‘The wrong nationality'

Official Soviet documents, such as circulars, decrees, and instructions, of the kind held in archives are customarily endorsed with stamps emphasising the confidentiality of the material. ‘Not for Publication’; ‘Do Not Circulate’; ‘Return after Reading’; ‘Strictly Confidential’; ‘Secret’; ‘Top Secret’ etc. This lays bare a feature of the Soviet (and indeed post-Soviet) legal system that is familiar to anyone who has made a study of the subject: its binary character. The public face of the law (as presented in the legal acts published in the Soviet press) was countered by a web of regulations that was created by officials for their own purposes, and carefully concealed from view. Obviously, it was this second level, what one might call ‘Legality-2’ (pravo-2), that was of primary importance in guiding officials’ actual behaviour and their interpretation of statute. While some of this sub rosa material consisted of inter-office memoranda of little or no public interest, much of it was of fundamental relevance to rank-and-file citizens’ everyday lives, setting out ‘rights and duties’ (prava i obyazannosti), ² in the standard Soviet formulation, of which they were expected to be aware, and rules that they might be penalised for violating. The material relating to the definition of natsionalnost, nationality, that I am discussing here was of this order.