One day in the 1990s, I was playing with my cousin in a local park in Chișinău, the capital of Romanian-speaking Moldova, when two little girls from the Russian-speaking minority asked us what our names were. We told them: Mihai and Maria Paula. They immediately rebaptised us: “Misha i Masha!” To them, we were all Russians after all.
In 2024, such expressions of cultural imperialism are still rife in Putin’s Russia, but you wouldn’t expect to find them among Russian liberals, an estimated million of whom left their country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
And yet there are still moments like these, such as at a Chișinău concert earlier this year by Russian cult band Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine), whose founder Andrey Makarevich has been branded a “foreign agent” by his home country over his criticism of the invasion. When the crowd was slow to pick up on Makarevich’s attempt to cue up a sing-along, he tried to talk them up: “This is what our nation is like, we never get things right the first time round.” There it was again, that old reflex: “our nation.”
In this particular case, perhaps age can explain, if not excuse, such deeply ingrained attitudes: Mashina Vremeni was founded in 1969, when Moldova was still forced to share a nation with Russia through the Soviet Union.
But the younger members of the supposedly liberal Russian diaspora seem just as prone to revealing slips of the tongue. Tatar pop-rock singer Zemfira, who has also been labelled a foreign agent and has lived in exile since the start of the war, made her debut on the music scene in the late 90s. Yet in the middle of a performance in Chișinău in June, she told her audience that after touring Europe, she felt “at home here because I am a Soviet person”.
Hearing those words from within the crowd, I couldn’t believe that the artist I admired did not realise that her feeling of “home” – probably inspired by the architecture of a city destroyed in the second world war and most Moldovans’ fluency in Russian – was the direct result of Russia once having occupied my country.
Lithuanian philosopher Viktoras Bachmetjevas had a similar experience at a concert by Russian rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov in March. Blacklisted in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, and again in Putin’s Russia since 2022, there is little doubt about Grebenshchikov’s dissident credentials. But did he understand that even he, as a Russian citizen at odds with the regime, could still be held accountable for his country’s actions?
“I kept waiting, wanting him to make an anti-war gesture, but he did not,” Bachmetjevas recalls. During the concert, the stage was lit in blue and yellow colours, which the philosopher perceived as too timid a statement of solidarity with Ukraine. “Now is not the time for subtle gestures.”
Bachmetjevas is one of a growing number of intellectuals in central and eastern Europe who propose that we think about post-invasion Russia in the same ethical category as Nazi Germany. While war and other crimes should be persecuted on an individual basis, he argues, responsibility for the country’s conduct in Ukraine cannot be completely offloaded to its political elite. “By definition, political responsibility, which individuals carry as members of their political community, is a collective one,” he says.
Does the fact that the Russian state is a dictatorship not negate the argument for collective responsibility? Bachmetjevas argues that Russia’s citizens allowed democracy to wither away into tyranny, giving up their freedoms in exchange for promises of prosperity and national greatness. “No Russian citizen is single-handedly culpable for what happened and is happening – it is precisely a collective failure.”
Many of the Russians who have left their country since the start of the invasion have settled in Georgia, Armenia, Serbia and Turkey, in the Baltics or other EU states. Yet within the post-2022 Russian diaspora, “very few put in an effort to learn the languages and understand the context of the country they moved to”, argues Armenian anthropologist Lusine Kharatyan. Typically, she says, Russians try harder to integrate in the EU or the US rather than in countries of the former Soviet bloc, where Russian is often still spoken as a second language due to its history of occupation and migration.
Even some members of the liberal Russian diaspora espouse “a nostalgia for a lost ‘greatness’”, Kharatyan adds. Invited to a Russian-in-exile gathering in 2022, the Yerevan-based author said she felt as if she was mostly talked at rather than talked to. Some migrant activists tried to “teach the locals” about urban or environmental issues with little attempt to learn about previous local initiatives, something that Kharatyan attributes to a Russian superiority complex towards “backward and traditional” Armenians.
“While we are supposed to read all those great Russian classics,” she says, Russians volunteering to read Armenian classics was “rarely the case”.
Kyiv-based novelist Andrey Kurkov agrees that notions of Russian cultural supremacy and its political imperialism have become inextricably intertwined: “Pushkin statues in Ukraine are not about literature but about marking Russian territory,” he says. “To prove that they don’t merely want a ‘redecorated Russia’ with one tsar replaced by another.” Kurkov adds that members of the Russian opposition need to “give up on the idea of their greatness”.
There are some positive examples of Russian intellectuals denouncing the imperialist discourse. Journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote his 2023 book War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance to tackle seven persistent myths used to justify Moscow’s colonisation of Ukraine.
“Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war,” Zygar writes in the introduction. “It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour … We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, ‘great Russian culture’ belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.”
When Berlin-based Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, author of the terrifyingly prophetic dystopian novel Day of the Oprichnik, came to meet his Chișinău readers in April earlier this year, he kept mentioning his Romanian translations, respectfully acknowledging the difference between Moldova and his native country.
Russian actor Masha Mashkova, who condemned the invasion of Ukraine and now lives in the US, also added Romanian surtitles to the Chișinău performance of her new play, Nadezhdiny, based on the diary of her Chișinău-born great-great-grandmother, a printer and copy editor who married the Kharkiv-born revolutionary Evgeny Osipovich Zelensky-Nadezhdin. Now on a global tour, Nadezhdiny will also have Latvian surtitles in Riga in an effort to attract local audiences.
“As a Russian, I want to tell people in Moldova that I am aware of being a guest in your country and I respect your choice of language,” Mashkova says. “And I think my great-great-grandmother would have liked that.”