Emigration

There is a peculiar instruction I receive almost daily, and it always arrives in the same imperative tone. Do not interfere in American affairs. Do not interfere in European affairs. And, since I no longer live there, do not interfere in Russian affairs either. The logic, such as it is, runs like this: a person who lives abroad has forfeited the right to an opinion about the countries he watches from a distance, and any judgment he offers is an impertinence at best and a hostile intrusion at worst. I want to take this demand seriously, because beneath its surface lies a genuine question about who is entitled to speak, and about what honesty requires of anyone who does. My answer comes in two parts that may at first seem to pull against each other. The first is that the demand for silence is not modesty but censorship. The second is that the freedom to speak does not license one to say anything at all; it comes attached to duties that are easy to evade and important to honor. ...

There is a sentence that a certain kind of decent Russian likes to say, and that I have come to regard as a small masterpiece of self-deception. “I am against Putin,” the sentence goes, “but I am for Russia.” It sounds balanced. It sounds like the position of a grown-up who refuses to be swept into hatred of an entire nation. And in peacetime it would have been a perfectly serviceable thing to believe. The trouble is that we are not in peacetime, and the sentence, transposed into the year a country is bombing its neighbor’s maternity wards, becomes something else entirely. It becomes the exact structural equivalent of saying, in 1943, “I am against Hitler, but I am for the Third Reich.” Once you hear it that way you cannot un-hear it, and you begin to understand why I no longer accept the formula, however gently it is offered. ...

There is a phrase I keep hearing, and every time I hear it I feel a chill, because I know exactly where it leads. The phrase goes: if Russians don’t pour into the streets to stop this war, then they are all accomplices — every last one of them. It is meant to sound morally uncompromising. In fact it is the opposite. It is a slogan that hands an enormous, undeserved gift to the very people who started the killing. And I want to explain, as carefully as I can, why I believe collective responsibility is real and inescapable — and why collective guilt is a poison that has only ever produced fascism and Bolshevism. ...

There is a particular kind of theater that unfolds whenever the people who call themselves the leaders of the Russian opposition are handed a microphone in a European institution. They are well dressed, they speak fluently about human rights and political prisoners, they have suffered real imprisonment, and yet, the moment a sharp question is put to them, something gives way. They cannot answer it. Not because they lack the words, but because answering honestly would force them to stand on one side of a line they have spent years refusing to acknowledge exists. I want to describe that line, and why the inability to step across it tells us almost everything we need to know about the state of the Russian emigration today. ...