Suspect citizens

These draconian legislative steps send a clear message: Russian citizenship requires absolute loyalty to the state, and potential traitors are being identified primarily — if arbitrarily — by seeking out those with dual nationality. 

During the Soviet period, the rules were clear and cross-border travel was heavily restricted, halcyon days to which the Kremlin is now keen to return. The old doctrine of “us” and “them” has been retrofitted to meet the needs of the modern world, in which it simply isn’t possible to close off a country entirely.

Article 8 of the 1978 Soviet law on citizenship expressly stated that: “a citizen of the USSR is not recognised as a citizen of another state.” This did not mean however, that certain Soviet citizens did not want or try to obtain a foreign passport. 

The borders of the USSR were iron-clad and there was no option to simply move to the West, and even giving up Soviet citizenship was far from easy. The path to a foreign passport was notoriously hazard-prone. For the authorities, Soviet citizenship required absolute loyalty to the state, and those who wanted to give up their passport risked everything.

Perhaps the single most famous case of this kind was that of dancer Rudolf Nureyev, a star of Leningrad’s world-famous Kirov — now Mariinsky — Ballet and a centrepiece of Soviet cultural diplomacy. 

On 16 June 1961, while on tour in Paris, Nureyev managed to evade his KGB handlers and, with the help of French security officers, was able to request political asylum in France. Upon their return to the USSR, his fellow dancers branded him a “defector” and the following year Nureyev was sentenced in absentia to 7 years’ imprisonment for treason. 

Nureyev was not the only example of a Soviet “traitor”. Many other figures from the Soviet art world allowed to travel abroad managed to stay behind there, although usually in rather less dramatic circumstances. Mikhail Baryshnikov, another Soviet ballet prodigy, decided to defect while on tour in Canada in 1974.

In 1976, Russian chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi refused to return to the USSR from a competition in Amsterdam. He later recalled that he had first been given the opportunity to defect in 1966, which he had refused but then went on to deeply regret, feeling that as a result, he had missed out on an entire decade of his life. 

There were also those who requested permission to leave the Soviet Union while still living in the country, of course. Most famous among them were the so-called Refuseniks, the primarily Jewish Soviet citizens who were denied permission to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere in the West in the 1960s and 1970s.

Though thousands of Soviet Jews had been granted permission to move to Israel before 1967, the USSR effectively put an end to that after Israel beat a Soviet-backed military coalition in the Six Day War. Largely for the sake of propaganda and espionage, however, the movement of Jewish migrants to Israel was allowed to resume in 1968. 

Jewish citizens of the USSR looking to take advantage of this window of opportunity wrote directly to the authorities. One of them was 25-year-old Natan Sharansky, who filed an exit petition in the early 1970s that was subsequently rejected. 

As a result of his perceived disloyalty, he was then sacked from his job and struggled to find new employment, and in the end was forced to work as a tutor. Human rights activist Ida Nudel was fighting for the rights of Soviet Jews when she too requested passage to Israel in 1971. In 1972 her request was denied, as was the case for many. 

Many Refuseniks became active in underground movements, and in 1977 Sharansky was convicted of treason for his involvement with such groups. Nudel faced similar challenges; in 1978 she was arrested and forced into internal exile for four years for “malicious hooliganism” over a sign she had placed in her window reading “KGB, give me my visa to Israel”.

Some were even driven to desperation, as was the case in the 1970 Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair, when a group of 16 refuseniks planned to hijack a single-engine biplane in Leningrad and fly it to Sweden where they planned to defect.

However, the conspirators were arrested by the KGB on the morning of the planned hijacking and were sentenced to death. Following much international outrage and an intervention by US President Richard Nixon, the sentences were commuted to 15 years imprisonment.

Until the end of the 1980s, refusing a Soviet passport only occurred under very specific, state-sanctioned circumstances. Only the 1990 citizenship law established the right to renounce citizenship, with article 21 of that law articulating that: “renunciation of citizenship of the USSR is permitted upon request in accordance with the procedure established by this law.”

The new initiative put forward by the Foreign Ministry does not formally forbid Russian citizens from renouncing their citizenship, but it does instil an air of toxicity around the subject which has not been felt for some time.

This toxicity has manifested itself in a number of varied and (legally) questionable prosecutions: from administrative detentions and criminal cases with abstract language, to public statements exerting pressure and accusations of associating with “undesirable” organisations simply for being abroad.

There is also another level of risk. Possession of a foreign residence permit, or holding citizenship of another country, is now treated as suspected disloyalty. Dual citizenship ceases to be just a legal status and instead becomes the mark of a potential traitor. 

At the same time, this new thinking on behalf of the government will affect many apolitical people who have already learned to “accept Russia as it is”. This was the case, of course, as long as their Russian citizenship didn’t interfere with their lives outside of Russia, where they were free to work, study and even live with the help of their foreign passports.

Based on materials by Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Cornell University Press, 2011)