Wary Russians seek refuge overseas amid Putin's crackdown

ISTANBUL • They lined up at ATMs, desperate for cash after Visa and Mastercard halted operations in Russia, swapping details on where they could still get US dollars.

At Istanbul cafes, they sat quietly studying Telegram chats or Google Maps on their phones. They organised support groups to help other Russian exiles find housing.

Tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Istanbul since Russia invaded Ukraine last month, outraged about what they see as a criminal war, worried about conscription or the possibility of a closed Russian border, or concerned that their livelihoods are no longer viable back home.

And they are just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands left for countries such as Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan that are better known as sources of migration to Russia.

While the exodus of about 2.7 million Ukrainians from their war-torn country has focused the world on a burgeoning humanitarian crisis, the descent of Russia into new depths of authoritarianism has left many of its citizens despairing of their future.

That has created a flight - though much smaller than in Ukraine - that some are comparing to 1920, when more than 100,000 opponents of the Communist Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War left to seek refuge in what was then Constantinople.

"There has never been anything like this before in peacetime," said Mr Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago. "There is no war on Russian territory. As a single event, it is pretty huge."

Some of those who have fled are bloggers, journalists or activists who feared arrest under Russia's draconian new law criminalising what the state deems "false information" about the war.

Others are musicians and artists who see no future in Russia. And there are workers in tech, law and other industries who saw the prospect of comfortable, middle-class lives - let alone any possibility for moral acceptance of their government - dissipate overnight.

They left behind jobs and family and money stuck in Russian bank accounts that they can no longer access. They fear being tarred as Russians abroad as the West isolates the country for its deadly invasion, and they reel over the loss of a positive Russian identity.

The speed and scale of the flight reflect the tectonic shift that the invasion touched off inside Russia. For all of President Vladimir Putin's repression, Russia until last month remained a place with extensive travel connections to the rest of the world, a mostly uncensored Internet giving a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Slices of Western middle-class life were widely available.

But when they woke up on Feb 24, many Russians knew that all that was over.

In the days since the invasion, Mr Putin has forced the remnants of Russia's independent media to shut down. He has engineered a crackdown against anti-war protesters, with more than 14,000 people arrested across the country since Feb 24, including 862 in 37 cities on Sunday, according to the rights group OVD-Info.

To be sure, many Russians support the war, and many of those supporters are completely unaware of the extent of their country's aggression because they rely on state-run television news.

But others have flocked to places like Turkey's Istanbul which, like in 1920, has again become a haven for exiles.

The pain of leaving everything behind has been excruciating, many said - along with the guilt of perhaps not having done enough to fight Mr Putin.

Ms Alevtina Borodulina, 30, an anthropologist, joined more than 4,700 Russian scientists in signing an open letter against the war. Then, as she walked with friends on central Moscow's Boulevard Ring, one of them pulled out a tote bag that said "no to war" and promptly got arrested.

Ms Borodulina flew to Istanbul on March 3, met like-minded Russians at a protest supporting Ukraine and now volunteers for a project to help other exiles.

"It was like I was seeing the Soviet Union," she said of her last days in Moscow. "I was thinking that the people who left the Soviet Union in the 1920s probably made a better decision than those who stayed and then ended up in the camps." NYTIMES