“I see two tickets from Moscow to Istanbul for Saturday.”
“Anyone know someone who is at the Verkhny Lars border crossing in a car? A friend’s son has been on foot for thirty hours—he is looking for a place to rest.”
“T. is raising money to send her son, S., out of the country. Any amount helps.”
“They are putting a mobile draft office at the Astrakhan border crossing with Kazakhstan.”
Since Vladimir Putin announced, on September 21st, that Russia would be instituting a draft, these and hundreds of other similar messages have flashed across my phone screen, in group chats suddenly repurposed for coördinating an exodus. The Russian government claimed that the draft would be “partial,” aimed at assembling some three hundred thousand men to fight in Ukraine. But Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Russian-language newspaper in exile, recently reported that the actual goal is a million conscripts. Tens of thousands of people—possibly more—have left Russia since the draft began, crossing the border in the west, south, and east of the country, by plane, train, bus, private car, bicycle, and scooter, and also on foot. They are staying in hotels and hostels, in hastily rented rooms, on the couches of friends and acquaintances. About a thousand people have found shelter in a movie theatre in the city of Uralsk, in Kazakhstan.
Ivan Fayt, a twenty-one-year-old furniture refinisher from Moscow, felt desperate when he heard about the draft order. For months, he had been helping people whom the Russian government refers to as refugees—Ukrainians who have been forcibly transferred to Russia—and, he told me, “that taught me that there is no law. Even if they say that they are not going to draft college students, that means nothing.” Fayt had no idea what to do, so he prayed to his patron saint, John of Shanghai and San Francisco, who was born in a village outside the Ukrainian city of Izyum, in 1896, and died in Seattle seventy years later. And then a miracle happened: two childhood friends, Kirill and Anastasia, told Ivan that they were driving to Georgia and there was a seat for him in the car. On the morning of Saturday, September 24th—three days after the draft began—the three of them set out from Moscow.
“We kept hearing that the border was about to close,” Ivan said. Telegram chats and channels were rebroadcasting this rumor, as were the many traffic-police officers who stopped the car along the way. So far, Russian officials do not appear to have closed any border crossings, but they have opened temporary draft offices at many of them. The young people drove all day and spent Saturday night in Rostov, a bit more than halfway to the border with Georgia—and a couple of hours from the Ukrainian border. Authorities had set up checkpoints along the road, and every time the young people stopped they were approached by locals who offered to show them a shortcut to the border. They paid fifteen thousand rubles (about two hundred and fifty dollars) to follow a car through a field, bypassing the large city of Vladikavkaz. Later, they paid a young man a hundred dollars to get in the car with them as they passed through some checkpoints—the temporary passenger apparently had the connections to get them through. “The police even saluted him,” Ivan said.
By six on Monday morning, Ivan and his friends were moving toward a queue to the border. Cars were lined up four or five across on a two-lane road. Still, cars and bicycles kept passing on the side. It seemed that some people were ditching their cars, buying used bicycles, which were going for upward of nine hundred dollars, and riding to the border. The line wasn’t moving. Ivan and his friends decided to leave the car and start walking. They walked for two hours and arrived at the border at noon. The lone café near the crossing was selling half-litre bottles of water for the equivalent of nine dollars. Ivan estimated that about two thousand people who had come to the border on foot or by bike were waiting to cross. Border guards were letting people through in groups of five. Conflicts broke out when people tried to cut the line. A border guard kept threatening to call special forces to detain people and turn them over to the draft office.
Around seven in the evening—more than nine hours since they ditched their car—Ivan and Anastasia were allowed to cross. Kirill was taken in for questioning. After about twenty minutes, he rejoined them and they started walking again: another forty minutes to the Georgian side of the border. They had no water. Their phones were dead. There was a long queue to cross into Georgia on foot; people in line said that they had been standing there for twelve hours. Ivan, Kirill, and Anastasia found someone with a car who agreed to drive them about a hundred yards into Georgia, for ten thousand rubles, or about a hundred and seventy dollars. They finally got to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, on Wednesday, September 28th, four days after they left Moscow and exactly a week after Putin announced the draft.
“You can tell the people who just got here,” Grigory Sverdlin, a native of St. Petersburg, told me. Sverdlin left Russia for Georgia weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, in February. “The people who left half a year ago look reasonably comfortable,” he said. “But the ones who just left have post-traumatic stress written on their faces.” Some quarter million people may have left Russia back in late February and early March. The current wave of escapees may prove even bigger.
