"The fifth line" on the Soviet passport which listed the bearer's "nationality" (what we would usually call ethnicity in English) was only removed from Russian

"The fifth line" on the Soviet passport which listed the bearer's "nationality" (what we would usually call ethnicity in English) was only removed from Russian passports in 1997. Bit of an aside, but this used to be pretty common. Religion, in practice a proxy for ethnicity, was only removed from Greek identity cards in 2000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_identity_card#Removal_of_religion_and_nationality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_identity_card#Removal_of_... (It's a proxy for ethnicity in Greece because religion has traditionally been rooted in ethnic groups in the region, so whether someone's card said "Greek Orthodox" indicated whether they were ethnically Greek, vs. a member of the Turkish or Albanian minorities.)