By Will Englund

T o go. To stay. To be Russian, to be once-Russian. To be here, but to be ready for there.

The political struggle that suffuses Moscow today has acutely heightened an age-old tension between “at-home” and “abroad.”

“Nothing good will happen,” said Maria Baronova, 28 and the mother of a 5-year-old, who once thought of leaving, but not since she became active in opposition politics — not even after she was criminally charged with inciting violence at a protest on May 6. “I’m very Russian. So I better live here.”

A year ago, the young and the liberal wereset on leaving, according to polls and political conversation, but the thinking changed over the winter when tens of thousands demonstrated, first in favor of free elections, then against President Vladimir Putin. The speaking out and standing up after years of silence gave them hope, and now they are losing it as the authorities inexorably tighten their grip instead of loosening it.

The forces around Putin have, step by step, moved to vilify Russians with foreign connections. Opposition leaders visiting U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul have been videotaped and denounced on television news. Putin himself said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave the signal for opposition protests against him. A new law requires nonprofit groups that receive funds from outside Russia to register as foreign agents. Alexei Navalny, a prominent blogger who not long ago spent a semester at Yale, has been accused of learning revolution there. The image of the Canadian passport of Pyotr Verzilov, the husband of a jailed feminist rocker, has been held up on TV and declared to be evidence that he is trying to tear Russia apart.

Navalny shot back last week with a blog post, accusing Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigating Committee, of having business interests in the Czech Republic, which is against the law for Russian officials and, Navalny impishly suggested, has opened Bastrykin to blackmail by Western agents.


For years, Russia’s business elite has been furiously buying up properties in London and New York, against the day when staying at home becomes untenable. Russian scientists have decamped to the West in search of opportunity. But now the authorities are attempting to revive once again the sinister implication that anything beyond the borders is inherently un-Russian.

It’s a durable theme that draws its strength from Russians’ sense of their native country. If American patriotism is largely about the founding ideals of the United States, and if Germans’ sense of identity is rooted in ethnicity, Russians derive their feelings of Russianness from the land itself. The Whites, losers in the civil war of the early 1920s against the Reds, carried little boxes of Russian soil with them when they left. The author Alexander Solzhenitsyn found a house in exile in Vermont, but not a home, and returned to Russia after his Communist tormenters had fallen from power.

Why leave?

In one important respect, Putin’s government differs from its Soviet predecessor: People are free to leave. It’s an important safety valve. For anyone who’s unhappy or unsatisfied, the government says, there’s always the airport.