Ethnic Russians in Emigration Organizing Regionally to Help Each Other and Retain Ties with People Back Home

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 13 – That non-Russians who have been forced to emigrate typically organize themselves to support one another and to maintain ties with their co-ethnics in the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation is no surprise. But that ethnic Russians from various regions of that country are doing so is as well and may be at least as important. 

            The largest and most active of these groups is Petersburg without Borders, whose six hundred virtual members include not only those in the diaspora who want to help one another but many in Russia’s northern capital with whom both those who have left and those who haven’t want ties (nemoskva.net/2026/02/13/razrushit-stenu-mezhdu-uehavshimi-i-ostavshimisya/).

            Olga Galkina, a former member of the Petersburg parliament who left Russia after the start of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, is active in that group and also in the Reforum Space Berlin and Inter-Regional Initiative groups and shared her thoughts about that group and others like it as far as regional identities and contacts with people back home are concerned. 

            Both many Russians and many people in the West think about Russia “only through the prism of Moscow,” as if that city by itself could represent the country, Galkina says. But “the regions of Russia are very different, and those differences must be recognized and responded to if Russia is to become the country or countries its residents want.

            The Kremlin has worked tirelessly both to promote Moscow-centrism and to prevent people from any region organizing at home or even abroad to focus on that region’s specific needs. But several years ago, she continues, she and a group of fellow emigres from the northern capital organized European Petersburg to help one another and maintain ties with those at home.

            Convinced that they were on the right path, the group organized something called “the Inter-Regional Initiative” to help Russians from other regions do the same and then to share their ideas with one another. Petersburg without Borders is serving as a resource center for these other groups that now exist in slightly more than a third of all federal subjects.

            Many of these are from the non-Russia republics, Galkina says, but there are also ethnic Russian groups from Perm, Tomsk and Yaroslavl.  These movements are taking off and may become important actors in coming up with new ideas for the future of the country. Later this month, she says, the group will launch its own portal.