Latest news feedRefugees Magazine Issue 147 ("The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless") - Chasing the propiska
by Vivian Tan
Alexei Martinov has spent half his life bouncing around Central Asia in search of a country that would accept him. Today, 16 years after he first became stateless, he is hoping against hope for a chance to start a new life with his two children in an ancestral homeland he has never known.
Martinov is one of many people who fell through the legislative cracks after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and his odyssey through five countries typifies the complex chain of bureaucratic cause and effect that lies behind so many of the stateless situations in the post-Soviet era. Many of these, initially at least, revolved around the propiska, the all-important residence permit, which every Soviet citizen had to have and which was designed to control internal population movement in the USSR.
Alexei Martinov, now aged 35, is the son of ethnic Russian parents, who lived in eastern Uzbekistan, then part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1990, he went to study in Ukraine with the support of his kolkhoz, or commune. His propiska was transferred from Uzbekistan to Ukraine.
The following year, he returned to Uzbekistan to get money to cover the second part of his education. All of a sudden, as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 19-year-old Martinov's world was turned upside down. In the newly independent Uzbekistan, previous agreements with the Soviet kolkhoz were declared no longer valid. Meanwhile back in Ukraine – now a foreign country – his institute refused to transfer his propiska back to Uzbekistan, apparently because he had some unpaid bills.
This was just the beginning, as a multi-national bureaucratic nightmare began to unfold, affecting Martinov and millions of others like him all across the former Soviet Union.
"It was a time of ethnic clashes and anti-Russian feelings in Uzbekistan," Martinov recalled."My parents' home was burned, and they decided to flee to Turkmenistan. Using my old Soviet passport, I went to Kazakhstan to join my wife's family."
The couple moved in with his father-in-law, but were unable to get a Kazakh propiska – an essential prerequisite for legal employment, as well as for basic services such as healthcare. A few years later, they moved to Turkmenistan, where his own family was now living.
His father had died while he was in Kazakhstan, and his widowed mother and his sister had both married locals and received Turkmen citizenship (Turkmenistan has also naturalized around 10,000 stateless refugees who fled from Tajikistan in the early 1990s).
Martinov applied for citizenship too, but was rejected. So, once again, no propiska. Frustrated, his wife finally gave up and returned to her own family, leaving him and their two young children behind.
In December 2006, Martinov and the children were deported by train to Uzbekistan."I did not want to go back because I had nothing left there and [ethnic] Russians were not treated well," he said."The border guards in Uzbekistan said the deportation order did not meet international standards and that Turkmenistan should have verified my Uzbek citizenship before deporting me. There was a lot of shouting and no one wanted to listen to me."
Denied entry to Uzbekistan, the country where he had spent all his childhood, the stateless father and his two stateless children were forced to stay on the train until it reached the end of the line in Khujand in Tajikistan (the fourth of five Central Asian states where he has now lived, but not been accepted)."We were all very tired from the trip and just wanted to get off," he said."The Tajik border guards did not know what to do with us. They called Security who took us to the osce [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe]."
The family was eventually given a free room at a local centre for disabled people, where they were still living in June 2007. They receive three hot meals a day and 40 Tajik somoni (about US$11) per month in financial assistance. The children, aged 10 and 15, attend the local school while Martinov works at a nearby carwash and workshop, earning about five somoni for each car."I'm very grateful to the management because no one lets me pay for anything. I keep everything I earn, and there are women and doctors to help with the children," he said.
While his life has stabilized for the moment, Martinov still lacks the documents necessary to lead a normal life.
His future may lie in the Russian Federation, thanks to a program for ethnic Russians, called the "Voluntary Resettlement of Compatriots in The Russian Federation." Tajikistan's Migration Service is currently trying to verify his nationality – or lack of it – with the authorities in Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Turkmenistan, while the local human rights centre is trying to help him get a statelessness certificate, which is a prerequisite for settlement in Russia.
It is perhaps the ultimate irony that even a statelessness certificate requires supporting documents.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 147: "The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless"
(September 2007). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (1.8 Mb) here or high-resolution (6.8 Mb) here.
