trying to help 750 refugees from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol who were stranded in abandoned industrial housing near Penza in central Russia.

She said she raised more than $14,000 through crowdfunding, buying food, medicine, children’s books and even lingerie for some destitute women. Increasingly hostile local officials asked him to deliver aid through them.

soon someone wrote “An ally of the Ukrainian regime lives here” at the door of his apartment. Agents of the FSB, the federal security service formerly known as the KGB, interrogated her for an hour. Soon after she was released, four burly men kidnapped her from the building’s parking lot and took her into the woods.

She recalls one of them yelling at her, “We’ll bury you here!” her as she was pushed to the ground, giving her a concussion and severe bruising. “Who gives you the money? Who do you work for?

When she was released five hours later, she decided she had to flee the country.

To avoid having to show their passports, fugitives often avoid public transport and resort to long-distance taxis, but this too has its dangers.

The young girls, for example, said that one of their drivers was going 160 kilometers per hour and that, at one point, he started eating shish kebabs while talking via video conference with his wife. When he delivered them in a Siberian city six hours ahead of schedule, at 4 in the morning, the organizers of the escape from Russia scrambled to find accommodation so as not to leave the women on the street and attract the attention of the police.

However, for many fugitives, the threat of disappearing in a penal colony far outweighs the risks of flying. “We had no choice,” said one of the girls, nervous about being stopped at the Kazakhstan border. “If we stayed we risked even more.”

Some of the fugitives fled to avoid the draft after President Vladimir Putin announced plans in September to recruit 300,000 men.

Oleksandr, 32, a Ukrainian-Russian actor, had moved to Moscow from his hometown of Donetsk after Russian-backed forces took up arms in eastern Ukraine in 2014. His bosses in the city’s government said he sent to the mobilization office, assuring him that the army would turn away a citizen of Ukraine.

Instead, they ordered him to mobilize immediately. “Great! You will serve, you will defend the Motherland,” barked the woman who examined her case in a chilling voice. She ordered him to get on a bus that was leaving in less than an hour.

The young recruits, stunned, cried or got drunkOleksandr remembers. Stepping into a cigarette-smoked bathroom, he saw a narrow window. He slipped away and jumped from the second floor onto a porch and then onto the street. He wasn’t afraid of being hurt, he said, he just thought, “There was only one way out.”

He had to pass next to a bus that was waiting and into which some young people were being pushed, while some mothers were left crying. He rounded the nearest corner and ran for 30 minutes, convinced he was being followed, then contacted In Transit through a friend of a friend.

In Transit’s founders say they have yet to lose any escapees, though they say other groups have, particularly people who ignored orders to leave their cell phones or even posted on their social media from the routes .

Those who fled described mixed feelings upon crossing the border: relief mixed with the knowledge that they would not return or see their families again in the foreseeable future. As they rebuild their lives, they all deal with anxiety, especially the fear of somehow being returned.

Actor Oleksandr said when he finally got to a hotel room outside of Russia and closed the door, he was left in the dark for an hour, crying. For the next month, scenes from the military enlistment office haunted his dreams.

But when he hears of his friends being killed in the war, he doesn’t regret it. “They were decent people before,” she said, “and now every day I meet more of them, people who couldn’t escape, and just like that they said goodbye to their lives.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society