Returning to my home city after emigrating to the United States is a bit like being an apparition. I landed on a weekend in mid-May, when some of Moscow’s residents had not yet returned from the string of holidays that free up most of the first half of the month and others were out of town starting the summer dacha season. Moscow was unseasonably hot, unusually sparse of people, and felt like a ghost town — and I was the ghost.
If someone came to visit you from the afterlife, you would talk to that person about death. To me, everyone talked about emigration — although, to be fair, my friends claimed that’s all anyone talks about anyway. In the just five months I’ve been gone, the country has changed profoundly: It is a country at war, which means tolerance for a difference in political opinion is at an all-time low; the political crackdown has intensified; and the economic outlook is bleak.
A new kind of conversational shorthand has appeared in Moscow: “What’s your month?” people ask one another. They mean the month for which you are signed up for an interview at the Israeli embassy to receive initial immigration documents. The nearest available slot for people booking an appointment now reportedly is in November, but most of my friends have appointments in August or September. Even getting an appointment is an ordeal: The embassy’s phone lines are so overburdened that getting through to the right department can take hours. And according to a recent, leaked picture, inside the embassy, it is a mob scene reminiscent of 1990-91, the peak years of the Soviet Jewish exodus.
Not everyone has Jewish ancestry, or wants to live in Israel, so other options are discussed. Latvia is a European Union country that will grant residency in exchange for a relatively modest investment in property. Germany has a program for absorbing people of outstanding achievement — as does the United States, but Germany’s is reputed to be easier to navigate and to be particularly beneficial for artists. Distance is a recurring concern, albeit an illusory one: Running away to Europe seems somehow less catastrophic than running away to the United States, as though a five-hour difference in flight times from Moscow made a difference.
A., a restaurateur, is opening a place in London and this qualifies him for a long-term visa and eventually for a residency permit. B., an opposition television journalist, is interviewing for a job as the Washington correspondent for a Ukrainian channel — take that, Moscow! C., who grew up a military brat, has a brand new Ukrainian passport: She qualified because she was born and partly grew up in Soviet Ukraine.
The big question is whether to comply with regulations the Russian Parliament has just passed, requiring all citizens who have a second passport or residency abroad to report this fact to the authorities; noncompliance will be a criminal offense. The rationale behind the law is that as a country at war, Russia needs to ferret out potential spies and traitors. But some politicians have proposed banning Russians who have a second passport from exiting the country and banning dual citizenship altogether — an elegant way of making people choose whether they are in or out.
Among the crowd of would-be émigrés, opinions are evenly split. Some are unwilling to risk a criminal conviction and will disclose; others are planning to hide their second passport away as a secret insurance policy. Appealing as the idea of an insurance policy may sound, a realtor friend (with a second passport) said that the city was emptying out: Rents have fallen, while on the sales market supply has overtaken demand.
The only person who didn’t talk to me about emigration was an activist friend who had spent the previous two months coordinating weekly street opinion polls on President Vladimir V. Putin’s policies in Ukraine. She told me the results have held steady, at 70 percent or more of respondents expressing approval for Mr. Putin. She also told me that a pending political trial appeared to be broadening out to include more defendants and that she would likely be among them. She recently served 10 days under administrative arrest in a Moscow holding facility, and she seemed to view it as a sort of rehearsal. It wasn’t so bad, she said, though she had been bored and had a hard time adjusting to people again once she got out. She seemed resigned to the very likely possibility of going to prison for several years.
Moscow may really be a ghost town next time I return. If there is a next time.
Masha Gessen is the author, most recently, of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.