The Politics of Citizenship Policy in Post-Soviet Russia. (original) (raw)
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Acquiring citizenship in the country of resettlement is the ultimate step on the integration pathway of a resettled person. For people from countries of the former Soviet Union (fSU), we can see a great variety in patterns of citizenship acquisition and changes in migration policy governing the granting of citizenship. Russia is the main player in this field. As a descendant of the fSU, the country uses its right to determine whether or not to grant its citizenship to people in the new independent countries as a way of maintaining its influence on the post-Soviet and even the former Russian Empire regions. Russian citizenship was granted to m 8.6 million people between 1992 and 2016 (excluding the Crimean population), more than 92 per cent of whom were from the fSU. Russia employs a range of different policies, starting with its compatriot policy for individual resettlement; then comes its not formally declared policy of issuing Russian passports for the population of non-recognised states (such as Transdnestria) and finally there is Russia's policy of automatically granted citizenship for 2 million Crimean people. This paper explores the phenomenon of Russian citizenship policy and compares it with European or Eura-sian policy governing fSU countries. It also discusses the implementation of this policy at both regional and global levels.
PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 587, 2019
The post-World War II era, and especially the post-Cold War era, has seen the global spread of dual citizenship. Situating post-Soviet states in this global pattern reveals some similarities and important differences in the rationale behind allowing or forbidding dual citizenship. Three distinct trends in the politics of dual citizenship in the post-communist region are evident. First, to a greater extent than in Western states, concerns for safeguarding state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and associated fears of possibly subversive actions by other states, particularly neighboring states, by means of dual citizenship and dual citizens are a key factor behind opposition to dual citizenship. Second, the extension of dual citizenship to co-ethnics is not a uniform reality. Instead, the right of ethnic diasporas to dual citizenship has been a highly contested issue, and fears of diaspora influences on domestic affairs have often stood in the way. Finally, the ruling elites’ drive for power maximization can also makes dual citizenship rules a tool for punishing and weakening political opposition.
Nationalities Papers, 2005
From the introduction: The registration of citizens’ ethnicity (“nationality”) in official documents was commonplace and often obligatory in the Soviet Union, and the practice continued in the Russian Federation through the 1990s. In 1997, the Yeltsin government replaced the Soviet internal passport with a new one not featuring the “nationality” entry. The new document was met with an instant wave of protests from Russia’s regions, above all the ethnically defined federal subjects. They objected to the removal of the “nationality” entry, and also because the passport (unlike the Soviet one) did not have a section in the federal subject’s own language(s) besides Russian, and did not display the emblems of the region in question. (---) The article first gives a background to the federal decision to abolish the “fifth point” before it lays out the discourse in the regions over the new passport and the “nationality” entry. Thereafter, the political context is explored in some more detail, as the controversy is seen in light of the “nationalizing” trend in the regions in the 1990s, and the issue of ethnic reidentification and ethnicity registration. The last two sections describe how the conflict came to an end, and how the Council of Europe’s experts have assessed the solution and its compatibility with the Council’s Framework Convention on Minority Rights.
Inheriting the Soviet Policy Toolbox: Russia's Dilemma Over Ascriptive Nationality
Europe-Asia Studies, 1999
From the introduction: In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party leadership made a habit of boasting that their immense statehood was the home of individuals from 100 different peoples. And they would add that in the USSR ’the national question’ had been successfully solved. Well before the 1980s were over, it had become obvious that the latter was not true. Moreover, ever since the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, many observers have predicted that the Russian Federation will fall victim to the same development – a nationalistically driven break-up along the lines delineating the federal subjects. At the same time, however, several essential aspects of the multitude of peoples in the USSR and Russia have been mostly overlooked. Few have discussed how these peoples were in fact defined by the Soviet authorities, what motives lay behind the policies in this field and what specific consequences of these policies can be witnessed today in the new Russian state. These questions – above all, the last one – will be the focus of this article. The article will address them by discussing two contradictory positions that have been assumed in relation to a specific element of Soviet nationality politics – the so-called ’fifth point’ (pyatiy punkt; pyataya grafa) which implied an obligatory identification of all citizens according to nationality (natsional’nost’ – the Soviet/Russian term for ethnicity).
An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2006
This article sketches out what I call Russia’s “imperial rights regime” and focuses on the law and courts as areas where citizenship is practiced. I describe Russia’s “umbrella of imperial law,” address the confusing category of “difference,” explore the significance of the imperial rights regime for both elites and commoners, set out the parameters of lower-level court practice in the late 19th century, engage briefly a 20th-century conflict between liberal plans for and peasant experience of local courts, and conclude with a consideration of the significance of an “imperial social contract.” I suggest that both rulers and subjects of the Russian empire—and later of the Soviet Union held conceptions of the state, its powers, and its significance in social life that derived from their experience of a regime of differentiated, alienable, but nonetheless legal and meaningful rights. The “habitus of Russian Empire” was critical to how the polity was held together, how it came apart, and how it was put back together again (twice) in the 20th century.