From London, a Russian film maker explores the pain of exile

London: Russian film maker Roman Liberov had long been fascinated by writers who fled the country after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. He never imagined that he would one day become an exile himself.

In the midst of the Covid pandemic in January 2021, Liberov left Russia because of a powerful conviction that its people had become "hostages of the state" and that a long-simmering conflict with Ukraine would erupt into full-scale war.

Thirteen months later, his fears became reality when Russia invaded its neighbour. In 2023, he was designated as a "foreign agent", making it very risky to return. Yet even now, Liberov said he suffers doubts, and wonders if he should have stayed.

Despite throwing himself into projects in his new adopted home, Britain, he worries that by choosing to leave, he cut himself off from the mainstream of Russian culture.

Had he remained in Moscow - even in a climate where people risk jail for speaking out against President Vladimir Putin or criticising the war - his voice would have been "incomparably louder", he told Reuters.

"It's always louder when you're in the same cage, when you experience the same difficulties, when you are with your country and with your people, with all its grief and joy. And now ... for those who stayed in Russia, I'm a betrayer, I'm an alien, I'm someone who left."

Artists who move abroad are "condemned to be forgotten in our home country... We need to declare that we exist," he said.

"We Exist!" is the title Liberov gave to a 2023 "film concert" he produced that features Russian musicians now spread across the world from Montenegro to Argentina. It is also the name of the cultural foundation he runs from London, which aims to promote arts throughout the Russian diaspora.

Poems of exile

When Russia was convulsed by revolution and civil war more than a century ago, an estimated two million people fled abroad including artists, musicians and poets.

Some, like Vladimir Nabokov, author of "Lolita", became famous in the West, while others lived in near-obscurity, haunted by the desire to return home but able to do so only in their imaginations.

Liberov is equally fascinated by those who made the opposite choice and remained in Russia despite the danger of persecution, such as the poet Anna Akhmatova.

Akhmatova wrote dozens of poems reproaching her former lover Boris Anrep for leaving her, and Russia, behind - foreshadowing what Liberov calls the "terrible conversation" taking place today between those who stayed behind and those who left.

She endured surveillance by the NKVD secret police, expulsion from the Writers' Union and her son's arrest, while other writers and artists including her friend Osip Mandelstam perished in Josef Stalin's camps. Several Akhmatova poems are included in Keys to Home, an album compiled by Liberov in what he calls his farewell to Russia. It features music by artists still inside the country, though Liberov said seeking partners there was a tough process during which he discovered "things I'd prefer not to know".

"People were selfish, scared. People lied, people were false. People avoided (me), people did not respond," he said.

But he declines to engage in personal recriminations. "If we're going to blame those who stayed and they're going to blame those who left, it leads to nowhere, just to further separation."

Jailed artists

From exile, Liberov, 44, has tracked the repression of fellow artists with horror.

In a high-profile 2024 case, a playwright and a director, Svetlana Petriychuk and Zhenya Berkovich, were sentenced to six years each in prison for "justifying terrorism" in a play about Russian women who married Islamic State fighters.

Inspired by a defiant speech that Berkovich delivered to the court in verse, Liberov created a widely viewed YouTube video in which her words were turned into rap-style lyrics, accompanied by drawings made inside the courtroom.

Last July Russian pianist Pavel Kushnir, 39, died in a Siberian prison where he had launched a hunger strike while awaiting trial on charges of inciting terrorism, after posting anti-war material online.

Thanks to Liberov's efforts, a recording of Kushnir playing Sergei Rachmaninov's preludes has been restored and released on Spotify and Apple Music, and a scholarship was established to support young pianists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who want to study in Europe. Concerts dedicated to Kushnir are taking place this month in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and Berlin.

Liberov is pessimistic about what lies ahead. Russia squandered the opportunity to reinvent itself as a free country after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he said.

"And so the question now is: will we... ever have this chance again? I pray for that, but I doubt it. If we have this chance I would love so very much to go back home and to work there."