"I just can't bear the idea of watching Putin on television every day for the next 12 years," Irtenyev said of the Russian leader who has presided over a relatively stable country, though one awash in corruption and increasing limits on personal freedoms. "I may not live that long. I want out now."
Irtenyev and his family have joined a new wave of Russian emigration that some have called the "Putin decade exodus."
Roughly 1.25 million Russians have left in the last 10 years, Sergei Stepashin, head of the national Audit Chamber, told the radio station Echo of Moscow. The chamber tracks migration through tax revenue.
The exodus is so large, he said, that it's comparable in numbers to the outrush in after the Bolshevik Revolution. "About as many left the country after 1917," he said.
The reasons vary. Some, like Irtenyev, chafe at life under Vladimir Putin's rule, which seems all but certain to continue with the prime minister's expected return to the presidency next year. But for many others, economic strictures are the prime motivation. With inflation on the rise, and the GDP stuck at an annual 3 percent growth rate the last three years - compared with 7 to 8 percent before the global economic crisis - Russians are feeling pinched.
Russian nuclear physicist Vladimir Alimov, who now works at the University of Toyama in Japan, said he could not survive on the $450 monthly salary of a senior researcher at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"Yes, I miss Russia, but as a scientist I couldn't work there with the ancient equipment which had not been replaced or upgraded since the Soviet times," Alimov, 60, said in a phone interview. "Here in Japan, I have fantastic work conditions. I can do the work I enjoy and be appreciated and valued for it."
