Huffington post published an article by Daniel Allan Kennedy, headlined “Russia’s New Exiles.” “At first there appears to be little linking these three men. One is a 28-year-old entrepreneur and founder of Russia's most popular social network; the second, a respected economist who has been an advisor to Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev; and the third, a world-renowned former chess grandmaster and outspoken critic of the Kremlin,” the article begins.
“What links Pavel Durov, Sergei Guriev and Garry Kasparov together is that all three have fled Russia in the past three months amid fears of politically motivated prosecution. They are, in effect, a new generation of Russian exiles,” the author continues.
Daniel Alan Kennedy notes that exile was a common destiny for Soviet dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov in the 1970s and 1980s. According to him, “the latest string of high-profile emigrants suggests the Kremlin may be turning the screws on previously untouchable figures.” “The three cases display striking similarities. In each, the individual is questioned by members of the feared Investigative Committee, often as a "witness" to another case. The questioning and requests for personal information both interfere with the individual's day-to-day life and create a pervading sense of unease and fear. The cumulative effect of this questioning is to leave the individual in no doubt that life will be much easier if he or she leaves the country,” the author writes.
The author believes that the departure of a high-profile individual creates much less of an impact in the Western press than the highly politicized trials of oppositional figures like Khodorkovsky or blogger Alexei Navalny. The Kremlin has discovered it is better to have troublemakers move abroad than to make potential martyrs of them at home. With Russia currently clamping down on dissent on all fronts, we can expect to see more high-profile Russians packing their bags for good in the future,” he writes.
