--- On Tue, 10/6/09, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> Well in the SU, ethnicity was a legal entity.
> Everyone had an ethnic identity stamped on their ID card,
> which entailed certain rights and/or disabilities, depending
> on how you looked at it. How you got it basically
> operated on the principles of ius sanguinis citizenship law:
> you legally inherited your Dad's ethno-nationality,
> irrespective of what his genetic endowment to you might be.
>
It's kind of interesting that this is not at all what the case was in the late Tsarist era. At that time passports listed not ethnicity, but religion. A typical passport would list you as "Orthodox (or Muslim or Jewish or whatever), A Subject of the Tsar."