FROM OUR REPORTER
BELGRADE – On February 24, 2022, Olga woke up with a start because Maxim, her husband, was crying.
At that moment, in another part of Moscow, Mikhail Korostikov was about to quit his job as a manager in Russia’s largest bank: in a few days he would start learning Serbian in order to start a new life elsewhere.
The attack on Ukraine had started a few hours ago, but Olga, Maxim and Mikhail already knew that there was no more room for them in Russia.
Ivan instead crossed the border into Kazakhstan on foot at eight o’clock in the evening of September 21; Ten hours earlier he had read the mobilization order on his smartphone in his Moscow apartment.
The four did not know each other, they had never met. But the war has forced their lives to come together in one place: Belgrade, the only European capital where – says Olga – “we can speak Russian to our son in the street without having to look around”. A city far enough away to be away from Russia, but unlike the West, to open up to hundreds of thousands of children fleeing Russian despotism.
They are not refugees and not welcome, only tolerated.
They are voiceless and landless refugees.
They are often the authors of acts of citizenship, for which they pay a heavy price that no one will ever recognize.
Belgrade has filled up so quickly with Russian exiles in recent months that coworking spaces, restaurants and meeting places have sprung up here for them in just a few months, while rental costs in the city have exploded. According to the Interior Ministry, more than 140,000 Russians registered as permanent residents in Serbia between February and October. Since then, they have continued to flow in waves. And on the arrival dates, the ideas, the existential state, maybe even the future decisions remain written against the light.
There are those who arrived with the first stream of exiles: those disgusted by the war, those who, since February 24, 2022, have wanted nothing to do with Vladimir Putin and his regime.
Then there’s the second wave, the morally ambiguous status: always suspected that they didn’t see need to turn their backs on the dictator before realizing he was ready to throw them into the furnace of war too .
Maxim and Olga: «Russia is now a fascist state»
That’s certainly not the case with Maxim, Olga’s husband: the 42-year-old man who, on the morning of February 24 a year ago, opened the news channels on his phone and started crying and banging his head on the refrigerator. “I never thought that we would find ourselves in the situation of Nazi Germany,” says Maxim, who requests that his last name be omitted to avoid trouble for the European company he works for as a digital nomad in Belgrade to prepare.
His office is a very simple corner of the apartment where Maxim and Olga receive me for dinner. ‘I grew up thinking that we Russians are the good guys. And now our troops are bombing Kharkiv, Kiev – says Maxim -. I know Ukrainians hate us when we call them brothers, but that’s how I felt about them. On that morning of February 24, the last seal separating Russia from a fascist state was broken.”
Maxim had stopped joining the anti-Putin demonstrations by 2022 at the latest because the disproportion between their incredible effectiveness and personal risks seemed too great. “I would have gone into politics if there was an easy way,” he admits. At some point, listening to Echo Moskvy, one of the few opposition radio stations, had helped him eliminate the problem (“I didn’t think about it anymore”) and basically made life in Russia bearable for him.
Then the story took on the task of tearing Maxim and Olga out of the bubble they were trying to build around their family. By the evening of February 24, they had already decided to leave everything, and she consulted a psychologist to tell her eight-year-old son Yuri. “We told him that if we stayed in Russia we could never see Sardinia again.”
It is more difficult to explain to her elderly mother the decision to leave her. Olga’s father was a submarine captain, she had spent five years of her life under water, and her mother was a nuclear engineer. Olga grew up on a naval base near the Arctic Circle before perestroika and the end of the USSR put everything on hold and the family plunged into poverty. Maybe that’s why her mother is with Putin today, for the war, for the restoration of the empire. «Impossible to talk to her about these things – says Olga -. Sometimes I tell myself I got the wrong lottery ticket to be born in Russia. But my mother told me that it would be okay if we go to Serbia because it is an orthodox country».
Except that Belgrade seems far from being a definitive landing place. It looks more like a no man’s land, suspended between East and West, mired in its past as the capital of the tiny lost Yugoslav Empire.
