The Anti-Putin Russians are leaving, with a push from the Kremlin

When Karen Shainyan opened her Facebook page the other day, it was filled with messages saying “Congratulations!” like her birthday.

There were also expressions of sympathy.

Shainyan, a Russian journalist and gay rights advocate, took a moment to melt the mixed message:

the Kremlin simply labeled him a “foreign agent,” a designation that many opposition see as validation of their work, but one that greatly complicates their lives.

The government uses the label to exclude and underestimate opposition numbers and organizations, which is tantamount to branding them as enemies of the state.

More than 400 people or organizations they have been appointed foreign agents since the label started in late 2020, with new names being announced almost every Friday today.

There was no prior notice or explanation from the government.

Analysts and the opposition say the designation is a way to increase repression that contributes to increasing caps.

Shainyan is, by his own calculations, in good company.

The other seven people on the list of foreign agents that week included a prominent political scientist; a journalist with a very popular talk show; and a well -known cartoonist who continues to “cheat” President Vladimir Putin.

Some of those appointed, like Shainyan, have already left Russia, with a brand that seems meant to force them to stay. far away.

“They want to squeeze active people, not to kill them or put them in jail, but to expel them, across the border,” he said in a telephone interview from Berlin, where he landed after fleeing Russia last month.

The expelled went with an exodus of tens of thousands of Russians who have fled the country since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, an avalanche of talented and highly educated Russians who have decided toI would rather be exiled living in an authoritarian state.

Exiles include many people who are not directly involved in politics (technologists, businessmen, designers, actors, and financiers), countless professionals who are directly involved in the global economy, or simply want to feel connected to others. other parts of the world.

Tough economic sanctions and the radical withdrawal of Western companies from Russia were choking Gradually your chances.

“Russia is losing a lot of great people,” said Serob Khachatryan, 39, who started a cryptocurrency business in Moscow before the invasion and is now in Armenia, working with other IT professionals to find ways to help the Ukrainians and weaken Putin.

“It’s going to end up just being military with nukes and oil and gas. That’s what Putin wants. I think Russia needs more than that.”

Among those appointed as foreign agents along with Shainyan was Ekaterina Schulmann, a professor of political science at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, a rare private university with a reputation for being a liberal stronghold.

“Anyone can be on that list, why not me?” he says.

“Looks like it’s an attempt to kick people out.”

Schulmann said he hopes to finish the list.

Police investigators recently asked for more information about his links to the university.

Six people associated with him have already been arrested, including three accused embezzlement of public fundsin a case considered by many to be politically motivated.

Additionally, Schulmann, the host of a political talk show on YouTube with nearly 1 million subscribers, described the attack as witnessing the unfolding of a “disaster“.

Leaflets with the face and the phrase “She supports the Ukrainian Nazis” were hung in one of her former residences.

Schulmann announced on his show a few days before he was classified as a foreign agent that he was in Berlin on a one -year scholarship to the Robert Bosch Academy.

“Soon it will be impossible to work as a professional in my field in Russia,” he said.

He suggested that the length of the war would determine whether the political situation would improve.

“Otherwise, you’ll probably see the public sphere in Russia being more cleaned up, cleaning up its liberal and humanist elements.”

The Kremlin has long urged its critics to leave, and Putin clearly clarified his contempt for dissidents in March, saying in a televised speech that he regarded those identified with Western values ​​as “despicable and traitor.” .

He threatened to remove them from society, as his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “cleaning“It just happens spontaneously as dishonest people move abroad.

The law associates foreign agents with the appointment of receiving funds from outside Russia, but historically, the term has been associated with spies and infiltrators.

The latest additions to the list of foreign agents have attracted a lot of gay rights journalists and activists.

But the circle of people it has been targeting in recent months has expanded to include any kind of critic.

Schulmann once served on the presidential Human Rights Council.

Alexei Venediktov mingled at receptions with all sorts of Kremlin advisers for many years when he was editor-in-chief of the radio station. echo of moscowfavorite of liberal intelligentsia that closed in February.

A famous rapper, known by his stage name Face, was the first musician to be branded.

Those marked must put a label that is prominent in all their work, stigmatized, and file frequent and heavy financial disclosure forms.

For more than two years, Shainyan has used his YouTube channel to focus on the lives of LGBTQ people, a controversial topic in Russia, where vaguely defined laws make it illegal to distribute “gay propaganda” in minors.

It seeks to encourage gay Russians to be fewer and promote greater acceptance in the Russian population.

Shainyan, 40, carried his camera to provincial outposts such as Kazan, Irkutsk and Vladivostok.

“I don’t want to hide; I want to live freely, ”said Ivan, a young businessman among the dozens of gay or transgender people appearing on the show.queerography”From the Shainyan of Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal.

Shainyan always thought that he might be called a “foreign agent” for that work, especially since he received financial support from abroad, so the fact that this just happened made him think that his latest interviews well -known critics of the war might put him on the list and not his gay activism.

Russia seems to be experiencing widespread emigration with some painful regularity.

That’s about it 1 million Russians fled in the early 1920s after the Russian Revolution and civil war.

Among the most popular are artists such as Marc Chagall and Vasily Kandinskyas well as writers Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

In 1991, the turmoil following the collapse of the Soviet Union caused another wave of exiles, especially among scientists.

“It looks like in Russia, one or two generations grow up, and then the last revolution or war happens, and then part of that generation leaves,” said Grigory Sverdlin, 43, who used to run a charity called Nochlezhka who established about a dozen facilities for homeless people in St. Petersburg. Petersburg and Moscow.

“Obviously the removal of active, educated people is bad for the country’s economy, bad for the country’s culture, and culturally I include the political culture as well.”

But the earlier waves of migration lasted over years, not months.

“It’s not sudden; there is nothing like it, ”said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago and a critic of the Kremlin who left in 2015 after being fired from his job at the university.

Alexei Skripko, 47, who runs a small simultaneous translation business, left with his wife and four children.

They avoided politics, but the feeling of increased repression was inevitable.

He said he was absolutely certain that there was no chance that the Soviet Union would survive again.

“What I see now tells me that I was wrong,” he said, “and that I have been wrong my whole life.”

Sverdlin, who is now in Tbilisi, Georgia, decided to leave because he could not speak out about the war and warned that his protests by someone, although legal, had caught the attention of law enforcement.

He called the decision the hardest of his life, quoting a line from a foreign poet who left after the civil war:

“The whole world is there; now it’s not here. “

Sophia Kishkovsky and Alina Lobzina contributed to the reporting.

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