The New Emigration

In the 1970s, dissident balladeer Alexander Galich wrote a song about a KGB major who loses his passport and facetiously declares that he is Jewish. His commanding officer assumes that he wishes to go to Israel and tells him resentfully: “While all of us here, with blood on our faces / March in lockstep toward the bright future / You’ll be having a ball in Israel / Gorging yourself on matzos, you bastard!”

Soviet propaganda couldn’t decide how to portray Jews who were emigrating to Israel and the United States in the 1970s in growing numbers. On the one hand, they were disloyal, ungrateful rats who chose the easy life in the West over the difficult, glorious task of building communism at home. On the other, they were dupes who trusted bourgeois fairy tales and then endured untold hardships in the dog-eat-dog capitalist world.

In the early 1990s, the collapse of communism ushered in a brief period of openness, when Russians became interested in the outside world and fascinated by the emigre experience. That was when writer Sergei Dovlatov and singer-songwriter Willie Tokarev achieved their great fame. But lately, I have noticed that old Soviet attitudes have returned. Internet comments about my articles either brim with the kind of resentment that Galich satirized in his song, or they claim that when I criticize anything in Russia it is just an attempt to convince myself and others that my emigration wasn’t a huge mistake.

Russians are now free to travel, own property and live anywhere. Many have taken advantage of this freedom. Aside from the 20 million Russians left behind in former Soviet republics, the official data counts another 10 million living abroad. Since many Russians work, study or live in foreign countries temporarily, the actual number is probably much higher. As many as a quarter of all Russians live outside the country.

But they are very different from Soviet Jews, who were the last wave of traditional emigration. When my family left the Soviet Union in 1974, we knew that we would not be allowed back. The moment we stepped off the airplane in Vienna, our past lives ended. Communicating by phone was costly and complicated. No Soviet television was beamed abroad, and newspapers took days to arrive. Only a few friends risked getting our letters, and soon even that correspondence lapsed.

We were like 19th-century emigrants from Italy or Ireland who went to the United States and were not heard from for decades. Moreover, since there were so few Russian speakers around, we had little choice but to assimilate — very quickly. But today’s emigrants stay connected with their old motherland by e-mail, text messages and social networks as closely as if they never left. Air travel is affordable and easy. Since the world has shrunk, the old-style emigrant has disappeared.

But many people in Russia don’t get it. Nor do they realize that the millions of Russians living abroad are a potential catalyst for change at home. They are familiar with more than one culture and understand how the world works. They know that things should — and could — be very different in Russia, too. They could modernize Russia if they choose to come back.

But they may also give up on their country and settle where they now live. This would be a catastrophe for Russia, since it would represent a loss of yet another layer of educated, employable and active people — of which the country has lost so many over the past century.

Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.