A Russian Winter’s Lost Generation

“When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent.”

I first saw them alongside the boardwalks of Antalya in Autumn 2022. Mostly young, mostly male, wandering the seafronts with melancholy expressions. Stuck in limbo, between their homeland and the EU, wondering what to do next.

I had no doubt about who these men were. They were Russia’s lost generation, yet another wave of emigres caused by the nation’s endlessly wasteful imperialist ambitions.

This phenomenon is not limited to Turkey. Cities such as Tbilisi, Berlin, Yerevan and Tashkent have seen a significant uptick in immigration from young Russian people, whether it’s to flee the draft or simply out of disgust with Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. The total number could be close to a million.

Patric Chiha’s thoughtful, unfocussed documentary A Russian Winter (2026) looks at the lives of five Russians in Paris and Istanbul — Margarita, Yuri, Philipp, Andrew and Tatianna — and captures this inner sense of turmoil through wide tableaus, contrasting our Gen Z flyaways against vast buildings, rivers and fields.

Foregoing any sense of editorialising in favour of letting the young adults speak for themselves (even as their conversations are very much “staged” in terms of blocking), this documentary gives us an insight into the other side of the war. One less dramatic, and infinitely less painful than the Ukrainian experience (one subject refuses to call himself a victim here). Nonetheless, this film offers a sensitive portrait of what it means to be cast adrift by a society bent on pointless war and destruction. 

We get the sense that the Russian youth still don’t have anything to rally around. As the epigraph shows, a quote by a Soviet official paraphrased by one of the kids, the artistic scene in the nation has been decimated by this act of barbarism, with no slogan, no “Peremen!” (Changes), for the next generation to believe in. Right now, as captured in Chicha’s languid scenes, they are caught in a holding pattern, unable to envision a return to the motherland.

Touched upon, but not fully unpacked, is the discrimination these people feel in their new homes. You only have to click around Twitter a little bit to find huge corners of the internet, led by NAFO and senior figures in Estonian politics, that are dedicated to painting all Russians as bloodthirsty non-Europeans, with no compassion for their fellow man. Small films like this, even if this one is a little minor, show us how such views are utter hogwash. These are just your generic Generation Z kids, forced into extraordinary circumstances by Putin’s fascist regime.

It’s easy to criticise this film for its lack of rigour. Conversations are often repetitive, with many artistic gestures — musical interludes, colour negative footage, dramatic camerasweeps across the Bosphorus — perhaps unrelated to the subject at hand. But this approach captures the meandering, moody, elegiac atmosphere I first encountered three and a half years ago on the Turkish Mediterranean: poor men caught between lives, dreaming of an impossible alternative.