Putin was empowered by ‘political silence’

In private Telegram groups and on Russian Twitter, Russian-speakers around London share outrage over Vladimir Putin’s war on a neighbouring country and brother nation and the wanton destruction it has brought. Sardonically, they refer to the botched battle plan and military snafus in English as a BlitzCringe. They’re done with Russia and yet they can’t be free of it.
“Russia is seen as a failed state with a not-so-modern military and a nuclear arsenal,” says Nikita Dedik, the 38-year-old founder of a London-based tech start-up. “What we are seeing is a shame for all of us.”
I used to complain to my late Russian father-in-law, whose own father was born in Ukraine and fought in World War II, that Russians were too siloed, too unwilling to stand up for democracy and against corruption. But then how could I really appreciate the costs of opposing a ruthless dictator, having lived in freedom my whole life?
Julia Kotchetygova, who moved to the UK with her husband and daughter in 2014 after her employer, S&P, offered to relocate her, used to join protests and try to organise. But she realised that Russians did not want the help she wanted to give. She notes a saying popular among Russians, especially outside the major cities: “ya v nye politiki” — which roughly translates to “I am apolitical” or “I am apart from politics.” There seems to be a national inclination toward ignorance and acceptance, she says. “People isolated themselves from information even when it was available.”
At least for Russians outside of Russia, the Ukraine war has forced them to become political. For investors, tech entrepreneurs, teachers, not to speak out is to be complicit in crimes being committed in their name but not with their consent.
The vast majority of younger Russian speakers in Britain left Russia because they did not see a future under Putin’s regime. They have little in common with the oligarchs on the UK government’s new sanctions list, with their mega yachts and Mayfair mansions, though some have found considerable success. There are Russian professionals in every sector of the economy, especially in technology and parts of the economy where Britain is desperate to recruit talent. They can be found at most schools and recent graduates at the major banks, at Google or Bloomberg or other major firms. In the tech community, they work side by side with Ukrainian and Belarussian coders and developers.
Nearly everyone I have spoken to in recent days has encountered a relative who parroted Putin’s insistence that Nato is a threat to Russia or the war simply a necessary minor clean-up operation that is going well. Dedik says his father was born in Ukraine and has relatives there, but he is no longer talking to his parents.
“It is probably the most disgusting and disheartening part, besides the war itself, that so many educated people in Russia support the war. I don’t know if historians and psychologists will study it in the future as they did Nazi Germany,” says Michael Bronstein, a professor of computer science at Oxford University who emigrated to Israel before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. And occasionally, the attitude can even be found, though not so loudly these days, among expatriate Russians, particularly older ones.

—Bloomberg