Mikhail: «Putin and his people represent a dying mindset»
For Mikhail Korostikov it seems to be above all the stage, he says, “of a journey through time and space: here I seem to have returned to the Moscow suburbs of my childhood”.
At 34, Mikhail has had many careers. He is a graduate of Moscow State University with a gold medal in international relations and completed a year of study in Shanghai. He was offered to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘I declined because you are not a person there, just an instrument of what they see as the national interest. This place is for people who are not afraid of looking immensely stupid,” he interrupts.
Instead, in 2015, Mikhail joins the newspaper “Kommersant” and writes there about Asia. He accompanies Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on his trips to China and experiences the progressive erosion of his own freedoms day after day. «I could politely criticize something about the minister – he recalls -. But I knew that if I did it too often, I would travel with him less and less.” The pressure on him and the newspaper is increasing slowly but steadily. No one ever told him not to write anything, Mikhail admits, but little by little he felt more and more isolated. ‘It was a gradual descent until no one took my calls. And the main problem is not the censorship, he says, but the financial deprivation. “We knew in the newspaper that if we went too far, the government would control the business world and would ask big companies not to buy advertising on Kommersant.”
For this reason, in 2019, Mikhail left journalism and started to deal with green finance, up to a very high position at the major Russian bank Sberbank. Ukraine’s aggression is only a few weeks away. “I explained to everyone that Putin would never attack because I analyzed rational factors,” says Mikhail. “Instead, the reason for this war is that Putin and his circle represent a dying way of life and thinking. You want to go back to the 70s. They know that when they physically disappear, nothing remains of this world: that’s why they want to stop time and go back now before it’s too late. But I’m not ready to live in a country where the President considers me an asset to be thrown into the Donbass meat grinder».
Today, Mikhail runs green finance for a London firm from his apartment in Belgrade.
Ivan: «I will stay abroad for the rest of my life, Russia is already defeated»
Instead, Ivan, a 28-year-old digital nomad, asks me to be vague and use a fictitious name so as not to interfere with his father’s work as a designer for major Russian companies. Ivan left as soon as the first news of the war came. Then he returned until he woke up at ten o’clock on September 21 and read the mobilization order on Telegram. Two hours later he is at the airport with a ticket to the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, the only one he had found. Two thousand kilometers to the south. From there it’s an hour’s drive to the border with Kazakhstan, hire a taxi until the last traffic jam before the border and from there hectically cover the last stretch on foot. “I’m lucky because I can still talk to my parents about Ukraine,” he says upon meeting me at Kafeterija Magazin 1907, a historic Belgrade café-turned-hipster hangout. But he continues: “I will stay abroad for the rest of my life. Every Russian generation has had its war, mostly the result of imperial dreams and false upbringing. I don’t want my children and grandchildren to experience what I experience.”
For Ivan, Russia is “already defeated”, morally, historically, even if the war lasted for years. On the other hand, it is pointless to ask Maxim if he expects defeat in Moscow, which will lead to regime change. He cannot wish for the defeat of Russia, not even Putin’s Russia. “I’m not willing to say that so many Russians have turned into monsters in the army,” he says. I can’t say I hope Russia loses. I just wish the war would go away. But this is not a film, there is no happy ending, I don’t see a positive outcome or a path to democracy». Mikhail Korostikov, if possible, is more negative. ‘If we had democracy, in two days we’d have – he claims – a different Putin. Even I share the reasons for his resentment. Blinded by its sense of superiority, the West thought it would teach us the lesson. But he committed war crimes before us, in Iraq, in Libya, in Yugoslavia. This is not to say that Russia should commit any worse crimes. But Putin does nothing but use Russian resentment to strengthen his power,” says Mikhail. He politely shakes my hand as I exit a downtown restaurant. And he returns to his apartment to work, composed and calm like a willing exile whose heroism perhaps no one will ever know.