Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union, Volume V

861.111/8–2449

Revised Information Sheet From the Embassy in the Soviet Union¹

Moscow, June 16, 1949.

Information Concerning Soviet Exit Visas²

Under Soviet law no person living in the Soviet Union may depart from the country without the permission of the Soviet Government in the form of an exit visa. This regulation applies not only to Soviet citizens but to foreigners as well, including diplomatic personnel. Except in the case of diplomatic personnel and other representatives of foreign governments who receive their visas through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, applications for such visas must be made in the administrative center nearest the applicant’s place of residence to the appropriate office of the Militsiya, or police, which in the Soviet Union is an agency of the central Government, being a branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs or M.V.D.

Such visas are issued with comparative readiness to foreigners who recently arrived in the Soviet Union with passports properly visaed by Soviet officials abroad, though even such persons may frequently experience considerable delays. For many years, however, it has been extremely difficult, and for the past two years virtually impossible, for all other persons to obtain exit visas. In the case of those who may be claimed by any possible interpretation of Soviet law to be Soviet citizens, it is safe to say that the present Soviet policy is to issue no exit visas for travel to the United States for any reason, however compelling, except the official business of the Soviet Government. No Soviet citizen whose request for an American visa was not officially sponsored by the Soviet Government has received a Soviet exit visa for travel to the United States since October 1947.

There are now on record with the Embassy the cases of approximately 5,500 persons who at some time since 1940 (in almost all cases, at least three years ago) have informed the Embassy of their desire to travel to the United States. The great majority of these persons were neither residents nor citizens of the Soviet Union before 1939, but acquired Soviet citizenship automatically as residents of territories annexed during or since the recent war. Of this group approximately 2,000 have presented claims to American citizenship; about 3,500 have no such claim but are applying for American immigration visas.

To the Embassy’s knowledge, only 76 of these 3,500 non-American citizens have succeeded in departing from the U.S.S.R. since 1940, and of these 76 at least 41 were not Soviet citizens but citizens of other countries or of no country at all, 33 of them were given exit visas not for travel to the United States but for repatriation to Poland as Polish citizens under a Soviet-Polish agreement. However, even this slow rate of departure has been checked since 1947. In that year exit visas were issued to Soviet citizens in this group in only 3 cases, all exceptional. Two of these cases involved the American-born widows of prominent Soviet citizens and the alien minor child of one; the third, the alien minor child of an American-citizen mother who was also the widow of a Soviet citizen. Since that year no Soviet citizen in this group has received an exit visa, and only one other non-American citizen has been able to immigrate to the United States from the Soviet Union.

Of about 350 Soviet wives of American citizens who have applied for permission to depart from the Soviet Union to join their husbands, not one has received a visa since August 1946. 97 of this group are the wives of veterans, and the great majority of them were already married when they became Soviet citizens in the manner indicated above. In connection with the problem of obtaining exit visas for fiancees of American citizens it should be noted that a decree of the Soviet Government published on February 15, 1947, forbids Soviet citizens to marry foreigners.³

Of the approximately 2,000 claimants to American citizenship mentioned above, the Embassy and the Department of State have been able to verify the claims of about 600. The claims of approximately 250 more are now before the Department of State for decision, and about 100 others have proved not to be American citizens or to have lost their citizenship. The majority of the remainder probably have valid claims, but the Embassy has had difficulty in collecting sufficient information in many cases to justify a decision, usually because after receiving an applicant’s initial letter the Embassy has been unable to communicate with him further. In many such cases the Embassy’s letters remain unanswered or are returned undelivered. In a few cases the returned letters indicate the applicant’s departure from the U.S.S.R. to Poland or some other country, perhaps as a Polish citizen under the agreement mentioned above; in other cases, merely that his whereabouts are not known. In still other cases, letters from applicants have indicated that they had not received the Embassy’s letters or that they had written earlier letters which did not reach the Embassy. In such circumstances the figures given above are necessarily inexact, but there are in all probability between 1,800 and 1,900 persons still residing in the Soviet Union who have valid or potentially valid claims to American citizenship and desire to return to the United States but cannot obtain the permission of the Soviet Government to do so.

The great majority of these persons are dual nationals; that is, while their claims to American citizenship are valid, they are at the same time considered by the Soviet Government to be Soviet citizens. The Soviet Government, however, does not admit the possibility that one of its citizens can at the same time possess the citizenship of another country, and such persons are considered under Soviet law to be Soviet citizens only. Like other Soviet citizens they have been seldom in the past and never in recent years permitted to leave the country for personal or family reasons. Since 1940 only 17 such persons have received exit visas; since December 1946, none.

Under a strict interpretation of the appropriate Soviet laws, only persons who actually possessed the citizenship of the country whose territory was annexed became Soviet citizens; a foreigner living on that territory did not. Some of the persons mentioned above were actually citizens of the country in question. Many were born in the United States of foreign parents and thus acquired the right to their parents’ citizenship at birth as well as to that of the United States. However, all such persons were not necessarily citizens of those countries. Pre-war Poland, for example, had a law which forbade such persons to claim both citizenships at once, but it did not insist in most cases that they keep their Polish citizenship if they had a right to, and wished to claim, another citizenship. Such persons if they came to Poland on American passports were considered to be American, and not Polish, citizens, and others who had lived as Polish citizens were allowed to leave the country on American passports and were then no longer Polish citizens.

