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Channel One, the Kremlin's main propaganda outlet, lit the news that night with fireworks. It was February 23, Defender of the Fatherland Day, a public holiday, and for more than two minutes, the broadcasts moved from city to city, showing images of the celebrations across Russia. Petersburg, the city of Leningrad, at the cost of incredible losses, was blocked.
I'd watched fireworks over Moscow many times before. As children, my brother and I would run to the window to see them light up the sky. But never had they seemed so ominous. The presenter was using the city's old Soviet names: Stalingrad, Leningrad. It was a deliberate callback to some of the bloodiest battles in the Second World War. For weeks, everybody had been speculating about when and if the invasion of Ukraine might start.
But at this moment I knew for sure that the war was hours away. At 1:30 a.m. I messaged my editor in London: "I'm going to get a few hours sleep before it all breaks out." At around that same time, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, posted a video to social media. In the video, he made a final appeal for peace.
Zelensky is standing alone in a TV studio. He is clean-shaven, dressed in a black suit and a tie, not yet wearing his signature army green. He's in front of a screen displaying a map of Ukraine. The country's borders are outlined brightly in white. But Zelensky is addressing the Russian public in Russian. I know they will not show this appeal on Russian television, he said.
But the citizens of Russia must see it. Who can prevent this war, he asks? The people, he says. Public figures, journalists, musicians, actors, athletes, scientists, doctors, bloggers, stand-up comedians, tiktokers and more. Do you want a Russian war?
Do Russians want war, he asks. I would like to answer this question myself, but the answer depends only on you, the citizens of the Russian Federation. A few hours after Zelensky posted that speech, Vladimir Putin announced the start of his special military operation. The invasion of Ukraine had begun.
Since that moment, the attention of the world has mostly and rightly been on Ukraine. More than a hundred thousand of its citizens have been killed and injured.
Its cities have been devastated. Millions have fled. But while Ukraine was being attacked, or in fact because Ukraine was being attacked, the ground was also shifting underneath Russia. Because by bombing Ukraine, Russia was engaging, and not for the first time, in an act of self-destruction, attacking its own future. This is the story of Russians who opposed the war, for Ukrainian's sake, and for their own.
They have taken different paths since the 24th of February, but they all felt the same that day. It seems to me that many people had the same day and I don't know for what reason, but everyone woke up very early, much earlier than they usually do. I thought, like, fucking hell.
I mean, like everyone, I mean, what can a normal person think when one morning he or she wakes up and realizes that its country has gone for a full-fledged invasion of the neighboring country? I clearly remember this feeling that this is not my world anymore. I see my apartment and you feel your apartment like a safe place. I don't feel it as a safe place anymore. So everything changed just in one second.
So for me it was an absolute, total crash of my hopes and plans. I naively dreamed about, I hoped this country will be one day sooner or later integrated in the global community. My country started this awful war and my country day after day kills innocent people. And I think that this shame will be with us for the rest of our lives.
It felt like Nazi Germany. It didn't feel like a literature, it felt like a real historic event that is happening right in front of me. I felt exactly the same. It felt as though the country I was born in had been seized by a fascist regime. It had just become a fascist state. I found it hard to breathe. I was raised in Moscow and left when the Soviet Union fell apart to study and live in Britain, my adopted home. For years I'd been writing about Russia becoming more and more authoritarian.
But suddenly, literally overnight, my worst fears had become reality. Over the past year, free-thinking Russians have had to reckon with this nightmarish change. And there is a reason Zelensky addressed them in his speech. Because their stories can reveal why this war started and how it might end. I'm Arkady Astrovsky from The Economist. This is Next Year in Moscow. Episode 1. This Damn Year.
It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon on February 24th when I stepped out of my flat in the heart of Moscow. Nearly 12 hours had passed since the invasion began and I wanted to see how the city had changed. But it hadn't. Outside there were no signs of a coup, no obvious evidence that the world had transformed overnight. The same shops, the same traffic, the same cafes. But the city was tense. People on the streets stopped to check their phones for news. Videos were starting to come through from Ukraine.
