MOSCOW—Over a bottle of vodka and a traditional Russian salad of pickles, sausage and potatoes tossed in mayonnaise, a group of friends raised their glasses and wished Igor Irtenyev and his family a happy journey to Israel.Irtenyev, his wife and daughter insist they will just be away for six months, but the sadness in their eyes said otherwise.
A successful Russian poet, Irtenyev says he can no longer breathe freely in his homeland, because “with each passing year, and even with each passing day, there is less and less oxygen around.”
“I just can’t bear the idea of watching (Vladimir) Putin on television every day for the next 12 years,” the 64-year-old said of the Russian leader who has presided over a relatively stable country, though one awash in corruption and increasing limits on personal freedoms. “I may not live that long. I want out now.”
Irtenyev and his family have joined a new wave of Russian emigration that some here call the “Putin decade exodus.”
Roughly 1.25 million Russians have left the country in the last 10 years, Sergei Stepashin, head of the national Audit Chamber, told the radio station Echo of Moscow. The chamber tracks migration through tax revenues.
He said the exodus is so large, it’s comparable in numbers to the outrush in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.
“About as many left the country after 1917,” he said.
They don’t leave like their predecessors of the Soviet 1970s and ’80s, with no intention to return. They don’t sell their apartments, dachas and cars. They simply lock the door, go to the airport and quietly leave.
The reasons are varied. Some, like Irtenyev, chafe at life under Putin’s rule, which seems all but certain to continue with the prime minister’s expected return to the presidency next year. But for many others, economic strictures are the prime motivation. With inflation on the rise, and the country’s GDP stuck at an annual 3 per cent growth rate the last three years — compared with 7 per cent to 8 per cent before the global economic crisis — Russians are feeling pinched.
Russian nuclear physicist Vladimir Alimov, who now works at the University of Toyama in Japan, said he couldn’t survive on his $450 monthly salary at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Yes, I miss Russia, but as a scientist I couldn’t work there with the ancient equipment which had not been replaced or upgraded since the Soviet times,” Alimov, 60, said in a phone interview. “Here in Japan, I have fantastic work conditions. I can do the work I enjoy and be appreciated and valued for it — everything I couldn’t even dream of back in Russia.”
The wave of emigration, which has included large numbers of educated Russians, has grave implications for a country with a death rate significantly higher than its birthrate.
Experts believe that 100,000 to 150,000 people now leave the country annually and warn that the exodus reached dangerous dimensions in the last three years.
“People are going abroad for better college education, for better medical help, for better career opportunities, believing they will come back someday, but very few actually do,” said Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst with the Institute of Geography. “The intellectual potential of the nation is being washed away, as the most mobile, intelligent and active are leaving.”
Lev Gudkov, head of Levada, also sees a political dimension. “The worst thing is that people who could have played a key role in the modernization campaign proclaimed by the Kremlin are all leaving. But it appears that the Kremlin couldn’t care less if the most talented, the most active Russians are emigrating, because their exodus lifts the social and political tension in the country and weakens the opposition.”
Even though poet Irtenyev’s wife, Alla Bossart, knows she will miss her cozy dacha near Moscow, as a former columnist of Novaya Gazeta she is well aware that in the last 10 years, five of her colleagues, including crusading reporter Anna Politkovskaya, have been killed.
On the morning she left Moscow with her husband and daughter, Bossart had to return from the taxi to her already locked apartment to pick up some things she had forgotten. And then she had to go back again to switch off the light.
As she walked down the steps again, she muttered an old Russian saying under her breath: “It is a bad sign to return.”
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Source: Toronto Star
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