Posted on 11/21/2024 7:16:53 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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.
Crane, for instance, insists that he entered the Capitol during January 6 as an observer and blogger, yet he nonetheless attracted the attention of the FBI. He came to Russia last year and made a documentary for the state-owned RT channel in Russian-occupied Donbas, billing himself as an “independent American journalist” (despite sporting a prominent “Z,” the symbol of Russia’s “special military operation,” on his baseball cap). Crane continues to make documentary films for RT, as well as running several popular social media accounts celebrating life in Russia. For Crane, Russia is a “beacon of hope” and a “lifeboat” for conservatives from the US and Europe.
“A lot of people in America are tired of the LGBT agenda being pushed on them by Hollywood and media organizations and the government,” says Crane, a former medical technician who quit after refusing to administer Covid vaccines. “Look at [western] economies right now, look at their people. Look at the amount of homeless people on the streets, the amount of drug addicts. They’re rejecting moral values. We see a massive decline in western societies.”
Others have more practical explanations for why they love Russia. Standley moved to Moscow more than a decade ago, but since the beginning of the war his business has been, by his own account, to find “legal holes in the sanctions which allowed money to remitted 100 percent legally… in every law in the world, every regulation, there’s always holes and regulation, there’s always holes and cracks in financial laws.” Maltese financial regulators, however, begged to differ, and for a year and a half Standley was wanted by Interpol. Though the case has been closed (Standley’s name is currently not among Interpol’s outstanding Red Notices), he says he’d never move back to the UK. Russia is “such a diverse country. It’s a very free country in terms of what you want to say. Taxation is very low here.”
For Schutzman, the final straw came when “the FBI declared that traditional Catholics like us were domestic terrorists” (a reference to a 2023 memo, later withdrawn, by the FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia, detailing possible links between specific “radical traditionalist” Catholic groups and white nationalists). He visited Moscow in February last year and moved with his family that fall. Despite speaking little Russian, Schutzman found employment as a senior executive working on IT transformation. “We have gone up in the world since moving to Russia,” he says. “Angels carried us here.”
He loves his life in Moscow — a recent RT documentary showed the Schutzmans wheeling their young children, all in matching outfits, across Red Square in a special toddler-carrying cart. “People are traditional and normal here,” he says. “Men act like men, women act like women.” In his home in rural Kansas, by Schutzman’s account, he couldn’t take his kids to the store without them seeing trans people. In Russia, “people don’t walk up to my wife and mock her for having so many children.”
The exodus of up to a million Russian top executives and IT specialists after the beginning of the war has left a huge need for qualified professionals. There’s a lot of work to be done and not enough people to do it, which explains why Putin is keen to encourage westerners to move to Russia.
Russia has a mixed history when it comes to welcoming immigrants. Catherine the Great sent out recruiters to persuade whole communities of Saxons, French Protestants and British adventurers to bring their skills to New Russia. Several hundred American communists — including the black labor activist Lovett Fort-Whiteman — moved there in the 1920s, but all ended up in the gulag. Lee Harvey Oswald demanded political asylum in the USSR in 1959 and lived in Minsk for two years, marrying a Russian woman before changing his mind and moving back to the US. And in the 1990s up to 100,000 westerners, from entrepreneurs to hucksters to journalists, bankers and executives, piled into Moscow in search of money and good times. In the wake of sanctions and Kremlin expropriations of western-owned businesses, just a handful remain.
Nonetheless, Putin evidently hopes to make Russia into a sanctuary for conservatives from all over the world, a new world based on the unchanging values of Christianity and traditional family values. “I used to believe that America was a shining city on a hill,” says Butina. “But that American dream is broken, it’s gone… Now, for many westerners, Russia is the hope. And we are ready to welcome them.”
Many folks say that Russia is more conservative and Christian than the US is now. I've chatted/texted with a few who have moved there and they love their lives. God bless them all, I hope they make happy lives there and prosper.
