Some Putin opponents have gone further. Last November, a group of exiled politicians known as the Russian People’s Congress gathered outside Warsaw to announce that in addition to ending its occupation of Crimea and other Ukrainian territories, Russia must pay reparations to Ukraine — and hand over War criminals stand trial. (The Congress is headed by Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian parliament who voted against the annexation of Crimea in 2014; he is now in exile in Ukraine.)
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Another exile group, the Free Russia Forum anti-war conference organized by former chess world champion Garry Kasparov and ex-political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said the conflict was not regional, Putin’s war Not just about Ukraine, but about the liberal Western world order. This is a battle over the “basic values” of Western democratic civilization.
Russia’s political exiles deserve our support, given their importance to Russia’s defeat and war victory. So far, they have been good at self-organizing and, to a large extent, self-financing. Western aid is mainly used to reduce or eliminate bureaucratic barriers. For example, the U.S. and EU should move faster to process one-year temporary visas for political exiles who have found quick but temporary refuge in countries like Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Turkey. A recent study by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, also suggests that Western consulates should issue work permits and refugee status documents more efficiently. Germany and the Czech Republic have begun designating special categories of immigrants for such cases to speed up processing.
However, the West should avoid arbitrating or taking sides in the inevitable cannibalism within exile communities. The goal is for the opposition to reflect as closely as possible the different parts of Russia’s political structure that have been leveled today under the deadly weight of the regime. As Herzen’s biographer Isaiah Berlin puts it, Herzen again indicated how he sought to be as inclusive as possible and welcome all who “have not died of human affection” to join “a mass protest against an evil regime.” .
Nor should the West impose political tests; there should be only two criteria for acceptance and support by political exiles. One is the unconditional confirmation of the Russian borders from January 1, 1992. The other is a broad, deep, sustained, and patient de-Stalinization and de-imperialization of Russia — culturally, educationally, and historiographically. Of course, how to accomplish these daunting tasks will be up to the Russians themselves. We can only hope that, where the sincere but intermittent public attacks on totalitarianism and the Soviet empire cease, a future Russia at peace with its own people and the world will systematically remove the foundations of the house Putin built: Russia As a divine force, a “Third Rome,” with a special God-given mission in the world; an equation of greatness and fear and dread; the supremacy of the state over the individual; and the cult of violence.
As with every modern mass migration, the civic-minded among Russian immigrants — human rights activists, bloggers, environmentalists and members of the political opposition — are a tiny minority: Of as many as 1.4 million migrants, an estimated 10,000 men and women have left their country since 2012, when Putin became the third president. However, the scale of their efforts to enlighten and motivate has grown far beyond their size.
“We have saved the honor of the Russian name,” Herzen wrote to his fellow self-exile, the 19th-century writer Ivan Turgenev. Ultimately, this is why Russia’s political exiles deserve the admiration and help of the West.
