It was inevitable. The Western expats who fled to Russia in search of 'traditional values' are now discovering what any student of history could have told them: empires built on authoritarianism are not sanctuaries for the disillusioned; they are traps for the naive. The UK Foreign Office's warning, issued this week, is a welcome but tardy acknowledgment of a farce that has been unfolding for years.
These expats, seduced by a fantasy of a virtuous, prelapsarian Russia, have found instead a country where 'traditional values' mean state-mandated submission, endemic corruption, and a stunning disregard for individual rights. The irony is exquisite: they fled the supposed decadence of the West only to land in a system that makes Victorian England look libertarian. The Victorians, at least, had the decency to cloak their repression in a veneer of progress.
Putin’s Russia dispenses with the veneer. It is, in fact, a kind of intellectual decadence all its own: a nostalgia for an imagined past that never existed. The expats are not so much discovering the truth as having it forced upon them by a bureaucracy that cares not for their ideological sympathies.
The Foreign Office’s warning is a classic British understatement: do not mistake a police state for a refuge. The tragedy is that it took a war for these self-styled dissidents to see it. But then, as Gibbon noted, history is little more than the register of the follies of mankind.
The expats’ disillusionment is a salutary lesson: there is no escape from the modern world, only different varieties of its discontents. One can only hope that those now stranded in Russia will return to the West with a chastened perspective, and a new appreciation for the messiness of liberal democracy. It is, however, unlikely.
The stubbornness of the romantic fool is legendary. They will instead blame the West for not rescuing them from a choice they made of their own free will. The Foreign Office can warn, but it cannot save people from themselves.