They seemed confused, as though they were looking for explanations. Black cars with sirens, flashing lights and tinted windows zipped around the city. They carried Russian officials, meeting each other in person, too scared presumably to talk on the phone about what had just happened. And the police, closing in on the city, putting up fences where people were likely to gather, as if the Kremlin was preparing for an attack on its own soil. Amid the confusion and the tension, one thing was immediately clear.
Russians opposed to Putin's war now faced a choice which we thought was resigned to 20th century history books: Lie low, resist or flee.
So that day, just to capture the moment, so we met at Pushkin Square. There was a protest. It wasn't that large. It wasn't that large. It's a very British way to put it. It was like 100 protesters and 1,000 policemen. Andrei Babitsky is a journalist and an intellectual, a very Russian intellectual, of the kind you meet on the pages of a Tolstoy novel. He's exaggerating here. There were probably thousands of protesters, but he is right.
It wasn't going to set any record for attendance. And when I saw Arkady, I thought, fuck, there's one person I know, and that means there's going to be a small rally, because at a large rally you don't meet people you know. The faces of the people who came to Pushkin Square that evening reflected three main emotions. Pain, fury, and shame. The demonstration didn't last long. Hello, my friend. You...
It's dark because it's winter. It's even more dark because of the black uniforms of the riot policemen. Helmeted riot police pushed protesters to the ground and threw them into vans. Some 1,700 people were arrested that night, half of them in Moscow. Others had similar protests around the country.
It was pretty obvious after like 15 minutes that not many people are going to come, that we did something for delusional feeling of having fulfilled some minimal citizen's duty, but we're not going to stop the war this way. A police officer approached Andrei. You're getting in the way, he said. Andrei replied, oh, am I getting in the way of your bombing of Ukraine?
Andrei got arrested on the spot. I was decided that, yes, it's easier if I am detained than my daughter and my wife leave peacefully. Because, you know, there is an implicit, tacit agreement within every Russian family that, you know, you don't put both parents in jail the same evening. So if they take me, the rest of the family can leave without feeling ashamed or something. Yeah.
Andrei spent several hours held in a police station that night with dozens of others. At the time, he already knew that this would be among his final moments in Russia. He'd known that since he woke up to the news of the war that morning, that compromises were no longer possible. I was sure I'm going to leave whenever it starts. It's one of the, actually, what they called my red lines. When you leave in Russia or in any country,
unfree country, you have to have red lines. You have to be ready to leave. You never can leave this decision to the moment, to the heat of the moment. Because every time something bad happens, everybody says, okay, we've got school to go, we've got appointments, we've got this and that, we're not going to leave. So decision that's important has to be made in advance.
I mean, so it was not a sudden decision. You thought about it. So why? Because there is another argument. I'm not leaving this country to these people. This is still my country. You know, who are they to say that I should be leaving? Why did you leave? I was fleeing from the sad choice between drinking myself to suicide or arrest because I thought that every evening after they work, I'm going to sit on my couch drinking
And I'll face this choice. Either I go protest outside, because you cannot just keep silent, or you drink vodka. And I thought that either they detain me a few times and arrest me, or I just have a few vodkas too much and I die. Andrei's thinking about this was shaped by a bit of family history.
In August 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. They crushed the democratic reform movement and overthrew Czechoslovakia's government. Back in Moscow, eight people came out in protest in Red Square holding signs. One read: "For your freedom and for ours." KGB agents beat them up and ripped up their signs. They ended up in jail, labor camps or psychiatric hospitals.
