Pensioners Irina Nippolainen and Anna Trusova, friends and residents of the small Karelian town of Segezha, fled Russia in the spring of 2023 after the FSB came to search their homes. Anna and Irina were forced to make a long trek to Azerbaijan via Belarus before making their way to Germany, where they now have residence permits and social housing, and where they hope to find work. Meanwhile, back in their home country their relatives have been summoned for questioning in the criminal investigation against them. Journalists at the website Okno tell the story of the two women, who chose forced emigration over unfreedom.

ESCAPE

On 20 March 2023, 60-year-old Irina and 58-year-old Anna said goodbye after taken a stroll and went home. A few minutes later, Irina called Anna and told her that the FSB had come to see her. Anna rushed to her house after Irina’s call.

“As soon as I rang Irina’s doorbell, I immediately turned on the video on my phone to put the squeeze on them: Who the hell are you guys? The FSB guys saw that I was filming on my phone and immediately called someone, saying, ‘She’s here, come over.’ Anyway, it transpired that they had come for both of us.”

During the search, the FSB officers confiscated their phones and computers from the two pensioners. The search warrant stated that the searches were part of a criminal investigation into “public calls to engage in activity threatening state security.” Anna and Irina guessed that the case had been triggered by a denunciation. They both had written many posts on their VKontakte pages about their opposition to war, and in response had received a “barrage of hatred” from those who had read the posts.

“It was stressful. I lost eight kilograms during that time: I was so worried, I didn’t eat, and I didn’t know what would happen. I knew that people in Russia are sent to pretrial detention centers at any age even for sneezing at the authorities, and I did not know what exactly the law enforcers would find in the devices they confiscated and how they would interpret what they found. As soon as we were searched, my children immediately got involved in the problem, checking out everything they could: internet sites, their acquaintances, and then their acquaintances who had left the country. They decided how we should proceed—where and how to get asylum or other options. After analyzing everything, they decided that a humanitarian visa was the best option. We had to decide where to go, where to stay, and what to take with us,” says Irina.

They considered fleeing to two countries—Finland and Germany—but decided on the latter because it was easier to get a visa there.

But first Irina and Anna went to St. Petersburg, because they had to get papers for Anna’s dog Ramona. They stayed with an acquaintance of Anna’s, but the woman was very afraid that she would be “prosecuted for her connection” with the fugitive opposition activists, so they had to move out.

“Our children, who were assisting us, gave us the contact information for a man who did not know us at all but who wrote, ‘Come and stay as long as you want’. He helped us out and fed us, and we spent all that time while we were taking care of business at his house,” they explain.

Anna and Irina stayed in St. Petersburg for a week before departing for Azerbaijan.

They did not travel to Baku directly. For security reasons, they got themselves new cell phones, discussed the route, decided not to buy plane tickets in Russia, but to do it in Belarus, and went to Belarus by cab, paying 20,000 rubles [approx. 200 euros] for the fare.

“We took everything into account because we didn’t know how quickly they would come for us. In fact, we were very surprised that they didn’t nab us right away. We also chose Belarus because the dog was with us, and we felt bad about putting her in the luggage hold. Belavia is one of the few airlines that allow passengers to transport small animals in a carrier on a seat in the passenger cabin,” says Irina.

After taking a cab to Minsk, they immediately went to the airport, bought tickets, and flew to Azerbaijan at night. In Baku, Irina and Anna initially settled in a small hotel.

“I was in such a state that my hair stood on end. For Anna, it was like an adventure, but for me it was like a misfortune, because I had left my home, my husband, and my pets. I didn’t want to leave my home or my country. That’s why I was very anxious. I even reached out to a psychologist from an aid organization, but she didn’t help me much,” Irina says.

Anna’s mood was a little different.

“I’m generally a traveler, but I hadn’t been able to travel lately. First there was the pandemic, then this whole thing happened. Not that I was freaking out about it, of course; I was freaking out for other reasons. But when it happened, I put three bathing suits in my suitcase—Ira makes fun of me—and went to the airport. I assumed I might have difficulties in Russia due to my intemperate tongue: I supposed that I would have to leave. I have a daughter in the Czech Republic, but the Czech Republic has a very bad attitude towards Russians, and they wouldn’t give me a visa. I thought that I would go to India, it’s quiet and peaceful there. My suitcase was initially packed with summer clothes. Of course, I was a bit nervous about the dangers. But basically, I always try to stay positive and hope for the best,” says Anna.

Irina and Anna ultimately stayed in Baku for four months. They submitted the paperwork for humanitarian visas to Germany quite quickly, and had been approved by early June. But due to the local and the German bureaucracies they had to wait a long time for their papers. During this time, the pensioners already had their own circle of contacts—their landlady, their neighbors, and other refugees from Russia.

