The Free Thinker

Nationality, Citizenship, and Passports in America and the Former Soviet Union

The concepts of nationality and citizenship are taken for granted by most people, but the existence and sense of such concepts is contingent on history and non-unique.  Historically, people have generally either lacked them or understood them differently than we do today.  And even today, different concepts are extant.  The Soviet/post-Soviet concepts differ from that prevalent in, for example, the contemporary United States.

When Lenin took power in 1917, the Soviets wanted to be the most politically advanced society of their day, and to do everything that was considered "enlightened."  One of those things was "national self-determination," and Lenin was initially inclined to dissolve the Russian Empire and give its peoples their own political space.  Of course, this was mostly nullified by the Bolsheviks' dictatorial ideology, but it did lead to a certain administrative autonomy for the fifteen "Soviet socialist republics," including a larger role for local languages and sometimes a revival of respect for local historical heroes.  One of its effects was to recognize everyone's "nationality."

A Soviet or post-Soviet passport records a person's "nationality": Russian, Chechen, Jew, Kabardinets, Buryat, Georgian, Tajik, Ukrainian, etc.  The nationalities are more numerous than the republics, and one's nationality is not determined by where one lives: there are Tajiks living in Uzbekistan and Uzbeks living in Tajikistan, for example.  Passports are more important in post-Soviet countries than here.  In the United States, people only get passports to travel abroad.  In post-Soviet countries, passports serve as a form of ID internally, like driver's licenses, and in principle the police can ask you for your passport at any time.  There are zagran pasporty, "foreign" passports for travel abroad, and vnutryennye pasporty, "internal" passports.

With the exception of the Baltic republics, and now Georgia, citizens of former Soviet republics can travel visa-free to Russia.  Lately a lot of migrants have been coming to Russia to work, since wages have been rising so fast and labor markets are so tight.  Once here, they lack rights-- Russians don't enjoy rights the way Westerners do, either, but migrants are treated much worse-- and they face discrimination, but it still seems to me that the society is able to accept them in its own way because of the attitudes towards nationality and citizenship inherited from Soviet times.  After all, there are already a lot of non-Russian citizens of Russia.  A migrant worker from Tajikistan, provided he speaks Russian, isn't all that different from a Russian citizen of Tajik nationality, or of Buryat, Tuvan, Kabardinets, Kazakh nationality, etc.

The American concept of assimilation and equal rights has a moral advantage in that an immigrant has, certainly as an ideal and largely in practice as well, the opportunity to become "just like everyone else."  He can, and certainly his children can, do or be anything that any other American can.  Russian nationality, on the other hand, is theoretically inaccessible.  On the other hand, Americans' psychic-ideological need to give everyone equal status means that if we don't feel someone is fit to earn that equal status we are compelled to try to shut them out altogether.  If a Tajik gets to America, he is on the path to being an American citizen/national (no distinction between those two concepts for us) with equal rights, which he can't be in Russia, but his chances of ever getting to America are virtually nil.  This exclusiveness vitiates, or perhaps nullifies or inverts, the moral advantage of America's belief in equality for the favored few who get to be citizens.  There is a sense, then, in which Russia is a more open society than America.  The average Western citizen, or journalist, or politician, knows nothing of this, both because he doesn't know the facts-- even the basic fact, one of the most morally important in the modern world, that the vast majority of the human race is excluded permanently from American territory by birth, is unknown to most Americans-- nor has he reflected upon the theory.

Contemporary Russia

My first impressions of Russia were perhaps unduly influenced by bad weather.  A few sunny days reminded me what I liked so much about Russia the first time I was here.  There is something expansive about certain summer days in Russia, as the lazy sun takes eighteen or twenty hours in Moscow to make its daily voyage from horizon to horizon, or-- up here in St. Petersburg-- never quite sets at all.  So much daylight to work with.  An abundance of daylight, an abundance of space: Moscow and Petersburg are crowded enough, but beyond them the landscapes of birch and pine are limitless.  This must be one of the last countries on earth where the concept of the frontier is not obsolete.  Vast expanses of Siberia, and probably even large parts of European Russia, are more or less habitable yet more or less empty.  Deep in the Siberian taiga, there are, perhaps, places where man has never yet set foot.  Yet in another way Russia is not a frontier, because it's not being settled.  The Russians are in retreat, both in absolute population decline, and in geographical retreat from remote Siberia, moving to concentrate in their cities.

