Sdelat' ZAGS (Russia)

Sdelat' ZAGS 🇷🇺
Location: Russia
Definition: Lit. "to do the marriage registration" to facilitate the obtaining of Russian citizenship
Keywords: Russia – Marriage – Wedding – Informal Welfare – Migration – Opportunity – Imitation
Author: Elena Borisova
Affiliation: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK

By Elena Borisova, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK

Sdelat’ ZAGS (Taj. ZAGS kardan) – literally ‘to do the marriage registration’. ZAGS is an abbrevia-tion for the Russian Zapis’ Aktov Grazhdanskogo Sostoianiia – an office where people register their marital status, newborn children, paternity, change of names, and death. Sdelat’ ZAGS stands for the practice widely used by migrants from Tajikistan: by officially registering a mar-riage with a Russian citizen they gain eligibility for the ‘fast track’ citizenship procedure. Once the eligibility is achieved and a migrant spouse secures a residence permit or citizenship, such marriages are usually discharged. In legal terms, it is a ‘fictive marriage’ (fiktivnyi brak), that, according to the Russia’s Family Code, occurs when one or both spouses register their marriage without the intention to create a family. Such marriages are considered legally invalid and citi-zenship acquired through them might be revoked. However, there are no legal mechanisms to ensure that marriages between Russian and foreign citizens are not fictive. The definition of intention is left to the discretion of the courts dealing with concrete cases, and the legal pro-cedure must be initiated either by one of the spouses or a public prosecutor. This means that for migrants sdelat’ ZAGS effectively remains a pathway to ‘fast track’ Russian citizenship vis-à-vis the Russian draconian migration regime.