War Through the Eyes of Meduza Readers. Today we are publishing Rita’s letter

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War Through the Eyes of Meduza Readers. Today we are publishing Rita’s letter

I often see the embarrassed “I can’t leave” in letters from Russians. But I think Russians do not need to justify themselves for that. I have not lived in the Russian Federation for more than 10 years, and in all that time I have almost never met people who would not have been ready to relocate in advance. Without a passport. Without knowledge of some specific language for the country they were moving to. Without a profession that fed them not only in their native village, but also in some faraway Panama City, Madrid, or Ottawa.

I have almost never met people who were not from a city of over a million. Who did not already have friends there who had moved earlier and would help. Without a business/grandma’s apartments for rent in the Russian Federation that would provide them with means to live abroad. And so that this money could be easily transferred and used to pay for things. I have almost never met young people whose mom and dad were not supporting them and handling their legal stay in those countries.

So if you are ashamed that you are no longer very young, or young but not from the “right” family, that you have personal obligations to loved ones, if you do not know any languages and are unable to learn them in just a couple of months up to conversational level, or better yet up to C1, then know that there is nothing wrong with you, you are not bad people, and you have nothing to be ashamed of. You are just ordinary people.

To put a couple pairs of underwear in your carry-on, a passport with a dozen open visas in your jacket pocket, and while boarding a plane tell a flight attendant in French how beautiful she looks, simply because you feel like it and not because you have to make a run for it, is a privilege of 1-2% of the planet’s population. And in Russia, where there is neither a middle nor an upper-middle class, even fewer. And you are not among them. So you should not be ashamed of this or be angry at yourselves. You (and I too) should rightly be angry about only one thing: the monster that has long since grown huge, that sows lies, stokes hatred, pits everyone against each other, and does not let us live normally and peacefully in our own country.

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