We took a Russian river cruise, starting in Moscow, along the Volga, and a number of canals, and Lakes Onega and Ladoga, ending in Petersburg, seeing a lot of churches and a good deal of history and a lot of remote landscapes.  Most haunting, in a way, are certain boggy landscapes we sailed through, with plenty of trees and full of bird life, and with a regular traffic of ships along a central waterway, but otherwise, as far as I could tell, uninhabited, vast and empty and remote. 

The portrayal of Russia in the Western press is predominantly ominous.  We hear of Putin's concentration of power, of rising nationalism and xenophobia.  What I'm struck by, being here, is the ease with which the Russians have taken to capitalism and freedom-- not freedom in quite the juridical and political sense of the West, but a social freedom and a wide range of opportunities.  There have been many moments, in a subway or a shopping mall, when I could have thought I was in America.  There was a store my parents called a "Russian Wal-Mart": Окэй.  I went into another store that was like a replica of Home Depot.  While it would not be true to say that this kind of Western-style consumer capitalism is accessible only to an elite-- Окэй is crowded with ordinary Russians-- goods in stores charge prices comparable to or higher than in America, while salaries, though rising fast, are much lower; I think ordinary Russians feel it as an expensive novelty rather than taking it for granted as Americans do.  Still, it's hard to resist the feeling (though it's at least as difficult to explain it) that people whose lives as consumers bear such striking, if intermittent, resemblances to ours could revert to totalitarianism. 

I find it fascinating how market capitalism can inhabit Soviet structures.  That is, the organization of the cities here is based on the Soviet tenement model, with big apartment buildings, with green space in between, with relatively few streets, quite different from the American suburban model with single-family homes and private yards.  The tenements have a Soviet look about them, and it seems to me they give Russian life a more collectivist flavor.  Yet the apartments are privately owned, and rented out.  Like a capitalist soul in a socialist body.

A corollary of the higher degree of population concentration that characterizes Russian cities is the abundant public transport, including good metro systems that effectively link the outskirts to the centers of cities, buses, trams, trolleybuses, elektrichki or suburban trains, inter-city trains, and-- a private-sector addition-- marshrutki, "taxis" as they're sometimes called, but which run along definite routes, more crowded and expensive than buses but arriving more frequently and connecting a wider range of destinations.  I have a feeling that it would be possible (not easy) to construct a variety of indicators of something like "personal mobility without a car," which might include, for example, the total number of people with whom one could, in theory, arrange and execute a face-to-face meeting within, say, two hours, or the total number of restaurants, stores, and other commercial establishments which one could access, and that by such indicators, Moscow and Petersburg (especially Moscow) would be greatly superior to most American cities.  This personal mobility, I think, affects youth culture.  Although the actual share of youth in the population is fewer than the US, youth seem more visible to me in Moscow than in, say, Washington, DC, or even its suburbs.  Population concentration enables youth to meet each other, and public transit enables them to move about.  This means (but I hope readers will duly discount these impressionistic speculations which are based on casual observation rather than data) that youth are less trapped at home playing video games and watching TV, but also that they have more distractions from studies.

There is enough that is vibrant and modern in contemporary Russia to make it seem strange and paradoxical that most of the power at the national level rests in the hands of a clique of KGB old hands.  I suppose a traveller a century ago might have felt the same way, finding it paradoxical that a country that was at the cutting edge of art and music and enjoying booming industrial growth was ruled by a tsarist regime still wedded to a quasi-medieval conception of divine-right absolutism.  Russian history is full of tragic setbacks.  In the 16th century, there was a tsar named Ivan IV who achieved breathtaking conquests in the east, while his prosperous realm, the largest in Europe, opened up new trade links with Renaissance England.  But in the later part of Ivan's reign, he became desperately paranoid, murdering his best generals, descending into all manner of torture, sending the oprichniki, black riders recruited from the dregs of society, to terrorize and murder the populace.  And for what?  He weakened his realm to the point where Moscow was sacked by the Tatars; and in a fit of rage he murdered his son and heir, causing a succession crisis during which Russia was invaded by Poles and Swedes and riven by civil war.  In the 1920s, the worst of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to have passed, as the New Economic Policy instituted by Lenin allowed a fragile proto-capitalism to emerge.  But then, after 1929, Stalin embarked on the collectivization of agriculture, and then plunged into escalating terrors and purges: he too purged the army, weakening the country so much that the less-populous Germans, already fighting the British and engaged in the Balkans, were able to charge a thousand miles into Soviet territory before sheer numbers and the Russian winter tipped the balance.  Why?  Putin's illiberal turn since the 2003 Yukos affair, though far milder than Stalin's or Ivan the Terrible's, has the same suicidal perversity about it.  Khodorkovsky, the civic-minded tycoon, eschewing corruption and embracing transparency while financing civil society initiatives, was exactly the kind of man Russia needed and ought to have admired.  Instead, Putin arrested him and nationalized the company in a crude power grab -- and the population supported it! 