But their protest was an example of dignity and freedom still revered today. One of the eight was Konstantin Babitsky, Andrei's grandfather. That story taught Andrei two lessons he told me. One is about the value of individual action. The other is that this protest broke his grandfather's life and in the end changed little. I've read lots of books about, you know, how people felt and how they behaved.
last hundred years in different countries. And it's always come to this now. If I want to rebuild Russia and I have filled responsibility for Russia, then I can use my faculties, however humble, to do it from abroad or when it is actually possible to do this. Now it is not. Now there is no momentum to join, to rally, to lead the mob to the Kremlin. What can I do?
Andrei left Russia the day after the war began. I stayed in Moscow for a while longer, long enough to see Putin overturn the remnants of free society in Russia. In the days that followed, the Kremlin shut down the last few independent media outlets. It also passed a law criminalizing fake news that was anything other than the Kremlin propaganda. Calling the war a war instead of a special military operation now risks a 15-year jail sentence.
And something else had started to happen in the shadows. So my name is Marina Davidova. I'm a theatre critic, director, even a playwright. Marina Davidova is a big deal in the Moscow theatre world. She brought modern avant-garde productions from Western Europe to Russia.
On February 24th, she posted an anti-war petition on Facebook. Applying to the government, personally to Vladimir Putin, that you should stop this awful war immediately, something like this. It got picked up by a few foreign media outlets and was shared widely amongst theatre people. I saw it that afternoon and signed it myself. But Marina moved on. To be honest, I just forgot about it.
Until a few days later, when Marina was at home, waiting for a TV crew from Austria. They had asked her for an interview. There was a knock at the door. And when I opened the door, I saw both of them, a journalist and a cameraman, they were looking at my door.
And they asked me, "What does it mean? What is on your door here? What is this strange sign?" And I didn't see it that moment. And I asked them, "What do you mean? What sign?" And then I just looked at it also. And at the very same moment, I understood that actually I need to leave my country. Maybe for a long time, maybe forever.
A large white letter Z had been crudely spray-painted onto the door. This half-swastika sign, which first appeared painted onto tanks, soon became the symbol of Putin's war, projected onto buildings, printed onto pro-war merch. It speaks to a grim truth about fascism. It starts as a performance, and then it creeps into the fabric of a place, in signs, in symbols, in language.
But back then, less than a week into the invasion, all this was still new to Russians like Marina. The only thing that I understood that it's like a black mark, you know, that I have to leave the country, otherwise something awful will happen to me. In the weeks after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of other Russians were also preparing to leave their country, gathering belongings, pulling children out of school, haunted by a feeling that they no longer belonged here or felt safe at home.
And this is exactly how the Kremlin wanted them to feel. Having long called them foreign agents and national traitors, Putin wished these people gone and encouraged them to go. Their flight would be the biggest single exodus of Russia's educated classes since the Bolshevik revolution a century earlier. Around the same time that someone painted a Z on Marina's door, I got a tip that staying in Russia might not be safe for me either. And as I walked out of my apartment one day, I realized that I was being trailed.
A couple of goons were following me. They were not exactly making their presence discreet. So that same evening, I drove to Vnukovo airport, already teeming with people trying to leave. Many of us were heading to the same place, a foreign city with a recurring role in Russia's history. Hello, I'm Zannie Minton-Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist. I'd like to tell you about the rest of our coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Ever since Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion, we've been reporting from the heart of this war. A year on, its outcome remains uncertain, and The Economist's correspondents continue to bring unparalleled analysis of what the war means for Ukraine and for the world. Our defense experts explain the dynamics on the battlefield. Our business and finance writers examine what the war means for energy markets and the global economy.
From big picture geopolitical analysis to documenting personal stories of courage and resilience, my colleagues have been doing extraordinary work. If you already subscribe to The Economist, thank you. You make this possible. Otherwise, for access to all our journalism and to join exclusive events with Arkady and others on our team, visit economist.com slash Moscow offer. The link is in the notes for this podcast.
