The bottom line. Russia is not stripping its emigres of citizenship — the constitution expressly forbids it. Instead, on 22 July the State Duma passed a law that switches off every function citizenship performs: passport, property, banking, notaries, consular protection. On paper, a person remains a Russian citizen. In practice, they do not. Russian history has a precise name for this construct: the lishentsy — the "deprived".
Updated 22 July 2026. The law has passed its second and third readings in the State Duma; approval by the Federation Council (scheduled for 24 July) and the president's signature remain. It takes effect upon official publication.
The big picture
On 22 July the State Duma passed, in back-to-back second and third readings, a package of two bills on "temporary restrictive measures" against Russian citizens who are abroad and, in the authorities' view, "evading" punishment. Behind the neutral wording stands a legal construct for which the law has an old term — civil death, civiliter mortuus: the person is alive, but as a subject of law they cease to exist for the state.
The key fact is what the law does not contain. It contains no deprivation of citizenship — because Article 6(3) of the Russian constitution prohibits stripping a Russian citizen of their citizenship. Instead, the law dismantles the substance of citizenship while leaving the shell intact. Anyone placed on the justice ministry's register will be unable to sell a flat, renew a foreign-travel passport, use a banking app, issue a power of attorney, register a marriage at a consulate, or count on consular protection if detained abroad. Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the First Department legal group, told Novaya Gazeta Europe the measure amounts to "de facto deprivation of citizenship"; lawyer Anastasia Burakova describes the resulting condition as close to statelessness — the person formally has a state, but it performs no function towards them except a punitive one.
This is not Russia's first experiment of the kind. It is the third. The construct of "a citizen without a citizen's rights" was twice an institution of Soviet law: as the lishentsy caste of 1918–1936, and as the practice of denaturalising emigres and dissidents — from Lenin's 1921 decree to the edicts against Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mstislav Rostropovich. Both practices were officially repudiated and dismantled in the Soviet Union's final years. The law passed on 22 July revives their logic in the registry format of the twenty-first century — the same format the state has already honed on "foreign agents" and "extremists" and is steadily assembling into a comprehensive domestic restrictions regime for those who left, as FACTUM has previously examined.
The mechanics of disconnection
The law creates a state register of "evaders", to be maintained by the justice ministry — the same agency that administers the "foreign agent" and "extremist" lists. The interior ministry, the FSB, prosecutors and court bailiffs will feed it data; an interagency "commission on the application of temporary restrictive measures" will coordinate the process. Listing requires three conditions simultaneously: a final court verdict or administrative ruling, established "evasion" of the punishment, and presence outside Russia. How "evasion" is to be established the text does not explain — the procedure is left to the agencies' discretion.
Restrictions take effect the day after a name is entered. Drawing on the published analyses of Novaya Gazeta Europe, Meduza, The Moscow Times and Current Time, the list runs as follows:
Property. Money and assets are frozen. Rosreestr, the state property registry, will return documents for any real-estate transaction without consideration; vehicle registration becomes impossible. This is not confiscation — ownership formally remains with the person, but they cannot dispose of it.
Money. All payments due — including pensions — are routed to a special rouble account governed by rules the central bank will set. Court-ordered debts may be recovered from the same account. Access to mobile banking and payment apps is cut off; banks may refuse credit.
Work and business. No registration as a sole trader or self-employed taxpayer; no new licences, with existing ones suspended.
Documents and representation. Notaries are obliged to refuse any act on behalf of a listed person; transactions by power of attorney are banned. Qualified electronic signatures are revoked, and access to the Gosuslugi state-services portal is blocked.
Consulates. No foreign-travel passport, no notarial services, no certification of documents, no civil-registry acts — and no consular protection as such, including in the event of arrest or emergency abroad.
Lawyer Valeria Vetoshkina points to a closed loop built into the law: to leave the register, the punishment must be executed — a fine paid, for instance; yet the same law blocks the person's banking access and bans representation by proxy, cutting off the very means of executing the punishment they are accused of "evading". There are four grounds for removal from the register: the court ruling is overturned, the sentence begins to be actually served, the person returns to Russia — or dies. For those sentenced to prison, the first two are unachievable from abroad by definition: the only practical exit from the register is to come back and go to jail.
The law's sole "humanitarian" provision is telling. If a listed person has dependants in Russia — parents, a spouse or children without income of their own — the interagency commission may grant them a monthly allowance. It will be paid out of the "offender's" own frozen funds.
Who is covered
Formally, the law applies to anyone convicted under any article of the criminal code who is abroad and not serving their sentence — and, for the first time in Russian practice, to defendants in administrative cases. Six articles of the Code of Administrative Offences made the list, and all six are political: failure to comply with "foreign agent" directives and violation of "foreign agent" operating rules (Articles 19.5 and 19.34), calls to violate Russia's territorial integrity (20.3.2), "discrediting" the armed forces (20.3.3), calls for sanctions (20.3.4), and participation in an "undesirable" organisation (20.33).
The choice of articles defines the real target group. In-absentia verdicts and "foreign agent" citations have in recent years been issued above all to journalists, politicians, human-rights defenders and activists — people the system pursues not for an act but for a stance, by the same logic that turned "foreign agent" status into a substitute for a ballot line in the case of would-be presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin, which FACTUM has covered separately. Lawyers polled by Novaya Gazeta Europe converge on one assessment: the law is aimed at those physically beyond the state's reach and works first of all as an instrument of intimidation — with weekly additions to the register likely, on the model of the Friday "foreign agent" listings.
