ABSTRACT
In 2004 the director of a Russian charitable organization working with forced migrants shared her reflections on the freedom of migration in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation of today. During the Soviet period, she recalled, while a Moscow propiska may not have been on offer, the state provided enough alternative options so that citizens really were making some kind of personal choice. Now, as a counselor to forced migrants, she often had to tell highly educated urban professionals from Baku or Grozny that they would never again live in a major city or practice their profession; they had no such choice. On another occasion, a middle-aged actress living in the wooded hills outside Sochi told me that she could not obtain permanent residential registration because the local police refuse to recognize the cottage she and her husband own as a legal address. Without this registration, even buying a train ticket for travel to a neighboring province had become a source of anxiety and endless bureaucratic obstructions. This anecdote illustrates yet another paradox of the post-Soviet transition. In the contemporary Russian Federation a citizen may end up holding no permanent registration anywhere in the country—thus creating a legal vacuum that the Soviet regime would have abhorred.