I've also read articles from folks who move to the Philippines and are happy there as well. Again, they did so to get away from US politics and it's increasingly immoral society.
For me, if I was younger and not saddled with medical problems I would certainly love to explore places like that. But I am retired and on SSI, so I don't know how that would work for me. But it would certainly be nice to know if Russia is the "big bad" that western society makes it out to be or if that hopla is all smoke and mirrors to keep US society in check.
. But it would certainly be nice to know if Russia is the “big bad” that western society makes it out to be or if that hopla is all smoke and mirrors to keep US society in check.
These folks should study up on the history of the Volgadeutsch.
I bet most commentators here has not even been to Russia recently, much less have lived there for any period of time.
People prefer to spout the simple stories that their egos hold in their brains.
FWIW, I have never been to Russia, but I have lived in multiple countries in Europe and Asia.
The reality is usually quite different from our biased and closely-held notions, and US MSM propaganda.
Russia can turn on these people just like they did Ukraine.
China is another place to go where perversion is illegal.
It doesn’t make it a perfect place but in many ways, day-to-day life in the Chinese middle class is better than many places in the US.
“...Western conservatives moving to Russia...”
Now, that’s funny right there
yeah, smart people live in countries where kids are given sex change hormones and sex changes are covered for prisoners and millions of gangsters and rapists and murderers are allowed in freely and on and on and on :)
America has a chance to right its ship and I would never leave.
But your arrogance is kinda funny considering the country just BARELY survived (and still many not if neocons and other idiots have their way and start WWIII) a leftwing apocolypse.
And what’s the FIRST thing Rs do with their new power?
Not show up in the senate and let schumer get all the judges he can voted on.
Yes, we are NOT the dumb ones for trusting them :)
Without knowing your medical issues, private medical care is often far CHEAPER, and more professional, overseas.
I had a complete 2-day physical and body scan with MRI, extensive bloodwork, stress-tests, ultasounds, review and consultation with multiple doctors trained at excellent universities around the world etc... done in Thailand for under $1000
In USA that would cost many multiples higher, and my crappy state-health-marketplace Obamacare coverage wouldn't cover any of it, even though my family pays them nearly $20K per year to our communist, political, state-sponsored "health care provider."
But the West, as a whole, is still intact and still capable of redemption.
In contrast, it is in the very antidemocratic nature of the Russian soul to yearn for a "strong man" and pursue imperialistic policies.
Regards,
Nearly everywhere in the world, if people have long-term peace and stability, and (important) civil-society is allowed space to function normally without too much divisive social-engineering and aggressive politics from government, nearly all societies will be at least generally pleasant to live in.
Nothing against the wonderful Russian people (as opposed to Russian politicians), but no thanks!
Bee going on for 30 years.
“ That’s what the J6ers thought.”
And that will be fixed in January .
No such remedies can happen in Russia
The best look I have found for life in Russia is youtube videos by vloggers who predate 2022.
There is SOOO much propaganda, likely in both directions, and it is on videos by vloggers who are latecomers. There are several Russian vloggers who have been doing so for many years.
Here are a few:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj5GXZaE7qs
The young lady who runs this channel does a great job. People watch these and say “I would never ever want to live in a place that cold. It’s horrible!” Then she interviews people on the street with their sophisticated electronics and buses and those people say . . . “Oh! I love to vacation in Sochi! But I would not want to live there. I like it here.”
Travelling with Russell. Predates 2022. Australian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT9wUfhkhe4
Tool expo, 4 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86mt0guB0Y0
Russian Hockey game well outside Moscow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqHTpTJCDEQ
1000 miles from Moscow, food
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT9wUfhkhe4
From a few years ago
Russians are mocking those leaving Russia for America | Viral Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot_MO0-oZdc
I enjoy Eli From Russia’s videos.
Well if you can stand the winters its supposed to be a pretty good place. Sad to realize that’s how far the US has fallen.
MAGA!
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