There’s a blank spot in my family history. Not the kind you skip in a photo album—this was erased, on purpose. My ancestors were ordinary peasants before the 1917 Revolution. Except one branch on my mother’s side. A branch that doesn’t add up.
My great-grandfather always wrote in official documents that he was a village house painter. Yet by the 1920s, he somehow got a higher education and moved up in the system. His brother did too.
But the strangest part? I know almost nothing about that side of my family. My mother doesn’t even know her own grandmother’s last name. That grandmother simply disappeared—no trace, no documents, no photos. The only thing that survived in family whispers was that she was pretty. My big eyes? Those are hers.
My grandfather, her son, was a Red Army colonel. He lied in his official biographies, claiming he didn’t know his mother. But that wasn’t true. When my mother was a little girl, they took her to see that grandmother—secretly, for one visit, one memory.
Why all the secrecy? The only explanation is that she was a лишенец—one of the “disenfranchised.” One of Russia’s invisible people.
In the Soviet Union, if your family was once nobility, clergy, a merchant, or even a low-ranking official, you were marked. The state called you an outcast, stripped you of rights, and erased you from society.
And contact with such people—even your own blood—could ruin your life forever.
You see, Russia has always divided people into first-class and second-class, by faith, birth, or ideology. It didn’t stop with the fall of the Soviet Union. Even now, people can lose everything if they fall out of favor with the state.
Today, we are going to uncover how Russia created its outcasts—how it marked people as “not quite human.”
And how that shadow still follows families like mine.
Dividing Souls
Long before ideology or class divided people in Russia, religion was the first to draw lines between “full citizens” and “second-class citizens.”
In the 17th century, Russia was torn apart by a church schism that many today barely remember, but it shaped the nation’s attitude toward power and conformity for centuries to come. This split began when Patriarch Nikon, supported by Tsar Alexei, decided to reform the Russian Orthodox Church to align its rituals more closely with Greek practices. What sounded like a minor edit turned into a cultural earthquake. Back then, it mattered deeply how people crossed themselves, how they pronounced prayers, and whether they held up two fingers or three. A big difference!
For the state, religious unity wasn’t about faith; it was about control. At a time when Europe was torn apart by religious wars, with Catholics and Protestants fighting and kings losing their thrones over faith, Russia’s leaders feared that even the smallest crack in religious unity could destroy their power. If you didn’t pray the “correct” way, how could they trust you to obey the tsar?
The Old Believers, those who rejected the reforms, were branded as dangerous rebels. The state hunted them relentlessly, burning their books, executing their leaders, exiling communities to Siberia, and imposing heavy taxes to force them into submission. In some cases, Old Believer villages were burned to the ground. Many chose to set themselves on fire rather than abandon their faith—a grim testament to how violently the state demanded religious conformity.
It wasn’t only the Old Believers who were persecuted. The Russian Empire viewed Catholicism and Lutheranism with deep suspicion, especially in its western territories, fearing foreign influence and potential disloyalty to the Orthodox tsar. The state restricted the construction of Catholic churches, limited missionary work, and closely monitored Lutheran communities, particularly those in the Baltic region.
Various religious sects suffered similar fates. Sectarians like the Molokans and Dukhobors faced fines, forced relocations, and persecution for their refusal to follow the official Orthodox line. Communities were split apart, leaders imprisoned, and families forced to convert under threat of exile or economic ruin.
And of course, among the most systematically discriminated second-class citizens in Russia were the Jews. They became subjects of the Russian Empire after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, and from the start, the state saw them as outsiders to be controlled. Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, barred from living in many cities, restricted in their professions, and subjected to additional taxes and legal discrimination that made them permanent outsiders in the empire.
This is a vast and painful history in itself—and I have a separate video dedicated to the history of Jews in Russia if you want to dive deeper into how they were made second-class citizens by design.
The Estate System
For centuries, Russian society was carved into estates, each with its own rights—or lack of them. There were the nobles, who held land and power. There were the townspeople, the meshchane, who were legally free but tied to their crafts and cities. There were the clergy, who held their own special privileges. And then there were the peasants, the backbone of the Russian Empire, who, by law and by social expectation, were treated as simple, foolish souls in need of guidance from those “wiser” and “more cultured” above them.
It was disturbingly similar to how enslaved people in 19th-century America were described by their owners—as helpless children who needed the “care” of their masters, all while being exploited for labor.
Serfdom in Russia tied millions of peasants to the land and to the will of their landlords. A nobleman could sell a peasant, separate families, or punish them as he saw fit. Peasants had no right to leave the land without permission, and their labor funded the luxurious lifestyles of the few at the top.
Could someone move between these estates? Technically, yes, but the doors were nearly closed. A peasant might escape serfdom by joining the military or by entering a religious order. Rare cases of merchants or exceptionally talented artisans buying themselves freedom did exist, and a handful of serfs became famous writers or entrepreneurs. For example, Artemy Tereshchenko, a Ukrainian peasant, rose to become a major sugar manufacturer and philanthropist. But these were exceptions so rare they became legends, not the norm.
