Anastasia Mironova Why do migrants get depressed and what does Erzyan Dima have to do with it 08:13

There is a new meme in the world. Russia has already given it one. This is a scuttle. I will not name a Russian peasant named Alexei, who blessed humanity with such a rich term, I will only note that the word “skuf” gradually spread in different countries, where it acquired folk etymology. For example, in British English I have already come across the word “scufidon”, which the British simply derived from scuttle – “dragging one’s feet” and cupid – “Cupid”. But all this is an allusion, the word is ours, the actual skuf is also ours.

And now we have enriched the world in another metaphorical way. It was Dmitry Ch., a 36-year-old Russian who became famous for not wanting to leave his dirty and unpaid apartment in Yerevan. The profile of the pink-haired man with eyeliner shows that he is a non-binary, chaotic, good homosexual, a Mordovian-Erzya queen. Who works or once worked as a programmer. Erzya Dima first became famous here, the next day all of Armenia knew him, and now a man with two cats is known in dozens of countries. For foreigners, he became a symbol of infantilism, carelessness and absurdity of a new generation of fragile people, who are mobilizing fragile people with their simple gender studies, leftist prejudices and affectionate attitude towards each other.

Dima has two cats, he is depressed and has no money. So he trashed the apartment and ruined it. I stopped paying for the same reason. When they decided to evict him, he called the police, sincerely convinced that a gay person with depression, no shelter, two cats and even a non-binary person cannot be kicked out of anywhere.

This is the new culture. People of this breed consider themselves very valuable. They are not joking, they really wonder why everything in this world is not given to them for nothing, just because they are defenseless, depressed and do not understand what gender they were born with. He was so convinced of his right to have everything because he was depressed, gender dysphoric and did not have an apartment that he personally called the police. Anyway, they evicted him. The leftist idea did not work. Apparently, Armenians are as saturated with communism as we are. And frankly, even during communism, there was no such thing as a person not paying for housing, not working and not having the right to fire him.

Dima also has an obvious complex – he really doesn’t want to be called Russian. There are 744 thousand Mordovians living in Russia, 52 thousand of whom are Erzya. The strange queen of Yerevan could of course be an Erzyan, but it seems to me that Dima from Penza is just Russian. As for the Mordovians, we Russians almost all have traces of Mordovians in our DNA. But if you need to find work abroad and you still haven’t paid rent for two months, then of course you start going out.
In general, this type of new person is crystalline in every sense. True, they appear among the zoomors, and “Dima” is close to forty. This makes the meme even brighter. A kind of grotesque symbol of the helplessness of a citizen fed by the left-tolerant agenda. He already has wrinkles and a bald spot, but he spends time with cats and demands respect for his depression and inability to cope with life. We have not yet seen such people en masse, but in Europe and America these people already receive disability and social assistance on the grounds that they are depressed and do not want to work.

By the way, in Penza, the Erzya Queen had an individual entrepreneur who provided certain computer services. That is, the person is completely impractical. But apparently he relaxed there. And he became a meme, showing the standard left-liberal nonsense that the new generation claims.

But there. But for us, the case of “Dima” is interesting to others. It shows the fate of the last wave of emigration. Our hero is an IT specialist. Average, as I understand it, success. Information about him is contradictory, it is unclear where he works: in Moscow or Penza? There were not enough stars in the sky in Russia, but somehow I lived. The key point is this: there was no political or civil activist among us. I did not find any political statements from “Dima”, not even a hint that he had an uncomfortable civil position in Russia that would prevent him from living and developing anymore. Why did he dive into the maw of a humanitarian catastrophe?

Yes, yes, I believe there will be migration in 2022-2023. We have a new humanitarian disaster. And not because we lost hundreds of thousands of successful, promising, valuable people. Like this Dima. The disaster is direct; people got into trouble. Nowhere. Of course, not all. Someone calmly parted with their savings and will never work again. Someone moved with their employer, they are happy, but of course they are nervous: what if they lose their job?

But most of them were left empty-handed. The second aggravating circumstance is that they were left with nothing. I remember the hasty exchange of savings at the rate of 150 rubles per dollar in February 2022. I remember changing my car for a bicycle in Upper Lars in September 2022. I remember the incomprehensible opinion leaders assuring people that everything would “settle down” in a few months. People left their settled lives, took their children and went away for a few months. With what they took out this time, others have been living abroad for the third year.

But this is not the hardest part. What’s worse, in my opinion, is that they simply leave. Most of those who leave have never faced any political or other risks in Russia. Even before 2022, they did not have the habit of speaking openly, they did not have popular pages on social networks. But what about the popular ones? I know those who have only recipes on their pages with 50 friends, classmates and classmates; they themselves worked at some municipal unitary enterprise and never planned to leave or political statements. Suddenly these people sat down and went/flew to God knows where. I really don’t understand why and I don’t understand where. They were not in danger here. They had never felt the need to protest against anything before. It is understandable that men are sometimes afraid of the army. But there are many single women who run away, even with their children.

This is the third year of wandering around foreign countries. It is not legalized anywhere. Sell everything in Russia and eat the income already. Deprived of affordable free health care. Without the opportunity to meet friends and relatives. After all, you do not have a native language and you do not have the opportunity to choose your social circle. This is very important in emigration: you communicate not with those who are of interest to you, but with those who speak Russian nearby. Different people inevitably become friends. They go to parties, picnics, and movie shows together. Just to hear your native language. This factor (inability to choose a social circle) is often unpredictable to anyone until they leave this circle. And it turned out to be, perhaps, the most important.

The local environment does not accept you, especially if, as in Yerevan, about a quarter of the city’s population of immigrants arrived at the same time. The locals are fed up with foreigners and are closing their doors. Russians are settling in cheap areas and trying to get along. There are many poor people among them, which means there is a lot of crime, depression, betrayal… And we have to live with that.

Of course, Dima-Erzya became the personification of the new, unfunny ethics of queer people who, first of all, do not want to work in the old fashioned way. He is the face of the last wave of migration. Depressed, desperate, confused. Of course, the displaced migrants are now groaning with us about how the Penza programmer opened his apartment. They say that they absolutely cannot live like this.

But don’t let them guess. There’s a lot of depression and suicidal thoughts involved. People took perhaps the most important step in their lives, and more often than not it turned out to be wrong. Make mistakes when making the most important choice. Bet on everything and do the calculations.

Of course, they are depressed. I repeat, there are happy ones. And lucky ones. But mostly unhappy ones. Because in general, to end up in emigration, to be torn away from your native environment and native language is often already a misfortune. And if you did it in vain, and there are years of poverty, instability and wandering ahead of you, then all that remains is to sit in depression. Dima, a resident of Erzya, became a symbol of such depression. A man who, for some unknown reason, wants to leave Russia and Russians.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.