The plane lifted through a pale, cloudless sky above Moscow, one of the last few to leave as sanctions grounded almost everything else. Inside the cabin, Ivan Kondratenko sat tightly, his backpack under the seat, watching the snowbanks along the runway quickly blur into motion. “When our plane was getting off there was like this huge sigh,” he recalled. “I had honestly, psychologically, a feeling of great relief.” Below, the city that had shaped his politics and his fears receded into the frozen dark.
At 42, he packed only what fit into that backpack, believing he would be gone for a couple weeks at most. It was late evening on March 3rd, 2022, nine days after he had woken in a fever and discovered that Russia had invaded Ukraine.
Three years later, Kondratenko sips a cappuccino in a small café in Gesundbrunnen, the Berlin neighborhood where he studies German. His curly hair has begun to gray. Berlin has become a kind of home, though never his own. Around him, thousands of Russian dissidents and journalists have built parallel lives in exile. They are the aftershock of a system that criminalized dissent and exported its silence abroad: the unintended diaspora of a country that could no longer bear its conscience. For Ivan and many others, persecution has travelled with them, even when they left Russia, and their lives, behind.
A native of Oryol, a Russian oblast close to the Ukrainian border, Ivan Kondratenko had devoted most of his life up to 2022 to political activism. After moving to Moscow in 2012 following his studies, he began working for the Moscow office of Amnesty International in 2014, eventually becoming its Acting Director until 2018. “It had a tiny office of five employees,” he explained. “I was very young.”
The morning of February 24th felt unreal. Kondratenko had just come back to Moscow from a work trip to Berlin, where he had also received a Pfizer dose of the Covid vaccine. Sweating profusely from the fever, he woke up confused, and started scrolling the news on his phone. The blue light from the screen flickered faintly on his face, as he struggled to understand what he was reading. “It all felt like a fever nightmare,” he said. “I didn’t know if I could trust myself.” Before dawn, President Putin had announced the beginning of the infamous “special military operation.”
During those nine days leading up to March 3rd, Kondratenko travelled back to Oryol to visit his parents. He put some anti-war leaflets up on streetpoles there. But, most importantly, he bought coffee. A lot of it. To this day, the coffee is still sitting in his Moscow apartment. He relied on a German experience from World War Two, when the country was struck by a shortage. “I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to leave Russia,” he explained. He hoped he wouldn’t have to.
When the police started detaining those who were attending the protests, Kondratenko started rationalising the situation. “You could either run away, or get caught,” he said. “Panic was growing that the border would be closed down.” On March 2nd, he bought a one-way ticket to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The following day, amidst fear as flights were held to the ground, he boarded the plane and looked back at the lights of Moscow flattened against the snow, not knowing it would be his last time.
Bishkek, for a few weeks, felt like a reprieve. He shared a small hotel room with former colleagues, working remotely and trying to stay connected to the world they’d left.
Awareness that exile was no longer an interlude but a life grew slowly. Three weeks later, when colleagues suggested he join them in Berlin, the decision felt almost casual. “I had a feeling I would stay there for a couple of weeks,” he said again, smiling at the irony. “Let’s see what happens next.”
He landed in Berlin at the end of March, but his stay only lasted a week. “I realised it would be very difficult to legalise myself first in Germany,” he explained. Like many others, he decided to leave for Georgia, where the border was still open to Russians. “It was easy to get there,” he said. “I had many friends there.”
He would spend six months in Georgia. For a while, it seemed like the war—and exile—might still be temporary. “In summer 2022,” he said, “it felt like I could just travel to Moscow—kind of dangerous but still possible.” That illusion faded quickly. By autumn, arrests were mounting for social-media posts, and the mobilization decrees made return impossible. “I was also in Maidan in 2013 and 2014”, he explained. “I said, ‘I have a record.’ If they start mass arrests, I would be a good candidate for that.”
The path that would bring him back to Berlin came, as he put it, “very random.” A colleague mentioned a new German program offering humanitarian visas for Russian civil-society workers. He wrote to the officials running it, attaching a one-page account of his work and life. “And then it was silence for several months,” he said. One day, he received a message: please come and bring your passport.
He was among the first to receive one of such visas. He officially relocated to Germany, where through the NGOs he was working with he helped others apply, drafting dozens of letters attesting that particular journalists or activists were “in danger” and should qualify for the visa.
In Berlin, Kondratenko moved into the House of Critical Voices, a residence for exiled media workers managed by the NGO MiCT. It is a place of constant proximity, where journalists, activists, and artists orbit one another’s routines.
Some kept producing articles and campaigns out of habit, but many others, including Kondratenko, the distance hollowed the work itself.
Danila Bedyaev, once a producer at Echo of Moscow, now keeps the lights running in the same building. “I’m the tech guy,” he said, “responsible for everything you can plug into power.” When he arrived with his wife and two small children, he imagined journalism would resume once the shock passed. “We thought it was temporary,” he said. “Two, three months—such craziness can’t continue.” But the war did continue, and the profession that had once defined him became a luxury. His wife, Lyudmila Shabueva, also a journalist, still tries to stay in the field, hosting a small monthly Russian-language radio show. In Germany, though, there is little space for Russian journalists in exile—too many voices, too little demand. The work survives as habit, not livelihood.
MiCT, supported by the German Ministry of Culture, created the infrastructure of the exile press. Coworking studios, legal counsel, emergency stipends. “Because no one wanted these people to stay on the street,” explained Bedyaev. The program kept dozens afloat, though it also revealed a harder truth: aid can sustain a community, but it cannot restore its purpose.
In the past three years, Berlin’s Russian-speaking exile community developed its own microclimate. One of nervous solidarity. Mental strain and professional burnout became shared conditions. “People feel stuck,” Kondratenko said. “They don’t see any future… It’s a very nervous community these days.” Yet he also described small rituals that allow them to endure. Weekend retreats in German villages, seminars, conversations that oscillate between despair and dark humor. “We do regular meetings, self-organised with my friends,” he said. “It’s both to have fun and a way we manage it.”
Over time, activism gave way to literature, a dormant passion in Kondratenko’s life. The NGOs he had worked for either collapsed or released him, and he began receiving state support while studying German and finishing a degree in creative writing.
His first novel—a blend of fiction and autobiography—draws from his years in human rights work and the experience of exile. “I’m trying to explain my generation,” he said. The book, recently accepted by a small publisher, follows young Russians who believed that one more protest, one more petition, might end authoritarianism. “We said, ‘Let’s do a little bit more effort, life will change, Putin will go,’ and then we found out it’s so difficult.”
Writing, for him, became both mirror and refuge. “Literature is something very important for me,” he said. “It’s how I can maintain my connection with my motherland somehow.” He has started attending Russian literary circles in Berlin and dreams of writing in English too, one day, inspired by Nabokov.
In Berlin, his days are organized around language classes in the morning and writing in the afternoon. But the war still shapes every silence. “It’s very shocking that this horrible war [has been] going on for three and a half years,” he said. “The Second World War… was going on for less than four [EN: for Russia].”
He no longer speaks about return. “I think actually this sort of exile provides a good distance,” he said. “But of course, exile also means a little bit of loneliness… sometimes I feel alone.” Distance, after all, was how he’d learned to live—and to look back.
The coffee he bought before fleeing Russia is still in his kitchen cupboard in Moscow, sealed and forgotten. It has survived three winters, waiting in a city he no longer recognises.
