Uncontrolled migration flows are one of the most pressing Russian problems. In the near future, the country's authorities intend to develop and adopt a series of measures that will curb the scourge. In particular, Moscow officials will push for entry into the capital for citizens of CIS countries to be possible only with foreign passports. Earlier, Sergei Sobyanin spoke about the idea of introducing a visa regime with the Central Asian republics that border Russia.
Entering Russia illegally will indeed become more difficult. True, in such a situation, according to experts' forecasts, demand for Russian citizenship may rise sharply, which even today is not always acquired legally. The trade in passports has long turned into a super-profitable business for corrupt officials. Becoming a citizen of 'our sacred state' through the back door is now possible in several ways, the tortuousness of which directly affects the price of the deal. However, the leadership of the FMS, responsible for granting citizenship, is well aware of the 'competing firms' and is therefore trying by all means to take control of the situation. True, so far with mixed success...
Arriving Citizens
To assess the scale of the problem, it is enough to type the phrase 'Russian citizenship' into any search engine. Dozens of offers of 'simplified and accelerated' acquisition immediately pop up. For the sake of a fair test, Itogi called several links and found out the cost of the service: it ranges from 50 to 250 thousand rubles depending on the complexity of the case. The order fulfillment period is from one to three months. However, according to people in the know, half of such offers show signs of a scam, and 'sellers of the homeland' disappear from the horizon as soon as the customer's money moves into their pocket or internet wallet. However, the other half of the offers are real. The competent authorities must seriously deal with this.
It is clear that if there were no demand, there would be no supply. As a rule, clients of 'gray passport agents' are natives of foreign countries who need Russian citizenship for various life circumstances – most often it is required for conducting entrepreneurial activities or simply working in our country.
Illustrative in this regard is the story of a businessman from Croatia, Kazimir K., whom an Itogi correspondent managed to speak with. In 2004, he opened a business in Russia selling ceramic tiles. The Russian partners registered the business in their own name, telling Kazimir that, according to the law, a Russian company, especially one claiming preferential taxation, cannot be registered to a foreigner. After about two years of successful and profitable work, the Russian partners, as they say, cheated the 'brother'.
He tried to sue, but there was no chance: formally, the business was owned by other people, and the Croat's claims were not heard. He didn't want to leave Russia, and that's when he thought about acquiring Russian citizenship. 'I met a girl online,' he says, 'who offered to enter into a fictitious marriage. That would give me the right to citizenship. I gave her $5,000, and can you believe it, I got cheated again: the lady, as it later turned out, was a Ukrainian citizen. Nevertheless, I didn't give up. Friends introduced me to another woman, she agreed to become my wife for $2,500. But I paid her only after the marriage certificate was issued. During the time we were processing the paperwork, we really fell in love, and our fictitious marriage turned into a real one; we have been living together for six years. I, by the way, got her Croatian citizenship – just in case.'
There are also exotic examples. Not long ago, employees of a terribly fashionable beauty salon decided to give their boss – a native of France – a Russian passport for his birthday. The deal, however, did not go through: the citizenship traders were scared off by law enforcement. But this case is an exception. As a rule, foreigners from far abroad take the migration requirements of the authorities very seriously, understanding that they have something to lose. Almost all top managers of major foreign companies, famous chefs, stylists, and athletes working in Russia strive to obtain completely legal citizenship.
As in most countries, all actions to obtain a national passport are clearly regulated by law here. According to Valentina Kazakova, head of the Citizenship Department of the FMS of Russia, the problem of shadow acquisition of citizenship exists primarily because most applicants simply do not delve into the intricacies of Russian migration legislation. If they did, they would have saved money and nerves and would not have run into legal problems.
'Most services for preparing documents and supporting the act of obtaining citizenship itself are offered by law firms,' says Valentina Kazakova, 'but here's the paradox: they charge from one to five thousand rubles for an initial consultation on this issue, while FMS employees do the same completely free of charge during office hours. But people still rush to law firms, somehow convincing themselves that there are huge queues at the migration service.'