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That's code LISTEN at bluenile.com for $50 off. bluenile.com, code LISTEN. This damn year is finally over. But what will be next? Perhaps things will get worse. When he wrote these words, Ivan Bunin was on his way to Constantinople, the city now known as Istanbul. It was New Year's Day, 1918. On leaving Russia, the Nobel Prize-winning writer kept a diary. He called it Cursed Days.
It was a damning account of the violence and civil war that gripped his homeland after the Bolshevik revolution. Bunin's story rang in my mind as I flew out of Russia. The flight from Moscow took longer than usual. The airspace over Ukraine was closed. Missiles were falling on its cities, fired by Russian forces. I woke up the next day to the sound of the call to prayer. I too had come to Istanbul.
I remember feeling transported in time, my head filled with the stories of Russian exiles who came to the city 100 years ago, leaving the country they knew behind. On the ferries crisscrossing the Bosphorus, on its steep cobbled streets, in the bustling cafes, it felt like half of Moscow was here. I could hear people speaking Russian everywhere.
Turkey had become a kind of way station in the Russian exodus. Russians didn't need a visa to go to Turkey, and Turkey was one of the few countries that was still taking flights from Russia. I stayed for a couple of days to decompress and to talk to friends who were already there, before flying back to London. In the coming months, I traveled to Ukraine, where I talked to Zelensky and his commanders. I reported the war. I visited Buchi and Irpen. I talked to farmers whose fields were strewn with Russian shells.
But I kept thinking about the origins of this war and about Istanbul because this great city is where history rhymes and where the story of Russian exile begins. So, as the first anniversary of the invasion approached, I went back. Halfway down the hill from my hotel, I stumbled across a bookshop. Its windows and shelves were lined with books in Russian. Its owner was a young emigre. So, we're okay to speak English? Yes.
Russian is better. It's hard for me to switch between four languages one day. Your English is perfect. And this is for an English podcast. Oh my God. Her name was Saniyya Galimova. Well, I don't know where to start. Well, I left Russia in March, just after the war started. Because I was really afraid for my family. I have a family of four. Me, my husband, daughter and a dog.
It's important because bringing the dog here was so expensive that we slept on the floor and we didn't have any furniture for five months because all our money and all our savings were spent to bring the dog here. Like me, Senya was in Moscow the day the war began. It was so frightening. I understood that the most vulnerable people in my family is my husband and my daughter.
My husband, because he can be caught and sent to war, and it's terrible, not because of danger of death, but before this death, he would be a murderer. It's worse. Then my daughter, because of propaganda, because I know how Russian educational system works.
Sania had always told her daughter that she had a right to her own opinions about the world, different from what she heard from friends or teachers. But when the war started, I understood that she has no right for opinion now. And she has no right to speak on it. How old is your daughter? She's 10 years old.
And I understood that my instructions will be changing. Like, I will say to her, "You don't have a right to say 'my parents are against war' in school, because if you say that, police will come to our home, they will take you from us and we'll have troubles and we can go to prison or we can get fired." And it means that my kids' brain should
Like, not brain, but... Conscience? Yes, conscience should split. And living with a split conscience, it's hard even for grown-ups. But for kids, it's enormous. I grew up in Soviet times, when things that could be said at home were also not to be repeated at school. Saniya is much younger than me. She was born after the end of the Soviet Union, and she didn't want her daughter to go back to it.
Tell me about the bookshop. Why did you decide to open a bookshop? I always had a romantic dream to have a bookstore like I guess every woman. Every rom... Okay, not every woman. It was sexist. Okay. Every romantic girl want to have a bookstore one day. And it was like kind of dream. Sania had worked in tech previously as a marketing manager at a startup.
But that life was now over, and she wanted to make a difference. I wanted to make something that will make everything better. I know protesting is good, it works, and we need people who protest. But my way to say something is to produce something. I wanted to make some place in Istanbul where we can start a dialogue. I mean Ukrainian people and Russian people.
