Leaving

In the late 90s I was mainly just teaching, and the reason most students gave for wishing to learn English was so that they could escape from Russia and build a new life in the West. We used to prepare for Toefl exams, and Gmat and Ielts, or for interviews at foreign embassies. I had a vague feeling of guilt at my part in their demographic crisis: would I teach everyone to escape and end up being the only person left in this vast land, roaming the abandoned streets trailed by packs of hungry dogs?

Then both Mr. Putin and high oil prices arrived on the back of the new millennium: the one brought some semblance of order, the other brought money, and soon I was helping people who were building careers here and for whom the west was a holiday destination. The Russian companies, flush with the new cash, began to steal all of the professionals who had been trained up by the foreign companies, paying salaries that sparked a construction boom. Some of those who had fled started to return as the truth emerged that the best careers were to be had in the city of their pasts.

Some stayed abroad, particularly in America and Germany, buying food from their youth in Russian shops and telling anyone who would listen that Russia was hell. In Berlin a girl living in a hovel and scraping money for food in a cleaning job explained to me that there was no way she could achieve that standard of living in the old country: there were simply no opportunities for an educated woman. And for these people it was not a matter of evidence: that was clear enough by this time, every paper doing their Moscow Babylon stories, and the ones who had stayed, swanking around Europe in designer clothes. It was that those who had left before had too much invested emotionally, even existentially, in the conviction that Russia was unlivable.

And then in the last years it has started to shift back: people, especially the young are wanting out again. They are no longer fleeing poverty. They are fleeing what? A sense of doom has taken over many of them: they tell me Russia is going backwards, the schools are worse, they don’t want their children to grow up here. Neither do the politicians or the rich for that matter: they all want their kids in English schools. People talk of stagnation, the older ones mention Brezhnev.

This is a worrying sign. And it is no less so just because their notions of what the west is are as distorted as those who wanted to leave in 98