Russia's Exit Dilemma

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2017

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stay or go? That's the choice facing Russia’s brightest and best. As the first generation born under Putin approaches voting age, many of Russia's young people are voting with their feet. Lucy Ash meets émigrés, exiles and staunch remainers in London and Berlin, Moscow and Saint Petersburg to weigh up the prospects for the ambitious in Putin's Russia.

The push and pull of Russia's exit dilemma plays out in galleries and start-ups, architecture practices and universities. Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova, is now campaigning for prison reform, and says her spell behind bars only fuels her sense of mission. "I really do love to be inside of this courageous community, risking their lives by trying to change their country. It gives sense to my life." But others - from Herzen to Lenin to Khodorkovsky - have tried to influence the Russian condition from abroad. Life outside the motherland isn't always the easy option; many struggle with feeling superfluous, with indifference or competition.

Although the biggest country on earth, space for freedom of expression in Russia has been shrinking. Recently, a propagandist pop song has been urging students to mind their own business. Its lyrics include: "Kid, stay out of politics, and give your brain a shower!", a symptom of the claustrophobic atmosphere that is encroaching on public space and personal life. Some make an exit in search of a reliable environment for their business or propaganda-free schools for their children; others are fleeing homophobia or political danger.

Contributors include best-selling author Boris Akunin; the rising star of Russian architecture Boris Bernaskoni; techno producer Philipp Gorbachev; exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky; Nonna Materkova, director of Calvert 22 Foundation; young entrepreneur Asya Parfenova; experimental linguist Natalia Slioussar; Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot; Russia's best-known music critic Artemy Troitsky; and curators Dishon Yuldash and Alexander Burenkov.

Producer: Dorothy Feaver

Image: Lucy Ash in St Petersburg, Credit: BBC

Transcript

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0:00.0	Coming soon, the assassination, an investigation into a true story that shook the world. A new
0:07.9	podcast from the BBC World Service. Subscribe to the assassination now and you'll get every episode automatically.
0:15.0	From the BBC World Service, welcome to the latest edition of the documentary
0:20.5	podcast. Every week we bring you a range of stories from our presenters and reporters across the world.
0:27.0	Please do rate the documentary on your podcast app and leave a comment.
0:31.0	Let us know what you think.
0:34.4	On the 28th of September 1922,
0:38.3	a crowd of men and women and children
0:40.6	were gathered on these steps,
0:42.4	this embankment going down to the river Nieva in St. Petersburg,
0:46.3	25 families in all. They'd been given an ultimatum by Lenin. Immediate deportation or death.
0:59.0	Welcome to the BBC World Service.
1:01.0	I'm Lucy Ash reflecting on an extraordinary event after the
1:05.8	Russian Revolution nearly a century ago when certain intellectuals were banished
1:10.7	from their homeland.
1:16.0	Some saw them as the soul of Russia itself. They were writers, philosophers, lawyers, religious thinkers,
1:21.0	and they were all seen because they were independent-minded
1:25.5	as a threat to the new Soviet state.
1:29.5	Behind them were the scruffy neighborhoods of the Vassilivsky island and ahead of them the open sea and an unknown future.
1:37.0	In this program Russia's exit dilemma, I'm asking why so many Russians today can relate to that uncertainty.
1:48.0	Some of the brightest and the best are making an exit, either by choice or because they've been forced out.
1:55.0	I'll be speaking to those who've decided to leave and those who've had the chance but opted to stay.
	...

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