Latvia stateless as a matter of national identity politics and ‘righting’ the historical wrongs (Fein & Straughn, 2014). In response, many former Soviet citizens actively refused to naturalise, some even say that they ‘choose statelessness’ (Vetik, 2011) as a ‘silent protest to what they saw as an unjust act of expatriation’ (Fein & Straughn, 2014: 701). The ‘zerooption’ policy was based, instead, on the concept of jus soli and civic citizenship (Shevel 2009: 274). Whilst it was arguably very inclusive, Shevel attributed this inclusivity to an ‘unintended side effect of contested politics of national identity’ shared by many new states in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union collapse (Shevel 2009: 283). The civic citizenship policy largely reduced potential statelessness, but it did not eradicate it completely. The ‘zero-option’ policy, despite comprehensive rhetoric, actually did entail some exceptions – it proved particularly exclusionary with regard to mobile Soviet citizens (including coethnics) residing outside the territory of a state at the time of the passing of the law, or those with an outstanding criminal convictions. Additional problems stemmed from the everyday and interminable bureaucratic caveats (Levin, 2018). Unsurprisingly, many currently stateless persons at some point simply realized that ‘their papers were no longer in order’ (Humphrey, 2002: 26) The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are around 91,000 persons under its statelessness mandate in Russia (UNHCR 2018). Like Mr Mskhiladze, a number of them are in long-term, potentially indefinite detention in Russia. The statistics of the Main Directorate for Migration of the Ministry of Interior (GUVM MVD) combined with reports by a Russia-wide network of immigration lawyers ‘Migration and Law’, demonstrate that in 2017 there were between 263 and 500 individuals in long-term detention in Russia, who could not be administratively removed (on file with the Author). [Table 1 about here] 7