“And while there was uncertainty as to whether we would be granted a visa or not, we were already considering Azerbaijan as a place to live, because we could have lived there on our pensions. We had already found some channels for cashing money there, because our bank cards didn’t work there anyway. But still, we didn’t consider ourselves safe there,” Irina explains.

“GOD, HOW DID YOU BEAR IT ALL?”

In July, all their papers were in hand, so Irina and Anna began packing for Germany. They decided to make their way to Georgia first, since it was cheaper to fly to Germany from Tbilisi than from Baku. They went to Georgio by bus, stayed in Tbilisi for a couple of days before flying to Germany.

“When we arrived in Germany, I was already on VKontakte recounting all our adventures. And people wrote, “God, how did you bear it all?” Because there were a lot of hard moments. Personally, I was constantly stressed out, but it had become a way of life, you know. Anya is fine, she’s easygoing, but I can’t improvise when it comes to serious matters, I have to prepare and think things over. If I hadn’t followed all those rules, maybe we could have flown to Germany more easily, who knows. I’m a thorough person, I don’t want to lose money and end up stranded at the airport not knowing what to do. That is, I was preparing, I was checking out all the chat rooms and websites, seeing what papers we needed to get and where to go. There was a lot of preparation just for the dog. Without the dog, we would have done it all ten times easier, if not more. Because in different countries there are particular papers and certain vaccinations you have to have, and the airlines have certain requirements for the carrier. Ramona is a basically a ‘homeowner’—she had three portable houses,” Irina says.

“For the first time in her life, probably, when leaving Baku, Irina took sedatives because the dog in its carrier had to be placed in the trunk of the bus. And I was so worked up that even I took them too,” Anna remarks.

Anna and Irina flew to Frankfurt, where they were met by a friend of Irina’s who had lived in Germany for a long time. They had to get to their initial placement site, the town of Suhl in Thuringia, which is a three-hour drive from Frankfurt.

“But when we arrived there, we were told that pets were not permitted. Ukrainians used to bring pets there with them, but since now there are few Ukrainians in this camp and mostly Muslims, who have a bad attitude to dogs and are afraid of them, it is prohibited. So we urgently began looking for help on the chat rooms. A Ukrainian family agreed to take Ramona in for a while. They lived right next to the camp, and so we would go to their house to walk the dog. But then this young woman found out she had allergies, so Ana’s daughter quickly came from the Czech Republic and took Ramona away,” Irina explains.

The refugee camp where the pensioners were initially placed was a complex of five buildings, mostly inhabited by people from Arab countries.

“It was a bit scary to live in such an unfamiliar environment, given that the doors to the room in which we were put were unlocked. The police even came once because of a conflict in the building. We also had our passports taken from us and there was a risk that we would be processed in a different status—as refugees, even though we had ‘humanitarian visa’ stamped on our papers. We wrote everywhere, because they said that if we were registered as refugees, we could change this status only through the courts, and the courts could take years. That was scary. I said that we could not even return to Russia without a passport. Basically, it was a massive problem. I’d only recently been released, and I had put on two or three kilograms, because one thing or another was causing stress, but there was no getting around it,” Irina recounts.

Everything worked out well, ultimately. After a week, they were moved to the town of Greiz, a two-hour drive from Suhl. There they were allocated a social apartment, started to receive an allowance, were insured, and were issued social security numbers. By October, Anna and Irina had received residence permits for three years. During all this time, however, the pensioners had to confront the famous German bureaucracy more than once.

“They have an algorithm, as it were. But the human factor often gets in the way. People who work in this system, they do not know all the laws, or often they do things just to check off the boxes. But our case was quite peculiar for them: we are Russian pensioners, we have humanitarian visas, and they probably have a million other refugees here. Things were difficult, but when you look back, you think, What was there to worry about?” said Anna and Irina.

After the paperwork was completed, the friends moved again, but not far—to the city of Gera, thirty kilometers from Greiz. Each of them found rented accommodation there, which is paid for by the municipality. The apartments there are rented empty, with no furniture or appliances.

“When we moved from one place to another, they stopped paying us in the old place, but here they hadn’t started paying us yet, and it took two months to process the registration. So for two months we were without money or furniture,” Irina explains.

Since she had not yet been discharged from social housing, they could still live there together legally for some time and work on furnishing their new homes.

“The Ukrainians who live here have set up a help chat room and chat rooms for selling different things. I bought a bed and a chest of drawers from Ukrainians. I got some things for free. Germans often sell things they don’t need for very cheap. For example, I bought a complete kitchen set for only 100 euros, which is practically nothing. Now I’m looking for a bigger refrigerator,” Irina says.

