This Friday, the State Duma passed the third and final draft of legislation that will protect Russia’s next generation from parents with “excessively original” ideas about how to name their babies. After the Federation Council and President Putin sign the bill, it will become illegal in Russia to name your children using numbers, punctuation, obscenities, or official ranks and titles.
In other words, very soon in Russia you won’t be able to call your kid “Captain F**k 23!”
And that’s not all. The new legislation will also require children to take the surnames of their parents. If parents decide to hyphenate their surnames, the order of the hyphenated surnames must be the same for all full siblings.
In 2002, artists Vyacheslav Voronin and Marina Frolova famously tried to name their son “BOCh rVF 260602” — an acronym denoting, “Biological Human Object of the Voronin-Frolova Genus, Born on June 26, 2002.”
Moscow officials refused to comply with the couple’s wishes, and the boy was never issued a Russian birth certificate. He later obtained a “World Passport’ from the “World Service Authority,” which allowed him to enroll in Russia’s school system, where he’s now a ninth grader.
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