9 Russians in Fight to Keep Citizenship


Igor Tabakov / MT The Foreign Ministry building in downtown Moscow looming in the morning fog.
The ministry lost records of at least nine Russians living abroad. Imagine waking up one morning without your citizenship. That’s what essentially happened to at least nine Russians after their names simply vanished from Foreign Ministry computers.
Viktor Gorn, 70, and his 72-year-old wife, Taisia Kirichenko, found out the hard way when they turned to the Russian consulate in Leipzig, Germany, to renew their passports in 2008.
Consulate officials informed them that their names were not listed in the Foreign Ministry’s database, Gorn said.
When the couple applied with the consulate in Hamburg in 2009, they faced another rejection – and consulate officials confiscated their expired passpor…

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