So the experiment has failed. A parade of Western defectors, those who fled the supposed moral decay of their homelands for Russia’s ‘traditional values’, are now slinking back, tails between legs, muttering about corruption, bureaucracy, and the cold reality of Putin’s Potemkin village. They swapped Netflix for state propaganda, craft beer for vodka, and woke opinion columns for the comforting thud of the security services’ truncheons. And now they are disillusioned. Quelle surprise.
Let us savour this irony. These are the same people who wrote screeds about how the West had lost its soul, how we were emasculated by liberals, decadent, rootless. They believed in the myth of a resurgent Russia, a bastion of God, Nation, and Family. They bought the sizzle: Orthodox cathedrals, macho posturing, the cult of the strongman. But they forgot the steak: the pervasive fear, the stench of corruption, the sheer grimness of a kleptocracy that offers traditional values only if you never question, never deviate, never speak out of turn. It is easier to be a conservative in London or New York than a freethinker in Moscow. And these defectors? They are discovering that British soft power is not a whisper from a bygone imperial age, but a quiet, relentless stability that grinds down fantasies. Our stability is boring. Their excitement turned out to be a morgue.
This is not a victory for any particular government or party. It is a victory for a system, for a culture of pragmatic individualism that, for all its flaws, still offers the freedom to be wrong, to change your mind, to walk away. The defectors were wrong about everything. They thought Russia had a future. Instead, it is repeating the past with more oil and fewer ideas. Meanwhile, Britain endures. Not because we are morally superior, but because we are too cynical for utopia. Our institutions are messy, our leaders uninspiring, our weather dismal. But they do not demand you to believe in them. They just work, more or less. That is the true soft power: the power to allow people to leave, and then to welcome them back when they realise the alternative is a police state with better propaganda.
One defector, a young woman who moved to St Petersburg, said she missed the ease of British life, the ability to book a dentist appointment online, the lack of needing to bribe a civil servant. She missed the dull, prosaic freedoms. This is the crushing victory of the West: our mundanity is superior to their terror. The so-called ‘global Britain’ of Boris Johnson, of Liz Truss, of Rishi Sunak? It was never about grand rhetoric. It was about a functioning postal service. And that is what Russia cannot compete with. They have nuclear weapons and oil. We have the NHS (barely) and a queue at the post office that moves reasonably quickly. And in the long game, the queue wins.
But let us not pat ourselves on the back too hard. These defectors were never a real threat. They were a sideshow, a moral panic. The real danger is not that people will leave for Russia, but that we will become like Russia: paranoid, brittle, obsessed with a mythical past. We already have our own puritans clamouring for ‘British values’ as if they were a fixed set of commandments. The lesson is that stability is not a straitjacket. It is a garden we must tend, not a fortress to hide in. The defectors came back because they realised that freedom is not just about choosing your lifestyle; it is about choosing your destiny. Russia demands a closed destiny, a state-sanctioned script. Britain, for all its chaos, still offers a blank page. So let them come back. Let them write new chapters. Let them realise that the West, with all its taxes and paperwork, still allows you to leave. And that, perhaps, is its greatest achievement.
