Notes at the Front

Estimates vary regarding the number of Russians who have left the country since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2024 (The Bell estimated it at a minimum of 650,000). Driven to flee by the fear of mobilization, political repression, or economic uncertainties in a country fast becoming a world pariah, many departing Russians were financially, mentally or emotionally ill-prepared for this forced emigration. Some ended up moving back (see article, page 12), while others came to terms with their new lives abroad. We asked several émigrés to recall their early days in their new surroundings. These are their stories.

Belgrade Life

On my second day in Belgrade I was asked to join a local colleague in checking out our new office. I rushed to Novi Belgrade – with which I was completely unfamiliar – to make it in time for our 9 a.m. meeting. After having a look, we prepared to go back to the old office on the other side of the river. I told my colleague: “Apologies, but I really need a coffee, can we stop by a café?” “Of course,” the colleague said. We popped into a nearby Coffeedream, so rancid with cigarette smoke it made my eyes water, but such is our reality now. “Cappuccino to go,” I said. My colleague nearly fainted. “Why to go? Aren’t we going to sit down?” “No, of course not,” I said, “We need to hurry back to get to work.” “And what will happen to the work if we get there 15 minutes later?” the colleague asked, incredulous. “What is it with you Russians and time? Why are you always racing to get somewhere?”

That was my first encounter with Serbia’s famous “polako” – not just the word, which means “slow, steady,” but also the way of life.

Over the next five months we got to see a good example of polako having to do with our balcony. We were lucky enough to rent an apartment with a huge picture window in a brand-new building. But, as the owner explained, the war had disrupted metal imports from Russia, so the balcony had never been finished. So we ended up with three lovely glass doors to a balcony that didn’t exist. “But don’t worry,” our landlord said. “Soon they will be bringing in metal from Macedonia and we’ll quickly add on your balcony.” “What do you mean, add on a balcony?” I asked. The concept of adding on a balcony on the sixth floor was unfamiliar to me. “And where are we going to live in the meantime?” “Not to worry, it’ll take a day,” the owner assured me. “Two at the most.”

Well, two months later the metal arrived, and some steel beams were plugged into the side of the building. A couple of weeks later, some workers came and measured something. Another week went by, and we had a horizontal surface. Then a crew came to lay the cement. That took about three days, and the crew spent those days well – I was even envious. Every 30 minutes they had a smoke break. Toward noon, someone would make a beer run. Sometimes I made them coffee (they politely requested it be served without sugar), which they leisurely drank on our, ahem, balcony.

Then the workers vanished. Almost everything was ready, but the balcony had no railing. We were not as brave as the workers and didn’t attempt to sit there with cups of tea, let alone anything alcoholic. Sometimes we nervously hung laundry to dry there. Every week I asked our landlord when the railing would be finished. He would dolefully show me the chat with the workers on his mobile. It looked as if he wrote or called them ten times a day, with no response.

Our balcony saga, which had begun in April, ended in October. Overjoyed, I bought two patio chairs on the day the railing appeared, and we were even able to drink coffee there a couple of times before autumn set in and it became too cold.

Faina

I don’t know where to begin. From the prewar hysteria? We were sitting in my sister’s kitchen. Her husband came in: “So, it’s war?” “Yup, it’s war,” answered my brother.

Life went on. No, nobody was bombing us back. No, the ground wasn’t giving way under our feet. No, the sky was just as blue, the sun had that pre-spring warmth… It was tempting to believe that this would end, the way you wish away a nightmare that keeps coming back. But there were signs this was going to last a while: colleagues being rounded up, police staked out all day outside colleagues’ homes, people starting to suddenly inform on one another. “Shall we go?” “And the children? Are you ready for them to become refugees? Without education, rights, helpless?”

Then the mobilization began. “They don’t seem to be taking those who haven’t served.” They were. “Tech workers get a deferment, right?” Not all. When the children started panicking at the slightest sound from outside, I gave my husband a ticket to Kazakhstan. He was annoyed and didn’t want to go.

