Near but not together
Life in exile
Suspended
I was met at Lisbon airport by someone from my previous life. We were from the same city but hadn’t seen each other in five years. He had long since left Russia and, a year before my move, relocated to Portugal from Hungary, where he had completed his master’s degree. In many ways, it was his decision that had pushed me toward applying for a PhD program and choosing Lisbon. I had expected warmth, perhaps even relief at seeing a familiar face. Instead, there was something ambiguous in his expression—more tension than joy. He hesitated before hugging me, as if deciding whether the gesture was still appropriate.
At first, I rented a small room, then he offered to host me for a few nights. His flatmate had a friend staying over, a woman from eastern Ukraine who had long been living in Budapest. His apartment was a small, cozy place in a mid-century building, with wooden floors, plastered ceilings and a lightly refreshed interior that kept its old warmth. The atmosphere was polite, the discussion measured. We did not touch on the subject of the war, as if each of us sensed that one misplaced sentence could tilt the balance of civility.
My search for housing dragged. At one apartment, the landlady’s expression shifted the moment she saw my Russian passport. At another, the owner admitted she could not in fact legally rent the room and drove me across town to show a different place. On the way, she mentioned that she had once worked at Portugal’s foreign ministry, that she had seen Vladimir Putin in person at official events. She watched my reaction carefully, as if checking whether I admired him. Then she began recounting stories of people “falling out of windows,” assuring me that we Russians know far less than we think. Nothing came of that conversation, either.
I ended up staying with my friend far longer than planned. He invited me into his circle—fellow graduates from Hungary, Russians who had been living in Europe for years. It was an established group, stable and self-contained. I assumed I was included. I was wrong.
My academic path was treated as an oddity. I later understood that within parts of the Russian émigré milieu, backgrounds in IT, digital marketing, and other forms of portable, well-paid remote work are valued far more highly. Against the mobility and financial security of those professions, a PhD in comparative politics is seen as impractical, even marginal. Invitations gradually stopped.
It was against this backdrop—of suspension, temporariness and a slowly crystallizing isolation, when it became clear that the dinner invitations had quietly ceased for good—that small, unexpected new avenues of social life began to open: hikes, film clubs, grocery stores, New Year’s gatherings, accidental conversations. Brief forms of togetherness in which people met for a moment, avoided certain questions and promised nothing beyond the evening.
No winners
I arrived in Lisbon in October 2024 at the tail end of a fleeting surge of activity among Russia’s liberal émigré community. I managed to catch only a glimpse of it.
In the first days, I was welcomed by Portuguese colleagues from a research institute. From those initial conversations, something became clear: The city’s political atmosphere was tense but not for purely ideological reasons. Yes, they criticized the rising popularity of the Portuguese right-wing populist André Ventura and his party, Chega. But there was another recurring note: Life itself was becoming noticeably harder. Prices were soaring, rental housing in the capital was increasingly inaccessible even to locals, and in some neighborhoods, people felt as if they were no longer at home.
When I mentioned that candidates of Russian origin were attempting to participate in Portuguese elections, I heard something along the lines of: “Strange—now even migrants are running for office instead of Portuguese.” There was no outrage in the remark. There was fatigue and unmistakable skepticism about politics.
Parliamentary elections had taken place in the country six months earlier. Among the candidates was Pavel Elizarov, a Russian former member of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s team, running on the ticket of Iniciativa Liberal. The center-right party secured only eight seats. Elizarov did not enter parliament but was actively promoting a legislative initiative on humanitarian visas. As he described it, the proposed law would allow individuals facing political persecution—including in Russia—to obtain a special visa to Portugal, enabling them to enter legally and apply for asylum once in the country.
But Elizarov lost that battle as well. A year later, in May 2025, after the dramatic rise of hte far-right Chega Party, parliament voted to extend the required period of residence for citizenship from five to 10 years with no transitional provisions.
The shop window
In one of my first days in the city, I stopped in front of a bookstore window. On the cover of a prominently displayed book were the faces of Putin, the Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine was printed in bold across the title. The book presented itself as an attempt to “explain the war in its entirety” through geopolitics, the fate of Europe and a language of historical inevitability.
