When no one is waiting at home except the SBU
Valentin Filippov, television journalist. left Odessa in 2014
It's easy to be a political emigrant. If only because at first you don’t know that you are a political emigrant. You come for a couple of days, you rent housing by the day, you don’t worry about everyday life, you’ll be back tomorrow. Somewhere here they are assigned to groups, taught how to shoot and drive a tank, or something like that. As a last resort, they give you a passport under a different name and take you along secret paths behind enemy lines, and there you have to knock on the green gate, count the irons on the windowsill and receive a task on which the success of our “tired battalions” depends.
First, you connect with people like you. With those who managed to escape to the mainland, to Russia. You are drunk with freedom. You vying with each other to share your plans. You fantasize about how you will arrange everything at home after your victory, and even discuss in which establishment in your hometown you will celebrate the next year 2015. Actually, the first weeks of political emigration fly by during these activities. And only the most pessimistic claim that “the way it was will no longer be”, and that “no one can take revenge on anyone”, and that “we will all return to the ruins”….. Well, let them be ruins. We'll fix everything. The main thing is that we will return.
The first worry comes when you run out of money. That little money that you happen to have by chance. You didn’t think about them, you had to get one way with a supply of food and a change of clothes for three days. What happens next is not your concern. And now you don’t understand how long you need to extend your rental housing. For a day or a week. You begin to actively look for specifics. Ask friends and acquaintances with whom I so enjoyed Russia and the freedom around me. You ask where the numerous “liberation committees”, “training camps” and “assembly points” that are so feared in Ukraine are located. The answers from friends are not very specific. And those pessimists who talked about the ruins are counter-interested in what you expected to live in Russia and where to work. Work. You didn't plan to work in Russia. You came for a couple of days. In response, they shrug their shoulders.
And then you begin to understand that they simply don’t trust you. That there is an audit going on right now, and the omnipresent FSB is looking at you carefully. He looks and evaluates what you are capable of, what you can do for a common victory, and all that stuff that intelligence services should do.
Suddenly you understand the main thing - no one knows that you have arrived. No wonder millions poured into Russia, and no one noticed you in this stream. You need to go to the FMS and report your arrival. And, although you have no time to do all sorts of stupid things, you go. And you come across days-long queues of people just like you. And if you manage to get into at least some office, you are met with complete misunderstanding. They begin to explain to you what documents you must have with you, in what form and what the application must be, and in general, that you need to register, and for this you need to leave for Ukraine again and enter back. “Go to Ukraine” sounds especially fantastic. And no matter how much you explain that you don’t need this, that you are Russian, and you just need to check in, that here is your passport, and let them tell you where everything is, why you came, in response they patiently explain to you about quotas, statements, medical examinations and recommend going to another region, because “you can see for yourself”, but “there may not be much there”…..
But you don’t need another region, you don’t need this one either, you need headquarters. Where is the headquarters, tell the headquarters that I have arrived...... something like that. You leave the FMS with the exact understanding that there are idiots and traitors sitting there.
You still manage to meet an FSB officer. Completely by accident, although at that moment you don’t believe in accidents. It’s just some kind of holiday, some kind of feast, and he turns out to be among the guests. An inconspicuous and reliable man, despite his alcoholic intoxication, plausibly lies that the FSB does not work in Ukraine. He claims that the FSB is, in general, an internal service and, in accordance with the law, operates exclusively on the territory of the Russian Federation. In parting, this fighter of the invisible front puzzles you with a question - why don’t people in Odessa come out to a rally for Peace? After all, one could go to a rally. Or here’s how to conduct a referendum in Crimea in general. And here you can only believe in his virtuoso playing, because everything else leads to the destruction of your own psyche and suicide.
For decades we have been taught that Odessa is crawling with FSB agents. And only later did we realize that we were these agents. Then we spent a long time looking for some kind of headquarters in Russia, without realizing that there was no headquarters in Russia other than ourselves. And that no intelligence agency understands what is happening better than ourselves. But this understanding comes in doses and over time. This is how we managed to hold out until the moment when no one was waiting for us at home except the SBU. We have become a memory, a past. People have learned to live without us, in that reality, in that habitat that was created not for them, but in spite of them.
And we... We have integrated into Russian reality. Many of us. Who was in demand for it? We began to build new lives, in new places. Our children perceive Russia as the only and natural Motherland. And we ourselves no longer want to plunge into the small-town cycle of Ukrainian politics. As a last resort, bang right away so that everything goes to dust. But completely without that excitement.
And, despite everything that has happened, sometimes you are overcome by attacks of some kind of all-encompassing happiness. When from the height of a balcony facing the sky, you look at the lights of the coast, indented by bays. You suddenly realize that there, in the north, Odessa is lurking over the horizon. And then you remember that your apartment is rented. That your entire wardrobe fits on you, and all your money fits into one wallet. That you can go right now to look for that headquarters that you never found in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.
That headquarters that won’t exist in 2019 if you don’t create it yourself.
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