There have been diasporas since the Old Testament, and tragedy aside, no two mass exoduses have been the same. In the 20th century, the world witnessed how Jews escaped from pogroms, from the Bolshevik revolution and then from Hitler; African Americans migrating en masse from 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 warfare; Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans have been emerging from poverty and violence; and now millions of newly arrived Ukrainians in Europe and elsewhere are wondering when or even if they will ever return home.
For some countries, diasporas are not new either. Ask the Russians. For three-quarters of a century, Stalin’s NKVD and its successor, the KGB, kept a close eye on Russian expatriates, constantly worrying about the threat they might pose. And now Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security service, the FSB, continues the tradition. According to recent FSB estimates, almost four million Russians left the country in the first three months of this year.
Obviously, the FSB’s statistics are difficult to verify. But the magnitude of the outings this year is staggering. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, Russian arrivals to Georgia and Tajikistan increased fivefold, Estonia quadrupled, Armenia and Uzbekistan tripled, and Kazakhstan doubled. Additionally, Latvia and Lithuania together welcomed some 74,000 Russians, and popular tourist spots such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey welcomed just under a million. Nearly 750,000 people crossed into the Georgian region of Abkhazia, one of Putin’s vassal territories.
While some of these Russian travelers have certainly returned home, the total number of departures in the first quarter is remarkable. It represents almost two percent of the country’s population, and that’s not counting the Russians who have gone to Europe or other parts of the world. The FSB is not tracking these exits just to pass the time. From the October Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian diasporas were flies in the ointment of the workers’ paradise. While the Russians had already begun to flee after the failed 1905 revolution, these numbers increased when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 and during the subsequent civil war. “Little Moscows” arose all over Europe.
This story was repeated in the 1990s, but with a twist. The collapse of the Soviet Union not only left 30 million ethnic Russians outside Russia’s borders (mainly in the Baltics, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine), but several million more emigrated to Europe, Asia, and North America, producing the second great diaspora in the space of a hundred years.
Do such large expat communities really matter? It depends on your point of view. In the 1920s, exiled Russian royalists, right-wingers, and assorted military veterans, the losers of the five-year civil war, continued to conspire against the Bolshevik regime. But they continued to embody all the division that had led to their previous defeat. Similarly, in 2011, the German historian Karl Schlögel argued that today’s Russian exiles lack the political structures to organize themselves and therefore have little potential to effect change in their home country.
But Schlögel also identified an important difference between the émigrés and refugees of the 1920s and Russia’s expatriates of the 21st century: Today’s diaspora includes the most dynamic and entrepreneurial elements of Russian society, from business managers and technology specialists to information to scientists and artists. Your flight abroad represents a major brain drain. Igor Zubov, Putin’s deputy interior minister, warned of this problem in June, when he called on the Russian parliament to allow more foreign IT workers into the country. In his testimony, he revealed that Russia was short of some 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 experts forecast that 10 percent of Russian IT workers may leave by 2022.
It’s not just the technicians. 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 are also leaving. Henley & Partners, a British firm that brokers citizenship deals for wealthy clients seeking to change their nationality, reports that 15,000 millionaires are expected to leave Russia by 2022. Most will try to establish their domicile in Malta, Mauritius or Monaco, where the attractive beaches and relaxing tax laws welcome immigrants who come with cash.
Whether Cristal’s skilled professionals and consumers 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’s why the Biden administration has proposed legislation to relax visa requirements for Russian IT workers and scientists with advanced degrees. And other countries and companies are making similar efforts to reap the benefits of the new Russian diaspora.
But these efforts will primarily generate private economic and financial gain, while the political potential of the diaspora remains untapped. If Western countries want to support Ukraine and confront Russian aggression, they should do more to pool the intellectual and financial capital of expatriates from Russia, forming a real community abroad that can communicate with and potentially influence Russians.
A century ago, some 300,000 Russians – businessmen, writers, artists and others – created Europe’s leading “Little Moscow” in Berlin, and by the mid-1920s the city had some 150 Russian political magazines and 87 publishers. Some of these were Soviet companies, but most were not. As Schlögel points out, Russian exiles were attracted not only by the freedom of Weimar Germany, but also by its strategic location. It was a place where political books, magazines, and pamphlets could find their way into the new Soviet state.
In today’s connected world, this episode in the history of printing may sound quaint. But that’s only because we have exponentially more powerful tools for disseminating information. Ultimately, only the Russians can shape the destiny of their country. But the West has ample means at its disposal to help those who want change in their homeland.
Kent Harington He is a former senior CIA analyst and has served as the CIA’s national intelligence officer for East Asia, Asia station chief, and director of public affairs.
Copyright: Union Project