I bought it almost automatically, less out of curiosity than professional reflex. At the register, I was even given a small discount after showing a certificate from an international conference in Almaty, where I had been shortly before arriving in Lisbon. An academic credential, it turned out, could function as currency in a bookstore.
The author was Portuguese. He described himself as one of Chega’s founders, later expelled from the party. The book largely reproduced familiar Kremlin narratives about the war: appeals to “realism,” civilizational confrontation, a geopolitical logic that framed Ukraine as a pawn in a larger struggle. There was also clear admiration for Dugin’s ideas. Later, I discovered that the same publishing house had released Dugin’s own book in Portuguese, The Trump Revolution.
A few months later, in noticeably larger quantities, a Portuguese translation of a book about Alexei Navalny appeared on Lisbon shelves. In the capital of an EU country, one could easily purchase both texts associated with Russian opposition movements and works echoing pro-Kremlin ideological frameworks. Polarization over such issues here—shaped not only by attitudes toward Russia but also deeper domestic divides over the perceived influx of migrants, the financial and political costs of supporting Ukraine and the increasingly contested role of Brussels in Europe’s future—was not simply imported by émigrés. It was already present, articulated in Portuguese, printed by local publishers, circulating among local readers.
Multiple formats
Among the more common Russian-speaking formats in Lisbon are Mafia game nights, stand-up shows at the bar Sputnik, a tight-knit circle of padel players, communities of climbers and surfers, a film club, hiking groups.
There’s also a club for Russian speakers where festivals and themed lecture events occasionally take place. Its origins are not entirely apolitical: The founder was previously married to a Russian businessman whose name has appeared in Ukrainian media reports in connection with alleged pro-Kremlin business networks.
An unspoken rule governs nearly all these spaces: avoid politics. Don’t ask directly what passport people hold, what nationality they claim, why they left or what they think about the war. What matters more is whether you can play, hike, make jokes, discuss a film or exchange practical advice about adapting to life abroad. Political views are not formally banned but they are not a foundation for belonging, either. They hover in the background, acknowledged but bracketed.
At the same time, the figures who are regularly mocked on a local Telegram channel known for pro-Kremlin narratives are rarely discussed offline. Few people in these circles seem to follow the activities of liberal anti-Putin activists such as Elizarov, Ksenia Ashrafulina or Timofei Bugaevsky—people who appear on Portuguese television and in local papers and are sometimes better known among politically attentive Portuguese than among the recent Russian-speaking arrivals. For many in this newer wave of emigration, those names remain peripheral, as do Portuguese politics.
What emerges is a fragmented environment: Public Russian-speaking actors operate in one sphere, digital polemics unfold in another and everyday forms of togetherness occupy a third. Most of the time, there is no shared stage connecting them.
Migrant hostility
At the same time, there is another Russian-speaking milieu in Lisbon, one that’s barely visible offline. It does not show up at film clubs, hiking meetups, kitchen-table conversations about human rights or lectures by visiting historians and performers. It exists primarily on Telegram. There are no awkward pauses there. The language is not always direct but it is unmistakably sharp and often cruel.
In that channel, supporters of Navalny and other opposition movements are derided as “parasitic little fighters” or “ridiculous gnomes.” Sympathy for Ukraine—and Portugal’s assistance to the country—is dismissed as hypocrisy. The official position of the Russian embassy regarding an attempted march of the “Immortal Regiment” to honor Soviet veterans of World War II is framed as the only reasonable one. Jokes about “cultural enrichment” circulate freely, often aimed at non-white migrants. Portuguese tolerance of others is mocked. Sympathy for Chega is not concealed.
It is in this digital space that the erosion of empathy becomes most visible. When a well-known figure within the newer wave of Russian migrants in Lisbon went missing and people began searching for him, the Telegram channel quickly filled with speculation. Commenters wrote not with concern but overt disdain that he was gay, a “fixer” helping other newly arrived Russians with paperwork, flooding Portugal with freeloaders like himself, and that he had probably fled the city to escape justice. There was no alarm in those messages. Only mockery.
