From London, a Russian film maker explores the pain of exile

TimesLIVE

14-05-2025

When Russia was convulsed by revolution and civil war more than a century ago, an estimated two million people fled abroad, including artists, musicians and poets.
Some, like Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, became famous in the West, while others lived in near-obscurity, haunted by the desire to return home but able to do so only in their imaginations.
Liberov is equally fascinated by those who made the opposite choice and remained in Russia despite the danger of persecution, such as the poet Anna Akhmatova.
Akhmatova wrote dozens of poems reproaching her former lover Boris Anrep for leaving her, and Russia, behind, foreshadowing what Liberov calls the 'terrible conversation' taking place today between those who stayed behind and those who left.
She endured surveillance by the NKVD secret police, expulsion from the Writers' Union and her son's arrest, while other writers and artists, including her friend Osip Mandelstam, perished in Josef Stalin's camps. Several Akhmatova poems are included in Keys to Home, an album compiled by Liberov in what he calls his farewell to Russia. It features music by artists inside the country, though Liberov said seeking partners there was a tough process during which he discovered 'things I'd prefer not to know'.
'People were selfish, scared. People lied, people were false. People avoided (me), people did not respond,' he said.
However, he declined to engage in personal recriminations.
'If we're going to blame those who stayed and they're going to blame those who left, it leads to nowhere, only to further separation.'
From exile, Liberov, 44, has tracked the repression of fellow artists with horror.
In a high-profile 2024 case, a playwright and a director, Svetlana Petriychuk and Zhenya Berkovich, were sentenced to six years each in prison for 'justifying terrorism' in a play about Russian women who married Islamic State fighters.
Inspired by a defiant speech Berkovich delivered to the court in verse, Liberov created a widely viewed YouTube video in which her words were turned into rap-style lyrics, accompanied by drawings made inside the courtroom.
Last July Russian pianist Pavel Kushnir, 39, died in a Siberian prison where he had launched a hunger strike while awaiting trial on charges of inciting terrorism after posting anti-war material online.
Thanks to Liberov's efforts, a recording of Kushnir playing Sergei Rachmaninov's preludes has been restored and released on Spotify and Apple Music, and a scholarship was established to support young pianists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who want to study in Europe. Concerts dedicated to Kushnir are taking place this month in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and Berlin.
Liberov is pessimistic about what lies ahead. Russia squandered the opportunity to reinvent itself as a free country after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he said.
'So the question is: will we ever have this chance again? I pray for that, but I doubt it. If we have this chance I would love so very much to go back home and work there.'