…People have fled Russia because they fear political persecution, conscription, and isolation; because they dread being locked in an unfamiliar new country that eerily resembles the old Soviet Union; and because staying in a country that is waging war feels immoral, like being inside a plane that’s dropping bombs on people. They have left because the Russia they have built and inhabited is disappearing—and the more people who leave, the faster it disappears.

Dmitry Aleshkovsky is one of the leaders of Russia’s volunteer movement. In the summer of 2012, when a flood destroyed the town of Krymsk, in southern Russia, and authorities tried to cover it up, Aleshkovsky quit his job as a news photographer to work as a relief volunteer. He later started a foundation, Nuzhna Pomosh (Help Needed), and a media clearing house for charitable projects, Takie Dela (So It Goes). When news of the war broke, he knew that this was the end—not of Ukraine, but of Russia. Aleshkovsky, who is thirty-seven, has spent a lot of time thinking about the Gulag. (His great-uncle Yuz is a labor-camp survivor who has described the experience in novels and songs.) Long ago, he concluded that if Putin ever wanted to re-create Stalinist terror there would be nothing to stop him. If he was bombing Ukraine now, he would imprison more of his people before too long. The morning after the war began, Aleshkovsky got in a car with his wife, the film director Anna Dezhurko, and their toddler daughter and drove west, to the Latvian border.

Alexandra Primakova, a forty-two-year-old marketing researcher in Moscow, woke up at seven that Thursday to get her kids ready for school. She saw the news and decided to let her husband, Ilya Kolmanovsky, a forty-five-year-old science educator, sleep a bit longer. Kolmanovsky had been having panic attacks about the possibility of a full-scale war in Ukraine. For a year or so, the couple had discussed leaving the country; both of them had been active in anti-Putin protests. Now they called a large family council in their apartment. By the end of the following week, thirty-three people in their immediate and extended families had left Russia, flying to four different countries. This group included journalists, academics, natural scientists, a developmental psychologist, a doctor, a musician, and a Russian Orthodox deacon.

Lika Kremer, a forty-four-year-old media executive, and her partner, the thirty-eight-year-old podcaster and editor Andrey Babitsky, attended a protest in Pushkin Square on Thursday night. Babitsky had been detained at a protest in September, and a second detention in less than six months could lead to a prison sentence. But they couldn’t not go. The traditional place and time for such a demonstration is Pushkin Square at seven in the evening—people have been prosecuted for social-media posts announcing protests, so it’s good to have a default plan. Kremer and Babitsky went with Babitsky’s twenty-year-old daughter. The square was sealed off by police. It was dark and wet. People milled about in front of the metro, slogging through rainy sidewalks. An uninitiated onlooker might not have identified them as protesters: they had no placards and chanted no slogans. Babitsky did get detained, along with several hundred other people, but he was held only briefly. The next day, Kremer and Babitsky flew to Venice for a seventy-fifth-birthday celebration for Kremer’s father, the violinist Gidon Kremer.

More at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/the-russians-fleeing-putins-wartime-crackdown

The lines for sugar in Saratov were hard not to compare to the Soviet era, part of a recent run on Russian staples that have revived fears that the Kremlin’s invasion in Ukraine will lead to a virtual slide back to the shortages or endless queues of the Soviet Union.

Bags of sugar and buckwheat began disappearing from local markets in early March, just a week after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. And when the local mayor’s office announced that it would hold special markets for people to buy the staples last week, hundreds showed up.

“People are sharing tips about where to get sugar. This is crazy,” said Viktor Nazarov, who said that his grandmother had tasked him with visiting the special market last weekend to stock up. “It’s sad and it’s funny. It feels like a month ago was fine and now we’re talking about the 1990s again, buying products because … we’re afraid they’ll disappear.” After an hour and a half waiting at the city’s main square, he was limited to buying one bag of five kilograms, he said.

…“I think we are steadily going back to a USSR,” said Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist for the Institute of International Finance, indicating that the Russian government would likely continue to close off from the world economy. “I’m not seeing it as a temporary shock and then we’re going to go back to the liberal democracy and reintegration into the world, unless there is a change in government.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/23/were-going-back-to-a-ussr-long-queues-return-for-russian-shoppers-as-sanctions-bite?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be “pointless and extremely dangerous.” It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten “the existence of Russia itself as a state.”

To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. Reached by phone this week, the retired general who authored the declaration, Leonid Ivashov, said he stood by it, though he could not speak freely given Russia’s wartime censorship: “I do not disavow what I said.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/world/europe/putin-russia-military-planning.html

Russians have withdrawn a record sum of money from banks since the start of President Putin’s war in Ukraine amid soaring inflation and shortages of everything from medicines to food.

The central bank said today that the total kept in personal savings accounts by Russians fell by 1.2 trillion roubles (£8.7 billion), or 3.5 per cent, last month. The sum is thought to be the largest monthly withdrawal in rouble terms since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Large queues at cash machines have become a common sight across Russia amid fears of economic collapse.

The rouble has plunged to an all-time low and weekly inflation recently hit 2.2 per cent, the highest for 24-year high, according to government statistics. The Russian economy is also on course to shrink by an unprecedented 10 per cent, analysts at Goldman Sachs said. They had predicted a rise of 2 per cent in GDP before the invasion.

…The central bank warned this week that western sanctions were creating supply problems and production bottlenecks. Sales of anti-depressants have risen four-fold, the Kommersant newspaper reported.

…The Kremlin denied recently that Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the central bank, had sought to resign. Nabiullina, who has run the bank since 2013, appeared to admit recently that there was discontent among officials over the war.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ff9bc1e2-a9fa-11ec-b5dd-c16e85f55725?shareToken=f11c092b7cbe94902e8c2b9b32905232

Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition to demand the deportation of Vladimir Putin’s rumoured lover, the former gymnast Alina Kabaeva, from Switzerland.

The petition describes Kabaeva as the “wife of a delusional dictator”, and says that “Eva Braun returned to her Führer ”. Over 56,000 people have signed it so far.

…One of Russia’s most decorated gymnasts, having won an Olympic gold medal at the 2004 summer games in Athens, she has been romantically linked to Putin since 2008...Kabaeva is rumoured to have at least three children with Putin, with at least one born in an exclusive private Swiss clinic. It has been claimed that Kabaeva and her children are now residents in Switzerland.

…The petition, published on the change.org website in French, German and English, demands that Kabaeva’s right to reside in Switzerland be investigated “very carefully”. It said: “Please decide whether the residence of this individual in your country is warranted…We also ask you to check the ‘cleanliness’ of the funds used for the purchase of real estate in Switzerland, of which this person uses”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/aaf88a3a-a955-11ec-b5dd-c16e85f55725?shareToken=9f607df379a7831860a05d5be90a9ee0