I was adopted from Russia in ‘96 but my passport they gave me still says USSR

    by a_yellow_moon

    19 Comments

    1. That is pretty interesting because the date of issue is 1996. Maybe there were some “you can pick your country” rules after the collapse?

    2. Russia didn’t start issuing Russian passports until ‘97. Tajikistan and Azerbajan continued to issue USSR passports through ‘98. Lithuania and Latvia were the first post-Soviet states to issue their own passports from ‘92 onward.

    3. This is a terrible thought but I’ll share: old soviet passport stock being used by human traffickers. There are estimates that several thousand babies have been reported dead and trafficked in Yugoslavia for example over the course of a couple decades. War and early-post-war Bosnia (1993-1996.) was hit most severely, I don’t even want to explain why. The world we inhabit has a lot of evil in it. Luckily, a lot of good as well. I hope you were raised in a lovely family.

    4. Russia didn’t start assigning Russian passports until 1997.

      In fact, post-Soviet countries continued to use Soviet passports through the year 2000. They were very slow to switch over to national passports. The dissolution of the Soviet Union wasn’t actually like one discreet event, it took YEARS for the legal framework to be replaced fully.

    5. Wasn’t like the last Soviet passport issued in 2014.
      Just because the Soviet Union collapsed, it didn’t mean, that every state immediately was able to issue their own passport.

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