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Between Minority Rights and Civil Liberties: Russia's Discourse Over “Nationality” Registration and the Internal Passport*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Sven Gunnar Simonsen
Sven Gunnar Simonsen*
Affiliation:
International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) Fuglehauggata 11, N-0260 Oslo, Norway, [email protected]
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Extract

The registration of citizens' ethnicity (“nationality”) in official documents was commonplace and often obligatory in the Soviet Union, and the practice continued in the Russian Federation through the 1990s. In 1997, the Yeltsin government replaced the Soviet internal passport with a new one not featuring the “nationality” entry. The new document was met with an instant wave of protests from Russia's regions, above all the ethnically defined federal subjects. They objected to the removal of the “nationality” entry, and also because the passport (unlike the Soviet one) did not have a section in the federal subject's own language(s) besides Russian, and did not display the emblems of the region in question.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 211 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe 

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References

Notes

* The author would like to thank Dominique Arel, Pavel Baev, Helge Blakkisrud, Tor Bukkvoll, Pål Kolstø, and two anonymous referees for useful comments on earlier versions of this article. The article has been written as part of the project Recreating National Identities in the Post-Soviet States , located at the Watson Institute, Brown University. The author is grateful for the funding and support provided by the project and its leaders, Dominique Arel and David Kertzer. Rafik Abdrakhmanov, Svetlana Akkieva, Ildar Gabdrafikov, Nail Mukharyamov, Vladimir Mukomel and Valeriy Tishkov provided kind assistance in the collection of source materials.Google Scholar

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49. Figures for the ethnic composition of each of the federal subjects are due to be published in November 2004. Cumulative findings from the census are available at www.perepis2002.ru.Google Scholar

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