Actually, I think I started this bookstore because it hurt so much that I needed to do something to make it better. The bookshop is her way of dealing with the war. She donates some of the revenue to charities assisting Ukrainians. She stocks both Russian and Ukrainian literature. The shop is called "Полторы комнаты" - "A Room and a Half". It's the title of an essay by Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel Prize-winning Russian author who ended up in exile.
It's an essay about a lost home and I wanted to recreate our lost home. Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and lived in America for the rest of his life. He was not allowed to see his parents before they died. They were not allowed to leave the Soviet Union and he couldn't return. After they died, he wrote about them in English. It was the only way he felt he could get them out of the country. What Brodsky did? Yes, he lost his home.
and he lost his parents, but he recreated them in something beautiful. Seniya and many others are trying to create another Russia outside the country's physical borders. It's easy to understand why, but the actions of the Russian state still weigh heavily on their minds. On New Year's Eve, the final day of 2022, Seniya was closing her shop when a feeling of paralysis hit her. I didn't want to leave.
Because when I close the bookstore and go to home, I need to think about New Year's coming. New Year's Eve is the biggest holiday of the year in Russia. Families come together, children open presents, parents cook a big meal. But for Sonia, turning over the calendar just sharpened the pain. I was believing that the year will finish and the war will finish. And it was...
Overwhelming for me. And as she realised that the arrival of 2023 wasn't going to change anything, something shifted in her. This bookstore was for me this kind of a dream. I thought like, oh, I will change the situation. I will help Ukrainian people, we'll build a dialogue. But I did everything that I could and it didn't make a huge difference. So I closed the bookstore, I went home and I cried for an hour.
You know, it's not that kind of grief when you cry it out and it passes. Because you can't cry it out. And I couldn't stop. This damn year is finally over. But what will be next? Perhaps things will get worse. In the depth of her sadness, Senia told me, she thought of another book. It was Man's Search for Meaning, a memoir by Viktor Frankl about surviving the Holocaust. Frankl was saying that the first people who died
in concentration camps was people who was thinking that it will pass really quickly. The second part of people who were dying quickly was who was thinking that it will never stop. But the people who didn't make any plans and just did their everyday routine and did their best, they survived.
And I understood that I just have to make my work every day, day by day. And then I stopped crying. I mean that when I'm tired a little bit, sometimes I forget. What about you asking me during long answers? Well, you've got a few things on your mind.
I last visited Vladimir Zelensky just before the new year, in December of 2022, nine months into the war. You started at the beginning addressing Russians in Russian. Yes. You actually thanked some of those who spoke against the war. How do you feel now? From the very beginning, he told me, I've believed that people should fight for their country themselves. Russians allowed their leader to start this war.
Are they responsible? Yes, they are responsible. And you're not guilty before me, you're guilty before yourself. This is how it was in the days of German fascism, Zelensky said. Whether you were a good or bad person, you were part of a generation of people who were fascists.
And this will scar you forever. If Russians believe they are good people, he said, they will do everything to make the regime fall. And it will fall. It's a matter of time. The stakes of this fight inside Russia could scarcely be higher. Not just for Ukraine or Russia itself, but for the world. Because while Ukrainian victory on the battlefield is essential, it will not end the war. To bring a lasting peace, this conflict will need to end where it began. Inside Russia.
But now many of the people who can make a difference are stranded outside Russia or silenced within. How can this lost generation defeat a militarized dictatorship that has turned back the clock of history? Will their time ever come? To understand that, we need to go back to the moment not long ago when they felt the future belonged to them. That's next time.
Next Year in Moscow is produced by Sam Colbert, Pete Norton and Ksenia Barakovskaya with help from Lika Kremer and Libor Libor Studios. Additional production and development is by Sandra Shmueli. Our sound design is by Wei Dong Lin with original music by Darren Ang. Our executive producer is John Shields. I'm Arkady Ostrovsky. This is The Economist.
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