On social media, many Ukrainians and some Western Europeans and Americans (including a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul) have argued that ordinary Russians did not do enough to stop Mr. Putin’s aggression. Russian ballet companies have had their tours canceled simply because they are state companies, not necessarily because of the views of individual dancers. American and European universities are canceling partnerships and events with Russian institutions and scholars, even as they are inundated by requests for positions from Russian academics who have fled Russia or hope to leave. New Yorkers have expressed their outrage at Mr. Putin by pouring out vodka, despite the fact that many popular brands are not produced in Russia, and by boycotting Russian restaurants, though sometimes the owners are not Russian at all. These private boycotts have contributed to a fear among newly exiled Russians that they will become pariahs on the grounds of their nationality.
“Collective blame is an easy way to channel rage,” Maria Stepanova, a prominent Russian poet, told me. But the impulse to punish Russians on the basis of national identity is a misguided one. Ms. Stepanova told me that many emigrants are driven by a feeling of pure moral indignation, a sense that emigration is the only remaining avenue for political protest. “They simply don’t want to breathe the air here,” she said. “They want to cut all ties with their country.… They’re willing to risk ruining their lives out of this feeling of disgust.”
Russia’s authoritarianism has steadily intensified since 2011, when many thousands took to the streets to protest against the falsified 2011 legislative elections and demand freedom for political prisoners. These demonstrations, among the biggest since the 1990s, triggered Mr. Putin’s longstanding fear that Russia would experience a pro-democratic “colored revolution” like Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution.
In response, Mr. Putin’s government essentially eliminated the right to protest, while persecuting opposition politicians. Independent press, NGOs and activists are now targeted primarily through a law against “foreign agents.” Many journalists and dissidents had already left the country by the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, often because they were in danger of imminent arrest on false pretenses.
Now anyone who dares to speak the truth about the war faces a level of repression that has not been seen since the Soviet Union. Thousands of Russians continue to be arrested at antiwar demonstrations, and some are determined to remain in Russia to struggle against the government. But the space for protest has narrowed even further.
Many Russians now departing in haste belong to the tiny minority of Russians who have turned out to street protests in recent years. Mr. Putin’s savage war on Ukraine and corresponding repressions at home are emptying his neo-Russian empire of its remaining free thinkers and opposition movements. The result is likely to be a more ideologically homogeneous Russia, one with even less access to truthful media and channels of political resistance, and one deprived, whether by arrest, assassination or emigration, of many of its most outspoken and brave opposition figures.
Yevgenia Baltatarova, an independent Buryat journalist from Ulan-Ude, in Siberia, spoke to me from Kazakhstan. After she wrote about the war on her Telegram channel, 15 government officers came to search her home, confiscating her possessions and those of her parents and nephew, she said. “The propaganda machine worked,” she said. “Now they have demonstrations with the new swastika” — the “Z” that has become the symbol of government-sponsored pro-war demonstrations that feature youths pumping their fists and chanting pro-Putin slogans.