Our youngest son came up to us. He had only just turned 9 and said, smiling: “Dad, I think Mom has a really great idea. You should say yes.” “I would need to leave, my little one.” The boy started crying, pleading with Dad to agree. Two days later, I saw evidence that my son was growing up: instead of streams of emojis and stickers on WhatsApp, he messaged a succinct “Dad has crossed the border.” Thankfully, I was at work. Back then we spent a lot of time crying and propping each other up.

When the fall school break came, I had to tell my husband’s parents they’d have to take the dog while we paid a visit to their son. At this point, they were starting to have their own doubts about what was happening.

It took a day on the train, together with the proverbial “Russian muzhik” from the heartland. I try to reason with him: “Do you understand that your military summons is illegal? You say your wife has no parental rights, and your boys are 14 and 12!” “But… what else can I do?”

Six hours in a taxi with a driver carrying on an obscenity-filled rant about guys trying to leave. “Medical exemptions my foot! Who needs you!” (Two years into the war, my hometown is plastered with portraits of guys with supposed medical exemptions… In a single day, 200 guys were sent to fight from a city of 40,000. And the only thing coming back are portraits.)

It was scary to arrive in a city where a fluffy white coat immediately identifies you as a newcomer. A city with feral strays roaming in packs, while we arrived with a dog sporting some all-weather booties.

On our way out of our building, there were two men drinking beer in the entry hall. Out of habit, I pushed the door, I always forget that you need to pull it here.

“Welcome,” a voice said behind me. “Uh oh,” I automatically thought.

“Moscow?” “Yes.” “But why?” “Because war is something that goes against everything human.”

“Well, we’re glad that so many good people are coming to Kazakhstan! I’m an economist. It’s important for me to have good specialists in my country. Would you be willing to start from scratch? What’s your profession?”

“I’m a schoolteacher,” I manage to say. “An honorable profession!” the man responds with sincere enthusiasm. “I teach Russian language and literature,” I add. “And my students truly love them,” I think to myself.

“That’s fantastic! You have a very important job, you teach humanity!” the fellow says, forgetting about his beer. “We have a shortage of good teachers: they’re very sought after in ‘the Russian World’… but why are you crying? Don’t cry! Folks like you aren’t at fault, you hear? Don’t cry…” a random Kazakh man in the entryway of a cookie-cutter high-rise is hugging me. My husband is standing nearby, and nothing means more to me than this hug, which allows me to believe that what I’m doing is not devoid of meaning.

Yelena

We moved to Berlin in spring of 2022. At that point a lot of people were arriving at the same time and it was very difficult to find a place to rent. By our standards, Germans have very strict rules: people should pay no more than 30 percent of their household income for rent, every child has to have a separate room, and so forth. That really limited our options.

I wrote a cover letter about our family, registered on the housing app, and started the search. I wrote over 300 applications and got responses to just a tenth of them. Half of them said something along the lines of: “Thank you for your interest, but you are 225th in line, as we had over 100 requests in the first 30 minutes.

I then set a timer to go off every 15 minutes so I could refresh the app and respond quickly to new ads. We began to be invited to showings. But most owners didn’t follow up. One response said: “We really liked you and we could easily imagine you living in our apartment, however we decided differently.”

Once we were looking at an apartment that was absolutely ideal for our family. It was just five minutes away from the school that had accepted our daughter, and the transport connections in the area were great. The app indicated that the apartment had had 880 expressions of interest and 50 families had been invited to view it. Everyone was walking through the rooms and then showing their portfolio to the owner. I was there with two children, 14 and 7 years old. The youngest kept climbing on the bar stool and falling from it. I tried to reason with him, while explaining to the owner that we are extremely optimistic people who would be perfect tenants. Nervousness made my German, still basic at the time, even more rudimentary. I mixed up English and German words and thought I gave a dismal impression. I was certain I had reduced our chances to zero.

Two days later the owners called us and said that they picked us out of all the candidates. While we were signing the lease they told us: “We picked you because of your courage. It’s very difficult to leave your comfortable life and your country behind when you think that you’re not directly threatened.”

After we moved in, a sign appeared in the hallway: Boikott gegen Russland (Boycott Russia). We have lived in this building for nearly two years and have a wonderful relationship with the neighbors. We say hello, we chitchat, we visit each other for coffee, and one German family even gave us the keys to their place so we can water their plants when they’re away on vacation. The sign in the hallway is still there.

