Some may call this post inflammatory, but I’m still going to write it exactly as I feel. This is Stanislav Mikryukov, a journalist living in the city of Tomsk.
He is a troublesome journalist, and so he was constantly clashing with the local authorities and the siloviki (security and law-enforcement agencies). In particular, it was he who told residents of Tomsk Region that the head of the local police department, living in extremely cramped conditions (a 360 sq. m house), had also received a 192 sq. m apartment in the city center from the state budget. So, Mikryukov was born in the country where most of us were born—the USSR. More specifically, in what is now Uzbekistan. Then, like the overwhelming majority of Russians, he moved to the country Russians generally move to when they are driven out: Russia. For the past 15 years, Mikryukov has been living in Tomsk. And now, a direct quote: I, Stanislav Yuryevich Mikryukov, ethnically Russian, born in the Republic of Uzbekistan (I hold that country’s national passport), have been living in Russia, in the city of Tomsk, for 15 years now. And throughout all these years, due to deliberate obstruction by officials of the executive authorities of the Russian Federation in Tomsk Region, I have been unsuccessfully trying to obtain Russian citizenship. I will begin with my open appeal, published on February 20, 2012. Two days earlier, on February 18, in Tomsk, on Novosobornaya Square, during a Solidarnost (Solidarity movement) picket called “For Fair Elections,” I was forcibly detained by drunk police officers (the Center for Combating Extremism under the regional Interior Ministry) and taken to the local office of the Federal Migration Service in Tomsk’s Kirov District. There they tried to charge me with a so-called “administrative offense” (violation of foreign citizen registration rules), with the subsequent cancellation of my right to reside in Russia and deportation from the country. To draw up the administrative report against me on a weekend, following a call from above, the deputy head of the Tomsk Region Federal Migration Service, Dmitry Romanov, came in person. In the end, I was fined 2,000 rubles, and told that “the second one wouldn’t be long in coming”. Source and further: *Federal Migration Service staff came. They handed over all three notices: refusal of a residence permit, removal from the registration rolls, cancellation of the temporary residence permit They said I had 14 days to leave*.
source I don’t even want to write about the obvious political pressure on a journalist. About how this illegal deportation is simply a way to silence him and stop his publications, and so on. That much is already clear. In that sense, this story is very similar to the lawless case of The New Times journalist Natalia Morar, who, after publishing reports about the “Kremlin’s black cashbox,” was declared an “undesirable person” in the Russian Federation.]({{URL_4}}) Let’s look at this story from a national and state-patriotic perspective. I’ll put it bluntly right away: HAVE THE TOMSK POLICE LOST THEIR MINDS, TRYING TO DEPORT A RUSSIAN MAN, MIKRYUKOV, FROM RUSSIA? Exactly like that, without irony. Judging by Mikryukov’s surname, the entries in his documents, and his appearance, he is ethnically Russian. He is Russian, he wants to live in Russia, and he has already been living there for 15 years. It doesn’t matter what is written where; that fact alone makes Mikryukov’s deportation impossible. For political reasons, moral reasons, and any other reasons you like, including simple common sense. Where is he supposed to go? What country is there for people like the Mikryukovs? Everything happening here brings us to fundamental questions about Russia’s very existence. Why did we build and preserve our statehood in the first place? To sell oil and gas? To hand out flashing blue lights and black Mercedeses to tribal chiefs? To give our citizenship away to elderly French alcoholics unhappy with the tax system in their own country? Or are we building a country where people like the Mikryukovs, with their Russian faces, can live peacefully, work, and raise families? No chauvinism here. If this were not a Russian Mikryukov but a Tatar Minnikhanov, an Ossetian Dzagoev, or a Tuvan Shoigu-ool, this should apply to them in exactly the same way. Russians, Tatars, and Tuvans have no other country. They are the ones who created Russia. With difficulty, with conflicts and tragedies, through a long historical process—but what came out is what came out. This is the country we have, and this is the one we live in. So how can some bastard from the Tomsk migration service throw Russians out of the country they created? The people who made this decision, and those behind it, are enemies of the people. We have long needed a law stating that citizens whose ethnicity is Russian or belongs to another indigenous people of the Russian Federation without its own statehood should have an automatic right to Russian citizenship. Show any document of your own, or one of your parents’, where ethnicity is listed—and you’re in. As in Israel or Georgia, for example. The right of return. It is obvious that as long as Putin and United Russia are in power, there will be no such law. All they want is to give citizenship to Tajiks and Uzbeks. They are quiet, obedient, and uneducated. They won’t publish articles about police apartments. They are a source of cheap labor and votes in elections. But even in the absence of the necessary legal framework, surely we must have something like a social contract or a civic/national consensus: you cannot deport a Russian from Russia. You simply cannot, that’s all. Otherwise everything loses its meaning. Then we have no state at all. We have a Disneyland for oligarchs and top officials.