The Federal Law “On the Legal Situation of Foreign Nationals in the Russian Federation,”53 which was adopted in 2002, established three types of legal residence in Russia: temporary stay, temporary residence, and permanent residence. This new law only applied to people who arrived in Russia after its entry into force. This meant that stateless persons who had lived in Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union could no longer obtain legal status, which blocked their access to the procedure for acquiring citizenship. The Federal Law “On RF Citizenship”54 was also adopted in 2002. This law equates former Soviet citizens without Russian citizenship with foreign nationals and requires them to go through the three-step procedure “temporary residence permit – residence permit – citizenship.” Even though the law established preferential treatment for these people in the form of a shorter waiting period for citizenship provided they have a residence permit, in actual fact the law bars access to temporary residence permits even for stateless persons because stateless persons do not have valid documents or the ability to establish their identity (the procedure to establish identity is not conducted or is drawn out for an extended period). Over 80,000 former Soviet citizens who acquired RF passports that established the owner’s identity but did not grant citizenship ended up stateless. These passports were officially issued in Russia from 1992 to 2002, but information from them was never entered into the appropriate databases, which meant that they were later confiscated and their holders were declared stateless persons. It was only after eight years that an amendment to the Federal Law “On RF Citizenship” was drafted to resolve this problem. In late 2011, the State Duma adopted the draft after its first reading, but then work on the draft stopped. In 2012, Chapter VIII.1 was added to the law “On RF Citizenship” to regulate the status of stateless persons who were never able to obtain legal status. “Preferential” terms were granted to stateless persons who were former Soviet citizens, who arrived in Russia prior to November 1, 2002, and who fell into the abovementioned class of former Soviet citizens who received a Russian passport prior to July 1, 2002—which were later found to have been issued illegally—or were citizens of a different state, as long as they did not have a document confirming their right to live in another state. A simplified path to citizenship that only involved submitting an application for citizenship and bypassed the stages of temporary residence permit and residence permit was established for these categories of citizens. The new chapter also took people lacking any documents into account. To document these people, 53 Federal Law No. 115-FZ “On the Legal Situation of Foreign Nationals in the Russian Federation” of July 25, 2002, http://ivo.garant.ru/#/document/184755/ paragraph/485087:1 54 Federal Law No. 62-FZ “On RF Citizenship” of May 31, 2002, http://base.garant. ru/184539/ 32