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I fled Putin’s Russia for Canada. It opened my eyes.

Canada showed me the importance of Indigenous rights. Now I want the same for Indigenous people in Russia. By Nikolay Zyuzev.

I decided to leave Vladimir Putin’s Russia—the first time—in 2006. And though it’s almost impossible to imagine now, people at home and around the world that year were applauding the Russian president’s successes. Russia had just hosted a G8 summit and signed a deal with the U.S. which eventually allowed it to join the World Trade Organization. Oil and gas profits were up, the economy was booming and Russians were enjoying middle-class luxuries—cafés, restaurants, vacations—that people in the West take for granted.

But as a social and political philosopher, it’s my job to look beyond the glittery surface, and it wasn’t hard to see signs of rot. Russia’s state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, had cut off supplies to Ukraine over price disagreements, demonstrating the Kremlin’s willingness to use energy as a geopolitical weapon. Tensions with Georgia were rising as the former Soviet Republic butted heads with Putin by developing closer ties with the West.

And Putin and his supporters were growing bolder and less tolerant of dissent at home. In October, the brutal assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya was a chilling warning to whose who dared to criticize the regime. Politkovskaya had become famous for criticism of Putin, and for her sympathetic reporting from Chechnya, which during the Soviet era had existed as an autonomous ethnic republic within the Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR, Chechens demanded their freedom, sparking years of brutal conflict with Russia.

Politkovskaya’s murder was a warning to dissidents, and the crushing of the Chechen uprising was a warning to members of Russia’s Indigenous and ethnic minorities. I was both.

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