“It’s over,” says Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at Carnegie Moscow. “All the vestiges of liberalism will be purged.”
“The rules were clear and they are not anymore,” Baunov says. “We can’t say what is dangerous and what is not. You don’t know what sort of repression you can meet for the things that were tolerated before.”
Educated Russians knew they were living in an autocracy, he says. Many had made peace with that. But they never expected to once again live in the type of country where “portraits of the Great Leader” hang on the walls.
People who work in journalism, the arts or for global firms are watching their career prospects evaporate. Russians have fled the country by the tens of thousands.
Educated Russians have long discussed the conditions under which they might emigrate, he says. For many, border closures, social media shutdowns and “the deglobalization of Russia” were their red lines, he says. Others simply feel that they can’t live as normal in a country that is attacking its neighbor.
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