Since Donald Trump’s victory, I have not been able to stop thinking about Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012 — another time in which an exhausted populace found itself unclear on what to do next.
For months leading up to that moment, tens of thousands of Russians protested as Mr. Putin prepared to return to the Kremlin following four years in a shadow role as prime minister. They were energized and often joyful, young and plugged into pop culture — it was the first time I had seen memes hop from the internet into real life, by way of protest signs.
The day before Mr. Putin was inaugurated in May, the police violently cracked down on a mass protest. When Mr. Putin drove through a Moscow cleared of any signs of life, and through the Kremlin gates, the protest movement was effectively dead. As this fact settled in, opposition-minded Russians flooded social media, recalling just how young they were when Mr. Putin first headed the state more than 12 years prior — some remembered their college days, others elementary school. I was reminded of that when some American first-time voters, some as young as 10 when Mr. Trump first ran for president, revealed they had never heard of the “Access Hollywood” tape, a key moment in the president-elect’s political and misogynistic lore.
The United States is not Russia, and Mr. Trump is not Mr. Putin. This country has checks and balances that Russia can only dream of (if we can keep them), and a tradition of free speech and freedom of association that, though often tested, are central to how America works. But something binds these men who seek power with no controls — the creation of internal enemies, the constant shock moves to keep people on their toes, their viselike grip on the information environment, as well as the anger and exhaustion they provoke in their critics. Here we go again.
In the months that followed Mr. Putin’s return to the Kremlin, a term that had been popular in the Soviet era seeped back into the culture: internal emigration, or as it’s better known in the West, internal exile. The fight against Mr. Putin had been lost, the thinking went, and you had but one life to live. Why not spend it making a cozy home, tending a little garden, shutting out the leaden horrors outside? You didn’t have to move anywhere to internally emigrate. There was no financial cost or material upheaval. You simply had — to bastardize a phrase popularized by Timothy Leary — to turn in, tune out and drop out.
There are hints this is happening in the United States. Democrats are not nearly as united as they were in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first win. Donations to nonprofits, which soared in 2016, are down, and tactics such as another Women’s March have been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm. This may be a result of exhaustion or a frustration with the old methods.
The desire to turn inward is understandable, and human. It’s a form of self-protection. It’s also a delusion. I keep coming back to an aphorism that bounced around Russia as the number of internal émigrés grew: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. A new approach is necessary if America is to avoid the fate that befell so many Russians.
The idea of internal emigration has a long history. It is said to date back to 1830s France, when the writer Delphine de Girardin referred to “émigration intérieure” among the elite following the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, when they chose to dance the night away instead of confronting the reality before them. The German writer Frank Thiess used the term “innere emigration” shortly after World War II to refer to those writers who stayed in Nazi Germany during Hitler’s rule, deploying it to argue against Thomas Mann, an émigré who asserted that all Germans carried collective guilt. In Soviet times, the term became tinged with resistance — in the face of an all-powerful security state, where everyone was surveilled and public speech was strictly controlled, it referred to those who created small private communities to pass around prohibited texts and discuss the political problems of the day.
The internal emigration that swept Mr. Putin’s Russia after 2012 as people checked out of politics tore at the collective fabric created by the protests that preceded his return.
Tonia Samsonova, a prominent young journalist at the time who participated in the protests and now heads an artificial intelligence company in London, remembered spending the months that followed arguing with older friends. She was convinced that there was still a fight to be had. “I had constant conflict — telling them to not sit on your hands, it’s your obligation to be politically active,” she recalled. “I was a big supporter of the idea that everything is in your control.” She added: “It’s not your right to live in a democracy — nobody will give you power; it’s what you should take.”
“The elder generation said: ‘We did it once, and we saw how it ended up.’ Basically, they lost trust in the Russian people and society,” she said.
Soon, many people who had been out in the streets spent less time reading the news and more time at their dachas, renovating their homes, engaging in what in America we would call self-improvement. “Internal emigration” became so fashionable it was embraced by Aliona Doletskaya, a former editor in chief of Russian Vogue, who referenced creating her own “internal Copenhagen” to shut out the horrors outside.
This all came crashing down in February 2022 when Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In an instant, the crushing dissent and political apathy being juggled by so many people inside Russia transformed into missiles and bombs killing thousands of Ukrainians over the border. In the months immediately following the invasion, at least 300,000 people were estimated to have fled Russia, many of them from the educated middle class, including those who presumably thought they could live in internal exile endlessly.
Some were wracked with guilt. One was Ilia Krasilshchik, a former journalist who helped organize some of the protests against Mr. Putin, and who wrote in The Times about how all Russians should question their role in the war’s outbreak. Rereading his guest essay today, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, feels like a warning. He bemoans a Russia that is “very individualistic,” where people “like to isolate ourselves from one another, from the state, from the world. This allowed many of us to build vibrant, hopeful, energetic lives against a grim backdrop of arrests and prison. But in the process, we became insular and lost sight of everyone else’s interests.”
I called Mr. Krasilshchik, whom I know from my years as a journalist in Russia, to see if he had advice for Americans adjusting to the fact of Mr. Trump’s return and battling, perhaps, a desire to turn inward. He insisted, correctly, that the two countries were fundamentally different — but in his words there was also a vision of a possible American future.
He said the main thing he missed in 2012 was that Mr. Putin wasn’t simply building on the terms he had already served. “What I definitely didn’t think at that time is that we are now in a completely different time,” he said. “It was the start of the time where we are right now, with the war in Ukraine, with a completely destroyed civil society.”
“What I didn’t understand was that it was only just the beginning,” he added.
Mr. Krasilshchik recalled a 2013 interview with Aleksei Navalny, one of the protests’ main protagonists, who died in an Arctic prison early this year following a decades-long battle with Mr. Putin, in circumstances that remain unclear. “He said everything we needed to do at that time: Don’t let yourself get distracted. Don’t let them lie to you. Sometimes, you want this lie to be true: It’s much more comfortable for you to think, OK, that’s true.”
For the most part, Russians I’ve spoken with since our election did not judge those Americans who decided to tune out. Fighting is hard, all the more so in a state like Russia, and Mr. Putin deployed an increasingly harsh raft of measures to shrink the room for dissent.
But typically it’s only people in a privileged position who can afford internal emigration. It is strange to even be thinking of the term, considering that it is immigrants whom Mr. Trump has in his sights as he prepares to take office, vowing to unleash a campaign of mass deportation. Migrants will not have the option to tune out, nor will the other groups, such as trans people, on which Mr. Trump and his party have turned their ire.
One of Mr. Putin’s early moves upon returning was enacting a law banning gay “propaganda” to minors, effectively using the power of the state to wage his growing culture war. (He and his government have since banned gender-affirming care, an undefined global L.G.B.T. movement, and, most recently, “propaganda” relating to a child-free lifestyle.)
With no access to power, liberals in Russia could not do much to resist these measures. Instead, they worked on themselves. Independent magazines including Afisha and The New Times embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and that fueled cultural change.
“There were coming-outs all across Russia. That was a very, very powerful response,” said Yevgenia Albats, editor of The New Times, who has remained politically committed over decades, even from her current exile in the United States. “All polls suggested the more Russian citizens, very conservative at large, learned about gays, there was less gay hate. And that was the action — you have to take an action.”
Miriam Elder is a journalist who reported from Russia for eight years. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
