Stateless

I felt photographically challenged today, although the weather was perfect. I decided not to blip but then I read a short feature on the BBC website called 'What does it mean to be stateless?', looking at the plight of people left with no nationality following political change in, or exclusion from, their native land.

So I fished out my father's identity documents, such as they were, because I doubt that many people have ever seen, if indeed they have heard of, a Nansen passport. That's the big sheet of (folded) stiff paper with his photograph on the front. This document was devised in 1922 specifically for the benefit the 800,000 or so Russian refugees who became stateless when Lenin revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921. It was named after Fridtjof Nansen the Norwegian explorer who made the first crossing of Greenland in 1888. After he retired from his arctic jaunts he became a diplomat and devoted himself to humanitarian work with the League of  Nations.He was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his efforts on behalf of displaced victims of WW1, the civil war in Russia and the Armenian genocide. The Nansen passport provided this human flotsam with identity papers that allowed them to travel and cross borders. It was recognised by 50 countries and among its holders were Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Robert Capa, Vladimir Nabokov, Hanna Arendt and Anna Pavlova.

The other documents in the picture are my father's defunct (pre-Soviet) Russian passport, his Aliens Order Certificate of Registration (which he had to present at the local police station each time he changed his address, right up to the final one) and his Certificate of National Registration 1915, "God Save The King".

Thanks to his English education and domicile in London when war broke out in 1914, my father was never in the desperate situation of the many thousands of displaced person who struggled to find refuge from the storm that engulfed Europe. Because of his proficiency in half a dozen languages he was not drafted into the army but served as a postal censor, scrutinizing letters passing in and out of Britain, from 1915 to 1919 when he was discharged from the war ministry with a record of excellence.

During WW2 he offered his services again but was not called up,  possibly because he succumbed to a very serious illness (leptospirosus) in 1940. By that time he was married to my British mother and his British son from his first marriage was already conscripted and fighting on the Western front.  Nansen passports were no longer valid and my father never again travelled abroad. You would not have known he was not British. 

People often tried to persuade my father to become naturalised. He would be accepted without question. He had respectable guarantors. It would make life so much easier. The forms were completed and I have them still. So why didn't he? His excuse was that he couldn't stand bureaucracy and loathed the idea of a formal interview. But I suspect that there was something deeply resistant to relinquishing his identity although he never spoke Russian or associated with fellow nationals. But sometimes late at night he would  press his ear to the wireless speaker to catch the quavering tones of a distant Slavonic broadcast...


Why did I trawl this up tonight? I suppose because it's just so tragic to think that a century after the War To End All Wars global conflicts have rendered so many, many more people stateless, rootless and homeless in a way my father fortunately never was.