The Westerners Moving to Russia

St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, Russia. By Reidl @ Adobe Stock

At The Spectator, Owen Matthews discusses a scheme run by the Russian government to help ease the transition of Westerners who move to the country. The plan is run by Maria Butina, who you may recall from news reports, was convicted in 2018 in the United States for being a Russian spy. Matthews writes:

Tofurious Maximus Crane was sitting in a barber’s chair in Moscow when he received the greatest news of his life. It was August 19, the day Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to immigrate to Russia. Now, the forty-six-year-old native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, could finally achieve his life’s dream of remaining in Russia forever. “For me, the decree is the best thing that ever happened in my life besides, you know, family and children,” says Crane, a charismatic bear of an American who sports a long Old Testament beard and perfectly coiffed hipster hair. “I got the notification about the decree, and I jumped up out of the chair and was crying. I was very excited.”

Thanks to Putin’s decree, citizens from a list of “unfriendly” western countries are officially welcome to immigrate to Russia as long as they share Russia’s “spiritual and moral values.” For thirty-nine-year-old Jozef Schutzman, originally from Dallas, Texas, Russia is a place where he and his growing family have found religious freedom and escape from the “liberal ideologies which have permeated through America… the US became untenable for me.” A traditional Latin-rite Catholic, Schutzman moved to Russia last year with his Australian wife in order to “preserve the innocence” of his seven children.

Maria Butina is leading the effort to set disenchanted westerners up with new lives in Russia. Butina is a member of the State Duma from the Kremlin-backing United Russia Party. She is better known in the US for her 2018 conviction for acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the course of her work with conservative groups in the US, including the National Rifle Association. The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded that Butina had also attempted to persuade the Trump campaign to establish a secret communications channel with Russia.

“This role was really thrust upon me after I was put in jail by the US government,” says Butina, who was released in October 2019 after serving fifteen months in a federal penitentiary. “They made such a show that it made a big name for me, especially among gun lobbyists, who are the kind of people who are interested in alternative points of view.” In the wake of the pandemic, Americans interested in moving to Russia began to write to Butina. Her entire Duma office staff are now devoted to helping western immigrants with the practicalities of their moves.

By Butina’s account, her team gets around fifteen serious inquiries every day, and around 3,500 westerners have already settled in Russia since 2021. Of these, 31 percent are from Germany, 25 percent from Latvia and the rest, in descending order, from Italy, France, the US, Canada and Australia. Butina’s office is not yet aware of any Brits who have taken up the new scheme, though several who have been living in Moscow since before the war attend Butina’s monthly receptions for the new immigrants in Moscow’s House of Nationalities. Butina doesn’t give the newcomers any subsidies, but the governor of Nizhny Novgorod has set up a scheme to attract up to 7,000 immigrants, headed by a German businessman, which offers cheap land and housing. Dobrograd, a private community development in Vladimir, two and a half hours outside Moscow, is advertising heavily to encourage westerners to move to apartments that start at €50,000.

In October, Butina organized a demonstration outside the US embassy in Moscow to protest against political prisoners in the US. Crane was there, as well as a handful of other conservative expatriates, including the British expat Dean Standley, who sported an orange T-shirt emblazoned with “Russian Lives Matter.” It concealed a tattoo of Putin that he has on his back. Standley is a forty-five-year-old financial services consultant from Solihull in England’s West Midlands. In Moscow, where he has lived since 2012, Standley says he has found “economic opportunity… the most beautiful girls in the world” and — perhaps most importantly — “freedom.” Russia is “a million times more free [than the UK] in terms of freedom in every aspect and context, even freedom of speech.”

According to Butina, many of the latest crop of émigrés cited compulsory Covid vaccinations among their principal motivations for moving. Religious conservatives were the next biggest group, including traditional Catholics, Protestants and Russian Orthodox converts. “These people want to educate their children in freedom,” says Butina. “They want to be able to protect them from LBGT values without some representative of the state juvenile social services coming to their door and taking their children away.” The smallest group is people with political motives, such as Americans who have been involved in the January 6 attempted insurrection and others who claim political persecution by the FBI and Interpol.

Read more here.