Russians Who Oppose the War Are Trapped Between Dictatorship and Absolute Rejection by The West
But we’re ready to pay the price.
Most Russians I know packed their bags in early March to leave anywhere that’s not Russia. They didn’t flee sanctions, as many might think. They ran from the dictatorship.
Russians have a long history of tolerating abuse from its government — you can jail the opposition, steal money, meddle with elections, what have you — but even people as stubborn as Russians have a red line you can’t cross. The war in Ukraine became that red line for people I call “the Normal Russians” (the other category — the one that draws the letter Z everywhere they see fit — being “fascist Russians”).
But as many of these fleeing Russians soon realized, leaving their home doesn’t mean they’d avoid the costs of this war. They can’t pay with their cards or access their savings because the Russian cards don’t work abroad. (Visa and Mastercard stopped supporting Russian banks.) Even in post-Soviet countries, many international banks refuse to open bank accounts for Russian citizens. There’s also discrimination on every corner: one of my friends has been rejected a PhD degree because he’s Russian; my other friend has been refused her college application for no reason; I heard stories of people being refused train tickets because the cashier heard them speak Russian; VCs stopped backing companies created by Russians founders; some Airbnb hosts put “NO RUSSIANS ALLOWED” signs on their apartment ads. The list goes on and on.
Russians — myself included — have found themselves in a peculiar situation: they can’t go back, and they can’t live fully in a world that hates everything associated with the word “Russian”. We’re trapped between the two evils: unrestrained dictatorship back home and what seems like the rejection of everything Russian in the West. Everyone is losing in this war — Ukrainians, Russians, the world, even Putin himself, whose political ratings are tanking, and whose economy is on the verge of collapsing.
We’re trapped between the two evils: unrestrained dictatorship back home and what seems like the rejection of everything Russian in the West.
Many of my friends — and again, myself included — are happy to pay this price. Of course, we don’t want to be discriminated against. Sanctions are a bitch. But the people I talk to all remember that this discomfort is minuscule compared to the horrors that people in Ukraine have to suffer. We all have collective shame. How can you complain about not being able to open a bank account or go to college when some people have their home city completely obliterated from the map?
As a holder of a Russian passport, I’m ready to pay the price.
So are all the “Normal Russians.”