Polarization does not always manifest itself in open debate. Sometimes it takes the form of separate registers of speech: In one, caution and a desire not to inflame tensions; in the other, a readiness to label, ridicule, exclude. People may walk the same streets and shop in the same grocery stores but still speak about the world as if they inhabit entirely different countries—countries that ceased to recognize one another long ago.
Sailors: symbol and person
Over the summer, an incident in the municipality of Setúbal just south of Lisbon drew wide attention in the Portuguese press. Sailors from a Russian vessel arriving from Brazil entered a restaurant wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “It’s Russia’s Time.” Ukrainians were present in the restaurant. An argument broke out and quickly escalated into a scuffle. Video clips and reports circulated across news media. The story became another reminder that the war does not remain outside Europe—it travels with people, with symbols, with tones of voice.
That episode lingered in my mind. Later, a friend and I were walking one night along the Lisbon waterfront when a voice called out from the darkness, sharp, with a slightly rough, streetwise edge. For a second, tension rose. We saw two men who introduced themselves as sailors from a Russian ship that had come in from Ireland.
The conversation unfolded unexpectedly calmly. One was a Ukrainian from Crimea holding a Russian passport. The other was Azerbaijani. They asked about housing prices, about everyday life in Lisbon. There were no slogans, no talk of “Russia’s time.” The Crimean man said something that stayed with me: “I don’t even know who I am now—Ukrainian or Russian.” He said it without drama, almost wearily. “At sea, it’s easier. You don’t have to decide every day.”
The scene did not negate what had happened in Setúbal. Those T-shirts were real. The fight was real. But the quiet exchange on the waterfront was also real. The category “sailors from Russia” isn’t monolithic. In one case, identity played out through a slogan. In another, uncertainty and fatigue. That gap felt important to me. In exile, as in war, it’s easy to generalize. Much harder to hold on to complexity.
The store
One day, I found myself in a small shop selling goods from Ukraine and Germany, the kind of place people visit not for exotic delicacies but familiar flavors. Bread, sweets, buckwheat, pickled vegetables—the ordinary staples of everyday life back home. The regular customers were immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus. No one asked where you were from. No one requested a biography. The shop operated by its own logic—calm, polite, resolutely domestic.
After a closer look, details began to stand out: posters in support of Ukraine on the walls, shelves stocked mostly with German-produced goods carrying Russian-language labels, alongside Ukrainian brands. Products from Russia were rare—likely less for ideological reasons than because of sanctions against Moscow, broken supply chains and the company’s own production facilities in Germany.
At the checkout, a woman spoke to the cashier in confident, almost patronizing Russian, as though she were returning to a well-established routine. The subject was the cancellation of special discounts. From the exchange it became apparent that she was a relative—the wife, probably—of an employee at the Russian embassy. She inquired about the price reductions that had previously been extended to “embassy families.”
The cashier responded gently: Those larger discounts had been discontinued, too many relatives, too many losses for the business. The woman quickly adjusted her argument. If not as an embassy wife, then surely as a loyal, longstanding customer, she deserved an exception. She emphasized how much she bought there. The evidence lay in her shopping basket, full to the brim.
The cashier remained impeccably polite. There was no irritation in her voice, no coldness. She listened, smiled and eventually found a compromise: To accommodate this important customer without formally breaking the new rule, she applied a standard loyalty-card discount and entered it as a birthday promotion. The gesture was discreet, almost ritualistic—a small administrative maneuver that allowed everyone to preserve dignity.
Later I thought that scenes like this perhaps best explain how the city functions after the rupture caused by the war and the arrival of new diasporas. People whom the same conflict had pushed to opposite sides of the divide: embassy-linked Russians, Russians who fled their own state and Ukrainians whose own experiences of the war shape their attitudes toward both groups in different ways. They now stand in the same queues and shop for the same everyday goods. No agreement is required. No reconciliation. No alignment of symbolic worlds. It is enough to remain courteous, uphold the ritual, avoid tearing the fabric. Politics don’t vanish in such spaces, they simply recede, giving way to conversations about discounts, birthdays and the plastic bags into which groceries are carefully packed.
