Cold, Ashamed, Relieved: On Leaving Russia
Editor’s note: This article has been translated from the original Russian by Boris Dralyuk. It was written by Maxim Osipov as he made his journey into exile from his town of Tarusa to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where Russians are allowed to enter without visas, and finally to Berlin.
Cold, ashamed, relieved. These three words close Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner’s memoir about the rise of fascism, written before the Second World War and published posthumously. It was a book that held us rapt last year. In it we sought and found coincidences with our own recent situation. And now many of us who have gone elsewhere—to Yerevan, Tbilisi, Baku, Nur-Sultan, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Samarkand—have also gotten to experience firsthand, on our own skin, those three words: frostig, beschämt, befreit.
We are those who left (escaped, fled) Russia shortly after it invaded Ukraine. We hate war, hate the one who unleashed it, but we also weren’t planning to abandon our homeland (motherland, fatherland)—every word, whichever you choose, starting with whichever letter, capital or lowercase, feels dirty, dishonored. The temptation to look at yourself as the flower of the nation (“We took Russia with us,” and so on—one hears such immoderate expressions from time to time) must be dismissed as dangerous nonsense. Some say that when you lose, you learn your true worth. Soon we will learn—because that’s what we are, losers, both historically and spiritually. Hundreds of thousands, millions of people who share our values have stayed behind, and they are busy at work: treating the ill, taking care of elderly parents, of one another. But no matter how ashamed those of us who have left are before those who have remained, it would be good to remember that the dividing line between us compatriots is drawn on another field: between those who are against this war and those who are for it.
“Where are you flying to?” they ask at the border.
You’d like to respond, . Instead you say, “To Yerevan, on
