Not your father's gulag

Andrew Kramer has an article in The New York Times about what passes for exile in the New Russia:

A few years back, before he settled in the bucolic town of Barvikha, in a pine forest near Moscow, Askar Akayev, then the president of Kyrgyzstan, had had a very stressful day. Outside his presidential palace, an angry mob had gathered. An overturned car was on fire. Protesters had shinned over a wrought-iron fence and were breaking ground-floor windows and prying open doors. Then came word from a security adviser: the time had come. “I left in the suit I was standing up in,” Akayev told a journalist soon after his downfall in March of 2005. Within days he was here, staying in a government-owned sanitarium— and in good company.
This improbable small town of villas and luxury boutiques, built around the sanitarium where Akayev stayed, is home to half a dozen or so deposed leaders and members of their families. And, in its snowy tranquillity, it offers one strange, possible future for the embattled president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, as Western governments have been pressuring Russia since summer to smooth his departure with an offer of asylum.
For now, even with rebel fighters closing in on Damascus, diplomats in Russia, Assad’s most important ally, have denied they are considering granting him safe haven as a step toward resolution of the conflict. But the Russians have come through with eleventh-hour rescues of their allies before.
“The Russians have experience with getting heads of state out in the nick of time,” said Mark N. Katz, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Virginia. “They could be trying to signal to Assad there is an offer, but the window of opportunity is not going to remain open for a long time.”
Leaders’ hurried packing and just-in-time flight to this place from angry street crowds or the nearing sound of gunfire brought measures of resolution to conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere.
Russia has been inching closer to agreeing to a settlement that would include Assad’s departure, if that is even possible at this juncture, with rebels occupying parts of the capital and firing mortar rounds at the presidential palace in the Muhajireen neighborhood of Damascus.
Recently, the United Nations envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Russian diplomats agreed to revive a peace initiative that stalled last summer after the Russians insisted it refrain from specifically excluding a role for Assad in any transition government. It was unclear whether Russia would accede to such a demand in any new agreement and, if so, whether the Syrian leader would land here.
Not all political exiles live in the districts of spacious country homes that lie here, along the Ryublyovsky Highway, but many do.
By many accounts, once here, these people enjoy the quiet and privileged afterlife of former elites of Soviet or Russian client states that have folded. In the Barvikha Luxury Village, a snowy shopping center, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, and Dolce & Gabbana shops were open on a recent visit, of possible interest to Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, who is known to dress fashionably
Borislav Milosevic, the brother of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who was accused of war crimes and who died in 2006, said that family members who had settled in Barvikha had been getting on swimmingly since the Yugoslav conflicts faded from the news. The former leader’s widow, Mirjana Markovic, and son, Marko Milosevic, live in separate villas here. “People come from Serbia to visit,” Borislav Milosevic said in a telephone interview about Markovic’s nine years in exile, a life he described as wholly “ordinary” in its daily routines. “She has friends over all the time. She lives a respectable, normal life.”
Markovic has been compiling a book of her husband’s interviews, and her son is married to a Russian woman, with whom he has a daughter. Markovic’s experience of exile in this town, with children and grandchildren nearby, is not burdensome or isolating, Borislav Milosevic said.
The neighborhood would by no means be seen as going downhill if the Assads came to Barvikha, Milosevic said. Accepting Asma al-Assad and the children in particular, he said, would be a “humanitarian gesture.” Markovic, asked by phone if a reporter could visit her country home for an interview, declined.
A telephone number for Akayev, the deposed president of Kyrgyzstan who took up residence here after escaping the street protests known as the Tulip Revolution in 2005, could not be found. But a shop attendant at the Bentley dealership in Barvikha, Anna Shkoda, said she regularly saw Akayev’s son, Aidar, around town. The dealership sold the family a Flying Spur model Bentley in their first year or so of exile. “They had much more money when they just arrived,” Shkoda said.
The town, home mostly to Russian nouveaux riches, is blocked from Moscow by traffic jams, but is otherwise a fine alternative to becoming the star in a show trial, or a victim of a summary execution on some dusty roadside. It is a sprawl of narrow lanes in a pine forest, where every house hides behind a gigantic wall, and the lenses of closed-circuit television cameras stare blankly at passers-by.
Five years after Akayev was ousted, his successor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was similarly deposed in a popular uprising when protesters stormed the presidential palace. But he fled to Belarus, avoiding the potential embarrassment of the two exiles, one of whom overthrew the other, becoming neighbors.
Moscow’s reputation as a welcoming city for deposed autocrats was reinforced in 2004, when the mayor at the time, Yuri M. Luzhkov, provided his private jet to Aslan Abashidze, the separatist leader of the Ajaria region of Georgia, in a timely gesture. Federal troops had already started their advance into his capital city, Batumi. Abashidze reportedly lives in Barvikha.
Not all asylum bids in Moscow have gone smoothly. After losing power in East Germany, Erich Honecker and his wife, Margot Honecker, who was known as the Purple Witch for her violet hair dyes and support for repressive policies, fled to Moscow from a Soviet air base in Germany. They took up residence in the Chilean embassy, but President Boris N. Yeltsin extradited the couple back to Germany.
In 1998, the leader of the once Communist-leaning Kurdistan Workers Party, Abdullah Ocalan, fled from Syria to Moscow. But the Russians would not take him. He was put on a flight to Africa, where he was caught; his enemies, the Turks, have kept him locked in an island prison since.
Today, time may be running short for the Assads. This week, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Russia did not even want to broker Assad’s asylum with a third country. “Some countries in the region have turned to us and suggested, ‘Tell Assad we are ready to fix him up', ” Lavrov said. “If these people are wishing to give him some kind of guarantees, be our guest.”

Rico says it beats the shit out of Siberia. Hopefully, Assad will avail himself of the opportunity... (But let's get this straight: the town has Gucci, Ralph Lauren, and Dolce & Gabbana shops, and a Bentley dealership? Amazing...)