The Soviet authorities themselves at first recognized that many such persons were not Soviet citizens and issued them residence permits identifying them as foreigners or as persons with no citizenship. Up to 1947 such persons were often allowed to leave the country. In 1948, however, only three of more than 50 American citizens not previously claimed as Soviet citizens were able to leave. None have left so far in 1949. Of the rest, many who obtained American passports and tried to obtain exit visas have had their residence permits and their passports taken away and have been declared Soviet citizens. Since it is a serious offense in the Soviet Union to live without proper documents, these persons face the threat of fine, imprisonment, or worse, if they then insist on their American citizenship and refuse to accept Soviet passports.

In this way the Soviet Government has claimed as its citizens because of alleged former Polish citizenship, persons who still had in their possession Polish documents identifying them as foreigners, children whose fathers had lost Polish citizenship by American naturalization before the children’s birth, and women who had lost their claim to Polish citizenship by the American naturalization of their husbands. Poland is taken only as an example since the Soviet position is the same in connection with the other countries part or all of whose pre-war territory has been annexed by the Soviet Union. In general, the Soviet Government appears to interpret the laws of these countries to mean that they, like the Soviet Union, regarded their citizenship as obligatory and compulsory for all who had any possible claim to it and emigration to another country as an attempt to escape one’s duties to the state.

It should also be noted that in most cases even those American citizens who are also clearly Soviet citizens under Soviet law acquired Soviet citizenship through no choice of their own. Soviet agreements with Poland and Czechoslovakia by which certain people had a choice of citizenship were limited by the persons’ “nationality”, a term which in the Soviet Union refers not to citizenship but to racial or ethnic origin. In the case of Poland, for instance, this right was open to persons of Polish or Jewish “nationality” only. Those of Russian or Ukrainian “nationality” were allowed no choice.

Some persons recognized by the Soviet Government as American citizens have been given exit visas only to have their wives and children who were Soviet citizens refused permission to accompany them of join them later.

The Soviet Government refuses to admit that the Embassy can have any legitimate interest in persons considered to be Soviet citizens. When the Embassy has requested the issuance of exit visas to such persons, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs has replied merely that as Soviet citizens they might apply for visas under the regulations established for Soviet citizens, in other words, that the matter was none of the Embassy’s business. Since such requests not only do not help the persons involved but may also attract to them the unfavorable attention of the Soviet authorities, the Embassy has ceased presenting direct requests to the Soviet Government in recent months except in the cases of persons who, in the Embassy’s opinion, cannot legally be regarded as Soviet citizens. In most cases the best that can be done for all others is to provide them, for presentation to the local authorities, with certificates of their status, and of the desire and ability of their relatives to care for them in the United States, and to inform them of the necessary procedure in applying for exit visas. The Soviet authorities still allow such applications, though they are often made difficult by requests for numerous documents or other technicalities. A final decision, however, may take a year or more, and, as indicated above, the applicants do not get visas.

Even in the cases of persons who, on the basis of all evidence available to the Embassy, cannot legally be considered to be Soviet citizens, the Embassy’s efforts, as shown above, have had little effect. The facts of the persons’ citizenship are frequently incorrectly stated by the Soviet authorities, and even when the actual facts are pointed out, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has never changed a decision that a person: was a Soviet citizen, once that decision had been communicated to the Embassy.

In such circumstances the decision as to a person’s departure from the Soviet Union obviously rests with the Soviet Government and not with the Embassy, nor is it noticeably influenced by the Embassy’s efforts or by such humanitarian factors as tragic family separations. None of the few who have left in recent years had received more help from the Embassy than many others who failed to obtain exit visas. The two widows of Soviet citizens who obtained exit visas in 1947, for example, did so without the Embassy’s help. The alien child of an American mother who received a visa in the same year, had been the subject of strong representations on the Embassy’s part, but all the Embassy’s efforts in another similar case, including a personal approach by the Ambassador to one of the Deputy Foreign Ministers, have had no effect. The one non-American citizen mentioned above as receiving an exit visa since 1947 was a boy who had lost both his parents in a German concentration camp and had no living relatives except in the United States. However, many others whose cases are equally appealing, and one whose case is virtually identical, have received as much help from the Embassy as this boy and have not received visas. For example, in the cases of eighteen children with both parents, or the only surviving parent, in the United States, the only effect of the Embassy’s efforts, including a personal appeal by Ambassador Smith to Mr. Vyshinski, the then Deputy Foreign Minister, has been that a number of them have been declared to be Soviet citizens.

The Embassy sympathizes deeply with American citizens separated from relatives in the Soviet Union and will continue to do whatever it considers possible and advisable to help them. It has, however, no means of compelling a change in Soviet policy and can offer no assurance that any resident of the Soviet Union, whatever his citizenship, will be able to secure an exit visa for departure to the United States. The Embassy must further continue to refrain from taking action in individual cases whenever it seems likely that such action would only increase a person’s difficulties with local Soviet authorities.

1. This document was originally transmitted to the Department of State as an enclosure to despatch No. 343 from Moscow on June 16, 1949. The copy here reproduced was sent as an enclosure to a Foreign Service Operations Memorandum from Moscow on August 24, 1949, in response to a request from the Department on August 10.
2. This version is a revision and an enlargement of the Information Sheet enclosed with despatch No. 178 from Moscow on February 10, 1948; Foreign Relations, 1948, vol. iv, p. 807.
3. See telegram 1203, Moscow, April 5, 1947, and footnote 1, Foreign Relations, 1947, vol. iv, p. 722.