Between minority rights and civil liberties: Russia's discourse over “nationality” registration and the internal passport*.

This article reports that the registration of citizens' ethnicity 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 Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin's 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 did not have a section in the federal subject's own languages besides Russian, and did not display the emblems of the region in question.