One friend likened the experience of living in Moscow to the classic 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where fear and paranoia grip the human protagonists as they struggle to work out which of their friends have been replaced by monsters. It could be the mother hauled in for a parents’ evening at her daughter’s dance school, where teachers put on a conspiracy-laden video warning of western plots to destroy Russia. It could be the Skabeyeva viewers in the family of a senior Russian businessman who educates his children in Europe. “They say, ‘Fuck everyone! Let’s nuke Holland! Let’s bomb London and Washington! Send the missiles!’ I say, What about your nephew, my son? He lives there! And they say, ‘Let them live in their own country.’”
The antiwar Russians who have not left the country have opted for a Soviet tactic, “internal emigration”, whereby the kitchen table has once again become the only arena for civic discourse. “There’s no way to organise anything,” my friend Sergei*, a biologist, says of protests he attended. “Even all the third-rate opposition leaders have fled or been jailed or been killed.”
While they wait for their European visas and Israeli passports to come through, my friends are finding new ways to cope. One finds solace in days-long meditation retreats. Others have turned to various forms of casual debauchery — drugs, alcohol, sex. After the protests failed, these were the only transgressive acts they felt they had left to them. “I just felt like I had to do something bad,” says Anya*, an artist.
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