WASHINGTON: Russian dissident historian Tamara Eidelman was on vacation in Greece when Moscow’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022 and she realized that she would not be going back to her home country.

With her single suitcase, Eidelman, 65, flew to Portugal, where her daughter had been living, and began a new life in exile.
“I am operating under the assumption that I will not return. I am building my life in Portugal,” Eidelman, who has over 1.6 million followers on her history channel on YouTube, told AFP. “I want to come back... but if I sit every day thinking ‘When will it finally happen?’ I will go mad.”
Eidelman, who was declared a “foreign agent” by the government in Moscow, is part of a group of exiled anti-war Russian public intellectuals and cultural figures who are rebuilding their careers abroad.
While they cater to a large diaspora — more than 800,000 Russians are estimated to have left the country in just the past two years — unlike the previous waves of emigration from Russia’s calamities, they are able to continue speaking to those who stayed via social media, despite growing government restrictions.
“I think it’s one of the advantages of today’s emigration, if there can be any advantages, that our ties with our homeland have not been ruptured so drastically,” Eidelman, who wore a pin in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on her black blouse, said before a lecture in a community center outside Washington.
“Today there is an opportunity to exchange ideas. And, despite all the bans, inside Russia you can still access what is being done by those who emigrated. It is extremely valuable, it must be used and cherished.”

While exiles are unlikely to have a significant impact on political life inside Russia, “they can be the keepers of ideas, the centers of expertise and civic education,” according to Alexander Morozov, a political analyst and lecturer at Charles University in Prague.
When political change occurs, “Those who have retained trust and their symbolic capital can play a role in Russia’s renewal,” he wrote in a recent paper.

