since Georgia did not recognize him as its citizen. His future amounted to a bleak prospect of potentially indefinite administrative detention without even a slim chance of actual removal, as Georgian USSR has ceased to exist long ago. Indeed, nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there are still people who, never in their lives, have held any passport other than that of the Soviet Union. They are stateless in every meaning of this term – both de jure and de facto (Vlieks, 2017)3. Their statelessness is a residue (Cole, 2017) of the post-imperial identity politics (Shevel, 2009). Some were intentionally made stateless by the new exclusionary citizenship regimes of Latvia and Estonia (Brubaker, 1992), others fell through the cracks of the ever changing citizenship laws, never quite fitting the evolving definition of a citizen, neither in Russia nor in the post-Soviet republics (Levin, 2018; Shevel, 2012). The relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness in Russia is a complex one, however, as I argue in this paper, it can also be legally productive if strategically challenged. The legal productivity arises from the mobilization of the international human rights protections embedded in de jure statelessness by local legal actors in a given, national immigration context to secure the rights of other undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, who are de facto stateless. The case of Mr Mskhiladze before the Russian Constitutional Court (RCC, 2017) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, 2018) illustrates this. The legal battle to free Mr Mskhiladze from prolonged detention led to elements of the Code of Administrative Offences (CAO) declared unconstitutional by the Russian Constitutional Court (RCC). This helped secure the enforceable (human) right to liberty (Art 5 ECHR) for other groups of non-deportable noncitizens in Russian detention centres. It was particularly 3 I am aware that the distinction between de jure and de facto statelessness is controversial. I employ it as a heuristic and define it on pp. 9 – 10 of this paper. 3