Sverdlin, who used to run the oldest and largest organization for the homeless in Russia, has launched a nongovernmental organization aimed at helping people hide from the draft inside Russia, escape the draft by leaving Russia, or, if they have been drafted, to escape the military by surrendering to the Ukrainian side. Sverdlin, who now lives in Tbilisi, used his social media to announce the plan on Monday, September 26th. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told me when we spoke three days later. “We already have a team of six people and money to pay them salaries. We hadn’t even started a fund-raising campaign, and we are already hearing from people who want to make donations. On Thursday morning, we had a hundred volunteers. In the evening, we had three hundred volunteers, and by next week we’ll have fifteen hundred or even three thousand volunteers.”
Sverdlin estimates that about forty per cent of the potential volunteers are Russians living in exile, while the rest are still in Russia. Some of the people getting in touch, he said, live near the border and are volunteering to take escapees across, using hidden paths, if the border is closed. “We are hearing from designers, I.T. specialists, psychologists, lawyers—including people who are themselves still waiting to cross the border,” Sverdlin said. “It feels like a sort of popular resistance.” He considered calling the new organization Resistance, but then decided to be humbler: it will be called Idite Lesom, an idiom that literally means “go through the forest.” The phrase is most often deployed as a curse, roughly translatable as “go fuck yourself,” which is what Sverdlin would like to say to the Russian authorities.
Still, the people who are leaving now made the decision to stay seven months ago. “I had this psychological defense mechanism,” a forty-one-year-old sound engineer told me. “I thought I could live in Moscow, just do my own thing, and separate myself from everything toxic.” The sound engineer, who asked that I not use his name, even had a theory about why he shouldn’t participate in antiwar protests: after taking part in the mass demonstrations a decade ago, he had concluded that these had literally driven Putin crazy. But, after Putin’s draft announcement, he said, “I saw men being stopped in the streets in Moscow, and I realized that I had only two options: either leave or live in fear. If I was drafted, I’d have to go to jail, because I’m not going to war.” He bought a plane ticket to Yerevan, where he stayed with an acquaintance who left Moscow a few months earlier. His wife and two children, ages twelve and seventeen, are still in Moscow in part because they couldn’t figure out a way to get tickets for everyone.
Ilya Danishevsky, a thirty-two-year-old writer, stayed because his father had advanced cancer. When the war began, Danishevsky gave up all his paying gigs—he didn’t want to contribute to the Russian economy in any way—and asked the German consulate for a humanitarian visa. Danishevsky’s father died a month ago. Around the same time, the German visa came through, with a start date at the end of October. An hour after Putin announced the draft, Danishevsky bought a ticket to Istanbul, one of the few cities where one can still fly directly from Moscow. From a couple of Telegram chats—one a sort of mutual-aid exchange for the writing community, another devoted entirely to issues of emigration and resettlement—Danishevsky learned that border guards at airports were asking for proof that tickets had been purchased before September 21st, the day of Putin’s speech. When the question was asked, Danishevsky was prepared. “I know how to use Photoshop,” he told me. He is staying with a friend in Turkey until the start date of his German visa. After that, he said, “it’s a bit silly to plan. It will be a new life.”
In some of the countries where Russian exiles are most likely to land, this exodus, like the one before it, is arousing suspicion. On social media in Georgia and the Baltics, people are calling for the authorities to turn Russian men back, to force them to protest the war at home rather than seek a safe haven elsewhere. Last month, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania stopped admitting Russian citizens even if they held valid Schengen visas. On September 29th, Finland closed its border to Russians who don’t have family, work, or study in the country and are not entering for humanitarian reasons.
Boris Pospelov, a twenty-two-year-old activist who spent fifteen days in a Moscow special detention center in March for protesting the war, did not want to leave Russia. His plan was to quit his job as a cook at Delay Kul’turu (“Make Culture”), a feminist bar and club in Moscow, and hide out in the countryside, where his parents had been restoring a house. “But then my girlfriend and I discussed this, and they told me that they aren’t prepared to sit it out in the woods for an indefinite period of time,” Pospelov told me. He and his girlfriend tried and failed to buy plane tickets. Pospelov’s parents drove the couple and their dog, a black long-haired dachshund named Bek, to the border with Finland. Like many other Russians with Jewish roots, Pospelov has an Israeli passport. But, he told me, “I am fleeing war, so I don’t want to go to another country that’s occupying other people’s land.” Pospelov and his partner made it a few days before Finland closed its doors to most Russians, and can now remain in the country legally for around ninety days. They are staying with friends outside of Turku, in a large house where a young man from Kherson, a Ukrainian city occupied by the Russian military, has also found refuge.
According to a recent survey by the independent public-opinion-research firm the Levada Center (which the Russian government has designated a “foreign agent”), the mobilization decree shocked Russians and made them feel anxious. But it has not had a measurable effect on expressed support for the war: about two-thirds of respondents continue to say that they support the so-called special military operation. Many of the men leaving Russia may indeed be fleeing solely in fear and not in protest. Still, the more men run from the draft, the less cannon fodder the Kremlin can send to Ukraine. ♦