I think I met an incarnation of Russia's ancestral demons on a bus last week.  It was late-- about 11:00-- but not dark, this being the time of Petersburg's "white nights," and there were people on the  streets.  I was the last to get off the bus, and a man made eye contact with me and sought to get my attention.  I couldn't figure out what he wanted.  He seemed to be saying something about "keys"... he followed me, and told me to stand at a corner, while he made a phone call... when I tried to walk away he stood in front of me and physically blocked me with his arm, not so strongly that I couldn't have pushed past him, but enough that I would risk a fight by doing so... he talked about calling the police...  I still couldn't figure out what he wanted.  He demanded to see my passport.  He seemed to be accusing me of stealing his keys.  There were a lot of people moving past on the streets.  We were something of a spectacle by now, and I started appealing to people for help.  One man came up and just stood next to the two of us, telling us he was on neither side.  Finally the man let me walk away... but he followed us (the other man accompanied me) into the metro.  I'm still not sure what to make of it.  He may well, in his mobile-phone calls, have been calling friends to back him up, but would they have attempted a robbery in broad daylight in a crowded street?  Or was there some other sinister design?  Or does he just enjoy aimless bullying?  It is interesting that, although he was obviously a thug, he intermittently threatened me with the police.  That wouldn't frighten an innocent man in the US; it might in Russia.  When we were safely away, my protector-- a man of seventy-- called him a russkiy koziol, ("Russian goat", which must mean something like "jerk" or "thug") and told me how fed up he was with the type after seventy years.

Too often, power in Russia has regarded the russkiy koziol, not as a nuisance, but as a resource.

Moscow

Moscow is full of faces. American car culture tends to insulate us. Moscow, where you ride the metro escalators and walk streets full of pedestrians, teems with faces. Seeing so many faces glide by brings to my mind lines from William Blake's poem "London":

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Only "weakness" and "woe" are not the "marks" I mark, but some other things. In older faces one sees the bleak conformism of Soviet subjugation, obviated by history yet lingering in the facial expression and demeanor. In younger faces, the insolence of the modern cool culture that comes with freedom, just as conformist in its way.

The economy is booming and wages and prices are going up. On Arbat Street, where my hostel is located, there are several stores with the word zoloto -- gold -- in the name, and that's what they sell: expensive jewelry. I wandered into a mall the other day of which the whole seemed to consist of jewelry stores. That, and a Godiva "chocolatier" with prices of $20 for 100 grams. A huge billboard that I've seen a few times says V chem sekret roskoshi: "In what [lies] the secret of luxury?" I think such a crude appeal to conspicuous consumption would be repugnant to Americans. I get the sense that decades of Marxist propaganda about soulless capitalism has led the Russians to adopt an unusually soulless version of capitalism.

The metro, fast and comprehensive, strikes me as more efficient than the car-based transportation system in the US. It makes the city, in a real sense, bigger than Washington: one can get to more places. Casinos. Clubs. Theaters. What one sees along the streets bespeaks a population, not perhaps less cultured, but less educated and less responsible than the staid bureaucrats that define the populace of DC.  I get the sense that this is a place where the simple life-narrative of boy meets girl gets good job raises kids can easily get strangled by high-rolling cynicism, or swept away in wild romantic under-currents. A place where nihilism is never as remote as it is amidst the complacency of American suburbia. For better or worse, an interesting place.

Traveler's tales, I should say, are notoriously unreliable: insightful and out-of-touch, at the same time.