interpretation of the judgment to protect migrants and asylum seekers in other precarious legal situations. These were the specific conditions, which testified to the legal productivity of statelessness and led to the diffusion of rights and protections to people without effective nationality in the post-Soviet context.5 This paper is informed by a five-month long ethnographic fieldwork in pro-bono legal aid clinics for migrants and refugees in Russia belonging to the activist ‘Migration and Law’ network in 2014. I conducted daily observations of the relationships between the migrant and refugee clients and their lawyers; I shadowed the lawyers in courts when they were representing their clients (overall, I conducted fifty court observations). I also accompanied the migrants to the meetings with the local FMS officers either applying for asylum or inquiring about the status of their application. Throughout my fieldwork, I did not actively seek stateless individuals, but the phenomenon of post-Soviet statelessness came to the forefront of my research whilst interrogating the various socio-legal predicaments of migrants and refugees in post-Soviet Russia. I supplemented this material with follow up interviews with two high profile immigration lawyers who represented Mr Mskhiladze before the RCC the ECtHR between 2017 and 2019. My argument proceeds in three parts. In the first section, I present the historical context of post-Soviet statelessness and the scale of this phenomenon in contemporary Russia. I then use the case of Mr Mskhiladze to illustrate a successful legal challenge of postSoviet statelessness before the RCC and the ECtHR. The third section reveals how this landmark decision has helped secure the rights of other noncitizens in de facto stateless legal 5 I limit my conclusions about the legally productive relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness to the post-Soviet context, which I studied empirically. I welcome further research to ‘test’ this relationship in other socio-legal and jurisdictional contexts. 5