The cinematheque
One evening I found myself at a small Russian-speaking film club founded by a few guys from St. Petersburg. The setup was modest, improvised: a projector, mismatched chairs, tea in paper cups, conversations held in lowered voices. That night, we were watching “EuroTrip”—an early-2000s American teen comedy that had once felt light, chaotic and almost carefree.
After the screening, discussion quickly gravitated toward the film’s romantic momentum and naïve optimism. The national stereotypes—English football fans of vaguely criminal appearance hurling insults at “frog-eating” Frenchmen, a caricatured German family with a child who draws Hitler mustaches under his nose and begins to march—were recalled as relics of a time when such stereotypes did not seem dangerous. The Europe on screen looked self-assured.
Someone suggested that back then, there simply was no “agenda.” I ventured that perhaps the difference wasn’t only about cultural norms but also the absence of war. In the early 2000s, the word “fascism” had long receded into the archives of history. Today, with war as the background noise, it has returned as a live label.
Not everyone welcomed that line of thought. Some shrugged it off. Others preferred not to engage. But the man sitting next to me muttered something under his breath, not in disagreement but seemingly in frustration with those who insisted on separating the film from the present—as if war had no bearing on what we find funny or consider permissible today. It was not an intervention, not an argument, just a quiet murmur of alignment.
The disagreements did not escalate. The interlocutors simply grew more careful. We remained in the same room, speaking the same language, reflecting on the same film. And yet it was evident that even here, there was no shared way to speak about past laughter without inevitably confronting the present.
The old New Year
Sometimes tradition and innovation combine in the most unexpected configurations. On New Year’s Eve, the most important holiday of the year back in Russia, I was in a gathering organized by a group of lesbian women. There was no grand plan. One had recently broken up with her Brazilian girlfriend; another had not yet found a partner; the roommates in the apartment where we gathered had no other large, noisy parties to join. The evening was assembled almost accidentally by people who, in many cases, were meeting for the first time, united by little more than coincidence and a shared reluctance to spend the night alone.
The conversation gradually shifted toward how exactly to mark the moment. Almost without discussion, everyone agreed we should open a bottle of Soviet champagne—bought at the Ukrainian-German grocery store where the Russian embassy wife had argued at the register. We timed the celebration not to local time but the Kremlin’s midnight chimes. Not because anyone insisted on “tradition,” but as if by inertia, as something self-evident to do.
However, the chimes come bundled with an obligatory preface, the president’s traditional New Year’s address. Not everyone was eager to listen. As Putin spoke, curses directed at “the old man” flew; someone turned away demonstratively, someone else rolled his eyes. But for the sake of the ritual, the precise timing of the chimes, the speech was endured, like a sequence no one dared interrupt.
As a counterbalance, once the toast was made, one of the women insisted that we watch another New Year’s address, by the political commentator Ekaterina Shulman, a leading exile. That decision did not please everyone, either. Some found it too bleak, too long, ill-suited to a festive night. And yet the fact that, in the same apartment, at the same midnight hour, the voices of Putin and Shulman followed one another back-to-back felt emblematic—a collage of incompatible layers of reality compressed into a single moment.
There was no irony, no carefully staged performance. It simply reflected how life after rupture functions: Some old rituals persist but filled with new meanings and new voices. Innovation does not displace tradition; it inserts itself, awkwardly at times, irritably at others, but almost inevitably. Soviet champagne, the Kremlin chimes, the presidential address, an independent political analyst, a gathering far removed from any conventional New Year’s table—all of it coexisted for an evening without resolving into harmony but also without falling apart.
Nothing is fully canceled, nothing fully embraced. Tradition no longer belongs to those who once claimed ownership. It exists in borrowed apartments and improvised communities, reshaped and repurposed, accompanied by the lingering sense that, for now, there may simply be no other way.
Andrei Prudnikow is a political scientist, former Russian journalist and doctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon studying conspiracy narratives and political discourse in contemporary Russia.
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