MOSCOW — Evoking the dark era of Soviet repression, Russian politicians and journalists are being driven into exile in growing numbers.
The steady stream of politically motivated emigration that had accompanied President Vladimir V. Putin’s two-decade rule turned into a torrent this year. Opposition figures, their aides, rights activists and even independent journalists are increasingly being given a simple choice: flee or face prison.
A top ally of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny left Russia this month, state media said, adding her to a list of dozens of dissidents and journalists believed to have departed this year. Taken together, experts say, it is the biggest wave of political emigration in Russia’s post-Soviet history.
This year’s forced departures recall a tactic honed by the K.G.B. during the last decades of the Soviet Union, when the secret police would tell some dissidents they could go either west or east — into exile or to a Siberian prison camp. Now, as then, the Kremlin appears to be betting that forcing high-profile critics out of the country is less of a headache than imprisoning them, and that Russians abroad are easy to paint as traitors in cahoots with the West.
“Their strategy is: First, squeeze them out,” said Dmitri G. Gudkov, a popular Moscow opposition politician who fled in June. “And if you can’t squeeze them out, throw them in jail.” » | Anton Troianovski* | Monday, August 30, 2021
* Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. He was previously Moscow bureau chief of The Washington Post and spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York. @antontroian
