Fleeing Russians find unlikely haven
Kyrgyzstan, supplier of laborers, now host in migration reversal
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Rents are skyrocketing; luxury hotels and grimy hostels do not have beds to spare. And on the dusty, sunny streets of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, bands of young migrants, nearly all men, wander aimlessly, dazed at their world turned upside down — and their hasty, self-imposed exile to a poor, remote country few could previously place on a map.
After leaving often good-paying jobs and families in Moscow and Vladivostok, Russia, and many places in between, tens of thousands of young Russians — terrified of being dragooned into fighting in Ukraine — are pouring into Central Asia.
The influx has turned a country long scorned in Russia as a source of cheap labor and for its backward ways into an unlikely and, for the most part, welcoming haven for Russian men, some poor, many relatively affluent and highly educated — but all united by a desperate desire to escape being caught up in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“I look up at the clear sky every day and give thanks that I am here,” said Denis, an events organizer from Moscow who last week joined scores of fellow Russians at a bar in Bishkek to rejoice at their escape and trade tips on places to sleep, getting Kyrgyz residency papers and finding work.
The gathering, convened to celebrate the start of a new “Russian community,” was one small part of a vast exodus of Russians to Central Asia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and a shrinking list of other places still willing
take them in during what has become their country’s most concentrated burst of emigration since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The outflow began in February, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving after Russia invaded Ukraine, but has accelerated since Sept. 21, when Putin declared a “partial mobilization” in response to battlefield defeats. In the subsequent four days, the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported, 261,000 military-aged men were estimated to have left. Tens of thousands more have fled since.
The chaotic rush for the exit has inverted the usual shape of a wartime refugee crisis: Unlike the millions of Ukrainian women and children who have fled into Poland and other European countries, these Russian
men are not running away from an invading army, but from serving in one. Nor do they fit the stereotype of migrants as destitute people trying to escape the developing world.
While Putin recently boasted that his war had given Russia millions of new citizens grabbed from Ukraine, the conflict is driving his real citizens to despair and flight.
“When it all started, we thought it would just affect professional soldiers and their families, but with mobilization, it has touched us all,” said Alexander, a 23-year-old university student from the Russian Far East. Staying in Russia, he added, would mean “either going to prison or into the army.”
That so many Russians took so long to start worrying about the war in Ukraine has infuriated Ukrainians,
who have endured seven months of torment and bloodshed. Even now, Russians who fled rarely talk about the war, focusing on their own travails with housing, money and unfamiliar customs.
After decades of being treated as Russia’s poor and desperate country cousins, many Kyrgyz, including the country’s president, Sadyr Japarov, are happy to see the shoe on the other foot.
“This is a very new phenomenon for us,” Japarov said. Noting that more than 1 million Kyrgyz worked in Russia, he added that “their citizens can of course come here and work freely” and had no need to fear being extradited home.
He said he did not know how many Russian draft dodgers had arrived but added that the influx would help his country, even as it jacks up rents and leads
some landlords to evict Kyrgyz tenants to make way for Russians willing to pay double, triple or more.
“We don’t see any harm and see lots of benefits,” he said.
In a contrast with Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, involving Syrians, Afghans and others, many of the Russians seeking sanctuary in Kyrgyzstan are highly educated and had good jobs back home, often in tech or culture.
Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian countries have long worried that refugees would pour in from nearby Afghanistan, but, said Yan Matusevich, a Russianborn American scholar who is researching migration in Bishkek, “nobody in their wildest dreams ever expected a flood of Russian refugees.”
In Osh, the country’s second-largest city, a Kyrgyz woman, Dinara, posted her telephone number online and offered to host penniless Russians at her home. “I will be happy to help you. No money needed, meals included,” she wrote, although such generosity is wearing thin as more Russians arrive.
The welcome has forced some Russian arrivals to reconsider their country’s self-image as a big-hearted, civilizing force superior to less developed parts of the former Soviet Union.
“It is a vaccination against imperialism to come here and be accepted by the Kyrgyz after the way they have been treated in Moscow, never mind other cities,” said Vasily Sonkin, a 32-year-old Muscovite, referring to the more than 10% of Kyrgyzstan’s population working in Russia, mostly in menial jobs, and often subject to prejudice.