During her first few months in Portugal, Eidelman, who worked as a history teacher at a prestigious Moscow school for more than 30 years before becoming an editor, blogger and public speaker, kept herself busy looking for a place to live, reassembling her YouTube team and signing up for Portuguese lessons.
But she would catch herself thinking she was there on a brief visit and that she needed to buy a bottle of Port wine to bring back to Moscow to her mother and friends. Then it hit her.
“I felt a tremendous weight pressing on me when things had settled down a little and I realized that I am going to be in this wonderful, beautiful country for a long time,” she said. “Of course, (President Vladimir Putin’s) regime will collapse, but I don’t know if I will be around to see it.”
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Eidelman’s YouTube channel has ballooned from some 500,000 followers to 1.63 million and a team of 30 people, with lectures on Russian, Ukrainian and world history — as well as a special presentation on Putin’s assault on democracy, which she delivered in a T-shirt that read “No Putin No War.”
“I want to express my unconditional support for Ukraine in this war and I believe that all its territories, including Crimea, must be returned to it,” Eidelman told AFP, referring to the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
During her lecture in an auditorium of several hundred Russian speakers titled “The Judgment of History,” Eidelman examined the painful questions of countries’ and societies’ culpability and responsibility for crimes from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany — with the clear undertone of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Prosecuting those who committed direct crimes against Ukraine will not be enough, Eidelman suggested in her interview with AFP.
“I believe that there cannot be collective responsibility, that a whole people cannot be guilty,” she told AFP. “But at the same time, there must be... moral responsibility, responsibility before one’s conscience.”
Alina, a 39-year-old Russia-born quality control manager drove more than eight hours to Washington from the southern US state of Tennessee with her husband and two children to hear Eidelman speak.
To Alina, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “a crime against a neighboring country, but it’s also a crime against my own country because crimes are being committed in the name of people like me, who don’t agree with it.”
In these tragic times, Eidelman’s talk was a breath of fresh air, Alina said.
“When I listen to her lectures, I believe that there is — if not hope, then at least some light ahead for you to follow,” she said. “You get the feeling that you are not alone in all of this, even though physically you live apart from everyone.”
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WASHINGTON: Students protesting the war in Gaza abandoned their camp at the University of Southern California early Sunday after being surrounded by police and threatened with arrest, while Northeastern University’s commencement began peacefully at Boston’s Fenway Park.
Developments in both places were being watched closely following scores of arrests last month — 94 people at USC in Los Angeles and about 100 at Northeastern in Boston.
Dozens of Los Angeles Police Department officers arrived about 4 a.m. at USC to assist campus safety officers. The university had warned of arrests on social media and in person. Video showed some protesters packing up and leaving, while officers formed lines to push others away from the camp as it emptied out. The university said there were no reports of any arrests.
USC President Carol Folt said it was time to draw a line because “the occupation was spiraling in a dangerous direction” with areas of campus blocked and people being harassed.
“The operation was peaceful,” Folt wrote in an update. “Campus is opening, students are returning to prepare for finals, and commencement set-up is in full swing.”
USC earlier canceled its main graduation ceremony while allowing other commencement activities to continue.
At the Northeastern commencement Sunday, some students waved small Palestinian and Israeli flags, but were outnumbered by those waving the flags of India and the US, among others. Undergraduate student speaker Rebecca Bamidele drew brief cheers when she called for peace in Gaza.
The Associated Press has tallied about 2,500 people arrested at about 50 campuses since April 18, based on its reporting and statements from universities and law enforcement.
Arrests continued apace over the weekend. At the University of Virginia, there were 25 arrests Saturday for trespassing after police clashed with protesters who refused to remove tents. At the Art Institute of Chicago campus, police cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment hours after it was set up Saturday and arrested 68 people, saying they would be charged with criminal trespass.
ARRESTS IN VIRGINIA
In Charlottesville, Virginia, student demonstrators began their protest on a lawn outside the school chapel Tuesday. Video on Saturday showed police in riot gear and holding shields lined up on campus, while protesters chanted “Free Palestine.”
As police moved in, students were pushed to the ground, pulled by their arms and sprayed with a chemical irritant, Laura Goldblatt, an assistant professor who has been helping the demonstrators, told The Washington Post. The university said protesters were told that tents were banned under school policy and were asked to remove them.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares told Fox News on Sunday the police response was justified because students had been warned repeatedly to leave, were violating the school’s conduct code, and that outsiders who were not students provided protesters with supplies like wooden barriers.
“We’ve seen folks that are not students show up in riot gear with bull horns to direct the protesters on how to flank our officers,” Miyares said.
He said some had put bear spray into water bottles and thrown them at officers.
It was the latest clash in weeks of protests and tension at US colleges and universities.
Tent encampments of protesters urging universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread in a student movement unlike any other this century. Some schools reached agreements with protesters to end the demonstrations and reduce the possibility of disrupting final exams and commencements.
DEMONSTRATIONS AMID COMMENCEMENT
The University of Michigan was among the schools bracing for protests during commencement this weekend, as were Indiana University, Ohio State University and Northeastern. More ceremonies are planned in the coming weeks.
In Ann Arbor, there was a protest at the beginning of the event at Michigan Stadium. About 75 people, many wearing traditional Arabic kaffiyehs along with their graduation caps, marched up the main aisle toward the stage.
They chanted “Regents, regents, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!” while holding signs, including one that read: “No universities left in Gaza.”
Overhead, planes pulled banners with competing messages. “Divest from Israel now! Free Palestine!” and “We stand with Israel. Jewish lives matter.”
Officials said no one was arrested, and the protest didn’t seriously interrupt the nearly two-hour event, attended by tens of thousands of people, some of them waving Israeli flags.
OTHER PROTESTS CONTINUE
At Indiana University, protesters urged supporters to wear their kaffiyehs and walk out during remarks by school President Pamela Whitten on Saturday evening. The Bloomington campus designated a protest zone outside Memorial Stadium, where the ceremony was held.
At Princeton University in New Jersey, 18 students began a hunger strike to try to push the university to divest from companies tied to Israel. Students at other colleges, including Brown and Yale, launched similar hunger strikes this year before the more recent wave of demonstrations.
The protests stem from the conflict that started Oct. 7 when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, about two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. Israeli strikes have devastated the enclave and displaced most of its inhabitants.