Anna, on the other hand, found an app similar to the Russian website Avito, where used furniture was sold, and bought almost everything she needed at wholesale prices.

“The only thing I was left without was a kitchen. I didn’t have a stove, but I got a microwave, and I could survive with a microwave. I bought a kettle. And that’s how I lived for the first few months,” she said.

The pensioners were at pains to point out that no one refused to help them. People who had also immigrated to Germany, some twenty years earlier and others two years earlier, offered them bedding, dishes, and household supplies. When Irina and Anna had settled in, they passed some of these things on to a family from Ukraine.

People who have been granted humanitarian visas in Germany can choose not to work and live on benefits. But they can try to find a job if they want. Before they retired, Anna was involved in marketing cosmetics, while Irina helped animals. After ten years at the official municipal animal shelter, she ran a mini-shelter for five dogs, one of which she ultimately adopted. Finding a job in Germany is still difficult for them.

“We don’t speak German, so the opportunities to find work are few and far between for the time being. I am registered at the job center, while Irina is now registered with the Sozialamt, and she can live on her pension in peace, but I will only go on 31 July to test the level of my German. God willing, I will test out at A1, since I almost got A’s in German back in school. After taking this test, I do not know when I will be able to take German-language classes. Many emigrants take these courses two or three times. Then again, I’m old, so things don’t stick in my head nowadays. Of course, I would like somehow to learn the language faster and integrate faster,” Anna says, laughing.

Irina says that she has not been assigned to an integration course, so for the time being she is also living without knowledge of the German language and therefore jobless. While she was still living in Greiz, she worked a two-hour trial day as a seamstress in a local factory . Irina liked it very much. When she moved to Gera, she also wrote to one of the factories there, but was told that German was required. Getting a job is likewise important to Irina because she wants to invite her husband, who stayed behind Russia, to join her in Germany, which is impossible to do if she is unemployed. Irina’s husband would also need to know German, but how and where he can learn it and pass the test for the simplest level is still unclear. Irina herself attends German language courses, but they are run by volunteers and thus unofficial.

Anna and Irina say that even without jobs they have enough to do—they have traveled all over the area.

“We have been traveling a lot since day one. While we didn’t have papers, we used to walk, and then we got the chance to buy transit passes that enable us to travel by rail, buses, trams, and subways,” says Irina, who has also been to travel to Finland to visit her children, and to Stockholm and Copenhagen to meet friends.

Anna has bought a sewing machine and begun sewing.

“I used to do needlework, but in recent years things had not been coming together. Now I have started knitting curtains, and I will start weaving; I want to do a lot of things. I knitted myself a sweater. I bought brushes and paints and started drawing a bit, but have given it up for the time being. Mostly, I want to walk more. We are from Karelia and have a tradition of walking as the first thing one needs to do. And I had a dog then. Here I bought a bicycle as soon as I got the furniture: I jumped on the bike and went riding. You have to see everything around you. It takes a lot of time to see everything, to photograph it, to edit it, to upload it to the internet. So there is not enough time,” she explains.

By the way, both pensioners are each on their third VKontakte page: their previous pages had been blocked by the Russian authorities.

“DID THEY WRITE ABOUT BUCHA?”

Karelian law enforcement never forgot Irina and Anna.

In April 2024, it transpired that a criminal case had been opened against the two émigrés on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. They found out about it because Irina’s husband was summoned to testify, for some reason, in the criminal investigation against Anna. Only when he met with the investigator, it transpired that Irina was also being prosecuted on the same charge. The husband refused to answer the investigator’s questions, invoking Article 51 of the Constitution (which permits an individual not to testify against themself or their spouse). Anna’s sister was then summoned for questioning in the same investigation. A little later, it transpired that both Anna and Irina had been put on the federal wanted list. And shortly before this interview, a person unknoiwn, who introduced himself as a policeman, wrote to Anna via WhatsApp and asked her where she was.

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How many criminal “fake news” cases have been launched in Russia

In March 2022, after invading Ukraine, Russia adopted laws that criminalized disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army and “discrediting:” its actions. As of February 2024, 402 such cases had been brought. Dozens of Russians have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for allegedly violating the law. According to human rights activists, this is tantamount to military censorship.

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It is still unknown why the criminal case was launched. The relatives were asked during questioning what Irina and Anna had written on their first VKontakte pages. They made a special point of asking, “Did they write about Bucha?”

“It’s no fun feeling like a criminal. Although we all know what it means now in this [sic] country. In short, the crackdown continues: you are on the right side, and they are on the wrong side. They have to do something: there’s probably no one left in Karelia to sink their claws into anymore, but they need fulfill quotas. It’s a crackdown for its own sake. I feared for my relatives, because way back in 1938 there were so-called enemies of the people, and children, wives, and husbands of enemies of the people. I’m afraid lest it come to this,” Irina says.

