To my dear expatriate friends...

...and friends who live in other countries who have told me, "just come, it's better here."

I leave you with the words of Anna Akhmatova in 1922:

I am not one of those who left the land

to the mercy of its enemies.

Their flattery leaves me cold,

my songs are not for them to praise.

But I pity the exile's lot.

Like a felon, like a man half-dead,

dark is your path, wanderer;

wormwood infects your foreign bread.

But here, in the murk of conflagration,

where scarcely a friend is left to know,

we, the survivors, do not flinch

from anything, not from a single blow.

Surely the reckoning will be made

after the passing of this cloud.

We are the people without tears,

straighter than you... more proud.

Anyways. Protest meeting this evening.