The gap between the lives of wealthy nobles and peasants was unfathomable. Even the most enlightened people of the 19th century, those who read Rousseau and discussed emancipation, could not bridge the chasm between themselves and the peasants. They might feel guilty about the suffering they witnessed, might build schools or set up clinics on their estates, might speak passionately about reform in salons—but they never saw the peasants as their equals. The divide was too deep and the belief in their own cultural superiority too ingrained.
Russia’s estate system was a machine built to divide its people and to ensure that, from birth, a person’s place in society and their opportunities were set in stone. Serfdom was officially abolished in 1861, but the habits of mind it created, the view that some people are “less than” simply because of birth, did not vanish with the stroke of a pen.
And in many ways, the belief that some people are meant to rule, while others are meant to be ruled, continued to shape Russia long after the chains of serfdom were broken.
Outcasts of the Tsarist Era
In Tsarist Russia, everyone—from the highest noble to the humblest peasant—lived under a constant, unspoken threat: you could lose everything at any moment. A wrong word, a wrong association, a hint of suspicion—and your life as you knew it could be over.
The higher you climbed in society, the more you had to lose and the more terrified you became of falling.
Even nobles were not safe. The tsarist system had a brutal tool called “civil execution.” It wasn’t a death sentence in the physical sense, but it was the death of your status and rights. A nobleman could be stripped of his rank, titles, and privileges, losing the protections that came with them. They could no longer serve in the military or hold government posts, and their family’s social standing would collapse with them. For many, it was a fate worse than death. One notable example was the poet Alexander Radishchev, who was exiled to Siberia for his writings criticizing serfdom and autocracy, effectively executed in civil terms for daring to question the system.
Merchants were not safe either. The state tightly controlled markets and fairs, granting and revoking trading rights at will. A merchant could lose the right to trade over a tax dispute, a bribe unpaid, or a suspicion of disloyalty. State agents ensured that trade served the tsar’s interests first, so one misstep could ruin a merchant’s livelihood and push his family into poverty.
Even among peasants, one could become an outcast. Peasants lived within the obshchina, or the village commune—a system that managed land distribution, taxes, and collective responsibilities. The obshchina was a lifeline in a harsh world, providing protection and a sense of belonging. But it could also expel individuals deemed troublesome or unable to fulfill communal duties. To be cast out from the obshchina meant losing your access to land, your right to farm, and the support network that was essential for survival. An expelled peasant became a wanderer, vulnerable to starvation, exploitation, and arrest as a vagrant.
Life under police surveillance was another form of slow erasure. Those marked by the state—whether for political suspicion, religious dissent, or criminal accusations—faced heavy restrictions. They could be forbidden from living in major cities, forced to report regularly to local authorities, or barred from certain professions. Exiles in Siberia could not return home without permission, lived under constant watch, and were often restricted in whom they could associate with, what they could read, and even where they could walk.
In Tsarist Russia, the fear of becoming an outcast was ever-present. The glittering palaces of St. Petersburg and Moscow were built on this fear—a fear that kept people obedient, compliant, and grateful for the rights they had, however fragile those rights might be.
Outcasts of the Soviet State
In the Soviet Union, becoming an outcast wasn’t about what you did—it was about who you were.
This was the brutal twist of the Bolshevik system: your personal merits, hard work, or loyalty meant nothing if your birth betrayed you. If your documents indicated that you came from nobility, merchants, or the clergy, you were automatically branded a lishenets—a person stripped of rights, a non-full-citizen in the workers’ state.
This connects directly to that strange blank spot in my family’s history I shared with you earlier. All these silences, all these erasures—most likely, it was because they were hiding something dangerous: the fact that they were lishentsy by birth, trying to survive in a country that could destroy them for who their parents were.
For the lishentsy, life was a series of closed doors. It was very difficult for them to secure state employment, and there were no other options available. They were the last to secure housing in the overcrowded cities. Starting in 1928, the Soviet regime launched mass expulsions of lishentsy from major cities, with Moscow and Leningrad leading the purge. Families were evicted from apartments, no matter their qualifications or the years they had worked, and their children were expelled from universities.
In schools, children of lishentsy were forced to publicly renounce their parents. Many families, desperate to remain in the cities, moved into small garden cottages (dachas), living in cramped, cold conditions while they tried to find any niche in the Soviet system. This is vividly depicted in my historical novel, The Prince of the Soviet, which tells how people clung to any fragment of dignity while being systematically pushed out of society.
Children of lishentsy did everything they could to hide their origins. They invented false biographies, destroyed old documents, and created new identities to slip through the cracks of the state’s relentless bureaucracy.
In the Soviet Union, the bureaucracy wanted to know everything about everyone. Every person had a personal file that contained their autobiography, work history, recommendations, and often, denunciations from neighbors or coworkers. Without this file, you could not get a job, except perhaps as a janitor or an unskilled laborer in a factory. And that is exactly what happened to many.
Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, it is estimated that around 3 million people in the USSR were classified as lishentsy. While official discrimination against lishentsy eased somewhat after the 1936 Soviet Constitution, suspicion and informal barriers continued for decades, with many former lishentsy and their children denied prestigious jobs, party membership, or higher education opportunities well into the 1950s and 1960s.
What happened to their descendants? Many managed to blend in by hiding their past, building new identities to become “normal Soviet citizens.” Others remained on the margins, locked out of social mobility. But the trauma of being an outcast, of living under the constant threat of exposure, left deep scars that shaped family histories—like mine—where entire branches disappeared, names were forgotten, and silence became the only way to survive.
Dissidents and “Social Parasites”
As the Soviet Union moved past the chaos of revolution and purges, it found new categories of people to cast out: dissidents and “social parasites.”
In theory, the USSR claimed to have eliminated class enemies, building a society where all were equal. In reality, the state replaced lishentsy with new forms of outcasts—those who dared to think differently or refused to conform to the strict expectations of Soviet life.
Who were the dissidents? Writers, poets, scientists, engineers, and even ordinary workers who criticized the government, demanded reforms, or simply spoke the truth about the system’s failures. Their “crimes” could be as simple as circulating forbidden literature, signing petitions against political repression, or speaking out about human rights.
Andrei Sakharov, a brilliant physicist who helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb, became a dissident when he began to speak out against nuclear proliferation and the lack of freedom in the USSR. He was exiled internally to the closed city of Gorky. At the time, my hometown was in such poor condition that living there was considered a punishment.
Publishing underground books and journals—samizdat—could get you expelled from your job, placed under surveillance, or sent to prison camps for “anti-Soviet agitation” or “slandering the Soviet system.”
And then there were the “parasites.” In the USSR, everyone was required to work in a state-approved job. If you did not have a work record, you could be charged with tuneiadstvo—parasitism. It was a criminal offense to live without official employment, and it was used as a convenient tool to silence those who refused to conform or who wanted to live outside the state’s structures.
For example, the artist and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko faced threats of parasitism charges when he refused to take state-assigned work that interfered with his writing.
The Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky was prosecuted for “social parasitism” because he wrote poetry instead of working at a state-assigned job.
Many informal street musicians, underground artists, and spiritual seekers found themselves in constant danger of arrest simply because they refused to join the rigid structures of official Soviet life.
How did people survive? Dissidents and those accused of parasitism often lived precariously on the edge of society. Friends and sympathizers provided food, shelter, or unofficial work to keep them alive. Some took on low-level jobs that allowed them to maintain a minimal legal employment status while continuing their true work in secret—writing, painting, or organizing underground meetings. In 1988, Boris Grebenschikov’s famous song called them the “generation of janitors and watchmen.”
Entire families suffered alongside dissidents. Children were denied entry to universities, spouses lost jobs, and neighbors were pressured to denounce them. Being labeled “politically unreliable” closed almost every door in Soviet life.
Foreign Agents – The New Outcasts of Modern Russia
The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but Russia has found new ways to create second-class citizens. Today, they are called “foreign agents.”
This label didn’t appear out of thin air. It has deep roots in Russia’s past, where the state has always seen independent voices and foreign connections as threats. In 2012, the Russian government introduced its “foreign agent” legislation, claiming it was necessary to protect the country from external interference. The law requires any organization receiving foreign funding and engaging in vaguely defined “political activity” to register as a foreign agent—a phrase that in Russian carries the heavy, Soviet-era echo of “spy” or “traitor.”
What does the state want to achieve? Fear and control. The label is meant to isolate, humiliate, and financially exhaust those who dare to think and speak independently. Human rights organizations, independent journalists, environmental activists, and even feminist and LGBTQ groups have found themselves branded as foreign agents simply for receiving a grant from abroad or reporting on issues the state wants hidden.
How does life change under this label? Those listed as foreign agents face endless bureaucratic harassment: they must mark all publications with a warning that they are a foreign agent, submit detailed financial reports, and endure constant inspections. Noncompliance leads to heavy fines and potential criminal charges. Employers are pressured to fire them, landlords refuse to renew leases, and collaborators fear association with them will bring trouble.
The stigma is real and intentional. People cross the street to avoid speaking with a foreign agent, afraid of attracting police attention. Banks may close accounts, and social media platforms may flag their content. State media smear them as enemies of the people, traitors, or puppets of the West.
And yet, many do not give up.
Independent journalists continue reporting, even after their newsrooms are raided and their colleagues are arrested. Human rights lawyers keep defending political prisoners. Activists keep organizing, even when forced to register themselves personally as foreign agents. Some move abroad to continue their work in exile, while others remain, accepting the risks, determined to give voice to those who are silenced.
The struggle of foreign agents is not just about resisting a label; it is about the fight for the right to exist with dignity in a society that demands silence and conformity. It is about the right to tell the truth, to criticize power, to speak on behalf of the marginalized, and to remain human in a system that prefers obedient shadows.
In modern Russia, the mechanisms of exclusion have evolved, but the logic remains the same: the state decides who is worthy and who will be cast out. The faces change—peasants, lishentsy, dissidents, and now foreign agents—but the pattern continues.
