Historian Rustam Alexander links the recent initiative by the Russian Foreign Ministry to toughen penalties for failing to report a second citizenship or residence permit to a long-standing state logic: citizenship is treated as a sign of complete and indivisible loyalty. Liability is already possible if a person fails to notify the authorities upon arriving in Russia, and the new measure, in the author’s view, deepens suspicion toward people holding foreign documents.
In the USSR, dual citizenship was explicitly ruled out by law. Article 8 of the Soviet citizenship law stated that a Soviet citizen could not be recognized as belonging to a foreign citizenship. At the same time, many still wanted to leave and obtain another passport, although doing so was extremely difficult and risky.
One of the best-known examples was Rudolf Nureyev. On June 16, 1961, after a tour in Paris, he refused to return to the USSR, was placed under the protection of French security officers, and requested political asylum. In January 1962, he was sentenced in absentia to seven years in a labor colony for treason. Similar decisions were later made by ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who stayed in Canada in 1974, and chess player Viktor Korchnoi, who did not return from Amsterdam in 1976.
Inside the country, Soviet Jews sought permission to emigrate. After the 1967 Six-Day War, emigration was almost halted, but it was partially resumed in September 1968. Natan Sharansky, who filed a request in the early 1970s, was refused, lost his job, and was later arrested in 1977 on treason charges. Human rights activist Ida Nudel was also denied exit; in 1978 she was sentenced to four years of internal exile for displaying a sign in her apartment window demanding permission to leave for Israel.
The author also recalls the late-1960s plan by a group of Jewish “refuseniks” to seize an An-2 aircraft and escape through Finland to Sweden. The KGB foiled the attempt, and the organizers were initially sentenced to death, later commuted to 15 years in prison after international protests, including intervention involving U.S. President Richard Nixon.
In Alexander’s assessment, the new initiative does not formally ban renouncing Russian citizenship, but it does increase its internal “toxicity.” In this framework, dual citizenship stops being merely a legal status and begins to be treated as a possible sign of disloyalty or even treason.