Emigres fleeing the ruins of Russia must be welcomed with open arms
Vladimir Putin, in the space of two weeks, has ruined two countries. What he has done to Ukraine is visible to all in the smouldering wreckage of Kharkiv, the slaughter in Mariupol and the horror of the more than two million refugees fleeing West, while the calamity he has wrought on Russia is only just becoming visible to those he rules.
One man’s reckless gamble, based on pitiful intelligence and executed with breathtaking ignorance of the basic facts of war, has brought upon the Russian people the harshest sanctions ever imposed on a major economy.
Russian capitalism is imploding: its currency has collapsed, its stock exchange remains closed, capital controls, export bans, expropriatory orders and a mass flight of Western firms, big and small, from McDonald’s to BP, from Uniqlo to Netflix, cause untold damage. For millions sudden poverty is looming, as it did in Russia’s last collapse.
As Ukrainians courageously resist and cower in bomb shelters during Vladimir Putin’s air raids, Russians are seeing their post-Soviet way of life ripped up before their eyes because of him: savings have been wiped out by the crash, import costs are suddenly sky high, supermarket shelves are rapidly emptying, medical supplies are in trouble, shipping lines have seized up, risking basic imports. Industries that rely on sanctioned supplies from the West, from aviation, to autoplants and IT, have only weeks to operate before they hit the buffers.
Panic has gripped those in Moscow who know this. Over the past few weeks tens of thousands of the most dynamic free thinkers have fled the country: catching planes to cities out of Mr Putin’s reach for which they don’t need visas, such as Tashkent, Tbilisi or Dubai. Painfully for the West, so far it is not the Russian system that is collapsing but the very sociology that could have produced a liberal opposition and a protest movement against this war.
Russia’s intellectuals, artists, journalists – indeed anyone, and there are millions of them in Moscow alone – reading foreign news about what is happening fear a dark new era akin to Stalinism. They are right to do so. The last remaining liberal radio station and TV station have been unplugged. Celebrities critical of the war have been taken off air. Free-spirited newspapers and foreign news outlets, from BBC Russian to Deutsche Welle have been blocked. Facebook has been switched off, Twitter throttled and Instagram will soon on be shuttered. Capping this, a new law states that merely referring to the events publicly as “a war” (rather than using Mr Putin’s description of them: a “special military operation”) can result in a 15-year prison sentence.
Russia is moving towards a dark, chaotic, new form of totalitarianism and those leaving it are taking with them more than themselves. They are spiriting away the country’s future. This is not a Soviet generation that is clueless about the outside world. This is a generation of globalised Europeans – travelled, skilled, online – who had the misfortune to live for 22 years under a dictator. This is truly a historic blow.
Konstantin Sonin, an economist, believes that even if all sanctions were lifted tomorrow – and Western firms flooded back – it would take Russia’s economy 10 years to recover. But that is wishful thinking: Putin’s order that the patents of “unfriendly countries” will no longer be recognised and departing firms brought under “management” herald its transformation into a giant and piratical Cuba that is breathtakingly isolated. The late Soviet Union was on Western credit lines and even Nazi Germany was not as severed from the international banking system until well into the 1940s. As he launched this war, Vladimir Putin called the West “an empire of lies” but if we want to keep alive a flame of Russian thought that has contributed so much to Europe and can eventually return to it, we must adapt the Kosovo protocol that Tony Blair adopted to help people there fleeing a war who looked to Britain as their ally and friend.
As a start we could exceptionally drop visa requirements for Ukraine, for those fleeing that valiant country, occupied Belarus and Russia itself and allow them one year’s right to remain while their asylum cases are processed.
When an iron curtain last stood across Europe anyone who could get past it – dissidents, defectors and refugees of all stripes – were welcomed. It was this moral dignity, that radical openness, right up until that night in 1989 that the gates in the Berlin Wall flew open, that played its part in the downfall of the eastern bloc. Across Eastern Europe, from the Ukrainian trenches of Donbass to the Russian dissidents in flight, Britain is looked to as a beacon of liberty on this continent – let us now be true to them.