Dominic, all citizens of the former Soviet Union had to carry internal passports that, among other things, listed their Republic of National Origin--Ukraine, Georgia, Turkmenistan, etc. But Jews, no matter where they were born, carried passports stamped "Jew." This was a perfect reflection of Soviet anti-Semitism, starting with Stalin, who regarded Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans." It was a sure way to keep Jews at the bottom of the social, political and economic heap in the USSR, and make them scapegoats for the regimes' failures. It also served the Russian mobs as a way to keep would-be Jewish members out--they were among the worst anti-Semites in the USSR.

Passage of the Jackson/Vanik Act in 1974 suddenly made Jewish internal passports worth more than gold--any holder could freely emigrate from the USSR to the US or Israel. The mobs, which controlled the USSR's huge counterfeiting industry (people needed reams of "official documentation" to do any kind of business in the USSR) started churning out fake Jewish internal passports to escape. That's how Russian gangsters set themselves up in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach. It also led to the stereotype (bigotry by any other name) that all or most Russian gangsters in Brighton Beach were or are Jewish, simply because they came to America under the Jackson/Vanik Act.

As for Marat Balagula: I didn't grow up with him. But I can tell you that Eastern European Jews are very particular about how they name their children: they use surnames of deceased relatives in the belief that doing so keeps the memory of the deceased relative alive through later generations. Most American Jews are of Eastern European origin. I promise you that you won't find one whose name was or is "Marat."