In a twist that has left the Kremlin’s propaganda machine spluttering into its borscht, a clutch of Western defectors to Russia have reportedly developed a sudden, crippling case of buyer’s remorse. The cause? The UK’s latest ‘Freedom in the World’ report, which has placed Her Majesty’s soggy archipelago at the very apex of global liberty. Cue the sound of thousands of disillusioned ex-pats simultaneously Googling ‘how to get a refund on a Russian visa’.
Let us paint a picture. You are a mid-level conspiracy theorist from Luton. You have swapped your daily commute on the M25 for a two-hour trudge through a Moscow snowdrift to buy radishes from a woman who may or may not be a FSB informant. You have traded the gentle hum of the BBC for state television’s relentless churning of patriotic muzak. You have done all this because you believed, with the fervour of a man who has watched too many YouTube manifestos, that the West was a decadent hellhole sliding into woke oblivion. And now? Now you are clutching a crumpled copy of the report, your breath fogging the page, as you realise that Boris Johnson’s Britain is statistically freer than Putin’s paradise.
The irony is so thick you could spread it on a stale blini. The defectors, a motley crew of former IT consultants, disgruntled journalists and men who own fedoras, flocked to the Motherland under the delusion that they were escaping the soft tyranny of political correctness. They thought they were joining a robust, traditional society where men are men and bears are bears and dissidents are... well, let’s not go there. But the rankings are clear. The UK has scored a perfect 100 on political rights and a solid 93 on civil liberties. Russia, by contrast, scores a pitiful 7 and 8 respectively. That is not a gap. That is a chasm with a sign saying ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ in Cyrillic.
And what of the defectors’ laments? One anonymous soul, a former BBC producer now living in a drab high-rise in Yekaterinburg, confessed to a reporter: ‘I miss the sheer chaos of a Pizza Express. Here, the only chaos is when your vodka ration runs out.’ Another, a self-styled philosopher king who now spends his days queuing for toilet paper, admitted: ‘I thought I was escaping the nanny state. Instead, I got a state that is less of a nanny and more of a terrifying, bearded uncle who locks you in the basement.’
Let us not forget the utter humiliation of it all. These are people who fervently argued that British schools indoctrinate children with gender theory while Russian schools teach traditional values. But look closer. Yes, Russian schools teach traditional values: namely, that you should inform on your classmates and that history is whatever the president says it is. That is not freedom. That is a cage painted to look like a dacha.
The great irony, of course, is that the defectors have now become the very thing they despised: whinging expats. They sit in their cramped apartments, drinking cheap vodka and moaning about the weather while dreaming of a Sunday roast and a good, old-fashioned British queue. They have traded the freedom to complain about the government for the freedom to complain about the government in hushed tones. Such progress.
Meanwhile, in the UK, life proceeds in its gloriously mundane, free fashion. You can still write a satirical column about the Prime Minister without fearing a knock on the door from Scotland Yard (unless it is for that unpaid parking ticket). You can still buy a gin and tonic at a train station bar at 10am and no one will bat an eyelid. You can still, crucially, change your mind. You can call yourself a Brexiteer one day and a Remoaner the next, and the worst that happens is a mildly heated argument on Twitter. That, my friends, is freedom. It is messy. It is chaotic. It is a constant, irritating buzz of disagreement. But it is freedom nonetheless.
So to the defectors, we offer a simple solution. Buy a one-way ticket back to Heathrow. We will be waiting at Arrivals, holding a sign that says ‘Welcome home, you absolute turnip.’ The gin is on us.
