PRAGUE — “Are you going to ask why I brought you here?” asked Alexey Levchenko as he arrived in Prague’s Smichov neighborhood.
It was a brisk October morning, and the editor of the Russian outlet The Insider had suggested the meeting place: a small park with a Baroque fountain featuring the Roman god Neptune held aloft by bears.
The neighborhood’s architecture, Levchenko said, reminds him of Russia’s second-biggest city, St. Petersburg.
“It’s difficult to know that I can’t come back to St. Petersburg,” said Levchenko, who often visited the city from his home in Moscow. “It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one of my favorites.”
Levchenko left Russia in 2021, a few months before the war began in Ukraine. He made his way to Prague, which has a history as a hub for dissident writers.
Although the Czech capital was once subject to Soviet rule, it’s different from Russia, Levchenko said. But for a fleeting moment, when he visits the Smichov neighborhood, the similarities can make him feel as if his life hasn’t been upended.
Watchdogs estimate about 1,500 journalists fled Russia after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and escalated its repression of dissent and independent media. Some journalists went to Berlin, Riga and Tbilisi. Others, like Levchenko, found refuge in Prague.
And while they enjoy a degree of safety to continue reporting, the journalists must also contend with the emotional turmoil that comes with being forced to leave your family and friends, your home and culture, for an unfamiliar place.
The journalists also maintain a fractured relationship with their homeland, characterized by nostalgia and homesickness as well as hope and a commitment to the work that forced them into exile in the first place.
Some, like Levchenko, look for comfort in their new surroundings. Others turn to the experiences of exiles who came before them.
After Alesya Marokhovskaya left Moscow in 2022, she began reading the memoirs of other Russian exiles. The editor-in-chief of the investigative outlet IStories says she found some solace and camaraderie in their writing.
She read the works of writers such as Boris Zaitsev, Vladimir Veidle and Marina Tsvetaeva, the latter of whom lived in exile during the 1920s and 1930s, including in Prague.
Marokhovskaya hoped their experiences would offer some guidance or wisdom. But what struck her most was that their writing often centered around a deep longing to return to Russia.
“They just lived for this goal, and they forgot to live in real life,” Marokhovskaya said when we met outside a cafe in Prague.
Unlike those exiles, Marokhovskaya decided she couldn’t cling to what was likely a false hope. She accepts that she may never return home. “I will try to create my life where I am,” she said.
Moscow has long targeted independent journalists with lawsuits, arrests and killings, say watchdogs. But repression reached new heights after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022.
A law that prohibits spreading what Moscow deems “false information” about the war has made it all but impossible for Russian journalists to report accurately on the conflict. The penalty is 15 years in prison.
The severe risks forced many journalists to make a difficult decision. Anna Ryzhkova, who works with the Russian outlet Verstka, left her family and friends for exile in Tbilisi and later Prague. But if she had stayed in Russia, she says, she would have needed to stop her work to stay safe. That would have been the ultimate sacrifice.
“If I stayed in Moscow, and I saw my colleagues working and me staying silent, I think that would be sacrificing,” Ryzhkova said.
Like Marokhovskaya, Ryzhkova has resigned herself to the reality that returning home is a far-off prospect. “I will need to build something new here,” she said.
More than 1,500 kilometers now lie between her and Russia, but Ryzhkova and the other exiles I spoke with said their homeland consumes a large part of their daily lives. It’s a jarring tension that leaves some feeling as if they left part of themselves behind in Russia.
“I’m working in Russia in my mind,” Marokhovskaya said. “It’s really not easy. Sometimes I’m falling asleep, and I’m still there, still in Russia, not here.”
It’s common for exiles to feel caught between different places and never truly at home, according to Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor at the University of Birmingham who writes about exile. “You’re always existing in two places at once,” she said.
Toward the end of World War II, the concept of “inner emigration” emerged to describe people who stayed in Nazi Germany but whose minds moved elsewhere as a form of resistance. Exiled Russian journalists appear to have flipped that concept, Stonebridge said, because they physically left Russia, but their minds remain at home.
Outside the cafe in Prague, as trams rumble past every few minutes, Marokhovskaya said she counts the city of Moscow among the things she misses the most. Gazing into her half-drunk cappuccino, she said, “The main problem is I miss a Moscow that doesn’t exist anymore because the city has changed.”
Moscow is now filled with banners and advertisements for people to join the army. Pro-war “Z” posters and symbols are everywhere. The mood is different, she said.
Being in exile often brings mixed feelings, including homesickness and grief, Stonebridge said. “You must be in mourning for the country you’ve left, but also the country that you think you could still live in,” she said.
That longing can also reflect optimism for the future, Stonebridge said. “It’s not just nostalgia, but nostalgia’s twin, which is hope,” she said.
That phenomenon is underscored in the mindset of many of the journalists who say they are committed to reporting on Russia because they are committed to improving their country.
“It’s really easy to hate the government and love the country,” Marokhovskaya said. “I’m a patriot for my country, and the Russian government — they’re not.”
In his 1984 essay on exile in the literary magazine Granta, the Palestinian American academic Edward Said warned against romanticizing exile.
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,” wrote Said, who was exiled himself.
For Ryzhkova, the homesickness is constant. ”It is something that I feel in the air at any time,” she said. “It’s not that it really hurts much, but it is still with you every moment.”
The journalist speaks with her family every day, but she finds it upsetting to know that she can’t help as much as if she had stayed. When her grandmother broke her leg recently, Ryzhkova said, all she could do was call to check on her. “That is really painful for me,” she said.
Ryzhkova, like the other journalists I spoke with, is grateful to the Czech government for providing a haven. But feeling out of place is inevitable.
Still, brief moments offer a respite — like a concert by the Russian singer Zemfira, who has lived in exile herself since the start of the war. Everyone at the concert spoke Russian, Ryzhkova said. “That’s a nice feeling,” she said.
Back in Smichov on the tour of what reminds Levchenko of home, he proclaimed that “nostalgia is not only buildings.”
It is found in other things, too, like a Russian supermarket that offers a taste of home. Across the Vltava River, the store is where Levchenko comes when he and his Russian friends have parties. Here, he can purchase Russian pickles and cabbage, caviar and vodka.
The store also sells colognes that Levchenko said were popular during the Soviet years, and wool caps that are worn when visiting Russian saunas known as banya. Not all saunas are created equal, Levchenko said, but Czech saunas are an adequate replacement for the banya that Levchenko frequented in Moscow.
His tour ended at Pelmenarna, a restaurant specializing in Russian dumplings called pelmeni and vareniky. Levchenko ordered the ones filled with beef and pork.
“Many people want to reconstruct their life” through the different elements of Russian culture found and created in exile, Levchenko said.
Does Levchenko try to reconstruct his former life? “Sometimes, yes,” Levchenko said.
The journalist explained that nostalgia can also come from unexpected places — even Starbucks. One branch in Prague has a similar interior to one he used to frequent in Moscow.
“It’s funny that Starbucks can remind you of home,” Levchenko said. He sipped his vodka and shrugged.
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