As President Vladimir Putin was launching his battle to restore Russia’s former glory by leveling Ukraine, something as important to his country’s future had already begun to play out at home. Russia’s most valuable asset — its young people — were indicating they want out.
A poll taken before the Feb. 24 invasion found that 43% of Russians between the ages of 18 and 24 want to leave the country for good. Of those, 44% cited the economic situation as the primary reason for departing. That sentiment will surely be strengthened by the impact of global sanctions and domestic crackdowns.
As growing numbers of Russians contemplate leaving their country, Putin will face a predicament familiar to his Communist predecessors and other authoritarians. China is seeing financial professionals flee Hong Kong in response to its crackdowns, a reminder that repressing citizens is one thing; keeping them from voting with their feet is another. That’s a challenge Putin will find difficult to win.
To understand why, consider what happened in Eastern Europe after World War II. When the Soviet Union began to consolidate its sphere of influence over what would soon become known as the Eastern Bloc, a first wave of emigrants from the new Communist countries fled west, seeking refuge in the democracies of Europe as well as the US.
The leading edge of this exodus included the country’s most successful people. In Poland, for example, one historian has described the initial wave as encompassing “former political elites, wealthy landowners, professionals [and] entrepreneurs who saw grim future prospects in the Communist dominated country.”
Something similar happened in Germany. An article published in West Germany’s Der Spiegel observed that the first wave from 1945 to 1947 consisted “mostly of owners of large businesses and industries, deposed by Soviet reorganization.” Then came small-business owners, followed by members of commercial firms.
As Communists intensified their hold on East Germany, doctors and pharmacists fled, too. By the end of 1952, the magazine noted, “the exodus of the farmers had begun. The iron stirring the cauldron of the transformation had now reached the depths of the social pyramid.”
At a certain point, the Soviet satellite states realized that these runaways cast doubt on claims that the Eastern Bloc was a socialist paradise. The authorities dealt with it the only way they knew how, locking their citizens behind the Iron Curtain.
Repression took many forms: brutal punishments meted out for anyone caught trying to flee; domestic travel restrictions designed to steer people away from borders with the West; military checkpoints at any vulnerable crossing, and even more draconian measures. Hungary, for example, created a no-man’s land 30 kilometers wide on its western border.
The crackdown served its purpose but was a disaster in other ways. The spectacle of the Eastern Bloc turning its societies into country-wide jails was hardly a winning strategy in the global battle of ideas.
The West understood this, of course, and exploited it. As early as 1952, the administration of President Harry Truman created the United States Escapee Program, which targeted high-profile defectors, providing enticements to intellectuals, scientists and others to flee the Soviet Union and its client states.
As one historian of this program has noted, the term “escapee” deliberately “conjured the Soviet sphere as one vast prison, surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and guards zealously posed over automatic weapons.” American popular culture helped cement this perception around the world.
Still, one portal to freedom remained open: Berlin. The city’s anomalous status in the Cold War, even after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s failed attempt to starve the city into submission, meant that East Germans could cross into the western half of the city and never return. And they did.
Between 1949 and 1961, it’s estimated that upward of 3.5 million East Germans — 20 percent of the country’s population — fled for the West. These individuals tended to be the smartest, best educated and youngest members of East German society. More than 75 percent of those who left were under 40.
The outflow of human capital caused no end of consternation for the East German state, which eventually declared these departures a crime: “Republikflucht,” or “flight from the republic.” The authorities described such behavior as an “act of political and moral backwardness and depravity.” But millions of East Germans failed to get the memo.
As East Germany bled its best and brightest, the government finally got permission from Moscow to build its infamous wall, closing the migration loophole in Berlin and stanching the exodus. But by then the damage had been done.
Putin may soon face a similar dilemma. If the youngest, most enterprising people make a break for it, he can sit by as they take Russia’s future with them. Or he can turn his vast country into a gigantic prison, resurrecting Soviet-style controls on borders.
Either way, Putin and Russia will lose.
Bloomberg