The main consumers of gray schemes today are natives of CIS countries – Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Ukraine – oriented toward not entirely legal work in Russia. By the way, many thieves-in-law of Georgian origin, although formally citizens of Russia, according to intelligence services, obtained their passports, to put it mildly, not very legally, using obviously corrupt schemes. Let's examine them.
Black Passport Agents
First of all, it is worth distinguishing between black methods, frankly criminal, and so-called gray ones, in which fraudsters proceed almost officially and yet violate the law.
We have already mentioned the simplest one – it is plain fraud, where clients are charged for processing documents and then the scammers disappear with the money. Another scheme involves using stolen or lost blank Russian passports. One of the largest fraudulent groups was uncovered in Karachay-Cherkessia. Swindlers, directly connected with local officials, were handing out Russian passports left and right for bribes, including to individuals wanted by the federal authorities for serious crimes.
The seriousness of this is illustrated by the case that launched the investigation into the "Karachay passport issuers." During one of the special operations in Dagestan, FSB special forces in a shootout eliminated an active member of the so-called Buynaksk group – a native of Azerbaijan. On him, they found a Russian passport issued in Karachay-Cherkessia. This episode became the start of the investigation into the criminal scheme operating in the republic. It turned out that Russian passports, whose blanks had been simply stolen in Karachay-Cherkessia, were sold at the Pyatigorsk market for $3,000 apiece. When the entire scheme came to the attention of operatives, a woman who had organized the illegal distribution of Karachay passports from her home was detained in Stavropol during an illegal transaction.
According to operatives, tens of thousands of people could have illegally obtained Russian documents this way. After this incident, the FMS launched a special database where anyone today can check the authenticity of a passport. For example, if someone comes to apply for a job, the HR officer can quickly find out whether the identity document in hand is genuine or fake.
Another outright criminal scheme dates back to the 1990s. At that time, people from former Soviet republics came to Russia, and to obtain a passport they provided a certificate of Russian citizenship issued by the Russian embassy in the country where they lived. There were huge crowds at Russian consulates seeking such certificates, and against this backdrop, dealers were actively plying their trade, for money adding to the lists people who would never have been eligible for Russian citizenship – that is, those who had problems with the law. Consuls, in many cases without even examining the submitted documents, signed these certificates in stacks.
According to the rules, documents submitted to the embassy were supposed to be sent to Russia via Foreign Ministry channels, but the fraudsters were so deeply embedded in the scheme that they operated even at this diplomatic level: documents that fell into their hands were never sent anywhere, but simply thrown in the trash. Meanwhile, the citizenship applicant kept a certificate signed by the consul, which was formally sufficient to obtain a Russian passport. Only after 2000, when the Russian Interior Ministry decided to conduct a total check of passports issued under the "consular scheme," did it become clear that many of them were fakes.
Surprisingly, this scheme was recently uncovered again in Tajikistan. People suddenly started actively approaching one of the local territorial departments of the Russian FMS with certificates that allowed them to expect Russian citizenship, issued by the Russian Consulate General in Khujand. They came in dozens. FMS employees suspected something was wrong and conducted an internal investigation, which led to the organizers of the criminal chain, who worked in one of the FMS departments in Russia.
Such schemes are criminally punishable – not long ago, Article 292.1 appeared in the Criminal Code, Part 1 of which provides for liability for "illegal issuance of a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation, as well as insertion of knowingly false information into documents resulting in illegal acquisition of Russian citizenship." By the way, according to unofficial statistics, most of those arrested under this article are employees of territorial FMS departments and registry offices – that is, those directly responsible for citizenship matters.
To be fair, it must be acknowledged that black schemes for obtaining citizenship are quite rare today. Primarily because it has become too easy to detect outright criminal forgeries. Gray schemes are a completely different matter – they are the main feeding trough for various lawyers and intermediaries. According to expert estimates, the turnover of the shadow market for Russian citizenship amounts to about one and a half billion rubles per year.
Marriage-for-profit
One of the most common ways to illegally obtain Russian citizenship remains the good old fictitious marriage. Success requires a partner who is in dire need of money. One lawyer, who specializes in providing intermediary services for obtaining citizenship, told Itogi on condition of anonymity that the monthly income of his small office from those wishing to become Russians in the near future is about 800,000 rubles. He specializes in fictitious marriages, and the "wives" are found in the Russian hinterland – mainly in the Kostroma and Vladimir regions. Weddings are quickly arranged there as well. The ersatz wife herself receives 50,000 rubles upon signing the deal, and signs an obligation not to file for divorce and, in case of questions, to say that her husband lives with her. The price for the applicant is 300,000 rubles for everything, including paperwork...