Running

I have been running in the mornings for the last 18 years. For many years my favorite route began in the early morning in Moscow, and I can still recall it down to the last detail. Let’s say it is an early July morning, for example 7 a.m., it’s Sunday, it’s sunny, and the streets are empty. I run out of our courtyard onto Dynamo, where I know every tree, bush, every bend in the road, every neighbor’s car. I run along a sunny empty street to the park. I know that here, in this clinic, [late nineteenth-century painter Mikhail] Vrubel was once a patient, and in this villa lived the pianist Artur Rubinstein. I run through the park, it’s where cadets were fighting the Bolsheviks in 1917 during the Moscow uprising – 200 young men were buried here in the park back then, a century ago. I know every tree in this park, I have run more kilometers in it than you can imagine. I will probably never see this park again, nor these trees, this house, nor the way the rays of sunshine are hitting the grass. Now I can only run here in my dreams, and sometimes I do – winter, autumn, early spring, when you turn a corner and a puddle appears, or after a summer rain, when earthworms emerge above ground. I remember it all. For the almost two and a half years since the war started and I left the country I have been running in other places. I now know how to run in Israel in early morning, before the heat sets in, how to run past palm trees, eucalyptus, and blooming jacaranda. Over the past year I have been running on the streets of Berlin, which sometimes reminds me of Moscow, at least more so than the hot Levantine summer. Linden, birch, maple, pine and even fir trees, it all seems so similar at times to my Moscow park, but it’s not the same… Emigration – it’s the fluttering of your heart when you turn a corner and a spring puddle once again appears or when lilies of the valley suddenly pop up in a Berlin park… Here too young men probably lie buried. And I, an emigrant, run through the streets of Berlin thinking of a past life that cannot be returned. I have to keep running, I have to keep living, I have to keep my children safe and to tell them there won’t be any more wars.

Ikea

Recently we bought a new countertop water filter. Water is quite good in Belgrade, it’s calcium-enriched, and probably healthy, but it’s a bit of a nuisance to constantly have to spit out white flakes while drinking tea. So I looked online to see exactly where the shop Aquafor is located, checked out the different models on the website, and sent the boys over to get one.

This brought to mind a time over two years ago when newly-arrived Russians were hunting for various household items all over Belgrade. Water filters back then were also a hot item, but first and foremost people were focused on kettles. The chats were humming with queries: “Where did people buy their electric kettles? Help! Point us to the store!” Now it’s funny – you can just go and buy one in any electronics store in town, but back then it was no joke. It was rather strange how none of us, having landed in this city unexpectedly, could find our way around. Throngs of confused Russians were meandering through the capital of Serbia as if it were a small village without infrastructure, looking for kettles, cups, and towels, and preferably cheap ones, because not everyone had funds to purchase a brand-new set of household necessities.

I remember that first week, after quickly finding permanent accommodations and signing the lease, I asked my friend to take me to Ikea. I hadn’t yet figured out how to make it to Ikea on my own. I really needed an Ikea pot and frying pan. Now I see that they sell pans in every supermarket, but back then I was so disoriented I couldn’t process that simple fact. So I was walking down the Ikea aisles (everything was so familiar – I love globalization!), picking out a pan, a spatula, a potholder. And I realized at that moment that I had been doing exactly the same thing one year earlier, when, finally overcoming my aversion to mortgages, I had purchased an apartment on Petrogradskaya. It was a small apartment, but with lots of atmosphere – an irregularly-shaped bedroom and other attributes of a building that was built at the turn of the twentieth century. After many years of renting, I rejoiced at my freedom and finally bought a rather expensive custom-crafted bedside table rather than an Ikea one. However, I also needed various housewares, and for those I had headed to Ikea.

I nearly burst into tears. Why on Earth, I thought, am I buying the same things over and over? Am I destined to go to Ikea for the very same potholders every year for the rest of my life? For crying out loud!

Nevertheless, I will say one thing: a city with an Ikea is better than a city without one.