“I did not want to make an emotional decision, but I could not raise my son in a country like that,” said Telitchenko, who resettled in neighboring Latvia in March with his wife and 3-year-old son. He spoke in their comfortable Riga two-story walk-up, standing near a high shelf with a white Santa Claus statue from his childhood — a reminder of what he had left behind.
“The war made me realize that Russia will not change,” he said.
Western attention is focused on the millions of refugees who have fled Ukraine since the Russian assault began on Feb. 24. But Russia is also in the midst of an emigration wave that is upending its spheres of arts and journalism, and especially the world of tech.
The Russian Association for Electronic Communications told the lower house of Russia’s parliament last month that 50,000 to 70,000 tech workers have fled the country, with 100,000 more expected to leave over the next month — for a total of about 10 percent of the sector’s workforce. Ok Russians, a new nonprofit group helping emigres, used a sampling of data from neighboring nations and social media surveys to estimate that nearly 300,000 Russians overall had left since the war began.
Mitya Aleshkovskiy, co-founder of Ok Russians, said some of those leaving are opposition activists, artists and journalists — people whom President Vladimir Putin is probably happy to see go, and whose departure could reduce active dissent within Russia. But nearly half of those leaving hail from tech — a highly transient, globally in-demand workforce that includes many who fear Russia’s global isolation, newly adverse business climate and near-total authoritarianism.
The Russian government is “really scared and shocked,” Aleshkovskiy said. “The prime minister of Russia has been begging these guys to stay. He’s telling them, ‘Don’t worry that Apple leaves, we will build our own Apple Store. Please don’t go.’ … But I would say that the best people are leaving right now. … The highly skilled, highly educated, highly paid specialists.”
Thousands of Russians who left, initially fearing that Putin would seal Russia’s borders, have gone back in recent weeks. But at least some are expected to leave again, as experts predict a fresh wave of departures in the coming weeks and months. Experts on global migration and Russian population are calling the current exodus Russia’s single fastest since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when millions of intellectuals and economic elites fled the rise of the Soviet Union.
“In some ways, this is a first,” said Jeanne Batalova, a global migration expert at the Migration Policy Institute. “We’re talking about a lot of people in a very condensed period, a matter of weeks. In 1917, Russia was in the midst of a civil war. But this is happening at time when there is no war within Russia itself.”
The departure of so much talent threatens to undermine a host of Russian sectors, from the state media to aerospace and aviation industries already reeling from Western sanctions. The tech and start-up ecosystem was already withering under escalating government interference and censorship.
Desperate to stem the tide, the Russian government passed an unprecedented incentive package offering IT firms tax breaks and reduced regulation. IT workers, meanwhile, are being promised subsidized housing, salary bumps, and no income tax for the next three years. Notably, the decree signed by Putin also grants IT workers an exemption from conscription into military service, something many young Russians have sought to avoid by fleeing the country.
Mikhail Mizhinsky, who runs Relocode, a London-based company helping tech firms relocate, said his Russian clients have surged to more than 200 since the war, a 20-fold increase. The largest are looking to move 1,000 employees. Most are relocating 100 to 200 staffers
We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
The tech exodus is also due to Western sanctions and the curtailing or ending of operations by Western companies including IBM, Intel and Microsoft. Smaller, Russian tech companies, or companies headed by international Russians, are also leaving. Meanwhile, major Russian tech players like Yandex, often called “the Russian Google,” have scrambled to hold on to employees who are fleeing Russia.