Russian Citizenship
Last month, just before I came back to the UK I visited the local UFMS (federal migration service) office to get Russian citizenship for my baby. Baby has a Russian mother, she was born on Russian soil, and her birth certificate confirms that her mother is Russian. It should be easy, a piece of cake. Unfortunately, doing any sort of business in Russia is a chaotic adventure.
The office only opens one day a week for baby citizenship registration, at 10am. We got there early at 9pm, and found a vast queue of people already queuing up outside the relevant room. Unlike British government offices, which mainly work on an appointment or ticket system, Russia has the famous “kto posledniy?” system. Each newcomer to the queue arrives and asks “whos last?”. The last person in the queue will shout out that they are last, and then the new arrival becomes “last”.
The room that were queueing for had two different “kto posledniy?” lines, as the room did two types of registration, babies and something else, so this complicated matters further. Not only did you need to find out who is last, you also needed to find who is last in the relevant line. My Russian isn’t quite up to determining correct queues, so I left the “who’s last” dealings to my wife.
10am arrived and still the door was locked shut with no sign of life. So much for business punctuality and customer service. Im most of my office jobs in the UK I was expected to be onsite, at my desk and ready to go immediately at the turn of the hour. Even if this meant that I had to arrive 15 minutes early to fire up the computers and phones, log onto the various systems and prepare myself. If I wasn’t onsite and on station at 10.01 then I could expect a warning, reprimand or to be fired. Russians seem to be used to abysmal customer service, they take it in their stride.
10.15 a grumpy looking middle aged woman arrives with a bunch of keys, opens the office door, goes inside, locks it behind her and emerges five minutes later with a cup in her hand, she then locks the door again and wanders off to make a cup of tea. The crowd watches intently but nobody says anything to her.
10.25, another woman comes back, unlocks the door and goes into the room. A brave man opens the door and asks if she could possibly do any work. She screams ” go outside and wait !”
10.30 A young woman walks past with a man, they are talking and seem to be friends. He is also clutching a similar bundle of documents to everybody in the queue, suggesting that he too needs to register his baby. The woman opens the door and invites him in. So much for orderly queuing, perhaps he knows somebody in the UFMS or has offered a nice bribe !
10.40 The woman comes out of the office, a couple of people start to complain that they were first in the line, had been waiting for hours and that this young man should have waited , the next thing all hell breaks loose and people start running down the corridor, including my wife. I decide to follow her and ask her what has happened. ”they have decided to change the room”.
10.50 The queue is now outside another room further down the corridor, and the queue order appears to have changed. Is this a new Russian custom that I’m not aware of ? A new queue order has formed outside this door.
11.00 My wife casually asks the people at the front if they can possibly let us go first, as we have a very small baby at home. After some cajoling and bargaining we are next !
11.10 We arrive in the mystical UFMS room. The angry grumpy looking UFMS official takes one look at our papers, see that daddy is British and looks confused.She calls somebody on the phone to ask advice then informs us – “your baby might have British citizenship already, you need to go to The British Embassy and provide a letter to confirm that British citizenship does not exist”. We explain that the British Embassy is roughly 1500 miles from Izhevsk, and they don’t know anything about my baby, and there is little chance of them providing this magical letter. My wife exploded at the clueless official with a torrent of rapid Russian.
We got the woman to call somebody higher up in UFMS to ask for further advice. Eventually they say that everything is OK and citizenship should be granted.
Our papers are stamped and we get the citizenship document. The woman even apologises and says that this isn’t her usual job, so she doesn’t really understand the law.
It’s times like this that I despair at living in Russia, simple tasks are made nearly impossible by power crazed officials interpreting the law in whatever way they feel.
We head for home and breathe a sign of relief.
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