“If history is any indication,” Savodnik said in a telephone interview, “he can expect purgatory on Earth if he stays in Russia. They’ll send him to a remote place, with no real society or life, somewhere far away from Moscow.”…

Savodnik predicts that if he stays, he’ll be hustled out of Moscow, sent to an out-of-the-way city and given an apartment in a khrushchevka — one of the now-crumbling five-story buildings hurriedly put up during the era of Premier Nikita Khrushchev more than half a century ago.

“From the Kremlin’s point of view, Snowden has already served his purpose,” Savodnik said. “He embarrassed the White House. If he had any data to share, they would have obtained it by now. At this point, if you’re [President] Vladimir Putin, you want Snowden to disappear.”

No doubt he would be given work, but the Russians wouldn’t trust him near anything sensitive, Savodnik said. The young man who might have thought he was changing the world can now expect to be a welder, or a janitor.