Freed Russian dissidents confront new reality: Fighting Putin from exile

Then he went into campaign mode, harnessing his release to rally his support base. On Wednesday evening, he was greeted by a standing ovation as he stepped onto a stage in a Berlin park and paid tribute to the hundreds of Kremlin critics still in Russia.

“I don’t know how to be a Russian politician abroad. But I’ll learn," he promised the cheering crowd. “Guys, you can count on me."

Yashin, 41, was released as part of the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, an exchange that also freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was imprisoned in Russia for more than a year on a false accusation of espionage.

For the vast community of Russians who have fled their homeland since President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the release of Yashin and other jailed opposition politicians was a cause for celebration and hope.

But many of those dissidents—now essentially barred from a country they had desperately fought to change from the inside—consider it a grave injustice. For Yashin, placing himself mentally in Russia is crucial to his mission of learning to be an activist in exile.

“I still haven’t fully accepted that I’m no longer in Russia," he said in an interview after a packed book-signing event in Berlin for a memoir he finished in prison. “The people around me will prevent me from severing my connection to Russian realities."

More than 700 Kremlin critics still languish in Russian jails. Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main political opponent and a close friend of Yashin’s, died in a prison colony last winter.

Yashin was sentenced to more than eight years in prison in 2022 for a YouTube broadcast in which he accused Russia of perpetrating the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. He was charged with spreading false information about Russia’s military campaign.

The risks of speaking out have risen so dramatically that the majority of activists now do so from the relative safety of Europe and the U.S. But most of the dissidents released in this month’s swap had chosen to remain in Russia.

The journalist and politician Vladimir Kara-Murza returned to Russia weeks into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine despite being the target of two poisonings he blames on the Kremlin. Former Navalny aide Ksenia Fadeyeva continued speaking out against Putin as a regional lawmaker in Siberia. Human-rights activist Oleg Orlov was penning antiwar articles from his Moscow base long after Russia introduced laws that made that a criminal offense.

Inside Russia, all of them struggled daily with a wrenching choice: whether to risk arrest by staying, or risk losing relevance by leaving. Many see opposing the regime from abroad as a doomed endeavor, because it is difficult for activists living in comfort in Europe to convincingly urge supporters inside Russia to risk imprisonment by taking to the streets.

And despite their longing for home, the dissidents’ return to Russia now would likely mean a very long prison sentence with no option of being included in another prisoner swap. It would also undermine the efforts of the governments that lobbied for their release, first and foremost Germany, which has come under criticism for releasing the convicted assassin Vadim Krasikov as part of the deal.

The Russian opposition abroad is riven by infighting over how best to weaken Putin, whose government has begun blocking YouTube in its latest push to drown out opposing voices.

“Directly influencing whatever happens inside Russia is impossible when you’re dealing with a highly repressive authoritarian regime," said Yekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist now also based abroad. “There are different kinds of autocracies, but the kind we have in Russia these days does not allow even a semblance of political competition."

To Yashin and other freed activists, Putin has robbed them of some of the symbolic power they wielded by exiling them. Behind bars, they were prisoners of conscience who were risking their lives to protest his authoritarianism and war in Ukraine. Every word they spoke in recorded court hearings or wrote in letters to supporters carried a weight they don’t have when uttered from exile.

Banishing opponents is an age-old Kremlin tactic that has stumped generations of dissidents. The Bolsheviks set up in Switzerland, Paris and London before returning to the collapsing Russian Empire to seize power. Soviet dissidents such as writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn came home after the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

Kara-Murza invoked the example of those Soviet forerunners during an emotional press conference less than 24 hours after the freed dissidents arrived in Germany. Sitting beside him, Yashin denounced his inclusion in the prisoner swap, holding up a written appeal against his expulsion that he says he handed to Russian officials.

“I say this sincerely: More than anything I want now to go back home," Yashin said, fighting back tears.

On the flight from Moscow to Turkey, where the Russian dissidents were transferred to another plane that took them to Germany, there was a sense of collective tragedy, said Andrei Pivovarov, an activist who had one month left to serve of a four-year sentence he received for working for a banned political organization in 2021.

Some of the Russians cried or just sat in stunned silence. Others jokingly asked agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service who accompanied them whether there was space on the flight back to Russia, Pivovarov said. Referring to Gershkovich and the other freed Americans, he said: “They were going home. We were leaving our home."

In the week following their release, the dissidents went different ways. Pivovarov settled into a hotel in Bonn, Germany, where his wife joined him; Kara-Murza flew to the U.S.; and Ksenia Fadeyeva and Liliya Chanysheva joined other former Navalny aides in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Chanysheva said she wants to improve her health so she can start a family with her husband, who remains in Russia. All of the activists said they plan to continue their political work.

The conflicting emotions about exile affect even Kara-Murza, whose health was rapidly deteriorating in prison due to the effects of the two poisonings, in 2015 and 2017. The U.S. resident is now with his family at his Virginia home, where he brought the books and notepads he had with him in his Siberian jail, including a Spanish-language course book he studied every day.

“I still feel like I’m watching a film. A good film, admittedly," he said. “Every morning in prison I’d wake up with the thought that I’ll die in Putin’s prison."

The freed activists know they aren’t entirely safe—even abroad. Former Navalny aide Leonid Volkov was attacked by unidentified assailants in Vilnius in March. Russian pilot Maksim Kuzminov was gunned down in Spain in February after defecting to Ukraine.

After the prisoner swap, Russian officials and state propaganda denounced the exchanged dissidents as traitors who should watch their backs wherever they go. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said the activists should “burn in hell" and “never forget about the frailty of their existence in this world."

Yashin has taken all of that in stride. He has reactivated his social-media accounts and YouTube channel to resume denouncing the Russian government and its war in Ukraine.

He has also been seeking advice from friends and supporters about how he might continue his work abroad, taking inspiration from previous dissidents whose memoirs he read in prison. He said he plans to travel across Germany to speak with Russian diaspora communities and gauge their hopes and needs.

The flurry of public events will end on Monday, Yashin said, when he will take a break from political activism to focus on putting down roots in Germany’s capital. There’ll be an apartment to rent, a subway pass to buy and documents to arrange. He’ll have to adapt not only to life abroad, but also to life as a free man.

“I got used to jail," he said. “I can get used to exile."

Bojan Pancevski contributed to this article.