Six Months in Exile: A New Life of Russian Emigrants

Abstract

The focus of this report is on Russian emigrants who left Russia after February 24, 2022. This report does not cover those who left earlier, as well as those who are still in Russia, but plan to leave. In August-early September 2022, before the announcement of the "partial" mobilization, the research project OutRush conducted a second wave of the online panel survey of emigrants from Russia who are currently in more than 60 countries all over the globe. We surveyed the respondents in March 2022 and invited new participants by posting and disseminating a link to the survey. The link was distributed through online channels, social media groups, and internet influencers. The participation of those previously surveyed allowed us to draw conclusions about the dynamics of the respondents’ movements, and changes in attitudes, plans, and expectations. Our panel data is the only opportunity today to monitor changes within the Russian emigrants’ communities who left the country after February 24. The survey data are complemented by a series of semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer of 2022 in Tbilisi.

War and Migration: Quantifying the Russian exodus through Yandex search trends

“…News articles reporting about trends of mass emigration and a potential brain drain appeared shortly after the start of the invasion (Demytrie, 2022). The main destinations of those who left were countries like Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, and Israel, typically tourist destinations with low entry requirements for Russian nationals (Kamalov, Kostenko, Sergeeva, & Zavadskaya, 2022). Early estimates of the number of leavers ranged from 25,000 in mid-March to more than 400,000 in the first half of 2022 (Demytrie, 2022;Australian Associated Press, 2022).…”

“…In the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, researchers have attempted to estimate internationally and internally displaced Ukrainians as accurately as possible by using Facebook advertising data and Google search trends (Leasure et al, n.d.;Minora et al, 2022;Jurić, 2022). One of the first projects monitoring the outflow of Russians as a reaction to the invasion was undertaken in form of an online survey conducted by a team of Russian researchers (Kamalov et al, 2022). The OutRush project started as a survey sampled through various Telegram channels and by self-recruitment reaching over 5,000 participants (OUTRUSH , n.d.).…”

“…The first wave that started right after the beginning of the invasion, consisted mainly of young, English-speaking professionals, with opposition political stances, from urban centers constituting at stark contrast to the already established Russian diasporas in the destination countries. On the contrary, the second wave, which emerged as a reaction to mobilization efforts, is mainly constituted by men from various socioeconomic backgrounds, from non-urban areas, and with a wide spectrum of political attitudes (Kamalov et al, 2022;Kostenko, Zavadskaya, Kamalov, & Sergeeva, 2023;Tumakova, 2022).…”

Leave Not Stay. Introduction to the Thematic Block

“…Per surveys, among the emigrants there is a large number of highly educated people, including journalists, teachers and scientists, IT specialists, people of creative occupations, and personnel of nonprofit organizations (Exodus-22 2023), that is, people who are prone to reflect on their experience through the production of texts, from articles to blogs. Moreover, a considerable number of these people have engaged in civic or political activism (Kamalov et al 2023) and are accustomed to participation in public life in Russia. Finally, among the migrants there are many famous people, whose lives attract attention of both the media and researchers.…”