The story told in Europe and North America is that Russia emptied of foreigners. The story told in Luanda, Recife and Lagos is completely different: a degree in engineering or medicine that a family can actually afford, in a big city with a metro that runs every two minutes.
Both stories are about the same country. Only one of them gets written about in English. This page is the start of our attempt to fix that — and it is deliberately built out of first-hand voices rather than my own opinions.
Why they choose Russia
The reasons people give, in roughly the order they give them:
- Cost. Tuition and living costs that are a fraction of Western Europe, North America or Australia for the same length of degree.
- Recognised specialisations. Medicine, engineering, aviation and physics, in universities that have taken international students for decades and know the paperwork.
- Existing community. Somebody from their city or their church has already done it and can answer questions on WhatsApp.
- Language as an asset. Russian is a rare skill to bring home, and it opens work that English does not.
What actually shocks them
The winter is not the hardest part. Almost everyone expects the cold and buys the coat. What nobody prepares for is the darkness: five months of a sky that never really opens, and afternoons that end at four.
Faces on the metro. A Brazilian arriving from a culture where strangers greet each other reads a carriage of unsmiling commuters as hostility. It takes a few weeks to learn that a Russian face in public is neutral, not cold, and that the same person is unrecognisably warm once you are in their kitchen.
How safe the night is. This comes up in almost every conversation with people from big Latin American and African cities: walking home at one in the morning with a phone in your hand, and nothing happening.
The language wall. Cyrillic is a week's work. Cases are a year's. The first two months of documents, dormitory forms and clinic visits are genuinely hard, and people who say otherwise are selling something.
The cold was in the brochure. The dark and the paperwork were not.
And what is honestly difficult
Bureaucracy is slow and unforgiving of small errors. Dormitory quality varies enormously between universities. And the experience of being visibly foreign differs from city to city and from person to person: most people describe curiosity and everyday decency, some describe staring and occasional hostility. We publish both, unedited, rather than choosing the flattering half.
This page is being built with them, not about them
Rather than write a profile of a demographic, we are collecting individual accounts: seven questions, answered by voice message in the person's own language, edited into first person and cleared with them before anything is published. Nobody has to write an essay.
If this is you
If you came to Russia from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, India, China or anywhere else outside the usual expat story, we would like your account here — in Portuguese, French, English or Russian, whichever you actually think in. Ten minutes of voice messages is enough. Write to us through the contact link in the footer.
What we are not claiming
We do not publish student numbers, tuition figures or visa rules on this page, because those change and we only publish numbers we can date and source. Nothing here is an endorsement of any government programme, and no interview on this site is arranged through a state organisation.