Do you feel like your country no longer represents your values? Are you struggling to recognise the community around you? Has migration, in your mind, fundamentally altered the place you call home? If so, here’s a radical idea: become a migrant and move to a country that is actively welcoming people like you. The catch? That country is Russia.
In 2024, Russia launched the “shared values” visa – or “anti-woke” visa, if you prefer. There’s no employment requirement or language test; all disillusioned Westerners have to do is denounce “the destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” of their homelands. The Russian government claims to have received nearly 3,400 applications – although, as the presenter Dan Hardoon caveats, these numbers are difficult to verify. What’s not difficult is finding people eager to share their stories of escaping Western oppression by embracing the conservative utopia that is Russia under Vladimir Putin. They might not want to talk to Hardoon about it (the biased BBC can hardly be trusted), but they’re happy to hit the influencer circuit, making viral videos about their marvellous new lives, where the streets are clean, people are friendly, and politics is not run by the “gay agenda”.
The “moral migrants” who do speak to the BBC are more nuanced. A Christian man from Texas who believed moving to Russia was his “destiny” has since become concerned about the censorship in the country others portray as a free-speech paradise and admits he misses “the freedoms that have shaped the American personality”. A former Tory council candidate from Essex who emigrated to be with his Russian wife has no such qualms. Isn’t moving to Russia – and running a business encouraging other Brits to do the same – in the midst of Putin’s war quite a political thing to do? “I don’t really get involved in that. I’m not here as a politician.”
Let them go, you might argue. And obviously there’s no way to stop them. But whether the émigrés will admit it or not, there’s a war on – and it looks like they’ve picked their side.
[Further reading: The viruses that heal us]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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