Russian Flight Since Putin’s War Began Now Called ‘Relocation,’ Abashin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 31 – A fuller picture of the more than 200,000 Russians who moved abroad since the start of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is now emerging thanks to a number of surveys and expert assessments (okrussians.org and holod.media/2022/03/19/nenastoyashhaya-zagranicza/). And Sergey Abashin says that many now refer to this flow as “a relocation.”

            That is a very different term than was used for those Russians who left after 1917, during World War II, or in the last decades of Soviet power; but it reflects the particular composition of current flow and the complicated motivations behind it, the historian at St. Petersburg’s European University says (liberal.ru/povestka/relokanty).

            Almost two thirds of those who have left are people between 25 and 45, Abashin says, most with higher education and two-thirds of whom are IT professionals. There are also managers and a far from small number of people from the humanities. But their motivations for leaving are quite varied.

            Some don’t want to remain in an aggressor country and bear the responsibility for that, he continues. Ohers don’t want to suffer from sanctions. Others fear either criminal prosecution for opposition or being drafted to fight in Ukraine. And still a third group fear the future as they are uncertain what it may bring.

            “For some,” Abashin says, “departure and the direction of flight were unexpected and not planned earlier,” but for others, these things had been discussed for some time and even prepared for with the purchase of property abroad, the securing of visas or even of dual citizenship. And many are uncertain whether they will return or be gone forever.

            According to the St. Petersburg scholar, “polls and simple observations find a broad spectrum of emotions: fear, anxiety, confusion, longing, anger, and shame but at the same time relief, feelings of liberation and hope, and desires to find new opportunities and gain new life experiences.”

            Because of this diversity, the flow is now being called “a relocation” and those involved in it “relocators,” Abashin says. This term originated in Belarus in 2020 to designate a new category of departees (pramen.io/ru/2020/12/belarusy-za-granitsej-relokanty-ili-bezhentsy/), and it is now applied to Russians many of whom don’t fit into the usual categories of such people.

            “’Relocators,’” he continues, “are simultaneously labor migrants, IT migrants, ‘digital nomads,’ refugees, and political emigres, and even tourists but at the same time none of them are fully the one or the other or the third.” They certainly don’t think of themselves in those terms and don’t want others to treat them as if they were the one or the other.

            According to Abashin, “the customary categorizations are unsuitable and too schematic for describing them.” And thus “the relocation of 2022 is destroying out ideas about stable migration scenarios on the post-Soviet space and pointing to new possibilities for the future” as far as movements of people are concerned.

            The earlier picture in which low skilled people flowed from the periphery to Russia and Russians didn’t move in the opposite direction must be corrected, Abashin argues. Now, fewer of the former are moving as they did; and Russians are moving to former Soviet republics few would ever have expected them to go.

            “We don’t know for certain what will be the case tomorrow or even more the day after that. Unpredictability has become the norm.” But it is possible that “’relocation’ and ‘relocators’ are the harbinger of a new social or political reality, although perhaps they are only a brief episode in Russian history.”