True, there is one circumstance that throws a wrench in the works for "marriage fraudsters" – a law has been passed according to which obtaining Russian citizenship is possible only after three years of joint residence of the spouses. True, there is no service in Russia that would monitor the "quality of marriage." Describing this situation, FMS employees recall with a smile one of the films starring the new Russian citizen Gérard Depardieu, in which the hero's wife, who entered into a fictitious union, was asked by representatives of a special marriage control service where his toothbrush stands and which side he likes to sleep on.
Abuses on the marriage front are possible primarily through bribery of civil registry office employees. Not long ago, one of the most high-profile court cases related to the illegal acquisition of Russian citizenship through the civil registry office took place in Krasnoyarsk. The case of a former employee of the local wedding palace was brought to court, who registered several fictitious marriages and arranged equally fraudulent divorces. As reported to Itogi by the SKR, "the woman registered Russian citizens with foreigners, in particular with citizens of Azerbaijan. These were men who needed to enter into marriage with Russian women in order to obtain Russian citizenship or extend the legality of their stay in Russia."
The investigation revealed 13 episodes of criminal activity, but it has not yet been possible to understand how many participants in the criminal scheme became Russian citizens. It is only known that for registering one ersatz marriage, the corrupt "servant of Hymen" took 30 thousand rubles. By the way, according to FMS employees, there are examples where the conclusion of a marriage is declared illegal, which entails the termination of all related legal acts, including an illegally obtained Russian passport.
However, today the legislation does not provide a statute of limitations in disputable situations related to obtaining citizenship. "There used to be such a procedure," says Valentina Kazakova, "a person lives with a Russian passport for five years and there are no questions about him – he retains citizenship under almost any circumstances, of course, unless we are talking about outright crime. Now the situation has changed: if the fact of a corruption component or the fact of simply illegal passport acquisition is established, it is annulled."
There are also statistics on this matter. According to the Federal Migration Service of Russia, in 2012, 95,737 people received Russian citizenship, and refusal of citizenship due to providing knowingly false information – 1,511 people. According to experts, the reason for such refusal is often an outright desire, having deceived the official authorities, to obtain the coveted citizenship.
With the prefix "state"
Another way to obtain Russian citizenship, including through a gray scheme, is to get into the State Program for the Resettlement of Compatriots. It is designed to attract able-bodied citizens to certain regions of Russia where population decline naturally outpaces birth rates. If a person arrives in a region participating in the program, he automatically gets a job and even housing. But most importantly, in this case, within 4 months the newcomer acquires Russian citizenship.
According to the general opinion of experts, today this segment of the migration market is the most corruption-prone, and it is no coincidence that during a blitz survey conducted by Itogi, participants in gray schemes offered to include us in the state program for as much as 250 thousand rubles. The scheme is organized in such a way that the FMS works directly with representatives of the subjects of the Federation who need certain specialists.
"According to the provisions of the state program," says Valentina Kazakova, "its participant is required to reside strictly in the specified place of residence indicated in the application, but in many cases checks reveal that this does not happen. Control over compliance with the program conditions is assigned, among others, to the territorial bodies of the FMS. So far, we have managed to control these processes, but the alarming trend persists. By the way, the recently introduced bill on so-called rubber houses is precisely aimed at countering this phenomenon."
According to experts, the market for shadow acquisition of Russian passports has been dynamically changing until now, adapting to the fairly liberal migration legislation. At the end of March, a bill was introduced to the State Duma that will tighten the rules for granting and restoring citizenship. Foreigners who have already been subjected to expulsion, deportation, or readmission from the Russian Federation will be refused 100 percent.
Those who have previously been notified of the undesirability of staying in Russia also have no chance of becoming Russian. There cannot be among us comrades who are not comrades at all. However, all these initiatives are good until new illegal schemes are invented. And they will appear, no doubt about it.