Journalist and writer Elisabeth Alexandrova-Zorina, who is married to a Swedish man and has a 14-month-old son, has been refused residency by Stockholm.
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On Monday, November 14, Russian journalist Elisabeth Alexandrova-Zorina, or “Liza” as she is known, received a letter from the Swedish Immigration Department. The letter informed her that her application for residency on family grounds had been rejected and that she had four weeks, starting from November 8, to say goodbye to her husband and 14-month-old son before permanently leaving Sweden. “The state’s interest in maintaining regulated immigration outweighs respect for private and family life,” the letter explained.
Ms. Alexandrova-Zorina’s situation is far from unique, as the journalist herself noted in an opinion piece published in the Expressen newspaper, on Tuesday, November 22, where she recalled that “families are permanently separated.” However, her case is becoming symbolic in Sweden, where it embodies the effects of an already restrictive migration policy, which the right and the far right, in power since October 18, want to tighten further. It also illustrates the impasse in which Russian dissidents in exile, not always well received abroad, often find themselves.
Born in Leningrad in 1984 and raised on the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic, Ms. Alexandrova-Zorina moved to Danderyd, near Stockholm, in July 2021. Since 2016 she had been going back and forth between Moscow and Sweden, where her partner lived. Her partner is Swedish screenwriter of Belarusian origin Dmitri Plax, whom she married in May 2021. Four months earlier, she had applied for residency on family grounds. Normally, she would have stayed in Russia while waiting for the answer, but she was pregnant and given permission to wait in Sweden. In September 2021, she gave birth to a boy in Danderyd hospital.
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