Ira Lobanovskaya

The Guide to the Free World (Гайд в свободный мир), is a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping people leave Russia after the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It was founded and is headed by Ira Lobanovskaya (Ира Лобановская), a former marketing strategist.

It maintains the eponymous Russian language Guide to the Free World website collating information, and the Relocation Guide from the Russian Federation (Гайд по релокации из РФ) Telegram chat that originated it, the largest such chat on the subject.

Irina Lobanovskaya, a Russian citizen who spent a lot of time abroad, started the Russian language Telegram chat "Relocation Guide from the Russian Federation" ("Гайд по релокации из РФ") on 25 February 2022, the day after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

She wanted to gather the stories of the most recent émigrés in her closest circle of acquaintances, those who left Russia in the past two years, to serve as instructions for others who wanted to leave.

She realized that there would be a demand, but not how much of one.

She didn't advertise besides posting about the chat on Facebook.

The chat started with 20 people who already lived outside Russia.

Irina Lobanovskaya was born 16 March 1989, and grew up in Ust-Labinsk, in Krasnodar Krai in the North Caucasus.

She was torn between studying mathematics and psychiatry, and decided to split the difference by attending the Saint Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics to study advertising.

After two days, there were 2000 people in the group; she remembers thinking that was many.

After two weeks, by early March, there were over 100,000.

There are other Telegram chats on this theme, but this is the largest.

The initial questions asked in the chat were, first, where people leaving Russia could go immediately, and second, what they could do when they got there.

The primary destinations discussed were Georgia, Armenia, and Turkey, secondarily Mexico, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

People would go where they traveled already, and where they could speak Russian.

The initial people interested in leaving were from the creative industries and information technology workers.

Later participants came from all social classes.

By October 2022, there were over 50 subsidiary chats focusing on specific topics and countries.

Participants in the chat help on three levels.

First, by providing and compiling the Guide to the Free World: how to leave Russia, where to go, what issues would be encountered at the border or upon arrival.

Second, they help émigrés find work - they gather both resumes and companies willing to hire.

Third, they discuss how to export Russian culture.

The chat is moderated, originally by Lobanovskaya, later also by moderators she knew and trusted.

The chat's popularity brought spammers, scammers, and a wave of Kremlinbots, spreading disinformation that the moderators battle.

The Guide itself is a website of information collected from that regularly repeated in the chat, and from other media writing about where Russians could go without a visa.

It contains information on how Russians can move to other countries, and what to do when they get there.

It contains over 3,000 pages of instructions for 36 different countries.

It was published on a Notion platform, and first linked in the chat when the chat had approximately 10,000 people in it.

It is regularly updated, usually 12-20 updates per day, with a digest of changes released in the chat.

By July 2022, it had a staff of 12 editors, including three with a legal education.

On 22 September 2022, the day after the announcement of the 2022 Russian mobilization, the website received 1.5 million visits, as many as in the whole month of March when the guide was first published.

Lobanovskaya reported that plane and train tickets for leaving Russia sold out even faster than at the start of the war.

She said that after invasion and before the mobilization, the Guide to the Free World organization had helped 40,000 Russians escape the country; in the two days after the mobilization, it was another 100,000.

The Guide to the Free World non-profit collects donations to help Russians emigrate through the web page and the Telegram chat's built in donation system.

Lobanovskaya says that it's crucial that the Guide remain a non-profit, that's part of the chat rules.

She says she gets regular offers for advertising or other ways to monetize the project, laughs at the presumption of telling an IT marketer how to monetize products, and blocks the senders.

She dropped out at the end of the fourth course, as the university required payment, and her parents had gone bankrupt in the 2008 crisis.

She worked as a waitress until 2011, when she moved to Moscow.

There she worked at different jobs, producing films, journalism, public relations, and media, until winning the only scholarship at the Wordshop advertising school in Moscow, supported by the BBDO advertising agency, and learning the work of a marketing strategist.