The human rights activists consulted by Anna and Irina have advised them not to return to Russia before the regime changes, otherwise they will be sentenced to hard time in prison.

“FOR THREE DAYS I BAWLED LIKE A BELUGA”

Both émigrés follow the news from Russia closely. They argue that the country is “hurtling into an abyss.”

“What is happening is simply absurd. It feels like the country exists in a kind of distorted reality in which good is evil, and black is white. They are engaged in such insanity, frankly, and you don’t understand how it is possible to support all of this. And then there are the people who have gone crazy on a nationwide scale and who think everything is fine there, that it’s the way it should be. I worked at a polling place for many years and I used to say all the time that when we socialize only with our own kind, we don’t see what the rest of the people are like, but I saw all kinds of people at the polling station. I know that might sound kind of arrogant, but I saw how massively ignorant people were. I’ve always been skeptical of the claim that the Soviet Union had the best education system. I don’t know how it was the best if it didn’t teach people to think, and if people blindly trust the authorities. The authorities are king and god to them, as this whole situation has shown. Basically, you get the feeling that all people have come down with insanity, and some are immune. The analogy with Hitler’s Germany immediately comes to mind, where the people were fooled in the same way, gulled by propaganda. Maybe there is still hope that if the regime changes and they tell folks on TV how it really was, then…. We are now like spectators looking at Russia from the outside, and it’s scary to watch what is happening there,” Irina says.

When asked how they reacted to the news of politician Alexei Navalny’s death, Anna is unable to reply. She immediately starts crying.

“That’s how we reacted,” Irina explains, crying too.

“It’s good that my daughter was here that day: we went to Munich with her. I spent the whole day with them. But in the evening they went to a concert, and I got on the Munich chat rooms and found out that there would be a rally on Freedom Square and went there,” says Anna.

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Alexei Navalny’s Death

The news of Alexei Navalny’s death came on 16 February 2024. He had been serving a nineteen-year sentence for “extremism,” after being convicted on seven criminal charges, including “creating an extremist community.” During his imprisonment, he was sent to a punishment cell twenty-seven times, spending almost 300 days there. After the politician’s death, pickets to mourn his passing were held in Russian cities, and the picketers were detained by the police en masse. The authorities refused to hand over his body to his relatives for a long time, demanding that they bury him in secret. Navalny’s associates argue that he was murdered and blame President Vladimir Putin for his death.

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“I bawled like a beluga for three days. I still can’t even look at the photos of him calmly,” Irina adds.

“In the past, Ira, you used to say, ‘Navalny will be released and I’ll go home,'” her friend remarks.

Irina doesn’t make any predictions now that she has emigrated.

“I don’t make any predictions and I don’t listen to them. My motto now is: do what must be done and what will be will be. And I would also add: do what you have to do and what you are able to do. What matters most is saving yourself and your loved ones. We don’t know how long this will last. Analyzing things even as they stand now, I can confidently say that nothing good is going to happen…. Well, how should I put it? Nothing good is going to happen quickly. But I’m not ruling out either possibility: that I’ll stay here, or that I’ll go back there. I’ll go home as soon as I can. If nothing changes there, I’ll stay here.”

Anna, however, says that she has almost no one left in Russia: her daughter emigrated to the Czech Republic back in 2016, and she hardly communicates with her relatives who stayed behind in Russia.

“I will be better off here anyway. As long as they don’t kick me out, I’ll stay here,” she adds.

The pensioners nevertheless try to keep involved in Russian politics. They traveled to Leipzig to sign a petition supporting Boris Nadezhdin’s presidential candidacy and then to Berlin to vote in the presidential election.

“There was such a huge queue. Because we were afraid of missing the train, we cut the queue a bit. A lot of people could not vote because, I think, only two polling stations were open in Germany—in Berlin and in Bonn. There were a lot of people who wanted to vote. We stood in line there with Yulia Navalnaya. And I talked to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and we had our pictures taken with Ekaterina Schulmann. There were so many celebrities, and the queue itself was very cool. There were a lot of young people, all chanting “Russia without Putin.” But there were also a few pro-Putin people who have lived in Germany for twenty years and go vote for Putin, and we trolled them a little bit. But this is life, this is reality,” says Irina.

What do Anna and Irina dream of?

“Grandchildren!” Anna answers immediately. “And first of all, of course, that the war end!”

“The first thing I wish for is that the war end. And the second is for me to go home,” says Irina.

Source: “‘It’s no fun feeling like a criminal’: female pensioners from Karelia emigrated to remain free,” Okno, 11 June 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.