The potential scale is set by the wartime emigration itself. Counts based on host-country statistics put the number of those who left since early 2022 at roughly 650,000; a study based on social-media geolocation data, cited by the To Be Precise research project, estimated around 860,000 in 2022 alone. The methodologies are not comparable, so the defensible statement is: hundreds of thousands of people. Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, ahead of the vote, identified the target without legal euphemism: the law concerns "extremists, traitors to our Motherland" (as quoted by The Insider). Official assurances that "ordinary" emigres will be untouched cannot be independently verified — and the text of the law draws no such distinction: any in-absentia conviction under any criminal article, plus a finding of "evasion", triggers the full mechanism.
The lishentsy: civil death, first edition
The construct just enacted has a direct historical prototype, recorded in the founding documents of the Soviet state. The 1918 constitution of the Russian republic created a category of citizens stripped of voting rights — the lishentsy: former "exploiters", traders, priests, policemen. The institution survived until the 1936 constitution, and the deprivation never stopped at the ballot box: lishentsy were denied standard ration cards, lost jobs and housing — historians record evictions from flats in favour of "the working class" — and their children were barred from universities. The lists of the deprived were published: the publicity of disgrace was part of the punishment. The justice ministry's register, with "current information on individuals" posted openly, reproduces that detail too.
The prototype's second pillar is the decree of 15 December 1921 "On the deprivation of citizenship rights of certain categories of persons abroad", issued over Lenin's signature. Behind "certain categories" stood virtually the entire post-revolutionary emigration: citizenship was withdrawn from anyone who had spent more than five years abroad without obtaining Soviet documents — the formula "loss of connection with the Motherland" made departure itself grounds for the sanction. Hundreds of thousands of people became stateless overnight; it was for them that the League of Nations created the Nansen passport in 1922, history's first document for people whose state had disowned them. The 1926 criminal code of the Russian republic completed the logic, adding deprivation of citizenship to the roster of judicial punishments — alongside being declared an "enemy of the working people".
Citizenship as punishment: the late Soviet decades
Stalin's constitution formally abolished the lishentsy, but the Soviet state kept punishing people through their citizenship to the end of its existence — in a personalised, decree-by-decree format. Leon Trotsky was stripped of citizenship in 1932. In 1974 it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, expelled after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. In 1978, Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya; in 1980, Vasily Aksyonov; in all, dozens of cultural figures and dissidents went through the procedure. The decrees' standard formula — "actions discrediting the title of citizen of the USSR" — was every bit as elastic as today's "evasion": no specific offence was required, a position sufficed.
How the practice ended is instructive. In August 1990, a decree by Mikhail Gorbachev restored citizenship to Solzhenitsyn, Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich and others — the state's de facto admission that it had punished them not for crimes but for dissent. And Article 6 of the 1993 constitution codified the lesson as a directly applicable norm: a citizen of the Russian Federation cannot be deprived of their citizenship. The provision was written precisely as an answer to Soviet practice — and it is precisely this provision that the law of 22 July circumvents without repealing.
The ban, circumvented
The law's legal novelty lies not in its severity but in the method of circumvention. Citizenship cannot be revoked — so it is frozen piece by piece: separate provisions disconnect property, banking, notarial services, state services, consular protection. Each measure, taken alone, is dressed as a "temporary restriction"; together they produce the same result as the decree of 1921 — a person holding the passport of a state that refuses to recognise them. The technique itself — an elastic norm covering an unlimited circle of people under a narrow formal pretext — is no invention of 2026: it is the pattern by which Russia has tightened its human-rights legislation for the past decade, a trajectory FACTUM has traced in detail.
There is also one respect in which the new construct is harsher than its Soviet prototype. An emigre stripped of Soviet citizenship lost a country but remained a legal subject wherever they lived. A person on the new register is worse placed: Russia keeps them inside its legal field — as a debtor, a convict and a target for recovery from frozen accounts — while switching off every instrument through which that field can be navigated. The state neither releases the person nor recognises them. It is the architecture of a trap, not of a divorce.
Conclusions
What is established. On 22 July the State Duma passed, in second and third readings, the law creating the register of "evaders" with the set of restrictions described above; it takes effect upon publication, with Federation Council approval expected on 24 July followed by the president's signature. For the first time, in-absentia deprivation of rights extends to administrative cases, and all six administrative articles included belong to political legislation. The law's construct is functionally equivalent to deprivation of citizenship while formally observing Article 6 of the constitution — the assessment offered by lawyers to independent outlets, and one the text of the law bears out. The institutional precedents — the lishentsy of 1918–1936 and the Soviet denaturalisation practice — are historical fact, not a columnist's metaphor: the mechanics (deprivation of rights in place of a sentence to it), the target group (emigres and dissenters) and the element of a public list all coincide.
What remains hypothesis. The scale of application. The register may stay a targeted instrument against a few hundred publicly known in-absentia convicts — or, on the model of the "foreign agent" lists, become a conveyor belt: the law contains no legal brake against the second scenario. Enforceability is also open: freezing accounts and blocking transactions is technically straightforward, whereas policing the "evasion" of hundreds of thousands of people would require an interagency machine that does not yet exist. If the trend of recent years holds — and every registry instrument in Russia has so far only expanded — the category of "a citizen without a citizen's rights" risks becoming not an emergency measure but a permanent institution of Russian law. As it was a century ago.
Sources: Novaya Gazeta Europe, Meduza, The Moscow Times, The Insider, Current Time, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Vedomosti, The Bell, To Be Precise, materials of draft laws No. 1095029-8 and No. 1095042-8 (State Duma legislative database), historical scholarship on the lishentsy institution and Soviet citizenship law. Estimates of the emigration's size diverge by methodology; statements by Russian officials on the law's purpose are cited as one party's position and are not independently verified.